Kevin Drum tweeted this last night, and I just remembered it thanks to Bob Cesca, but this seven part review of why the Phantom Menace sucked is just awesome:
You can see the other six parts here. May the force be with you.
And if you cringed every time he pronounced protaganist as “Pro-tuh-gone-ist,” you are probably an effete liberal who likes arugula and dijon mustard.
eastriver
This was passed around a few days ago. It’s brilliant. And funny. And, most damning of all, TRUE.
El Cid
whatuhVER
parksideq
Up until last weekend, I was wondering why George Lucas even bothered with Episode I, but now I know the answer.
It was made so that this epic takedown could also exist.
Tomlinson
As has been said, you will think “70 minutes? No fucking way I’ll watch that!” but watch four minutes, you’ll watch the rest, and you’ll keep thinking about it for a while.
Just amazing stuff.
fraught
Didn’t see the movie but watched all 70 minutes of this brilliant, screamingly funny critique last night. A.O. Scott, count your days.
Brachiator
Too true! And too painful! But you really don’t need 7 parts. A lot of this boils down to the sad idea that no one was probably brave enough to tell George Lucas that his story stank, his vision of the characters stank, well, that the whole freakin’ thing stank.
It’s also funny to realize that in the original, a group of mostly little known actors rose to the occasion and created something wonderful, while the Phantom Menace and the films that came after stifled a group of excellent actors and turned them into a bunch of boring stiffs.
MattR
I love the list of example “Pro-tuh-gone-ists”:
Ailuridae
Umm, I think the guy who made that (the one with all of the art school graduate friends analyzing the characters) doesn’t really mispronounce protagonist.
That said he’s right and its an awful movie. Empire Strikes Back is wonderful and the third of the prequels is very good; the other four movies are all substantially worse than Waterworld.
Royston Vasey
In Part 2 he actually pronounces protagonist correctly, but then makes other ‘mistakes’.
It’s all part of the ‘charm’ of the reviewers persona.
More please.
tavella
I really fail to get why anyone would bother. Episode 1 was a entertaining, though not great, movie. I didn’t like Episode II as well, since it relied more on the weakest part of the first movie (Anakin) and was missing one of the strongest bits (Liam Neeson.) And I never bothered seeing Episode III because I knew it would rely even more on said weak spots. The endless, endless whinging by Star Wars obsessives about how Lucas betrayed them are pathetic.
And I think people who are bothered by midichlorians got *way* too in love with their personal interpretation of the first trilogy.
Meg
If you dont have 70 minutes of time to watch this like I did last night (don’t ask) just watch part 7. Lucas and his lackeys are in the movie screening room, sporting looks of horror at what they created. It’s a textbook OH SH*T moment where they just realize “hey maybe this Lucas guy shouldn’t run the entire production.”
Notorious P.A.T.
Hilarious )
arguingwithsignposts
Saw that the other day, while waiting for teh kitteh. Who is, btw, a loyal reader.
Jason
Guess he’ll have to do a 140-minute review for Avatar.
wingnuts to iraq
so we all read Fark? That’s where I saw this last week for the first time.
It is really entertaining. I watched it all :)
Brick Oven Bill
As Santa’s vibrator-wielding elf, I hereby estimate that one in ten gifts sent out this Christmas season pay tribute (license) to George Lucas’ Star Wars.
This speaks to the current state of temporary decline in America. Star Wars was released thirty-two years ago. There is also still a hole in the ground where the World Trade Centers stood.
At least Bush got the Iraqis to pretend to be good.
arguingwithsignposts
@Brick Oven Bill:
I stopped right there. Yikes.
amorphous
what is this i don’t even
RedKitten
@arguingwithsignposts:
Didn’t I see a Savage Love column about that once?
Notorious P.A.T.
New tagline: What’s Wrong With Your Faaaace?
Yutsano
@RedKitten: Possibly, but I guarantee it was much more coherent and vastly more entertaining. I’d marry that man if we both weren’t taken.
ericblair
This thing is so good to watch, because obviously nobody asked any of the questions Mr. Boozy Narrator raised. On top of Lucas’s penchant for making bigger, more incoherent, and more ADHD movies, he has to go back and fuck with stuff he’s already done. And, of course, the stuff he’s already done is better because he didn’t either have the resources or the total control to execute his vision of total incoherence and visual overload. He screwed with THX 1138 just enough to bugger up the claustrophobic feel of the city by adding totally unnecessary action scenes. He’s one guy who really should have been stuffed in a closet ten years ago.
Steeplejack
@arguingwithsignposts:
Heh. Best Smudge pic yet.
tripletee
The ongoing butthurt over the Phantom Menace 10 years on is a lot funnier than this critique, imo.
Violet
@arguingwithsignposts:
LOL. That’s a great photo. Are you enjoying your new kitteh? Looks like a real sweetie.
Just watched part 1 – excellent. I’ll try to fit in the rest of them between batches of cookies. Two varieties of cookies down, four to go.
Nicole
Love this thing- made me want to reread the Star Wars section in Easy Riders Raging Bulls again.
And reminds me again how so much of the great in Empire is Kasdan’s script.
Kiril
After watching The Phantom Menace, I remember thinking, “well, there’s a couple hours of my life I’ll never get back.”
I just got 70 of my minutes back.
bago
@Brick Oven Bill: You ill informed idiot. They had almost ten stories of the freedom tower up when I visited 2 weeks ago.
Sly
@Tomlinson:
Four minutes? He had me at “Star Wars: The Phantom Menace was the most disappointing thing since my son.”
Comrade Luke
OT: I don’t remember anyone mentioning this
Lehrer’s Rules
I wish everyone else in the media held themselves to these standards.
Sad Iron
I was immediately hooked as well, and it’s hilarious. But, humor aside, this is a pretty formidable work of criticism. This guy obviously hates this movie to the very core of his being, yet he has watched it at least 100 times in order to compose this epic smackdown. Like any real critic, the guy did his homework and was informed to the teeth. The micro. The macro. There’s no weakness here. Lucas: surrender now.
freelancer (itouch)
I’m watching part 1, and that part where he goes “the main character usually gets the girl too” one of the four frames is charlie bucket ‘getting’ Willy Wonka.
That’s fucking boss.
Spiny Norman
@27: brilliant pwntage. Game over, BOB, game over.
wasabi gasp
That was brilliant. It makes that shitty movie, and a tied-up chick in the basement, worth it. I generally frown upon both of those things.
Shalimar
“I analyzed this movie with a team of cheerleaders and they came to one unanimous conclusion: that if I let them go they wouldn’t tell nobody.”
The review is so much better and more creative than the actual movie.
Notorious P.A.T.
