Can the original Star Wars trilogy be ruined further?

[Great Rumbler]

YES

<iframe width="640" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/5hMRfAIynh4" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

[A Black Falcon]

Is that really so much worse?

[Dark Jaguar]

I thought you were with OB1 on the "George Lucas can do no wrong" front there GR.

[Great Rumbler]

Is that really so much worse?

Yes, because it reminds us of how awful the Prequel Trilogy was. And it's a totally unnecessary addition to a scene that was handled really well originally. This addition is just pointless junk that beats us over the head with the obvious.

I thought you were with OB1 on the "George Lucas can do no wrong" front there GR.

You're thinking of OB1 and Fittisize:

http://www.tcforums.com/forums/showthrea...=star+wars

[Fittisize]

You're thinking of OB1 and Fittisize:

http://www.tcforums.com/forums/showthrea...=star+wars

I am honestly shocked I had that much to say about Star Wars.

[Dark Jaguar]

Wait, that wasn't a parody? They actually dubbed in the "noo" line into the blu ray version? ... Why?

I'm not angry I'm just... disappointed...

I'm not one to hate on CG just for being CG like so many internet reviewers these days. If its done well and will work better than some other sort of effect, go for it. However, looking back at some of those scenes in Star Wars, I just gotta wonder exactly why I needed to see two people wrestling with some giant alien pack mule. I just wondered why that was needed. It wasn't that they tried to "liven up" some areas that should have been populated, but the fact that all of them had to be goofing around and calling attention to themselves with "look at me" antics.

Now, the added scene with Han and Jabba? That one was nicely done. I'll give credit there, it really did add something to the movie.

[Dark Jaguar]

When it comes to Phantom Menace, I actually felt it was a fairly solid kid's movie. It had issues, but I think it did well when taken like that, ignoring the entire rest of the series. Padme... She's creepy. I don't see this brought up very often, but it has to be said. In Phantom Menace, the relationship there seems entirely what a kid and someone her age would have, sort of a surrogate older sister, little brother relationship (aside from that entirely weird "Are you an angel?" line that so many writers seem to shoe horn in when they want some kid to have a "crush" on someone). The very next movie, apparently all that was supposed to be them deeply in LOVE in Phantom Menace, not just caring about each other.

That's creepy! Lucas, you just wrote Padme as a pedophile, and that's no good. It makes her "explaining" things like love and so on to Anakin come off very disturbing, not unlike "coaching" a victim.

Heck if Lucas had run with that angle, we could have had a much darker trilogy about the horrible mind warping effects a sexual predator can have on a kid.

[Great Rumbler]

However, looking back at some of those scenes in Star Wars, I just gotta wonder exactly why I needed to see two people wrestling with some giant alien pack mule. I just wondered why that was needed. It wasn't that they tried to "liven up" some areas that should have been populated, but the fact that all of them had to be goofing around and calling attention to themselves with "look at me" antics.

Yes, I've noticed that as well. Those little CG scenes Lucas added in just do not fit at all with the rest of the movie. They don't fit the tone, they don't fit the look, and they add absolutely nothing.

[alien space marine]

Sometimes less is more, I hate to repeat what everyone has already said but the "Noooo" is unnecessary and all it does is remind us of a much parodied final scene of ROTS ruining the impact of this.

You don't need him to say anything to bring across to the viewer that Vader/Anakin is emotionally torn inside watching his son get electrocuted by his boss.

Lucas has the artistic right to change his work but the thing is he didn't make ROTJ by himself other people contributed to it and the last two films were a collaborative effort and only the first film can be considered purely his baby , Richard Marquand directed it & Lawrence Kasdan wrote the screen plays, As far as I am concerned he shouldn't make these kinds of changes no matter how minor without the prior approval & input of the last two film's co-creators.

[A Black Falcon]

I don't think this change makes much of a difference, negative or positive. I don't mind it, sorry.

And no, the Prequel Trilogy was definitely not awful. Each one was better than the last, and Ep. III is about as good as the original trilogy films, in my opinion. Sure it has some issues, but so does everything, and it's pretty good for the most part.

[Great Rumbler]

I don't think this change makes much of a difference, negative or positive. I don't mind it, sorry.

Imagine watching a dramatic scene from a movie.

Now imagine watching the same scene, except this time some guy nudges you in the ribs and explains to you what is blatantly obvious.

And no, the Prequel Trilogy was definitely not awful. Each one was better than the last, and Ep. III is about as good as the original trilogy films, in my opinion. Sure it has some issues, but so does everything, and it's pretty good for the most part.

Here's some tidbits I wrote back in December 2009:

Having not seen more than a minute or two of any of the PT in at least 3 years, since Episode III came out on DVD, I decided, because morbid curiosity conquered reason, to take a trip down memory lane and see how things have changed.

