We took Caroline to see “The Phantom Menace” in 3D yesterday. She’d seen the commercials for it a few weeks ago and said she wanted to see it; we then insisted she watch what we consider the real “first three movies,” namely episodes 4, 5 and 6. She did so with some reluctance and found them enjoyable in her own way, as I mentioned in an earlier posting.
So we were most interested to see how she would react to a “Star Wars” film that she had not first seen parodied on “Family Guy.” One that is generally reviled as being boring, turgid, poorly acted, badly written, badly directed, and the debut of a character so detested that he actually made people nostalgic for the Ewoks (no small feat, that.)
Personally, watching the film yesterday–the first time I’ve seen it in its entirety since it premiered years ago–I found it as dissatisfying as ever, with 3D effects that were lackluster at best. Even the pod race, which should have rocked in 3D, was unimpressive.
So what did Caroline think of it?
“It was great!” she burbled. “It was better than all three of those other films put together!”
Holy crap. Holy freaking crap.
Now I know exactly how those older science fiction fans felt in 1977, when relative youngsters like me were singing the praises of this new film called “Star Wars,” and the old fogies were dismissing it. Sure, they said, you couldn’t argue the quality of the effects. But the story? Bland, flat, preposterous. The characters cardboard at best, stereotypical at worst. A rehash and recycling of “Flash Gordon” movie serials, gussied up with some new age religious tripe called “the Force.” It’s glitzy, sure, but it was no “Forbidden Planet” or “War of the Worlds,” and certainly–as movie SF went–a quantum leap backward from the sophistication of “2001.” Hëll, even “Star Trek” fans were dissing it, offended that this crap was hitting it big in the movies while any hope of a big screen “Trek” film seemed languishing in development hëll. (Two years later they got their wish with “Star Trek: The Motionless Picture,” so that wised ’em about getting what you wish for.)
And now here we are, and the next generation–or at least my small representative sample–is embracing “Phantom Menace” with the same energy that we despised it, and with as little care for our appalled reactions as we had for the old fogies that preceded us. (And when I say old, I mean pretty much everyone who’s reading this. Trust me, when you’re nine years old, everything from thirty-five and up is ancient.)
But how! you ask. How could any child find enjoyment in “Phantom Menace”?
Well, let’s see. First of all, she liked that there was a kid protagonist. When he left his mom behind, Caroline was actually tearing up because the concept of separation from one’s parent, with no idea of if or when they’ll see them again, cuts to the core of a child’s greatest fear. So that hit her where she lived. We sit there thinking, “Well, he’s off to go and be evil,” but that scene completely invested her emotionally in the film.
Second, it’s the first and pretty much only “Star Wars” film that featured not one, but two kick-ášš females: Padme (Natalie Portman, who my daughter Shana couldn’t stand back when they both went to the Usdan drama camp in Long Island. “She goes around acting like she’s gonna be a movie star!” Shana would complain to me) and her unnamed decoy (who had Caroline going, “Why do I recognize her voice?” and I said, “Because she played Elizabeth Swann in the ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ movies.”) Unfortunately, toward the climax of the film, when the Viceroy alien momentarily is tricked into thinking that he’s captured the duplicate princess and sends his people running off after the actual decoy, under the false impression she’s the real item, all I could think of was the guy in “Spaceballs” shouting, “You fools! You’ve captured their stunt doubles!”
In any event, between the kid pilot saving the day and two strong females running around, she found it compelling viewing.
And yes, I asked her what she thought of Jar-Jar. Did she say, “Well, obviously I’m offended by him. Not only is the ‘humor’ involving him over the top and so broad that it’s detrimental to the tone of the movie, but it harkens back to racist Step-and-Fetchit shtick that we, as a society, should have outgrown?”
Nooo.
She said, “He’s funny!” and “That’s so rude!” and then stuck her tongue out and waggled her cheeks.
So if she’s representative, then basically this more or less lousy film has hooked in a new generation for the “Star Wars” saga, forcing us to a hard-to-swallow conclusion:
No matter how much we may have reviled “Episode 1,” George Lucas knows what he’s doing.
PAD
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Peter: I was so disappointed in the 3D version. It was done so poorly. Nothing was done to make the colors more intense or vibrant. nothing was done to spiff up the visuals. To me, this was done on the cheap. It was great to see the movie on the big screen again, but to me it was a wasted opportunity
I’m largely with Caroline on The Phantom Menace.
I don’t hate the film at all. I think it’s the most enjoyable of the Prequel Trilogy. Jar-Jar doesn’t even bother me.
By comparison, I think Attack of the Clones is appalling, and Revenge of the Sith is an atrocity.
Why do I like Phantom Menace, which fandom hates, and revile Sith, with fandom thinks is the only worthwhile film of the Prequel Trilogy?
It’s a simple thing, really.
The Phantom Menace has the freedom to do something original. We’re some period of time before the Star Wars films we know, and anything can come before it. Lucas has a blank canvas to work with in Phantom Menace and he takes advantage of it. We get Naboo! We get giant land battles! We get monstrous spacecraft! We get undersea cities! We get Coruscant! We get Qui-Gon Jinn!
Unfortunately, once Lucas shows us the canvas of The Phantom Menace, we know that that canvas has to join up with A New Hope and so we can figure out much of what needs to come in between. There needs to be clones, because we know there’s a Clone War to come. There needs to be an Anakin romance, because we know that he fathers twins. There needs to be a falling out between Obi-Wan and Anakin, because we know that Anakin succumbs to the Dark Side of the Force. Attack of the Clones avoids much of the expectations game (and based on the novelization there’s a decent story under there, but Lucas isn’t a decent director to get at it), but Sith cannot avoid it, and thus it’s a movie in which nothing unexpected happens for two and a half hours because Lucas has to make sure that his canvases join together.
I won’t say that The Phantom Menace is good. But I don’t think it’s the total disaster as a film that it’s widely considered to be. If on pain of death I had to watch only one of the Prequel films, Phantom Menace is the one I would opt for every time.
“Sith cannot avoid it, and thus it’s a movie in which nothing unexpected happens for two and a half hours because Lucas has to make sure that his canvases join together.”
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That’s my problem with it, as well. I was all pumped for this movie, super excited to see how it all panned out, but then a strange thing happened. I sat down, the lights went out, the Fox fanfare erupted, and it suddenly hit me: I knew everything that was going to happen in the next two and a half hours. Why had I been so excited? This was a crushing blow to my enthusiasm that the movie wasn’t good enough to overcome, and I found myself uninterested in a Star Wars movie for the first time in my life.
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““Sith cannot avoid it, and thus it’s a movie in which nothing unexpected happens for two and a half hours because Lucas has to make sure that his canvases join together.””
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“I sat down, the lights went out, the Fox fanfare erupted, and it suddenly hit me: I knew everything that was going to happen in the next two and a half hours. “
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You know, I can’t quite go along with that. I understand that it’s your take on it and I won’t change that take on it, but it’s a concept I don’t really get.
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When we all sat down for Sith for the first time, we knew the general fates of Obi-Wan Kenobi, Anakin/Vader, Luke and Leia. We also have a vague idea of what would happen to Yoda we sorta knew that the Jedi were going to bite it. But that’s really all we knew about what “would happen.”
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And if that’s the case, we really didn’t know anything more than we know going in to 99% of the films out there. I mean, we know when we walk into most films that the good guys will live, the bad guys will die and they’ll probably set us up for a franchise that will repeat that formula. Hëll, most popular TV is like that. What makes it work is the story around the characters and, occasionally, the spectacle of it all.
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They could have pulled anything out of their hat in the second and third films. They could have created story twists and turns and concepts that would blow our minds and tear at our hearts.
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What we got was paint by number.
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What went wrong, what allowed you to have that feeling of knowing everything would happen and feeling uninterested in what was going to happen, was that Lucas fell victim to his own paint by number structuring. He knew he had to get us from point A to point B, but he focused more on points A & B and not enough on the path between the two points. He could have personally walked into the theater before the first screening of Menace and told us exactly what the last 15 minutes of Sith would be line for line and beat for beat and still had us hot and bothered for it when we were halfway through Sith if he had given us path between points A & B.
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And that’s not idle speculation on my part. There have been some hugely enjoyable books and films where we saw what happened last at the beginning of the story and then the joy of the story was seeing how that opening came to be. Your feelings are perfectly valid for you, but my feelings on it are that it failed to excite not because we knew where everything would go and who everyone would be, but because Lucas failed to take us to that destination with anything beyond a mostly paint by number film trilogy.
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Sigh…
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“He could have personally walked into the theater before the first screening of Menace and told us exactly what the last 15 minutes of Sith would be line for line and beat for beat and still had us hot and bothered for it when we were halfway through Sith if he had given us an enjoyable path between points A & B.”
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“When we all sat down for Sith for the first time, we knew the general fates of Obi-Wan Kenobi, Anakin/Vader, Luke and Leia. We also have a vague idea of what would happen to Yoda we sorta knew that the Jedi were going to bite it.”
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Well, that’s a lot of things to know about a movie before it even starts. So no, it’s not the same as 99% of films out there. We don’t usually know the fates of all of the characters before we even see the movie.
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I’m not saying I literally knew everything that was going to happen. That was just how I felt at the time the movie started, this sudden lack of interest in sitting through a film in which all of the major plot points were already known to me.
Yeah, I know what you mean. When I sat down for Titanic, I realized that I knew everything that was going to happen. The ship was going to sink. (sorry, did I spoil that for anyone?)
You are dead wrong, PAD.
As much as the original trilogy may have been rejected when it was first released by a few fans of “real” science fiction (and I admit that I have engaged in Star Wars bashing myself in my more foolish days), the original movies have become institutions with the passing of the years, and are widely accepted as classics of American cinema.
They have stood the test of time. I’ve watched them recently and was blown away by their power.
The new movies? Do you think that 20 years from now people will be looking back at them as classics? Fat chance. Perpaps they’ll look at them as one might look at Independence Day or Avatar, a movie that wasn’t exactly great cinema, but broke some new ground in special effects and promotion. But I don’t think they will even be remembered for that. The movies weren’t as impressive as ID4 and Avatar in that regard.
