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Sgt. Politeness
Sep 29, 2003

I've seen shit you people wouldn't believe. Cop cars on fire off the shoulder of I-94. I watched search lights glitter in the dark near the Ambassador Bridge. All those moments will be lost in time, like piss in the drain. Time to retch.

Hazo posted:

I will march to my grave saying Attack of the Clones is the absolute worst Star Wars movie.

I mean some people say Phantom Menace but I don't think it's an outrageous opinion to say Attack of the Clones is worse.

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Hazo
Dec 30, 2004

SCIENCE



Sgt. Politeness posted:

I mean some people say Phantom Menace but I don't think it's an outrageous opinion to say Attack of the Clones is worse.

Phantom Menace is a well-crafted self-contained movie that at least has a cool podracer sequence and arguably the best lightsaber fight of all the films.

There's nothing enjoyable or redeeming about Attack of the Clones.

fartknocker
Oct 28, 2012


Damn it, this always happens. I think I'm gonna score, and then I never score. It's not fair.



Wedge Regret

Hazo posted:

There's nothing enjoyable or redeeming about Attack of the Clones.

Meh, the big rear end battles at the end aren't good and the CGI did not age well at all, but drat if 12-year old me didn't love that poo poo when it was first in theaters.

Also, it's still better than Rise of Skywalker. :can:

Robot Style
Jul 5, 2009

Hazo posted:

This is actually kind of cool, and I want to believe Lucas had this kind of imagination instead of pointing at spray bottles and telling interns to make them into robots.

Spray bottle Grievous rules.


Lucas has a good ability to let other people's imaginations do the heavy lifting, but sometimes that leads to a lot of ideas without much focus.

Apparently the design process for Dooku was pretty grueling. He gave the artists free reign to come up with a scary design for Darth Maul, and tried the same tactic again for Episode 2. The art dept was really into the idea of having a cool female equivalent to Maul, but since Lucas didn't tell them jack poo poo about the character's role in the story, he never got a design he was happy with and eventually just gave up and hired Christopher Lee.

Some of the designs were eventually used for Asajj Ventress, but the fact that those two characters were originally intended to be the same person is a big red flag in terms of a director knowing what they're looking for.

skasion
Feb 13, 2012

Why don't you perform zazen, facing a wall?
Attack of the Clones is alright, but the most important scene in the script (Padme confronts Dooku and they argue politics) got cut in favor of more loving droid factory hijinks. The other really big Padme scene (where they meet her family) also got cut. It leaves the movie feeling hollowed out because it’s all about this woman but she doesn’t really get to do anything. It’s a problematic movie but no way is it worse than any of the sequels. It’s also the most loopy and out-there and exciting with art and design stuff, imo. Its Blade Runner neon night Coruscant has become justly iconic, Kamino and Geonosis are both amazingly realized space opera settings. It was there that the CG revolution really kicked in, for better and worse.

Sgt. Politeness
Sep 29, 2003

I've seen shit you people wouldn't believe. Cop cars on fire off the shoulder of I-94. I watched search lights glitter in the dark near the Ambassador Bridge. All those moments will be lost in time, like piss in the drain. Time to retch.
I liked the fight between Jango and Obi Wan but otherwise....well I was a little too old to get caught up in the prequels.

Sombrerotron
Aug 1, 2004

Release my children! My hat is truly great and mighty.

Hazo posted:

I will march to my grave saying Attack of the Clones is the absolute worst Star Wars movie.
Rise of Skywalker is by far the worst and may God have mercy on your depraved soul if you honestly believe it isn't.

Vinylshadow
Mar 20, 2017

https://twitter.com/sleemo/status/1438681640990085124

Davros1
Jul 19, 2007

You've got to admit, you are kind of implausible



fartknocker posted:

Meh, the big rear end battles at the end aren't good and the CGI did not age well at all, but drat if 12-year old me didn't love that poo poo when it was first in theaters.