Watching Phantom Menace, I couldn't help but feel that it wasn't nearly as bad as I remembered it being. There were some pretty good scenes, decent acting, decent writing, and it still looked pretty good despite being 10 years old. Then, the inevitable: Jar Jar Binks appeared on screen. I'd completely forgotten about him. Instantly, I realized just why I have a mild hatred for the movie despite most of it actually being fairly decent. Jar Jar is beyond horrible and unbelievably annoying. Also, the kid is kind of annoying too, but I could have overlooked that. Jar Jar kills what would have otherwise been a fluffy, but fun movie. Could have done without the Gungans as a whole really. The lightsaber battle at the end is good stuff.

AoTC has a really awesome chase scene near the beginning where you get a pretty good look at what Coruscant is like. There's a really awesome battle near the end where the clone army shows up for the first time. I didn't rewatch any of the scenes in the middle, but I don't think I'm being out of line in saying that it drags a lot and features some very terrible and cringe-worthy, even vomit-worthy, scenes that are meant to be "romantic" somehow. Some of the highest highs of the PT, but also, by far, the lowest lows. Watch the first twenty minutes and the last twenty minutes. Forget that the rest ever existed.

Revenge of the Sith opens with some awesome space battle footage that unfortunately gets drowned out by Obiwan and Anakin messing around with some missiles and some robots that latch onto Obiwan's ship. This is easily one of the film's biggest faults. They had the perfect opportunity to rival the space battle from Return of the Jedi and they completely blew it. Putting that aside, it doesn't start out too badly. Unfortunately, things get bogged down a bit in galactic political wrangling that no one cares about. But it gets tossed after a while and the clones totally own a bunch of jedi, which is a high point of the movie and the trilogy. There's also a scene somewhere in there where Padme and Anakin stare out at the city and some very un-John Williams music plays in the background, which is kind of awesome because it actually feels like Lucas is trying to be a real director for a minute. It passes quickly though. One of the low points is Anakin becoming evil incarnate after about two seconds and then killing a bunch of kids because he's so HARD. The final battle is pretty awesome and is one of the movie's high points. Then Padme dies of a broken heart and ruins the ending.

The PT is a mess. Some pretty cool scenes that are as good as any in the OT, saddled with some truly awful scenes that just make every fiber of your being HURT. The OT was hardly perfection, but only a few scenes are actually bad and none of them are as bad as the PT's worst.

[Great Rumbler]

Rather than pick at nits and try to point out the main glaring flaws with the PT, I'll instead boil them down to a few general points:

1. Trying Too Hard [repeating memorable phrases from the OT, lots of obvious OT references everywhere, and the humor]

2. The Humor [in TPM it was Jar Jar being horribly clumsy all the time, in AotC it was C-3PO suddenly spouting puns for no reason; in general just a lot of slapstick humor that was rarely present in the OT aside from a little bit in Return of the Jedi and the added Mos Eisley scene in A New Hope]

3. No Memorable Action Scenes [the battle with Darth Maul and the pod race are pretty good, as well as some scattered scenes in the other two movies; overall the action scenes are just flat, devoid of impact. They're poorly paced, poorly set up, and lack for imagination and sense]

4. Bloated [there are way too many scenes and lines of dialog that only exist to pad out the movie or to simply state the obvious; scenes range from minute, like the deathsticks dealer in Attack of the Clones, to massive, like the Tatooine segment from The Phantom Menace which took up nearly a third of the run time but served no purpose other than to introduce Anakin]

[alien space marine]

I don't think this change makes much of a difference, negative or positive. I don't mind it, sorry.

And no, the Prequel Trilogy was definitely not awful. Each one was better than the last, and Ep. III is about as good as the original trilogy films, in my opinion. Sure it has some issues, but so does everything, and it's pretty good for the most part.

Ep III is the king of shit mountain, But it's still shit!

What hurts those last two PT films is the way Anakin is made to be a whiney self centered bitch rotten from the start, his contrived love story with Padme is just painful to watch, The little Anakin of the Phantom menace is annoying too but tolerable compared to his adolescent stage & Jar Jar binks .

[Great Rumbler]

Young Anakin destroying that Trade Federation ship by accident was still pretty painful to watch, though.

[A Black Falcon]

I'd forgotten how much you hate the PT, GR. It's sad, but you're so wrong about it... :(

Did I respond to that '09 thing at the time? Which thread's it from?

Young Anakin destroying that Trade Federation ship by accident was still pretty painful to watch, though.

All Star Wars movies have a million accidents or cooincidences that are key to the plot, that's nothing special about just ep. 1...

What hurts those last two PT films is the way Anakin is made to be a whiney self centered bitch rotten from the start, his contrived love story with Padme is just painful to watch, The little Anakin of the Phantom menace is annoying too but tolerable compared to his adolescent stage & Jar Jar binks .

