Vladius

"Many are unhappy with the quality of new canon films and novels, and have begged for their favourite old novels and characters - Shadows of the Empire, Thrawn, Mara Jade and so on - to be re-introduced into the official timeline. "

This would be very foolish and I think the ignorance of those people only becomes more and more evident with time. It’s better to leave those things alone and not do a much worse version of them. Like we’ve said in other threads I think the ideal, more realistic solution would be to let authors work within the Legends continuity if they want.

I agree except for the part about Greedo, that was completely justified self defense and not really sleazy.

Connor MacLeod said:

Vladius said:

Connor MacLeod said:

I don’t think this show saved Anakin, yet alone the prequels. This show is too silly. I find it ironically amusing when people say this show saved the prequels, when it has the exact same issues. Awful droid humor, jar jar episodes, Anakin is still excessively obsessive and weird with Padme (think about that one episode where he gives Padme his lightsaber in the office and his demanding and immature attitude), the tone is all over the place, Anakin is easily duped to evil ( think about Mortis trilogy, he becomes evil because the evil son showed him in the future that he will be evil and thinks being evil in the present will stop him from being evil in the future, RIDICULOUS). And even the parts of the show that are good like Maul, are ridiculous when you think about it… Maul literally parades around with no genitalia. It’s absolutely absurd and I wish this wasn’t considered “canon.” Even though I only really count the OT as canon since SW has been retconned into oblivion.

Nothing can save the prequels. They are done. They exist. If you don’t like them then try to focus on the original prequel ideas that exist in the ROTJ novel and Thrawn trilogy, as rare as the details are.

That being said if Ihad to revisit Lucas’ prequels I read Darth Plagueis and ROTS NOVEL…

Yeah it’s overrated even by itself. The animation style has this weird floaty, weightless quality that keeps any of the action from having impact.

When you watch the show people have these charts where they tell you what episodes to skip and which arcs are good because they’re so hit or miss. It seems like a lot of the popularity comes from memes about “heh wow this is so dark for a kids show, they’re doing war crimes right now.” Okay, it’s dark for a kid’s show. You showed very light, bloodless versions of people getting tortured and soldiers dying in combat. And? Does that make it good?

Not to mention nothing matters. The show was created after everyone had already seen Revenge of the Sith. There is no tension at all because we know how everything ends already and we know exactly who lives and who dies, even down to the minor background characters and almost every villain. Oh no, our heroes are captured for the 30th time, just like every other episode! Will they make it to the movies to do all the stuff we already saw them do?

The closest it goes to patching the prequels somewhat is adding a little bit of information about Sifo Dyas that goes nowhere, and adding the brain chips to the clones to further explain Order 66. But the chips are only patching a problem that the show itself introduced, making the clones all sympathetic characters that wouldn’t betray the Jedi on their own.

I don’t know about you but for me, if I have to skip episodes in order to enjoy a show, that means it’s not a very good show. No one says to skip Breaking Bad episodes, Sopranos episodes, Game of Thrones episodes, Avatar Last Airbender episodes, etc. etc.

If you were to tell someone to watch this show starting from Season 1 I’ll wager more than half would quit just based off the first episode with Yoda and the clones and that insufferable droid humor.

To be fair there are a lot of hit or miss shows that are still really good, especially when they have full TV seasons of 20 or so episodes. There are watch orders for Star Trek TNG or Deep Space Nine for example, and TNG season 1 is considered really rough. There are episodes of Avatar that people hate that they probably skip on rewatches. Game of Thrones famously ended poorly in its later seasons.

However I think with The Clone Wars it’s just worse overall. The story is all divided up into arcs and it’s a sort of anthology show that jumps around in the timeline and doesn’t focus on any particular narrative thread. If you have a bad arc then it’s a string of 3-4 episodes that all go down. If you have a good arc it can get ruined by a boring episode in the middle. You don’t just skip episodes, you skip whole characters like Jar Jar and Padme. There are a bunch of episodes that focus on side characters who aren’t particularly interesting, and you’re just waiting for Obi Wan and Anakin to come back.

Mocata said:

They just need to pick the ideas and elements that worked before and expand them. For example the best episode of the Mandalorian was the Wages of Fear/Sorcerer fuel transport depot story. A tight action set piece followed by a decent character moment. Instead of muddying the waters with yet more Jedi nonsense and failed attempts to add nuance or new dimensions to the Force, just start with classic movie homage. They did the Dam Busters, so they can do Battle of Britain. Or Cross of Iron. Or Kelly’s Heroes. Or anything. Star Wars itself was always a ‘steal from the best’ situation after all.

lol every time they do this they remake Seven Samurai/Magnificent Seven again or they claim they’re doing “Rashomon.” Even in Star Wars Visions, one of the episodes was remaking The Hidden Fortress even though that’s already the original movie.

