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Ani does have friends, they're the other slave boys who cheer for him during the race. They're just not important characters to the story He and obiwan aren't actually friends - they're a squire and a knight with a caring but difficult relationship. Friends/brothers may be what Kenobi believes it to be, but that's just another thing that he is wrong about
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Apr 20, 2021 16:45
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I won't stand for this erasure of Kitster and Little Greedo
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Apr 20, 2021 16:57
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Blood Boils posted:Ani does have friends, they're the other slave boys who cheer for him during the race. They're just not important characters to the story Yeah, they're functionally not characters in the story, which is bad. Obi Wan and Anakin aren't really depicted as friends, but the story acts like they are friends and would be stronger if they were. Because the prequels are not actually well crafted.
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Apr 20, 2021 16:58
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TheLoquid posted:Yeah, they're functionally not characters in the story, which is bad. Obi Wan and Anakin aren't really depicted as friends, but the story acts like they are friends and would be stronger if they were. Because the prequels are not actually well crafted. Actually the whole point is that they have a dysfunctional relationship and you just completed missed it
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Apr 20, 2021 17:01
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Really, the friendship that ends with one character dismembering the other was dysfunctional? Wow, you've really opened my eyes. A dysfunctional relationship does not preclude friendship or love between the characters. The lack of emotional connection between the characters weakens the story as a whole. If that was intentional, then that's a bad choice. TheLoquid fucked around with this message at 17:15 on Apr 20, 2021 |
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Apr 20, 2021 17:12
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Anakin is very quiet about it (as part of his whole 'being emotionally repressed' thing) but if at times he comes across as if he strongly dislikes Obi Wan that's probably because he does.
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Apr 20, 2021 17:14
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Doctor Spaceman posted:It has some good points but it's also pretty annoying and frequently takes the most literal or uncharitable interpretation so as to set up a straw man Why would he be charitable to it? It's a dumbassed conspiracy theory. Like this: JonathonSpectre posted:It all comes back to the original sin of starting Anakin out as a child. IMO this was a Lucas decision made because he absolutely doesn't understand human interaction and he thought kids who saw the movie would want to play as the kid, so the kid had to do dumb heroic poo poo. Also so they could make that one poster with the child with Vader's shadow. Original sin? It's a Cinema Sin! Having a character be a child is not only unholy, but an absolute stupid failure of humanity. Whoa! But then, we can interrogate this. JohnSpec's contention is that the Anakin character was invented for two reasons: -For a poster used in the ad campaign, where they hint that he is an evil kid. -So that children at home would have someone heroic to play as. Of course the poster would have been created by advertisers long after the movie was already in production. So we know that's horseshit. And, of course those two ideas are contradictory - is Anakin supposed to be fun and heroic, or evil? But, for the second point, why don't we apply that logic to every other heroic character in the film? Strictly speaking, you don't 'need' the Jedi in the movie. Like, if you go back to earliest drafts and you're looking to cut some protagonists, you could just have badass warrior-queen Padme go an adventure to save her planet, and pick up Anakin on the way - dropping him off at the Jedi temple at the end of the film, if you'd like. Was Quigon included purely so that kids would have someone to play as? Or was warrior queen Padme included purely so that kids would have someone to play as? (Do kids actually play as them? Did kids play as Obiwan Kenobi's dead blue rear end back in 1985? Have we conducted polls w/r/t this? ) JohnSpec is apparently approaching the film as something akin to a D&D module to be reenacted by live-action roleplayers, or that he can doubly immerse himself into by imagining that he is a child imagining that he is badass (adult!!!) Anakin Skywalker. But is that how films are written? Or is it his imagination? He certainly fantasizes that, because he liked the early teaser poster, the entire film must have been created just to produce that single photoshop'd image. The reality is, of course, that the poster used in the ad campaign was based on the existing not-really-subtext that kid Anakin has a dark side. Pre-teen Anakin effortlessly slaughters millions of people, and then Satan Himself says "we will watch your career with great interest!" Anakin may or may not be fun to play as, but the character himself is literally playing - with guns. Note that killing shitloads of people is now Anakin's career. He's fated to this, at the age of ten. Anakin's role in the film is, as a living superweapon, to give expression to how easily the Republic ideology sways people to do bad. He is literally God, and has the power of God, so people hope to wield him against their foes: "God is real, and he's an American!" Yoda himself says this will eventually lead to suffering, and he's not wrong except for the fact that suffering is already here - it's just being inflicted against the "right people". I would characterize the "now this is podracing!" stuff as darkly comedic - because, like, it's literally this monster kid saying how much he loves gladiatorial combat. So it would appear that this is a direct attack on the concept of LARP and of "kids playing war". SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 17:21 on Apr 20, 2021 |
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Apr 20, 2021 17:17
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The Clone Wars show helps build their friendship up (along with just about every other character in the prequels).