Grow up.
amorphous
@Comrade Luke:
But sometimes there isn’t.
Other than that, I got no issues. Assuming the viewer is smart is a stretch, but when the other guys are NOT making that assumption then the audience should self-filter. That in itself is a problem, though.
jrg
“This is K-Billy’s Super Sound of the Seventies.”
MattR
@Shalimar:
More coherent and better acted too.
Oscar Leroy
Wow man. I can understand misspelling a long word, but “the”? Yikes.
Notorious P.A.T.
Thank you.
FlipYrWhig
@Brick Oven Bill:
Wasn’t that the Soft Cell Christmas single for 1981? I think it was the B-side to Sex Dwarf.
booda
That was hilarious up until the tied up woman in the basement. That’s where I had to bail.
Ha ha! get it? Rape and kidnapping is hilarious!
Would have been on board for all 7 parts if it hadn’t been for that bullshit. Otherwise the review was spot on.
Comrade Luke
@amorphous:
I assumed that he was referring to the fact that you should investigate from every angle, not that you should do the typical he said/she said.
But if not, I agree completely.
kommrade reproductive vigor
@Brachiator: This. Also. Times a million.
Corner Stone
@Notorious P.A.T.: Damn. You are one hard individual.
Corner Stone
@tavella:
You are dead to me.
amorphous
@Comrade Luke: I’ll buy that interpretation.
wasabi gasp
There is always another side to the story. But, sometimes that side is found face down in a pile of dog shit requiring a touch up, or a toothpick, during the Hardball commercial break.
freelancer (itouch)
@booda:
Before it panned over to the woman, we saw skelatal remains, implying that he’s a murderer. It’s funny because he is more pissed about the after effects of this movie than with his own demons. In part 5 he even makes a comment about a rape joke in the film. You have to bend over backwards to get pissed about that particular shot. Get over yourself.
scarshapedstar
Wait a sec… I thought a protagonist was a guy who does colonoscopies.
stibbert
mebbe i’m way too far out of it to remember correctly, but wasn’t the orig StarWars movie touted as the 1st episode of the ‘middle’ of the saga, that there were supposed to be three ‘trilogies’, that is, by the time they got their act together to produce them all, there was gonna be 9 movies?
and then i had this years-long blackout episode that i’m still tryin’ to deal with, & it ends up that there’s only gonna be 6 StarWars movies, & that the last three were gonna be totes awful unless you shelled out large $ to get the cross-marketed Lego toys, which were much better than the movies.
booda
Hey man, did I give anyone a hard time for liking this review? Did I insist that anyone share my opinion or agree with me? No, I did not. I simply stated my reaction to the video which is what comment threads are for. Perhaps you should “get over yourself” for having such a belligerent reaction to another person expressing an opinion.
eco2geek
Holy shit, that was good.
No, that’s an astrologist.
(Meta: OMG! There’s an edit button I’ve never seen before, and a countdown timer in case I chicken out and want to cancel my post! It’s the Balloon Juice equivalent of a Christmas present!)
amorphous
Well the ending was weird.
I guess since there really was no speaking pizza roll then he couldn’t have been talking about the same movie I watched. All of his arguments are null and void, therefore I can only conclude that Episode I was the greatest movie of all time.
QED.
Mike in NC
Saw “Star Wars” and was happy to never ever see any of the sequels and prequels. They all SUCKED!
handy
Midichlorians was just one case (of arguably several) where Lucas got sloppy or lazy with his story arc. There wasn’t even a hint of it in the original trilogy. And it took away from what (we thought at the time) made the rise of Luke as the hero so intriguing–backwoods wanna flyboy ultimately finds his inner courage and maturity and takes down the evil empire.
Ahhh, what the hell am I talking about. /starwarsnerd
Anne Laurie
@Corner Stone:
I saw the “original” STAR WARS when it first came out, hated hated hated it, and avoided further exposure until “Episode III”, when the Spousal Unit dragged me to it with the promise that it was absolutely positively gonna be the last not-a-recut Star Wart atrocity visited upon us. It suckedeth, but with a shape and arc of suckitude directly predictable from Travesty the First. I was already in my 20s when the original was released, which is at least ten years too old to fully appreciate the wide-eyed, open-hearted, flatlined-IQ mashup of stolen tropes and bad scripting that is the true glory of the Lucas-verse.
Jeff Fecke
@booda:
While I kept watching after that, I agree, that bothered me quite a bit. It was gratuitous, and IMHO distracted from the piece rather than adding to it.
Lavocat
That was twisted and funny as hell.
“You know what to do!”
I never knew it took that many cans of Raid. You learn something new every day.
amorphous
Oh no… oh god… someone is wrong on the internet. I don’t know what to do…
stibbert
i’d guess the main ughfortunate thing about the StarWars and its plot-disaster sequel, is how the producer-dollar movie-making Hollywood culture munged Lucas’ creative ability. The Lucas made mega-dollars, poured it all back into Industrial Light & Magic & his own personal SkywalkerRanch film-production facilities, but somewhere along the way, he either ran out of creativity, or bought into the idea that making mega-blahgbuster sequels was his best option.
i’m still a fan of his 1st feature, THX1138. iirc this was a ‘remake’ of his film-school ‘grad-thesis’ production, it had large portions of Harlan Ellison-style sci-fi edge. if he’d stuck w/ exploring that fringe, perhaps he’d have a better filmography than the one he ended up with.
FlipYrWhig
I still think the newer trilogy has some interesting ideas about how political systems change from republics to empires, with some not-particularly-masked visual and thematic comparisons between Rome, Nazi Germany, and Bush’s USA. Of course I still don’t really know _what happens_, where everything is, who is in league with whom and who is whose cat’s-paw, but I liked the attempt to deal with politics. (Which I don’t think the first series does at all, apart from there being a tyrant and a bunch of rebels.) It was a bit like Flash Gordon meets Coriolanus.
Mark S.
Which is worse: Phantom or Attack of the Clones? They are both so awful but in different ways. It’s difficult to decide if Anakin is more annoying as a 6 year old or as a teenager.
freelancer (itouch)
@Mark S.:
which is worse, being stabbed in the hand or the foot?
bago
@Corner Stone: Fail. The correct reaction to that comment is:
NNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!
Spiffy McBang
@freelancer (itouch): You don’t have to bend over backwards at all. I’m actually somewhat surprised it took so many comments before someone pointed that out. Scattered skulls and such are one thing, but if you have friends that have been abused in a not-dissimilar manner as what’s portrayed, it’s very easy to find that disturbing as hell.
And imagine the effect on somebody who’s actually been through it. Like Jeff said, it’s gratuitous and unnecessary.
