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feedmyleg posted:
What I've grown to really appreciate is that the prequels' art design is straight out of Golden Age sci-fi art. The OT deliberately went for the "used universe" thing which grew out of 70s naturalism, but with the prequels Lucas just decided to make every shot a cover of Thrilling Wonder Stories. Regarding the acting, I think Portman had a stronger grasp on the character in both Eps. 1 and 3, for whatever reason- she's still not used to High Melodrama, and I think that's the key divider between her, Christensen, and the actors who work better like McGregor and McDiarmid, but she's closer to it. The odd thing about not just the sequel trilogy but pretty much all post-buyout SW is that the art design has all felt kinda spartan. With the sequels it can actually work well, there's sort of a post-apocalyptic vibe, but I miss things being so dense.
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# ¿ Jul 14, 2025 04:17 |
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AOTC is the most flawed but also the most interesting. The romance scenes are creaky and the early digital photography can be rough at times (Geonosis being all sandy brown-orange presents its own challenges) but there are some wonderful shots in it. What makes it great though is that it pretty much nails the Republic becoming the Empire- the image of the Republic airships flying in to the rescue, the calvary coming in, but they're all stormtroopers with the Imperial insignia and even the ship guns are little Death Star cannons, it's like "Oh, right, this is how it happened." Lucas nails that historical shift of today's heroes being tomorrow's oppressors. Plus all the stuff with Obi-Wan as Space Detective is fun, and there's also a shot where the characters fly into the opening of Blade Runner which is great. (Between that and the Harryhausen monsters and the maser tanks straight from Toho, the film's full of cool poo poo from movie land. Lucas makes it a celebration of cool poo poo from everywhere.) Maxwell Lord fucked around with this message at 02:36 on Dec 7, 2020 |
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By the time of the events of Phantom Menace, it's arguably already too late for the Jedi and the Republic- the rot is already there. They let slavery flourish on the Outer Rim, they let the Trade Federation get to be a military power, the Jedi didn't even notice a Sith Lord being elected to the Senate. Actually fixing the Republic's problems would require the kind of upheaval neither the Senate nor the Jedi Council are willing to risk. Qui-Gon for his faults at least knows something's wrong, but he's devoted to finding the Chosen One as a solution.
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And of course, being "moral" does not necessarily protect one from making bad decisions. There were a whole lot of good intentions in whatever happened on the way to Episode I.
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I mean if we follow Lucas' premise, it then follows that the Jedi should have taken action to end slavery in the Outer Rim territories, even if it meant overthrowing governments and becoming a much larger galactic power. They had the moral authority, but chose not to use it.
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I feel another consideration was that Jedi use their lightsabers which cut through enemies and slice them up and it's much easier to keep that in PG territory if you're fighting robots. (I feel like there are a couple of spots in Return of the Jedi where Luke uses his lightsaber on non-droid goons but it's done in a very old-movie way where the camera conceals any contact and Lucas maybe didn't want to do that with every single fight.)
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Wouldn't be surprised if he cast Neeson specifically because of that. Yeah but this was of the "guy waves their [laser] sword at someone and they go 'ahh' and fall over" variety and I imagine for TPM Lucas wanted it to be just a little bit more visceral.
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Isometric Bacon posted:For me this has always been the disconnect between the Vader we know and the Anakin of the prequels, and it's more a fault of the way the character is written moreso then the acting. I think there's some deleted or unfilmed material suggesting that IS his true form, and doing the lightning bit just exposed it.
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It's also got sort of a pro-wrestling thing, they're trying to psych each other out. At this point in the fight it's basically become a mirror match, they can anticipate each other's actions and match each other's blows, so they're getting just a little desperate.
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Payndz posted:"Let me ask you this. If Obi-Wan were riding a horse, not a lizard, would you put in a horse sound effect every three seconds?" It's a cool sound effect. And a cool chase. I don't understand why it being weird and over the top is a bad thing in a space opera.
