Vladius

adywan said:

After being pretty “meh” after seeing the trailers, i was surprised at how much i liked the first 2 episodes. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but to me it actually feels like Star Wars, unlike BOBF, Ahsoka and the latter part of Mando. The acting & dialogue is fine, which the trailers somehow made it seem prequel level bad, but it isn’t. And thank GOD we finally have colour back in Star Wars and not that horrendous desaturated & over dark grading that’s plagued the majority of the TV shows so far. The only thing that feels a bit off to me is the ending of both episodes. They don’t seem like an episode ending. It’s seeming to be aimed at editing into one long movie that has been chopped up into episodes more than an episodic formula.

Sadly, the dark side of the fandom is ripping it apart. The usual " Woke" bullshit comments are everywhere. Slating the show because of its female lead, the fact they mentioned " two mothers" and other crap. If it’s not white male lead they don’t class it as Star Wars. Wankers. I’m so fed up hearing how Star Wars is dead, just because it doesn’t follow their narrow minded bullshit. No one is allowed to just enjoy it any more without all their vitriol. I’ve seen so many commenting on how they refuse to watch it but will review bomb it wherever possible. Then attacking fans who dare to say they like anything “Disney” Star Wars.

This show has started out pretty well. It has my interest. I LOVE the score and i think that’s one of the reasons why it feels more like Star Wars to me. It feels very Willams to me. Although i don’t mind the different style scores in things like the Mandalorian, it seems to take away something for me. The Acolyte is probably the first TV show that i rewatched the first eps in the same day.

It doesn’t help that the creators and actors go out of their way to publicly say that they’re trying to make people mad on purpose

OFFICIAL Ranking

1. Original Trilogy
2. Revenge of the Sith
3. Phantom Menace
4. Rise of Skywalker
5. Force Awakens
6. Attack of the Clones
7. Last Jedi

Overall prequels take it just for having the best parts of Revenge of the Sith and Phantom Menace. Not coincidentally those are the easiest movies to fix and it’s been done probably a hundred times by different people here and on other sites.

Attack of the Clones is really bad and directly caused pretty much everything I hate about the entire series including in the Expanded Universe, but it doesn’t quite attack the audience itself or the concept of the setting, and it has some fun stuff with Obi Wan. Last Jedi takes the foundation and goes a step further into active hostility toward the other movies and the viewer. It has some neat cinematography but that’s nowhere close to making up for any of it.

Rise of Skywalker is a blast to watch because it’s so ridiculous and insane but it is also the only one of the sequels that actually gives the main characters something to do and it ends on a positive message. Force Awakens would be higher if it weren’t so dependent on having a next installment to answer all the questions, so it’s retroactively worse as a result.

New unpopular opinion - Rise of Skywalker is the best of the sequels and it’s not even close.

NFBisms said:

Vladius said:

Unpopular opinion - I don’t like their depiction, but as depicted in the movies, the prequel Jedi that people call “dogmatic,” “flawed,” “political,” “cold,” etc. were right about a lot of things.

They can be right and still be all of those things.

I’m saying that the things that they’re getting criticized for and called those things for, are things they were right about. Not in a realpolitik sense or whatever you’re thinking of, but just in terms of common sense and what is actually depicted in the movies.

This is probably an unpopular opinion now. Return of the Jedi is way better than people think it is and most of their complaints are illegitimate. The Jabba sequence introduces Luke as an almost-complete Jedi, redeems Lando, and rescues Han, simultaneously resolving things that happened during the previous two movies and setting up the rest of this movie. The “pacing issues” of Endor are not really issues at all. No one complains about the early scenes of C3PO and R2D2 wandering around in the desert and getting captured by jawas in the original Star Wars, even though those scenes are even slower, because it just isn’t a problem unless you’re used to the cracked out modern editing of current movies.
The ewoks are fine and also not that different from jawas or ugnaughts. They show the Empire’s hubris, overlooking things they consider small or insignificant. They serve mainly as a distraction to pull the imperial troops into the forest away from the bunker, and the battle is only won because Han, Leia, and Chewie are crack shots and they have elite rebel troops to hold the bunker. If there’s one change I would make, it would be to just add more shots of the rebel soldiers doing more of the fighting.
The second death star is fine and the insanely good space battle and throne room scenes (both still never topped after 40 years of trying) wouldn’t be the same without it.
Leia being Luke’s sister is awkward but… so what? It’s funny and it’s a meme, but that’s it.
I understand that people love to complain because I also love to complain, but every time it comes up the Return of the Jedi criticisms are just unnecessarily cynical for no reason.