Ask Caroline again, 20 years from now, and I bet she will recognize that the new trilogy is infinitely inferior to the original. And she will be as ashamed of her youthful indiscretions as I was of my love as kid for the dreadful TV show with Nicholas Hammond as Spider-Man
I’m “dead wrong?” About what? That I didn’t like the film? That Caroline did? That I felt the 3D was a disappointment? What am I wrong about? I’ve stated fact and opinion based on a movie that was in front of me. I said George Lucas knew what he was doing insofar as building an ongoing audience, based upon my daughter’s reaction. So where am I demonstrably, indisputably wrong?
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The new movies? Do you think that 20 years from now people will be looking back at them as classics?
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How the hëll would I know? There are Oscar winning films that we look back on now and say, “What were they thinking?” There were films that were desperately unpopular in their day and it’s only decades later that people appreciate them. I have no idea what people will be looking back on 20 years from now as classics and oh, by the way, neither do you.
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PAD
You are indisputably wrong in comparing the initial reactions of people to the original movies to the new trilogy. You make it sound as if the original movies were as despised as the new ones when they were first released, and that it took decades for the acclaim to come.
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Not so.
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While there were detractors of the original movies, they had their fair share of critical acclaim even at the day they were released. Roger Ebert called Star Wars “an out-of-body experience”, the movie was nominated for a best picture and best director Oscar, it was nominated for the Golden Globe and Saturn Awards. And the movies’ reputation grew with each passing year, it didn’t take very long.
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While I can’t predict with any certainty which movies will be hailed as classics, I can hazard an educated guess, and so can you. Particularly, I can hazard an even better guess as to which movies WILL NOT be regarded as classics.
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PHANTOM MENACE won’t. By the way, it’s been 13 years already, right? By 1990, the original STAR WARS already had a place in the canon of great Sci-Fi movies.
Rene…seriously…what the hëll are you talking about? You’re getting worked up about things that I never said, but merely your interpretations of it. “You make it sound” are the key words there. I was talking about the reactions of many hard-core SF fans, and the reason I know about this is because I was at the World Con that year and I heard it constantly. The older fans bìŧçhëd about Star Wars. Not all of them. But quite a few. People went around dressed in karate outfits pressed into service as Luke Skywalker’s outfit and older fans reacted to them like Dracula facing a cross-wielding Van Helsing.
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Oscars noms? Really? That’s what you’re using? Let’s face it: any Hollywood nominating procedure that puts George Lucas up for best director has to be inherently flawed. And I don’t say that because I hate Lucas or something; I don’t. I say it because it was badly directed, particularly the actors who by their own accounting received little to no direction at all, and it sure as hëll showed.
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I mean, I get that you felt the need to run over to Wikipedia and pull up references from Roger Ebert. That’s nice. But I remember critics dismissing it as, believe it or not, a rip off of “The Wizard of Oz,” likening 3PO to the Tin Woodman and Chewbacca to the Cowardly lion. But if Wikipedia is what matters to you, then here…one paragraph down from the one you referenced:
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However, there were a few negative responses. Pauline Kael of The New Yorker criticized the film, stating that “there’s no breather in the picture, no lyricism”, and that it had no “emotional grip”.[72] Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader stated, “None of these characters has any depth, and they’re all treated like the fanciful props and settings.”[73] Peter Keough of the Boston Phoenix said “Star Wars is a junkyard of cinematic gimcracks not unlike the Jawas’ heap of purloined, discarded, barely functioning droids.”
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Here’s what you’re overlooking: There were NO expectations for “Star Wars.” None. It’s simply ridiculous to compare 1977 and that lack of expectations (not to mention being dazzled by FX that no one had ever seen before) with the expectations heaped upon a film decades later which viewers were expecting to measure up to a film they saw as youngsters that was unprecedented in its swashbuckling visuals. And this time around, fantastic effects–which SW:TPM had in abundance–wasn’t sufficient to appease the older viewers. Not remotely. But the kids loved it. And they still love it, willingly overlooking the weaknesses in it the same way that we did with its predecessor.
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I mean, look at it from their view. High speed chases. An entire council of basically superheroes. And holy crap, what about the light saber duels? The emotional stakes of the light saber duels in Eps 4-6 are very powerful, but compare that to the speed, choreography and flash of the Jedi vs. Maul battle of SW:TPM. Sith lord my ášš: You never saw Darth Vader wielding a double sided saber and doing back flips, hëll no. Mark Hamill has even lamented over feeling envious of what he saw in the prequel films, because that’s what he wanted to do in his films. But Lucas said firmly, “No, light sabers are heavy, like broadswords.” Obviously he changed his mind. But to a modern kid, the action set pieces are simply way more visually exciting than the originals. And who’s to tell them they’re wrong for feeling that way. You? Me? I don’t think so.
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PAD
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“But Lucas said firmly, “No, light sabers are heavy, like broadswords.” Obviously he changed his mind.”
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I’ve read that for years now and that never made sense to me. it looked like Lucas cribbed so much of the Jedi concept from Asian sources that I could never figure out why he insisted on slowing the fight choreography down by declaring that energy weapons were heavy and cumbersome like broadswords. Maybe he felt he couldn’t pull off high end choreography for Vader and Kenobi’s fight, but he could have explained that away with an easy and very true concept; even the Jedi age. The greatest warrior will slow down and lose a step. And if not, well, before the age of CGI fight scenes we had these really useful things known as “stunt doubles” who got a lot more use than they seem to today. It would have been easily doable.
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“But I remember critics dismissing it as, believe it or not, a rip off of “The Wizard of Oz,” likening 3PO to the Tin Woodman and Chewbacca to the Cowardly lion.”
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I don’t remember as much as you do. Hëll, I was six when it came out and nine when Empire hit. But what I do remember tracks more with what you were saying above. With some exceptions in both camps, I remember that there was a generational dividing point where friends, family, teachers and others seem to break on the issue. The younger you were, the more you seemed to dig it. A lot of the people around me older than my father’s generation seemed a little bemused by the thing. It was this pretty film that wasn’t all that good or just ripped off the good stuff they grew up on.
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Hëll, I know of at least one fairly well known “old guy” who hated the film, hated the quality of the plot, despised the quality of the scripting and did little to hide his contempt for it all whenever the film series was brought up around him. Some guy named Alec Guinness.
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And, correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t even some of Lucas’s friends, directors themselves, original see the film before it was released and express some concern as to how well it would do?
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I really think conversations like this are funny. Decades after the fact we look at a film that changed everything or is hailed as a classic, and it’s almost inconceivable for some that it wasn’t as universally hailed as such when it was new. It’s interesting to see how time and distance shade our perceptions on things.
Jerry: According to Mark, Lucas’s reasoning was that he wanted them to come across like broadswords because they were Jedi KNIGHTS, and knights used broadswords. That was the look and feel he was going for, the whole medieval thing. It may well be that Lucas eventually came around to your way of thinking, leaning more toward the way samurai would fight than knights.
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The whole thing about it being a rip off of “Wizard of Oz” became so pervasive (and ridiculous) for a while that years later the mindset was immortalized in a weekend update of SNL. A pre-Seinfeld Julia Louie-Dreyfuss portrayed a high school cheerleader doing a review of “The Wizard of Oz” which she had just seen on TV for the first time, and dismissed it as a rip off of “Star Wars.”
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PAD
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“According to Mark, Lucas’s reasoning was that he wanted them to come across like broadswords because they were Jedi KNIGHTS”
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Yeah, I caught the fact of the naming of them (Jedi Knights, Knights of the Old Republic) a long time ago. But, name aside, almost every other aspect of them screamed of Asian origin to me back then and still does to a large degree. Even if you factor in some of the other mystical warrior myths from other parts of the world, they most resemble something with an Asian feel to me. So, for me at least, the idea that so much of them felt the one way but that he saddled them with something nonsensical from the other just never seemed right. And, as I said above, it seemed even odder to my young mind that an energy weapon would be heavy and cumbersome.
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But, hey, it’s his film and series to do right with or screw up. Just wish that the modern tilt on that scale didn’t seem to lean so much towards the “screw up” direction.
Keeping in mind that Lucas makes claims to the effect that he meant things to be The Way They Are all along when that is obviously not the case…
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When Luke is first given his father’s light saber by Ben he swishes it through the air in a way that is entirely inconsistent with this “broadsword” claim. Try that with a broadsword; you’ll drop it and cut off your toes unless you have tendons like coiled steel.
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More likely scenario–they had a better fight planned for Star Wars but the dámņ sabers kept breaking, limiting what they could do fight-wise. As I recall, the original plan was to use rotating sticks covered in scotchlight but they didn’t work and had to be rotoscoped afterwards. I once actually obtained some scotchlight for that purpose (Also to attempt front screen projection. Neither idea amounted to much.)
Obviously he changed his mind.
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Yeah, he has a really bad habit of doing that.
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Lucas is his own worst enemy.
PAD, I agree with you that 1977 is not today. But that is all the more reason why a certain similarity of reactions among the people who saw STAR WARS back then and those who saw PHANTOM MENACE in 1999 is completely incidental, at best.
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Regardless of how one feels about the script, acting, directing, etc. of the original movies (and that is very debatable and subjective), STAR WARS was a new kind of movie back in 1977. Or maybe not new, but a rebirth. George Lucas was responsible at least in 50% for the new age of the Hollywood Summer Blockbuster. The other 50% of the blame I’d assign to a fellow named Steven Spielberg.
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I can see how older critics, used to the new artistic heights of the Hollywood of the 1970s, with Copolla and other directors, would sneer at STAR WARS. Or fans of more serious Science Fiction. STAR WARS was more or less a return to pure entertainment in cinema. And a brilliant return at that, but I can see how it wasn’t a movie for everyone.
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With the new movies, I can see the “not for everyone” part, but I don’t see the brilliance, nor the potential for the movies to be vindicated later. And I don’t think that is just because I’m not a kid born in the 1990s. The new movies launched no revolution in pop culture.
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I am sorry if I was rude or if I was misreading what you said. But to me it felt like “Hey kids, when the Beatles first started in 1963, older fans of music also sneered at them. So the New Manufactured Pop Band of the Week that you’re sneering at? They could be the Beatles, it’s just that we’re too old to judge now, or something.”
I’m sorry, PAD, but you’re losing the war against ridiculous Hollywood gimmicks that are only there to suck extra money out of us.
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It’s sad, really, that what I remember most fondly of Episode I (and perhaps all of the prequels) is the trailer for Episode I. It was so well done.
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And then we got to see the rest of the film(s). Sigh.
Are the originals pretty simple and straightforward? Yeah, but they were still good, they were enjoyable.
And I say that as a Star Wars fan who REALLY wanted to like the prequels, too.