Phantom Menace and Revenge of the Sith blow out the Obi Wan show, easily. Attack of the Clones ties with it. Counted together the prequels win. They have the much bigger budget and setpieces, better sets, costumes, extras, effects, music, and action, and have Ewan McGregor AND Ian McDiarmid consistently instead of just one. Jar Jar is less irritating than Reva.

Connor MacLeod said:

I don’t think this show saved Anakin, yet alone the prequels. This show is too silly. I find it ironically amusing when people say this show saved the prequels, when it has the exact same issues. Awful droid humor, jar jar episodes, Anakin is still excessively obsessive and weird with Padme (think about that one episode where he gives Padme his lightsaber in the office and his demanding and immature attitude), the tone is all over the place, Anakin is easily duped to evil ( think about Mortis trilogy, he becomes evil because the evil son showed him in the future that he will be evil and thinks being evil in the present will stop him from being evil in the future, RIDICULOUS). And even the parts of the show that are good like Maul, are ridiculous when you think about it… Maul literally parades around with no genitalia. It’s absolutely absurd and I wish this wasn’t considered “canon.” Even though I only really count the OT as canon since SW has been retconned into oblivion.

Nothing can save the prequels. They are done. They exist. If you don’t like them then try to focus on the original prequel ideas that exist in the ROTJ novel and Thrawn trilogy, as rare as the details are.

That being said if Ihad to revisit Lucas’ prequels I read Darth Plagueis and ROTS NOVEL…

Yeah it’s overrated even by itself. The animation style has this weird floaty, weightless quality that keeps any of the action from having impact.

When you watch the show people have these charts where they tell you what episodes to skip and which arcs are good because they’re so hit or miss. It seems like a lot of the popularity comes from memes about “heh wow this is so dark for a kids show, they’re doing war crimes right now.” Okay, it’s dark for a kid’s show. You showed very light, bloodless versions of people getting tortured and soldiers dying in combat. And? Does that make it good?

Not to mention nothing matters. The show was created after everyone had already seen Revenge of the Sith. There is no tension at all because we know how everything ends already and we know exactly who lives and who dies, even down to the minor background characters and almost every villain. Oh no, our heroes are captured for the 30th time, just like every other episode! Will they make it to the movies to do all the stuff we already saw them do?

The closest it goes to patching the prequels somewhat is adding a little bit of information about Sifo Dyas that goes nowhere, and adding the brain chips to the clones to further explain Order 66. But the chips are only patching a problem that the show itself introduced, making the clones all sympathetic characters that wouldn’t betray the Jedi on their own.

Emre1601 said:

I’ve only watched the part of the video linked to in the opening post, and this is an interesting subject to me in that it also highlights what George failed to do or show onscreen in the Prequel films. And the continuing attempts since to fix, repair, or explain the shortcomings or problems with the Prequels in the ancillary series and material since. Whether that is 2003 Clone Wars (to an extent), the 2008 film, The Clone Wars series, Rebels, or Tales Of The Jedi and so on. Or official articles and interviews, and the slew of fan-made “George is a secret genius” or “Prequel deeper meaning” material such as Ring Theory or visual symmetry, or overlong and videos pieces on fans simply “failing to understand the Prequel films”. None of which changes anything onscreen in the Prequels themselves.

For example, I really enjoyed the Dooku segments of 2022’s Tales Of The Jedi. But I could not help but question just why we were not shown such material in the Prequels themselves, which would have made his character and story arc far more compelling. 20 years on from AOTC and we finally got some enticing onscreen content about Dooku and his motivations, instead of what we saw in AOTC & ROTS; a 2D disappointing mustache twirling throwaway villain.

We really could do with a Special Edition of the Prequels, such a thing would be fascinating to see, along with the reactions and thoughts of many Prequel fans.

Though I still don’t understand why Obi-Wan and Anakin’s friendship, them becoming a team, and then closer like “brothers”, wasn’t shown in the Prequel films themselves; that it needed “a footnote” such as TCW to explain or show this.

According to George, the Anakin character was “very one-sided” in ROTS, perhaps this was why George felt the need to show that more charming heroic side of Anakin, “his settling down and maturing a little bit which is what happens when you become a parent or teacher”. But this takes place shortly before his fall to the dark side, betraying the Jedi, killing the children again (and the men and the women too!), choking his pregnant wife, and fighting Obi-Wan. Then finding out it was all for nothing, that he was lied to and misled by Palpatine, but still continuing on to become Space Hitler. To me it is all quite uneven, and jarring.
 