SparkySywer said:

Vladius said:

The line “once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny” is also misinterpreted. Yoda isn’t saying literally any time you get angry or use the Force in anger, you’re beyond hope or redemption. … The consequences of your actions will still be there.

I don’t agree. The full line is “Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny. Consume you, it will! As it did Obi-Wan’s apprentice.”

Specifically look at Yoda’s usage of the word “consume”. Your actions and your decision making will eventually be completely affected by the dark side. It isn’t just that your life is marred by the consequences of your actions, although it is that too, he’s saying that you can’t just dip your toes in the dark side. It’s something that’ll pull you further and further in.

After Return of the Jedi, there’s irony in referring to Darth Vader because he does return to the light. But Darth Vader is, at this point in the story, fully committed to evil. Yoda brings him up to emphasize that once you turn to the dark side, you inevitably become like Darth Vader.

I’ve ranted about this many times before, but Yoda and Obi Wan were not telling Luke to kill Vader.

Luke: “I can’t kill my own father.”

Obi-Wan: “Then the Emperor has already won.”

Yes, and Yoda was right.

I addressed that already. Obi Wan is saying that Luke has to be willing to kill Vader, but he’s not sending him to kill Vader, as that would be pointless. The word they use is confront. I already posted this somewhere else but there’s a quote from one of the Timothy Zahn books where Luke talks about this, he says that he assumed that when they told him to confront Vader that that meant he would have to kill him, but that was wrong and that wasn’t necessarily what they meant. Not that that is Disney canon or G canon, but it shows that before the prequels that was the normal interpretation.

MORC said:

Cool, but are we going to ever see an animated series like this for OT characters?

I don’t think Filoni wants to do that, which is good because I don’t want it either.

I wouldn’t do it at all. But if I had to, it could be cool to have very cryptic, creepy 2-second shots of him sensing things through the Force. No explanation of who he is. Like maybe he feels some kind of ripple and his eyes open when Luke meets Obi Wan or tells him he wants to be a Jedi, he smiles when Alderaan gets blown up, and he looks irate when the death star is destroyed.

Channel72 said:

The DS2 being constructed much faster than the DS1 really is not implausible at all. Of all the silliness in Star Wars, this is one of the least implausible things.

There’s many ways to easily explain this. It really depends on why the DS1 took so long. Firstly, the DS1 was developed secretly under a government that still nominally had some democratic organs and accountability to a pluralistic Senate. So planning, logistics, allocation of funds (a massive amount of funds!), would all need to be carefully orchestrated to appear harmless to the Senate, while also balancing the various competing interests inherent to any pluralistic governing body. But when constructing the DS2, the mask was already off. At that point, Palpatine was just like “Yeah, fuck it, I’m evil. Just deal with it.” So presumably there was no need to cleverly hide resource allocation to maintain a façade of accountability. Palpatine could allocate funds with dictatorial fiat.

Consider how in real life, planning and building the new World Trade Center tower in New York after 9/11 took over a decade, with around 8 years required for construction. Meanwhile, in the United Arab Emirates, a much larger tower, the Burj Khalifa, was constructed in only 5 years. This is because the construction companies involved in building the new WTC had to contend with the large bureaucracies and competing multi-agency interests in New York City, whereas the Burj Khalifa was constructed in a mostly monarchic (or oligarchic) state, with fewer competing interests.