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But they’re just complete crap, and Lucas is to blame for the vast majority of that.
Yeah, but you’re missing the point Craig. There were plenty of people–hard core SF fans–who considered the original to be complete crap, for all the reasons that I stated.
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Think about it. Every single criticism that you can lob at “Phantom Menace” WAS thrown at “Star Wars” back in 1977. Every single one. Poorly written and directed. Stiff dialogue. Wooden performances, with the single exception being from an older, accomplished actor (Alec Guiness back then; Liam Neeson now.) Two dimensional characters (hilarious when it’s 3D). Annoying comedy relief (3PO back then, Jar Jar now). Great effects, but what did it matter when it was in service of such a lousy product?
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What it comes down to is that you saw Star Wars in your youth and fell in love with it while many older and more experienced fans treated it with disdain. And now–as Darth Vader once said–the circle is now complete.
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PAD
I think the reason why the originals work despite their flaws also has to do with the strong source material Lucas drew from. The original movie was a melding of John Ford’s “The Searchers” and Kurosawa’s the “Hidden Fortress.” Lucas seems to cut-n-paste large portions of the latter movie in particular into Episode IV.
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What’s especially strange is that the Hidden Fortress was one of Kurosawa’s weaker films. His films are a bit like sex that way – even when they’re bad, they’re still pretty good.
Malcolm, there’s actually very little of Hidden Fortress that made it’s way into the original Star Wars films.
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The two robots echo the scene of the peasants wandering through a desert. They’re captured by slavers. But instead of escaping and hooking up with the heroes, they’re sold to the hero and aren’t scoundrels constantly trying to sell the hero out.
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There’s a bearded old general and a young rebel princess. Unlike Fortress, these two never once actually meet on screen and the plot of trying to smuggle the princess across enemy lines is entirely stripped out. It was resurrected for Phantom Menace, though.
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There’s a duel between two old warriors. In Hidden Fortress, they were old enemies that had formed a mutual respect for one another over the years and the results of the duel led to them coming together as allies. In Star Wars, they’re allies who fell apart and this is their final confrontation, ending with one of their deaths.
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The charge that Star Wars cut large portions out of Hidden Fortress is an old one, but one that’s wildly exaggerated. Yes, his original outline for the first film is nearly identical to Kurosawa’s work, but that’s because George actually licensed the rights and was planning to remake the film in a scifi setting much like how Seven Samurai was restaged as a western. But from the first full draft to the final shooting script, Lucas abandoned that approach and the elements taken from Hidden Fortress became more and more diluted to the point where the final film only has a few slivers of the original tale. Not “large portions”.
And now–as Darth Vader once said–the circle is now complete.
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Really, because my wife enjoyed the Star Wars Expanded Universe novels for many years, before, during, and after the prequels.
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I’ve enjoyed many of the Star Wars games over the years, as well.
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The only Star Wars I haven’t enjoyed? The prequels?
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Not only that, but the prequels are near universally reviled, where as the original trilogy was not.
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Peter David: “What it comes down to is that you saw Star Wars in your youth and fell in love with it while many older and more experienced fans treated it with disdain. And now–as Darth Vader once said–the circle is now complete.”
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Craig J. Ries: “Really, because my wife enjoyed the Star Wars Expanded Universe novels for many years, before, during, and after the prequels.
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I’ve enjoyed many of the Star Wars games over the years, as well.
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The only Star Wars I haven’t enjoyed? The prequels?”
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You know, I kinda have to go with Craig here. There were science fiction, fantasy and horror movies and television shows that I saw during the period that I saw the original Star Wars trilogy. I still love Star Wars after all these years while I can’t say the same for some of the other stuff I saw back then. Likewise, the part of Star Wars I don’t like much back then, the Ewoks, I’ve only grown to dislike more as an adult. And, like Craig and his wife, I’ve also continued to enjoy some of the modern Star Wars books; especially Death Troopers. 🙂
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I’ve also seen modern stuff that’s not much more than a rehash of older stuff that I grew up on and enjoyed that as well. I just did not really enjoy the new trilogy and absolutely hated the first film in the new trilogy.
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Right now the jury is likely still out in many households on the idea that “the circle is now complete.” I think we’ll know if/when the circle is complete when on this matter if/when the children growing up on the new trilogy are adults and still enjoying them or if they’re actually looking at them in large part the way I look at films that I loved back at that age like the original Gamera films and some of the Godzilla films like All Monsters Attack – What the hëll was I thinking?
Really, because my wife enjoyed the Star Wars Expanded Universe novels for many years, before, during, and after the prequels.
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None of which were written by Lucas or directed by Lucas. I was referring specifically to the movies. The movies, with one exception, have never been really well written. (And acting and directing in books become the challenge of the writer to convey). All I’m saying–and actually, you’ve pretty much just backed me up on it–is that when you were younger, you didn’t care. And now you do. Quality matters more. The “Star Wars” universe was brand new and shiny and had great effects, and the poor quality of the writing–dialogue so bad that Harrison Ford famously threatened to tie George Lucas to a chair and make it read it out loud–simply didn’t matter.
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I suppose the bottom line is that if “Phantom Menace” had come out in 1977, everyone would be hailing it as a masterpiece.
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PAD
It’s sad, really, that what I remember most fondly of Episode I (and perhaps all of the prequels) is the trailer for Episode I. It was so well done.
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Same here. I plan to study that trailer someday for lessons in editing.
I have to agree with Craig here, 3D is just another trick to squeeze more money out of us. Which is why I don’t go to 3D movies.
I think the word “trick” is a bit harsh. It’s not like the audience for the most part doesn’t already know the film. If they think seeing it on the big screen again, but in 3-D for a different experience, that’s up to them.
I certainly don’t plan on giving Lucas anymore of my money to see the 3-D version.
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That said, I have to side with Peter about the prequels. I do think they’re pretty horrible personally. But I know a loy of new fans who were kids at the time who thought they were a lot of fun and just great.
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Everything we enjoy in our youth we have a special bias for. Or something has been hailed a “classic” so many times we fail to entertain the notion that anything today could possibly be superior.
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For example, I remember watching a repeat of the “Thrilla in Manilla”, a legendary, epic fight by two men universally regarded as two of the best heavyweight champions ever. My younger brother was watching it and said, “Wow! Those guys were slow!” There are a lot of reasons that contributed to this, but compared to no-name heavyweights today – or both men when they were younger – he was RIGHT! They were slow.
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Also, Chris Evert is my favorite female tennis player ever. I used to cheer for her against Martina Navratilova especially. their rivalry remains one of the biggest in sports history.
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But you know what? If you look at a match today between Serena Williams and, say, Maria Sharapova, well with the way they hit the ball, Evert and Navritilova seem to be playing badminton by comparison.
My 6 year old son loved it as well, which is what I expected. After all, it was a big hit with kids his age back in 1999 as well.
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On the topic of Jar-Jar, I found myself wondering “Is there anything intrinsically offensive about a character acting that way?” Clearly to those of us who are familiar with how such portrayals were used to denigrate people of African heritage, it seems in poor taste. But should children, who have thankfully been spared exposure to such shameful portrayals of fellow human beings, find it offensive or distasteful when a completely fictional alien race acts that way? And if they don’t, should they be taught that they should?
Y’know what? I think if they’d simply had Jar Jar talk like Curly from “The Three Stooges,” he’d have been hugely popular with everyone. Have him picking fights with inanimate objects and going, “Oh, a wise guy, eh?”
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PAD
It works. Boy, does it work. And the Gungan leader would be Moe? Keeping Curly in his place?
Sure, why not?
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PAD
“On the topic of Jar-Jar, I found myself wondering “Is there anything intrinsically offensive about a character acting that way?””
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Not to my way of thinking. For one thing, I’ve never heard any real person, of any race or nationality, talk the way Jar-Jar talks. I guess he kinda sorta sounds vaguely Caribbean if you close your eyes and use your imagination. If he’s a racial stereotype, I’m confused about what exactly he’s meant to be stereotyping.
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And anyway, in order for something to be “intrinsically offensive,” the person responsible must be deliberately trying to offend. I’m pretty sure neither George Lucas nor Ahmed Best were trying to insult or denigrate any ethnic group.
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“I’ve never heard any real person, of any race or nationality, talk the way Jar-Jar talks.”
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I don’t agree with it, nor, for that matter, does the voice actor, a black voice actor, who voiced him, but the complaint wasn’t that he sounded like a real group of people. Some groups said that he spoke a type of language associated with some old, negative stereotypes of blacks.
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So, no, you would never have heard someone talk like him any more than you would see blacks doing some of the things that they were depicted doing in visually derogatory depictions from back in the day.
I watch a lot of movies from the time when black stereotypes were pervasive. I don’t think Jar Jar in any way reminds me of Stepin Fetchit, Willie Best, or Mantan Moreland (who was considered as the replacement when Shemp Howard died…imagine an alternate reality where we had a multiethnic 3 stooges!). For one thing, those guys were great actors, with the kind of timing we don’t see much these days.
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But since the PC police have made it very hard to see any of their movies it isn;t surprising that people think they acted a certain way.
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(Weren’t there also complaints that the Trade Federation Viceroy sounded Asian? I thought he sounded more Transylvanian.)
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I agree with PAD that id episode 1 had been released in 1977 we would have all loved it, though it’s longevity would have suffered. STAR WARS was a phenom in part because it was just such a quantum leap over any SPFX film that had come before. Ep 1 has that in spades. But take out Darth Vader, Han, Chewie…you might as well speculate on how popular STAR TREK DEEP SPACE 9 would have been if it had preceded TOS, not followed it.
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“I agree with PAD that id episode 1 had been released in 1977 we would have all loved it, though it’s longevity would have suffered. STAR WARS was a phenom in part because it was just such a quantum leap over any SPFX film that had come before. Ep 1 has that in spades. But take out Darth Vader, Han, Chewie…you might as well speculate on how popular STAR TREK DEEP SPACE 9 would have been if it had preceded TOS, not followed it.”
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Given the mess that Menace was, and the boring mess it was most of the time at that, if it had been released in 1977 we likely wouldn’t be talking about second trilogies, remastered versions, 3-D versions or any of this and Menace would be fondly loved by slightly less people than Message from Space and just slightly more people than War in Space.
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Of course, if Menace had come out in 1977 instead of Hope, we might not have had Massage from Space and War in Space. Or, at the very least, we wouldn’t have had a bad guy that looked like a Wookie with a set of bull horns on its head.
