This is a very fair point.
What Are the Ways the Star Wars Prequels Could Be Improved???
- Thread starter VulcanMindBlown
- Start date
More practical effects, less green screen.
You know, people keep mindlessly blurting out this tired old criticism and seemingly always in utter ignorance of the fact that the prequels used a *ton* of practical effects. Some of the largest and most detailed miniatures ever made were built for these movies.
With a few notable exceptions, most of the green screen work was for set extension, which is just the modern equivalent of the old matt paintings.
I do wish that instead of pure digital characters they'd gone for a more hybridised technique with on-set makeup and puppetry enhanced with digital effects (GMT's 'Hellboy 2' & 'Pan's Labyrinth' are still the gold standard for this IMO) but realistically, they were inventing the technology as they went along, just like with the original movies. Seriously, go back and watch other CG effects heavy movies from 1999 to 2004 and you'll see very few of them hold up even half as well as the Star Wars prequels.
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Phantom Menace used a bunch of practical stuff. The next two, not so much.
TFN also has an entire thread dedicated to it
http://boards.theforce.net/threads/...e-prequels-sets-pictures-models-etc.50017310/
http://boards.theforce.net/threads/...e-prequels-sets-pictures-models-etc.50017310/
Have a look at that video again. There's plenty of stuff from episodes 2 & 3. All the featured Coruscant buildings from Padme's tower to Dex's diner, the Geonosian area, the tree cities on Kashyyyk, the Utapau sinkhole (in several scales!), that entire lava valley in Mustafar, the city on Kamino and the Felucian jungle plus of course the Jedi Temple (multiple interiors and exterior models) all leap to mind.
Sure, there was a lot more green screen work too, but that's mostly a matter of production practicalities and the sheer scope of what they were doing. Unless you know a location where they could have filmed people flying through an ecumenopolis? Or an underground droid factory safe enough to shoot a complex, fast moving action scene without the actors or camera crew getting decapitated?
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Agreed. The scenes with Cody on the Star Destroyer and later down on Utapau always grate on me. I get Lucas wanted to keep things simple from a production standpoint, but the motion tracking technology just wasn't there yet and it looks like Morrison's head is just floating on top of the armor and the movements of his shoulders just don't line up.
I mean how hard would it have been to get a bunch of stunt performer's who are approximately the same height and build of Temuera Morrison? It would have probably been doable with only a dozen or so, with combined multiple passes with the same people moved around to make a reasonable sized crowd for the foreground and kept the CG troopers for the mid-to-background.
They didn't. This was very much a CG driven boundary pushing project.
Totally agree with all this. The amount of stuff in the prequels that WASN'T CGI is way more extensive than you think. It's a lazy criticism of these movies in my view. I think they're all still pretty stunning looking films considering their age, and show a load more creativity in the environments and visuals than TFA. I can still get as good a visual feast out of them as most modern blockbusters even now. And they boast far superior scores to boot.
I think the prequels are way too underrated and get a lot of undeserved hate in my opinion.
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1. A better actor for young Anakin.
2. More implications that Padme was actually taking advantage of Anakin and had some mental/dark issues of her own.
3. Padme survives, takes the twins to Alderaan. Anakin is rebuilt as Vader, and then Palpatine tells him that to purge himself of his weakness and prove his loyalty, he must kill the wife of Skywalker. Vader tracks her to Alderaan, lands on the balcony outside of her quarters in the rain, where he is confronted by Jar-Jar, and they fight with Jar-Jar desperately trying to talk him out of it and fighting hard, while Vader seems like his heart isn't in it. He does kill Jar-Jar, though, and then goes inside, but looks like he regrets what he just did. Padme is nursing baby Luke, and we saw before Vader arrived that a nursemaid had taken Leia from the room shortly before Vader's arrival. Vader sees Luke, pauses, and then tells Padme, "Padme Skywalker is dead. Be sure that my master never has reason to believe otherwise." He turns and leaves, with Padme calling for Ani not to leave. He pauses once, at the door, and then goes.
#3 above is from "spoilers" that someone who was supposedly a Lucasfilm insider on another board shared before ROTS came out. I've always thought it would have been better than what we got.
2. More implications that Padme was actually taking advantage of Anakin and had some mental/dark issues of her own.
3. Padme survives, takes the twins to Alderaan. Anakin is rebuilt as Vader, and then Palpatine tells him that to purge himself of his weakness and prove his loyalty, he must kill the wife of Skywalker. Vader tracks her to Alderaan, lands on the balcony outside of her quarters in the rain, where he is confronted by Jar-Jar, and they fight with Jar-Jar desperately trying to talk him out of it and fighting hard, while Vader seems like his heart isn't in it. He does kill Jar-Jar, though, and then goes inside, but looks like he regrets what he just did. Padme is nursing baby Luke, and we saw before Vader arrived that a nursemaid had taken Leia from the room shortly before Vader's arrival. Vader sees Luke, pauses, and then tells Padme, "Padme Skywalker is dead. Be sure that my master never has reason to believe otherwise." He turns and leaves, with Padme calling for Ani not to leave. He pauses once, at the door, and then goes.