If George Lucas worked on and had significant input on TCW along with Dave Filoni, then George should likely deserve more credit for “saving Anakin Skywalker”, with any others who worked on that side of creativity for the film or series. Is the video posted by SWOTFAN25 about 2008’s The Clone Wars film, or the series? But anyway, we should also remember and acknowledge why Anakin needed “saving” in the first place, going on what was shown or portrayed in the Prequels. Or not shown, in this case.

100%

Spartacus01 said:

Connor MacLeod said:

I think Star Wars needs to take a break. A very long break. I don’t think the universe needs to get bigger but smaller. For me, less is more when it comes to Star Wars. For me, Star Wars was at its best in the pre-prequel era because projects were coming out minimally, and when they did, it was special. I feel like there was a more quality over quantity approach. We need to get back to that. Rather than having 10 shows running at the same time, I would rather have one show with all those resources put into it. That would be an Emmy award-winning masterpiece like breaking bad, or the Sopranos or Game of Thrones. Instead of releasing 100 books a year release three, but make the contents, super impactful to the universe and significant.

I agree with everything you said here.

Superweapon VII said:

Fan_edit_fan said:

I think the old Tales of the Jedi comics did the thing we’re talking about. It felt like older tech and clothing…a.more interesting visual style than Jedi robes and Tie Fighter looking ships from the KOTOR style era.

Indeed. It’s like creators post-1998 got together and said “We don’t have to be creative anymore; we got the prequels now.” SW has been a coprophagic ouroboros ever since.

You know, I think that even if the prequelization of the Jedi and Sith orders was introduced in-universe only after the Battle of Russan, you would still say that the EU authors were not creative enough. Why? Because the vast majority of the stories within the EU take place between 1,000 BBY and 4 ABY, so you would still have the majority of EU stories portraying the Sith and the Jedi in a prequelized way.

I would say a massive amount of the EU stories are set after Return of the Jedi, just in terms of sheer text. A good chunk of other EU stories are 4000 BBY and were changed to be more movie-like with the release of KOTOR. KOTOR is great though, and I think part of it was just how difficult it would be to translate all the lavish comic book artwork into a 2003 video game. So I don’t blame them visually, at least.

NFBisms said:

The “dark side” as a blatantly degradative drug is just kind of a boring read IMO. If The Force is supposed to be “everything” then the nuances of the human experience should be given room to work inside the framework. Agency and choice is a far more compelling engine to drive a story than mythological convention. It’s part of what makes ROTJ work for me; it wasn’t “too late.” It denies this idea weight.

Whether or not it accidentally stumbles into it, the prequels do enough to portray that rigid understanding of the Force as flawed pedagogy too - more than truth about nature. For all the convoluted vagueness about the galactic polity and what it’s meant to analogize, the denial of anything innocuous possibly leading to “the dark” (for a child) works too well in a decade not far removed from satanic panic and at the height of Catholic church scandal. I know not everyone agrees, but I do think that stuff is interesting. The Wire is a good show, and better than Lord of the Rings.

The prequels get so close to finding a good synthesis, but ultimately fail by retreating into Anakin’s wacky yellow-eyes corruption in ROTS’ third act. It just doesn’t leave much genuine room for feelings of remorse or guilt in The Force, and make Anakin/Vader feel less real.

The nuances of the human experience do work inside the framework. That’s the point. The agency and choice is the mythological convention. We always have a choice. We should choose good over evil. Moreover, like I just said, the dark side is not normal emotions at normal levels. Han Solo (or Andor or whoever) gets frightened, angry, jealous, greedy, etc. quite a lot, but he is not tapping into the black magic of pure hatred. He doesn’t have the position of power necessary to make that a possibility - people with the Force do. You can compare it to the Ring or “with great power comes great responsibility” or the atomic bomb in Oppenheimer, or whatever suits your fancy.

Here we go with the anti-Christian stuff again. Here is the issue with that - it’s Faust. It’s inherently a story about a guy selling his soul to the literal devil, which you can then use to symbolize non-religious things if you want. But that is the story. The Jedi’s interpretation of how it works in the prequels is correct. Their portrayal contradicts the message because it was done incompetently.

The Wire is not better than Lord of the Rings. That’s the ultimate apples to oranges comparison.

Duel of the Fates is really good. The music and the acrobatic performances play into the (intentional) feeling that this is something ritualistic and ancient. The gigantic plasma pillars could be toned down a lot but the huge cavernous space suggests a kind of temple. Here we’re meeting our enemy from a thousand years ago and we’re all bringing those many years of tradition with us.

The duels in Attack of the Clones are awful. Most of the Palpatine and Yoda duel, and parts of the Anakin and Obi Wan duel, are pointlessly flashy and don’t contribute to the epic feeling in the same way the Darth Maul fight does, but the Anakin and Obi Wan duel is pretty good otherwise.