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Lucas isn’t entirely right- some of the dialogue just doesn’t flow due to the awkwardness of everyone speaking Very Proper. (An example is “As a Senator it will be difficult to convince her to leave”, that’s a dangling participle Ani, you should know better.) But for the most part yes. Much of the dialogue in the prequels is on a par with what you hear in The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad or a Flash Gordon chapter. There is a poetry to this kind of cheese.
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Jewmanji posted:This whole thing about plotting your trilogies in advance is some weird brain worms from the MCU I think. Lucas had plans for Star Wars that were constantly shifting up through ROTJ. He didn’t have some master design that he slavishly adhered to and that’s why it’s a coherent narrative. Plenty of writers/authors manage to write one story after the other without knowing where it’s headed- it’s not terribly difficult or unusual- the MCU approach is much more of an outlier. The failure to plan isn’t why the sequels sucked. They just had lovely writers (or good writers doing a lovely job). I think it's more just that Lucas was the one creating the overall story in the OT, and he had an idea of what he was going for even as the specifics kept shifting around- the early drafts of The Star Wars are quite radically different but you can tell he's going for a sense of something, a rhythm, an energy. By contrast with the sequel trilogy, despite a "story group", you apparently did not have a lot of coordination between the people who were actually making (or in Trevorrow's case going to make) each episode. So J.J. Abrams sees what Rian Johnson came up with for Episode 8 and decides it's mostly wrong, and rapidly tries to steer things back to what HE wants it to be. I think given the specific setup of this trilogy they really should have had a single big story worked out, Abrams should have already put down answers for the mysteries he set up in TFA instead of doing it as a game of telephone.
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Yeah a lot of Lucas's thinking was "Okay, this is the down part, there needs to be some dramatic loss, so Han maybe gets kidnapped?" (Earlier drafts had him leaving on some mission but you can see them deciding something more urgent.) The big problem with Rise of Skywalker isn't even the retcons (though Rey Palpatine is very stupid), it's that it's this very clumsy pile-on of stuff happening and ham-handed exposition. Palpatine shows up and explains the whole Evil Plan in the first 5 minutes, instead of building up any suspense or mystery, Hux goes traitor on a whim even though he was cast as more the True Believer vs. Kylo wanting to just burn everything, "Poe was a smuggler" like this is supposed to mean anything, there's just no structure. Space Opera- and Star Wars in specific- is a lot more plot driven than people think, it actually kinda matters how you tell your story and pace it out.
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I mean I think the show still works, the main story arc makes sense and all, it's just you can also tell Disney wanted them to carry a bit of water for the umpteen SW series coming up. The only real problem with the Luke scene is the CGI they used doesn't allow him to really interact or be part of the scene, he just stands in one place and says lines.
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While I'm largely wary of Disney making Mandalorian do more tie-ins and hooks to set up other Star Wars poo poo, so far I haven't hated the execution of any of it, even if Luke had a certain Patty Duke Show quality. The episode was quite good in and of itself. As for the Baby, there's no way he stays gone for very long. This was clearly an end-of-season beat where Mando has had to give up someone that was giving his life meaning beyond just mercenary violence, and has to deal with that, but I doubt that means they'll never be reunited. So I suspect the Child doesn't stay at Jedi Camp long enough to be around when the Ben Solo thing happens.
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I mean what TLJ set up was something I'd like to have seen pursued. The First Order is now run by Kylo Ren who is very unstable and doesn't want control so much as he wants to destroy everything of the past, the Resistance is now so small all its members can fit in the Falcon, everyone's just sorta fighting over the ruins of the last war- but instead ROS has Palpatine show up in the first five minutes and say "I'm in charge now, it's Jedi vs. Sith again".
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No Mods No Masters posted:If your movie intake is such that star wars 9 strikes you as 'mediocre' and not 'a loving nightmare', please watch better movies I mean I've seen better and I've seen worse. Looks way better than Solo, it never really gets dull, it's basically a C-grade space opera. I'd put it on par with Message from Space easy.
