Hey, I don't remember this part from Empire...
Hey, I don't remember this part from Empire...
Time for a long rant. I've been a Star Wars geek since I first saw ESB in the theater when I was four years old, and always will be. Over the past couple of years, I have been reading Star Wars novels. Starting in high school, I began buying these books without really reading them. I read only a few over the decades, but not many. So, I've been catching up on a lot of reading. Some of these books are excellent, such as Timothy Zahn's Heir to the Empire trilogy and Michael Stackpole's X-Wing series. Some of them were only so-so, such as Dave Wolverton's The Courtship of Princess Leia. The book took the whole "princess" thing way too literally, and it had Leia falling out of love with Han for fickle reasons. This is the guy she risked her life to rescue from Jabba the Hutt, and once they have some time and distance between the two, she doesn't know for sure if she still lives him or not. At the same time though, the book had some interesting concepts, such as Force-using "witches" riding atop rancor monsters, but the author also gave Luke super Jesus powers like levitation and healing, and it was terrible to read. Some other books I won't even bother to read, such as Vonda McMcIntyre's The Crystal Star (which was actually a failed Star Trek: Deep Space 9 script re-written with Star Wars characters swapped in), and Children of the Jedi by Barbara Hambley is said to be a real turd too. But the nice thing about reading these books (at least the well-written ones) is that they spark a love for the Star Wars galaxy, and reignites my love for when the Force was mystical and the Jedi were mysterious. They were written prior to Episode 1: The Phantom Menace. These books barely touch on what the Clone Wars would have involved, not treading far into the past, but basically expanding upon the story that was set forth in the original trilogy. These books are fun to read and they make me nostalgic for when Star Wars was at its best.
Now we live in a time when Star Wars now is all about midichlorians, vague prophecies, a virgin birth, and a convoluted plot that makes Darth Vader into a sort of dopey Christ-like character. It's just not cool to be a Star Wars fan anymore. The fact that there are so many people out there that prefer the new prequel trilogy over the original films because of the more fantastic action scenes and CG special effects is a total shame. I reluctantly bought the original trilogy when it was released on DVD several years back, but I didn't bother getting the deluxe versions. Now I wish I had, since they contain the unaltered, original versions that were a dump from the laserdisc versions. This summer, the entire six films have been released on Bluray. Even if I had a bluray player, I probably wouldn't bother buying them.
Before progressing, I need to establish some terminology for sanity's sake. I will be mostly using abbreviations for these movies: TPM= The Phantom Menace, AOTC=Attack of the Clones, ROTS=Revenge of the Sith, ANH=A New Hope, ESB=The Empire Strikes Back, and ROTJ=Return of the Jedi. So now allow me to complain about how Star Wars has become so incredibly lame.
Changes to the original trilogy
Seeing the original Star Wars trilogy on the movie theater again in 1997, there are some aspects to the revisions made to these that I really liked. Some, of course, were terrible. I wish these could be a bit of a Chinese buffet restaurant. Grab some of the tasty General Tso's chicken, pass on the crappy stuff that's supposed to be sweet & sour pork, which is nothing but fried pieces of meat without the vegetables and pineapple that you pour the sauce on top of. Grab some beef and broccoli along with the green beans, but just ignore that weird meatloaf and other crap that is supposed to appeal to people who don't like "exotic" food.
The idea of cleaning up some stuff in the original trilogy is decent, as long as they did not change the mood, defeat the characters, look and sound ridiculous, and basically muck up things. The changes should have been subtle, such as the final edition of Blade Runner. The changes to Blade Runner seems to be brought up in discussions of the original Star Wars trilogy edits, but I really cannot compare the two. Ridley Scott was revising his own movie, not rewriting it. I love Blade Runner. I wanted to see it in the theater when the Director's Cut was released, but I was a high school student without a driver's license at the time. So seeing Blade Runner on the big screen, at last, in the winter of '07 was a dream come true. But for those who hadn't seen the movie for a long while, or who did not watch it as religiously as I did growing up, then you wouldn't even notice anything different about the movie. Because of that, in my opinion, the final cut of Blade Runner is perfection. It's the way movies ought to be touched up: subtly. I went to go see the Final Cut with a friend in the theater in December '07. I apparently had seen the movie more often then he did, and I was like, "oh, that's new. oh, they changed that. oh..." He didn't pick up on a lot of the changes. For those who don't know, there were a lot of continuity errors with Blade Runner, many of them due to cutting the part of an additional Replicant named Mary. Because of this, the Replicant count throughout the movie would have been inconsistent, and they had to rework the order of the scenes. When Leon meets Roy who is waiting in the phone booth, the scene was supposed to begin right after Roy is meeting with Mary. So instead, they show the scene from the Bradbury building of Roy's hand going decrepit, then suddenly a reversed shot of Roy looking at Dr. Tyrell with the sound of Leon rapping on the glass of the phone booth, and then suddenly you see Roy exiting. That was re-edited to make it appear that Roy was actually inside the phone booth. Additionally, there was the reworking of scenes in which the fight with Leon had to come after Bryant visits Deckard, in order to maintain the proper number of Replicants still on the loose due to Mary's part being cut from the movie in the midst of filming. In the original film, Deckard has a sudden bruise on his cheek when talking to Bryant, then suddenly it's gone, only for Leon to give it back to him. They fixed this. Plus, there were other small things corrected, such as the part of the serial number on the snake scale under the microscope not matching what the Laotian woman was reading, as well as the mismatching lips moving when Deckard questions the Egyptian.
But, enough about Blade Runner. Let's talk about the Star Wars trilogy changes. I'll start with the changes that I liked. It was good that they cleaned up the transparency of the snow speeders' cockpits (not that I noticed this to begin with, but that's good). They removed the ghostly film splices that track the the Tie Fighters and such. One thing that always bugged me was the matte painting in the detention corridor in ANH that didn't look right when filmed from different camera angles. They fixed that with the DVD release to make the long corridor actually look real. They changed the English text on the tractor beam's control panel and replaced it with the Basic written language (whatever it's called) to make it consistent with the other films. They improved some of the footage with the TIE fighter vs X-Wing dogfights at the end of ANH to make the action look faster and more exciting. I thought adding the Biggs scene was necessary to give his death some meaning, and working Jabba's scene in ANH was a nice idea (although the CG involved looked terrible until it was redone for the DVD). Plus, stuff like freezing Han's mouth from lip syching Leia's lines when they're in the asteroid, having Lando clap to the rhythm of the music at the end of ROTJ, getting rid of the dumb Ewok song... THOSE are the good edits.
But there are so many bad changes to the movies, too. The infamous change that everyone despises, of course, is the "Greedo shoots first" crap. It was a deliberate attempt at trying to soften Han Solo's character, to make it seem like Han waited for Greedo to attack first before killing him. It's as if they thought that Han killed him in cold blood. But really, wasn't George Lucas paying attention to his own movie? Greedo was basically telling Han that he's waited a long time to kill Han, and how much pleasure he will take from it. He was pointing a gun at Han's head, and he made every intention of either shooting Han on the spot, or perhaps marching him outside to shoot him in the street. Han simply took the best opportunity to kill Greedo preemptively on the spot. He's a brash, opportunistic pirate, who takes initiative. Having Greedo shoot first (or simultaneously as with the DVD revision) is completely stupid. When James Bond is being held at gunpoint at the end of a 007 movie, and the villain is monologing about stuff like "I've waited a long time for this, Mr. Bond. You have interfered with my plans for world domination for far too long, and I'm afraid it is now time to finally kill you." Bond won't just wait for the guy to shoot, he'd do something clever to kill the guy before he gets shot. That's what John Mclaine would do too, as with any other badass action hero. Marty McFly would point behind him and say, "What's that?" So why would Han be any different?