As for Obi Wan vs Vader in the original movie, it is a bit slow due to the limitations of the props, but it’s still good. This guy just sped it up a little and it works very well. Much more classy than SC38 or the Obi Wan show. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVqg7sTcra0

Channel72 said:

Regarding Vader and the negative portrayal of prosthetics/cybernetics, I think this is more like a visual metaphor for losing one’s humanity. In a separate conversation I was having in the OT section with ZkinandBonez, we were talking about how Star Wars is to some extent written as a timeless piece of mythology. If it weren’t set in some psuedo-futuristic space civilization, but instead set in like, a Lord of the Rings type high-fantasy environment, Vader would be something like a “Ring Wraith” or Gollum or some kind of decrepid yet powerful being, whose loss of humanity and descent into evil is symbolized by some kind of physical deterioration or dependency on dark magic. Vader’s cybernetic suit and iron lung serve a similar function, as a visual representation of a formerly good person who became evil. The cybernetics was simply a handy visual metaphor suggested by the sci-fi setting.

There’s also buried underneath all of this a very Christian theme of a “deal with the Devil” type thing, where achieving great powers of darkness comes with a very severe price of physical deterioration. Lucas implemented this idea very literally with having Vader fall into lava after embracing the Dark Side. The Emperor also appears physically deformed, presumably because he’s been screwing around with Dark Side powers for so long.

However, I don’t completely agree with this interpretation. I think it’s partially true, but Vader’s cybernetic suit also serves as a manifestation of a very modern fear about technology consuming our humanity (whatever that means in practice). This is a running theme in Star Wars, where reliance (or over-reliance) on technology is considered a bad thing, which is why Luke has to switch off his X-Wing targeting computer before pulling off the impossible shot, and a primitive Ewok tribe is able to defeat the technologically advanced Imperial troops.

Regardless, the idea that the cybernetics somehow makes Vader less powerful is really an entirely off-screen idea that isn’t really apparent in any of the films themselves. If I recall correctly, the first time I even heard this idea was in the context of trying to reconcile the highly kinetic, acrobatic, fast-paced lightsaber duels in the Prequels, with Vader’s slow, sometimes almost clumsy fighting style in the OT. In other words, the idea that cybernetics makes Vader less powerful probably emerged from out-of-Universe inconsistencies in choreography and special effects between the two Trilogies.

I always thought this was obvious and it’s very bizarre to me when people talk about the dark side like it’s just getting emotional or choosing the wrong politics. Which means if you like those emotions or those politics it’s a legitimate choice.

It literally turns you into an inhuman cyborg or a freakish monster with gray skin and yellow eyes. It’s supernatural. It affects Force users like an addictive drug. It isn’t just getting afraid or mad sometimes, it’s having hatred in your heart and a lust for power.

Note that Vader didn’t just replace his limbs like OG Anakin or get a normal life support system. He’s in an armored suit designed to frighten and intimidate people so he can lead the evil empire from the front.

Superweapon VII said:

Vladius said:

Superweapon VII said:

Frickin’ blacks, feminists, and queers. They all need to go back to Africa, the kitchen, and the closet. Tolkien is for the white, super-straight ubermensch. Cleanse Hollywood of degenerate art. Deus vult.

what a glorious strawman

I have zero patience for anti-SJWs. You can have legitimate grievances with Hollywood “progressivism” and express yourself accordingly. But if you start dropping “woke” pejoratively, spouting conservative rhetoric with no nuance, I’m taking the kid gloves off.

this was two years ago but lol that your idea of taking the kid gloves off is just posting the same stuff in a cringier way

Superweapon VII said:

Vladius said:

Superweapon VII said:

Frickin’ blacks, feminists, and queers. They all need to go back to Africa, the kitchen, and the closet. Tolkien is for the white, super-straight ubermensch. Cleanse Hollywood of degenerate art. Deus vult.

what a glorious strawman

I have zero patience for anti-SJWs. You can have legitimate grievances with Hollywood “progressivism” and express yourself accordingly. But if you start dropping “woke” pejoratively, spouting conservative rhetoric with no nuance, I’m taking the kid gloves off.

this was two years ago but lol that your idea of taking the kid gloves off is just posting the same stuff in a cringier way

I’m less concerned with the in-universe logic of leaving Luke on Tatooine, which I’m fine with. I just think that making Anakin on Tatooine a major part of the story is an out of universe decision that makes the world seem smaller.

The virgin birth, step family, having to leave to become a Jedi thing also makes all of it wonky. It would be a lot more straightforward if

1. Owen was Anakin’s actual brother, or at least his friend, and they grew up together. Maybe they’re not even from Tatooine natively but they ended up there for some reason.
2. You could become a Jedi anywhere and didn’t have to fly to Coruscant and stay there permanently. Anakin was a Jedi on Tatooine and then when the Clone Wars broke out he decided to leave on his damn fool idealistic crusade.