Secondly, it’s also very plausible that part of the reason the DS1 took so long was due to the novel engineering and technical obstacles they encountered while building it. These obstacles needed to be overcome and solved for the first time, requiring extensive R & D. But once solutions were discovered, they knew exactly what to do the second time around. Perhaps they ran into technical difficulties with (I don’t know) heat diffusion caused by the superlaser. A lot of R & D would be required to solve this issue. But once an effective solution was discovered, they could easily replicate it a second time. This sort of thing is common in real-world engineering projects.

And thirdly, there was way more urgency to finish the project quickly the second time around, because after Yavin, the Empire was likely facing countless uprisings, badly straining the Imperial navy. The Empire played the “Tarkin doctrine” card but were then suddenly caught with no Death Star to back it up. They probably had to scramble to build a new one, while their military was stretched thin quelling endless uprisings.

So it’s really not particularly implausible to me that the DS2 could be constructed much faster than the first Death Star, because it was constructed under different political constraints with way more urgency, and they already solved all the engineering challenges required to create it the first time.

And finally, remember that the DS2 wasn’t actually ever completed. Presumably it still couldn’t move. And it was never demonstrated that the superlaser was yet capable of scaling up to the energy level required to blow up a planet.

You nailed it.

As another point, they could have even started working on the second death star before the first one was finished.

It looks horrible and “the Jedi are fallible” is a boring idea

timdiggerm said:

Channel72 said:

And I agree about Alderaan. I’ll never understand why Lucas created Naboo instead of just using Alderaan as one of the principal settings.

As much as I agree, I can’t help but feel that if he had done this, we’d be calling it the prime example of “universe shrinkage”

If Anakin wasn’t from Tatooine, Anakin didn’t build C3PO, and Jabba the Hutt, Boba Fett, and Chewbacca didn’t appear, it would be completely fine and no one would have said anything or been any the wiser.

I strongly disagree with points 3 and 4 but I guess that’s the idea. I think those opinions are already more popular than the inverse though.

NFBisms said:

NOTE: Everything I’m about to say doesn’t mean I think the prequels are good

I don’t actually mind a lot of the PT’s lore on stuff like this; I find it infinitely more interesting that the story we knew secondhand via Old Ben wasn’t just exactly what those movies are, particularly within a narrative primed to disentangle and even criticize “from a certain point of view”. Even if most official material hasn’t taken full advantage of it (until Andor), I’ve always had a fondness for at least this era’s state of play.

Anakin / Darth Vader is purposefully re-contextualized as a kid, and I think there is some value in foregoing the fabled ‘Jedi Hunts’ (that were sure to have happened between canonical III and IV anyway) to examine what made the monster at earlier psychological and political points. He’s a failure of institution, radicalized by war, exploited by an abuser, abandoned by pedagogy. It’s a different flavor of tragedy than personal failure.

On some level, Vader’s evil is romanticized when depicted in a badass light; which would be far beyond a meaningful reason to do prequel films in the first place. I still enjoy stuff like Vader in Rebels, Rogue One, or the Respawn Jedi games, but I can respect that those weren’t new ground to break into the saga. They’re literally just depictions of what we know from the OT. The wholly imperfect execution didn’t make the prequel direction not worth doing IMO, and I can appreciate that it now lives in the objective text.

With regard to the surviving Jedi and Yoda calling Luke the last, an interesting question emerges in this context - What is a Jedi?

If our understanding of the Jedi has shifted from ANH’s idealized Knights Errant fable, to something closer to a monastic FBI and military branch - is ‘Jedi’ perhaps a political label, and not just a description of one’s relationship to the Force? After all, there are other Force users in-universe that are not Jedi. Whose to say that characters like Kanan, Cal, or Ahsoka are even Jedi [to Yoda] at all? Ahsoka was expelled before she could finish her training, Kanan and Cal gave up many aspects of the path to survive and fight back; none of them were in contact with or under the direction of the Rump Jedi Council of Kenobi and Yoda. Meanwhile Luke is trained by that council, the only project undertaken by them during the Galactic Civil War, and specifically has an uncomplicated view of who they were. It’s ultimately pedantic and matters mostly to justify Yoda’s line, but participation in The Order as institution is an important theme for Anakin’s downfall. It may very well be an important part of what makes “a Jedi” in the non-colloquial sense, to an official of its ranks such as Yoda.

