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

https://morbotron.com/meme/S07E06/60060.jpg?b64lines=IEkgYW0gRGFydGggU3Ryb3llci4KIA==

I've always said Lucas has a better sense of humor than people give him credit for. He does love trolling both his fans and his employees.

Jesus Christ that Greedo scene, it's like a Lifetime channel movie. Imagine it being your job to defend garbage like that, "I was really disappointed to lose the Greedo scene ..."

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i still find the "qui-gon contacts yoda" deleted scene the most laughable. another great one that Blank Check turned me on to: anakin and padme have an awkward dinner with her PARENTS in "clones." it is as pointless as you might think.

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nice turnout! can't argue with any of the top placers.

i never really got around to hating on jabba and the pod-race here but really that was dumb. i agree that i can see jabba emceeing a race, but having darth vader be from tattooine and a star participant in a sport overseen by jabba is just as uncreative and world-shrinking as anything else here. if we had to see his childhood at all (hint: no), he could have been from anywhere in the whole galaxy! but coming up with new planets is hard i guess.

the insistence on the tattooine tie-ins is ruinous i'd say. because you could delete that entire act of the movie if anakin was just like, some force-sensitive teenage understudy space pilot on planet naboo. or fuck it, teenaged pod racer, sure - they could race pods just as easy on naboo. he's got big dreams but he's impatient, always looking for the way that's quicker... easier. got it. now use the forty minutes you've just saved and devote them to giving the movie an actual plot and interesting character scenes.

Shoulda just had him be a farmer from Wyoming that stumbled into a new galaxy by sheer chance

what's up with palpatine's homies who watch the ballet with him before anakin shows up. who are those people

Cultured

Palpatine contributed to Partisan Review, knew Sontag, disagreed with her taking photos with the NVA.

Not only was Cornelius Evazan a doctor (?!), but his cosmetic surgery shop was across the street from a restaurant called ADMIRAL SNACKBAR?!

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Admiral_Snackbar

wookiepedia is fucked up

lol #1 is hilarious because Anakin building 3PO is introduced in TPM as evidence he's a child prodigy yet about 5 seconds after being introduced to 3PO in the first Star Wars you see many similar units wandering around in the background so it's obviously a standard form factor. and yes the last minute mind-wiping is lazy as fuck even in that montage where they realized all the shit they should have made the prequels about they have to wrap up in 5 mins.

concerning palpatine's buddies: according to wookiepedia, mas amedda, the big blue guy who says "this is a crisis!," has no backstory at all. and then suddenly circa the end of Sith he becomes an incredibly important figure in the history of the galaxy, mysteriously held offscreen for the original trilogy - manages the entire civilian side of the imperial bureaucracy, survives the second death star, becomes some de facto ruler in the empire's last days. he's the guy who ultimately signs terms of surrender with the rebellion!

Palpatine has his little coterie in Return of the Jedi too. The beau monde of the Empire.

https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/starwars/images/4/44/Inner_circle.jpg

sith goals

I am on board for every theory claiming those dudes are important
all of them are Snoke now

blue horns crisis dude being snoke would rule. really deflate the entire enterprise, with no survivors. i have not seen the new one yet tho so no spoilers if this in fact turns out to be the case. i would also accept jocasta nu and maybe sebulba.

there's a Star Wars marathon tonight at an AMC starting at 10 pm and all I can think is they started it then so that everybody can catch some ZZZs during the prequels and wake up when A New Hope starts

jocasta nu is in the marvel comics right now

*further outs self as complete nerd*

one of the best things the new movies will do for star wars, long term, is just crowding out the later lucas films, even just at the level of airtime in marathons. as many problems as i had with rogue one it is wayyyy more appropriate than "clones" as the kind of movie one should find on at 3 PM the day after christmas on spike TV while everyone's slumping around on a sugar crash.

the cheezmo style of the prequels, as mentioned upthread, is really the big problem with it. I forgot just how cheesy Eps 1-3 looked in comparison to the OG trilogy until Force Awakens last year, which used more practical effects and looked more earthy and lived-in than the cartoonish universe of the prequels.

or as one of my friends aptly said about AotC, "where the fuck was this shot? Toontown?"

