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Prequels are really bad. 14 year old me knew this immediately on seeing The Phantom Menace. 17 year old me knew this when my dad replied to Hayden Christiansen's line of "Are you in agony too?" with "I'm in agony." 19 year old me knew this when I heard the voice of Darth Vader ask about Padme, and something in me said no, this is wrong, this has permanently linked one of the coolest villains of all time to this piece of poo poo.
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Feb 8, 2020 02:13
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Bongo Bill posted:Why is it bad that Darth Vader was revealed to be a dork? I meant the movie.
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Feb 8, 2020 02:14
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Bongo Bill posted:Why does Darth Vader being revealed to be a dork make the movie bad? I never said it did. It's bad for many other reasons.
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Feb 8, 2020 02:15
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euphronius posted:It’s good because it accurately shows a story between two bad people Padme is actually supposed to be a good person, but the characterization is so badly handled that she only makes sense as a character if she is a bad person. Not to excuse that lovely lovely political analogy, because that was real bad, and that goon should be ashamed for making it.
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Feb 8, 2020 02:20
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Bongo Bill posted:What is this "supposed to?" Who told you that she was supposed to be anything than what she is? Why did you listen to them? If it doesn't make sense for her to be something, then maybe the answer is that she... isn't? The way she is framed, featured and used throughout the story tells me that she is supposed to be a good person who cares about people. She is only bad when she comes into contact with Anakin and lets her feelings for him interfere with what she should be doing. Now, this could actually be a good point of characterization, if you execute it correctly. In order to do that, you have to show that she has some sort of feelings for Anakin, and that those feelings are making her stupid. However the two characters have no chemistry. They don't even have horny teenage Romeo and Juliet energy. There's just nothing there. So the story treats her as a good person up until she runs into Anakin, who, according to her performance, is an acquaintance she can almost tolerate being around, and suddenly she becomes an idiot for no reason.
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Feb 8, 2020 02:35
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euphronius posted:Noted good people : queens And other royalty Is a queen really a queen if they are democratically elected and give up power when their term is up?
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Feb 8, 2020 02:38
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Bongo Bill posted:Noted good people: wealthy politicians. Also she was 14, so she was almost certainly not a politician herself but just some weird political pawn.
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Feb 8, 2020 02:39
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euphronius posted:It’s not strange for monarchs to be elected It is really strange for monarchs to be elected at the age of 14 by a vote of the people.
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Feb 8, 2020 02:41
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Also if you want to go with the Naboo probably genocided the Gungans at some point I am with you there. The corollary to that is that the Trade Federation are the good guys who were just trying to collect taxes.
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Feb 8, 2020 02:43
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euphronius posted:The opposite of text That... is not what subtext means.
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Feb 8, 2020 04:43
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euphronius posted:It isn’t ? Subtext is meaning found beneath the text. The opposite of text would be something like authorial omniscience.
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Feb 8, 2020 04:47
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Basically you can only read subtext through examining the text itself, so they aren't opposites. Text and subtext should be complementary.
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Feb 8, 2020 04:50
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CainFortea posted:He's got his crew up on the podium announcing him. Jar Jar is the one who makes the motion to make Ole Sheev supreme chancellor. They cut to the senate voting him into power. That's all high level politics. Senators and representatives doing big important government stuff. Fascism is based initially on a mass movement of the people. The people must be convinced to hand over the reigns of power. This is the most essential and important part of the rise of any fascist government and it is completely absent in the prequels. There is no rhetoric or cause to motivate people. There is a war, but the causes of that war are high level politics, not genuine ideological differences that might spawn a movement. The fascism of the prequels is purely cosmetic.
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Feb 8, 2020 09:10
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ruddiger posted:Things that happen in a movie= fan fiction. Got it. You have absolutely no evidence as to what public opinion is in the Republic regarding Palpatine. You listed things that happened in the movie, then made assumptions as to what people in universe thought about them based on zero evidence.