Alright, point made. Back to teh funnies.
Walker
The best part of the review is his hatred of the Special Editions. That scene in Star Wars SE where the CGI animal walks in front of the characters while they are having dialog on the land speeder pissed me off to no end.
mcc
I guess? Except my personal interpretation of the first trilogy had something like 45 published novels in its canon so maybe it was mildly reasonable to expect it continue to be consistent with future licensed products
Corner Stone
@tavella: NNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!
Corner Stone
@Anne Laurie:
***Sputtering***
Mnemosyne
I was bothered by the midichlorians because it was a stupid idea. “Oh, look, Anakin is the messiah! Except he isn’t, because he’s evil!”
Not to mention that a 7-year-old was way too young to be playing Anakin and it made his scenes with Amidala super creepy. What was up with the whole “no, a 7-year-old is too old to be trained as a Jedi” crap? Do they usually start training them in the womb? And does that mean that Luke will always be a pathetically lame Jedi since he didn’t start training until he was 20?
If you’re going to contradict everything you said in the first three movies, at least have a rationale, for chrissakes.
moe99
There were hints of Lucas’ suckitude early on:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXcb7VPw59s
Just in time for the holidays too!
Mark S.
@tavella:
I think the review does a good job of showing the main problem with the prequels: the characters are utterly forgettable. They aren’t even one dimensional because they lack a single personality trait. As the review argues, Qin Gon (or whatever the fuck his name is) is utterly superfluous and it would have been better just to have merged him with Obi Won.
Another thing that would have been good would have been to have not made three movies, since there is no discernible story in the first two.
Mark S.
@Mnemosyne:
I never even thought of that.
It amazes me how clunky the entire series was with stuff like that: the “Now we have to explain this plot point with wooden dialogue” so characteristic of bad movies. My favorite is sometime in the second movie they decided that Jedis are celibate. Well, ok, but I don’t remember Luke ever worrying about that, or wondering how he was born if his father was a Jedi.
eco2geek
I saw the first Star Wars movie when I was in my early teens and loved it, all the way from the capture of Princess Leia at the beginning to the award ceremony at the end. Good soundtrack, too. Really exciting stuff at the time.
At least one can admire the three “prequels” for their sheer spectacle. Watching Attack of the Clones in IMAX was interesting.
@Mark S.: Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith made $1,122,035,618 at the box office in the US. So, making three movies was a very good decision, at least from a financial perspective.
NobodySpecial
You know what bothered me about Episodes 1-3? The whole lack of timeline space between that and Star Wars.
I always had the idea from the first trilogy that the Clone Wars were something that happened in the far, far past, and the prequels made it seem like it was something that maybe happened 10-20 years before Luke goes and talks to Ben.
And which fucking side of the family did his Aunt and Uncle come from? Were they Anakin’s brother/sister and spouse that he suddenly was completely unaware of? Or were they Padme’s brother/slster that left a life of royalty to become moisture farmers in the anus of the Empire and who didn’t know what Ben Kenobi was, even though he was running around stuck to their inlaw like toilet paper on his shoe for all that time before the Clone Wars?
Not to mention the whole ‘Where’d all the racing go?’ How come no one knows about midichlorians? Etc, etc, ad nauseum.
Jeff Fecke
And which fucking side of the family did his Aunt and Uncle come from? Were they Anakin’s brother/sister and spouse that he suddenly was completely unaware of?
They do sort of explain that, badly. Owen is Anakin’s stepbrother through his mother’s marriage to Owen’s dad. Anakin meets him for about a day and a half.
That doesn’t mean it makes any damn sense to give Luke to them.
William
@Jeff Fecke:
Yeah, I agree that the basement scene was a lapse in judgment. I think his point with all of that (comments about his family, son, wife, kidnapped cheerleaders, etc) was to keep the viewer interested while simultaneously acknowledging that it is an incredibly weird thing to spend this much time obsessing about the Star Wars films.
Most of that material worked for me, and probably for a lot of his intended audience: the guy is posting about Star Wars on YouTube. That’s a dork-fest for sure, and a sizeable chunk of Internet culture (e.g., 4chan) involves a boundary-pushing exploitation of horrific things for humor’s sake.
I think that’s partly because the Internet distances us from the horror; it’s easier to be callous when it’s just another image on your screen. But another part — for me, the deeper part — is a black humor that lets us process the horror. At any moment, the Internet may bring you something hideously and dumbfoundingly true. Joking about the ugliness in the world isn’t — at least for me — a way to approve of it. It’s a way to acknowledge and try to understand it without going crazy with grief or rage.
marjo
loved this.
Though I don’t think he spent enough time on the weirdness that Anakin “invented” C3PO and then didn’t recognize him in the original Star Wars, as well as didn’t seem that familiar with Tattoine or seem to remember that he once lived there or had relatives there or that Obi Wan lived there…??? I guess that lava bath in Ep 3 really singed Darth Vader’s mind. Also, how come Leia remembers her mother to Luke when Padme died in childbirth…???
these things wrack my dreams.
MobiusKlein
@marjo: screwing with continuity is a time honored tradition in SciFi / Comics. What is unforgivable is making such a shitty turd while doing it that folks get so bored watching the flick that they actually notice it.
I watched the Phantom Menace when it came out (Metreon theater in San Francisco, nice big screen) and was so bored, I critiqued the star field layout. (no nice nebula like Trek, just a random spattering of same sized white dots. The night time sky from earth is 10 times better.)
I vowed to never pay for another Star Wars movie ticket ever again. (I had to buy the DVD for the kids, but that’s different.)
I know someone who worked at Lucas Arts (computer side of that) and she says Lucas’s shop the biggest ‘yes men’ area around.
FlipYrWhig
@Mark S.:
Well, IMHO the story of the whole second series is about how a war got trumped up by evil people as a pretext to turn the government from republic to empire. But Lucas is stuck trying to narrate the creation of Darth Vader from a personal crisis rather than a political one, and that’s why it gets all jacked up, and why it takes on tones of “You can’t tell me what to do! I’m SO out of here!” in the Hayden Christiansen scenes. He became a tyrant because he loved too much. Aw…
Andy K
@Anne Laurie:
I completely get it. I know very few guys- and no women that come to mind- two or three years older than me who care much for Star Wars.
Star Wars came out when I was 11. I was the target audience, and Lucas scored a bullseye. While I’d been fed a diet of 30s and 40s classics (Bogie, Cagney, Flynn, Stewart, Fonda, etc.), I’d never seen Flash Gordon, and I’d never even heard of Kurosawa, so the stolen tropes were fresh to me. The bad dialogue didn’t bother me much either, what with the light sabers, and laser cannons, and X-Wings and TIE Fighters. These days I can watch the first three films lovingly even though I know that they aren’t The Best Films Ever Made. I figured that my older, jaded self wouldn’t have even half the same feeling for the prequels, but I didn’t expect them to be so terrible that there is no way I could make excuses for how shitty they are. But they are that bad.