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Apr 20, 2021 17:18
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TheLoquid posted:Really, the friendship that ends with one character dismembering the other was dysfunctional? Wow, you've really opened my eyes. Literally the entire series is about how Anakin is tormented by a lack of healthy emotional connections.
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Apr 20, 2021 17:22
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TheLoquid posted:Really, the friendship that ends with one character dismembering the other was dysfunctional? I can only assume this is referring to Obi-Wan's quote in A New Hope: "...and he was a good friend" I think it's important to remember that this is a scene where Obi-Wan is intentionally leaving poo poo out/lying to Luke about his father in order to recruit him as a Jedi. And that in the same movie these "good friends" have a duel to the death.
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Apr 20, 2021 17:28
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Jewmanji posted:Literally the entire series is about how Anakin is tormented by a lack of healthy emotional connections. And it's a really bad series, which goes to the last part of my post. ^^And the numerous attempts at relationship building in the second and third movie that are definitely present but fall so flat that they've been reinterpreted as Anakin and Obi Wan never had any love for each other, apparently. TheLoquid fucked around with this message at 17:35 on Apr 20, 2021 |
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Apr 20, 2021 17:29
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Vintersorg posted:The Clone Wars show helps build their friendship up (along with just about every other character in the prequels). That's just the "it can only exist as an HBO miniseries" fantasy. Episode 2 shows us simply that the characters are not friends, except in the very technical sense that they spend time together and have banter ("from a certain point of view"). Their relationship, to the extent that they have one, is tense. They're rivals. Obiwan has an actual friend in Dex Jettster, who serves as an obvious contrast to Anakin.
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Apr 20, 2021 17:29
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TheLoquid posted:Yeah, they're functionally not characters in the story, which is bad. Obi Wan and Anakin aren't really depicted as friends, but the story acts like they are friends and would be stronger if they were. Because the prequels are not actually well crafted. I don't understand why Lil Greedo need to have a larger role than a couple scenes and speaking lines - what would it add to the story? You're half right - the movies does not depict the jedi as friends, so much as comrades in a religious warrior cult. It's a father-son dynamic more than anything else, regardless of how one of those characters thinks of it. I don't see how the story would be stronger if they were shown hanging out during their limited off-duty time or were similar in age or w/e
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Apr 20, 2021 17:30
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TheLoquid posted:And it's a really bad series, which goes to the last part of my post. Kinda sounds like you have an idea of what these movies are in your head, which is entirely at odds with what the movies actually are. This type of disjunction and willful blindness explains why you would like a movie like TLJ which requires an enormous amount of good will and editorializing on the part of the audience in order to smooth over the complete incoherence.
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Apr 20, 2021 17:38
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Blood Boils posted:I don't understand why Lil Greedo need to have a larger role than a couple scenes and speaking lines - what would it add to the story? It's not about lil greedo, it's about trying to make child Anakin work as a character. If you don't think building up interpersonal relationships in stories is important I'm afraid you'll have to take it up with our social ape brains because that's a feature of storytelling going back to like Gilgamesh.
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Apr 20, 2021 17:40
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Unfortunately, the prequels just weren't planned out very well. Lucas didn't bother to establish Anakin and Obi-Wan getting to know each other in Episode I, since he thought the next movie would take care of it, but then the next movie turned out to be about Anakin and Padme's relationship, while Obi-Wan was sidelined with the pointless assassination investigation that just gets ignored once he discovers the clones. Episode III tried to hastily retcon a friendship into the first act of the movie, but because the first two movies are so disconnected, it just kind of comes out of nowhere. It also kind of hurts that Episode III completely drops all the plot threads set up by Episode II (like the aforementioned assassination, and the origin of the clones). The whole thing just needed someone in charge of keeping a consistent story across the trilogy, because this slapdash approach of not knowing where your story is going in the next movie really doesn't work.