As with seemingly everyone else, ESB is my favorite of the trilogy. Fortunately, it was the least changed, yet what was changed is mostly objectionable. I was indifferent to the addition of the wampa footage in ESB (at least it wasn't CGI). Having Ian McDermid reprise his role as the Emperor while Vader and he are talking on the phone in the asteroid belt was a cool idea. They could have used CGI to make him look thinner as he was in ROTJ (would've been easy to cover up since it was a hologram, afterall), but they had to go and alter the dialogue! GRR! And a minor gripe of mine was removing Luke saying "You're lucky you don't taste good" to R2D2 after he was spit out by the swamp creature. Was it really necessary to get rid of Vader saying, "Bring my shuttle" and instead changing it to "Alert my Star Destroyer to prepare for my arrival" when the voice doesn't even sound like Vader? I don't mind them showing the shuttle taking off and such, but just the way he said "Bring my shuttle" showed such frustration in his voice, after having his son refuse to join him and instead prefer to fall to his death. There was also the part where they added Luke screaming as he fell in Cloud City on Bespin. He wasn't fully trained to take on Darth Vader yet, and he'd rushed to leave his training incomplete in order to save his friends. Vader was one-handing his lightsaber at first, holding back during the fight, but then Luke starts giving him difficulty and he starts to get worked up. Luke has his hand amputated, Vader reveals himself to be his father, and gives him the ultimatum to either join him or die. Luke knowingly chooses death, and steps off the platform to his death to avoid becoming a monster that would endanger his friends. Adding that scream in the '97 version totally defeats this emotionally powerful moment, and having the scream taken back out in the DVD release shows how Lucas's obsessive/compulsive disorder is inconsistent. Similarly, in this new edit of ROTJ when Vader sees his son being tortured to death by the man he has sworn his duty to, having him look from his son crying, "Help me, father. Please!" to the hateful monster he serves, and then finally tossing the Emperor into that pit, he now shouts, "No. Noooooo! Knock it off, asshole!" In the original version, you only see Vader's mask. You cannot see his face, but in that silence, you can actually feel his inner turmoil. The music supported this, too. Having him shout "Noooo!" completely ruins the scene, which had already ruined his character in Revenge of the Sith. There are other additions that are stupid, like the cartoony song and dance scene in ROTJ. Seeing that loogie hanging from that cartoony Muppet wannabe's teeth was sick when his open mouth takes up the whole screen. Plus, they made Mos Eisley a goofy place when it's supposed to be a hive of scum and villany. They put that stupid droid floating around Mos Eisley doing everything short of putting "KICK ME" signs on the backs of stormtroopers just to show off the technology of digital insertions. This was just dumb. They had the technology to digitally insert stuff into the original footage, but they went way overboard with it. Giving Mos Eisley more depth by adding a few extra pedestrians and ships flying overhead was cool, but having that little flying droid annoying everyone was stupid. Plus, they put that dinosaur's ass crossing right in front of the camera when Luke and Ben are being stopped by the stormtrooper patrol. That was simply bad filmmaking, obscuring the camera like that. It was essentially them saying, "Did you like Jurrasic Park? We did too!" I've seen footage on YouTube from the new bluray version of ANH of R2-D2 hiding from the Sandpeople, and they've added fake-looking rocks to make him hiding more. The result is showing the droid hiding in a place that he could not have been able to fit into!
There were also some changes that they could have made for the better, but they didn't. Way back before 1997 on the FidoNet Star Wars Echo (during my pre-Internet days), there were discussions on edits that we were speculating and anticipating that never came. Check out the Millenium Falcon evading the Star Destroyers in the Hoth system in ESB. The freighter is obviously modified and is not a clunky, slow-moving barge. It's juking back and forth, diving, and dodging the Star Destroyers. The Destroyers launch TIE Fighters to pursue the Falcon because it's moving too fast for their lasers to track. Then look at the Falcon being pursued by Star Destroyers in A New Hope. "Don't worry, I know a few maneuvers to lose them." And as they pointed out in Riff Trax's commentary, this entails SLOWLY FLYING IN A STRAIGHT LINE. Back prior to 1997, we figured that we'd see the Falcon flipping around, juking and jinking like it does in Empire. But we didn't get that. Or when the TIE Fighter is "too far out of range." Uh, you can throw a rock and hit that fighter... it was right in front of their cockpit! They did at least insert the moaning sounds of the Falcon's ship computer that brought the ship to life in ESB, but the maneuverability just isn't there in ANH.
George Lucas is crazy
Back in the '80s, George Lucas was full of hot air when he bragged about his initial vision for nine movies. At the time, we all seemed to believe that he had it all figured out, because he had delivered such a wonderful story to us already. But really, I do not believe that any real story for episodes 7-9 existed in his mind at the time, and I'm pretty sure he's actually admitted that. Despite his claim to have a grandiose story in his mind, it is apparent that Lucas was making things up as he went along. That's not always a bad thing though, since JRR Tolkein was obviously making stuff up as he went along once he started writing the Lord of the Rings books, and they turned out brilliantly. For example, I don't know if he originally had planned for Darth Vader to be the same person as Anakin Skywalker, but it is apparent that Luke and Leia being brother and sister in ROTJ was tacked on as convenient plot filler. And I'm sure that what happened in Phantom Menace was not what he'd originally planned way ahead with the whole Adventures of Anakin Starkiller stuff in the 70's. All we knew since forever ago is that by the time Obi Wan finds Anakin, he is already an accomplished pilot (not a dumb hotrod-driving kid), trains him as a Jedi, fights alongside him during the Clone Wars (and we thought the Mandalorians would have played a bigger part in that), and we knew that their relationship ends with them fighting on a volcanic planet, leaving Anakin severely maimed, disfigured and burned. Sure, there were some fantastic imagination brought to live in the prequels, like the beautiful Gungan underwater city or the sensory overload of Coruscant, but everyone had built up in their minds in anticipation what the prequels would have been like in those many years of waiting. And I bet most of us all had better ideas than what we ended up getting with the prequel movies. In the early '90s, there was a fraudulent screenplay of "Star Wars Episode III: Fall of the Old Republic." It floated around sci fi conventions and the like, and I believe the way I obtained it was by finding it with a Gopher protocol and downloading it from an FTP server through a BBS. I only skimmed through it a bit, but as dumb as it was, some of it seemed to make more sense than the official Episode III movie.
George Lucas's impact on movie making is undeniable, for better or worse. The negative aspect about the original Star Wars movies it that it started this trend of making what I call "roller coaster" movies. Basically, you just go along for the ride, and be wowed by the special effects. The original trilogy had charm to it, however, and compelling characters. Lucas's inspirations for the story and cinematography in ANH are clearly evident in ANH, such as Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress and old WWII films, such as Michael Anderson's The Dam Busters. The result was a fantastic movie. The acting was a little weak, but it captured everyone's sense of adventure. Along came the sequel, ESB, which actually surpassed the original. It didn't really seem to copycat any other films, as far as I could tell. The story was cleverly unique and it expanded the characters.
Then along came ROTJ. Of course I loved it when I was a kid. I was seven years old, so I was blinded by how dumb the Ewoks were. In the same way, kids today are blinded to the fact of how incredibly stupid Jar Jar Binks is. The movie is incredible with so many things going on at the same time. I liked it, but I can understand criticisms about how this detracted from the story. The main problem, other than the Ewoks, is that the plot of the movie is about destroying yet another Death Star. How this was handled was cool, with the fighters flying into the superstructure and blowing it up from within. The models used for these scenes were incredible.
But the reason why the first two Star Wars films were so solid was that the creative process was a collaborative effort. Star Wars was the concept developed by George Lucas and Gary Kurtz. They made Star Wars together out of their love of old SF serials, and it was something they did together. Apparently Lucas had some goofy ideas, and Kurtz kept him in check. When Lucas insisted on having another Death Star in ROTJ, as well as trashing all of the plot elements that would have made the story more compelling like ESB was, Kurtz left, and ROTJ was not as incredible as it could have been. According to Kurtz, Luke and Leia were not siblings, and this was just a convenient way to dissolve the tension of the love triangle without Luke's feelings getting hurt. ROTJ would have been more about Vader trying to persuade Luke into joining him to overthrow the Emperor, and that he believed the best way to do that was to use the Dark Side. Interestingly enough, Luke was originally supposed to finally defeat the Emperor in Episode 9! In ROTJ, Han Solo would have died during a raid on an Imperial base. The final clash would have left the Rebellion in pieces, and Leia would have been named queen over the remaining Alderaanians. Luke would have gone on his own way, much like the lone hero of a Western movie. It would have been much more of a bittersweet ending, but Lucas threw all this out in favor of a happy ending, a second Death Star, and stupid Ewoks to market to children. Kurtz decided to leave. Lawrence Kasdan was still the screenplay writer, and his idea was to have Lando die in the Death Star explosion, thus sacrificing himself to save everyone. There was even some foreshadowing when Han looks at the Millenium Falcon and has a feeling that he'll never see his ship again. But no, Lucas insisted on having none of the main characters die. He wanted everything to be wrapped up with a happy ending.