Somewhere along the way this became an unpopular idea, but to me Luke not killing his father as counter to Obi-Wan and Yoda’s direction was always an early suggestion of what the PT would eventually, if dispassionately, present about the Jedi Order. So “The Jedi” may have been purged, but the light wasn’t and couldn’t be. I can square the survivor count with Yoda’s line when I think about how Yoda kind of sucked

Counterpoint - you’re wrong and all of this is worse, even if it was intentional on Lucas’s part, which it wasn’t.

Channel72 said:

Sideburns of BoShek said:

I really liked FOTR at the time, and still prefer it to what we actually got. Though imagination and our projections in filling in the blanks often triumphs reality. I’d love to see an animation or comic book form of it, even fan made, but then is so much of that early “what if?” stuff I’d like to see, along the lines of “The Star Wars” comics from 2013/14.

A common element across most fan speculation about the Prequels is that our imaginations concocted stories almost entirely based on elements from the OT. Things like Alderaan, Captain Antilles, spice mines of Kessel, etc. But Lucas obviously wanted to make the Prequels unique, with new settings, new characters, and completely unexpected plot developments. And since it was Lucas’ creativity and imagination that created Star Wars in the first place, it seemed likely that he would come up with amazing new things that far surpassed the mediocre imagination of the average fan.

And indeed he did come up with lots of new, unexpected stuff. Things like Gungans, mysterious clone conspiracies, a “chosen one” prophecy, Qui-Gon Jinn, General Grievous, Dexter Jettster, pod racing, etc. I mean, who could have expected that Episode I would go in an entirely bizarre direction - telling a Kurosawa-influenced side story about two Jedi Knights protecting a young Queen from evil invaders - a story almost completely unrelated to anything that happens in the OT. Lucas obviously wanted to flex his creative muscles, defying fan expectations to such a degree that the whole thing came off as wacky instead of cool. In retrospect, the pre-Prequel fan expectations - derivative and straightforward as they often were - sound like a much better “rough sketch” for the Prequels than what we ultimately got.

Out of that list of unexpected stuff, the only thing that was universally liked and well handled (maybe) was podracing. “At least it did something different” is always a bad excuse for this kind of thing.

That’s not a bizarre direction for episode 1 at all. You’re not winning any points by namedropping “Kurosawa-influenced” by alluding to The Hidden Fortress when the original Star Wars in 1977 was already drawing on that setup so heavily. If anything the prequels ruined those elements by making the Jedi the FBI instead of samurai.

The developments weren’t that unexpected given that they are prequels and some of the material was already written. Everyone knew going in that Anakin would become Darth Vader, Obi Wan would be a main character and train Anakin, the Emperor would be a main character and corrupt Anakin, the Emperor and Vader would kill the Jedi minus Yoda and Obi Wan, Luke and Leia’s mother would be a main character and some kind of royalty, and Luke and Leia would be born and get hidden from Vader. It’s not really fair to any fans or writers to say that they had a failure of imagination for sticking to what was already well established, especially given that writers were explicitly prevented from detailing very much about the prequel era.

For Alderaan specifically, it makes much more sense for Alderaan to be a part of the story than for Anakin to be from Tatooine, which was something Lucas chose to do over. He did re-use a lot of ideas and imagery, it’s just that people nowadays credit that to Ring Theory or something rather than a lack of imagination or to fanservice.

What would that movie look like, though? Who would the non-Vader characters be and what would they be doing other than getting killed?

You’re spot on! There’s no rescuing it though, it’s too late. The only scenario I can think of that would salvage it would be if they separated this part of Disney canon out into its own sphere and went extremely wacky with it. Like basically turn it into a convoluted over the top anime series full of the most absurd retcons and “lore” details.
This is why I actually liked Rise of Skywalker, it started to do that. Very fast paced, cracked out editing, stupid sith daggers, possessed C3PO, goofy unnecessary characters, new force powers everywhere, meme dialogue, Palpatine returning and shooting bass boosted lightning into the sky, etc. Setting all the other problems with The Last Jedi aside, Rise of Skywalker was so much more fun. Just take that to its logical conclusion instead of trying to do a very serious important story about the rise of fascism or whatever. (not referring to Andor)
Doing a high quality Andor-level series would just be wasted on something that doesn’t deserve that treatment.