There are a lot of sci-fi and fantasy movies from the 70s and 80s if not earlier that are considered fondly by some fans and have a cult status but that are now considered pretty cheesy and ridiculous.
Brace myself for what? That Caroline has good taste?
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The Phantom Menace is wonderful. Not as good as Star Wars or Empire, but better than Return of the Jedi. Accusations of it being boring, turgid, badly acted, etc. just leave me wondering if the accuser saw the same movie I did. Empire is more boring and turgid than Phantom (not that I think it’s either of those things, but if someone were to call one of the SW films “boring and turgid,” I would think Empire, or ROTJ, to be the most likely target… not the light, fun Phantom).
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And the original trilogy had Mark Hamill, yet PHANTOM has been called “poorly acted”? I don’t get it. Ewan McGregor was excellent, and the rest were just fine. It’s not as though Hayden Christensen were in it or anything. Natalie Portman, I’ll give you, but she’s bad in everything except Black Swan and maybe a couple films she made as a kid.
The thing is, you’re basically saying that the Phantom Menace is good as a kids movie. And you may be right, it certainly has a lot of elements (trade negotiations aside).
But if Lucas was setting out to create kids movies, you can’t really explain the next two. Sure there are some moments kids can relate to (saving the senator, etc.) but Anakin murdering people (and later kids) in cold blood hardly sits well for children.
It seems like Lucas wasn’t quite sure where he wanted to go. Maybe he wanted to make a grown up prequel set, but somewhere someone told him “hey, kids are a big target audience” and that’s why we got stuck with a 5 year old protagonist in Phantom and absolutely ridiculous Yoda fighting styles later on. But I’m not convinced he had it all planned out like some sort of master mind that you’re implying here.
“so that wised ‘em about getting what you wish for.”
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No pun intended?
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Terry Whitlatch, who did the graphic design for Jar Jar was actually an acquaintance of mine. I was in a play with her now ex-husband when Episode One originally came out. She had some interesting stories about her time working on Skywalker ranch. She said that Lucas used to come into the room where she and the other graphic designers were sequestered with two colored pens. Without saying a word, he’d look over all their work, and then he’d take one piece of work and cross it out with the bad pen, and he’d choose a one piece of work and mark it with the good pen. Then he’d leave without a single utterance.
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About Jar jar and the racial implications, I’ve never made a secret of being a conservative white guy. I also don’t pretend to be the most racially sensitive guy on the planet. However, even I was offended by the racial stereotypes that Jar Jar seemed to possess. Please note, that Terry had absolutely nothing to do with the writing of that character.
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Peter — I’m actually pleased that Caroline can see the humor in Jar Jar. She’s removed from the racial baggage. C3PO is also traces back to the gay sidekick but most audiences don’t read him that way.
Caroline’s reaction would please Lucas, who claimed that he made a kids movie and adults didn’t get that. They also unfairly compared a kids movie to a kids movie they’d seen as kids and viewed now through nostalgia. I don’t entirely agree: The villains and heroes are not as memorable. Darth Maul vs Vader? Tarkin vs Sidious?
Oh, I don’t know about that. Tarkin, an effete snob who is so shortsighted that his famous last words involve this being their moment of triumph, even though his own people try to warn him. Sidious manipulates everyone from hiding and the good guys don’t even realize he’s standing RIGHT THERE.
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As for Maul: total bad ášš. Killed a majorly tough Jedi and had Obi-Wan on the ropes. The future Vader? Totally the go-to guy if you need to slaughter children. Vader himself? Honestly, I think this pretty much is the final word on that: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmQB1n68KFQ
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PAD
I know this is bordering on off-topic, but for my money, my favorite Star Wars villain is still the novels-only character, Admiral Thrawn. He just put so much thought and effort into his plans that I kind of wanted him to win.
On the Tarkin vs. Sidious question: you’re right in the broad strokes, but IMO wrong on the emotional strokes. The famous last words you mention are not only classic last words, but are basically a perfect sentence to sum up the guy’s entire character. “Evacuate? In our moment of triumph? I think you overestimate their chances.” He literally could not perceive that there was any realistic chance of him losing. That, combined with Peter Cushing’s acting chops, made him a terrific villain for only a relatively few lines.
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Sidious doesn’t really come off well unless you’re a long-time fan who recognizes Palpatine’s name and/or Ian McDiarmid’s face/voice. Later on in the trilogy (Ep3, I’d say), that comes together pretty well, but not here.
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Actually, PAD, I’d be curious to hear what Caroline thought of Darth Sidious. Did she make any connection to Palpatine? If not, what did she think of Sidious?
She didn’t actually connect him with Sidious, which surprised me because usually she’s pretty sharp. But she thought “the guy in the cape” was really creepy; she didn’t like him one bit.
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PAD
Interesting. For the record, when my mother and her then-boyfriend saw the film when it first ran, they didn’t connect it either. I didn’t find this surprising; the surprising part to me was that they went to see the film at all, since Mom had really disliked the first one and skipped the next two. When I made the Palpatine-Sidious connection clear for them, they basically said “that helped … but not really enough to make us like it.”
Actually, I didn’t make the connection between them the first time I saw it, and I was a lifelong fan who know that the Emperor’s name was Palpatine. And yet, somehow, I failed to recognize him as Darth Sidious. I just assumed that Palpatine would become Sidious’s apprentice in the next film and would ultimately replace him as the Sith Lord.
So all these people saw Palpatine, the bad guy, right in front of them, and yet they didn’t realize he was a threat. You might say he was some kind of…phantom menace.
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And yet fans bìŧçhëd about the title.
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Go figure.
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They also hated “Attack of the Clones.” I never understood that. Were there clones? Yes. Did they attack? Yes. Then what’s the problem?
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PAD
Darth Maul was awesome. My biggest disappoint in Phantom Menace was that they killed off such a great character after only one movie.
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I also loved Sidious throughout the movies. He was so much smarter than the other characters, I was kind of rooting for him. I’ve never found Tarkin interesting enough that I could remember his name without someone reminding me about him, but I looked forward to scenes with Sidious.
I don’t know if it considered ‘canon’, but the radio adaptation – which I very much enjoy – of the movies had an explanation for Tarkin’s actions at the end of HOPE. His second in command – in the radio play – had been building up Tarkin’s desire for power by reminding him of how far away the Emperor was, that Vader was only one man, that he, Tarkin, was in control of the most powerful weapon in the Empire … that sort of thing. Then, as the attack begins, Tarkin wisely starts to order an escape ship to be prepped just in case, only to have his underling point out “How long do you think you can maintain your status if it is seen that you can be driven away from your source of power at the slightest provocation?” At which point Tarkin does an about face and we end up with the result movie-goers are familiar with when an officer reports that “There IS a danger…” and Tarkin waves him away.
I always brace myself for an emotional conversation when someone mentions the prequels. The number one complaint I hear is that George Lucas started aiming the movies at kids. So I point out that the originals were squarely aimed at kids, too.
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Friend: No they weren’t!
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Me: R2-D2 was a cute cute little robot that went “beep beep boop.”
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Friend: I think Lucas was picturing a future where androids really do communicate that way for efficiency and people know enough about computers to understand them. [Yes, a friend actually used this justification.]
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Me: The sand people who captured C3PO and R2 were also cute little guys in hoods.
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Friend: Well… okay.
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A lot of the people who are around my age were about 8 when they saw the first or second movie. So of course they didn’t like the Ewoks, by the time they saw the third movie they were looking at it through older eyes. Empire was my first movie in the theater, so I was young enough that I really liked the Ewoks and enthusiastically watched the TV movies and cartoon series about them that came later. By the time the new movies came out, my friends were even older, so of course they had an even stronger reaction to the prequels being aimed at children.
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This kind of things happens all the time with franchises. I remember when the first Transformers movie was in production and Micheal Bay said he saw it as a family franchise. (For the purposes of this conversation, let’s ignore whether or not he actually delivered on that.) I guy I know at work was offended by that idea, saying that Transformers shouldn’t be aimed at families. So I said, “You’re right, after all, the original cartoon was all about graphic violence. Oh wait, no, it was a childrens cartoon where nobody ever got hurt.”
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I just remembered a comic strip that sums this up very well:
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http://www.shortpacked.com/2005/comic/book-1-brings-back-the-80s/06-mrs-greg-killmaster/a-61/
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For some reason, people expect they stuff they loved as a kid to both remain exactly the same and to grow up with them. I think a few things have managed to actually pull this off, like Doctor Who. I’m not even talking about modern Doctor Who, the show started appealing to older audiences around the time that the fourth Doctor started hanging around more scantily clad companions. However, most franchises hit some kind of growing pains or other as their audience gets older.
For some reason, people expect they stuff they loved as a kid to both remain exactly the same and to grow up with them.
In an introduction he wrote for the White Wolf edition of Fritz Leiber’s The Swords of Lankhmar, Neil Gaiman made the point that many stories we loved in childhood we should not return to as adults because over time we have layered many things that were not there onto what little there was there.
Christopher Youd, (as John Christopher) the author of the Tripods Trilogy, died last week. I read the Trilogy when I was about ten and I loved it. I thought about rereading it around 1995 along with the prequel novel he’d written, When the Tripods Came, that I hadn’t read. I decided against it, because I knew the reality wouldn’t live up to the memory.
We grow up. Our expectations change. Our experiences change. The material remains the material, but what we want from it — and what we understand from it — will differ because our perceptions and our vantage point differs.
In this case they might, Allyn. I read them again when I was in college and showing the BBC Tripods series to some friends. They still read very well to me.
Do read them again Allyn. I originally read them in middle/high school (don’t actually remember that was so long ago). Then, years later, at the tender age of 21 or 22, went on a search for them and was not disappointed. Again years later, dug them out when in my 30’s and still enjoyed them.
And I did not know he had died recently. I actually teared up when I read that.
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My four year old son has seen only parts of any of the movies so far. He has seen Jar-Jar though and had the good sense to not like him that much. I’d brag about his good taste and my spectacular and obviously superior child raising abilities, but then again my son absolutely loves to death Godzooky from the old Godzilla cartoon
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Where did I go wrong?
Ya mean, beside showing Ian the old Godzilla cartoon?
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It’s on Netflix kids. What hope did I have?
I’m grateful for Caroline’s insights. Over time, I’ve come to prefer the newer movies to the originals, and it’s little things like her observation about a child’s anxiety that helps with that.
