Plinkett gets REVENGE
- Thread starter Flying Spaghetti Monster
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I was gonna make a list of my own, counting the things I'd keep, and the things I'd change...
I actually even started typing, but then I thought... WHO GIVES A SHIT?
Prequels are old news anyway, dead and buried, but for some reason, people like Plinkett keep necromancing them.
My personal SW fandom can be summed up to this:
I actually even started typing, but then I thought... WHO GIVES A SHIT?
Prequels are old news anyway, dead and buried, but for some reason, people like Plinkett keep necromancing them.
My personal SW fandom can be summed up to this:
- Worship the holy trinity (The Original Trilogy)
- Make peace with the prequels (they are what they are, there's no going back, so enjoy the good, ignore the bad, and stop caring)
- Have fun watching Clone Wars
^ Excellent post.
What's the problem with that. It was a great movie. The name thing was just a way of showing that you'll find someone new and it'll start all over again, no matter how important you think the girl is that just broke up with you. Just like the seasons change. The girl at the end was "Autumn"; there'll be a "Winter" after that. If you thought the name wasn't very realistic...well, that's not really what it was about.
Oh, too late for that.
It's a generic indie romcom whose only defining feature is it's non-linearity. Remove that and it's nothing special.
Maybe Anakin's love interest is another Jedi? I don't see why she has to be a "princesse" type. Two Jedi parents might also explain why Luke and Leia are both force sensitive. A beautiful Jedi more advanced in her training than Anakin would seem to be the perfect object of desire for a young Darth Vader. It would also explain why both parties consider the relationship to be taboo at first.
Yeah, rather than Droid vs. Clone battles with cannon fodder on both sides, an endless army of clones vs. The Outnumbered Defenders of the Republic That We DO Care About would have been better.
I think this is the key thing to get rid of. Why do we need the immaculate conception and the meaningless prophecy about "bringing balance?" Anakin's story would be at least as compelling if he were just a powerful Jedi who falls to the Dark Side. And then we have less nonsense to worry about.
Anakin should probably have started out as approximately Luke's age in the first movie, and he probably should have begun to fall sooner, perhaps becoming estranged from Obi Wan and the rest of the Jedi at the end of the second movie. The third movie takes him from Fallen Jedi to Darth Vader and ends with the climactic duel with Obi Wan. So basically you would end up with a tree-part structure that went like this: Anakin becomes a Jedi, Anakin breaks away from the Jedi order, Anakin becomes Darth Vader.
I like Liam Neeson, but I see no point to his character. Yodi trained Obi Wan, and Obi Wan trains Anakin, after meeting him somehow on Tatooine as a teenager, like Luke. This solves the problem of TPM having no protagonist, since a teenage Anakin can be the protagonist (as he really should have been from the beginning).
The Sith Apprentice character also could use some streamlining. Darth Maul is too disposible, and Count Dooku could stand to be more compelling. The Emporer is in the background all the time, so the main villain in the foreground has to be Vader-level cool, or as close as possible. Make him a single villain for the whole trilogy until he is killed by Anakin in the third movie as part of his transformation into Darth Vader.
I would make him closer to Anakin's age as well, and very charismatic: somebody who can taunt Anakin and fuel the flames of his powerlust.
The core issue, though, is Anakin's personality and his turn to the dark side: it can't come from weakness and gullibility, but from the character's strength and conscious desire for more power.
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Funny, no one ever suggested that needed explanation in the pre-PT days.
The fact that you reject its canonical meaning doesn't render it meaningless.
It can't come from "weakness", but it must come from the desire for more power?
See any problem there? Also, the presumption of "gullibility" ignores the role of Anakin's Force visions and erroneously assumes the information he received from Palpatine to be factually untrue.
It's for comedy. I've watched the reviews for ep1 and 2 more than I've watched the actual movies themselves.
I've also watched more Angry Video game nerd than I've played actual NES games over the last year. Again, comedy.
Well I haven't seen a ton of "indie" romcoms, but I HAVE had to endure plenty of the regular kind... and 500 Days of Summer looks like a freakin work of art in comparison. lol
He could have made fun of dozens other, MORE RECENT movies, but for some reason, his main focus are the prequels and Star Trek.
His Avatar review, regardless of how good it was, was only 20 minutes long which led me to believe he didn't really have any interest in reviewing it, but did it anyway, just because most of his audience expected him to.
My point, the guy is probably a huge old school SW fan, and these reviews were his way of becoming a voice (a champion, if you will) for those people whose childhoods Lucas raped with the prequels.