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Ingmar terdman posted:Message from Space is much better I mean it has structure problems of its own (for a while I thought it was one of those movies condensed from a TV series but it turns out the TV series was later.)
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Why is a 60-year-old Jennifer Lawrence lecturing Luke about the Force
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porfiria posted:The original Star Wars included references to Westerns, Kurosawa, WWII actions flicks, Leni Riefenshtal, the works of Stan Brakhage, the history of the Roman Republic, the American Revolution, the Vietnam War, 50s teen car culture, Dune, John Carter of Mars, 20s pulp sci fi magazines and serials, Buddhism, Taoism, Joseph Campbell, and George Lucas's relationship with his dad. I haven't gone through all of it but Last Jedi did have a very obvious lift from Wings, and The Mandalorian did an episode where the premise was basically Wages of Fear.
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I still maintain the biggest crock in all the sequel trilogy was that Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, et. al *never got* top billing. It's seemingly a minor thing but Hamill and Ford were barely in TROS and Fisher was only there in spirit, and yet.
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I do think design has something to do with it. Mandalorian has Doug Chiang, who worked on Eps. 1 and 2, on the design staff, and he's got a good eye. The ships in the OT were stuff you hadn't seen in a sci-fi movie before, it was this very distinct design aesthetic which wasn't rockets and wasn't the more detailed NASA-influenced stuff from 2001, and the prequels went more golden age but they all still have these unusual shapes. In the sequel trilogy they try a few times but it's not the same.
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Every Porg dies. Not every Porg truly lives.
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Rise of Skywalker definitely has stuff in it I like. The problem's really structural in that they feel compelled to do so much storywise that it can never take a breath. Still the best part is when C-3P0 is newly amnesiac and is introducing himself to everyone again, leading to my favorite exchange: "Greetings, I am C-3P0" "I Babu Frik."
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ADF's treatment leaked before this dispute started (or at least became public, maybe they were priming the public but I doubt it.)
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Vintersorg posted:I hate you is one of the funniest things uttered in the PT but second to I hate sand. Just garbage all around. It's absolutely fitting. All Anakin has at that point is just pure, childish hate. He's incapable of reflection or regret. Obi-Wan leaves because for all he can see there is nothing left of his friend.
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Actually you now got me thinking about this. The final fight between Obi-Wan and Anakin in ROTS is unique in that Obi-Wan really wants to talk his friend down. He's been commanded to go there, against his wishes, and he- like Luke later- is holding out hope that he can turn Anakin back. He wants to win the argument. It's like arguing with a fascist online. You can't. Obi-Wan can literally dismember his opponent, it doesn't matter. Anakin won't give up. Like one question asked about this scene is why Obi-Wan won't kill Anakin. It's clearly a failure he regrets later, hence in Return of the Jedi he's convinced Anakin can't be turned, he has to be destroyed. But the reason Obi-Wan won't kill Anakin there is he didn't come here to do that. He never wanted to, he was never prepared for that. So yeah, that scene emphasizes just the tragedy of someone giving in to the worst side of themselves and they can't turn away even when it's actively killing them. Losing doesn't make you reconsider your beliefs. It's not enough.
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Jewmanji posted:Firstly, I think it's made clear that Obi-Wan goes there explicitly to kill Anakin. Secondly, I don't think Obi-Wan is failing to kill him- I think when he walked away he had every reasonable assumption that Anakin was going to die there on the shore. I mean, yeah, he's sent to do it. But he doesn't want to. He still keeps trying to argue with him, trying to *persuade* him. And at the end, he just shouts in frustration, you were supposed to be better than this. He doesn't do a mercy kill, he doesn't finish him off. He can't quite go that far. Maybe he had no way of expecting Anakin would be rescued, but his resolve falters.