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Feb 8, 2020 10:31
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Bongo Bill posted:The dialog and the acting acting are both no worse than in the original trilogy. Why hate one and love the other? No, they are in fact much much worse in the prequels. And it isn't even close.
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Feb 8, 2020 23:00
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euphronius posted:I thought this was absolutely the most dishonest part of the RLM “”reviews” You have never seen the RLM reviews and you just proved it.
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Feb 11, 2020 17:58
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RBA Starblade posted:That can easily be explained as Luke being severely mentally ill So Luke in this scenario is a prequel lover? C'mon guys this was low hanging fruit.
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Feb 11, 2020 19:22
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euphronius posted:Are clone troopers in it Yes, please post the scene that has been posted in this thread multiple times again. Apparently we all have the memory capacity of a goldfish.
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Feb 11, 2020 20:26
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ruddiger posted:Yikes. I don’t think I need to know anymore, thanks. Yes, having this reaction to someone saying "Actually the prequels do a very bad job of expressing the horrors of slavery," is very normal.
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Feb 11, 2020 23:49
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ruddiger posted:I already posited the question if it’s possible for a slave and a slave owner to have a consensual sexual relationship. It’s not a judgement left up to the movie but your own. Schmii is portrayed as someone whose agency is stripped away by every authoritative male in her life (except for her son) and someone saying “the movie makes it look okay” says more about the poster than it does the movie. Whatever questions you have posited are immaterial. What matters to this discussion is what the prequels posited. And I would argue that the prequels as a whole are largely uncritical of slavery, and gloss over it's worst elements. The depiction is neither insightful nor particularly well thought out. Saying the movie makes it look okay is not advocating slavery, it is a condemnation of the prequels.
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Feb 12, 2020 00:00
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Basebf555 posted:Now there we can agree, this was an issue with the entire era of film that the prequels existed in. The tools were there, but the limits of those tools weren't quite established yet and Lucas was one of the people who was really pushing those limits to find out where they were and how they might be extended even further. Give Lucas all the credit you want. But it doesn't make the prequels any better. An experiment that doesn't quite work is still an experiment that doesn't quite work.
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Feb 13, 2020 16:56
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Basebf555 posted:I'm not here to change your opinion of the prequels. But I do think you can criticize the prequels without using revisionist history that says they came out and people immediately jumped all over them for using bad special effects. That's just not the case. If the CG in the prequels had been used in the same way that Harryhausen used his effects, I wouldn't complain as much. Same if they were just used in place of matte paintings. The big change was that CGI stuff was being inserted into scenes for no reason. This is less an issue in Episode 1, and the CGI in that movie looks dated, but not terrible. Episode 2 the CG looks really bad because you get a very strong uncanny valley effect off of the CGI clone troopers. Especially when they are next to real people. Episode 3's CGI looks much better, but it is so invasive that every scene that isn't an action scene had to be filmed with as little movement as possible in order to fit in the effects Lucas wanted in the background. Here's the thing though. Of the 3, only episode 3 is actually made a significantly worse by this. Episode 2 is already so bad from an acting/writing standpoint that by the time I get to the clone troopers I'm already checked out of the movie. So the movie has already lost me, the bad CG didn't make the viewing experience worse. At some point I will do an actual effort post to explain what really is wrong with the prequels. But the CG wasn't it. This is not to say that the CG in AOTC isn't laughably bad, because it is, but again by that point I could use a good laugh.
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Feb 13, 2020 17:23
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Basebf555 posted:I appreciate that you went to the effort, and I know you'll accuse me of moving the goal posts, but you can't really read what the critics were saying and assume it was the general opinion. By and large, the critics were usually the type of old, stodgy complainers who just were never going to like the transition from practical to CG effects. The same vague complaints appeared in basically every review of any CG heavy film that came out, because the old guard didn't like it. Yet those reviews do accurately sum up my feelings about the CG. At a certain point you have to accept that a significant number of people were complaining about the CG from the start.