In interviews, Kurtz has said that Lucas began putting the cart before the horse by ROTJ. The movies were no longer pushed to sell a great story and having the toy sales follow as a result, but ROTJ was made to push the toys first. Look, I was four years old when I first saw Empire Strikes Back. I was hypnotized and mesmerized, and this is the movie that kids today consider the "boring one." I did not need furry teddy bears with spears to captivate me. Seeing the first two Star Wars movies as a child in the theater were amazing experiences for me as a kid, and there was no cute marketing involved. Heck, even in the novelization of ROTJ, When Leia first wakes up in the forest to see Wickett standing by her, immediately she is reminded of the plush dolls she played with as a child! As a child, the Ewoks were okay, but that's not what sold ROTJ to my soul. It was the aspect of Luke confronting Vader and the incredible space warfare. I still get chills when I watch the starfighters and ships blasting at each other in ROTJ! When the Ewoks and Droids cartoon played on Saturday mornings, I didn't care much to watch the Ewok episodes at all, and I was much more interested in seeing the episodes about C3PO and R2D2!
So after ROTJ, Along the way Lucas's head became so inflated with hearing people call his movies a "modern mythology." I think this is why he borrows way too much from mythology and history in these new movies, instead of coming up with original ideas. A slave boy wins a chariot race to save the queen, a savior of immculate conception, gladiators fighting dangerous animals in an arena, ancient prophecies of a messiah, and so on. ANH was cool because it borrowed heavily from World War II movies, but by ROTS you see Ben Kenobi and Anakin swinging on ropes and sword fighting, as if they were in a swashbuckling Errol Flynn pirate movie. And then he copies Frankenstein when Vader gets off the operation table! So lame.
As Gary Kurtz said in an interview, "I think one of the problems that Lucas has now, in the Lucas Film empire, is the fact that he doesn't have more people around him who really challenge him." In another interview, Kurtz points out that Lucas had gone from being a director who had a passion to do his best to being a director who wanted to do something that was just "good enough" and let the marketing do the rest of the work. Kurtz has gone on record telling about how George would have run-ins with the art department and the cameraman, and how they would push back. He said that George Lucas was unhappy with Irvin Kershner being the director on ESB. He didn't want to be the director, but he was expecting to be able to phone Kershner up and tell him what to do and vicariously direct the film. Wow. That didn't happen, and many of the reasons why everyone loves ESB more than the other two movies was because Kershner was going to direct the film the way he wanted to, and have input from the actors as well. Richard Marquand, the director for ROTJ, was somebody Lucas could control more easily.
It's just sad because ROTJ could've been so much better, if only Lucas would have surrounded himself with people who could flat out tell him, "that's not a good idea, George. People won't like this." Instead, he was surrounded with guys who fawned all over him and seemed to do whatever he asked them to do without offering alternative suggestions. It only became worse with the prequels.
So in the long wait between ROTJ and TPM, Lucas built his Lucasfilm empire full of people who grew up with Star Wars, and they idolized Lucas. They were "yes mans" who would do anything he says. Lucas has said in interviews that he felt so good not having anyone telling him what to do, and unfortunately this meant that he no longer had people like Gary Kurtz and others to keep him in line. Nobody seemed to challenge or question his goofball ideas. "Oh, a big stupid rabbit-eared gecko who acts like an annoying, unfunny cartoon character? Brilliant!" "Have Yoda hopping around like a frog with a Lightsaber? George, you're a genius!" It's hard for any of them to voice their concerns with Lucas's cock in their mouths. It worked better with Lucas behind the main plot and driving the visuals and creativity and leaving the writing and directing to others. And Lucas's copout excuse for his bad directing that goes something like, "My movies are for the visuals, not the plot or the acting" is a bunch of crap. This completely contradicts what he was saying back in the '80s about how special effects should not be the purpose of a movie. Instead, what we got were prequels that were made for the purpose of special effects. He is not a good drama director at all, as Irvin Kershner apparently was. Episode 2's wooden "romance" scenes are so intolerable and wretched, but it's not the fault of the actual actors. The dude who played Anakin did a good job at being very believable as an impulsive, quick-to-anger young man, but as a romantic he failed bad. A New Hope had fairly bad acting and dialogue ("I knew I meant more to you than money!"), and guess what? Lucas was the director. He remained a director for all three prequels. He knew that Star Wars had become a huge success because of others, and it's like he had to prove to the world that he could do it all over again without the help of others. He only worked with people who would do whatever he wanted them to do, no matter how stupid his ideas was. This totally reeks of an inferiority complex.
Last year, I picked up an issue of Star Wars Insider magazine because it is for the 30 year anniversary of ESB, my favorite Star Wars movie as well as most everyone else's. This magazine has some quotes from Harrison Ford. Here's one about how the "I know" line came to be just before Solo was frozen:
"Film is a collaborative process," says Ford, "and I was happy that I was able to make a small contribution. It didn't go down so well with George at the time. He would have been a lot happier with the scripted line which is, 'I love you too.' But I felt, and Kersh (director Irvin Kershner) agreed, that it was the opportunity for a more 'character-smelling' moment."
Ford then explains how Lucas said that it was a bad line and that people would just laugh. He says that the test audience thought it was great, so it stuck. But what strikes me as amusing is how Ford points out the collaborative process of filmmaking. If dumb George had his way, ESB wouldn't have been the great movie it was. Harrison Ford knows this, and he indirectly said so in this interview.
In that same magazine issue is an ironic interview of Lucas from 1980. Here's why he didn't direct The Empire Strikes Back:
"I've never really enjoyed directing. So I have more or less retired from directing. I felt that if I directed Empire I'd have to direct the next one, and the one after that, and so on for the rest of my life. Being an executive producer is a much easier job than directing. I generally oversee the production and, although I have less control over specific things, I find I can live a much saner life than as a director!"
Oh, if only he could have kept to his promise to be the idea man behind the scenes instead of the director! Natalie Portman and Ewan McGregor are not bad actors, but under George's directing, there were some pretty poor scenes. And to think that Halley Joel Osmet could have played young Anakin in TPM! Watching the DVD's special features and seeing the other kids who tried out for the part, there were others who did a better job than the kid who got the role.
But ignoring the collaborative process that kept Lucas in check...that made Gary Kurtz leave. So for all those years, except for when he was involved with movies such as Tucker, Radioland Murders, Willow, The Last Crusade, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, as well as doing some producing like Don Bluth's The Land Before Time, Lucas more or less hid for a very long time, building up everyone's anticipation and admiration for new Star Wars films. He surrounded himself with ass-kissing "yes mans" like Rick McCallum, and then what we got in the end was a bunch of crap.
In the end though, the Star Wars movies were meant to be a tribute to the corny space opera serials, and it succeeded in in that. But they were made to be fairly believable, at least the first movies were.
Oh yeah, and does anyone remember ten years or so ago when Lucas was saying that the Playstation 2's "Emotion Engine" was so powerful, that it would be capable of making the CG for the upcoming Episode 2? Between Lucas and Ken Kutaragi, who's cock was in who's mouth that time? Or was it some sort of 69 thing going on?
