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

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

Obi-Wan's floating-ball Force lesson actually standard Jedi day-care exercise
Jar-Jar introduces motion to empower Palpatine and start Clone Wars while Padme is away falling in love with Vader

both of these are great

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

This was already canon in Return of the Jedi iirc.

Yeah, Mr. Binks haplessly enabling the advent of the Empire redeems most of the rest of the prequel trilogy.

I still don't get people's objections to the Tatooine stuff. The Emperor straight up tells Newborn Vader, "Hey, you accidentally killed your pregnant wife in a fit of rage." So he has no reason to believe he has living children.

And, being from that point on a creature made completely of anger, hatred and coldness, what reason would he have to swing by the planet where his most vivid memories are of a) being a slave and b) watching his recently-tortured mother die in his arms? Sentimentality? Old time's sake?

Who cares that Obi-Wan only changed his first name? Did he make the news a lot? Did anyone on Tatooine besides the Lars family and maaaaaaaaaaybe Jabba have much reason to GAF who he was?

Yeah, it's a perfectly valid point that Vader didn't even know Luke and Leia were born.
But he surely was aware that Obi-Wan survived, was actively searching out & killing all Jedi, I'd think that a bit of a thorough search might have had some results. If changing his last name didn't matter at all, why change his first name/if changing part of the name, the last name would be more obvious, right?

Obi-Wan was the Anakin part of his life that Vader wanted extirpated.

If I were Darth Vader, and was trying to think of where Obi-Wan might have disappeared to after leaving me to die on a lava beach, "Tatooine" wouldn't even be in my first 50 choices.

And, being from that point on a creature made completely of anger, hatred and coldness, what reason would he have to swing by the planet where his most vivid memories are of a) being a slave and b) watching his recently-tortured mother die in his arms? Sentimentality? Old time's sake?

Am I allowed to drop spoilers from the Darth Vader comic here y/n?

So far as I'm concerned, go for it -- I read them too.

I'll refrain but it's inevitably super hard fan service wrt character connections and that's more than reasonable when it comes to Expanded Universe canonicity.

I mean I don't think DV forgot how their last fight turned out either. I mean their battle on the Death Star is a bit like the Black Knight from The Holy Grail coming back as a dime-store Goth Robocop after Arthur is well over the hill, and still only winning because his foe is ready to retire and become a force ghost

I haven't read that recent short story collection but the funniest lede for a story I've heard of is Obi Wan telling Yoda that he's sending someone to train, and Yoda's like "finally, yes" but then gets pissed when he finds out he's getting Luke and not Leia

I want a cartoon version of that conversation where Yoda responds with "NOOOOOO!" and it's inexplicably just the Vader yell from the end of Episode 3

A minor one I forgot: Obi-Wan declaring "so uncivilized!" or whatever after he kills General Grievous (uggggggggh) with a blaster, so that we have a new understanding of his claim in the original film that the lightsaber was the weapon of "a more civilized age."

“Jar-Jar introduces motion to empower Palpatine and start Clone Wars while Padme is away falling in love with Vader”

this is one of my favorite things that happens in the prequels (i’m a fan)

worst of these is jango fett easy

http://i.imgur.com/ySqv56d.jpg

General Grievous is sort of redeemed in the Clone Wars cartoons, especially the one early on where they visit his creepy-ass lair

lol adam

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.