I liked many of those things. It helped create a sense of continuity with the OT and the EU.
STAR WARS PREQUELS - a love/hate relationship
- Thread starter HAL.9000
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I liked many of those things. It helped create a sense of continuity with the OT and the EU.
I'll grant these two. (I'm not a blind devotee after all.) In the original Star Wars, Obi-Wan clearly treats "Darth" as Vader's first name.
I don't mind the robes, really, in fact it adds a neat Buddhist monk effect to the Jedi. But it is odd that they all dress like Owen Lars.
This one makes sense actually. Why wouldn't Obi-Wan start Luke off in the same way that all young padawans learn to use a lightsaber?
Who said it was simply a training method? He talked like that throughout the original movies.
The no-attachment thing is a terrible idea. And I think the movies show that. That is why Obi-Wan and Yoda let Luke grow up with a family before introducing him to the Jedi ways. They learned from their mistakes. Just because the movie presents something as the Jedi way it does not mean it was ever the right way. Just like the Old Republic rotted away, the Jedi order was also stagnant and ripe for a fall.
That's funny.
You're cute. 
No, it didn't.
You mean the scene in the dining alcove right before the sunsets, after Luke left the table?
All this dialog establishes is that Owen and Beru Lars were familiar with at least some of the exploits of Luke's father. It doesn't even definitively establish that either had met Anakin personally.
Or maybe you mean what Ben told Luke?
You mean in the same conversation where he told Luke that his father was dead? So, some point-of-view wiggle room on whether Luke's father is dead is allowed, but everything else Ben said must be absolutely 100% true? Right. Sure.
(source = http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Star-Wars-A-New-Hope.html)
By the way, if Ben was really telling the truth here, when exactly should Anakin have decided to stay on Tatooine and not gotten involved? When he was six years old? Please. Precisely what higher ideals was little Annie following at that time? Oh, and as far as I recall, Owen Lars had never met Anakin when Anakin left Tatooine to join the Jedi; Owen didn't even appear at all in The Phantom Menace. Edited to Add: Ergo, what Ben said here in the OT doesn't jibe with what went down in the PT, which contradicts the idea that one can take this dialog on face value.
Also, there is another interpretation of this little bit of dialog. It could just simply mean that at some point Anakin might have had the opportunity to move to Tatooine, say with Padmé, to raise a family, and leave the Republic behind altogether. That would have been an ironic place to hide Luke, where Anakin might have moved to escape the war and his fate, but didn't. Tatooine not as the place of hardship where Anakin was born, but the rugged frontier to which he might have escaped, but didn't. Edited to Add: This would have supported the idea that the OT is about Luke picking up the torch dropped by Anakin in the PT, which in fact the OT seems to be. I agree that it does not make sense to think of the OT as a narrative revolving around Anakin. Clearly, the OT revolves around Luke.
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I guess I don't remember any Yoda dialogue in Empire/Jedi reaching "not if anything to say about it I have" levels of awkwardness.
I guess the children training with lightsabers scene just struck me as a tad too derivative. I don't mind the concept, the execution was just struck me as a tad too close. Something a bit different would have been nice; blindfolds or maybe being shot at by other students with harmless blasters as opposed to a remote, that kind of thing.
I guess the children training with lightsabers scene just struck me as a tad too derivative. I don't mind the concept, the execution was just struck me as a tad too close. Something a bit different would have been nice; blindfolds or maybe being shot at by other students with harmless blasters as opposed to a remote, that kind of thing.
Look at the events of AotC and RotS from the point of view of Owen Lars. His stepmother is kidnapped and presumed killed. Out of nowhere his long-lost stepbrother appears and shows amazing powers in finding her. He is there all of a day or so and then a message comes from an Obi-Wan Kenobi, calling him away.
Owen reads the news, he hears of the Clone Wars. He probably heard about some of Anakin's adventures, as the poster-boy for the Republic. But then, just as the wars wind down, the same Obi-Wan who called him away appears with Anakin's infant son. Obi-Wan explains that Anakin is dead, and that he will be sticking around to watch over baby Luke.