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Apr 20, 2021 17:54
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Jewmanji posted:Kinda sounds like you have an idea of what these movies are in your head, which is entirely at odds with what the movies actually are. This type of disjunction and willful blindness explains why you would like a movie like TLJ which requires an enormous amount of good will and editorializing on the part of the audience in order to smooth over the complete incoherence. TLJ rules tho and the exact phenomenon is what is happening there. The people who hate TLJ expected something different (Luke to be their strong friend who would never try to kill a child) in the exact same way prequel haters expected something different (Obi-Wan and Anakin to be best buddies who would never have a duel to the death)
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Apr 20, 2021 17:56
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TheLoquid posted:It's not about lil greedo, it's about trying to make child Anakin work as a character. If you don't think building up interpersonal relationships in stories is important I'm afraid you'll have to take it up with our social ape brains because that's a feature of storytelling going back to like Gilgamesh. Okay, so who is Padme's friend then? Sio Bibble? Her body-double? In A New Hope, Luke's friends are never actually shown at all. The friends are in the film, but you are just arbitrarily declaring them "not good enough" and then attributing that to a gut feeling.
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Apr 20, 2021 18:01
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Guy A. Person posted:TLJ rules tho and the exact phenomenon is what is happening there. The people who hate TLJ expected something different (Luke to be their strong friend who would never try to kill a child) in the exact same way prequel haters expected something different (Obi-Wan and Anakin to be best buddies who would never have a duel to the death) No, TheLoquid’s specific objections to the prequels as stated above are a bizarre misreading of the films as they present themselves. Criticisms of TLJ in this thread by and large are about the film’s inarguable incoherence, not fanfic about what the movie should’ve been about.
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Apr 20, 2021 18:06
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Anakin was written as a child in order to convince children to steal their parents' cars to do donuts. Hundreds of children were killed because George Lucas told them "spinning is a cool trick," a crucial victory in Lucas' ongoing war against the youth.TheLoquid posted:It's not about lil greedo, it's about trying to make child Anakin work as a character. If you don't think building up interpersonal relationships in stories is important I'm afraid you'll have to take it up with our social ape brains because that's a feature of storytelling going back to like Gilgamesh. It is true, there are very few scenes in the prequels where characters hug and I don't think there's a single line of dialogue where one character tells another "You are my friend now."
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Apr 20, 2021 18:06
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anakins objective in the space battle was to turn off the autopilot and fly away
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Apr 20, 2021 18:10
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Robot Style posted:Unfortunately, the prequels just weren't planned out very well. Lucas didn't bother to establish Anakin and Obi-Wan getting to know each other in Episode I, since he thought the next movie would take care of it, but then the next movie turned out to be about Anakin and Padme's relationship, while Obi-Wan was sidelined with the pointless assassination investigation that just gets ignored once he discovers the clones. Lol this took me a minute
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Apr 20, 2021 18:20
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Guy A. Person posted:TLJ rules tho and the exact phenomenon is what is happening there. The people who hate TLJ expected something different (Luke to be their strong friend who would never try to kill a child) in the exact same way prequel haters expected something different (Obi-Wan and Anakin to be best buddies who would never have a duel to the death) Wrong
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Apr 20, 2021 18:28
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TheLoquid posted:It's not about lil greedo, it's about trying to make child Anakin work as a character. If you don't think building up interpersonal relationships in stories is important I'm afraid you'll have to take it up with our social ape brains because that's a feature of storytelling going back to like Gilgamesh. He works fine as a character, since it's not his relationship to his pals that's important to the story but rather his relationship with his mother and wife and mentors, all of which are built up over the course of the series. Also I've read Gilgamesh, iirc there's not really a lot of "build up" to those interpersonal relationships
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Apr 20, 2021 18:29
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Jewmanji posted:No, TheLoquid’s specific objections to the prequels as stated above are a bizarre misreading of the films as they present themselves. Criticisms of TLJ in this thread by and large are about the film’s inarguable incoherence, not fanfic about what the movie should’ve been about. I agree with the first point, I may be getting threads mixed up but I find it hard to believe that at no point was there discussions about what TLJ (or any of the sequel trilogy) should have been about, since that seems to be a core component of almost any Star Wars debate. In any case, these points don't connect to why TheLoquid likes TLJ. Your argument is that they hate the prequels because they believe they were trying to show one thing but accidentally showed the opposite (e.g. that Anakin and Obi-Wan were supposed to be friends and the Jedi were supposed to be wise, but Lucas hosed up and instead Obi and Ani are rivals and the Jedi are corrupt and hubristic) but I don't see how this translates to TLJ. Like TheLoquid thought that TLJ was trying to say something it clearly wasn't but...liked the wrong thing the thought it was...or something? It seems like a cheap shot designed to effectively be "you like a movie I think is dumb so you have bad taste" with more justification.