Also, it's still better than Rise of Skywalker. :can:

It's better than The Force Awakens too.

Cerv
Sep 14, 2004

This is a silly post with little news value.

Robot Style posted:

The monsters actually had specific design requirements, since Lucas wanted each of the prisoners to have their own creature to deal with.
The Nexu was designed to be an analogue to the big cats used in Roman arenas, the Acklay was requested as a praying mantis / velociraptor hybrid, and the Reek was designed from the horn outwards - Lucas wanted Anakin to break his chain by wrapping it around a beast's horn.

It’s nice that you expect anyone to know those names

fartknocker
Oct 28, 2012


Damn it, this always happens. I think I'm gonna score, and then I never score. It's not fair.



Wedge Regret

Cerv posted:

It’s nice that you expect anyone to know those names

I learned them from the old Galactic Battlegrounds game! :eng101:

SidneyIsTheKiller
Jul 16, 2019

I did fall asleep reading a particularly erotic chapter
in my grandmother's journal.

She wrote very detailed descriptions of her experiences...
Attack of the Clones and Rise of Skywalker are my favorites of their respective trilogies. Intentional or not (and going by its title, I'd wager at least Attack of the Clones is to some extent), they feel endearingly pulpy exactly because they're such bigass corny messes.

SidneyIsTheKiller
Jul 16, 2019

I did fall asleep reading a particularly erotic chapter
in my grandmother's journal.

She wrote very detailed descriptions of her experiences...
I forgot this was the pictures thread

SlothfulCobra
Mar 27, 2011

Gann Jerrod
Sep 9, 2005

A gun isn't a gun unless it shoots Magic.
Can I just say that the Attack of the Clone toys sucked because they all had action features tacked on that made them awful to play it regularly.

ruddiger
Jun 3, 2004

Sgt. Politeness
Sep 29, 2003

I've seen shit you people wouldn't believe. Cop cars on fire off the shoulder of I-94. I watched search lights glitter in the dark near the Ambassador Bridge. All those moments will be lost in time, like piss in the drain. Time to retch.
This thread. I didn't realize people hated the sequels enough to rank them under the prequels, that's on me.

BiggestBatman
Aug 23, 2018
There's three monsters cause they're putting on a show for a crowd. If they cared about efficient executives they'd just shoot em

reignofevil
Nov 7, 2008

BiggestBatman posted:

There's three monsters cause they're putting on a show for a crowd. If they cared about efficient executives they'd just shoot em


Moon Slayer
Jun 19, 2007

Sgt. Politeness posted:

This thread. I didn't realize people hated the sequels enough to rank them under the prequels, that's on me.

Rise of Skywalker is worse than any of the prequels and I don't know how anyone couldn't think that.

Owlbear Camus
Jan 3, 2013

Maybe this guy that flies is just sort of passing through, you know?



Moon Slayer posted:

Rise of Skywalker is worse than any of the prequels and I don't know how anyone couldn't think that.

It's so bad it's an act of narrative vandalism that turns the whole sequel trilogy into a shaggy dog story AND shits on the redemptive sacrifice at the end of ROTJ.

It's one thing to merely be a bland/bad/overlong slog like AOTC, and quite another to be so bad you retroactively ruin your own trilogy and sour the OT.

Sgt. Politeness
Sep 29, 2003

I've seen shit you people wouldn't believe. Cop cars on fire off the shoulder of I-94. I watched search lights glitter in the dark near the Ambassador Bridge. All those moments will be lost in time, like piss in the drain. Time to retch.

Moon Slayer posted:

Rise of Skywalker is worse than any of the prequels and I don't know how anyone couldn't think that.

They're old enough to not have nostalgia blinders for the prequels.

Robot Style
Jul 5, 2009

Gann Jerrod posted:

Can I just say that the Attack of the Clone toys sucked because they all had action features tacked on that made them awful to play it regularly.

What, you don't like foreverially screaming broken arm Mace Windu?

