Spoilers AHSOKA series [Spoiler Discussion]
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At one point I found this old clickbait saying The Acolyte was cancelled.
Mission accomplished.
Now the clickbait is about Disney selling it back to Lucas. How fickle we fans are!
There was really only one real problem with the PT that I saw: George didn't have anyone around him with the power or cojones to rein him in when he got outside the box. The story ideas were generally there, he just needed a script doctor, a couple different directors, and frankly, his ex-wife's abilities as an editor.
Yup.
Rein in what? I keep coming across this critique but no one ever goes into details on what Lucas was supposed to rein in.
His almost total lack of direction to his cast, who did the best they could with what they were given.
His use of complete green screens with nothing for actors to play against
Cringeworthy dialogue.
Jar Jar
Child Anakin
MIDICHLORIANS
There's a list to start from.
Yeah, it's unfortunately but there was no balancing act against Lucas' indulgences. Lucas talked the PT with the idea of innovations of digital filmmaking, which were groundbreaking at the time, massive digital cameras, monitors and cables to take full advantage of new digital technology, digital characters like Jar-Jar, and green screen environments.
The struggle is that Lucas, by his own admission, is not a great director. He does not always enjoy working with people, and much more enjoys the editing process and taking the "raw materials" as he puts it and shape it to his vision. This is why you see adjustments in edits, changing things in different takes, flipping plates, changing performances. As one friend of mine put it "The film is polished to the point of being sterilized."
He didn't have anyone to reign in these eccentricities, as Lucas is prone to have. He can be nervous, myopic, and perfectionistic. Having a lack of limits shows in the final product.
His almost total lack of direction to his cast, who did the best they could with what they were given.
His use of complete green screens with nothing for actors to play against
Cringeworthy dialogue.
Jar Jar
Child Anakin
MIDICHLORIANS
There's a list to start from.
I don't get it. I've encountered cringeworthy dialogue in nearly every Star Wars production I have seen. Including the Disney productions. As for Jar-Jar, the nine year-old Anakin and the midichlorians, I never had a problem with them. I do find the fandom's attitude toward Jar-Jar a little disturbing and worthy of a psych paper.
Once again, I'm going to be the opposing voice. What can I say? It's me. Granted, the Prequel Trilogy had its flaws. Actually, so did the Original Trilogy and just about every Star Wars production I have ever seen. But flawed or not, I consider the Prequel Trilogy movies to be among the best Star Wars productions I have seen, along with the OT films. Not only did I understand the 1999-2005 movies very well, I thought it did a great job in expanding the Star Wars Universe. I think those films did a better job in expanding the franchise than the Disney movies and streaming shows. And I am utterly grateful that Lucas didn't try to repeat the style and tone of the Original Trilogy. It was telling a different kind of story and I believe it would have been a mistake if he had tried to copy the Original Trilogy's style.
And once again, I've noticed that the criticisms of the Prequel Trilogy seemed to be expressed in a vague manner.
It's not like it was a conscious choice. He actually tried really hard to find both a writing partner and a collaborative director and nobody (with talent) wanted to take it on, so he had to go do it himself. Seriously, even Spielberg turned him down, and they're mates.
Also I think this narrative that "George needs to be reigned in" is a bit of a misnomer that fundamentally misunderstands how creative collaboration works. It wasn't people that limited what he could do the first time around, it was mostly circumstance. Ralph McQuarrie never argued with him about the direction of the conceptual style, so far as I'm aware.
Lucas's problem was never that he needed to be restrained, it's that he needed collaborators he could trust. Having a sounding board that actually offers an intelligent, constructive opinion isn't "restraining" as a creative, it's freeing. Now I'm not going to speak to who on the PT production may or may not have fallen short in this regard, but I think it's pretty obvious that he finally found his ideal collaborator when he hired Dave Filloni for Clone Wars.
Few things here; Lucas never claimed to be a good director or writer, indeed he's often insisted on quite the opposite. Really, he's an editor at heart, but in order to tell the stories in his head, he had to take on the former two jobs as well . . . and still managed to make some of the highest grossing, most enduring movies in cinema history, and change the entire industry forever . . . twice. Oh well!His almost total lack of direction to his cast, who did the best they could with what they were given.
His use of complete green screens with nothing for actors to play against
Cringeworthy dialogue.
Jar Jar
Child Anakin
MIDICHLORIANS
There's a list to start from.
