star wars prequels: most embarrassing and hacky attempt at fan-service and plot resolution

it kinda makes the Frank Oz original performance in Empire all the more special.

regarding padme's death, i should also have mentioned the "it's as if she's lost the will to live" dialogue, which i suspect was hastily added when someone pointed out that having her die from being choked to death by darth vader makes it a lot harder to buy his redemption at the end of ROTJ. actually everything he does in this film kinda wrecks that but that probably seemed particularly beyond the pale. (i almost said "icky" but...you know.)

i left out midichlorians because it didn't seem like it was trying to explain or set up any particular plot thread. obviously it's trying to explain "the force" so yeah i guess it could have counted. what's so amazing is that it's never, ever mentioned outside of that one scene. if that had been deleted along with the greedo scene, the waterfall scene, and padme and anakin starting their day before the pod race, i wonder how different the reception of the film might have been. people might have had to articulate their disappointment in terms of the general lame aimlessness of the film rather than the childhood-ruining i'm returning to in this thread.

i guess it's possible boba fett being the source a clone army could have been in some expanded universe shit before. i guess i figured that entire dumb plot, with the jedis being tricked into accepting a clone army because some guy ordered one back in the day (and palpatine's evil plan depending on obi-wan tracking the mystery to the scrupulously covered-up clone planet - what if he'd never found it?), was so stupid it could only be something lucas thought up on the way home from the premiere of phantom menace.

The entire character of Anakin and his conversion to a child-mass-murdering psychopath, if that were a single option. Its the central theme of the entire trilogy, it doesn't work psychologically or dramatically and it isn't sold to us in either script or performance.

The prequels in microcosm

https://youtu.be/KHCyDxxXog4

No-one was clamouring for Midichlorians, though.

My 'other' nomination would be the exaggeration of Yoda's speech from mostly normal with some odd loops in the original films to completely tortured in the prequels.

er, sorry, "jango fett." i have never been able to keep him straight as a separate character.

the one thing i can say for him is that temuera morrison does have some kind of fleeting screen presence in that weird scene when he meets obi-wan in his dorm room on the clone planet. i think this was pointed out to me by the griffin newman/david sims podcast series on these films. i just mentioned them on another thread, i guess they've been my main lowbrow podcast listening at work lately. they've got some really annoying running bits and juvenile humor sprinkled around (newman is so fucking young it makes my head hurt).... but also some gut-busting brilliance and real in-depth treatments of bad decisions in these films. love the 'performance review' episodes where they go all the way down the cast rating the most obscure walk-on characters, or similarly, the digressions into wookipedia for people like the "gorg-monger" who gets on jar jar's case for trying to eat some street food without paying. contrary to this thread, their operating conceit is that they don't know the original star wars movies exist, so when they encounter the stuff in this list they just mark them as bizarre out-of-the-blue developments. if you're the right kind of nerd it's good stuff.

we should do this ILM artist poll style

Django Fett-Reinhardt

i would support a ballot poll for the full list of crimes of george lucas but compiling that has taken the better part of a decade, with no end in sight. focusing on the hacky tying-everything-together bullshit is my attempt at a smaller task, achievable by this december 14 when - you may be surprised to learn - there's a new star wars movie coming out! wow!

Glimpses of the Death Star, first as a hologram and then early in its decades-long construction. Because the ultimate plan all along, even before the Clone Wars begin, has been to have a giant death ball.

Will watch with all progeny and will struggle to describe what the fuck is going and how it fits in with Empire

The cheap like-daddy-like-son foreshadowing where Anakin loses his arm

incredible needle-in-a-haystack odds

hey, it's like they say:
it's a small galaxy
(long ago and far away).

My 'other' nomination would be the exaggeration of Yoda's speech from mostly normal with some odd loops in the original films to completely tortured in the prequels.

Yes! During the big clone battle in ep 2, he's all barking orders and it's like dude, if time is of the essence here, maybe simplify your sentence structure so these Jango Fetts can blow up the droids more efficiently.