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Apr 20, 2021 18:36
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TheLoquid posted:Yeah, they're functionally not characters in the story, which is bad. Obi Wan and Anakin aren't really depicted as friends, but the story acts like they are friends and would be stronger if they were. Because the prequels are not actually well crafted. That’s an impressive hand wave away of his friends. Who have multiple speaking lines. “Not functionally characters”. Ok
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Apr 20, 2021 18:40
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pospysyl posted:Anakin was written as a child in order to convince children to steal their parents' cars to do donuts. Hundreds of children were killed because George Lucas told them "spinning is a cool trick," a crucial victory in Lucas' ongoing war against the youth. Wait, so are they supposed to be friends, or is the movie about how Anakin never had any friendships? Much to ponder. quote:Okay, so who is Padme's friend then? Sio Bibble? Her body-double? In A New Hope, Luke's friends are never actually shown at all. They are not good enough. This is not a new critique. quote:That’s an impressive hand wave away of his friends. Who have multiple speaking lines. “Not functionally characters”. Ok Lol. If you are referring to lil greedo and company, I defy you to say anything interesting about any of them. I guess I should say that I find the reading of the prequels in which the Jedi are completely wrong and every system in the Republic is slouching towards fascism to be compelling, but not really translated on screen in an interesting way. To the extent those themes are present, they are subsumed by the really clear failures in character development and plot structure such that many viewers, myself included, simply don't care that much about what's happening in the story. The interesting ideas undergirding the story are lost to inartful storytelling, particularly in creating characters that relate to each other in interesting, coherent, and compelling ways. TheLoquid fucked around with this message at 18:49 on Apr 20, 2021 |
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Apr 20, 2021 18:42
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TheLoquid posted:I guess I should say that I find the reading of the prequels in which the Jedi are completely wrong and every system in the Republic is slouching towards fascism to be compelling, but not really translated on screen in an interesting way. To the extent those themes are present, they are subsumed by the really clear failures in character development and plot structure such that many viewers, myself included, simply don't care that much about what's happening in the story. The interesting ideas undergirding the story are lost to inartful storytelling, particularly in creating characters that relate to each other in interesting, coherent, and compelling ways. Fair enough! Thanks for elaborating.
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Apr 20, 2021 18:52
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I think it’s ok to finally admit that the last Jedi sucked and that it wishes it could achieve what the prequels did
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Apr 20, 2021 18:54
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TLJ is good, actually. VVV Completely, 100% sure, yes. TheLoquid fucked around with this message at 19:09 on Apr 20, 2021 |
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Apr 20, 2021 19:04
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TheLoquid posted:Wait, so are they supposed to be friends, or is the movie about how Anakin never had any friendships? Much to ponder. That is well said but are you sure you are not conflating your subjective experience of a movie you don’t like and making those into objective qualities of the film.
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Apr 20, 2021 19:06
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The REAL Goobusters posted:I think it’s ok to finally admit that the last Jedi sucked and that it wishes it could achieve what the prequels did Admit anything you'd like honestly, it becomes weird when you spend all day arguing a redemptive reading of the prequels only to pull out "and this is why TLJ sucks" as a non-sequitur.
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Apr 20, 2021 19:10
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Guy A. Person posted:Admit anything you'd like honestly, it becomes weird when you spend all day arguing a redemptive reading of the prequels only to pull out "and this is why TLJ sucks" as a non-sequitur. It’s a boring movie OP.