As for the rest of it: that's the thing about pushing the envelope on a technical level. The first person through the wall always gets bloody, and bigger the swing, the bigger the miss. The green screens were a necessity for what they were attempting to achieve; which was backgrounds and locations that were at the time physically impossible to capture in-camera. So them mostly had to go with digitally composited miniature work (people seem to forget the PT had some of the most extensive miniature work ever.) Also notice that the actors that complained about all the green-screen work are also the ones that didn't have a lot of theatre experience. The ones that did, adapted quickly, because they actually know how to act (aka. "pretend a thing that isn't there is real")
Jar Jar was a couple different things happening at once; on a technical level he was the first real attempt at a photo-real CG character existing in and interacting with on-set actors. There's no Golem without Jar Jar.
On a character level; he's a clear attempt to counterbalance the tone of the movie that's by necessity mostly made up of fairly dour, serious characters and one kid. By Lucas's own admission at the time, he overcooked it, and what we saw was the "damage limitation" version. Here's the thing though; that's something you really don't know how it's going to work until you're in the editing bay.
On a performance level: Ahmed Best's performance is colossally undervalues. He managed to take a character who on paper was mostly physical comedy, and still delivered some emotionally sensitive and nuanced scenes.
Yes, Jar Jar is a clown, often an inconvenience to everyone around him, and possibly neurodivergent . . . but he's also the most emotionally aware and present character in that whole cast (and that includes the two space wizards that can actually sense emotions.) Such characters have value, and while he's far from my favourite, Star Wars would be poorer without both Jar Jar and Ahmed Best.
Child Anakin wasn't a mistake. Anakin's childhood as a slave, and relationship with his mother is a vital part of his character arc. You can't just start when he's a teen already at the temple and just mention that part in passing; it doesn't work. The audience needs to see it to invest it. Also; acting is hard. Finding good child actors is even harder. Getting the shots you need in the limited time you have them available in a working day is hard. Trying to do reshoots with them several months to a year later and hide the fact that they've grown half a foot is next to impossible. Also, Jake Lloyd's had more than his fair share of crap from this over the years, and people really need to get all the way off his back about it, and then back up like five more paces.
As for the "dreaded" midichlorians; that's entirely on the fans for wilfully misunderstanding their purpose, even though it was explicitly explained.
Also, it's not an invention Lucas came up with for the PT, that's a commonly repeated false narrative. They first showed up in his notes made circa 1977/78. He had this idea in his head the whole time, he just never bothered to include it because it wasn't relevant to the plot until TPM. They're just meant to explain why everyone can't just using the force and levitating things after attending a weekend seminar with a travelling space guru. That's it. Some people have a natural talent that makes training them easier (and even then it's best to start as early as possible) and there's a marked correlation between inherent talent and m-count. You can still train people with little to no talent, it's just *really* hard.
Midichlorians don't "give people the force". The force is created by all living things. It's a part of *everyone*. That's kind of the whole point (how else do you think mind tricks work?) Midichlorians are just a mechanism for bridging the temporal and the ethereal. Just as the rods and cones in your eyeballs bridge the gap between your brain and certain wavelengths of the electro-magnetic spectrum, thereby allowing you to construct an image of the universe around you.
Anakin having a freakishly high m-count was just a way to express there's something fundamentally different about him. It doesn't mean he's a super-hero, just that he has the touch of destiny. A little of the divine about him. This is mythological storytelling after all! This is just the Star Wars equivalent of: "his mum once f*cked a goose and/or ray of sunshine that actually turned out to be Zeus in disguise." Given the choice; I take the midichlorian version anyday!
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They absolutely did not.Reverend said:
"While we were preparing the text for The Making of Star Wars, Lucas added a note to this passage about midi-chlorians, bringing his original words in line with his later thoughts and the events of the prequel trilogy."
https://www.starwars.com/news/so-what-the-heck-are-midi-chlorians
Midichlorians are an invention Lucas came up with for the PT, and the "commonly repeated false narrative" is your own.
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A lot of things people complain about the Prequels were present in the Original Trilogy already, particularly ANH, the one OT movie written and directed by Lucas. Cringeworthy dialogue? Harrison Ford famously told Lucas "you can type this shit up, but you can't say it." Jar-Jar is basically filling a similar role C-3PO played in the OT.
The backlash against Midichlorians is just fans getting a little OTT. And as for the criticisms against Jake Lloyd's acting, Samuel L Jackson summed it up best. "He was only a kid working with a director who doesn't know how to work with actors. How good could anyone's performance be under those circumstances?"
The backlash against Midichlorians is just fans getting a little OTT. And as for the criticisms against Jake Lloyd's acting, Samuel L Jackson summed it up best. "He was only a kid working with a director who doesn't know how to work with actors. How good could anyone's performance be under those circumstances?"