Until the prequels, Vader doesn’t make any sense. He acts like a temperamental child all the time, breaking people any time he doesn’t get his way simply because he can. Once you realize he has never been a rational adult, it all clicks. Addiction to power stunted his maturity. Of course he’s not going to react rationally.
Better still, we see how and why fear of loss has come to define him. It could have benefited from better acting and writing, but I think the plot works much better here than in the other trilogy.
If you’ll forgive me a hipster moment, I remember when Vader was cool. The main reason I like the later three movies is because it makes it abundantly clear that this was never the case. Anakin had considerable talents in the prequels, but he was never cool–and those things hold true for the guy we see in the original trilogy. He’s still a good pilot with a creative streak, and he’s ruled more than ever by a childishly destructive temper.
I do wish I could make more sense out of Padme, though. I get that Anakin was looking for someone to replace his mother (and that’s creepy), but what damage caused her to shuffle into his shadow? Was it a consequence of having been given so much authority at such a young age?
Oddly enough, this is something else I like about the movies. The characters are not as black-and-white as those of the original series, even when it comes to the struggles between the Jedi and Sith. There is more to discuss about the characters, regardless of performance.
I don’t know if you’ve discussed this but the movie The People Vs. George Lucas came out on dvd a couple months ago (it had a very limited commercial release, such as playing one theater in Los Angeles) but it is a surprisingly well made film. I expected something one step above a fan film but it is a very well executed documentary worthy of playing on network TV. It has lots of vintage footage, including how excited people were in 1999 when Phantom Menace opened and the letdown many fans felt after seeing it. Interviewing people as they left the theater after waiting in line for hours (or even days) is quite revealing. I can’t say I was surprised by the lackluster quality of Phantom Menace even in 1999 as The Return of The Jedi in 1983 left a lot to be desired and I don’t think it holds a candle to Star Wars and Empire, and it is basically just a remake of Star Wars. It was supposed to be more. Gary Kurtz (who had a falling out with George Lucas over the spiraling budget of Empire, which cost 3 times as much to make as Star Wars and would have bankrupted Lucas had the film failed) talks about what Jedi was originally supposed to be before Lucas decided to make it a toy movie with all of the commercial potential that implies. Much of what is wrong with Phantom Menace is present in Jedi as well. The only part of Jedi I like at all is the climax with Luke, Vader and the Emperor. People forget that the Star Wars phenemenon basically died after Jedi was released, so much so that when Mel Brooks released the Star Wars parody Spaceballs three years later, nobody cared and it flopped. Even the Star Wars novels disappeared in the 1980s and only started being revived in the early 1990s when Lucas decided to start reviving the franchise. When Marvel stopped publishing the Star Wars comics in the 1980s, the only publisher who wanted to pick up the license was Blackthorne, who published comics out of his basement. That’s how dead Star Wars was after 1983.
“so much so that when Mel Brooks released the Star Wars parody Spaceballs three years later”
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I just didn’t think Spaceballs was one of Brooks’ better movies.
The sad thing is that it’s been a long while since Brooks had a better movie. The film he directed that I liked was “High Anxiety” and the last one that I really loved was “Silent Movie.” I did enjoy “To Be or Not to Be,” but he didn’t direct or write that one.
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Me, I still think his best was “The Twelve Chairs.”
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PAD
I really liked Robin Hood: Men in Tights. It had a young Dave Chappelle. Best of all, it had what all parodies should have, a lead actor who was good enough that he could play Robin Hood in a serious version. Unlike some Robin Hoods, Cary Elwes could speak with a British accent.
Cary Elwes was the only good thing about Robin Hood: Men in Tights. I didn’t laugh once in that movie, but I did smile once, merely because of Elwes’s charm. He should have been in Prince of Thieves instead of Kevin Costner (which wasn’t a good movie, either. Was Robin and Marian the last good Robin Hood movie? I skipped the Russell Crowe one).
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I did like Life Stinks. I think that was Mel Brooks’s last good movie. My favorite is still The Producers, though. The Twelve Chairs is fairly awesome, too.
I do remember SOME people thinking poorly of A NEW HOPE, but they were a small minority. Most people were quite taken by it. Heck, 2001 is my all-time favourite film, and I was a big fan of STAR TREK from Day One of the original series yet, when that Blockade Runner flew overhead, followed by that enourmous Star Destroyer blazing away at it, my well-remembered thought was “Wow, E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith is alive and well in George Lucas.” Part of the problem, I think, is that marketing hyperbole back when had it the new ‘2001’ which it was never meant to be, so some people were disappointed. But even Lucas specifically stated it was never meant to be real science fiction. It was a rousing example of space opera/science fantasy (wherefore my comparison to Smith’s LENSMAN series) and that it excelled at.
As for the problems with the ‘prequels’, Jar-Jar was the least of them. From taking the unknowable, mystical ‘Force’ and turning it into a quatifiable phenomenom thanks to those silly ‘midichlorians’, to the unexpectedly sadistic Kenobi who left the horribly burned Annakin by the lava lake instead of putting him out of his agony (just because the plot required it), there were just too many examples of sloppy writing.
From taking the unknowable, mystical ‘Force’ and turning it into a quatifiable phenomenom thanks to those silly ‘midichlorians’…
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That was really my only serious problem with Phantom Menace. The Force isn’t this mystic energy field that surrounds us and binds us – it’s some kind of super-flu! (My personal fanwank on that was that midichlorians do not, in fact, enable Force use, because if that were the case, the Jedi could have simply cultured some in a lab, injected Yoda and Windu, turned them into super-Jedi, and torn down the Dark Side veil that was their problem in the first place. Instead, in my view, some Jedi researcher discovered once that the most powerful Force users host the biggest midichlorian colonies, came the the conclusion that the microbes cause the Force, and the Jedi, being Jedi, never really questioned that – but in fact they’re parasites, feeding on the Force energy of the host, and the Sith seem so powerful because they clean themselves of the infestation!)
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It might also have been nice to have a throwaway line from Qui-Gon acknowledging that the Gungan had once had a developed, highly technological civilization (as shown by their selective permeable force fields, sophisticated underwater craft, and hand-held plasma grenades), but had somehow lost that as their culture degraded (possibly as a result of hiding from the humans on Naboo?). It would have only taken a few minutes of screen time, which could have easily been subtracted from their journey “through the planet’s core” (yeah, right)…
My personal fanwank on that was that midichlorians do not, in fact, enable Force use, because if that were the case, the Jedi could have simply cultured some in a lab, injected Yoda and Windu, turned them into super-Jedi, and torn down the Dark Side veil that was their problem in the first place.
My spin on the midichlorian problem is entirely opposite yours. 🙂
My theory is that Shmi worked for Sidious on Coruscant. She became pregnant by an unknown father. Sidious decided to create a super-Force user, and so she was injected regularly with midichlorians to try and increase her growing child’s Force potential.
Then, to hide what he’d done, he dumped Shmi on Tatooine at the ášš-end of space (love that line from Troops!) so that the child could develop out from under the watchful eye of the Jedi Council. The Force potential would largely protect the child (see pod-racing), the lack of Jedi training would make the child something of a feral Force user, and the child’s raw power would be such that it couldn’t be easily tamed even if he did fall under the Jedi’s sway.
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“My spin on the midichlorian problem…”
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My spin was that they were a big problem for me. They took a lot away from the myth of the original movies.
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They way they laid out what a Jedi was and the training and life they had to live, there was almost the idea that anyone could be a Jedi. It wasn’t true that anyone would become one, but at some point, anyone could be.
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It was a bit like becoming an astronaut or a Ninja or a monk. Not everyone who sought out the profession would ultimately have the natural aptitude to do it, but we could all try. But suddenly, after nothing even remotely like the concept being hinted at in the first three films or touched on in the various early book lines, you suddenly have this odd idea come up that says that only special people, only people with high levels of some bs Force virus can even be considered as a potential Jedi.
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It was a weird thing to contribute to my souring on the film, but it did. It took the idea that these amazing warrior monks known as the Jedi were beings who took to this life and made themselves an ideal and worked to make themselves something that took hold of the greatest possible potential of their existence and turned them in to a group of people who just happened to be lucky enough to have caught the Force Flu virus.
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Not only was this a dumb move by Lucas as far as I was concerned, but it was an unnecessary one. By coming up with this bs explanation as a plot device, he hurt the myth of the Jedi a bit and he didn’t have to use that plot device just to have a young Anakin Skywalker discovered as a potentially powerful future Jedi. It was definitely a case of explaining something away that didn’t need to be explained away and hurting things rather than helping them.
And, knowing the tricks the Force can play, he just left Shmi and the kid out there on the ášš-end of space, without so much as someone keeping an eye on them, secure that there would never, ever be Jedi who just coincidentally happened to stumble across this little planet? (Especially when, judging by the number of times they had to go back to the same few worlds in the prequels, there must have been like maybe three dozen inhabited worlds in the entire Republic. Yoda’s old buddy Chewbacca? Really??)
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Nope, can’t buy that a puppetmaster as skilled as Palpatine would have left the kid alone that long. He’d have come along when Anakin was about three, had Shmi killed, taken the kid under his wing, and raised him to believe the Jedi were responsible.
While I could dispute various things about Phantom Menace, you’ll get no argument from me about midichlorians. To me that was Lucas listening too closely to critics who dismissed the Force as vague, new age claptrap. After Phantom Menace, “May the Force be with you” officially meant nothing. Before, it was a general sort of blessing, hoping that right and spirituality would be on your side. In the revised Force, if you peed in a cup and it turned out you didn’t have enough of these little creatures in your system, it didn’t matter how righteous your cause. You were šhìŧ outta luck.
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Hated that.
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PAD
I’m trying to remember whether or not the whole midichlorian thing made any impact on me back then. “The Force has always been strong in my family” line from Return of the Jedi kind of implied a genetic basis for the whole thing (though in a more mystical “destiny follow this bloodline”/royal blood kinda way.) I think at first I saw the whole “midichlorian” test as “if you are strong in the force, these things show up in your blood” the same way that if you have a certain virus, certain antigens show up in your blood, the antigens don’t cause the virus.