Name Change
Oct 9, 2005


Attack of the Clones is the worst because with all that planning it's the best George could do, Rise of Skywalker is the worst because you can absolutely tell it was shoved together at the last minute.

Robot Style
Jul 5, 2009

Episode III was pretty bad for Lucas actually writing and planning the story as well. For nearly the first year of pre-production, Lucas procrastinated so badly on actually writing the script that they had to start scheduling meetings for him with different departments to try and make him realize how many people actually needed story information to be able to do their jobs. Nobody got to even read a first draft until about 12 weeks before they started shooting, and the only way they knew what to design and build for the movie was by asking him leading questions. For example, the only reason they even knew Vader was going to be in the movie was because Lucas made an offhand comment one day about being careful not to design Grievous to look too similar.

Hazo
Dec 30, 2004

SCIENCE



Sgt. Politeness posted:

This thread. I didn't realize people hated the sequels enough to rank them under the prequels, that's on me.

I'm not saying the sequels aren't bad, but AotC is just so joyless and hollow that when I rewatched it recently, even the Jango fight and the duel at the end weren't as enjoyable as I remembered.

Sodomy Hussein posted:

Attack of the Clones is the worst because with all that planning it's the best George could do, Rise of Skywalker is the worst because you can absolutely tell it was shoved together at the last minute.

:hmmyes:

Sgt. Politeness posted:

They're old enough to not have nostalgia blinders for the prequels.

:hmmyes::hmmyes:

Robot Style
Jul 5, 2009

I feel like Episode II suffers from Lucas making it the second part of a trilogy where the first part is detached by 10 years, and the third part drops a bunch of plot threads in order to race to the end of the trilogy.

Episode III is obviously where all the big events happen to setup the originals, and Episode I is basically Lucas resurrecting all the ideas he'd been holding onto since the 70's and never got a chance to do, but Episode II is just a liminal thing that seems to only exist because it has to.

SlothfulCobra
Mar 27, 2011

Gann Jerrod posted:

Can I just say that the Attack of the Clone toys sucked because they all had action features tacked on that made them awful to play it regularly.

I didn't mind that much as a kid, and the AOTC toys were probably my biggest period of collecting Star Wars figures, but I do remember being amazed when the ROTS toys came out and just had way better articulations by having normal balljoints everywhere instead of weird swivels.

I did love a lot of the features, like plastic blob blast effects. The magnetic features were probably one of the best things, because it's otherwise pretty hard for a figure to hold a tiny lightsaber, and then the figures with detachable limbs, I just straight-up played with the features in ways they weren't intended, like imagining Zam Wessel could phase through objects like Kitty Pryde, and Luke would have a gun underneath his detachable hand (or attach a lightsaber to the magnet for a lightsaber hand).

Also the Jedi Starfighter play feature spiced up the playability and accidentally hinted at its later incarnation.


Sgt. Politeness posted:

This thread. I didn't realize people hated the sequels enough to rank them under the prequels, that's on me.

I think the prequels are OK and that a lot of the hate for them took on a life of its own as one of the foundational memes of the internet, but even aside from that, the flaws in the prequels are very different from the flaws of the sequels, so it's a bit of apples and oranges.

And the flaws with the Sequels are still fresh, people are still angry over them, and it's unclear how the franchise is going to deal with them going forward. If you have feelings about the franchise as a whole, you have to reckon with the whole business strategy embodied in the sequels as well as dealing with them as individual movies (which probably they might work better individually than as part of a trilogy or a franchise where audiences have feelings about the things being thrown under the spacebus in each movie). Some of the more charitable feelings about the prequels has come with time, and some have come with extra licensed materials smoothing out a lot of the rougher bits, but Disney actively chased away most of its licensed authors from dealing with most of the sequel stuff for fear of interfering with The Plan for the sequel trilogy (when there actually wasn't a plan), so it's a much worse position overall.

There's supposed to be a dome for talking about the sequels and prequels, but it kinda went dormant after the Prequeldome got locked and there was a sort-of merger with the Sequeldome.