Otherwise it’s like Channel72 said. None of them have enough time together for their comments and actions to fit what actually happened.

fmalover said:

Anakin Starkiller said:

Patali said:

• I don’t have much of an opinion on eras beyond, because I think the storytelling potential of focusing in a close time period is so much greater than spreading thin to multiple disconnected eras. I did love both Kotor games back in the day, but a problem I have is, it’s supposed to be set 4000 years before, yet it doesn’t feel like it. If you told me it was 1000 years, I might believe that easier. But the lack of change over so long I think is unreasonable, and honestly dissapointing. In terms of design, I think High Republic actually did great in terms of style and palettes. I buy the idea that its the 100 years before the PT. But Old Republic being 4000 years? No way, not even a chance. In my personal head canon, it is only 1000 years before. And I think that is the danger in jumping so freely in the timeline outside of what is developed already.

This 100%. The technological and political stagnancy over literal millennia is laughable and immersion breaking. It’s just a roundabout way of making an alternate universe at that point. Remember the hyperdrive booster rings in the Prequels? How 'bout every starfighter needs them. And if you go further back only capital ships have hyperdrives. Little touches like that to make it feel older.

This is a complaint some have expressed with Tolkien’s Middle Earth. The stories take place over millenia yet there is ZERO technological advancements.

They have magic. They have supernaturally good and plentiful food, medicine, architecture, and metallurgy, not to mention more explicit stuff like seeing stones. Those are all forms of technology. Also in a thematic sense, 1. Tolkien and the good guys in the story are not fans of industrialization and avoid it on purpose, and 2. one of the biggest themes of the setting is physical and spiritual decline.

Again this relates to our modern bias where we automatically see “advancement” as inevitable and desirable and not something that can stop or even go backwards.

Anakin Starkiller said:

Patali said:

• I don’t have much of an opinion on eras beyond, because I think the storytelling potential of focusing in a close time period is so much greater than spreading thin to multiple disconnected eras. I did love both Kotor games back in the day, but a problem I have is, it’s supposed to be set 4000 years before, yet it doesn’t feel like it. If you told me it was 1000 years, I might believe that easier. But the lack of change over so long I think is unreasonable, and honestly dissapointing. In terms of design, I think High Republic actually did great in terms of style and palettes. I buy the idea that its the 100 years before the PT. But Old Republic being 4000 years? No way, not even a chance. In my personal head canon, it is only 1000 years before. And I think that is the danger in jumping so freely in the timeline outside of what is developed already.

This 100%. The technological and political stagnancy over literal millennia is laughable and immersion breaking. It’s just a roundabout way of making an alternate universe at that point. Remember the hyperdrive booster rings in the Prequels? How 'bout every starfighter needs them. And if you go further back only capital ships have hyperdrives. Little touches like that to make it feel older.

I think this is just an assumption people have from living in the 20th and 21st centuries. We live with an exponential increase in technology every few years but that doesn’t mean that we always will. It’s possible that a plateau can be reached where it’s mainly incremental changes. There could be a regression under certain circumstances, and sometimes there are just hard physical limits.

The technology level is already extremely high to start with and takes fully sentient robots, cloning, and faster than light travel for granted, so I have no problem believing that you can’t go much further beyond that. Or that maybe some species or civilizations can, but that there are cultural and economic factors that prevent those advancements from spreading or catching on.

daveybjones999 said:

MORC said:

I believe a cartoon set in-between OT movies is a better move than a post RotJ one. TCW fleshes out the period very nicely, yet we have virtually nothing between 4-5-6 despite those being the most well regarded movies.

Honestly, that’s kind of why I don’t want them to do that. The original trilogy is great, and a series set between them focusing on the Rebels during that time period could be a great show, but 1, Star Wars Rebels already exists, and 2, people are already still annoyed at Disney for de-canonizing the old EU so just imagine the outrage a series set between the original series would cause, especially if it isn’t good. I’d much rather them do something like that for the sequels and set it between episodes 8 and 9. The Clone Wars already went a long way towards redeeming the prequels for lots of people, even though the quality of the movies didn’t actually change people’s perceptions of them did, so I’d much rather them put the energy towards doing that for the sequels and trying to mend something that actually needs fixing, instead of adding things in between movies that don’t need them. I’d definitely be interested in them finding some way to appeal to original trilogy fans but I’m 100% certain in the inevitability that if they try everyone’s just going to hate it because even if I do like, or at least tolerate, a lot of the recent Star Wars Disney+ offerings I have 0 faith in Disney to do something like that for the original trilogy and have it be any good.

Why do you care whether or not people think the sequels (or prequels) are “redeemed?”