One Rogue One retcon that irks me is that when Leia tells Vader in ep 4 "we're on a diplomatic mission from Alderaan", it's turned into the most brazen bullshit line because her ship was seen just minutes earlier fleeing from the scene of the first major Empire/Rebellion space battle, which centered around stealing the Death Star plans.

ugh yeah hated that. it was so much cooler to imagine they'd been involved in some subtle stealthy plan with a carefully worked out "diplomatic" cover. i remain convinced the entire space battle aspect of rogue one was a late addition to make it more star warsy. and then in turn they have to add more stitching scenes with the rebellion deciding to go public with a big space battle.... lotta screentime and probably this is to blame for all the cutting-room-floor stuff with the character arcs.

So glad the prequels came out when I was a kid and was the target audience for Jar Jar Binks. I saw Episode I nine times in theaters, more than any other movie before or since. Still my favorite of the prequels.

Qui-gon invents force ghosts at the end of III. so random and tacked on.

I forgot about Yoda/Chewie. looked it up on youtube, thought it was some fan film at first. That CG animation has not held up.

I Mean really where did the first order come from, fake side shit was busted in Jedi
*FUCKING SIGH*
Who gives a fuck anyway

The diplomatic mission was to deliver evidence to the senate that someone within the government was creating planetary-scale weapons off the books

I mean, it’s not cover anymore because the ethical senate faction just got the info from a group that carried out a guerilla raid on an imperial data store, but the entire “if we show the senate what the Emperor is doing we’ll regain the government” was the pipe dream of every alliance member who kept voting to defer action

wait, i thought leia's specific mission from mon mothma was to go find obi-wan. jimmy smits and mon mothma talk about it earlier in the film, right? it's confusing...

a hilarious aspect of the force ghost thing is that they did prepare a scene with yoda being contacted by qui-gon, with a ridiculous temp-track vocal. unfortunately, most versions of the scene on youtube are fan edits where they've dubbed in qui-gon dialogue from a TV show or something, but you can watch the proper thing at 13:20 here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-hFh35U3go

watching it again it seems pretty clear this was actually just a one-second shot of yoda sitting still before jimmy smits enters and the scene begins, and then for the DVD extras someone hit "pause" on it and dubbed in this nonsense. for what reason i cannot guess but clearly this is not "animated" at any level. i haven't watched all those scenes but the first one, with anakin and obi-wan cracking wise in an elevator, has another amazingly odd bit of dubbing which suggests that anakin has the power to make perfect R2-D2 sounds with his mouth. what the hell was going on?

"Your physical self will fade away but you will still retain your consciousness. You will become more powerful than any Jedi could imagine."

This doesn't seem all that distinct from the Sith desire for power + immortality.

clunky attempt to tie into obi-wan's line from ]star wars: "if you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine." apparently he learned all of his later zingers in the last half hour of revenge of the sith.

“The diplomatic mission was to deliver evidence to the senate that someone within the government was creating planetary-scale weapons off the books”
Exactly !

So then she's being pedantic just to pointlessly obfuscate the glaringly obvious fact that she was just part of a massive space battle that featured the Empire using the Death Star to nuke their own base. It doesn't take the Force to suss that out.

the most brazen and hacky thing is definitely anakin having built c-3po but there's something about the more incidental and tossed off laziness of the force ball being standard jedi training exercise that's really irksome.

special shoutout to the jedi temple being a grey government building in the intergalactic national mall with all the spiritual power of the meditation room from in the loop.

there's a case to be made that things like that are more offensive than things like jar jar because you can continue star wars forever and never mention gungans again but you'll never be able to change the fact that the jedi temple is sandwiched between the galactic history museum and the space dmv.

I haven't given a shit about Star Wars in years, but this idea of a Space DMV intrigues me.

the whole Anakin being seduced to the dark side because he has nightmares that Padme dies in childbirth was also really terrible. mostly because in the OG trilogy, Obi-Wan's vague references to Anakin's defection implied something more gradual and abstract. Not that he abruptly became Darth Vader cos he was having boo-hoo nightmares

like I think at one point they were toying w/ his reasoning being that he was brainwashed into thinking the Jedi were trying to take over the Republic, which would have made for a much more interesting story

Anakin building c3p0, Greedo & Vader being childhood pals, all the clones being Boba Fett, could be a kind of conscious or subconsciousness reaction to the expanded universe, a fuck-you to the people taking control of his idea. Everything within the first three films is connected & there is nothing outside of them - a contracted universe, so to speak.