#3 above is from "spoilers" that someone who was supposedly a Lucasfilm insider on another board shared before ROTS came out. I've always thought it would have been better than what we got.
It's certainly not *all* undeserved. I just think that of all the things to criticise about those movies, the technical side of things (VFX, sets, costumes, music, sound design etc.) is not one of them.
You say that like they didn't audition and screen test hundreds of kids, but just picked Jake Lloyd at random.
"Anakin went bad because a woman done him wrong"? Seriously? Leaving aside the heavily implied misogyny; how would that even remotely fit into the story?
All of that sounds awful and astonishingly, even more melodramatic, hackneyed and poorly conceived than the cringe-fest they actually ended up making.
So in other words: "almost certainly complete and utter horseshit."
I say that as though, whatever process they used, I don't care, because it ended with a terrible choice.
No, no, no. More like the age difference and his naiveté leading to a teacher/student relationship kind of thing. Obviously she had some sort of damned problem - normal people don't immediately respond to their boyfriend violently mass murdering people including children by holding and comforting him. And it would be a side character thing for Padme, not the reason he went bad. Or at least, nowhere nearly the main reason.
Well, yeah, definitely.
You seem to express your opinions on this rather strongly and rudely, as though they were more important than those of others in some way other than subjectively, to yourself. Iz zat you, Mr. Lucas?
When they served the story, absolutely. Well, even when they didn't, it was still pretty to look at
The short:
Better dialog.
Smaller shots with less obvious green screen, not every scene needed to be so "dense" as Rick McCollum (sp) put it in the documentary.
No Padme, Anakin falls to the dark side because he becomes frustrated with how the Jedi seem to be reactive to things instead of proactive, starts to believe he can do it better himself (stress that more), make the audience buy into that he REALLY believes he is bettering the galaxy by his actions instead of some corny line at the end. Actually, the Jedi should have refused to participate in the Clone Wars, this would have made it interesting because you could have had Anakin get all hotheaded and run off and try to play the hero, and Obi-wan has to go after him to bring him back, and Obi-wan winds up helping him (and the Clones, win a major battle) on the condition that Anakin return with him, or something.
A more likable Anakin, esp. in the first two movies (see: better dialog) make us root for him more instead of cringe when he speaks of hating sand.
More Deathsticks.
Really, most of the problems stemmed from "Better Dialog" Lucas really should have had established writers working with him to better the lines and the humor.
Have some time to show how Dooku became a Sith Lord, so you can see how Palpatine played him (conversational flashbacks of him being recruited by Palpatine, etc.) before he is killed off in the final film.
No Jesus birth for Anakin. Shimi was forced to sleep with one of her former masters, and we find out through dialog he owed a lot of money and was killed by a bounty hunter, which is why we neverhear of him again.
No midiclhorians either.
Okay, maybe that wasn't so short.
Better dialog.
Smaller shots with less obvious green screen, not every scene needed to be so "dense" as Rick McCollum (sp) put it in the documentary.
No Padme, Anakin falls to the dark side because he becomes frustrated with how the Jedi seem to be reactive to things instead of proactive, starts to believe he can do it better himself (stress that more), make the audience buy into that he REALLY believes he is bettering the galaxy by his actions instead of some corny line at the end. Actually, the Jedi should have refused to participate in the Clone Wars, this would have made it interesting because you could have had Anakin get all hotheaded and run off and try to play the hero, and Obi-wan has to go after him to bring him back, and Obi-wan winds up helping him (and the Clones, win a major battle) on the condition that Anakin return with him, or something.
A more likable Anakin, esp. in the first two movies (see: better dialog) make us root for him more instead of cringe when he speaks of hating sand.
More Deathsticks.
Really, most of the problems stemmed from "Better Dialog" Lucas really should have had established writers working with him to better the lines and the humor.
Have some time to show how Dooku became a Sith Lord, so you can see how Palpatine played him (conversational flashbacks of him being recruited by Palpatine, etc.) before he is killed off in the final film.
No Jesus birth for Anakin. Shimi was forced to sleep with one of her former masters, and we find out through dialog he owed a lot of money and was killed by a bounty hunter, which is why we neverhear of him again.
No midiclhorians either.
Okay, maybe that wasn't so short.
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