FWIW, Lucas had one truly great film in him, and he made it just before he made Star Wars. American Graffiti is outstanding. I thank the gods of film for not allowing him to write the screenplay by himself.
Oh, shit! Where did the glasses for my Terry “The Toad” Fields action figure go?!
Andy K
@marjo:
Uhm…Midchlorians?
[uses The Force to run away fast]
Dream On
This is really quite brilliant. But “Ewan MacDonald”? Was that an intentional screwup of his name?
Andy K
@Dream On:
Yes.
ronin122
@NobodySpecial:
What do you mean far far past? In the first movie (Episode IV) the conversations between Luke and Kenobi reveal that both Obi-Wan and Anakin fought in the Clone Wars. Taken from a perspective when there was no other episode, this heavily implies 20-30 years considering the ages of Luke, Obi-Wan and Luke’s aunt/uncle.
NobodySpecial
@ronin122:
It wasn’t revealed in the movies whether or not humans have the same longetivity as they do now. Plus, does Alec Guinness in IV really look like he’s only aged 20 years since the Clone Wars?
Dream On
Finished the link. 70 minutes long and I could happily have watched more. I also did not care for the serial killer jokes. Distracted from some pretty sharp analysis.
@NobodySpecial,
Alex Guinness must have had a rough 20 years since the Clone Wars.
Dream On
The creator of this link also does good Star Trek…
http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=RedLetterMedia#p/u/0/h06WKYFYdlo
HeartlandLiberal
I want to publicly thank John for providing me with a means of brutally and sadistically tormenting my friends who are Star Wars fans.
They already know I cannot bear to see even five minutes of the Star Wars Episode 1 – III films. I actually watched the Phantom Menace. Wasted good money to see it in the theater. Felt like I should have demanded my money back afterwards. Tried to watch the second on video, but kept either falling asleep or going numb from the neck up. Of course I was old enough to have sat in a theater for the release of the original, and can remember the drama of the opening, and the understanding I was seeing a seminal event and turning point in cinematic history.
My sharing of this review will be in the genuine spirit of the season, of course. /obligatory seasonal sop to niceness.
robertdsc
I found the first clip dull and didn’t bother to watch the rest.
I’ve been a SW fan since I was a child and I enjoyed all three of the prequels, with Revenge Of The Sith being my favorite.
Comrade Scrutinizer
Thanks for this, John. This is a great course in film criticism, wrapped in a juicy shell!
Seanly
@Meg:
Yeah, the look of all the folks in the viewing room is pretty damning. Lucas even agrees there is too much going on, and then rationalizes not starting over.
I’m glad Mike mentioned the stupidity of Anakin building C3PO. That never made sense and seemed a hackneyed way to get all the characters in all the movies. “Oh, wouldn’t it be cool if all the characters were all intertwined even way back when?” No, that is now a horrible cliche.
Don’t even get me started on the idea that you need an army of clones (I know that’s the next movie, but the premise is so stupid it reaches back). It’s stupid when they use it on Earth-based SF stories (there are 6 billion people on our planet – save billions of dollars by just hiring soldiers?)
r€nato
I’ll have to take y’all’s word for it that it is worth my time to watch 70 minutes of video about why that movie sucked so badly…
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
I didn’t care for the serial killer jokes. Otherwise, this was great.
My favorite thing is that he focused almost no attention on Jar-Jar Binks. The traditional revulsion with the movie that I’ve seen is that it has too much Jar-Jar in it. What this review (correctly) points out is that the movie is a train wreck even if you disregard the Jar-Jar moments completely.
Robin G.
I kinda liked Phantom Menace, to be honest; I have a deep and abiding love for Liam Neeson, it looked like Amidala’s character would be pretty cool, and the lightsaber fight with Darth Maul was made of awesome. I was able (with effort) to overlook the rest of it and focus on those good bits.
Then AotC came out. I still throw up in my mouth a little when I think about it. And RotS just… no. I will defend all of the soundtracks, however.
I must agree, though, with tavella. As a friend of innumerable geeks, I can say from direct observation that the “But that contradicts the Jedi Academy books! And where’s Grand Admiral Thrawn?!?” whinging got entirely out of hand. Like it or not, Star Wars belongs to Lucas, and if he says the expanded universe isn’t canon, then it’s not canon. And I say that as someone who thinks Timothy Zahn is a god (and thinks Kevin J. Anderson can jump off a cliff).
I let my inner fangirl out there for a moment, didn’t I? :cough:
Xanthippas
Sorry, but I’m still stuck on the “no fucking way I’ll watch that.” And anyway I liked Phantom Menace at the time and prefer to remember that, as opposed to be given more reasons not to like it. And it was the best of the three movies, so the fact that somebody can rant about how wrong it was for almost an hour and a half is just depressing.
Xanthippas
Oh and I have to add one more thing. I say this with the greatest of love towards my fellow nerds and as a semi-partial devotee of Star Wars and Star Trek: there’s better sci-fi out there guys. You are wasting your nerddom on franchises that are not deserving of your love and devotion. Try Herbert, or Dick, or Wolfe (or even Asimov or Clarke) and stay out of movie theaters.
Randy P
I’m one of those who thought the original Star Wars films sucked too. Appallingly bad acting and stories. But I saw every one. I felt like I needed to see the story through. It’s kind of like that old joke: Curmudgeon 1: “I hate this place. The food is just terrible.” Curmudgeon 2: “Yeah. And the portions are way too small.” It was cheesy, space-opera-y, Flash Gordon stuff. Princesses? Swords? Knights? Emperors? Come on! Who are we kidding here?
Yet I was endlessly graceful to Lucas and the Star Wars phenomenon because he created Industrial Light and Magic, and despite making really bad sci-fi, he opened the doors for sci-fi. It became mainstream after that. He made it possible for all the Philip Dick stuff to get made, by whetting the public’s taste for that.
But about seeing the story through… I was waiting to see what Lucas would say about how Anakin moved from good to bad. As far as I could tell, it ended up being reduced to a single line. Queen Aboodaboo, now apparently a housewife who does nothing but sit around the apartment all day (I guess that’s what happened to queens who got married in that galaxy far, far away), observes “you used to be so good, but now you’re… you’re… ee-vul”. And that was it. Great character arc there.
Randy P
@Xanthippas:
Re good sci-fi.