What went wrong with the prequels
I admit, at first I was so awed with the idea of seeing new Star Wars films that I saw each of the prequel movies several times in the theaters. I initially did enjoy each of the prequels, for what they were worth. I was excited to see the space ships and such, and I did my best to ignore the problems I had with them. I recently have watched these reviews of the prequel movies by Red Letter Media. They are very long, but I've watched them twice through already. If you think that these movies were great (perhaps you are under the age of 20 or so), then I suggest you invest the time into watching them. Watching these videos are funny, entertaining, as well as very informative. Some of the criticisms are a bit fetched, but those are rare. The reviews are done from the perspective of an old man who abducts prostitutes, keeps them in his basement, and murders them. It's funny for a bit, but it does get old after a while. Anyhow, the reviews are very informative and are genuine film critiques. Watching these reviews reminded me of all the various objections I had while first watching these movies. It's funny because as a Star Wars fan, I was trying to be too forgiving and just accepting that these movies are here to stay. I'm not going to just parrot the Red Letter Media reviews. These are my own views, which I'm sure resonate with with what their reviews say.
The Phantom Menace
Before The Phantom Menace was released, I had understood that the movie would be a whimsical childhood adventure movie, so it helped to soften the blow. I even defended Jar Jar in a previous article I'd written. To me, the character of Jar Jar was insultingly childish and absurd, but after the whole Ewok thing, his character wasn't too much of a stretch. The Jar Jar antics weren't too bad, although they go overboard a bit and the "exqueeze me" line was terrible. I was expecting a "baking powder?" followup after hearing that. Those accusing Jar Jar of being a negative racial sterotype seemed to have overlooked the fact that he was played by a black guy. Nevertheless, they could have kept the character but not made him quite so cartoony. LOTR's Gollum looked way more convincing than Jar Jar, who looked, moved, and was animated too cartoony. I let the fart joke and stepping in poo gags roll past me without wincing, because after all, we saw that frog creature outside of Jabba's palace eat a critter and belch, and we even saw the Sarlaac Pit belch too. So, a camel's fart wasn't that much of a stretch past that.
The thing that really pissed me off in TPM was the whole "midichlorian" crap and making Darth Vader into Space Jesus by giving him a virgin birth and a half-assed prophecy that he would bring balance to the Force. This was all determined by a freaking blood test. Blood tests should determine if you have a disease or something, not how big of a Jedi you are. When midichlorians were first mentioned, I was immediately uncomfortable. Ben Kenobi's talks about The Force in ANH established it as an intangible, mystical energy field that flows throughout all of creation. Yoda's monologues in ESB expanded on this further, making the Force such a powerful, eloquent, beautiful thing. Then TPM trivialized it by trying to scientifically explain it all. The Force was now no more than microscopic cells in people's bloodstream, and the more you have, the more of a Jedi you are. So if you get a blood transfusion from a Jedi, would that make you a Jedi too, or at least temporarily? This was such a stupid concept, and I felt insulted and betrayed. It's like trying to scientifically explain God, or as moronic as trying to use science to disprove the existence of God as antagonistic atheists are prone to do. Science can only explain the observable. It cannot even explain the concept of a soul, let alone something like God. But, I digress. The whole "prophecy" thing wasn't explained well at all, and it just seemed to be a convenient plot vehicle to try to tie both trilogies together by making Anakin the main character and how he would bring "balance to the Force." But really, what does that mean, "balance to the Force"? How can the Force be "balanced" with the Dark Side wiped out? Shouldn't it be more of a Taoist Yin and Yang concept, where both Light and Dark constantly keep each other in check? And why would the Jedi be so concerned about "balance" when they are obviously on top of things in this first movie? The Sith don't even exist, as far as they know.
And why the heck did they make all of the Jedi in the prequels dress like they are from Tatooine? When I was a kid, the ROTJ Luke Skywalker action figure specifically said "Jedi Knight Outfit" and he was wearing black pants and a black tunic that has a collar that can flip down and look totally badass like Captain Kirk's red Starfleet uniform in The Wrath of Khan! I thought it was established 20 years ago what a Jedi's outfit was supposed to be. They're supposed to be clad in black!
I read the novelization of TPM, and aside from the stupid midichlorians and the virgin birth (seemed to be trying to fit in too many myths and legends with that one), the plot does have some interesting concepts. A conniving senator manipulates some greedy corporate thugs to besiege his homeworld, manipulating his queen to initiate a vote for a new supreme chancellor, thus ensuring that he gets the sympathy vote and putting himself in charge of the galactic government. I liked the concept of a slave boy winning a chariot race in order to save the queen. The underwater city was beautiful as well as the alien technology it contained. Coruscant was beautiful, and I remember reading the Han Solo Adventures books by Brian Daley as a kid and how it described an endless flow of starship traffic and I could hardly envision it. Seeing it on the big screen was cool. However, The Yoda puppet was terrible in TPM, so redoing that for the Blu Ray is an improvement for sure. I liked the idea of a droid army, and it showed them as clunky, old technology, of which there really wasn't enough of. I mean, for a movie that's supposed to take place 40 or 50 years earlier than ANH, the technology looks a lot fancier than it should have. Would it have killed them to make the holograms, technology and such look more primitive than the original movies? Or how about having hologram technology be not yet invented in the prequels? Phantom Menace was supposed to be 40-50 years in the past. Couldn't they have made the interiors of their space ship look a bit more simplistic? Why are the shield generators so incredibly powerful in the prequels, whereas in the original trilogy, they can only take a few hits before the ship is in serious danger?
It's annoying that the alien accents in the movie all sound like our own terrestrial accents. Although come to think of it, Lucas was always wanting to make the alien languages more like Earth languages. In ROTJ, Lando's copilot Nein Numb in ROTJ was acted by a Kenyan movie star, and his "alien" language is just spouting nonsense sentences in Kenyan, like "one hundred herds of elephants are standing on my foot" or something like that. The Ewoks sounded a bit like Vietnamese to me, which would make sense since Lucas has said he thought they were an allegory to the Vietnam war in which the "little people" (maybe that's not the right words he used) outsmarted a technologically superior army. (That's the common delusion is that the North Vietnamese army outsmarted the American army, when in reality we just outdumbed ourselves.) Come to think of it, the only truly imaginative aliens were in the very first Star Wars movie. Hammerhead (Ithorian) speaking in stereo with two mouths... that's cool. Louis Gosset Jr.'s performance in Enemy Mine was brilliant, and he gave life to the Drac race. His accent was alien, as well as his behaviors. The Navii in Avatar are another great example. They were obviously patterned after the Native Americans, but their accents were original and interesting. Come on, it's not hard to use your imagination. Nute Gunray did not need to sound like a grumpy Chinese gangster. Watto did not need to sound like a stingy Jewish man from New York.
Having Anakin as a 10 year old boy was a bad decision. Ben Kenobi's chat in ROTJ made it seem that Anakin was an established pilot by the time they had met, so I always figured Anakin would've been older in the first movie. Knowing how to drive hotrods and flying space ships are two different things. But again, Lucas was focusing on children and toy sales. He figured that if children see a young boy as a protagonist, then they could project themselves into his place in their fantasies. Heck, plenty of 10 year old boys have fantasies of hooking up with 14 year old girls (I know I did at that age), so the movie had this part covered for sure. But when I was growing up, I didn't need Luke or Han to be kids for me to relate to them. It's good to have adults to look up to. That's what puts most American action films apart from Japanese shows, I think. In Japan, there's always a little boy getting caught up in the action, whether it's a Gamera movie or a mecha anime. If Anakin had been more of an adult in the first movie, it would have made it so much better. Plus, this would have avoided having a bad-acting kid to annoy the audience. I mean, there are some child actors who are wonderful actors, such as Halley Joel Osmet and Dakota Fanning, but the kid they got to play the young Anakin really wasn't that great of an actor. He didn't bother me as much as others, but my point is that this could have been avoided with just having him start out older than this.
The movies had some decent actors, especially with Liam Neeson, Ewan McGregor, and Natalie Portman. However, their talents were wasted. Ian McDermid was fantastic as Palpatine as always, but everyone else seemed bored and they didn't want to be there. The acting could have been better if 1. it wasn't directed by Lucas, and 2. if they had actually built sets so that they weren't standing in front of green screens constantly. The green screens were certainly annoying, but the one good thing about the Phantom Menace is that they at least shot scenes in Tunisia, Italy, and such. Thus, the visuals were great. The Naboo city was actual architecture that they were interacting with, and the hangar was an actual set with actual starfighters lined up. But stuff like this costs money, and Lucas figured he could just film everything in front of a blue or green screen and save money on the rest. I know that they had a huge heartbreak when their podracer props were damaged during a sandstorm out in the desert. I think Lucas wanted to avoid this happening again by making everything make-believe.