Conveniently enough, he's pretty talented. No one can deny that.
I think there are a lot of reasons why the prequels are a good choice from a reviewer's standpoint, especially one with Plinkett's style and sense of humor. The PT may be yesterday's news in a sense, but in another sense it will stand forever as a monument to bad storytelling and wasted opportunity. Just as Star Wars and Empire put on a clinic on how to make movies like this, the PT takes us to school on how to completely botch the very same thing. The contrast is just irresistible.
When you take something that should have/could have been great and make a titanic mess out if it, that is a lot more interesting to analyze than just any bad movie. Those are a dime a dozen.
RoTJ is actually somewhere in between imo. Some of the problems that would end up dominating the prequels are starting to emerge, but the overall feel is closer to SW and Empire.
Oh I don't hate it, but I don't think as highly of it as SW and Empire. It's much, much better than the PT, but you can already see that Lucas is starting to recycle ideas in RotJ and, yeah, the Ewoks are the first step toward the Gungans (sp?) of TPM.
Without the Ewoks RotJ would be a lot closer to the first two films in terms of quality.
If only they would stop showing TCW! It's annoying to see the story the way it should have been all along! 
) Since the story turned out to have a significant political dimension, it makes sense for Mrs. Skywalker to be a politician, but she didn't need to be so prim. Someone who was more exasperated by being constrained for her whole life by rules, rules and more rules might be more inclined to turn a blind eye to Jedi rules, especially if Anakin was a reinforcing her "rules suck" worldview. It would have made her more of an actual character in her own right. Padme turned out to be too prim to really come alive as a character.
Why not have this character and Mrs. Skywalker be one and the same?
Yeah, and I think the biggest motive for the fall can't be political or psychological. It has to be something mystical and beyond normal mortal mentality. There needed to be more Dark Side hooey thrown in - secret temples, murky swamps, big altars with eldritch prophecies inscribed in stone, spooky black clouds of swirling mist. How about Anakin discovering the black armor in some ancient Sith temple that is forbidden to all Jedi? Everyone tells him he can't go there, so of course he has to check it out. Big mistake. Just jazz it up for us!!! Anything but more scenes of people on couches talking.
Recycling the Death Star was amazingly lazy writing, and a preview of the lazy, film-the-first-draft approach of the PT.
For whatever reason, for years I just assumed Mrs. Skywalker was a Jedi, too. (Possibly Obi-Wan's daughter when I was in a corny soap opera mood.
) Since the story turned out to have a significant political dimension, it makes sense for Mrs. Skywalker to be a politician, but she didn't need to be so prim. Someone who was more exasperated by being constrained for her whole life by rules, rules and more rules might be more inclined to turn a blind eye to Jedi rules, especially if Anakin was a reinforcing her "rules suck" worldview. It would have made her more of an actual character in her own right. Padme turned out to be too prim to really come alive as a character.Why not have this character and Mrs. Skywalker be one and the same?
Yeah, and I think the biggest motive for the fall can't be political or psychological. It has to be something mystical and beyond normal mortal mentality. There needed to be more Dark Side hooey thrown in - secret temples, murky swamps, big altars with eldritch prophecies inscribed in stone, spooky black clouds of swirling mist. How about Anakin discovering the black armor in some ancient Sith temple that is forbidden to all Jedi? Everyone tells him he can't go there, so of course he has to check it out. Big mistake. Just jazz it up for us!!! Anything but more scenes of people on couches talking.
Recycling the Death Star was amazingly lazy writing, and a preview of the lazy, film-the-first-draft approach of the PT.
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Yeah, I guess... It would have been cooler if the final battle was about Rebels attacking the Imperial Capital or something (imagine X-wings and tie fighters dogfighting among the skyscrapers), with Luke and Vader facing off in Emperor's majestic throne room.
Although, a huge battle station orbiting and guarding Coruscant wouldn't have been a bad idea, IMO.
Still, I always loved ROTJ, despite some "lazy writing" and those annoying teddy bears everywhere...
I can definitely understand that complaint, but between the cool, half-built design and it's awesome use during the final battle (with it blowing up rebel ships left and right, and all it's crazy tunnels at the end), I thought Lucas somehow made the idea work.
I think it detracts a lot less from the film's overall quality than the Ewoks because, yeah, the Emporer's trap works very well from a dramatic point of view and changes things up a bit from the original scenario in SW.
That said, it always struck me as unnecessarily repetitive, and now that we have seen the PT, it's obvious that the tendency to recycle ideas ad nauseum was only going to get worse.
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