One of our favorites, pre-Star Wars: Silent Running. But good stuff like that died in obscurity, and in the 70s there was still a vague general suspicion throughout the culture that anybody who even read sci-fi had something wrong with them. What was wrong with reality?
So as I said in my other comment, I’m kind of glad that Lucas opened the doors for the mainstreaming of sci-fi with his cheesy high-budget Flash Gordon.
Gravenstone
In a perhaps amusing bit of serendipity, Spike TV is currently showing the prequels back to back today. Enjoy (or not) as is your whim. Personally, I want my two hours of wasted ep. 1 back and stand by my choice not to bother with eps. 2 or 3.
Kyle Moore
How weird, I’ve hated this movie for a long time and always had something bad to say about it. Specifically Nat Portman who I think was actually numb throughout the shoot.
But I had never stopped to realize that there is no actual main character until I watched this vid. For all the gaping flaws of the flick, I didn’t catch the single largest one until now.
Gravenstone
@Randy P:
Hey now! No fair denigrating Flash Gordon. That was good, cheesy fun.
Randy P
@Gravenstone:
Huh. They did a movie?
I was thinking more of the 1930s serials they used to show on some Saturday morning kiddie shows.
Steeplejack
@Gravenstone:
Mmm . . . Melody Anderson . . . Ornella Muti. Arrgggglle! [Bob Hope/Wayne’s World throat sound]
Xanthippas
I’d be inclined to agree with you, except the mainstreaming of sci-fi means that filmmakers now use sci-fi as a vehicle for action flicks with special effects, and horror movies. In other words, it’s not actually sci-fi. And while the 70s saw a lot of pretentious and ridiculous sci-fi movies, I give them credit for at least trying.
DBake
I didn’t think the serial killer jokes in general were bad, but the one scene definitely took it too far. I had to make a choice whether I wanted to continue watching at that point. I’m glad I decided yes, but putting the audience in the position of making that decision was unnecessary, given the intent of this film.
Stefan
They do sort of explain that, badly. Owen is Anakin’s stepbrother through his mother’s marriage to Owen’s dad. Anakin meets him for about a day and a half. That doesn’t mean it makes any damn sense to give Luke to them.
You are trying to hide Luke Skywalker, infant son of Anakin Skywalker, from his father. Therefore you take him to Anakin Skywalker’s boyhood home and give him to Anakin Skywalker’s stepbrother to be raised under his own name. But of course! No one would ever assume you’d do such a stupid, stupid thing, and therefore no one would ever look there! Makes perfect sense to me…..
Stefan
One strange thing in the prequels: most of the main and many of the minor characters in the middle three movies showed up in the prequels, or at least had a shout-out to them (Luke, Leia, Obi-wan, C3PO, R2D2, Chewbacca, Vader, Bobba Fett, Jabba, even Greedo, etc.)….except Han Solo.
Why no Han? He’s one of the three most important, er, protagonists, and yet there’s not even a hint of any kind of history or backstory about his character in the prequels — even though he’d probably be a teenager at the time of Revenge of the Sith.
Now, of course if you introduced Han in Sith, you’d have to explain why his character doesn’t know any of these people in Star Wars — but then again, that kind of logical inconsistency didn’t seem to stop Lucas elsewhere.
Robin G.
@Stefan: I think the arguments (fanwanks) are, essentially, that Luke is the diversion. That is, if Luke is discovered, maybe Vader will be satisfied, and never think to look for Leia.
Everyone admits that this takes a LOT of wanking.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@Stefan:
Well, if Anakin Skywalker never bothered to go back to his home planet and buy his mother out of slavery, why would he bother to go check and see if his son was being raised there? Clearly, he didn’t give a shit before he was pure evil, so why would he start caring once he became pure evil?
Robin G.
@Stefan:
My biggest disappointment — BIGGEST — is that we never saw Corellia. I imagined an entire planet that looked like New Jersey, with occasional spots of Pittsburgh.
Stefan
But Lucas is stuck trying to narrate the creation of Darth Vader from a personal crisis rather than a political one, and that’s why it gets all jacked up, and why it takes on tones of “You can’t tell me what to do! I’m SO out of here!” in the Hayden Christiansen scenes. He became a tyrant because he loved too much.
You have to give Lucas points in the Obi-Wan/Anakin scenes for prefiguring the John McCain/Sarah Palin relationship…..
Randy P
@Stefan:
Well, it would have been fun to see Han as a budding young smuggler. Even more fun to see him start the relationship with Jabba. He wouldn’t have to actually know any of these people.
But that’s the sort of thing you’d have to have an actual writer to think of…
Stefan
One of the main problems with the prequels is that they made Anakin too young in the first. A seven year old really can’t develop as any kind of character, and so you’ve basically wasted one movie out of three in telling how Anakin Skywalker became Darth Vader. His character should have been anywhere from 15 to 20 in the first movie to let us see him as a innocent young man so we could then appreciate his later slide into darkness. But no, the sequence we get is infant/bratty teenager/petulant young adult.
Robin G.
@Randy P: Probably he wouldn’t have been that old. A ten-year-old pickpocket, perhaps…
Mnemosyne
I loved that this very advanced society never developed an ultrasound machine and thus had no way of knowing if someone was expecting twins or not.
Robin G.
@Mnemosyne: I can allow wankage there, given that she was hiding the pregnancy and perhaps never went to the doctor at all. Though why Anakin couldn’t tell with the Force that there were two, or alternatively why Obi-Wan couldn’t tell she was pregnant at all through the Force, is tricky.
Edited to add: What can’t be wanked is that Leia remembers her mother. That’s just hopeless and there’s no retconning that can save it.
Stefan
Edited to add: What can’t be wanked is that Leia remembers her mother. That’s just hopeless and there’s no retconning that can save it.
I think it happened because a Vulcan mining ship from the future came through a black hole, spinning off an alternate universe where….never mind, wrong movie.
Jason
Are “Luke” and “Owen” the only normal English-sounding names in the whole series? All we need is an Andrew and Lucas will have prophesied the Wilson brothers.
daveNYC
Not to mention that Padme dies because ‘she’s lost the will to live’.
I had always thought that the first prequel should have started off during the Clone Wars (No backstory needed, it’s a war! Against clones!) with Obi-Wan meeting a young fighter pilot named Anakin, discovering he has mad force skillz, and deciding to train him even though Yoda thinks it’s a bad idea. Have Anakin be like a Han Solo who saves the day at the end of A New Hope, but his motivation is money and fame, not helping the people he’s started to care about.
Qui-Gon will always be ‘Ginny’ to me.