I agree that Anakin was a whiny teenager in the second and third movies, and his motivations were kind of stupid, but that was the whole point... he wasn't thinking things through, and he was a teenager and made some stupid decisions that he then had to stick with. It's not entirely implausible. I guess the issue is just that people wanted Vader to be cooler than that, but eh, Anakin was in fact a powerful Jedi, etc (see the Clone Wars cartoon for instance, as well as the movies)... I mean, sure, Anakin could have been better, but could have been worse too.

As for Jar-Jar, I've said before that I like the character concept, but dislike the stupid, not often funny humor he's stuck with all the time. That is what I think of him.

1. Trying Too Hard [repeating memorable phrases from the OT, lots of obvious OT references everywhere, and the humor]

They're prequels, and some of the same characters appear, there should be references!

2. The Humor [in TPM it was Jar Jar being horribly clumsy all the time, in AotC it was C-3PO suddenly spouting puns for no reason; in general just a lot of slapstick humor that was rarely present in the OT aside from a little bit in Return of the Jedi and the added Mos Eisley scene in A New Hope]

You are right that the PT isn't as funny as the OT. There are bits that are, but overall the PT just isn't as funny. And yes, it is a failing of the trilogy. I also would agree that the attempts to put in more "child-friendly" humor like Jar-Jar were bad ideas. Even though eps 2 and 3 mostly dropped that, they didn't add enough humor to make them as funny as the OT movies. However, they are good movies anyway.

3. No Memorable Action Scenes [the battle with Darth Maul and the pod race are pretty good, as well as some scattered scenes in the other two movies; overall the action scenes are just flat, devoid of impact. They're poorly paced, poorly set up, and lack for imagination and sense]

That's completely insane... First, the PT has FAR superior lightsaber fights to the OT. I mean, in comparison to the PT lightsaber battles, the few, short lightsaber fights in the OT are completely pathetic. They're short, light on action, not nearly as acrobatic and exciting, and more. And each PT movie ramps it up from the second one. The climactic Obi-Wan/Anakin battle in episode 3 was quite impressive for instance, but so was the Darth Maul fight in ep. 1...

And even beyond that, each film has some great action scenes. They're Star Wars movies, so they're action movies first, and each is full of memorable action. Ep. 1 has the Podrace, the journey through the sea, etc, ep. 2 has that great Coruscant chase scene and the arena/clone v. robot battle, Yoda fighting... and ep. 3 of course has the opening battle (I don't know why you say it's bad, but it isn't), lots of great lightsaber fights, etc. I just don't agree at all that they are badly shot or something.

4. Bloated [there are way too many scenes and lines of dialog that only exist to pad out the movie or to simply state the obvious; scenes range from minute, like the deathsticks dealer in Attack of the Clones, to massive, like the Tatooine segment from The Phantom Menace which took up nearly a third of the run time but served no purpose other than to introduce Anakin]

I like the political aspect to the movies. I think that the PT benefits from setting the series more clearly in a working universe -- one of my complaints about A New Hope is that it's just too simple, it's just this adventure film but doesn't have the greater context that the other movies have. So I do like things like setting the scene, having scenes in the Senate showing what's going on there, etc. They make the movies better.

But beyond that, the Tatooine segment pointless? What? How could it be pointless? It's the backstory of one of the series' central characters, and it's important to the story of the episode too... sure, it is true that TPM isn't as good as the other movies (I like TPM, but it is the weakest of the six films), and it is a somewhat less exciting movie than the others, but still it's mostly a reasonably entertaining movie, if not as good as it perhaps "should" have been as the first new Star Wars movie in such a long time.

As for that deathsticks dealer thing, that was just a short joke scene, and I'd say it was kind of amusing.

[Great Rumbler]

All Star Wars movies have a million accidents or cooincidences that are key to the plot, that's nothing special about just ep. 1...

Luke Skywalker spent his time flying single-person fighters on Tatooine, shooting at giant rats and racing through narrow canyons. He didn't press random buttons on his control panel, accidentally end up at the exhaust port, and then manage to shoot it without even having any idea what he was doing.

There are coincidences and there is TERRIBLE WRITING.

[Dark Jaguar]

How exactly did Luke get the chance to fly single person fighters when he was living with his dirt farming aunt and uncle on a nearly lifeless desert planet?

[Great Rumbler]

Broken-down, single-person fighters are the hot rods of the future.

[Dark Jaguar]

Yeah just like broken down fighter jets are the hot rods of today. Oh wait...

The Empire SUCKS at keeping control of military surplus...

[etoven]

WOW, that's some really horrible voice over work..
I think George Lucas just destroyed what little respect for this movie I had left.

Did you guys check out the related videos? That's not the only scene they ruined.