Can You Believe It's Been Ten Years Since TPM Premiered?
- Thread starter Tulin
- Start date
I think episode 1 holds up really well. I was initally disappointed by it, but watching it now, it's pretty good, other than the whole Jar Jar thing, which was totally unnecessary. I would say it's the most "Star Warsy" of the prequels.
Personally I never had an issue with the political jargon in the movies. I actually enjoyed it some what and made the universe feel more fleshed out to me
It amazes me too!
However, I am still amazed by the Ewoks as well.
Ewoks aren't as bad. At least they didn't talk.
The Ewoks are redeemed in the fact that they're cannibals. And would eat Jar Jar.
Ewoks aren't cannibals. One has to eat their own species to be a canibal. Luke, Han, Chewie, and R2 are different species, therefore eating them is not cannibalism.
Now unless the EU has established that Ewoks do eat their own kind...
I was all hyped up for TPM when it first came out and enjoyed it for the most part (I can't seem to be too critical of anything Star Wars) but I was mostly lost for the most of the movie because I had no idea about any of the characters except for Obi-Wan Kenobi, Anakin Skywalker (although I had no idea he would be a kid), R2-D2, and C3P0. I had never heard of Lord Sidious before although when his hologram appeared at the beginning I had little doubt who he would eventually become- given his familiar dark shrouded appearance- and I knew that Palpatine was the would-be Emperor (and that both of those characters are supposed to actually be the same person) who we would see in ESB and ROTJ but most of the rest of characters, locales, and concepts (i.e. Sith, midichlorians) were brand new creations never before referenced at all in the OT (although it was later integrated into the Star Wars EU). Like with all of the Star Wars movie, the beginning and ending scenes were the best.
...wait....Palpatine and Sidious were the same person? Crap, now I have to watch the movies all over again...
Saw TPM twice in one day, and the second time I feel asleep for pretty much everything Tatooine, but woke up for the pod race (good timing, eh?).
My least favorite of the prequels. AotC and RotS suffered a great deal from the fact that they needed to get the characters into place for the rest of the films, and the Anakin-Padme romance is just awkward and painful to watch. Also, Padme dying after giving birth to twins because she's lost the will to live because her boyfriend went psycho? Great message there...
Saw TPM twice in one day, and the second time I feel asleep for pretty much everything Tatooine, but woke up for the pod race (good timing, eh?).
My least favorite of the prequels. AotC and RotS suffered a great deal from the fact that they needed to get the characters into place for the rest of the films, and the Anakin-Padme romance is just awkward and painful to watch. Also, Padme dying after giving birth to twins because she's lost the will to live because her boyfriend went psycho? Great message there...
I remember the day I saw it in the theater I skivved off from work. Anyway as it finally started, it was an emotional experience. It had been so long since SW was on the big screen, and now to see the familiar trappings once again...well, it just took me back. Seeing "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away..." then "STAR WARS" blasting onto the screen with the beginning of Williams' fanfare. And then when "Episode I" appeared at the top of the scroll, it finally hit -- I wasn't watching a re-release of one of the OT movies, this really was a NEW STAR WARS MOVIE!! Though opinions about certain parts of the film may have clouded since then, watching the movie that day was an exhilarating experience.
I remember I went with a huge group of friends. There were like 20 of us. (Basically my entire high school nerds "clique.") One of them worked at the theater and he saved half the tickets for the Midnight show for us.
I loved it; I was really the only one of the group who did. Everyone else had the typical reaction: "Jar-Jar is annoying; it's too confusing; I want to push that stupid kid down," etc.
I still love it and think it's the best film of the PT for several reasons:
Jar-Jar really isn't that annoying and he's easy to tune out.
The scroll was a bit cumbersome and convoluted, but as long as you paid attention it really wasn't all that hard to follow.
Lloyd, despite all his annoyances, is still better than Christensen.
Liam is always good.
People complain about how it basically used ANH as a plot template. I, however, saw this as a plus. ANH is the ultimate fantasy adventure plot structure. Why is it a bad thing to copy it?
Darth Maul >>>> Darth Tyrannus. In fact, I've always thought they dropped the ball by having him die instead of keeping him around for the entire Trilogy. Dooku really added nothing to the story and his death was ultimately meaningless. However, Qui-Gon's death could have been a good plot device (revenge) for both Ani and Obi. Anakin's scissor chop of death would have been so much more meaningful had it been Maul.
I think, overall, it had the best effects. That is, assuming you ignore Yoda.