Hazo
Dec 30, 2004

SCIENCE



That's a really good analysis of prequel-bad vs. sequel-bad.

SlothfulCobra posted:

I didn't mind that much as a kid, and the AOTC toys were probably my biggest period of collecting Star Wars figures, but I do remember being amazed when the ROTS toys came out and just had way better articulations by having normal balljoints everywhere instead of weird swivels.

I remember SA had a thousands-page-long megathread ahead of Episode III's release and one of the recurring themes was how loving awesome the Clone Commander action figure was. Ball joints, grappling hook, removable pauldrons and utility skirt, and THREE guns? Hell yeah.



I drove a lawn pesticide truck as a summer job in college and you better believe that motherfucker was swinging from my rearview mirror.

I also had the sick Grievous 3.5" figure that split into four arms but it's been lost over the years.

Hazo fucked around with this message at 19:59 on Sep 18, 2021

Robot Style
Jul 5, 2009

Hazo posted:

I remember SA had a thousands-page-long megathread ahead of Episode III's release and one of the recurring themes was how loving awesome the Clone Commander action figure was. Ball joints, grappling hook, removable pauldrons and utility skirt, and THREE guns? Hell yeah.



He wasn't even in the movie, but I guess the toy was cool enough that they came up with an extensive backstory for him.

Apparently he was based on concept art for this guy, who had his armor color changed to yellow in the movie, and of course means he's a totally separate character:

SlothfulCobra
Mar 27, 2011

The clone troopers in their segmented armor and joints covered in seam-concealing black were really great for sticking a lot of joints into, while flowing Jedi robes don't take as well to balljoints. They can hide swivels in the sculpted folds and wrinkles, but a whole balljoint is more difficult. I never really figured out how to use that grapple hook clip thing though.

Revenge of the Sith didn't really spare much times for clones looking cool in battle (and maybe didn't wanna glorify the guys doing the slaughter in the movie), but in the leadup to it, there was plenty of room for clones being cool in the cartoon series.



According to Genndy Tartakovsky, the ARC trooper design also came from Hasbro, so it might've also been derived from the concept art for that guy, just pushed closer to the initial clone armor design. And you definitely saw all of them using all of their guns.

BiggestBatman
Aug 23, 2018

He's got my vote

JethroMcB
Jan 23, 2004

We're normal now.
We love your family.

Sodomy Hussein posted:

Attack of the Clones is the worst because with all that planning it's the best George could do, Rise of Skywalker is the worst because you can absolutely tell it was shoved together at the last minute.

I would also add that for all its many, many faults, at least TRoS managed to cobble together something resembling a cohesive narrative throughline (Somehow, Palpatine has returned; Rey and Ren race against one another to find him.) AotC has no core to its story, instead there are just two parallel plot arcs (Obi-Wan investigates the origin of a dart; Anakin and Padme become vacation boyfriend and girlfriend) that don't go anywhere. Obi-Wan finds a massive clone army that he's told belongs to the Republic and his reaction is "Huh. Weird!"; Anakin and Padme fail to convey a blossoming romance but wind up getting married because that's what needs to happen for the story. Those arcs are suspended between two (kinda fun) setpieces that are nakedly about being as toyetic as possible (the chase through Coruscant/the super battle with the Clone Army that nobody knew existed 15 minutes before they arrived but don't care to investigate further.)

Lucas had three movies to explain Anakin's origins and why he fell to the Dark Side, and he effectively threw the middle act in the trash. It handicaps the entire trilogy and as a result RotS winds up being an only slightly less muddled movie about how Anakin kind of grudgingly embraces the Dark Side on a whim after he had a bad dream.

Hazo posted:

I remember SA had a thousands-page-long megathread ahead of Episode III's release and one of the recurring themes was how loving awesome the Clone Commander action figure was. Ball joints, grappling hook, removable pauldrons and utility skirt, and THREE guns? Hell yeah.



