Question to those most disappointed with the SW prequels

[FluffyUnbound]

Casting hurt, a lot.

A more credible Anakin (at both ages) would have helped immensely.

If you simply can't believe that Anakin is incredibly talented and capable - that it's possible for him to grow up to be Vader - the movies can't work, even if you have great scripts (and they didn't). It's like casting Pauly Shore as T.E. Lawrence and expecting Lawrence of Arabia to be a good film.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

In my opinion the greatest of all the Expanded Universe books were Shadows of the Empire...

I think Shadows is adequate, but not great, due to the way that whole project worked. The Boba Fett storyline, which if I remember correctly is pretty essential, is shunted off to the comic book tie-in. The novel would have been stronger (and obviously more complete) had it been able to tell the whole story, not just two-thirds of it.

 

[DWF]

Casting hurt, a lot.

A more credible Anakin (at both ages) would have helped immensely.

If you simply can't believe that Anakin is incredibly talented and capable - that it's possible for him to grow up to be Vader - the movies can't work, even if you have great scripts (and they didn't). It's like casting Pauly Shore as T.E. Lawrence and expecting Lawrence of Arabia to be a good film.

Anakin was talented but I can't really say he was totality capable, hewas at an impressionable age and it showed since he had two mentors.

 

[2takesfrakes]

A New Hope is the only STAR WARS movie that's any good. Whilst Empire Strikes Back has some interesting moments, it's boring, for the most part. Especially the Yoda sequence(s) and watching Luke and Vader play hide and seek on Bespin. Ever since, it's been one shitty-assed movie after another. Finally, someone else has control over the saga. Let's see if J.J. Abrams can convert his enthusiasm for the subject matter into something worth watching, again.

 

[Set Harth]

There simply isn't enough running time devoted to politics in the PT for it to get to a level where it would fairly be called tedious.

Rubbish; political plotlines are prominent in all three films. Added up, they probably get more screentime than the romance does.

Good thing I wasn't comparing them. You're basically talking about a handful of scenes in an entire trilogy, with TPM having the only such content with a back-and-forth in it and hence a nontrivial running time, together with a couple of stray sound bites of dialogue here and there. That's tedious? No. Cloak of Deception is tedious. The PT doesn't come close.

This is just one of those tired PT criticisms which gets recycled over and over by those who accept it unquestioningly as fact because they agree with the general negative sentiment. But it loosely translates to "I'll bitch if I get any politics at all".

 

[cooleddie74]

Besides all of that, how does one even TELL the story of the Prequel Era and the downfall of the Old Republic and its institutions without involving politics and its factions? Palpatine aka Sidious manipulates events behind the scenes to get elected Supreme Chancellor of the Republic so that he can trigger a war and use said war and the resulting carnage and deepening distrust of a corrupt system to overthrow it, creating a Sith-ruled Empire governed with an iron fist. Like it or not, that's called politics.

Some fans may not enjoy it, but trade embargoes, Senate machinations and power plays in the halls on Coruscant are part of what creates the galaxy we know in the OT and in the upcoming Sequel Trilogy. Without the political intrigue we don't know how the Empire is born, Palpatine becomes the all-powerful Emperor and the ways of old are silenced or buried. It's not as if The Phantom Menace is some two hour-plus C-SPAN3 coverage of a boring Senate security or commerce committee session.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Having the political angles itself wasn't the problem with the PT. As cooleddie says, politics is an essential aspect of the story. The first scene aboard the Death Star, the "briefing room" scene, discusses politics, and it's one of my favorite scenes in the OT.

 

[Pondwater]

"Empire Strikes Back" will always be my favorite.

The prequels were okay. I didn't care much for "Attack of the Clones" or the cheesy love story. Except for Padmé's dress at the end. Besides that, I only wet my feet a little in the EU to find out how much machine Darth Vader really was.

 

[Timby]

Whilst Empire Strikes Back has some interesting moments, it's boring, for the most part. Especially the Yoda sequence(s) and watching Luke and Vader play hide and seek on Bespin.

 

[cooleddie74]

Yeah, that was pretty much the same facial reaction I had when I read that post.

 

[TEACAKE'S PLEATHER DOME]

Casting hurt, a lot.

A more credible Anakin (at both ages) would have helped immensely.

If you simply can't believe that Anakin is incredibly talented and capable - that it's possible for him to grow up to be Vader - the movies can't work, even if you have great scripts (and they didn't). It's like casting Pauly Shore as T.E. Lawrence and expecting Lawrence of Arabia to be a good film.