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Apr 20, 2021 19:13
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TheLoquid posted:They are not good enough. This is not a new critique. Sort-of, but not really. The generic complaint that you wanted more backstory is quite familiar - e.g. that we need to emulate Marvel and produce ‘solo films’ for all the characters before the big Naboo/Gungan/Jedi/Anakin team-up film in order to maximize audience investment in each character. We see that with fans who profess that they could not fully understand the prequels without watching dozens of hours of the tie-in cartoon show. In this way, audience emotional investment is directly linked to time investment (16 hours of Anakin footage!) and investment of other resources by the studio (a multi-season tv show arc, a feature film, etc. - these all tell us a character is Officially Important). But the specific complaint that not enough screen-time is devoted to Anakin’s slave friends is a new one to me. And I’ve been keeping track of these things for a while. Anakin is a relatively minor character in Phantom Menace, in that he is ‘merely’ an extension of the Jar Jar character. Jar Jar Binks is the film’s protagonist, but ends up purposefully overshadowed from the moment Anakin is introduced. Jar Jar remains the protagonist, but Anakin does the spectacular feats of effortless violence and gets heaped with praise from all the characters - including Satan - while Jar Jar works enormously hard, laying his life on the line for a distraction, and basically just ends up impressing Boss Nass. That Anakin has friends at all is to show us that Anakin is striving for a certain level of validation - that he’s not just doing this because he has to, but because he likes to impress people. He has an audience of muggle children who lack his genetic abilities, but love that Anakin is able to stand tall with the adults (who include, y’know, their owners). I’m not sure how more screen-time would enhance this. Where Lucas did include more screen-time, it was to underline that the other slave kids will probably just get shot dead in a bar somewhere, because they aren’t considered worth saving. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 19:42 on Apr 20, 2021 |
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Apr 20, 2021 19:33
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Robot Style posted:Obi-Wan was sidelined with the pointless assassination investigation that just gets ignored once he discovers the clones.
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Apr 20, 2021 19:35
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Guy A. Person posted:Admit anything you'd like honestly, it becomes weird when you spend all day arguing a redemptive reading of the prequels only to pull out "and this is why TLJ sucks" as a non-sequitur. The redemptive interpretation is that the movie does an incredibly bad job of expressing that Ben Solo is the true good guy and everyone else is just gaslighting him into insanity, so the ending is tragic as Luke doubles down and declares war on the kid he tried to murder. The ‘bad job’ part is that the writing and editing both genuinely suck.
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Apr 20, 2021 19:38
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TheLoquid posted:Wait, so are they supposed to be friends, or is the movie about how Anakin never had any friendships? Much to ponder. As I see it, Obi Wan and Anakin are friends. They're not besties or anything; they're essentially work friends who only meet in professional contexts. They're the kinds of friends who take lunch breaks together. This isn't expressed through dialogue, but rather through performance and tone. Anakin and Obi Wan are at ease together in a way that they aren't with other Jedi or strangers, but this is contrasted with how Obi Wan behaves with Dex, a much closer friend. When Obi Wan disapproves of how Anakin drives, does cool stunts, or otherwise acts recklessly, he does so in a comically exasperated way, i.e. filling a familiar straight man role in the pair, which suggests that there is a pair in the first place. This kind of friendship has layers; at the climax of RotS, Obi Wan is anguished ("We were brothers!") That's interesting! Maybe someone whose religious beliefs dissuade him from strong emotional connections gets deeply attached to the few relationships he does have, no matter how tenuous those relationships are in objective reality. What your complaint seems to be is that you prefer it when these kinds of relationships are established through dialogue. There's good news for you here: most Hollywood films made today are very much concerned with spelling these kinds of things out in crystal clear dialogue. We know Poe and Finn are friends because Poe shouts "Buddy!" when he sees Finn and then they hug. Very clear, there's not a chance anyone could misinterpret it. When Lucas chooses to render the relationship more opaquely, that is an intentional choice, not an accidental mistake. Whether or not you agree with that choice is not a determination of the objective quality of the movie, but an expression of subjective preference. pospysyl fucked around with this message at 19:45 on Apr 20, 2021 |
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Apr 20, 2021 19:42
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Anakin claims he made a protocol droid to help mom around the house (do protocol droids do windows?) but it seems fairly obvious that he made it so he had someone to talk to. I always got the vibe that even though Anakin did have that lil Greedo and producers' kids goof troop, that we were supposed to think even before he was THE CHOSEN ONE he wasn't able to relate to "normal" people his age. It doesn't help that he's then kidnapped and raised in a cult so, yeah, his singular friendship with his teacher is gonna be weird and offputting.
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Apr 20, 2021 19:51
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The Last Jedi works decently as a parody/critique specifically of The Force Awakens, but that's about it.
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Apr 20, 2021 19:57
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The REAL Goobusters posted:I think it’s ok to finally admit that the last Jedi sucked and that it wishes it could achieve what the prequels did But I don’t believe it does. I keep watching it expecting it hate it but nope. Still love it
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Apr 20, 2021 19:58
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