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Feb 13, 2020 20:02
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Roth posted:I'm more confused by the fact that people act like it's a mystery that people could like a movie, and gently caress you it's an established fact that these movies suck you dumb opinion haver. If people said that they knew they were lovely movies but they like them anyway I'd be like cool, cause it's okay to like lovely movies. But people keep insisting, no the star wars prequels are actually good, and that has been the dominant opinion of them since the beginning, and they aren't just good but actually have a deep message about fascism. I love the movie Con Air. It is a bad movie. I freely admit this. I do not argue that Con Air is actually a deep critique of our criminal justice system.
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Feb 14, 2020 00:36
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Saint Drogo posted:someone has definitely argued you can't like something while admitting it's bad itt lol Okay, well guess what? I didn't make that argument, so how is this even slightly relevant?
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Feb 14, 2020 00:42
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CainFortea posted:You'd have a stronger argument if you decided to do so though. I don't care about having a stronger argument about my like of lovely movies. Why would I?
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Feb 14, 2020 00:48
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I don't honestly think we're arguing here I think we actually agree so I'm gonna drop it.
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Feb 14, 2020 00:49
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I only post in this thread because I get bored at work.
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Feb 14, 2020 01:51
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Basebf555 posted:My issue with a lot of the discussion of the prequel is that it focuses on Lucas and uses assumptions about what was going on in his head to talk about the things he failed to do. This is the thing though, in order to have any fun doing that I have to at least believe that it is possible that Lucas could have done so. And the very basics are so incompetently handled that I can't give him the benefit of the doubt. Here is an example. In TPM Qui-gon and Anakin head back to the ship separately from everyone else. The scene starts with them running to the ship, and out of nowhere Darth Maul attacks them. As a fourteen year old, I watched this scene for the first time and asked myself, "Why were they running? They didn't know Darth Maul was after them." It took me out of the movie for a moment, but it felt as if something was missing from the movie. But it wasn't a big deal. Flash forward to the DVD release. Turns out, there is a deleted scene there. Qui-gon and Anakin discover they are being followed by Maul's probe droid, then start running to the ship. I felt vindicated, because know why that awkward cut to them running happened. All in all this is very minor. Except, Lucas explained why he cut the scene. He cut it because he had already established that the probe droid was following them. But he had established that to the audience, not to the characters. This scene was about Qui-gon discovering what was happening. He deleted the scene because it didn't reveal something new to the audience, even though it explained later actions that without the scene remain fairly mysterious. But then think about the scenes Lucas left in that are about the same length. It isn't that much longer than the scene where Jar Jar steps in poop, or one of the silly looking scenes where Anakin's head is bobbing up and down during the podrace. He could easily have put the scene in and not made the movie longer. Now this may seem minor, and it is. At the time I disliked TPM but was a huge starwars fan so I desperately wanted to find some way to enjoy the movie. Then AOTC came out. And it came to DVD. And it did the same thing. Lucas had cut a scene where Padme is talking to her mother and it is implied that she is attracted to Anakin. This is NOT a minor cut. It is an absolutely vital part of the narrative that shows that Padme's front of disinterest in Anakin is just that, a front. Going into the next series of scenes without knowing this makes Anakin look like a stalker. Knowing it you realize that Anakin's advances are actually not entirely unwelcome. This is doubly important because the acting is so poor in the follow up scene where Anakin is talking to Padme in that firelit room that I could not tell what the actors were trying to show that they were feeling. The movie needed that scene, because without it the first time she seems to like him is after he just committed an act of genocide. But if you look at what George Lucas said about that scene from TPM, it becomes obvious. He doesn't actually care that the characters are making decisions that make sense in character. All he cares about is whether advances his story in the immediate sense. At some point you figure out that Padme returns Anakin's feelings, so that has to be enough, right? But it isn't enough, you need the characters to be relatable in order to feel sorry for them when they make bad decisions. You need their actions to be coherent. And George Lucas deleted that scene in AOTC and kept in all the terrible scenes with C-3P0 making terrible puns. He gets no benefit of the doubt from me. He doesn't have a loving clue of how to establish good characterization.