I mean, this is the Ahsoka thread so I won't go all in on it. This has been discussed ad nauseum for 20 years. I could link you to various things, but I doubt you would take it seriously.
My biggest criticism is the weakness of the characters and the acting. Anakin does not come across as realistic in some scenes, and his delivery is unfortunately understated. Same with Natalie Portman, especially in the Phantom Menace. This was even noted in a Time review of the film, that Portman lacked a presence and gravitas to portray the royal authority. Her delivery is especially flat.
They did.
This doesn't make them good movies. This doesn't make them enjoyable narratives. Now, I think the Phantom Menace, especially, gave us very good ideas to be expanded on, and a lot of novels did so. But, again, that doesn't make it a good movie.
Yup. I don't hold it against the actors. I entirely put it at Lucas and his (self-admitted) discomfort with directing, and greater interest in editing than working with actors.
Portman and Lloyd gave what was asked of them. What came out was something feels intensely understated.
I don't agree with you. I'm sorry, but I don't. But I'm sure there are many who do. Nor do I agree with the prevailing view that the Prequel Trilogy was inferior. Certainly not to the Original Trilogy. I just don't. But we can all leave it at we agree to disagree.
All of Genevieve O'Reilly's appearances as Mon Mothma.
Some, yes, but not all. There is very little passion in her voice and 14 year olds that I work with are at least able to muster some measure of emotion in their delivery on passionate topics.
I've seen Portman in a bunch films over the years, and I've seen her deliver fantastic performances, and I've her very much not deliver fantastic performances. In my experience that's the hallmark of an actor that *really* needs a good director to bring that performance out of them, and George Lucas is not that kind of director.
That's not to say she's a bad actor by any means, but IMO the truly great actors are the ones that are good no matter what they're in. Sam Jackson for example has been in a ton of sub-par to actively terrible movies, and yet he's never not entertaining to watch.
If you put an actor like Natalie Portman in the mid ground of a scene without specific direction or dialogue and she'll mostly just stare into space. Put a Sam Jackson, or say a Gary Oldman, a Sigourney Weaver, or a Tommy Lee Jones in that same shot, and they'll gleefully steal the scene with a single raise of an eyebrow, because they're actually bringing something to the performance.
So I'd say the failing there is in casting someone who was a poor fit for Lucas's directing style. Yes, it would have been better still to have a director that could actually direct actors, but he tried, and nobody wanted the gig (or at least, nobody he wanted, wanted the gig.) I suspect this is one of the main reasons Lucas went back to TV after the prequels, since that's a better fit for his creative style. In movies, the director is king, so trying to get any movie director willing to play second fiddle to an EP is all but impossible. In TV on the other hand, it's the writers that are king, while directors are totally used to working to execute a show-runner's vision with little to zero input into the script. Indeed, his background in TV production is exactly why Richard Marquand was hired for RotJ. Honestly, I would like to take a look at the alternate timeline in which the PT was made as an especially lavish limited series for TV.
Which brings us back to 'Ahsoka', because we have Steph Green who is now two for two on doing a wonderful job of directing episodes that feel every inch like a Filloni joint.
That's not to say she's a bad actor by any means, but IMO the truly great actors are the ones that are good no matter what they're in. Sam Jackson for example has been in a ton of sub-par to actively terrible movies, and yet he's never not entertaining to watch.
If you put an actor like Natalie Portman in the mid ground of a scene without specific direction or dialogue and she'll mostly just stare into space. Put a Sam Jackson, or say a Gary Oldman, a Sigourney Weaver, or a Tommy Lee Jones in that same shot, and they'll gleefully steal the scene with a single raise of an eyebrow, because they're actually bringing something to the performance.
So I'd say the failing there is in casting someone who was a poor fit for Lucas's directing style. Yes, it would have been better still to have a director that could actually direct actors, but he tried, and nobody wanted the gig (or at least, nobody he wanted, wanted the gig.) I suspect this is one of the main reasons Lucas went back to TV after the prequels, since that's a better fit for his creative style. In movies, the director is king, so trying to get any movie director willing to play second fiddle to an EP is all but impossible. In TV on the other hand, it's the writers that are king, while directors are totally used to working to execute a show-runner's vision with little to zero input into the script. Indeed, his background in TV production is exactly why Richard Marquand was hired for RotJ. Honestly, I would like to take a look at the alternate timeline in which the PT was made as an especially lavish limited series for TV.
Which brings us back to 'Ahsoka', because we have Steph Green who is now two for two on doing a wonderful job of directing episodes that feel every inch like a Filloni joint.
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All of Genevieve O'Reilly's appearances as Mon Mothma.
I wish her hippy phase lasted a bit longer
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