Mnemosyne
@Robin G.:
Admittedly, I’m not up on all of the details, but is it her adoptive mother that she says she remembers or her biological one? Obviously, since she doesn’t know she’s adopted, it would make perfect sense for her to refer to her adoptive mother as her mother.
Robin G.
@Mnemosyne:
Luke: “Do you remember your mother? Your real mother?”
Leia: “A little. She was very beautiful, but sad. Why?”
Luke: “I have no memory of my mother. I never knew her.”
Can’t wank that one, sadly. And I’ve tried.
daveNYC
Depending on how far you were willing to pretzel yourself, you can get around it. All you have to do is say that Leia’s adoptive mother died, then papa Jimmy Smitts remarried, and bammo, it still fits.
The problem is that it totally destroys that scene from Jedi. Luke thinks she’s talking about his real mom, and it’s kind of touching. Instead, she’s talking about some random stranger and nobody cares.
Robin G.
@daveNYC:
That requires that Leia thinks she wasn’t adopted, which is tricky — how else would she have accepted relatively quickly that Luke was her brother? I mean, okay, that’s weird anyhow…
God, I’m a geek. This is all my husband’s fault. I didn’t think like this before I met him. Well, much.
Theron
Anytime I walk out of a movie thinking that if I’d just been allowed to do a pass over the script it could have been so much better – you know, tighten things up a bit, give people some decent lines, make their motivations more clear – it’s a problem.
Oh yeah, and also, no racial stereotypes as characters. A small thing, really.
Stefan
Can’t wank that one, sadly. And I’ve tried.
And Lucas and everyone involved knew it was there! They knew that scene was in the earlier movie, they knew that Leia had said she knew her real mother, and yet they then went ahead and had Padme die in childbirth. It’s so sloppy it’s inexcusable.
Also…Jimmy Smits? I love him, he’s a fine actor, but the minute I saw Jimmy Smits I was dragged right out of the movie (Also every time I saw Sam Jackson). Some actors just give off too much of a contemporary vibe and should never be cast in sci-fi/fantasy/period/historical movies. (Curiously, this applies far more to American than to British/Commonwealth actors).
Stefan
I had always thought that the first prequel should have started off during the Clone Wars (No backstory needed, it’s a war! Against clones!)
And yet it turned out that in the Clone Wars we’d heard so much about, the Clones were the good guys fighting for the Republic — and they were all clones of Bobba Fett’s father???
Like Padme, that’s where I lost the will to live.
It feels so good to talk about these things, to get them off my chest. I’ve been carrying them inside me for so long, too long…I thought no one cared……
MattR
@Stefan: I care.
Robin G.
@Stefan: Me too. Remember the Sound of Music scene in AotC? My god. The anguish.
Martian Buddy
That reminds me of the comic strip Darths n’ Droids, which is retelling the story of the prequels as being a sci-fi roleplaying game where the players are blatantly ignoring the GM’s plot to do whatever they feel like. They make so much more sense that way.
Stefan
And if Qui-Gon is such a master Jedi, how come he can’t tell that Padme/Amidala are pulling a Prince and the Pauper switch? Huh? Huh?
And OK, the Trade Federation has an army of droids. OK. Basically mobile computers. Then why the droids have ranks? Does Version 3.0 outrank Version 2.0? And why do they talk to each other with voice commands? Wouldn’t they just communicate computer to computer?
And these powerful Jedi are reduced to betting on a hopped-up drag race to get off the planet….?
Aarrgh, the more I think about it the more annoyed I get….
Martian Buddy
@Stefan:
He actually does turn to Obi-Wan and smirk during the big reveal. Whether that was in the script or was Liam’s version of an eyeroll is anyone’s guess.
Chuck
@Stefan:
I actually liked this — the inhumanity and slaughter committed by the Republic in doing so actually added a lot of moral ambiguity in a series otherwise populated with mustache-twiddling mua-ha-hah’ing villains. The fact that they are depicted looking the same as Imperial Stormtroopers underscores the point that Yoda was as responsible as Darth Vader or even more so when it came to creating the Imperial Wehrmacht.
I’ll grant you that such nuance when it appears in a Lucas film is purely by accident.
daveNYC
@131
Best link I’ve gotten in a while. Probably going to get fired for laughing in the cube.
Robin G.
@Chuck: I disagree. I think the clones made it worse; it was “Greedo shot first” writ large. In the original series, it was kind of hard to get around the fact that whether they were fighting for truth and justice or not, the Rebellion was killing hundreds of thousands of Empire troops, possibly conscripted. Blowing up the Death Star was pretty horrific in that regard, and added a certain “moral certainty is the first casualty of war” aspect.
Instead, they’re just clones. Not real people. No worries. Agh.
You’re right about the Yoda thing, though. And it was definitely accidental.
Martian Buddy
@Chuck: Karen Traviss really hammered on that point in her Republic Commando novels. After Padme reacted with shock and horror to the thought that Anakin and his mom were slaves in the first film, it’s painfully ironic to see the Republic fielding a slave army in the second one. (And Boba Fett’s ship is named Slave I… hmmm.)
Randy P
@Stefan:
I’m guessing you would have had some trouble with the Shakespeare in the Park production of Twelfth Night we saw a few years back featuring Jimmy Smits, Julia Stiles and Christopher Lloyd.
I had some trouble accepting Christopher Lloyd, but none with the other leads.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@Martian Buddy:
Yes, but AotC made clear that the clones have very limited free will, and are very susceptible to command.
So it’s okay that their slaves, and it’s okay to kill them!
(Lucas is a sick motherfucker.)
Martian Buddy
@Robin G.: That was another plot point in Traviss’s novels; they used “growth acceleration” to make the clones, so they age abnormally fast. By the time of A New Hope, the stormtroopers are indeed all conscripts.
Stefan
I’m guessing you would have had some trouble with the Shakespeare in the Park production of Twelfth Night we saw a few years back featuring Jimmy Smits, Julia Stiles and Christopher Lloyd.
No, Shakespeare’s different — I thought Smits was fine, but not great, in that production (but again that’s a failing of a lot of American actors who came up in film and television and so don’t have the experience to really inhabit Shakespeare’s language on stage). But, since theatre is more obviously, uh, theatrical, it’s not as jarring to see someone who looks out of place as it is in a movie, which is (even in science-fiction) supposed to be an approximation of “real life”, of what’s actually happening in front of you.
Stefan
Yes, but AotC made clear that the clones have very limited free will, and are very susceptible to command.
The first Teabagger army.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@Stefan:
Maybe the clones get to vote, too. Maybe Palpatine is repeatedly democratically elected, and since his army is basically infinite and they all vote for him, any votes against him are drowned into irrelevance.