I was completely checked out of Star Wars collecting (and almost Star Wars in general) by that point, but I absolutely still sought out a Clone Commander figure and have held onto it ever since.

Sitting in the theater on opening day before the house lights went down, I was rattling off some of the "spoilers" that the thread came up with to my brother ("Yeah, I can't believe Han Solo is a clone, wonder how they're going to explain that") and at a certain point the middle-aged guy in front of us shot me a look that told me he thought what I was saying was true, and how dare I just casually ruin the entire movie for him before the previews had even started.

Robot Style
Jul 5, 2009

SlothfulCobra posted:

Revenge of the Sith didn't really spare much times for clones looking cool in battle (and maybe didn't wanna glorify the guys doing the slaughter in the movie), but in the leadup to it, there was plenty of room for clones being cool in the cartoon series.

Although we didn't see much of them, they did do a ton of new designs for the clones, to show how they had begun to express individuality right before being turned into identical Stormtroopers. The clones were hit just as hard by the Empire sucking the life out of things as anyone else, and it's not really surprising to see Lucas giving them sympathetic subtext considering the similarities to the society in THX-1138.

koshmar
Oct 22, 2009

i'm not here

this isn't happening
There is nothing in AoTC as dumb as the ground attack on a Star Destroyer in RoS. Not to mention the idea that somehow Palpatine constructed a fleet of Star Destroyers in secret?

The Prequels weren’t good, but the Sequels were insulting

koshmar fucked around with this message at 23:58 on Sep 18, 2021

Robot Style
Jul 5, 2009

koshmar posted:

There is nothing in AoTC as dumb as the ground attack on a Star Destroyer in RoS.

They thought having a western-style cavalry charge was a cool image, and then contrived the entire rest of the movie to get there.

Farmer Crack-Ass
Jan 2, 2001

this is me posting irl
the ending is such an unearned reversal, too. like, the whole sequel trilogy has this increasingly dour and bleak outlook on ~~*~the Resistance~*~~ having fewer and fewer resources to fight what appears to be an even more powerful empire, climaxing at TROS with a bare handful of starfighters and a sole troop transport facing off against a super-armada of death penis star destroyers... which is then reversed at the very end with "and then the whole galaxy finally got off their asses and simultaneously wiped out the death penis star destroyers that had already got loose in addition to the huge fleet"

Farmer Crack-Ass
Jan 2, 2001

this is me posting irl
not to mention the incredibly bleak juxtaposition of showing the First Order kidnapping children throughout the galaxy to indoctrinate into being soldiers, and then showing the whole death penis fleet being annihilated - welp, guess all those brainwashed kids just got to eat hot laser death! hooray!! :buddy:

Owlbear Camus
Jan 3, 2013

Maybe this guy that flies is just sort of passing through, you know?



Farmer Crack-rear end posted:

the ending is such an unearned reversal, too. like, the whole sequel trilogy has this increasingly dour and bleak outlook on ~~*~the Resistance~*~~ having fewer and fewer resources to fight what appears to be an even more powerful empire, climaxing at TROS with a bare handful of starfighters and a sole troop transport facing off against a super-armada of death penis star destroyers... which is then reversed at the very end with "and then the whole galaxy finally got off their asses and simultaneously wiped out the death penis star destroyers that had already got loose in addition to the huge fleet"

There is a way more interesting movie in one or a few of the characters actually shown rallying the galaxy.

Also doing next to nothing with Finn being a reformed stormtrooper could have been redeemed by having his arc bring him from reluctant defector to guy who makes thousands of troopers turn on their oppressors. You even already had the EVEN BADDER BADDIES color coded red so you could have the first order defectors fight them.

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skasion
Feb 13, 2012

Why don't you perform zazen, facing a wall?
Finn is a terminally broken character by like, 15 minutes into Force Awakens when he has shifted from being traumatized by the very experience of combat to gleefully slaughtering his own former comrades

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