The problem with Clones and Sith is, while certainly they had that "wow" factor, the presentation just seemed artificial and cold at times. Phantom never had this problem. The Droid Ship space battle really felt like a Yavin IV update and not a video game.
Along those same lines, I think the saber duel is the best of the entire series. Certainly it didn't have the emotional impact of the Cloud City and Mustafar battle, but it did have the best choreography. The Cloud City fight does seem a bit outdated (I think it's the most dated aspect of ESB.) and the Mustafar fight was just too much. Somewhere between the epic start and the tragic ending, there's a lot of pointless flash in the middle between it and the Yoda/Sidious stuff; it does start to wain a bit on the overall drama. But the Maul fight had just the right mix of flair and drama.
I loved it; I was really the only one of the group who did. Everyone else had the typical reaction: "Jar-Jar is annoying; it's too confusing; I want to push that stupid kid down," etc.
I still love it and think it's the best film of the PT for several reasons:
Jar-Jar really isn't that annoying and he's easy to tune out.
The scroll was a bit cumbersome and convoluted, but as long as you paid attention it really wasn't all that hard to follow.
Lloyd, despite all his annoyances, is still better than Christensen.
Liam is always good.
People complain about how it basically used ANH as a plot template. I, however, saw this as a plus. ANH is the ultimate fantasy adventure plot structure. Why is it a bad thing to copy it?
Darth Maul >>>> Darth Tyrannus. In fact, I've always thought they dropped the ball by having him die instead of keeping him around for the entire Trilogy. Dooku really added nothing to the story and his death was ultimately meaningless. However, Qui-Gon's death could have been a good plot device (revenge) for both Ani and Obi. Anakin's scissor chop of death would have been so much more meaningful had it been Maul.
I think, overall, it had the best effects. That is, assuming you ignore Yoda.
The problem with Clones and Sith is, while certainly they had that "wow" factor, the presentation just seemed artificial and cold at times. Phantom never had this problem. The Droid Ship space battle really felt like a Yavin IV update and not a video game. Along those same lines, I think the saber duel is the best of the entire series. Certainly it didn't have the emotional impact of the Cloud City and Mustafar battle, but it did have the best choreography. The Cloud City fight does seem a bit outdated (I think it's the most dated aspect of ESB.) and the Mustafar fight was just too much. Somewhere between the epic start and the tragic ending, there's a lot of pointless flash in the middle between it and the Yoda/Sidious stuff; it does start to wain a bit on the overall drama. But the Maul fight had just the right mix of flair and drama.
Ron Moore finally admitted in the season 3 finale podcast (it’s not like you want to publicly renounce the network that buys your show), once the season was finally over, he finally admitted that the Scifi Channel had forced them to drop their running storylines and make a season of standalones (to hook new viewers). Keep in mind this is SPECIFICALLY what Scifi also did to ruin Farscape season 4 (is there some show, OF WHICH I AM UNAWARE, that switched from storyarc to standalone format and yet INCREASED in ratings? The score is 0-2, what justification do they have?!
That said, yes, the writers also….this was just painful; they had always said “we didn’t plan out the middle of the story that much, though we’ve got ideas for the ending” (like, mid-season 2 they’d say that). But then came the revelation that “we have no Cylon Plan, there was never a Cylon Plan” and “we started picking Final Five Cylons based on shock value rather than any story-logic, actually retconning things…then episodes would run long or short; forcing a season of standalones meant that 1-some episodes that blatantly should have been two-parters got crammed into one episode, resulting in *consistently* 5-10 minutes of deleted scenes per episode and sometimes like 20 minutes (Unfinished Business). 2-or, B-plots from other episodes got stretched into full episodes (the back half of season 3). And the back half of season 3 got rushed through production with no time for scripting because they wanted to make sure to keep the viewers hooked instead of taking the time to get it right.
But the big problem was just “dear God, you didn’t actually plan this out, even though you’ve been hyping, directly hyping, that there was a “central mystery” that we should waste time trying to decode”
You’re right, it wasn’t just the network. It was the network AND the writers, the result being BSG season 3; a failure of truly Homeric proportions. Season 4 skiffy backed off and let the writers work, so at least some damage could be salvaged, but it just wasn’t the same show after the season 2 finale (and seriously; the Apollo/Dualla relationship dragged on for THIRTY EPISODES!? We were complaining about it after only 10? No, seriously, I have yet to hear a writer give a coherent defense of the season 3 “Love Polygon of Doom”, when the political storylines took a back seat to Soap Opera we’d been promised would never happen.
