The PT is new and shiny and wears Boots of Speed; the OT is old and dingy and needs a walker to get around.
Phantom Menace is the best Prequel.
- Thread starter TheLobes
- Start date
The PT is new and shiny and wears Boots of Speed; the OT is old and dingy and needs a walker to get around.
The OT were not childrens films, they were family films! A bit like Back to the Future or Indiana Jones, they could be watched by the entire family. Fun adventure films that may appeal more to men than women, but that are still basically enjoyable for everybody, not just people who can switch their brains off.
^yeah, some people seem to confuse "accessible to children" with "made for children". They were accessible to all age groups, mainstream audiences... but there was also a ton of cool stuff (ships, props, costumes, etc.) and technical accomplishments (sfx, camera work, lighting, sound, editing, etc.) to appeal to geeks of all types.
The PT, I don't know who the hell they're for. Politics! Slapstick! Video Game Action! Soap Opera! Decapitation! heh, even the Boring is extreeeeeme...
The PT, I don't know who the hell they're for. Politics! Slapstick! Video Game Action! Soap Opera! Decapitation! heh, even the Boring is extreeeeeme...
I haven't seen Toy Story in years so I can't comment on that, but the first Star Wars, and especially Empire, were pretty dark! Civil war, an SSI style gestapo, a main character whose father was turned into a mechanical bad guy, ect.
I personally don't think Lucas was looking to make these films into kid films until RoTJ rolled around. He realized early on how well the merchandise was selling to kids, so he figured why not make a film that lends to more merchandising. So we have Ewoks, burp jokes, and set pieces seemingly designed to be turned into action figure playsets.
Good point. Just for fun, I looked up Roger Ebert's scores for all of the Star Wars films.
Star Wars - ****
The Empire Strikes Back - ****
Return of the Jedi - ****
The Phantom Menace - ***1/2
Attack of the Clones - **
Revenge of the Sith - ***1/2
The Clone Wars - *1/2
I tend to agree. Maul is just generally bad-ass, but really he isn't interesting. He is just a lackey used to kill jedi and thats his entire purpose and character. But Dooku, he is a respected jedi master who was trained by Yoda and who himself trained Qui-Gonn. He is not like Anakin who was unstable and whose turn to the Dark Side was to no surprise. Dooku is a guy who should have known better, but who still turns for reasons of his own whether they were idealistic or self-serving. I think the question of his turn is what makes the character so interesting to me. How a guy who devoted his entire life to becoming a jedi could then become a Sith.
Didn't the original Star Wars have a lot of political dialogue, especially in the 'exciting' opening scenes: "We're on a diplomatic mission" "It will create sympathy votes for the Rebellion in the senate!" "How will the Emperor control the senate without the beauracracy?" "The regional governors now have direct control over the territories".
Also in ESB "So you're part of the commerce guild, then?" "We have labor difficulties"....etc
ROTJ is the only SW film WITHOUT politics. Even Timothy Zahn realized this, and his novels deal a lot with the ruling council and the senate. A politician (Borsk Feyla, a Bothan elected because his people wanted representation for the those who died getting the Death Star plans) is a central character.
Also in ESB "So you're part of the commerce guild, then?" "We have labor difficulties"....etc
ROTJ is the only SW film WITHOUT politics. Even Timothy Zahn realized this, and his novels deal a lot with the ruling council and the senate. A politician (Borsk Feyla, a Bothan elected because his people wanted representation for the those who died getting the Death Star plans) is a central character.
yeah, too bad really that there wasn't more focus on Dooku. He should have been the Sith apprentice from the beginning of the PT, and only been replaced midway or late in Episode III. As the disappointed idealist who comes to no longer believe in the Republic, he seems to have actual ideological motivations for being against the Galactic Republic and the Jedi. He's not just some cartoonish villain in it for the power. At least that's what I got from AOTC.
Throwaway lines about the current political situation hardly compare to countless scenes set in offices, or where the characters are on couches talking back and forth about trade disputes or voting for a new chancellor.
That is beside the point.
I don't respect all of Ebert's opinions, but he is the top film critic in America. I posted his reviews to show Lucas is full of crap when he says film critics have bashed all of the Star Wars films.
The OT has dialogue which relates to the larger story of whats going on in the galaxy. From very little information, we get all the information we need, this gives the characters a context. The empire is just about to consolidate total power, and 'the remnants of the old republic are being swept away'. That piece of broad information is all we need to know. Also, the dialogue happens at the same time as character development and exposition.