So by the second movie, it was all blue or green screens and CG. You know when the Jedi are in that arena at the end? Some of the worst green screen crap can be seen there with the extras. In more than one shot, you can see some dumb idiot kid standing there barely swinging a lightsaber around, and it's supposed to be a big, intense battle. I think a lot of these people either worked for Lucasfilm or were the family of those who worked there. I'm sure many of them begged and begged to be in a Star Wars movie. Heck, I love Star Wars, and I love it enough to know that a Star Wars movie deserves to NOT have me act in it! But this way, these clowns got to say, "Duh, yay, I was in a Star Wars movie." Again, LOTR mops up SW in this aspect. For AOTC, aside from the Tatooine homestead, there were no more sets; forget it. The Chancellor's chambers was all apparently CG. They couldn't even bother to put up a wall for them to stand in front of, and it really looks fake. Some of the CG really shines, like the car chase in AOTC and such. But so much of it was really bad. For a movie that is supposed to be a vehicle for special effects, that's really pathetic.
The main problem with the whole premise of Senator Palpatine being a "phantom menace" is the lack of true motive. If you aren't a fan and already know that Palpatine = The Emperor, then you would be totally bewildered as to why anything in that movie actually happened. It totally shoots a hole through Lucas's idea that the movies would be made to be seen in order from 1 to 6. Yeah, the camera looks right at Palpatine when Yoda and Mace Windu are talking about the Sith, but they could have made it a bit more apparent for everyone else. I saw the movie on opening night, and I overheard women asking if that was a young Luke Skywalker and not Anakin. I won't excuse their lack of attention to detail, but they really had to make things a bit more obvious for non-fans. Again, if Lucas really wanted these movies to be seen in chronological order from episode 1 to episode 6, the story to TPM should have been presented in such a way that people who've never seen a Star Wars movie would have been able to understand. And that means making the waving of hands for Jedi mind tricks a bit more obvious for people to catch onto. That was part of the beauty of the scene in which Ben Kenobi influences the stormtroopers to overlook the droids. It was good storytelling to have Luke be ignorant of such things, to allow an exposition on Kenobi's part so that he can explain to the audience how the Jedi mind trick works on the weak-minded.
We are made to assume that Palpatine is just evil for evil's sake, but really, what is in it for the Trade Federation and such? They're just greedy? The summation of the three prequel movies is that it's all one giant, tangled, convoluted conspiracy by Palpatine to put himself in charge and declare himself emperor. The novelization to the first Star Wars movie says that Senator Palpatine came to power because he was "Aided and abetted by restless, power-hungry individuals within the government, and the massive organs of commerce." So it says that he was aided by commerce, not having commerce had its own own army. Why would commerce even be allowed to have its own army?
The whole idea of Anakin being too old to begin training, and yet he's unofficially trained anyway by Obi-Wan is stupid. Moreover, Kenobi's motivation to train Anakin is extremely weak! This is one of many things that didn't sit well with me after first watching TPM. Kenobi even told his master Jinn, "The boy is dangerous. They all sense it, why can't you?" This of course is foreshadowing the eventual murder of the Jedi by Vader, but why put that in there and ruin the character's motivation? If Kenobi knew that his master was a stubborn fool and that training Anakin would have severely dangerous consequences, why does he so readily agree to train him just because it was Jinn's final dying wish? Kenobi is suddenly so stubbornly adamant for training Anakin after this. WHY?
What's up with this Trade Federation? Why on earth would a "trade federation" have an army capable of invading and occupying planets? What's their motive? Enslave an entire planet because they refuse to pay taxes? I understand that they were just putting pressure on the queen to sign their treaty. Fine. That does make sense. They were probably lying to Amidala that her people were being killed too, to guilt her into coming back to Naboo. But wouldn't such a large scale invasion be extremely illegal and immediately obvious? What kind of investigation would be necessary to prove this? Why only send two Jedi for this? Why not CNN?
The question of motive never once comes up in the original three Star Wars movies. There is no question as to why Luke would join Ben Kenobi. There's no question as to why Ben and Yoda would train Luke to become a Jedi. There's no question as to why Ben sacrificed himself to Vader's lightsaber. There's no question as to why Lando had no choice but to betray his friends in order to spare his citizens, nor was it unclear why he helped them in the end. There's no question as to why Vader chose to save his son at the end and defeat the Emperor. But the question of motive comes up all the time in the prequels, because Lucas felt the need to make everything far more convoluted than it really needed to be. And unfortuntely, the issue of motive plagues too many movies these days as Hollywood tries to make movies more and more convoluted.
Attack of the Clones
So while I was convincing myself to think that the first movie wasn't so bad, I was really looking forward to the second, even though the movie's title did not sit well with me. I got my hopes up for nothing, because it turned out to be another turd. The dumb romance scenes in AOTC were pathetic. The blatant ripoff of Romeo and Juliet was made even worse with the wooden performances and the cringeworthy "you're softer than sand" dialogue. Again, maybe these scenes would not have been so bad if there was a decent director behind the camera, but Lucas wanted to have total control of these movies. If there had been external influences on the script, then perhaps the dialogue would not have sounded as cheesy and pathetic.
People, stop looking at Romeo and Juliet as the ideal representation of "true love!" Do you know WHY Shakespeare's play is called a "tragic comedy?" Because the comedy aspect comes from Shakespeare mocking the foolishness of young love. Here you have a young pinhead swearing by the moon that he would love some girl forever, yet he'd only met her that night and his only interaction with her is just whispering to her from the bushes as she stood at her balcony. That's not love, it's just raging hormones! It's not real love! Their so-called "love" causes them to act foolish and stupid. Check for a pulse before you kill yourself, you pinhead! They die, thus the tragic part, but it's still a comedy! So please, realize that Romeo and Juliet both embody stupidity and youthful, blind love. NOT true love!
On top of this, AOTC's plot has way too many convenient plot vehicles to try to cover up the gaping plot holes. After TPM, AOTC is just bad writing on top of bad writing. So in AOTC, we learn that, inexplicably, the Republic has no army for itself. Not even a coalition of forces from different planets, Lucas? I mean really, why would a "trade federation" be allowed to have its own army, yet the Galactic Republic, which has thrived for thousands of years, has somehow never once had an army of its own? Even the United Nations has its own joint military. As worthless as the UN's "blue helmets" may be, at least there is an army. Even the novelization to TPM had Anakin conversing with a Republic starship captain, and he told Anakin of how he'd delivered soldiers and Jedi to a combat zone somewhere. Before the prequels were released, we all assumed that the Republic would have its own army. I mean, at least individual planets like Corellia would have their own armies. There ought to be some sort of coalition of forces for peacekeeping operations. The Jedi couldn't have been able to do everything on their own.
What is Amidala's motive? Of course she wants to save her planet in TPM, but she "will not condone a course of action that will lead to war." So once she escapes her planet and pleads her case to the Galactic Senate, she goes back to start a war with the Trade Federation. Well, I guess she learned her lesson and that was character development? But by the next movie, after having her planet invaded and having her people pick a battle with the bad guys and destroy their army, wouldn't she of all people understand why it is necessary to form a standing army of the Republic? Why would she be opposed to the formation of such an army in the second movie, an army which would have been capable of rescuing Naboo from being invaded by robots in the first place? If she wants the Republic to survive and she believes in democracy, why wouldn't she of all people realize that having an army to defend that democracy is in her best interest? Oh, that's right. She must be like a far left-wing Democrat with no common sense. But still, after having her home planet's sovereignty invaded and all she went through to liberate it, you'd think that she would have wised up and ditched the liberal BS. This was hard to swallow in AOTC, but it's like Lucas was hoping that people wouldn't really spend time to seriously contemplate the motives of these characters.