Spartacus01 said:

Vladius said:

Spartacus01 said:

Vladius said:

I will say that the Darth Plagueis book does a magnificent job of turning the prequels into a coherent setting where almost everything does actually make sense in context, but that’s just the issue, it takes an entire extra book’s worth of context. People that have read that book are going to retroactively imagine details in the movies that were never there and were not explained at all.

I said it before, I will say it again. The Prequels are a really good story if you take the time to explain everything in detail. But three movies are not enough to explain everything that needs to be explained in detail, and the Prequels should have never been movies in the first place. The Prequels should have been either a long, live action TV series (4+ seasons), or an Expanded Universe multimedia project of books, comics and video games that are interconnected to each other, something along the lines of the Clone Wars Multimedia Project that existed in real life, but including the main story of the movies too. The problem is not the story that Lucas was trying to convey to the audience, but rather the fact that the story is not suitable to be portrayed in three movies. The story is way too complex and contains a lot of information. Three movies are not enough.

I think the problem was the story he was trying to convey, or at least the details of the story. The extra details that fleshed it out and made it make sense came later from other people doing their own interpretations, and those extra details didn’t exist at the time. There essentially was an EU multimedia project, just not all at once. But there shouldn’t have to be. It’s a movie series that exists to be watched as movies, and it’s unreasonable (especially in 1999-2005) to expect everyone to invest time, money, and energy into puzzling together your story for you like homework. You have almost 7 full hours of screentime, plus the direct exposition from opening crawls. So much of that is wasted, or in the case of the “taxation of trade routes” thing we’re talking about, actively makes it less clear.

I think that you missed the point of what I was trying to say, though. I didn’t say that you are required to spend money and time reading and experiencing EU stories to fill in the gaps, I said that the Prequels should have been conceived as an integral part of the EU from the very beginning. We shouldn’t have Prequel movies, we should only have Prequel books, comics and video games, and possibly a TV show. This is the only way to preserve the core elements of the story that Lucas was trying to convey, while simultaneously expanding them, exploring the overall setting, locations and characters in detail, and making everything feel more believable. The Original Trilogy is able to stand on its own, because it is a simple adventure, a classical hero’s journey that doesn’t require a very complex world-building. But Anakin’s story from his childhood to his transformation into Darth Vader? The Clone Wars? Palpatine’s rise to power? Nah, these are all things that necessarily require a complex story, a lot of world-building and a lot of explanations, all of which are not feasible for three movies, unless you end up making movies of 6 hours each.

No, I got that. I don’t think that’s a good idea either. You could also do the prequels as a simple adventure. But the thing that it’s trying to be is a classical or Shakespearean tragedy. Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, etc. have all been performed or adapted in under 7 hours, and did not require multimedia campaigns. “Worldbuilding” as an end in itself is a very modern concept that doesn’t actually result in good stories.

Spartacus01 said:

Vladius said:

I will say that the Darth Plagueis book does a magnificent job of turning the prequels into a coherent setting where almost everything does actually make sense in context, but that’s just the issue, it takes an entire extra book’s worth of context. People that have read that book are going to retroactively imagine details in the movies that were never there and were not explained at all.

I said it before, I will say it again. The Prequels are a really good story if you take the time to explain everything in detail. But three movies are not enough to explain everything that needs to be explained in detail, and the Prequels should have never been movies in the first place. The Prequels should have been either a long, live action TV series (4+ seasons), or an Expanded Universe multimedia project of books, comics and video games that are interconnected to each other, something along the lines of the Clone Wars Multimedia Project that existed in real life, but including the main story of the movies too. The problem is not the story that Lucas was trying to convey to the audience, but rather the fact that the story is not suitable to be portrayed in three movies. The story is way too complex and contains a lot of information. Three movies are not enough.

I think the problem was the story he was trying to convey, or at least the details of the story. The extra details that fleshed it out and made it make sense came later from other people doing their own interpretations, and those extra details didn’t exist at the time. There essentially was an EU multimedia project, just not all at once. But there shouldn’t have to be. It’s a movie series that exists to be watched as movies, and it’s unreasonable (especially in 1999-2005) to expect everyone to invest time, money, and energy into puzzling together your story for you like homework. You have almost 7 full hours of screentime, plus the direct exposition from opening crawls. So much of that is wasted, or in the case of the “taxation of trade routes” thing we’re talking about, actively makes it less clear.

Channel72 said:

Vladius said:

Channel72 said:

Spartacus01 said:

Hell, the only reason Lucas introduced the “no marriage rule” for the Jedi is because he wanted Anakin and Padmé’s love story in Attack of the Clones to be a reminiscence of Romeo and Juliet’s Love story: a forbidden love story between two people that shouldn’t be in love. In The Phantom Menace itself there is no indication whatsoever that the Jedi are not supposed to have romantic relationships.