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My thoughts on the the two trilogies? In episodes 4-6 We heard Vader’s voice, opinions, anger, pleading, motivations, temptations, ideas, and apologies. Darth Maul was silent and we learned nothing about him or why we should care about him as a character. Some would point to Boba Fett in the same way from eps 4-6 and when we found out where he came from, I still didn’t care about him. I like Liam Neeson as an actor, and he appeared to be trying, but I saw more from Alec Guiness in the films, regardless of how little he liked them (at least according to his quotes.) I think he was given more to work with overall.
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I think Episodes 4-6 hold up better despite their weaknesses, and will continue to throughout the years. We’ll see.
I think I may just be a kid; I’m with Caroline in that I really enjoy Phantom Menace as well as the other prequels. To me it’s just a part of the whole saga, not to be compared to the later films, just to be enjoyed.
I’ll never be a film critic and yeah, I think I may just be a bit of a zombie when it comes to Star Wars (and Star Trek I might add), but I certainly get the impression I get more enjoyment out of the experience than a lot of people. Stick to your guns, Caroline! It’s all good fun!
Jack
The only excuse for having Jar-Jar be Jar-Jar in the first film would have been for him to evolve by the third film. I would have dug it had he been a senator in the third film speaking like John Houseman: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63gpEtgrDq0&feature=related
How old were your daughter and Portman when they met at drama camp? After all, Leon was a 1994 release, and she was eleven or twelve when it was made, so perhaps she had some reason to feel she was gonna be a movie star…
Nine or ten. It was before “Leon.” I know that because all the aspiring actresses in Long Island knew when they were casting for “Leon.”
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PAD
I really like Phantom Menace. Is it better than the orignal trilogy? In my opinion, NO.
But Phantom Menace is a really fun movie imo. I think it may just be the best of the prequels too. I like Anakin better in this movie (he’s a bit too whiney in the other movies) and I liked Neeson & McGregor in this. Oh and I have to be one of the few people that LIKE Jar Jar. He’s just a fun, wacky character. I don’t think Lucas might to offend anyone with him. (and no, he’s not the best character that Lucas created, but he is fun).
Oh and the fight between Darth Maul, Obi Wan, and Qui Gon Jinn at the end! EPIC! Probably better than any of the fights in the orignal trilogy. Just well put together.
So, yes, the orignal trilogy is better. But I like Phantom Menace. Its just a fun movie. Its what you’d call a popcorn movie. And really, why can’t we have movies like this? Isn’t it nice to escape from reality once & awhile? I think Phantom Menace & does a good job of taking you to another universe far, far, away.
Oh and btw, I like Attack of the Clones too. Though, the third one, Revenage of the Sith, is a bit too dark for my tastes. I don’t think Lucas needed to be that extreme in showing Anakin’s turn into Vader.
Oh and I could totally see a kid enjoying Phantom Menace more than the orignal trilogy. Come on! The main character is a kid! And there’s lots more action, special effects, etc. I think kids get the whole “its just movie, its just for fun” thing more than *most* adults do.
This adult, right here, likes to see some fun popcorn movies once & awhile.
I think the biggest problems with the prequels was that there was no one telling Lucas “No” on anything or at least diluting his ideas. I’ve wondered over the years if the original movies would have been as good if Lucas had had total control and got all that he wanted. I think “Jedi” certainly suffered for not having Gary Kurtz around. I’m not trying to Lucas’ accomplishments away from him to be sure, but he did have some awesome help with his older movies.
I can’t muster up any fanboy hate for the prequels, my daughters enjoyed them when they came out, and my oldest considers herself a SW fan – mostly because of the prequels. Also mostly because of Hayden Christensen. I will speak no more on that…
I do remember a certain fan snobbery about SW back in ’77. Yes, it was well received by most, critics and the general public. Heck, it’s one of the few movies my mom went and saw twice in the theaters and she was no SF fan. But I do remember some prominent SF authors hating it (Harlan Ellison for one). I also lost a friendship over it. Knew a guy in art class who seemed it was his duty to let me know how badly it sucked, to the point where I wanted to punch him in his smug-smug mcsmuggie-smug face (I didn’t, but yelling loudly that “no one gave a dámņ” about his opinion finally shut him up, and ended our friendship). So yeah, Peter, your dead to rights on that aspect.
Crap – “take Lucas’ accomplishments away” it should read: also “who seemed to think” and “you’re dead to rights”
Sigh.
Drew McWeeny did a similar series of articles documenting him showing the six movies to his children (in the order 4-5-1-2-3-6) that are well worth a read. This is the first one and you can click on the Film Nerd 2.0 tag at the bottom to find the others.
http://www.hitfix.com/blogs/motion-captured/posts/film-nerd-2-0-we-kick-off-a-special-series-with-a-first-viewing-of-star-wars
I was going to bring this up too. When I read that order, it was like a revelation. A genius way to show the kids the films.
PAD, do you plan on showing Caroline the other two prequels at home on TV or await for the 3D conversations over the next two years?
Actually, I gave her the choice. She said she wanted to wait for the 3D versions.
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PAD
I can proudly say that I have seen NONE of the prequels that Lucas foisted upon us. And I never will. I had no interest when they first came out, I have even less interest in them now.
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I’ll just enjoy the original three and ignore the rest.
That’s an unusual reason for pride.
I’d have been okay with Phantom Menace except for two characters:
Jar Jar Binks.
He is the single worst type of character: the comedy relief who has no redeeming virtues. None. Zero. Zip. All he’s got is clumsiness and a goofy voice. I call the the Orko syndrome. Remember Orko from He-Man? The little wizard whose spells misfire EVERY EPISODE, and those misfires are duck-and-cover dangerous and take He-Man to fix? Jar Jar just breaks everything he touches! That is not funny, it is irritating and predictable. You want a great comedy relief character? Try Ron Stoppable of the Kim Possible cartoon. He was able to fight (monkey kung fu of some kind), and he had great lines (during yet another attack of monkey ninjas: “Why does it always have to be monkeys?!?! Why can’t it be crazed supermodels?!?!?) And no, I do not blame Jar Jar’s voice-over actor in the least. I blame the guy who wrote the character: not even the best actor in the world can make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear script. Okay, Scrappy Doo is more annoying than Jar Jar, but it is hard to out-annoy Scrappy.
And the kid. Yawn.
He had all the acting inflection of a tranquilized toddler. Listen to his voice when he is flying the fighter into orbit. Is this how he’d act on a rollercoaster? Like he is reciting the periodic table of the elements to his bored classroom?) And he treated leaving his mom forever like going off to a mildly boring summer camp. (The kid actor still has plenty of time to get better acting chops, and I wish him all the luck in the world.)
I liked 2 and 3. I liked Anikin, he could show some real menace. And the emperor, WOW!!!! Especially in 3, a perfectly inflected, squirt-poison-in-the-ear, snake-hissy voice, his face and every gesture dripping of royalty and love of EVIL.
P.S. Why was the midichlorian thing even there? Look, you show that Matt Dillon is a good shot, the best in the west. But explaining how his six-shooter works adds nothing to the story.
I think the reason why the originals work despite their flaws also has to do with the strong source material Lucas drew from. The original movie was a melding of John Ford’s “The Searchers” and Kurosawa’s the “Hidden Fortress.” Lucas seems to cut-n-paste large portions of the latter movie in particular into Episode IV.
What’s the apocryphal tale? After seeing A New Hope for the first time Kurosawa says he wants to meet Lucas. George is thrilled and can’t wait. When they actually meet Kurosawa just looks at him saying nothing. Finally George looks away and writes him a check. (totally false but..)
Also a chunk of Yojimbo – the fight in the cantina is lifted pretty well bodily, including the cut-the-arm-off ending.
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At least he didn’t lift the coffin-ordering bit, too.
Speaking of Star Wars, I just read a day or so ago that Lucas has gone a bit Orwellian on us. Apparently, according to him, Greedo ALWAYS fired first in ANH, and “the viewing angle” was just such that we couldn’t make it out.
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And oh yes, we have always been at war with Oceania.
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Wow… Seriously?
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Greedo always fired first and we just couldn’t see it due to the angle of the shot? Right… And I guess Greedo was using a super silencer as well since we never heard him fire first either.
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And the FBI agents in E.T. never carries guns either. That was just some odd think we all remembered wrong.
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He seriously said that? Do you have a link? Not that I’m doubting your word, Tim, I just want to see it myself so that I can read the whole bit and figure out if I should laugh or just shake my head.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/george-lucas-star-wars-interview-288523
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Yep, he actually said that. On the record and everything. [rolleyes]
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Holy
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Mother
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of
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God…
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He has completely lost his mind.
The Force is nuts in this one.
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PAD
Well, we *are* at war with Eurasia. We’ve always been at war with Eurasia…
Yeah, that’s the thing that gets me the most. It is ok to defend yourself if someone is pointing a gun directly at you and says I’m going to kill you now. If he fired at Han first, Han would be dead. I didn’t buy the blu ray, I just can’t give money to Greedo firing first, or at all.
I’ve always said that of Lucas could wipe all of our brains about things like Han shot first, and destroy all copies of the film, he would.
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Almost hard to believe he’s such a supporter of film preservation.
Okay, I was curious, so I watched that scene frame by frame to see if there was any possible way Greedo could have fired first. And there isn’t. Han says “I bet you will”, and literally the next frame is the blinding white flash of his blaster. Even if Greedo somehow missed by such a wide margin that it fell outside the frame of the film (even though there’s a good two feet of space on either side of Han), there simply isn’t time for him to fire first.
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So, clearly, there had to have been a second shooter from the grassy knoll.
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I have question on the topic that might actually settle it. My copy of the original novelization of Star Wars from way back when is in a box, so I can’t look, but didn’t Lucas write the novelization himself? If so, then he would have written that scene in the book as he intended it to be way back then.
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Also, although probably less meaningful than the other question depending on the answer, the Marvel adaptation of the film was approved by Lucas and his people. It’s fairly clear about who shot first. Was there ever any complaint by Lucas about Han shooting the first and only shot of the exchange in the book that anyone has ever come across?
Lucas was credited with writing it, but it was actually ghost written by Alan Dean Foster.
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Not as definitive as I would have hoped then. Still an interesting thing to check. The only thing is that it isn’t first gen Lucas. It would be a bit like the comic though. He and his people must have approved it and it would have been done off of his original script and notes on the material. The original intent for the thing would thus likely have been known to the ghost writer in question.
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I’d still be interested in finding a copy (or finding the box that mine is in) and looking it up.
Here is the scene from my copy:
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“Over my dead body,” Solo said unamiably.