So due to their greed, the Trade Federation people allowed themselves to be led around by Darth Sidious. When things go wrong for them with the events of the first movie, Nute Gunray goes and cries on Count Dooku's shoulder and felt betrayed. But somewhere along the way, didn't he notice that everyone he's siding with are taking orders from Darth Sidious? Wouldn't that have raised some alarms inside of Gunray's head? And what the heck is with his name, anyway? Is his name a play on Newt Gingrich and Ronald Reagan, seeing as how Lucas is yet another idiot Leftist who thinks that it's best to promote socialism: tax rich people like crazy, despite reaping the rewards of capitalism and making millions of dollars himself? It's like that dickhead from the band Rage Against the Machine. His lyrics espouse the virtues of communism, and he has huge paintings of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao hanging in his big huge expensive house. What a hypocrite. If he hates capitalism and people who make lots of money, why does he live in a big, fancy house paid for by the capitalistic society he supposedly "rages against"? He can take his hat that says "commie" and stuff it up his ass.
Growing up, the concept of the "Clone Wars" was something mysterious. It was only mentioned slightly in the first Star Wars film, and since cloning is morally controversial, so many of us always figured that the clones were used to attack the Old Republic. The name of the movie is even titled Attack of the Clones, which led me to believe that clones were going to attack the Republic! They sure seemed pretty suspicious when Ben Kenobi went to go check out the factory making them on El Camino. I figured that since the Separatists were a minority, they made up for their lack in numbers by using clone troops. Being utterly useless, the battle droids just don't pose much danger whatsoever, so why couldn't they have made the switch to using clones? But the way things are in these movies, having boring clones vs boring droids is a big problem because there is no real tension in this. In the beginning of ANH, we are suddenly shown several Rebel fleet troopers lining up along the ship's cooridors to defend the princess from the stormtroopers about to burst through the doors. We don't know who any of these men are, but you can see the fear in their faces and the tension in their eyes. Even though we don't know them or their names, we care about them because their plight is real. Throughout the original trilogy, you see Rebels getting killed left and right. They are real people risking their lives for their political ideals and the freedom of the galaxy. These are people who were probably refugees from their Empire-controlled home planets, unable to return to see their families (or perhaps their families were killed by the Empire). We didn't care about stormtroopers because they were faceless minions. So having the Clone Wars being about faceless minions that nobody cares about fighting against boring robots that nobody cares about is BORING.
I first saw AOTC while I was living in Japan, and I had to wait about a month after its premiere in the USA before it was finally released in Japan. I purposely avoided reading any reviews of AOTC and any spoilers. So when I first saw the clone army in AOTC, I was thinking, "Okay, so somehow they're going to be fighting these guys, right?" But no, it turns out that these are the "good guys" (at least for a while). The problem is, the clones are expendable and we don't care about them. For those of us members of the original generation of Star Wars fans, what we gathered from reading the Empire Strikes Back novelization and from tons of fan speculation was that the Clone Wars had something to do with the Mandalores, of which Boba Fett belonged to. I remember reading an article in some magazine (I think it was Entertainment Weekly) that had speculated about Kenneth Brannaugh playing Obi Wan Kenobi, and that the Clones would all be Boba Fett-style Mandalorian armor-clad warriors. But instead, the clone soldiers we got seemed to wear armor vaguely similar to Boba Fett's, yet not as badass-looking. They look more like the stormtroopers of the original movie. This is so dumb on so many levels. Stormtroopers in the original movies were not clones. They had different voices and they had some sort of individual personality to them. Their commanders were regular people, as well as everyone else from scanning tech crews to Star Destroyer bridge crews. These were people who were either enlisted or conscripted into the Imperial Forces. They believed in the Emperor and they believed that what they were doing was right. Even Nazi soldiers on the front lines felt that they were fighting for their country and doing what was right.
It all goes back to motivation. If we are to swallow the prequels as canon, then basically, we must accept the fact that everyone was tricked. It was all an elaborate prank. It would have been much better for the Separitists to have a better motive than to just be led around by a shadowy, cloaked evil guy they've never even met in person who continually fails them. So the Separatists were duped into attacking the Republic (for whatever gain that would pose remains a mystery), and the Republic and the Jedi were tricked into accepting a clone army that just so happens to have been created by a forgery. Idiot Jar Jar Binks was manipulated to push for a vote for emergency powers for Palpatine to create an army, and oh look! Suddenly, it just so happens that here is an army of clones we can use!
The whole clone army seemed to be waaaaaay to convenient. Nobody seemed bothered that the army was cloned from a bounty hunter who had tried to assassinate Amidala, or that they were created by what was apparently a forgery by an imposter posing as a Jedi who was killed long ago. It's like waking up on a hotel room with a gun sitting next to you, and suddenly somebody breaks through the door to attack you, forcing you to use the gun in self defense, thereby killing him. Then suddenly the police arrive. Wouldn't you think you were being set up? So isn't it just a bit too convenient that just when you need to fight a war, there was an army created for you? Wouldn't they have investigated who was behind this forgery? I read the novel to AOTC, and it still doesn't explain this.
And why are the Separatists not actual planets, but instead they are entities like the Trade Federation, the Techno Union, the Bankers Clan, etc? What the heck is that about? I get what Lucas was getting at: his message is an analogy on how the corporations, military industrial complex, and the banksters get us into war on false pretenses for their financial gain as well as increasing their power over people. That scene with them on Geonosis chattering about what to do may as well be the Bilderberg group. But if there is such a Trade Federation, why are they only Neimoidians and not comprised of other races? Do they only hire their own race by blatant discrimination? Or does this mean that there is a planet comprised entirely of tax accountants, or a planet consisting only of lawyers, and they feel the need to speak for everyone else in the galaxy? This is so stupid. Again, if Lucas was trying to make a point about the evils of capitalism, he sure is a hypocrite since he's a huge sellout himself. It took over a decade for me to see the analogy Lucas was making by showing the Separatists like the Globalists in our world, but maybe he was oversimplifying it by making all of these various groups as uniracial entities.
So at the climax of AOTC, the concept of the Force is further ruined by giving Yoda a lightsaber and having Dooku shoot lightning out of his hands. (Dooku is such a stupid name, and you may notice that Lucas always says Dohku instead, which actually sounds not so bad. I think maybe his kids were anime fans, and so instead of Goku, he wanted there to be a Doku. So many of the names in the prequels are ridiculous, so I won't get into this further.) Once Yoda shows up at the end, the movie turns into Big Trouble in Little China with all the lighting bolts and jumping, midair swordfighting. I saw AOTC three times in the theater, and every time, people would bust out laughing at how Yoda would jump around like a frog. Lucas thought that we all wanted to see Yoda using a lightsaber, but in reality, so many of us figured that he was beyond that sort of thing. Just as how Palpatine would've been beyond using a lightsaber as well. We figured that the lightning from the fingertips was a display of raw, evil Dark Side power, and seeing Yoda and Dooku bounce this around back and forth like it's nothing really trivialized what Luke went through in ROTJ.
And just as Luke lost his hand in ESB, Anakin loses his hand in AOTC. The good thing about this is that Anakin's hand looks like lower technology than the perfect-looking hand that Luke receives. And as I mentioned before, there isn't enough examples of this in the prequels. The prequels borrowed way too much from the original films, destroying lines like "This asteroid is not entirely stable," or "my powers have doubled since the last time..." Dumping trash, hiding the ship by attaching to a Star Destroyer/asteroid... Lucas went from aping works of genius like Kurosawa films to basically aping his own movies. This became more evident in AOTC and got even worse in ROTS.
Oh, and guess what? Grand Moff Tarkin wasn't really instrumental to the development of the Death Star after all. No, it was designed by a bunch of flying termites living in mud castles. Puke-a-tronic.