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Feb 14, 2020 16:11
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reignofevil posted:correction they're fat lovely movie critics Jay isn't fat!
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Feb 14, 2020 20:05
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Bongo Bill posted:Yeah, in the finished product "Padme was reciprocally into him all along" becomes a twist, a third-act reveal that recontextualizes what came before. Not an obscure one - she literally, explicitly said that's how she felt and why she was hiding it. That's a pretty abstract twist, and it comes after a lot of really uncomfortable scenes that people might check out of. Maybe it even comes across as a cop-out, as though the message is "stalker boy just kept trying until he got what he wanted arbitrarily." It's necessary to understand it as part of a whole, think about how the story changes in light of its ending, which can't be done if you just stop at "ah, it is incompetent." I like stupid puns if they are done well. The ones in AOTC just didn't work for me. I have to admit, I don't remember what the music was like in their fireside chat scene 100%, but I thought it was a romantic sounding song, which would be odd if it was a twist. You'd think you'd want to make the scene uncomfortable rather than romantic sounding. But my memory may be playing tricks here.
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Feb 14, 2020 20:21
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Bongo Bill posted:How so, exactly? Sheev was supportive, and Anakin admired him, but the relation was with his kindly old Chancellor Palpatine persona, who wanted him to be the best Jedi he could be, which Anakin explicitly doesn't think means killing a bunch of kids. I actually agree with you about this. Anakin's actions in that scene are very much a result of his own inability to control himself. It isn't until after this that Palpatine starts hardcore recruiting him.
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Feb 14, 2020 22:52
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Watto loses everything because for some inexplicable reason he refuses to point our heroes in the direction of a currency exchange.
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Feb 15, 2020 06:19
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The Darth Plagieus scene didn't bother me so much because by that point I already saw Anakin as a megalomaniacal lunatic who just did things because it seemed good at the time. So him being convinced by that argument wasn't surprising. Palps making that argument makes less sense, but if he is a master manipulator he probably realized that Anakin was bonkers and just strung together an argument that would keep him interested long enough for him to go full Dark side.
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Feb 15, 2020 21:46
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A Gnarlacious Bro posted:actually they both sound high as gently caress George Lucas probably cut a scene when they were both toking up, then someone reminded him he was going for a PG rating.
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Feb 17, 2020 16:38
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The Jedi banned space Google because it allowed young force sensitives to learn how to control their abilities without joining the child soldier cult.
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Feb 17, 2020 19:51
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CainFortea posted:I mean, Lucas said the point of the movies is to tell the story of Anakin Skywalker. Oh, you are in for a treat. Never tell a goon what pedantic argument they can't make!
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Feb 19, 2020 01:26
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Cease to Hope posted:I genuinely cannot figure out how you got this from the prequels If you are using the term hero like it is used in Romance of the Three Kingdoms it makes sense. Hero has no moral component and probably should be translated as champion or something instead. We know Lucas likes Kurosawa, maybe he likes ancient Chinese literature? If not it's a drat stupid word choice.
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Feb 19, 2020 17:12
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CainFortea posted:They're going to dictate everything. I am confused. Usually it is the prequel likers who like to read in their moronic interpretations of what happened in the prequels, but we have just had page after page of otherwise sane prequel haters saying "No! No! The group called the 'Separatists' doesn't want independence! They want to destroy the Republic!" For Christ's sake! You hate the prequels! Repeat after me: "The Separatists wish to break off of the Republic. This is obvious. George Lucas is just such a bad writer he didn't communicate this through their actions well at all." As it is with all plot holes in the prequels.
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Feb 21, 2020 17:20
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Bongo Bill posted:I just don't want 'em teaching in my schools I don't mind evil people teaching my kids, and I don't mind wizards. But evil wizards is a step too far.
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Feb 22, 2020 08:33
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