See the OT is about a set of characters more than the events that are going on around them. The PT did not make this distinction, they were a rushed mess designed to make money, so the whole story just became 'lets get Anakin in the Vader suit and lets set up the Emperor', instead of focusing on the development of characters. This means the script needs to keep feeding us all this rubbish because theres no characters to tell the story with.
As for Ebert, I find it suspiscious that he gave ROTS a good review, but also praised RLMs review of the same movie.
And yet, they also disprove that critics thought that the PT was shit. Two and a half stars might not be great, but it is still a thumbs-up.
You forget that a lot of time passed between the reviews
Why does that matter?
It shouldn't but maybe his opinion changed. Or maybe he was sick of hearing people complain about his positive review. Or maybe RLM convinced him of the error of his ways
Who else are action figures made for?
The politics in the OT are as thin as can be. What do we know? Rebels = good, Empire = bad. They're fighting; only one can prevail.
That's as simple a setup as can be imagined. Nobody's going on and on about trade routes and taxation.
And it turns out, the political/military angle isn't even the real story. The fight is actually going on, on the mystical level. What happens between the Emperor, Vader and Luke is the important thing.
The sad thing is, The Clone Wars is depicting the PT political landscape as fairly interesting, something I never got from the movies in the least. The Separatists are not just a bunch of greedy black hats; they have valid and understandable reasons for breaking off from the Republic, because it has serious problems with corruption.
But it's still ambiguous. The Republic has been established as corrupt enough that the Seppys can be seen as having a valid point, but not so corrupt that Bail, Padme, Obi-Wan and the rest of the Jedi are idiots for not abandoning it, too.
And crucially, that ambiguity could be a plausible reason why Anakin might jump one way while the Jedi jump the other way, without anyone needing to be stupid or naive.
That's a pretty complicated picture, and it might have been tough sledding to try to shoehorn it into three movies. If so, either the story needed to be simplified, or it needed to be told in more movies (or in a TV series).
And however the political story is told, it still needs to take a back seat to Anakin's mystical journey, which was utterly ignored in the PT. It's like the Force was just something people used so they could jump around like grasshoppers, and had no greater meaning than that.
That's as simple a setup as can be imagined. Nobody's going on and on about trade routes and taxation.
And it turns out, the political/military angle isn't even the real story. The fight is actually going on, on the mystical level. What happens between the Emperor, Vader and Luke is the important thing.
The sad thing is, The Clone Wars is depicting the PT political landscape as fairly interesting, something I never got from the movies in the least. The Separatists are not just a bunch of greedy black hats; they have valid and understandable reasons for breaking off from the Republic, because it has serious problems with corruption.
But it's still ambiguous. The Republic has been established as corrupt enough that the Seppys can be seen as having a valid point, but not so corrupt that Bail, Padme, Obi-Wan and the rest of the Jedi are idiots for not abandoning it, too.
And crucially, that ambiguity could be a plausible reason why Anakin might jump one way while the Jedi jump the other way, without anyone needing to be stupid or naive.
That's a pretty complicated picture, and it might have been tough sledding to try to shoehorn it into three movies. If so, either the story needed to be simplified, or it needed to be told in more movies (or in a TV series).
And however the political story is told, it still needs to take a back seat to Anakin's mystical journey, which was utterly ignored in the PT. It's like the Force was just something people used so they could jump around like grasshoppers, and had no greater meaning than that.
I always took it that the Republic's problems were being fanned and exaggerated by the Sith pulling strings in the background.
A half star difference on 2 of the 3 prequels? His review for TPM is hardly scathing, either. I agree with his 4 stars for Jedi, too.
"If it were the first "Star Wars" movie, "The Phantom Menace" would be hailed as a visionary breakthrough. But this is the fourth movie of the famous series, and we think we know the territory; many of the early reviews have been blase, paying lip service to the visuals and wondering why the characters aren't better developed. How quickly do we grow accustomed to wonders."
In fact, it seems to buy into a nostalgia theory.
The Original Trilogy didn't have as much of a political focus as the Prequel Trilogy for the simple reason that they both take place in much different times. The Empire dominates the galaxy in the Original Trilogy and is the established government. The films set up a conflict between the Rebel Alliance and the Empire. The prequel films are in a time where democracy along with all of it's trappings are involved as well as the machinations of an individual who seeks to bring that democracy down using that democracy against it's self so of course there will be more concentrated political dialogue and a focus on politics in the prequel trilogy. Plus in the Original Trilogy the Emperor dissolves the Senate in the first movie so there is no need to focus or show the inner workings of the Empire's political situation.