MattR
@Scruffy McSnufflepuss: Or maybe the clones don’t get to vote but are counted as 3/5 of a person when figuring out the Galactic Electoral College which means that Palpatine-leaning territories are given extra weight :)
Martian Buddy
@Scruffy McSnufflepuss: If it wasn’t for the whole “massacre of the younglings” part, I could sympathize when the clones start fragging their Jedi generals.
inkadu
@FlipYrWhig: If you want to see a political story done right, you should see the first season of HBO’s Rome. It is incredible.
It is also twelve hours long.
And not targeted at eight-year-olds.
Mnemosyne
@Robin G.:
I think I’ve pretty much blocked Return of the Jedi out from my mind. Those fucking Ewoks.
Though that does make the whole “Amidala dies in childbirth” decision extra-creepy. Because she’s not allowed to divorce evil Anakin and marry someone else, taking (one of the) kids with her. She’s especially not allowed to marry the good-lookin’ king of Alderaan. Nope, her only possible escape is to die.
I knew Lucas was traumatized by his divorce, but come on …
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@MattR:
Proof that the system works!
Corpsicle
@marjo: Anakin didn’t “invent” C3PO, he built him from parts. Like putting together a car from parts, if you do it right, you can’t distinguish it from a “real” one.
And Anakin had no way to know that ObiWan went back to Tattooine after their little altercation.
Leia remembering her mother is the only criticism you got right.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@Martian Buddy:
Fair to say that in any conflict, neither side is wholly blameless.
Episode III is, in that respect, actually containing the kernel of an adult-oriented message. Or maybe that’s just what I chose to read into it.
Corpsicle
@Mnemosyne: If you like Amidala dying in childbirth, you really need to see Robot Chicken Star Wars.
“Lost the will to live? What is your degree in, poetry?”
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@inkadu:
That’s a great show. I haven’t even watched Season 2 yet, and I’m still pissed they ended it there.
Redshirt
Some of you nerds need to brush up on your Star Wars lore.
First, The Phantom Menace is a pretty good movie if you consider it’s intended for kids aged 8-14 or so. It explains a lot. But even then, I still think it’s a mostly good movie, with some notable bad parts.
AOTC is where the train went off the tracks, and didn’t get back on. Terrible movie. But! Everything to do with Obi-Wan in the movie is pretty good. Everything to do with Anakin is pretty much terrible.
ROTS improved on AOTC, but still not so great. However! The novelization of ROTS is fantastic.
And that leads me to my main point: The overarching story of the prequels is quite good, and very, very topical. Unfortunately, the delivery of that story led a lot to be desired. Part of it is intentional – Lucas is trying to get stiff performances out of his actors, whatever his reasons. Part of it’s unintentional, and mostly due to creative hubris.
As for the clones: The internet states that by the time of A New Hope, the Stormtroopers were a mix of conscripts and clones, and the clones were not all derivations of Jango Fett.
terry chay
@Meg: That stuff is in the bonus features of the Episode 1 DVD. When I first saw it, the whole mess made sense.
One of the most enlightening was watching the casting of Anakin Skywalker.
Robin G.
@Martian Buddy: Man, Traviss tried hard to make things work, didn’t she?
Corpsicle
@Mnemosyne: The good looking king of Alderaan was married, by the way.
MattR
@Corpsicle: OMG. Robot Chicken Star Wars is awesome. So many funny quotes pop into my head, but for some reason the portrayal of the opening scene of “A New Hope” as part of “Take Your Daughter to Work Day” just slays me.
Vader (to a Rebel while referencing the stormtrooper next to him): “Gary here doesn’t get to see his daughter because of people like you”
Robin G.
@Redshirt: I agree on a lot of that. Every scene of the prequels, I think, “Man, this is almost good, if only the dialogue was better.” Or “if the acting was better.” Or “if the plot was clearer.” Or, or, or…
There were one or two very good scenes, a several hopeless scenes, but the vast majority were one or two tweaks away from being quite good. (Which is why the novelizations, across the board, were way better. RotS particularly — I love that Anakin hadn’t slept in about a month.) It drove me crazy.
Redshirt
Also, any Star Wars fans should definitely be watching the Clone Wars cartoon on Cartoon Network. Again, definitely aimed at kids, but actually, very subtle and sophisticated. The cartoon is in fact some of the best Star Wars I’ve ever seen.
Corpsicle
@MattR: Totally.
The Family Guy stuff is pretty funny, (Blue Harvest), but Robot Chicken is friggin hilarious. Wish they would do more of them.
Martian Buddy
@Robin G.: You could practically hear her exasperation at some points in those novels, particularly with the officially stated figures of 3 million for the Grand Army of the Republic versus quadrillions of battle droids for the Seperatist army. There’s a bit where someone on a Crossfire-style holonet show openly derides those figures and accuses Palpatine of exaggerating the droid threat–said person ends up dead in a “mysterious accident” later on.
FlipYrWhig
@inkadu:
I only saw part of it, and it was in the middle, so I was hopelessly confused. But in general I do think that in installments I-III Lucas is trying to do Space Romans, which he wasn’t doing in IV-VI, and it accounts for a lot of the disgruntlement among fans.
@Robin G.:
I was 6 or 7 when Star Wars came out. Maybe grown-ups thought that blowing up the Death Star was morally ambiguous, but the rest of us didn’t think of that until Kevin Smith made a point of it in _Clerks_.
@Chuck:
I disagree — I think that’s the only part he really thought about, the way that the big war is actually a trumped-up war fought under false pretenses. That’s the “chancellor demands emergency powers” storyline that accounts for the degeneration from republic into empire. Believe it or not, it’s the _coherent_ part of the series. Not the exciting part, but the coherent part.
Redshirt
I find Palpatine’s story to be, by far, the most interesting aspect of the prequels. For all the talk about Vader and Luke, the entire series is really about Palpatine (just like LOTR, for all the hobbit adventures, is really about Sauron – it’s even named for him).
It’s the story of the rise and fall of Palpatine. Vader’s just a flunky after all. Everyone’s a flunky to Palps.
And specifically, Star Wars is the story of institutional malaise corrupting a society, and creating people who play to that corruption. Most of the time, Palpatine is simply getting other people to play to their own interests, their own greed.
Palpatine is the one who convinced the Trade Federation to build droid armies. He sold it as a completely different project of course, but all the while he’s grooming the ego of the head of the TF.
Sadly, because I am a nerd, like my Father before me, I’ve spent way too much time over the past decade thinking of the parallels between the prequels and the Bush Admin. There’s many.
Stefan
As for the clones: The internet states that by the time of A New Hope, the Stormtroopers were a mix of conscripts and clones, and the clones were not all derivations of Jango Fett.