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Okay this is probably the stupidest idea I've had about the ST and Star Wars but hear me out. In the Last Jedi, Yoda, a past Jedi Master, "destroys" the sacred texts. Luke is sad but Yoda tells him that basically, the next generation (Rey) has what she needs and will move on. Is all this a meta reference to Lucas/Disney making the "unaltered" versions of the OT- the Truest of the One True canon to most Star Wars fans-unavailable? Like, SW fans put *so much weight* on Han shooting first and all the minor things about the theatrical cuts (or at least the theatrical cuts as preserved via early VHS and laserdisc releases), and those are, to them, sacred. But Yoda/Lucas is like, whatever. It's not such a big deal. And later, Rey does have the sacred texts. And, like, people now do have access to the unaltered cuts of the Star Wars trilogy if they so desire. It's on the Internet, you've got fan restorations of them to 4k quality. That old tree is the "official" home, you can't get them from there, but- they're somewhere, right? I maybe doubt that this is what Johnson and Co. intended, but like- he is a filmmaker aware that people want access to these cuts, that the official source ain't making them available for whatever reasons, but like, you wanna see Han shoot first, you can right? And like it makes sense because Yoda's like "we made a lot of mistakes, whatever, the next generation will learn from us" and Lucas has never treated Star Wars with the sacredness that its fans have. Addendum: I am drunk.
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Ingmar terdman posted:Always liked the reprise of "I will do anything/whatever you ask" there Yeah this is kinda key to Anakin's character- he's basically got a follower personality. He starts out as a slave, is separated from his mother at a tender age, spends the ten years in between in service to the Jedi, there's never a time where he's been allowed to be his own person. And Obi-Wan can't recognize this since he's been in service to the Jedi forever- and Padme, arguably, has always been groomed for politics (some of this was cut from Ep. II but they left in her first kiss being a guy from the Model UN club) so she probably doesn't have the best concept of a normal personal life either.
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Cheesus posted:I thought it less the characters and more that there were too many of them. They went from getting scraps of screentime since their introductions to nothing once the space battle started and you had to pay attention to another equal sized group. I mean that follows along with the war movie element, it's a big group and you learn a little about each one and then they all die. I think the film has its issues but the final act really ties it together.
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All of them dying is again, sort of a war movie thing- not all war movies end with everyone dying, of course, but you typically have a high body count.
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Yeah don't blind-link us to that poo poo, it's gonna mess up my recs for sure.
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Patrick Stewart famously took the Picard role because the assumption was the show would last maybe a season, just make that money, go to LA, enjoy yourself, then come back.
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Grandpa Palpatine posted:lol how did they not realize they had a winner The first Star Trek had lasted only three years, there had not been a single hit sci-fi show in the US since (Battlestar Galactica was probably the closest and it was too expensive to last beyond a season and a lovely "let's put them on modern day Earth to save money" spin-off) and it was absolute chaos on the set for the first two seasons which is part of why they're so patchy.
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A major problem was that Roddenberry brought on a bunch of old guys who had done the show in the 60s and assumed TV production still worked the same way.
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galagazombie posted:Wait, are you agreeing or disagreeing with me? Cause this is exactly what I'm talking about in regards to modern Star Trek missing the point entirely. Of course this is why I think Star Trek generally doesn't make for good video games while Star Wars does. It's hard to make an interactive experience based around sitting in chairs discussing the ethical considerations of saving the Cardassian Legislature from the Photonic Entity. It's easy to make a game about laser sword fights or "Star Fox but with X-Wings". The adventure games are pretty solid- if you went more the old-PC-game route of a slow in-depth story-driven thing (maybe even an RPG) rather than fast action you could do something cool.
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And the result was a great movie.
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Vim Fuego posted:lmao. You can pick any lovely rock to shoot on and you choose a nature reserve. And Canto Bight A big blockbuster movie going to ritzy locations and building large sets? Unthinkable! Spend that money on... uh...
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# ¿ Jul 14, 2025 04:17 |
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I mean I honestly don't think anything in the TPM documentary is "damning" unless you are already of the opinion that TPM is bad. There seems to be a similar level of projection here. Like sometimes it's a nice breezy shoot that turns into a bad movie, or an absolute trainwreck of an out-of-control shoot leading to something good and entertaining (Apocalypse Now being the iconic example.)
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