Even the EU did this to an extent. Remember the time when the second Death Star became briefly self-aware because IG-88 uploaded his consciousness into it just before it was destroyed? Yeah.

It could be fun trying to one-up old George on this front. Like maybe Annie secretly built all of the prominent droid characters by hand. Maybe the Sarlacc was Boba Fett's abandoned childhood pet. Maybe ancient Jedi were shrunken to microscopic size and they now perpetuate their lineage as 'midichlorians'.

That IG-88 story is hilarious. Why is a single short story in an anthology allowed to entirely rewrite the significance of the main trilogy for the sake of elevating a random non-speaking droid character whom we saw in one scene? Something tells me they weren't taking the EU seriously.

it was like two seconds before it blew up. completely irrelevant

pulling the trigger for C-3P0 being a build-your-own model kit assembled by first-grade darth vader. just gets stupider and stupider the more i think about it.

This thread is so funny ty valuable poster dr c

hey man anivader can build anything

Voting for Yoda and Chewbacca being war buddies,

If they were gonna do that, they should have just committed and made an offbeat buddy comedy with Yoda and Chewie as forest detectives or something

yoda and chew-chew, always trying some harebrained scheme to swipe a picanic basket from the ranger

Nothing here's as embarrassing as starting and stocking this poll.

fucking amazing is what it is. the Lucas youth

I referred to the C3P0 origin in another thread as something I actually liked, which may even have spurred the creation of this poll.
Yes, it is incredibly forced, unbelievably coincidental - but I really don't mind that in this case, I think it's quite funny and adds something I find interesting to that idiot robot. Some dark, twisted roots to a naive, ever-present side character.
However, the R2D2 thing that is on this list, I do agree with and might even vote for!

The fan-service thing that annoyed me most isn't on the list: it's Yoda fighting with a lightsaber in Episode II. How it starts, with some kind of 'reveal' that, yes, even Yoda has a lightsaber; then you get a hyperactive ball of CGI flashing that thing through the screen. The entire thing screamed at me "IT'S YODA WITH A LIGHTSABER! IT'S COOL AND CUTE AND YOU HAVE TO LOVE THIS!!!". I didn't. It worked for me when he fought Palpatine in EpIII but not at all with that thing in EpII.

From this list, I think it's a toss-up between the 'all stormtroopers+Fett being a clone' thing vs R2D2. Or Yoda & Chewie.
What I always thought was even more stupid than Vader not checking up on Owen/Beru or Bail is Obi-Wan going in hiding and only changing his first name.

Padme killed in childbirth just to get rid of her; no effort made to cover Leia's memories of her mother in ROTJ

george had his extra large coffee, the greenbacks were rolling in, everything was fine

Wat if princess leah mum came back as jedi ghost

The reason Vader never went looking for his kids is because he didn’t know they were born before Padme died. No? Palpatine deliberately misled him.

it always makes me lol that one of vader’s kids got to go and live under an assumed name on a distant planet and the other kid kept his dad’s name and lived with his dad’s family on his dad’s home planet, watched over by his dad’s mate who decided to go undercover by changing his first name but keeping his own surname

it’s like obi-wan hid leia really well and then suffered debilitating brain damage before getting around to stashing luke

otoh Kenobi also was well aware that he had put the guy in a walking iron lung with four prosthetic limbs so

It's called 'hiding in plain sight' and it's a very effective tactic.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B9NfJrACAAAzvjc.jpg

The Purloined Jedi

Solo 2: The Death Stick Prerogative

Nothing in Solo suggests that Han & Chewie were in Jabba's employ up until Star Wars. It's only mentioned a crime boss on Tatooine pays well, they could've completed that gig and continued as freelancers, working for Jabba every now and then. Certainly the OG trilogy implies Han and Chewie have a long history with Jabba (even moreso if you count the cut scene that was added to the Special Edition of the first movie).

sure, just given all the other tie-a-bow on it stuff, it really feels like, okay, han's life story is complete now except jabba, well we'll be cute and withhold that one but tell you he's heading straight there now... and once he gets there he's pretty much complete. (obviously his personality is entirely different from the guy in ANH but the film gives me no sense that its creators were aware of that.)