Oh, well, if the internet says it, it must be right….
If they could make an infinite number of clones, why do they need conscripts?
FlipYrWhig
@Redshirt:
It’s deliberate, no? I think it probably started out in Lucas’s mind as a rise-of-Hitler thing (with all the explicit Riefenstahl moments), with a touch of sword-and-sandal epic (Ben Hur, Spartacus, etc.), and both of those got mashed up with Bush and Iraq. I haven’t sought out interviews or anything, but that’s what I’ve reverse engineered from the way the films came out.
(ETA: I think there’s also an ingredient of China vs. Tibet in _Phantom Menace_, a big Hollywood cause in the late 1990s.)
Redshirt
@FlipYrWhig: While I don’t doubt AOTC and ROTS were written with an eye towards current events and the Bush Admin, it’s somewhat unlikely, to the point of impossible, that The Phantom Menace had the same focus, as that movie was scripted and in production in 1997-1999. Well before W.
However, it’s quite prescient, I think, even down to the title – all the threats and fears from 2000-2008 felt like “phantom menaces” to me.
As for the Clones v. conscripts, they cannot make an infinite amount of clones. It’s a fairly slow process and expensive. Also, during the Clone Wars, the big cloning facilities were destroyed. Finally, the Galaxy is ginormous. You’d need millions upon millions of clones.
You can see the shift happening from ROTS to ANH; in Rots of course, is the revelation of the Empire and the disbanding of the Republic. In ANH, one of the main political plot lines is the dissolution of the Senate (20 years after ROTS) and the devolution of power to regional governors. As regional governors – i.e. Kingpins of specific planets – they have their own fighting forces, who don the Stormtrooper armor.
FYI – if you’re a star wars fan and are looking for some fun SW pictures, click my name above to go to my blog – I’ve got a ton of them, with tons more to come.
Martian Buddy
@Stefan: Clones cost more; conscripts are cheaper cannon fodder. Presumably, the clones still in the ranks are the survivors from back in the Republic days when conscription was still politically unacceptable.
@FlipYrWhig: At least from what I’ve heard, Lucas denies that the prequels were about Bush and claims that Vietnam was a major inspiration. Then again, at various points in the past, he’s claimed that Star Wars was always intended to be
twelveninesix films.Andy K
@Robin G.:
Did you forget that the people on board used the Death Star to blow Alderaan to smithereens? I mean, c’mon, it’s the DEATH Star, fer chrissakes, not the Imperial Court Star or the Antares System Public Library Star.
Stefan
mean, c’mon, it’s the DEATH Star, fer chrissakes, not the Imperial Court Star or the Antares System Public Library Star.
Plainly the Empire had not adopted Bushian branding strategies. I guarantee you that if Rove had been in charge of that thing, it would have been known as the Defense of Liberty and Puppies Star.
FlipYrWhig
@Redshirt: Right, I think there’s a difference between the politics of Phantom Menace (which IMHO are probably linked to worries about the ineffectiveness of the UN+) and the politics of Clones and Sith (which are more about war under false pretenses).
+ I think there’s a Tibet thing going on–the Tibetan Freedom Concert is 1996; the Jedi seem to have become something more along the lines of Buddhist martial-arts monks–but also suggestions of Rwanda, Somalia, the Yugoslav wars, etc.
Mnemosyne
@Corpsicle:
Oh, picky picky. The Alderaanians can’t be polygamists? :-)
FlipYrWhig
@Andy K: No, no, it’s the “D.E.A.T.H. Star.” It’s an acronym for Defense of Everything Appealing To Hold.
Andy K
@Redshirt:
Kinda like Lucas’ own experience, then: Who needs to actually work hard when you can just throw it all up against the wall, then sell the stained wall for billions of dollars?
Stefan
Oh, picky picky. The Alderaanians can’t be polygamists? :-)
Plus, he’s not actually married — he’s just written that way. Just unmarry him in the new draft and have him take Amidala away.
Corpsicle
@Mnemosyne: Well, he is pretty handsome.
Stefan
Plus: no way Hayden Christensen grows up into Darth Vader. None. No way. He simply doesn’t have the gravitas, the sense of a formidable presence, that a young Vader requires. The part required a much more imposing actor (not necessarily imposing in terms of sheer physical size, though that would have helped because I always had the sense that in a hand-to-hand honest fight Natalie Portman could take down Hayden Christensen), someone who feels solid and dangerous.
Andy K
@FlipYrWhig:
I really hope that that’s snark, but I fear that you’re sincere.
Redshirt
@Stefan: Whiny Anakin of AOTC did a lot to ruin future Vader. He was insufferable throughout the film. I don’t blame the actor, I blame Lucas for all that.
But! If you watch the original trilogy, and look past the badassery of Vader, you’ll see he’s very insecure and needy. He’s constantly referring to Obi-Wan throughout the first two movies – “Obi-Wan’s failure is complete”. By ROTJ, Vader is pretty much a wuss.
Andy K
@Stefan:
What would it matter who was cast in the role? The character on the page in episodes I-III had no gravitas. The dialogue had no gravitas. The stories had no gravitas. Lucas, when given free rein, is just a bad writer. You could overlook the fact that he wrote horrible dialogue in Episode IV because he kept the plot simple, but packed it full of action. Had Lucas gone in depth in the first film like he did in the last three he made, there wouldn’t have been any more films in the franchise, and Lucas would be known as the guy who directed the most episodes of Babylon 5.
calling all toasters
@Andy K:
Well, gravitas has less force in space.
FlipYrWhig
@calling all toasters:
Well played, old chap, well played indeed.
@Andy K: The D.E.A.T.H. Star defends puppies, kitties, and bunnies.
daryljfontaine
@Redshirt: I absolutely blame Hayden Christiansen for Anakin being a whiny little git; he’s never played anything but a whiny little git in all of his film roles. Shattered Glass, that movie with Kevin Kline, etc.; Hayden Christiansen playing a whiny little git is like Nicholas Cage playing a grinning half-lidded idiot who can’t act.
Of course, once I saw Attack of the Clones, my first thought was, “So that’s where Luke gets it from.”
D
justme2
I thought Liam Neeson was pretty badass — but what’s the line about movies with kids and animals (Jar-Jar qualifies as quasi-animal, right)?
Joel
Hilarious, except for the creepy/eerie psychopath subplot, which was completely unnecessary. I understand that they were probably going with the “meta” critique of all of SW’s useless plots, but whatever, it was weak.
I saw Sherlock Holmes a few nights ago and kept these critiques in mind. It was a lot better than Phantom Menace but still fell prey to being too clever by half, too many incoherent plot points, and too much dumb villainy.