How should Owen think of these things? Over the next twenty years he probably tries to imagine what exactly it was that drew Anakin away. He most likely rebuffs Obi-Wan's attempts to have anything to do with Luke's upbringing. He doesn't want Luke following Obi-Wan off-planet and getting himself killed like Anakin did. Which is exactly what the dialogue in ANH indicates.
Sometimes it seems people really wanted George Lucas to spell every little thing out for them...
"For the Jedi, it is time to eat as well."
"Luminous beings we are, not this crude matter.
"When nine-hundred years old you are, look as good, you will not."
"Your father, he is."
Perhaps he did more of the backwards talking in the prequels but he had his share to begin with.
(double post)
The funny thing is that prior to both the prequels and reading about the "Lars is Kenobi's brother" retcon in the ROTJ novelization, I had assumed that Beru was just Anakin's sister, with Owen as his brother in law.
There was nothing in the films that technically contradicted it, and in my head I imagined that Owen and Anakin never really got along well to begin with, and cooperated really just for Beru's benefit.
(I had a lot of time on my hands as a kid)
There was nothing in the films that technically contradicted it, and in my head I imagined that Owen and Anakin never really got along well to begin with, and cooperated really just for Beru's benefit.
(I had a lot of time on my hands as a kid)
InklingStar, I suspect that you may have completely misunderstood the context in which my remarks occur. In my last post, I was simply pointing out that there is nothing in the OT that requires the PT to depict Anakin as having ever been on Tatooine.
Yeah, the irony is that Jedi dont breed...yet the force is something biological (remember the medichlorian BS).
The lifestyle imposed on the Jedi is really, when observed from reality not fiction, something detrimental to healthy human development. Maybe it's the psychologist in me, but the Jedi overall are neurotic.
Or monks. It goes with the robes.
And personally, I think that makes sense for Jedis to be like monks.
I just finished watching the full run of the original 1960s Japanese children's programme Ultraman. Not only did I see more interesting camerawork than in the Star Wars prequels, but I found many of the later stories had more pathos. The characters were certainly more sympathetic (and I'm not talking about the giant monsters here). Perhaps Lucas should have taken a refresher course on filmmaking before attempting the completion of his "magnum opus."
Heh, I'm quite flattered, honestly. Thanks.
The only reason we have to doubt Obi-Wan's version of events is because the original trilogy itself discarded a major part of them. When the first Star Wars film was made, yes, Vader was supposed to be the guy who killed Luke's father. It was only during the creation of the sequel they revised his background to make him Luke's father, which required the subsequent handwave from Obi-Wan.
In other words, when it came to ignoring the backstory established in A New Hope, the original trilogy was well on its way long before the prequel trilogy gave it a shot.
The idea that Lars was Anakin's half-brother and they both came from the same barren scrapheap of a world frankly is a pretty sensible extrapolation from what the films give us.
I do appreciate the argument that putting Luke on Tattooine and not even bothering to change his name looks a whole lot like hiding him in plain sight, but that Tattoine is supposed to be this obscure, irrelevant planet way out on the Outer Rim - judging from A New Hope, the Empire barely bothers with having any kind of influence there beyond recruiting people for the Imperial Academy.
It made the Jedi sound more like a religious order, like the Knights Templar. It's kind of weird, sure, but I think the Jedi eschewing attachment is probably the single most interesting thing the prequel trilogy did with the Jedi Knights.
Besides, the only hint of Jedi family we get in the original trilogy is that Anakin Skywalker had two children, but he wasn't exactly held up as an exemplar of Jedi doctrine (and tying his family directly to his downfall wasn't a bad choice, regardless of the issues in execution).
This is more or less true. But...