I saw it when I was nearly 10, liked it but not much, I wasn't really critical at all back then (although I think I had known even then that Jedi dropped the ball). It's interesting to me how my perspective of it has changed over the years; now, Jar-Jar isn't funny but he's not bad either, Neeson makes the dialogue work (aside from the blue line) and I really like the symbolism, allegory; for a while now I've liked how the sets & CGI looked fairly consistent with the OT, compared to the shinier look of Clones (where the dialogue, acting and disjointed storyline really hurt).
I wasn't really paying that close of attention when I first saw it, but when Obi-Wan's first line is "I have a bad feeling about this," everyone laughed and/or cheered. But then it turns out he was referring to something completely unrelated to what he and Qui-Gon were doing? Which wouldn't be "this."
Darth Vader was always called "The Dark Lord of the Sith." Not in the actual movies, but on toy packaging, novels, children's books, comics, all over the place. I didn't know what a "Sith" was, of course, none of that was really ever fleshed out in a way that corresponds with the prequels.
^The definition of "Sith" has also been somewhat inconsistent. Interestingly, Palpatine was not officially a Sith lord until the prequels. He was just a Dark Side user. We only knew Vader went by the title, really, and it was assumed in "fanon" that he was the twelth and final of the lords (Not sure where that came from)
Timothy Zahn assumed the Sith were some kind of alien race that Vader commanded (Hence "Lord of the Sith"); ultiametly this became the Noghri.
The "Tales of the Jedi" comic book sagas ( which eventually inspired the popular KOTOR games) assumed the Sith were an alien race that were conquered by exiled dark Jedi. This group is apparentally being revisited in the new TOR game.
Later comics assumed the Sith were pretty much a catch-all term for most dark side users. However, when TPM revealed that the Sith were just "Always two there are", some retconning had to be done-basically, that the reason that there are two is that numerous Sith fought amonst themselves until one Sith (Darth Bane) decided that just two was enough. Not sure if Bane was Lucas's idea so as to not contradict the EU writers or something Terry Brooks wrote up for his novel, but Bane has since been the foundation for comics and an ongoing novel series...
The multiple EU spinoffs have explained that not all dark-side users are Sith, but instead "Dark Jedi"-characters like Ventress in the various Clone Wars media, for instance.
Timothy Zahn assumed the Sith were some kind of alien race that Vader commanded (Hence "Lord of the Sith"); ultiametly this became the Noghri.
The "Tales of the Jedi" comic book sagas ( which eventually inspired the popular KOTOR games) assumed the Sith were an alien race that were conquered by exiled dark Jedi. This group is apparentally being revisited in the new TOR game.
Later comics assumed the Sith were pretty much a catch-all term for most dark side users. However, when TPM revealed that the Sith were just "Always two there are", some retconning had to be done-basically, that the reason that there are two is that numerous Sith fought amonst themselves until one Sith (Darth Bane) decided that just two was enough. Not sure if Bane was Lucas's idea so as to not contradict the EU writers or something Terry Brooks wrote up for his novel, but Bane has since been the foundation for comics and an ongoing novel series...
The multiple EU spinoffs have explained that not all dark-side users are Sith, but instead "Dark Jedi"-characters like Ventress in the various Clone Wars media, for instance.
It wasn't until this post in the thread, with the mention of Williams, that I was able to figure out that TPM stands for The Phantom Menace. Reason #47 that I'm becoming a luddite.
Now that you mention it, I think that he was referred to as a Sith in SOTE, which, of course, predated the prequels but then again I didn't even read SOTE until long after the prequels. Interesting tidbit though. Prior to the prequels, I always assumed that he was simply a "dark" or "fallen" Jedi Knight, which, to some degree he really was IMHO. I'm not sure he was ever as into the whole Sith "mythology" as Palpatine, Lumiya, and some of the other ancient lords of the Sith seemed to be.
Totally agreed. I can't believe it's been so long... and two more disappointments later the prequels were complete.
Hard to believe.
I can't believe how much faster life moves as an adult.
I remember seeing ANH when I was 7. I remember buying the 10th Anniversary Starlog Magazine of ANH in 1987 and 10 years seemed like a lifetime (well, it practically was then!)
10 years since TPM seems like a drop in a bucket. Where did all that time go?!
I remember seeing ANH when I was 7. I remember buying the 10th Anniversary Starlog Magazine of ANH in 1987 and 10 years seemed like a lifetime (well, it practically was then!)
10 years since TPM seems like a drop in a bucket. Where did all that time go?!