At this point, I must make a statement on how the image of the Jedi, as depicted in these prequels, really failed to live up to my expectations. This has been mentioned by others, especially the Red Letter Media reviews, but this must be said. The whole idea about Jedi essentially being child abductors who won't allow the children to have a relationship with their parents is absurd and pointless. If the Jedi are to be just and righteous, then it must be the child's decision to devote him or herself to the Jedi Order. Having the Jedi be cradle robbers, forbidding the children from loving their parents is just wrong. In the expanded universe, a character named Corran Horn is the son of a Jedi. Michael Stackpole wrote the X-Wing novels before the prequels were released, so the author, as with everyone else, just assumed that Force-sensitive individuals such as Corran would naturally be the children of Jedi parents. But having the Jedi forbidden from marriage makes me think of the failings of the Catholic church and how it's become corrupted by homosexual pedophiles. I think perhaps Lucas was thinking more along the lines of Buddhist monks who are chaste and meditate on enlightenment to forsake the worldly pleasures and such. I philosophically disagree with either case, but if Lucas was to promote the notion that Jedi are to meditate on enlightenment and to become devoid of emotions, they are certainly not depicted as such in the movies. All of us over the years figured that the Jedi were just like knights or samurai, who are free to love and marry and have children. It makes me wonder if Lucas thought up all this crap for the prequels just to a. force a "star-crossed lovers" Romeo and Juliet-style love plot into these movies between Anakin and Padme, and b. to just manufacture this as a plot vehicle for Anakin resenting the Jedi and eventually wanting to kill them all.
Revenge of the Sith
OK, so now on to Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. Before this movie came out, we were all still hoping that this movie would somehow redeem the prequels. Everyone knew that Lucas couldn't direct. His friend Steven Spielberg even offered to direct the third movie to try to salvage the series. Spielberg knew that the acting in AOTC was terrible, and he wanted to save the series. Spielberg apparently cared more about the Star Wars fans than Lucas did! But no, Lucas wanted total control. Lucas insisted on smelling his own farts and believing they didn't stink.
So the movie starts out with a fantastic, epic starship fleet battle, which was what I was craving all along. The fleet battle in ROTJ was mindblowing, and it still is today. But this whole scene is ruined when they introduce goofy technology. The technology in the original SW films was straightforward and to the point. If they fire a proton torpedo, it is to blow up the Death Star or something. But the intro scene to ROTS is ruined with stuff like exploding missiles that release tiny droids that use welders to try to rip apart a ship. How practical is that? Sure, they're made by the Techno Federation or whatever, but how cost-effective is that? Just make them release exploding shrapnel or magnetic bombs or something. Stuff the droids with M-80s or something. Don't just give them welders. Lucasfilm guys were so in love with going over-the-top goofy with special effects that it detracted from what could have been a really awesome, epic fleet battle. We never saw crap like this in the origial trilogy, which occurs several decades in the future.
So back to the issue of motive, what is Anakin's motive in ROTS? For the entire movie, he is stupid and is duped into following Palpatine down the path to the Dark Side. The entire trilogy failed to make Anakin Skywalker an interesting character at all, making his plight trivial. Nobody cares when tragedy besets foolish characters. That's why I hated He Ping's movie Red Firecracker, Green Firecracker. At the end of the movie, the protagonist becomes a eunuch by blowing his nuts off with a firecracker because he's a fucking moron. The end of the movie could have been completely avoided if he wasn't such a retard. He was a dumb character making a dumb mistake. Not interesting. Now compare that movie to Zhang Yimou's Raise the Red Lantern in which an interesting protagonist makes a bad mistake, or To Live, in which the protagonists are beset with one tragedy after another, despite their best efforts. OK, so I enjoy Chinese cinema, and maybe all that was lost on most people who may read this!
OK, back to Anakin. He wants to learn how to save his wife from dying in childbirth (although you'd think that such a medieval way to die would be easily remedied in such a technologically advanced galaxy). His path to the Dark Side was way too rushed and not at all convincing. Again, it's all about silly trickery. His turn to the Dark Side didn't feel real; he was just tricked into it. In ANH, Kenobi says that Vader was seduced by the Dark Side, not tricked. He also said that Anakin was a "good friend" and seemed to have fond memories of him. Yet the only brotherhood and comraderie between Kenobi and Skywalker is established with small talk, and the rest of the time, they are bickering with each other and Kenobi is always filled with distrust of Anakin since the very first movie! See, if Lucas didn't bother with that stupid "prophecy" nonsense, none of this would've been necessary. Anakin Skywalker could have just been a good-hearted, noble, strong man who is seduced by the powers of evil and falls from grace. That would have made his becoming Darth Vader far more powerfully tragic. Instead, we just have a brooding kid with a mean streak who is forced to suppress his sensual urges by the rigid discipline of being a Jedi.
When exiting the theater after ROTS, I overheard conversations like, "So why does Leia say that she remembered her mother vaguely when she was a little girl?" I guess she must've been remembering her adoptive mother, but still, this was a bit dumb. Just like having Luke and Leia turn out to be brother and sister, having Anakin create C-3PO, bringing Boba Fett into AOTC and then dragging Chewbacca into ROTS, it really turns out to be like Charles Dickens's Great Expectations in which it turns out that everyone is related to each other. I mean really, is the galaxy really that small? Yoda's like, "Oh yeah, at one with the Wookies, I am, With Chewbacca, I hang. Yes."
And why the hell does a backwater planet like Tatooine on the outer rim of the galaxy seem to be the constant centerpoint for the movies and the books? It's just Tatooine! If it was that exciting of a place, why was Luke so anxious to escape that planet?
On top of all this, the special effects weren't even that great in the movie. There's a lot to be said about using physical models for space ships and such. Recently, a coworker brought From Star Wars to Indiana Jones, a big book covering the three SW movies and the three Indiana Jones movies. Looking at the models of the space ships and sets of the original three Star Wars movies, all of the space ships looked so real because they were weathered, worn, and used. Lucas made a point to make sure everything looked like stuff was commonplace in the universe, and well worn. Dust streaks and grime on the space ships, areas on the Millenium Falcon that had been damaged, etc.
But that's totally gone with the new movies. Everything is so shiny and new. This reflects Lucas's idea of how the old times were, an unrealistic portrayal of America's silver age. He's made movies like American Graffiti and Tucker because he loves the cars of his childhood. But have you ever noticed that whenever you see a period drama of the '50s or '60s, the cars always look so brand new and shiny? They're all beautiful, immaculately restored cars from auto clubs and such. Not everybody in the '50s drove a brand new, shiny car. But this sort of misinformed view of how things were greatly affected the SW prequels, with shiny space ships and everything looked so new. The Republic had lasted forever, but apparently everyone was flying in brand new space ships. I think the yellow Naboo fighters were an homage to a Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers design, but what separates Star Wars from those old cheesy shows is that the stuff is supposed to look real. A part of what made Star Wars so real and believable was lost on Lucas himself, apparently.
The technology was not consistent with the original trilogy. Why not make the holograms look even worse, or better yet, how about there not be any holograms at all since perhaps they hadn't been invented yet? At least make the computers look older. If Lucas was going to screw around with the Special Editions, couldn't he have updated the computers in ANH to make them look newer, thus keeping it in-line with the prequels? Also, the ships' shields seem to be able to take quite a pounding, and seem more advanced than in the original movies. In AOTC, Slave I's lasers was pounding Kenobi's starfighter like crazy with rapid fire direct hits. If this was a starfighter from the original trilogy, Kenobi's ship would've been vaporized after several direct hits to the shields. Stupid.
And although this has been pointed out before, it must be said again here. If Lucas's copout excuse as to why the movies suck is because they're supposed to be "kids movies," you can't have long, boring discussions on trade embargos, taxation, slaughtering children, and burning to death on the side of a volcano if it's supposed to be a kid's movie. Grover as a Jedi would have been a better idea than Jar Jar.
It really could've been better overall, but I think the biggest strike against the prequels was having way too many years of anticipation built up really hurt the films. It's possible that people would've hated them no matter what. Strike two was having Lucas in full control and surrounded by "yes mans". Strike three was the over-dependency on CG special effects, which was contrary to what Lucas is on record of saying way back when. And strike three was that Lucas had somehow forgotten how to make real cinematography. He used to be influenced by the likes of Kurosawa, but now he's just influenced by himself and pursuing his own self interests and feeling too comfortable with having them not questioned.
How I would have made the prequel trilogy.