I agree with pretty much everything you wrote. I just wonder if Lucas had already conceived of the Jedi as celibate even during The Phantom Menace. TPM doesn’t explicitly mention the no marriage rule, but it’s clear that by the time Lucas wrote TPM, he was already developing ideas about a very weird “anti-attachment” pseudo-Buddhist philosophy for the Jedi, because the script emphasizes how the Jedi get very fussy about 10 year old Anakin’s attachment to his mother. Even at this early stage in the Prequels, it’s clear that Lucas’ vision for the Jedi and their anti-attachment philosophy is already at odds with mainstream sensibilities. Like, it seems absurd to the average audience member that the Jedi are so averse to emotional attachments that they fear a 10 year old being attached to his mom. This already suggests the Jedi are some fucked up cult that kidnaps infants before they can even form emotional attachments. So the “no romantic attachments” rule in AoTC seemed like a natural extension of what TPM set up. But yeah, it’s very likely that Lucas’ desire to shoehorn in some Romeo & Juliet was the motivating factor here, but this also feels like a natural extension of the “no attachment” stuff in TPM.

I don’t think it’s the same thing. They’re using it as a point to convey that he will need to master his negative emotions like fear if he’s going to be a Jedi. They turn him down for training, not just because they’re worried he’ll turn to the dark side, but also for his benefit. If they just hated the idea that people have families and wanted powerful Force users no matter what, they would have whisked him away no questions asked. They trained him because Qui Gon pushed it on them and on Obi Wan especially.

As much as I dislike how they’re portrayed in the prequels, this is a common misconception people have. There’s this idea of “oh, how ironic, they were religious zealots who believed in this messiah figure, this is like Jesus coming and he’s actually the devil.” No, not really. The only person who believes in the chosen one idea fully is Qui Gon. Everyone else expresses a lot of skepticism, rightfully so.

They never kidnap anyone. They have the parents’ permission. It is a philosophical issue, like you could say, well, the kid didn’t consent to be raised as a Jedi. But no kids ever consent to being born into whatever family or culture they’re in anyway.

Even as late as 1999 and 2000, maybe 2001 there are comics that have a Jedi couple in the prequel era. I don’t know a lot about it but one of them is a tree lady. It started with Attack of the Clones.

You might be right. I wouldn’t be surprised though if Lucas already was strongly considering the Jedi to be celibate, even during the writing/production of TPM. I mean they look like freakin’ Franciscan monks. I know that imagery is explainable independently as derivative of Obi Wan’s desert robe in the Original Trilogy (and wasn’t even the original concept design for the TPM Jedi uniform), but it’s also yet another component that serendipitously suggests the idea of celibacy. None of the Jedi in TPM are shown to be married either, which, granted, is an “argument from silence” - perhaps there was simply no relevant occasion to show any married Jedi or bring up the subject. But again, I’m making a cumulative case here. Lucas famously never liked the idea of Luke marrying Mara Jade either. According to Timothy Zahn, as early as 1993/94 Lucasfilm rejected the idea of Luke getting married. But ultimately, after some convincing, Lucas allowed Luke to get married, or at least didn’t bother to veto the idea. But according to J.W. Rinzler, Lucas never really liked the idea. It’s likely that George Lucas’ feelings about this were initially limited to Luke specifically and not the whole Jedi order, but I suspect his feelings about Luke played an important role in shaping later ideas about the Jedi Order as an institution.

As for the 1999/2000 EU comics, there’s no guarantee any of that was in sync with George Lucas’ latest ideas. Maybe Lucas was toying with the idea in TPM, but wasn’t sure about it until some time after those comics were approved for publication. Maybe Lucas was too busy developing the Prequels to micromanage the EU at the time. The point is, a lot of elements in TPM serendipitously support the “no romantic attachments” rule from AoTC. Whether this was planned or not at the time TPM was written is uncertain, but there’s enough in TPM to make me suspect Lucas was at least headed in that direction. At least, the idea doesn’t seem to have popped up out of thin air in AoTC from a completely ad hoc need to add in a forbidden romance subplot. There’s clearly some indication of a precedent here (even if it was just a vague uneasiness Lucas had about Jedi marriage) that supported the subplot beyond the immediate needs of the script at the time.

Also, I understand the Jedi don’t actually kidnap children. But nothing in the movie explains how the recruitment process is supposed to work normally. All we know is that 10 year old Anakin is “too old” and the Jedi fear that his (completely normal) attachment to his mother could be a major problem down the road. The audience is thus left to fill in the blanks about how the Jedi recruit young children as new Padawans. It’s understandable that some people would read cult-like vibes into all this, given how real-world cults try to discourage outside attachments among members.