I have fonder feelings for the prequels than for Rogue One. They're at least fun to laugh at. Rogue One is more generically mediocre.

o_O

re: the crappy digital look - yeah. it's all interrelated... chicken and egg problems with building a movie in computer-world versus lucas not giving a shit about stuff you'd normally have in a movie to give it meaning and depth. one thing that struck me a while back thinking about this (which i don't think i've posted?) was that, after shmi and anakin's house in the first one (which is on a real set with real lighting, and looks good) you never see anybody's domestic space again, except padme's incredibly bland CGI apartment. wouldn't we have more of a sense of this character from his home and his stuff? even if there's no room in the film to show him interacting with anybody about anything not strictly related to advancing plot points or covering holes... surely it'd help? but now also imagine someone had had to locate or build, then dress and light, mace windu's jedi monk chambers. wouldn't having stuff to pick up and interact with, light to step in or out of, things to lean against or stand free from, give us a sense of this one guy's particular ways of moving, ways of thinking, how he inhabits a space with other people... all this little stuff that actors on set normally get to bring to a movie are just not available. and lucas, thrilled at the possibility of compositing together different actors' takes against different green screens, has no idea it's even missing.

Huh. The C3P0 thing I liked & mentioned elsewhere which probably spurred the creation of this poll actually won.
Whatever, I still like it.

or as one of my friends aptly said about AotC, "where the fuck was this shot? Toontown?"

This USA Today clickbait column is actually kind of great

Why Anakin Skywalker should’ve been removed from the Jedi Order for sexual harassment

Maybe if the Jedi were more concerned with gender equality, and less concerned with balancing the force, then they would still be around today.

wow that is for real the best thing i have ever read in a USA Today. promote that writer to the Onion!

the set design in the phantom menace is genuinely awesome imo

the insistence on the tattooine tie-ins is ruinous i'd say.

Ugh, so many myopic, lazy creative choices attached to this. It's supposed to be a dusty backwater on the edge of civilisation and suddenly it's promoted to the most important planet in the galaxy where all the significant shit went down.

If The Last Jedi doesn't feature a desert planet, it will only be the second of nine movies not to.

third, right? empire and sith...

Empire and Force Awakens - he returns to Tattoine to kill sand raiders in Sith iirc

that's kind of a big hole in the middle of return of the jedi -- if han's trying to dodge jabba while he gets the funds to pay him off, why the hell was he on the planet where jabba's main home is?!?

xp Oh right, a desert planet.

that is, he was on some backwater planet in Star Wars, and then when ROTJ rolls around we find out that same backwater was Jabba's home base

the awful tusken raiders massacre sequence is in Clones, not Sith - but your confusion is understandable since it takes real effort/detachment from reality to take this as a youthful oopsie from which the character can recover. logical that memory would put it in amongst his other arbitrary atrocities, in Sith.

Tatooine is probably the best place to network with other scum and villainy and pick up smuggler work.

Yeah, you're completely right - the Tatooine appearance in Sith is right at the end when babby Luke is taken there.

really jabba could have been on any planet. unclear why it's tattooine now that you mention it. would be nice to go someplace else, tho that might have foiled lucas's orientalist urge to create a harem/opium den kinda thing. i do like the like/han "I was born here, you know!" exchange.

empire has the best environments. hoth's surface and ice caves, dagobah, cloud city's front and back of the house spaces (incl the whole factory setting of the climax) plus landing platform and dangling-underneath-space, asteroids, various imperial interiors (especially vader's emo sphere)... just great.

and duhhhhhhhh of course yes, baby luke arriving on tattooine. which one of my poll options complains about! silly me.

somehow in the midst of all of the weird technical and direction choices, the fact that Anakin runs off and kills a shitload of people mid-prequel series and no one is really the wiser still stands out as an odd choice

(extremely pedant voice) strictly speaking Hoth is also a desert, like Antarctica

hmm yes

In retrospect, Jabba on Tattooine makes zero sense. Why would a creature composed entirely of mucous membrane hang out on a planet covered with sand, why.

What, was the salt planet full?

he drew the short straw when it came to dividing up hutt criminal territory

it's like the member of the mob who runs a couple outfits in like, vermont

can't I come hang out in an actual city? no, sorry man, you gotta make the maple syrup protection money

I don't mind them going back to Tattoine in Jedi to sort of bring the OT full circle. But it should've been left alone after that.

empire has the best environments.

Easily the most well designed and beautiful of all the films. Up there with best of any SF/fantasy in that respect.

Jabba actually spent most of his weekends on his golf planet.