I love TPM and AOTC but totally agree about the casting of Anakin. And the writing I would have liked to see Anakin as incredibly charismatic, sexy, a young man people were drawn to, a character that even after he turned would have followers and not just because he was one big weapon. He should be a character that has a huge fan following and he is not. Yes Darth Vader is iconic, but the man in the suit, Anakin Skywalker who we all wondered about for years and years was just a whiny, sad, arrogant jerk. You should be able to go on tumblr and see people swooning over Anakin, instead he's been the butt of jokes since AOTC came out.

This is clearly a failure. I don't think the whole is a failure, and I accept that this is canon Vader but it was a hugely missed opportunity.

 

[2takesfrakes]

Yeah, that was pretty much the same facial reaction I had when I read that post.

Seriously! In fact, talking about this just made me remember an EMPIRE STRIKES BACK memory. I was over a girlfriend's apartment, I had at the time. I'm in her bed, flipping the channels and come across EMPIRE, whilst she's in the shower. It was in the middle of the Imperial Walker sequence on Hoth and I'm thinking this looks Photoshopped, or some junk. She comes out, toweling her hair and sees what I've got on T.V., and goes, "what the hell's this stupid shit you're watching?" And you know what? I totally feigned ignorance and said, "... yeah, I know. Boring, too and I only just turned it on." So, I'm not alone in my assessment of EMPIRE STRIKES BACK. There are others ...

 

[TEACAKE'S PLEATHER DOME]

2takes you betrayed and murdered your ESB!

 

[2takesfrakes]

Don't I know it? She made me watch Josie & the Pussy Cats with her, instead, starring Tara Reid. 2 hours of pure, unfiltered bovine excrement. Apparently my pretending to her that I liked it worked so well that she got me it as a Birthday present ... It's not so bad, really, if I watch it in French.

 

[cooleddie74]

At least we can agree on Josie. That's the kind of movie where you get ten minutes in, black out and wake up in a truckstop diner parking lot in Colorado. You're half-naked, broke and have no memory how you got there, but you're just glad you're not watching the rest of Josie.

 

[2takesfrakes]

Yep! And that's just how I feel about Attack of the Clones, in particular ...

 

[shivkala]

It's been a long time since I've read the Star Wars books and even then, I was never much into them.

However, I do think my disappointment in the prequels has more to do with fact that, being born in 1979, and I figure I was about 6 or 7 when I saw the movies and really started to think about them. So that's roughly 12-13 years worth of wondering how Anakin became Vader, how the Jedis died out, how the Republic gave way to the Empire etc., before the Phantom Menance and closer to 20 years before Revenge of the Sith.

That's a little over a decade to build up things in my mind before the first of the trilogy, and an addition 6-7 years to come up with things between the first and last of the movies.

I can't remember specifics, but I do remember not including a huge dose of politics, making the Jedi chaste, having Anakin be whiny, etc.

I guess the biggest disappointment was seeing the Clone Wars themselves. I kept picturing a war of Jedis fighting cloned versions of themselves, or something else. Having the titular clones be clones of Boba Fett's father and turning them into the forerunners of the Stormtroopers which fought for the Republic wasn't what I had in mind.

 

[TEACAKE'S PLEATHER DOME]

I like the politics a great deal, it's so much less good vs evil than we thought it was about during the OT.

As to the Jedi being chaste, it's attachments that are forbidden not sex.

 

[shivkala]

^
Which makes even less sense, though I thought, as I was typing that "chaste" was probably not the best word. It makes the Jedi look less like the Knights of the Republic and more like cult members, forced to sever their ties with everyone and everything outside of the group.

 

[Harvey]

I was briefly obsessed with everything Star Wars from about age seven to eleven (basically, when I was in elementary school). I loved the interconnection of everything in the expanded universe -- how I could go from reading a book, to playing a PC game, to reading a comic, and watch stories unfold and notice references made across all the different media. I suppose Shadows of the Empire, which came out during this period, was the apotheosis of this (it helped that the special editions of the OT was released theatrically in '97).

My interest in the books vanished with The New Jedi Order series. I might have read a few pages of "Vector Prime," but I certainly didn't get close to finishing it. The Phantom Menace probably didn't help sustain my interest -- my brother and I had a lot of stuff related to that movie. When it turned out the movie wasn't great (and then, a few years later, the second prequel was even worse) my interest in Star Wars vanished.

When I finally revisited the OT years later, I was happy to learn that the movies were actually quite good. Jedi might be my favorite, although it's obviously the least of the three, with a disjointed structure and a juvenile miscalculation with the Ewosk, but the Emperor/Luke/Vader duel is my favorite sequence in the series.

Since 2005, I've seen bits and pieces of the prequel trilogy on TV and always had to turn them off. John Williams' work aside, they're horrible.