If we were starting over from scratch, that’s another story.

Excellent work.

Reading through all of it at once, it’s surprising how compatible a lot of it is with how the prequels turned out. The structure of how the Republic fell and became the Empire is all there. The parts that prequel fans are stubbornly attached to seem to be droid armies, the Republic being the side with the clones, and the Jedi being “blind” (dumb). Imagine how much more impactful the betrayal of the Jedi would be if it came from normal people they served alongside with and not programmed clones, or from Anakin stalking them and relying on the well-earned trust they have in him.

The Force has an aspect, somewhat separate from its other aspects, responsible for the existence of life and consciousness. Not necessarily life force or life energy or whatever, but just the spark of being. This is how droids can be sentient living beings even though they don’t otherwise register in the Force. This is how ysalimiri and other creatures that block the Force can do so without harming themselves or life around them. This is how the Jedi Exile survived and continued living while cut off from the Force, and also how they got it back. I haven’t read all the Yuuzhan Vong books but I imagine this would also apply to them.

I thought the clone wars were plural because they were a number of conflicts that all kind of sprang up at once or close together due to cloning being invented or made easier somehow. Any group of systems, warlord or terrorist cell suddenly had the capability to make a clone army, and it destabilized the whole galaxy until cloning was somehow banned or prevented or all the would-be rogue cloners (what the Thrawn books call the Clone Masters) were dealt with. It would have been even more chaotic because you could use clones to impersonate people and sow confusion and paranoia.

NeverarGreat said:

There’s that as well, but I’ve always found it a strange and horrifying implication that a clone’s death is more justifiable than the death of a more ‘normal’ person. I’ve even seen people online specifically saying that clones aren’t really people, so it’s okay that they are dying by the thousands.

I honestly would have just preferred it if George had given us a Republic army vs Clones, because at least then there would be no denying that this war was waged at horrible human cost, no matter how a person viewed the clones. As it is, the ‘family friendly’ marketing of droids vs clones implies that clones are less than a true person, and for me is far more ethically insidious than just admitting that war is inseparable from atrocity.

No no no, you don’t get it, it’s to show how the Jedi have lost their touch, how far the Jedi have fallen! (from what? we don’t know)

Wrath of Khan
good episodes of The Next Generation
First Contact
Deep Space Nine
Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force game

MORC said:

I started getting into this franchise not long ago after years of avoiding it, so I have no nostalgic attachment to it. (I had watched some of it as a kid with my parents but the movies did not get my attention at the time so I mostly forgot what I saw then)
I don’t have anything new to say about the prequels but I want to highlight that the greatest problem in them is just how much TPM doesn’t advance anything in the plot or relationships.
In the grand scheme of all the trash that gets released into movie theaters, I think the prequels are fine action-adventure space movies, even good at certain points. I see the bad reception as a result of Lucas getting out of touch but also the fans have massively high standards set by an overrated perception of the originals. Prequel fans are accused of being nostalgia biased but the same is true for OT fans who can’t see the issues in those films.
I respect ANH knowing the time it came out and the limitations in technology and budget, but it is a movie that didn’t age well. RotJ has many of the flaws that plague the prequels but it’s not acknowledged enough even by those who criticize it. ESB is the only Star Wars film I believe deserves it’s legendary status, the only things that rival it in quality are the 03 Clone Wars cartoon and a few episodes from TCW.

Original Star Wars aged plenty well. I think people see the Tantive IV explosion at the beginning and start immediately going “oh nooooooo 1970s cheesy baddd” but the effects generally are really well done. Everything feels tactile and real. It would be nice if the audio on the dialogue were a little bit higher quality but it’s unfair to expect that.