Finally, the Jedi are initially skeptical that little Anakin is the Chosen One, but they seem to accept that it’s at least a strong possibility, especially given the contemporaneous re-emergence of the Sith. At the end of TPM, Yoda says to Obi-Wan something like (paraphrasing) “The Chosen One he may be, but I still don’t like you training him, even though the Council approved it”. By the time of RoTS, Yoda seems to accept that the Chosen One prophecy applies to Anakin, but worries that the prophecy might have been misinterpreted. But I agree that the Prequels don’t really lend themselves well to an “ironic false Messiah” narrative like Dune. In interviews, Lucas flat out says the Chosen One prophecy is true, and Anakin fulfills it in ROTJ by killing Palpatine. So Vader is not really a “false Messiah” so much as a round-about, circuitous and misunderstood Messiah. He’s more like the ironic result of wishing for a Messiah using a monkey’s paw or something, i.e. you get exactly what you wished for, but it sucks in unexpected ways.

I still disagree but I think we would have to look at the details of AotC drafts to see exactly when the idea cropped up.

I wonder if Luke not getting married is more of a personal preference for the character on an aesthetic level. There are a lot of higher-ups who didn’t like the idea of Spider-Man getting married, for example, and in the 2000s they famously wrote an awful story where he makes a literal deal with the devil to erase his marriage (so that his elderly aunt who is permanently on death’s door anyway will live a little longer.) From this perspective, his youthfulness and singleness is considered such an essential part of the character that he just shouldn’t get married for story reasons. Stan Lee approved of this. I could see something similar with Luke since he’s such a youthful character. Or maybe it’s a weird artifact of Lucas’s own divorce. Who knows.

That could have been an early indication of a celibacy thing but I don’t think so. Lucas approved of plenty of other EU projects that had Jedi with families.

I would say people really overstate the premise with Dune as well but that’s another story lol

I will say that the Darth Plagueis book does a magnificent job of turning the prequels into a coherent setting where almost everything does actually make sense in context, but that’s just the issue, it takes an entire extra book’s worth of context. People that have read that book are going to retroactively imagine details in the movies that were never there and were not explained at all.

Servii said:

Channel72 said:

I recall back in the day the most controversial claims from Plinkett were related to how a lot of the whole Naboo invasion plot doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny. I agree with RLM on this one, but that point always received lots of backlash by Prequel fans eager to explain Palpatine’s amazingly nebulous and malleable master-plan that could really be whatever you want it to be.

There’s this Youtuber, Sheev Talks, who in his TPM video did a response to a lot of Plinkett’s points. He accused Plinkett of not paying attention, and claimed that the opening crawl made the conflict perfectly clear.

I don’t agree. The crawl does not explain the situation well. It was never clear to me whether the Trade Federation was for or against the trade route taxes, and the movie never specifies. It tells us the taxation is in dispute. That’s all.

And the guy then goes on to explain the specifics of Palpatine’s plans and contingencies, a lot of which feels more like conjecture than anything else, then acts like it’s all perfectly obvious.

It’s fair to say something like “ahhh, it’s a long story and it gets complicated, but just to summarize it was about taxes.” Real-life disagreements about politics and business are often technical and focused on minor points. But that isn’t very exciting and doesn’t get the audience engaged for an action adventure movie.

My original point with the RLM tangent was that the criticisms of the prequels were mostly correct. No one has really disagreed with that, just disliked the presentation.

rocknroll41 said:

I know we’ve gotten on a huge tangent here, but regarding RLM; I really think they’re old and out of touch these days.

I just watched their review of Alien Romulus, for instance, and they were asking questions like “where did all these new facehuggers come from?” When the movie clearly stated that they were genetically engineered using dna from “big chap.” At one point they also go “the first film clearly established that every alien hive needs a queen,” when that was really only established in the second film. They completely forgot about the egg-morphing from the deleted scene of the first (which I’m pretty sure is on the director’s cut, which they claim to have seen).

That’s just one of several examples of how lately they’ve been making more mistakes/ overlooking details. Their memories are getting hazy, and they seem to have a harder time actually paying attention to the things they’re watching/ reviewing… IDK, they just act really old now. Too old, too ignorant, too grumpy, etc.

They’ve been that way for a long time and it really pissed me off. They really just do not pay attention, and I think they do it because they think it’s funny and relatable to act confused. They would also do that a lot with information they’re not directly familiar with. They have an encyclopedic knowledge of certain dumb and obscure things, but the idea that Taskmaster was a popular Marvel villain, for example, gets played up into this crazy wild nerd concept for them to act baffled about. I don’t even care most of the time, it’s just annoying when they pretend like having some information or context is somehow beneath them.

If they wanted to do something truly original, they wouldn’t have any Sith at all. Or maybe a Sith that we’re not familiar with, and no Jedi.