The only issue I have with what you say is that, until we get our hands on Lucas's notes, and maybe not even then, we really won't know in what ways and to what degree the saga was streamlined for the first film in 1977, versus in what ways the first film was outright retconned in TESB and ROTJ, versus in what ways the first film went exactly as planned all along with respect to the parentage issue.
For, I believe there is evidence that supports the idea that Lucas had already planned Vader to be Luke's father when he made the first film, and that he dropped a couple of clues to this effect into the first film, but that he otherwise saved the reveal for later, if the series proved successful and if he decided to commit to the idea (which would irrevocably alter the tone and thrust of the whole series). The way the first film stands, I think Lucas was free to go either way (is he or ain't he Luke's father). And by the way, that freedom of choice (is he or ain't he) may have been all along part of a well-conceived marketing plan that helped carry the major Empire cliffhanger across the three years from 1980 to 1983, since it created real mystery and helped keep the buzz going. Was the ambiguity part of the plan all along? Or was the contrast between what was said in the first two films something that was taken advantage of and milked, as an ample udder of opportunity to create ambiguity? Again, the answer may be in Lucas's dang notes, the so-called Journal of the Whills.
Others disagree with the viability of the idea that Vader was always going to be Luke's father which, based on the available evidence, is, I'm willing to concede, understandable. So, I'm not actually saying you're wrong, but I'm pointing out that things could be otherwise, as I happen to strongly suspect they are.
This is true.
Yes, it did. You can't get around it simply by acting as if anything TEH LYING LIAR Obi-Wan said can be thrown out. The fact remains that Luke's reaction to Ben's statement ( or rather his lack of overt reaction ) confirms that Ben was not lying about Anakin's home planet. If Ben's implication that Anakin was from Tatooine clashed with what Luke had been told by Owen, Luke would have questioned it.
CorporalCaptain said:
So, because the Jedi decided that Luke should not be told about Anakin's turn to the dark side until his training was completed, that means any other statements Ben made are automatically in question? Right.
CorporalCaptain said:
And we call that an appeal to ignorance. In other words, "if the real truth is ever revealed it might prove my case" is not an argument.
CorporalCaptain said:
Three years before TPM? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Try again.
CorporalCaptain said:
Speaking of contradiction, you said it was stupid to have Anakin be from Tatooine in the first place, erroneously assuming this to be a PT invention. Thus your original stance rejected the idea regardless of the specifics of the PT. Supposedly the PT's presentation of this idea was wrong because it did not fit with the OT. Now that the OT's presentation of the idea has been revealed, it must be thrown out because you can't see how it fits the PT. Interesting logic.
CorporalCaptain said:
This remains true even in the absence of needless after-the-fact revisionism of Anakin's home planet.
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LOL. Like he betrayed you or something. Raped your childhood. You don't like the movies, fine. Get over it.
When you pay hard cash to see a movie with a solid reputation and it turns out to be garbage, well then yes, you are betrayed.
Oh lol, just get over yourself. It's only entertainment. There are hits and misses every time.
I've seen interviews with Lucas in which he admitted that he made changes to the saga for the first film, in order to make the movie more self-contained. There's no question that changes were made; that's a fact. What we don't know is precisely all the changes that were made. If you don't care about that, fine. I really don't care whether you care about that or not.
As I pointed out above, Ben's line that Owen didn't agree with Anakin's ideals cannot be reconciled with what actually occurred in the PT. So, that's two points in the same scene where Ben demonstrably did not tell the truth (or in which later movies retconned the events anyway).
Yeah, Owen probably told Luke that Anakin was from Tatooine, but so what? He also told Luke that Obi-Wan was dead. So, we also know that Owen lied to Luke. Why does everything else Owen tells Luke therefore have to be the truth?!?
Anyway, you just don't want to concede that the PT could have be handled differently, even if it really could have been. That's the bottom line. You like the PT as it is, and that's fine too. But it could have been so much better; I suspect that lovers of the PT as it stands probably wouldn't have been able to tell the difference.
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