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The alien was not impressed. “If you insist. Will you come outside with me, or must I finish you here?”
note that Solo’s life was on the line. It was hardly cold blood.
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“I don’t think they’d like another killing in here,” Solo pointed out.
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Something which might have been a laugh came from the creature’s translator. “They’d hardly notice. Get up, Solo. I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time. You’ve embarrassed me in front of Jabba with your pious excuses for the last time.”
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“I think You’re right.”
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Light and noise filled the little corner of the cantina, and when it had faded, all that remained of the unctuous alien was a smoking, slimy spot on the stone floor.
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Solo brought his hand and the smoking weapon it held out from beneath the table, drawing bemused stares from several of the cantina’s patrons and clucking sounds from its more knowledgeable ones. They had known the creature had committed its fatal mistake in allowing Solo the chance to get his hands under cover.
STAR WARS Episode IV A NEW HOPE
by George Lucas
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Revised Fourth Draft
January 15, 1976
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INT. MOS EISLEY – CANTINA
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As Han is about to leave, Greedo, a slimy green-faced alien
with a short trunk-nose, pokes a gun in his side. The creature
speaks in a foreign tongue translated into English subtitles.
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GREEDO
Going somewhere, Solo?
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HAN
Yes, Greedo. As a matter of fact, I
was just going to see your boss.
Tell Jabba that I’ve got his money.
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Han sits down and the alien sits across from him holding the
gun on him.
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GREEDO
It’s too late. You should have paid
him when you had the chance. Jabba’s
put a price on your head, so large
that every bounty hunter in the galaxy
will be looking for you. I’m lucky I
found you first.
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HAN
Yeah, but this time I got the money.
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GREEDO
If you give it to me, I might forget
I found you.
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HAN
I don’t have it with me. Tell Jabba…
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GREEDO
Jabba’s through with you. He has no
time for smugglers who drop their
shipments at the first sign of an
Imperial cruiser.
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HAN
Even I get boarded sometimes. Do you
think I had a choice?
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Han Solo slowly reaches for his gun under the table.
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GREEDO
You can tell that to Jabba. He may
only take your ship.
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HAN
Over my dead body.
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GREEDO
That’s the idea. I’ve been looking
forward to killing you for a long
time.
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HAN
Yes, I’ll bet you have.
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Suddenly the slimy alien disappears in a blinding flash of
light. Han pulls his smoking gun from beneath the table as
the other patron look on in bemused amazement. Han gets up
and starts out of the cantina, flipping the bartender some
coins as he leaves.
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HAN
Sorry about the mess.
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So, no line about Greedo shooting first and Han managing to lean out of the way of a laser blast from three feet in front of him then.
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Yeah…
Further, Ford’s delivery of the line, “Sorry about the mess,” was properly shaky for someone who’d been forced to shoot first in what I can only call “preemptive self-defense”. He’d fought off enemy spacecraft before, and probably had to shoot people before, but was obviously not used to being the first to shoot.
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So Lucas’ fears were obviated by Ford’s acting choice. Of course, I don’t think Lucas has the first clue about acting, so…
Tomorrow I’m taking my grandson to see “The Phantom Menace.” 15 years ago I took his mother to see the original “Star Wars” when it was re-released as The Special Edition.
She loved it. And now we get to pass it on to another generation.
He’s 7, and I’m hoping he thinks it’s the greatest movie he’s ever seen.
I remember seeing archive news footage of some people’s reaction to Star Wars back in ’77 as they were leaving the theater and it wasn’t all positive.
In fact, IIRC that footage was played against some people’s reaction to ST:TPM and it gave me this deja vu feeling.
Dif’rent strokes, for dif’rent folks. PAD’s kid had a good time? Other kids possibly did? Good for them.
All the Lucas hating and fantrums I see posted on the net make me wish more people would remember that SNL skit and like the Shat once said, “Get a life!”
I remember an article in Boy’s Life, the official magazine of the Boy Scouts, that tore Star Wars a new a**hole. (I want to say it was written by either Ellison or Asimov, but don’t quote me on that.) It picked the film apart for excessive scientifically stupidity, from sounds in space to the ludicrousness of Han and Luke manning gun turrets in the Falcon. I read the article years later — a library closed up when I was about ten, and my dad got me bound runs of Boy’s Life going back about thirty years — but it’s stuck with me. People ragged on Star Wars even then.
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Boy’s Life… The only thing that I still remember science fiction-wise from that magazine was the actually pretty good (or seemingly at the time) comic adaptation of John Christopher’s Tripods trilogy.
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Actually, that’s dámņëd near the only thing I remember about Boy’s Life at all.
I enjoyed Phantom Menace. I don’t love it, but I don’t despise it either. I agree with the comments above that the part I disliked the least was the midichlorians.
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The funny thing is, if this was just a theatrical re-release like they used to do in the old days I’d want to go see it, just to see it in the theater again… but I’ve really been getting sick of 3D, especially on films that weren’t made for it.
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So I decided to go see Lucas’s other movie Red Tails instead. It was GREAT. Fantastic aerial battles and wonderful shots of the planes, as good as any of the dogfight scenes in Star Wars. An inspiring anti-racism message, interesting characters, and a feel-good story of the underdogs rising up and getting respected.
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(Of course, Lucas didn’t write or direct it, he produced it, but isn’t that the part of moviemaking he does best?)
Correction: I meant to say “the part I liked the least was the midichlorians.” Saying “disliked the least” would I mean I disliked other parts more. Whoops.
I actually enjoyed THE PHANTOM MENACE when I saw it (and I’m 41 now, so I wasn’t a little kid). Yes, it had numerous flaws (one of my biggest below), but the pod race was very exciting, and I liked the lightsaber duel at the end. What I remember is that a friend of mine was absolutely convinced it would be great, would talk at great length and great passion about how Lucaqs had years to make it and it would be absolutely amazing — and he left the theater after seeing it like he’d been hit with a large dead fish. I think it you went into it with no pre-conceptions, there was enough there to enjoy; if you viewed it as the next chapter in a great sci-fi series, you’d be disappointed.
And the part I hated: trusting Watto. He tells the Jedi he’s got the only engine in the region (planet?), he won’t accept Imperial credits — and they buy it. They apparently don’t look elsewhere, they don’t Jedi Mind Trick someone into swapping Imperial credits for money Watto would accept, they just take the greedy salesman at his word about what he’s selling. I suppose it was necessry to set up the Pod race, but to me it’s like going to buy a candy bar, being told it costs $1000 dollars in Canadian money, and immediately plotting how to get a grand in Canadian instead of thinking there might be an easier way to get a candy bar…
Count me as another person who liked the Phantom Menace. So much so, that I even wrote a Star Wars fan fic shortly after watching it, years ago, and posted it on theforce.net message board. On the bright side, my sister, who had bullied me practically my entire childhood, complimented me on it. One of the few times that she ever said anything nice to me.
Well, the real question I wonder about is will she still like Phantom menace in ten years or so the way you still like the Originals?
Probably. I view the originals as pleasant enough entertainment, but in many instances marred by subpar writing, directing and acting.
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I don’t hold it up as the be-all, end-all defining experience of my movie-going youth. Yes, I object to the Han-shot-first change, not because it raped my childhood (as people love to say) or undercut the character, because the character’s pretty cardboard anyway; I hated it because I thought it was badly staged, requiring Greedo to have missed a point blank shot by Han making a minuscule move. If he’d redone it using already existing alternate footage in which Han lunges to the right as Greedo shoots, hits the floor in a shoulder roll and makes a ricochet shot that blows Greedo’s head off, I’d have had no problem with it.
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For the most part, I honestly don’t care that Lucas makes changes. It’s his creative vision; let him do what he wants. Accept it, don’t accept it; see the films, don’t see the films. No skin off my nose. I just can’t wrap myself around the vitriol that accompanies his doing so.
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“Star Wars,” to me, was simply a film that I enjoyed in 1977. So were “Annie Hall,” “Close Encounters,” and “Saturday Night Fever.” I enjoyed the sequel to “Star Wars” more, the second sequel less.
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If Caroline, when she’s looking back at films she enjoyed in her youth, has that perspective toward it, then yeah, I’d really be okay with that.
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PAD
Peter, everything you said in your post and the following comments is true. I was incredibly excited when I watched the midnight screening of episode 1. I kept clinging on to the hope that it was going to get better. I wish you wrote it then it would have been awesome.
The first Hulk movie was also a huge disappointment which I had massive expectations of but I found your novelization of the film to be excellent, which at first glance would seem an impossible task.
There some things I don’t understand here.
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1) It is said that the same things that people say about the prequels were said by other people about the first trilogy. That true. But is that it? Does the fact that people said the same things about originals and the prequels means that the criticism is equally valid in both cases? I realize that taste is subjective, but this is the blog of a writer who also critics films, comics and TV shows. Is there nothing to say about the story, characters, acting etc. in the two trilogies other than that in both cases some people didn’t like them and used similar arguments?
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2) It’s pretty trivial that children (or teens) like somethings that adults find completely boring. But when we assess movies, TV shows, books and comics for kids — like Disney’s Snow White, The Lion King, Spongebob Squarepants, Superman, Spiderman, Narnia, Barney the dinosaur, Wall-E, Smurfs, Up, Tin-Tin, Saved by the Bell, Star Trek, Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, The Hobbit, X-Men etc. — isn’t there more to say than “well, the kids loved them.”
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3) It’s been about thirty years since the first trilogy and ten years since the second. Don’t we have enough time to start assessing the long term ‘staying power’ of each trilogy, both culturally and as far as whether the kids who viewed them still like them? Do the children who saw Phantom Menace in 1999 still like them? Do children who saw Star Wars in 1977 still like them?
“shakes head” … ahh, youth … no idea what the “Star Wars” phenom was really like when it first came out in the theaters … wild excitement on the part of youth, extra really long lines, multiple sold-out showings, held-over showings well in excess of a year’s time (does that even occur on a natural basis in today’s market?), eager anticipation of the not yet released “Star Wars- Early Bird” toy sales (you would send in a SASE and hope against hope that you would be a lucky kid chosen to purchase an offering of the not-yet released toys!), back when George Lucas was widely still considered a plucky kid up against a studio to get this project made, Han shot Greedo first – an act that significantly sealed impressions of him as a “cool dangerous dude” who was not to be messed with – despite later revisions by Lucas to make it the other way around, etc.