If I was to have written the prequel trilogy, the first thing to go would be the whole midichlorian crap would have to go. Jedi skills could be determined through aptitude tests, much like what happened with Dr. Venkman in Ghostbusters. They do this anyway in TPM, with Anakin perceiving the pictures displayed on the screens. It seems that Lucas had created midichlorians because he had painted himself into a corner with the premise that Jedi were babysnatchers. That could have avoided entirely if he hadn't decided that the Jedi were robbing cradles.
Obi-Wan Kenobi should have been the main character of the prequels, not Anakin. And as the Red Letter Media review illustrates, there is no real main character in the prequels. Luke Skywalker is unquestionably the hero of the original trilogy, so wouldn't it make sense for Ben Kenobi to be the true main character of the prequels? In ANH, it would've been like Ben was "passing the torch" of the main protagonist to Luke or something.
I think the Clone Wars should already have begun from the get-go. There's no sense in wasting time. The Clone Wars should be dragged out over several decades, I think, so let's just have it already begun before the first movie. So let's say that a planet like Naboo is under seige by neighboring star systems, aligned with Separatists. I like the idea of a droid army, so let's just leave that that the way it is. Perhaps the neighboring star systems are separating from the Republic, and having Naboo remaining a part of the Republic complicates that section of space. So perhaps they're trying to force the queen or whatever to ally with these Separatists. The story could involve a Republic task force with the two Jedi who are there to negotiate, and then promptly told to leave. The planet is invaded, and the Jedi go in and rescue the princess. Perhaps the Republic task force is decimated during a battle, and Anakin could be a fighter pilot who survives and helps the two Jedi rescue the queen and take her off-planet. Anakin and Padme could meet then, and that could be the start of the relationship. The movie would escalate to a conflict between Republic forces and the Separatists, and the Separatists are defeated. Instead of the blockade being conveniently reduced down to only one ship at the end, there could be a huge space battle over the planet between the Republic and the Neimoidians. The control ships would be destroyed, and the folly of using a droid army would then be quite apparent and the Republic wins the battle. Darth Maul was an excellent character with wasted potential, so perhaps he could've just been some rougue dark Jedi hired as a mercenary by the Separatists. He could still kill Qui Gon, and be defeated by Kenobi. Maybe he wouldn't be killed right off in the first movie though. Who knows? Maybe have him as a continuing antagonist.
Then by the second movie, perhaps Anakin could be a full-fledged Jedi and he's married to Padme. So the Separatists would have ditched the droid army since it just isn't practical for large-scale war. The Mandalores would have been developing these clones all along, and have built up an immense fighting force. The Republic could be constantly besieged by these clones, and the Republic forces, despite the leadership of the Jedi, could be losing the war. Perhaps here is where Palpatine could come into the picture.
Quite often, a bad person can come to power when he can sway the ignorant masses and have them blindly believe that he can fix all of their problems. Out of turmoil, he can present a shining face of salvation, and his ignorant, cult-like followers will herald him as a messiah. They will look to him to better their lives and to provide a solution for everything. Instead of having Palpatine duping everyone into following him, why not make the situation more credible and believable? I think it would have been far more effective if instead of making him evil for the sake of being evil, Palpatine could be evil for the sake of being good. Let's just say that perhaps the Republic is on the verge of collapse, under relentless attacks of these clones. You kill one clone, and two more takes his place. The Republic army and its Jedi just cannot stand up to the hoardes of clones. Perhaps Palpatine could have taken advantage of the situation, played on everyone's fears and vulnerabilities, and have everyone blindly following him because they view him as their savior. This has happened so many times before, From Adolph Hitler to FDR to more recently, President Barrack Hussein Obama. A cult-like devotion would rise up, and Palpatine's followers would blindly believe all of his campaign promises. They'd even believe Palpatine would keep their cars full of gas and their mortgages would be saved! Hitler rose Nazi Germany from the ashes of World War I, and Germany became a prosperous nation and an international superpower, capable of taking on the world. Just imagine how much more powerful President Obama would be if he was able to fulfill all of his empty promises! The first page to the novelization to the Star Wars novel says, "He promised to reunite the disaffected among the people and to restore the remembered glory of the Republic." Gee, I bet his campaign slogan was "Hope and Change." Oh yeah, and the book says he became "President of the Republic," not the "Supreme Chancellor." But, whatever!
So perhaps by the end of the second movie or the third movie, just as the Jews were the scapegoat Hitler blamed for all of Germany's problems, Palpatine could blame losing the war against the clones on the Jedi, saying that due to their lack of leadership, the citizens of the Republic are in grave danger of losing to the Separatists. The government decides to remove the Jedi from their place as guardians of the Republic. Heck, maybe Palpatine could appoint an army of specialist "czars" to make decisions on everything and circumvent the proper legislative process. Hmm, gee...
Dooku's character in AOTC resembles more of what I had imagined Anakin Skywalker to have been: a noble Jedi who has disagreements with the Jedi order and quits the Order. In the movie, Dooku resorts to attacking others when necessary, yet he seems reluctant to do so. Perhaps Anakin Skywalker could become disenfranchised with the Jedi during this time? Perhaps he's beginning to use the Dark Side to attack the enemy army, saying that the best defense is a good offense? This could be the point where he is seduced by Palpatine to use the Dark Side. Perhaps he's already in trouble with the now deposed Jedi for violating Jedi principles of using negative energies for the greater good ("the ends justify the means"), and he helps Palpatine to resurrect the old Sith Order? Perhaps he could be the one to destroy the cloners and bring about an end to the war. But perhaps during this time, Padme's been pregnant for a while and without communication with her husband, she's had no way to let him know that she is pregnant. Perhaps Palpatine could have a premonition that these twins would someday become a threat to him, and arrange to have her killed somehow. Perhaps Kenobi would somehow catch wind of this, and he assists her with an escape plan by using a decoy; a doppleganger as what is used in the prequels. So perhaps through deception her Kenobi could convince palpatine of her death, and he helps her go into hiding on Alderaan. Perhaps Palpatine would blame Padme's apparent death on Kenobi, and they have their fight on the volcano and Anakin is then defeated. The Jedi are scattered about around the galaxy, and Yoda and Kenobi go into hiding. This may not be the greatest idea, but at least it would be in-line with what Kenobi says in ROTJ about "The Emperor knew as well as I that if Anakin were to have childre, they would become a threat to him." What we got in the prequels make no effort to address that Palpatine knew about Anakin having any child/children!
Perhaps the murdering of Jedi would begin during the third movie, but this could just as well take place between the two trilogies. Murdering children was really in poor taste in ROTS, so that really would only be implied at best, if I were to have any say in the writing of the prequels. It would have been interesting to put some twists in the movies, like maybe Alderaan ends up doing something terrible, so they give up their weapons? Or better yet, maybe let them be the Switzerland during the whole ordeal? I don't know.
I think it would have been great if there could have been some real fan service for us die-hard Star Wars fans, such as having them featuring Victory-Class Star Destroyers on the Republic side and having Z-95 Headhunters as the starfighter of choice! I really like how the Clone Wars TV series has shown the Y-Wing Fighter in its "original" form, before it became the stripped-down, ugly fighter in the original movies. There was already so much source material put forth as canon in the RPG books and such that it would have been nice to keep everything in line by not introducing too much stuff to contradict these sources that have been around for years.
I guess I'm just rambling at this point. There were a lot of neat ideas put forth in Episodes 1-3 that I did like, so it's not that Lucas is a total hack. It's just that if he would have welcomed more input from others, it could have been a truly collaborative effort and it would have turned out a lot better. I know maybe my version might not be the most exciting, but at least it's not silly and stupid, and perhaps a bit more consistent with what we know about the characters.
Take a trip back to 1982 for more science fiction movie stuff.
Go back to the "Greg's Life" Table of Contents
"Fear can sometimes be a useful emotion. For instance, let's say you're an astronaut on the moon and you fear that your partner has been turned into Dracula. The next time he goes out for the moon pieces, wham!, you just slam the door behind him and blast off. He might call you on the radio and say he's not Dracula, but you just say, 'Think again, bat man.'" ---Jack Handey
mail: greg -atsign- stevethefish -dot- net