Surely the betrayals of Emilia Clarke's and Woody Harrelson's characters are supposed to be read as first steps on him becoming the cynical smuggler he is in ANH, as opposed to the fairly idealistic guy seen in Solo?

One might think

oops, sorry karl!

haha, oh no problem! tbh everything you mentioned i kind of assumed would be in a new disney han solo film, which is why i find the new ones to be satisfying in the moment but then i immediately forget about them afterward

the problem - and i basically said this in the solo thread so sorry for the rehash - is that it's AFTER at least one and maybe both (can't remember) of these two betrayals have been exposed that han does his most idealistic/altruistic deed in the film, presumably because someone thought that made for a happier ending. he finishes *less* like ANH solo than he starts. so at best they made a tedious, accoutrement-by-accoutrement origin story that ends still in need ("need") of another origin story. they shouldn't have made any origin stories for this character, but why do one that obsessively ties all his bits of business into a dead corner of the filmic universe but still isn't an origin? it's so dumb.

ehh, I took it to mean he’d pick an underdog if they tugged his heartstrings. pretty in-character

getting a little more guarded over the next decade would make sense

Is Han busting Chewbacca out of that pit this supposedly legendary "life debt" that makes him stick around forever or is that something for the next movie?

pretty sure that was it. it doesn't take much in star wars, cf. jar jar binks.

I took it to mean he’d pick an underdog if they tugged his heartstrings. pretty in-character

yes this. Dr C do characters really have to follow an exactly motivated arc in order to not be "dumb"? I'm retroactively anticipating the criticism of han joining in the death Star battle in star wars. so out of character! where did THAT come from? the audience hasn't been prepped etc

someone repeatedly making the same mistakes, learning from them, and then forgetting or ignoring the lessons seems at least as if not more human than "...and that is how i became the man i am today."

if it worked for you that's cool! for me the han movie felt like an embarrassing and hacky attempt at a fan-service cash grab so this character arc thing feels like a calculation that they bungled because they didn't understand or watch their own movie(s). not unprecedented in star wars prequels ("and he was a good friend"), and here we had a character who already went through an arc in the original star wars (and yes, a satisfying one) so shoehorning in another one was always going to be silly; i was far from the only person to predict that or to notice that the finished film fulfilled that prediction. ymmv!

it's almost as if you'd made up your mind beforehand

but yes i think that is what I'm saying, that my mileage is varying

"if this hacky, embarassing cash-grab resonated with you, that's cool i'm not judging"

haha sorry that's a fair response to my post. but really we've been over this on the solo thread: both of us walked in wanting to have a good time (in my case with a strong "in spite of what i feared likely" kind of thing, but still). the movie proved for me to be a hacky embarrassing cash grab, and for you to be a good fun time with your family. that probably colors how each of us responds to praise and criticism of any of its individual elements, like character arcs.

definitely. still.. just thinkin.. wouldn't it have been way more fan-service-y to end this movie on some sort of "and that's how he became bitter" beat? exactly the sort of loose-end-tying you decry elsewhere?

can't remember if i said so on the other thread but as the lights were coming up my 9-y-o said "dad i thought you said this wasn't going to be that good"

and i was like, i seriously thought it wasn't going to be!

i get where you're coming from but...idk. is fan service quite the right word for that? that's sort of "doing a competent origin story." all prequels are inherently fanservice of course. but clearly we can identify more or less satisfying attempts at the concept. what i wanted from solo, once they'd committed to making such a beast, was that they not make it an origin story - just have it be some caper centered around young han solo doing han solo stuff. maybe have it center on ONE of the things we already know about him (kessel run, or befriending chewbacca and lando) but not ALL of them. that could be a good, fun, afternoon's entertainment in the star wars universe. i guess. i also like the suggestion that's been made that it should have really been a lando movie (or more of an ensemble picture) since we know less about him and they have more room to do unexpected stuff.

but if it's gonna be not just a prequel but an origin story, and you're burning all this screen time to fill in the origins of all these other bits and pieces, but don't get around to the origin of the character we know as han solo, it feels to me more like you screwed up and didn't know what you were doing (consistent with a movie with a famously troubled production and two directors) than like you said "you know what, let's avoid the easy fanservicey thing, and leave this character in a totally weird, counterintuitive position! that'll shake things up!"