I went to a re-release of “Star Wars” years later with all the upgrades and revised story line. Oh, the kids ate it up to be sure, but they had no idea of the original impact of the movie – for them, the “Star Wars” had always been a part of their world. There’s nothing quite so generation-jarring as to realize that a kid has no true understanding of the progress made beforehand when all the wonders of modern technology has rendered them somewhat at a loss to fully appreciate things.
And, “Yes. I am older but, No, I am not so old that I am unaware of the past.”
No matter what our varying opinions on “Phantom Menace,” can we at least all agree that it may well have been worth it just for the Weird Al parody? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEcjgJSqSRU&ob=av2e
Abso-bloody-lutely. And amusingly, this spring we happened to see both Don McLean and Weird Al in concerts just a couple of months apart. That tune was much in our heads for quite some time.
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And back when the song was new, we also happened to see a Weird Al show while we lived in LA. He was singing this song, got to “I guess … I’ll train … THIS BOY.” And out walked Jake Lloyd.
Just about everything Weird Al does is worth it — and often leaves me laughing at songs that really have no inherent humor in them, from Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” to Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way.” Ah, the power of parody…
I love his “Christmas at Ground Zero.” Last Christmas I made a Christmas mixtape that intercut Christmas songs with the old “NORAD Tracks Santa” radio bulletins, but I left off the ones that revealed that it was, in fact, Santa, and it began with Neil Innes’ “Dear Father Christmas” (a song Innes wrote in the early 80s asking Santa to end nuclear war), had The Royal Guardsmen’s “Snoopy’s Christmas” in the middle, and closed with “Christmas at Ground Zero.”
Good. I’m glad Caroline liked it. I’m not a fan of the prequel trilogy, but I don’t see any reason to get all worked up about it. So, people saw some movies they didn’t like. Take that as it is and move on.
For what it’s worth, I just visited Box Office Mojo, and I see that film (before the final totals have been released) opened at No. 4 for the weekend.
I’ve been concentrating on catching up on the Oscar nominees myself. I’d planned to see “Albert Nobbs” or “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” (in which Gary Oldman is going to have to be dámņëd impressive to drive out my memories of Alec Guinness as George Smiley) this weekend, but they both left town. On the other hand, I rented “Moneyball” (the last Best Picture nominee I had to see — which reminds me, if you watch “The Tree of Life,” have heavy medication on hand) and “Beginners.” So I hadn’t even remember “Episode 1” was rereleased until I came here.
Oldman won’t drive out your memories of Alec Guinness, Kim, but he’ll impress you nonetheless. I saw the film a few weeks ago and liked it a ton — and Oldman deserved the Oscar nomination he got, IMO.
I haven’t seen the film since it came out when I was in high school. The one thing that I clearly remember about the movie is that it taught me to stop watching previews for movies that I was looking forward to.
Darth Maul’s double lightsaber was in every preview for that film at least in my memory. I remember watching the movie, and when the scene finally shows the double lightsaber there is a swell of music and a reveal that would have dropped my jaw if I hadn’t been expecting it. That’s my personal lesson from the Phantom Menace. I want to enjoy a movie and all of its surprises.
What’s most amazing to me is that adults are so attached to this movie series obviously targeted at kids. How did you feel about the new Smurfs movie? Watching the rereleases of star wars in the 90s I sat bored while my friends gurgled with glee. I hadn’t seen the movies since their initial release, hadn’t memorized the lines. I sat there blown away at how bad the trilogy I liked as a kid was so terrible. Still my kids like all things star wars now, but they also like alot of mindless crap – don’t we all?
“…we then insisted she watch what we consider the real “first three movies,” namely episodes 4, 5 and 6.”
I will show the to my son in this order: 4, 5, 1, 2, 3, 6. Do google search for the film nerd 2.0 blog on Hitfix, he makes a very good case about that order.
I’m gonna agree with your kid here, PAD . . . to a point. The movie isn’t NEARLY as bad as most people make it out to be. They can deride the acting and writing and direction all they want, but I’d totally agree that Phantom is at the same level as the originals, aside from a few key points. And with three MINOR changes, I think most people would have felt exactly the same way:
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1) I think Anakin should have been older. Not 17-19, but at least Portman’s age. Early adolescent. Beyond that, no real changes needed.
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2) The aforementioned midi-chlorians. He could have said they were a side effect of the Force, and it would have been cool, no harm, no foul. But the source? Bleh.
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3) Make Jar-Jar into Chewie: he doesn’t speak English. He can still be slapstick, he can be a klutz, he can even throw in a “How wude!” every once in a while. No one complained when Chewie did something funny, because he wasn’t narrating, so we could fill in our own inner dialog for him. Likewise, I really think Jar-Jar would be infinitely more tolerable if he was just a bit more, well . . . alien.
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I have a few more personal objections, but they’re mostly from a nerdy, nit-picker’s perspective (why does a tiny, desolate, largely uninhabited rim-world like Tatooine have to be a central location in four of the six movies? You’d think it was someplace IMPORTANT. And did the droids REALLY have to be in the entire series? They knew Vader as a kid? That’s kinda coincidental, huh?), but with just those three changes, I think the fandom would have embraced Phantom as a worthy successor . . . or predecessor, as the case may be. And for the most part, so is Clones.
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Now Revenge, that movie is a RAGING pile of Sith . . . .
Mr. David you just blew my mind…I had NO IDEA what-so-ever that Keira Knightley was one of Padme’s doubles…running to IMDB to check and discovering it was true shook me to my core for some reason. Also finding out there that Sofia Copalla was another was interesting- but makes sense given her father’s friendship to George “I have no sense of anything being sacred” Lucas.
I would’ve though that Ms. Knightley, at that point in her career (even being pre-Pirates” was above that small part. And I would also think she’d have hated to take a part next to an actress who people constantly compare and confuse her with.
Beyond that, thirteen years ago after being the first one in the theater to grab what I consider prime seating, I sat bewildered, a feeling of betrayal ripping my stomach apart before I let loose with expletive after expletive about what I had just witnessed. Ushers were asked to come remove me as friends tried to control me and talk me down from the heights of temper and rage while people stared (and laughed at my words…or at me…who knows?) as they filed out of the theater. I like to think they all felt the same sense of shame and indignity that we had just handed over more money to a man who had taken a piss over everything we had held dear…
For die hard Star Wars fans who spent years and years reading the comics and novels and buying action figure after action figure- the prequels were nothing more than a slap in the face.
I remember taking my mom and older sisters to see TPM and my mother enjoyed it. Laughed at Jar Jar. Was excited during the pod race. All that. Friends who weren’t really into Star Wars enjoyed it. Kids got it. So I’ve gotten from the first release that Lucas knew what he was doing. I was 5 when I first saw Star Wars in the theatre and I still remember a good portion of the images. He’s always maintained the films were for kids (and the kids in all of us)… shame so many forget that.
PAD,
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You need to have Caroline watch Weird Al’s “The Saga Begins” and tell us what she thinks of that.
With any movie, I suppose it comes down to whether or not you’re willing to allow other people to enjoy it if you yourself do not. There are those people (and we all have met them, I’m sure) who are so invested in their dislike of something that if you express anything short of active pure hate for said object, then you must be a tasteless moron. I personally had all sorts of problems with Phantom Menace; I thought Annakin was completely unappealing, it seemed like Jar Jar walked in from another movie, the attempts to explain the Force struck me as completely wrong-headed, Obi-Wan was a block of wood, I found the bits with Amidala and her decoy kind of confusing, and there were parts of the CGI backgrounds, in some of the interior scenes, that weren’t in proper perspective. Still, I enjoyed it a lot. Parts of it were quite exciting — Darth Maul was dámņëd cool, and deserved to last longer, in my opinion. I don’t castigate anyone for enjoying it; there are a number of films for which I have a great deal of affection that can hardly be said to be great, or even particularly good. The prequels will never hold the place in the culture that the originals do, because the originals were new and different and groundbreaking; no one had seen anything like them before. The same can’t be said about the prequels, regardless of how much anyone does or does not like them.
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Peter David: “She didn’t actually connect him with Sidious, which surprised me because usually she’s pretty sharp. But she thought “the guy in the cape” was really creepy; she didn’t like him one bit.
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For you, her and everyone else,
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We just got Ian, a total Lego freak, the animated Lego Star Wars feature The PAdawan Menace since we found it on sale for under $10 for Blu-Ray/DVD combo pack that includes a Lego mini fig of Han Solo as a kid. It’s 22 minutes of mostly just goofy kid fun, but a few gags are adult enjoyable as well.
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But there’s a beauty of a gag for anyone who scratched their head as to how Palpatine hid in plain sight and no one recognized him as a Sith Lord in the first third of the thing. And the one line during the interactions between Darth Vader and Lucas are actually pretty funny as well.
Children enjoying it was never the issue.
I think John Williams is the saving grace of the entire thing. His scores for each of the films grab some of the hokier elements of the story and gives them a sort-of artificial intensity, a gravity they didn’t have before. His scores are often just a tad intrusive, (in a good way) like he is trying to little-by-little take over the conversation from the characters and bend it into a more serious tone. Agree, disagree?
John Williams’ music does will the prequels to a higher level all by itself. And IMHO, his work on those films rank among the loftiest peaks of a very illustrious career.
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That said, the music does have a strong storytelling component in its own right, which may be the source of the intrusiveness you mention. It is rarely content to be sonic wallpaper.
It is never content, something a John Williams score and I have in common. 🙂
A John Williams score can improve any movie. But yeah, his work on the Star Wars series is kind of on another level, and is a large part of what makes it so great. That, combined with the sound design. There is nothing else in the world that sounds like a Star Wars film. You can walk blindfolded into a room in which one of them is playing, and within two seconds you’ll be able to identify it. How many movies can you say that about? I think only David Lynch has that kind of aural singularity.
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That’s why I don’t think I could ever dislike a Star Wars movie. The music and sound connect the films together so well that it’s difficult to separate them in my mind. I mean, if you’re attracted to someone, do you stop being attracted to them if they’re wearing a bad outfit?
Probably, but it’s their fault for wearing the bad outfit…
I guess it’s a time-honoured tradition for each generation to be more horrified and depressed by its heir than the one preceding it. Don’t worry, I’m sure in a couple of decades Caroline will be thoroughly mortified when her son becomes enraptured by POKEMON: THE NEXT GENERATION.
BTW, here’s a possible (and hysterical) explanation for the quality, or lack thereof, of the Star Wars prequels: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KF02VoDQSd0
It really does explain a lot…