Same with Return of the Jedi. I think you’ll find that a lot of people do criticize it and compare it with the prequels. I completely disagree with those people. It’s a fantastic movie in so many ways.

The high standards are not unreasonable given that the whole point of the prequels was to make money by filling in three more slots in a story that was already finished. If three movies in a row were all incredible, and you now have the effects budget, the technology, the time, and the momentum to supposedly do things even better than before, why don’t you do that?

For what it’s worth, both my youngest brother, and my wife, who had not seen the Star Wars movies before, watched all six with me on two separate occasions. (My wife didn’t even know Vader was Luke’s father.) We watched them in release order. Both of them independently thought the original trilogy was better. Granted you might argue that I had conditioned them in some way or told them that I liked one more than the other, or told them what parts I liked or didn’t like. That might have happened a few times but in general I tried to avoid it. My wife really liked Jar Jar, and they thought the incest thing in the OT was funny, but in almost every way they had the same praises and criticisms people have always had about the prequels before the 2010s pseudo-revival.

Sideburns of BoShek said:

DarthStarkiller1234 said:

Sideburns of BoShek said:

It would be cool to see a timeline for that pre-Prequel era, with events and also character bios. Including links to actual sources like the films, WEG sourcebooks, guidebooks, novels, comics, games and any other stuff like Making Magic and Behind The Magic CD-Roms. Or even a single thread covering those events and characters, their life and lore pre-PT.

Some OT threads that have covered what you are posting about (from a quick look around the Indexes on here):

• What if The Prequels were based on the Pre-PT EU and were more “OT Accurate”
• Were the Jedi supposed to not be allowed to get married, have children or any possessions when the OT was made?
• At what point did Tatooine robes become Jedi uniforms?
• OT lightsaber colours; and some waffling on about the various colours used across the OT & Expanded Universe
• Wars, organizations, relationships, and galactic history before the Prequels
• Putting The Original-Original Trilogy’s Prequel Story together
• Implied starting date of the Empire from OT dialogue; + character ages + when certain events took place
• Did G. Lucas ever intend to portray the Jedi as a flawed institution in the Prequels? Or was it added later in the EU?
• Original Trilogy vs The Prequels: inconsistencies, retcons, plot holes and discrepancies… (‘50+ issues’ list)

Some OT film drafts and character threads for the OT are in An Index for Original Trilogy Discussion
 

There is also a section in the ‘An Index for General Star Wars Discussion’ for this topic; with many relevant threads:

‘Star Wars before the Prequels (with the PT ushering in George’s ‘nu-SW rules’) : life and lore from both the Original Trilogy & EU’

 

Edit: I thought I had deja vu! You posted asking about ages of characters here just a month ago?:

How old Anakin and Obi Wan were originally supposed to be?

Ah yeah I’m really starting to get into the Pre-PT prequels so I’m posting a lot of questions if its okay

That’s great, I think there is a number of us on here interested in that era, and some even old enough to remember it!

Although wouldn’t it be better to put it all your questions in one “mega” Pre-Prequel thread? So anyone can easily find and answer any of your questions, and not have repeat questions and answers? Up to you DarthStarkiller1234, I hope you find the answers and information you are looking for.

I edited in 2 more threads to my original list above.

I am surprised there aren’t YouTube videos or even websites covering the topic. There seems to be hundreds of videos online out there repeating the same things on Star Wars, but not so many on the “pre-Prequel” era?

Yeah I think we should have our own thread for this. I’ve actually considered doing a YouTube channel or at least a video in the past, but never had the time.

I would like a link as well. Very curious to see how you put all this together!

People have said this before, but I’m really unsure how it would be done. When people bring up the idea of showing more Vader hunting down Jedi, what would that story look like? How would you do it without making it a very long montage? You could pick one or two or a group of Jedi for him to go after, but why should we get attached to them in particular? The major characters up to this point are all accounted for, so you would have to make up some new ones just for them to die by the end of the movie. Obi Wan’s summary of the situation in the original movie pretty much covers it.