I thought this Solo was a reasonably fun adventure movie, but I also thought it went too far in the prequelly need to tick all possible boxes of an iconic character's past. What was especially pointless was Han learning the lesson to shoot first... It's like Indy's hat in The Last Crusade or Hal Jordan's jacket in Geoff Johns' Green Lantern: all these things already made perfect sense as part of how those characters were originally established, there was no need to come up with an actual origin story for them.

What did work, however, was setting the path for Han idealism turning into cynicism. The fact that he did still do a good deed after Tobias' betrayal isn't that big a deal; as Tobias himself pointed out, Han should've expected a man like him to betray them. But Qi'ra's betrayal must've cut deeper, because Han had idealised her in his head for all those years, and finding her was the reason that made him do all that shady stuff... And then it turned out she was not that different from Tobias after all. So that works perfectly well for me as the beginning of a character arc that's finalised in ANH.

(x-post)

So according to Warwick Davis his cameo character in Solo is the same person as his cameo character in The Phantom Menace. Apparently he gave up life as a professional gambler and became a freedom fighter.

https://i.imgur.com/2PhrbUH.png

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DiKdRHwVQAEcVlE.jpg

and his sympathies for the rebel desert bikers is a nice seed to plant deep down, eventually flowering at the precise moment Darth Vader's special tie-fighter gets knocked into a spin

dr c maybe it makes more sense if you figure a couple more movies were slated in this set? i.e. it's an origin story, but only the first part of one

xpost nice!!

☐ The guy who stood next to Watto at the pod race later battles Darth Maul's crime syndicate, and participates in an attempt to recruit Han Solo to a proto-Rebellion

have to say i loved the open-ended vibe of Solo, felt like there was a lot more story to tell, a lot still to happen before Luke meets him in the cantina. even if it never reaches the screen. slightly LOTR in the way lots of other story is suggested but not told.

i wonder if i'd like the movie better if i'd never seen a star wars movie before and could genuinely see this guy's life opening out ahead into the unknown, filling it in with my imagination. i have to assume the answer is yes. like even valerian which was pretty much a garbage mess i was like "hey this is kind of a fun bit here," "ooh i like this alien" etc.

Hah, for me Valerian was pretty much the opposite, I was gringing every time they took elements and aliens from the comics which had provided me with genuine sense of wonder ever since I was a kid and dumbened them down to Hollywood sci-fi clichés.

yeah the comics look amazing.

maybe we can all agree that the best way to approach these movies is to watch them black-out drunk so that that every installment presents a fresh set of possibilities

It's kinda funny, with 5th Element Besson actually did a better job with bringing the sensibility of Valerian & Laureline comics on screen than with his actual official adaptation.

Surely the betrayals of Emilia Clarke's and Woody Harrelson's characters are supposed to be read as first steps on him becoming the cynical smuggler he is in ANH, as opposed to the fairly idealistic guy seen in Solo?

oof this sounds lame. he was great in SW because he was a random scumbag in a hive of scumbags who would rather shoot someone than argue with them. he was the cool outsider, he was this universe's rocker with a leather jacket smoking cigarettes. he helped Luke & pals because they personally went through shit together. by the end of they became a little family. that it was actually because he is secretly a rebel guy just like every other person in the universe is the most boring possible take.

xxp "What will happen next? No, I mean as regards my feet; I can't feel them"

I'm going full cynic now -- do we know how long Watto's species lives? he could totally be in the next movie

"Skywalker, Skywalker... *strokes chin* I owned -- I mean, knew -- a Skywalker once"

I hope in Solo 2 we see all the crazy stuff he’s seen while flying from one side of the galaxy to the other.