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The other thing I want to say about the prequels that Iāve probably already said on here is that even though it is expressed in a way that is so awkward and ugly, I really love the idea of making Yoda into a sort of bureaucrat general type, like he is just some apparatchik who becomes a wise hermit sage only after his political career ends and he is forced into exile
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I will always be fascinated at your ability to see these allegedly interesting political machinations offered by like six lines over eight hours of unwatchable bullshit
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Itās literally my job
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at least chinese history has interesting political machinations
the prequels at least have their own aesthetic and sense of world building; force awakens is completely devoid of anything. you could imagine a world in which the prequels turned out well enough and were remembered fondly in 2025 by people who werenāt degenerates. can you possibly imagine watching force awakens in 2030? probably no one here really disagrees with that sentiment, but I think itās being underplayed in regards to the prequels.
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The space politics of the force awakens are eve more nonsensical than whatās in the prequels. what is the first order other than a slightly different Empire and why does it exist. I really hope there is slightly more going on in the last Jedi in this regard
One thing u can do for fun is think about whether the titles of the movies refer to something about actual wars in the stars, or to shit that only is really relevant to the sky walker family saga, or both
The phantom menace and attack of the clones are space politics, revenge of the sith and a new hope are both, empire strikes back is space politics, return of the Jedi is pretty much just about Luke (and Anakin spoiler alert) and the force awakens is just likeā¦ A star warsy sounding movie name*. I reserve judgment on the last Jedi
*another ācoolā thing about th prequels is how barely anyone talks about the prophecy that Anakin supposedly is meant to fulfill. Another weird thing is thereās like a two second scene in aotc where mace windu and yoda are like btw it seems like the force isnāt working right anymore should we tell someone? Nah. Then it is never referenced again. I assume this is what the force awakens refers to but in true Star Wars fashion it is like never actually addressed in the movie
If I could imagine a world where the prequels were actually good I could just as easily imagine a world where Force Awakens was actually good. I mean as long as weāre sitting around imagining things.
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yes, and in that world force awakens would be a fundamentally different film, such that the exercise would be pointless. I donāt believe that is the case for the prequels. thatās my point.
Iām sorry neggy but I just checked and it turns out that all is vanity + chasing after the wind
I donāt think I buy any of these attempts to rehabilitate (or at least try to imply george lucas was any less a toy salesman than disney is) the prequel movies that started since right before force awakens came out
evanās been on this tip since way before there was any hint of any sequels though.
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I donāt really want to get into it, but none of this is about whether or not George Lucas is a toy salesman to me. I mean, he obviously is. I also donāt really think of myself as buying in to the ring theory / Lucas is playing 11 dimensional chess thing. They are barely coherent as narratives but thatās half the fun of it for me. Itās like, what else do you have to assume in order for these wildly discordant things to actually make sense. But, on the other hand, I think the kind of small perspective on a big story aspect of Star Wars is definitely deliberate, and that encourages overactive interpretation for me in a way that Lord of the Rings, for example, does not
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Thereās something actually criminal about turning an offhand and clearly basically script-improvised reference to āthe clone warsā in ANH into, fuckingā¦ this
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true fans remember when the hot rumor was that Obi Wan (OB1) was himself a clone
Just finished watching Rogue One for the second and a half time, I feel like I probably already wrote a ton about it itt when it came out. Iām curious to see what it is like to watch Episode IV right after this, but at the moment Iām just thinking of how weird it is to watch Episode III and Rogue One together, because in an odd way they sort of have a lot to do with one another (probably accidentally)
The aesthetic shift is jarring, but I guess 18 (?) years under intergalactic fascism will do that to you. I still really like almost everything about Rogue One. I have mixed feelings about the way Jedda is portrayed. Itās certainly less racist than uh most things that happen in the prequels (at least with Jar Jar Binks they were tryingā¦ somethingā¦ and failing spectacularly, but the Nemoidians are just lazy bullshit), but because of that I kind of find it even more irritating. I may or may not want to write more about this later but itās too complicated for me to express right now.
Right. So both Episode III and Rogue One end with most of the characters you see on screen totally miserable or dead, but manage to still have a kind of uplifting "Hope"ful ending. The writing in the prequels is across the board clunky (I unabashedly love the fact that āI have a bad feeling about thisā is even more of a franchise catch phrase than āMay the force be with youā), but I feel like Lucas should get some credit for not ending the movie with Obi Wan looking at infant Luke and saying, āThis ā¦ is our New Hopeā¦ to bring balance to the forceā¦ and return the Jedi,ā and then Rogue One not only drives this hope business into the ground, it plunges it through the earthās core and out the other side again until it basically becomes extremely poignant. (I like ārebellions are built on hopeā , the last line of the movie, not so much).
Here is the difference between the prequels and the Disney Star Warses in a nutshell: George Lucas used cutting edge CGI technology to create a wheezing cyborg robogeneral who fights with six lightsabers at once, Rogue One uses cutting edge CGI technology to recreate Peter Cushing. The lightsaber robot is a more convincing special effect.
Anyway, the thing I actually wanted to say is: Itās kind of funny how so much of the drama in the prequels is about how the Galactic Republic Senate is slow and ineffective, and Padmeās main thing (I think?) is trusting the system, and even though it is bloated and slow-moving, it is still better than a dictatorship, and then in Rogue One the major turning point in the movie is when the council of rebel elders or whatever cannot agree to go to Scarif without a full consensus, and then it takes a scrappy band of āRoguesā to circumvent the system and take matters into their own hands. So much of the movie is devoted to making you think about how edgy rebellions are*, and yet this is presented as probably the least morally compromised thing they do. I dunno. Hollywood!
*I actually like this though, for the most part. Itās good.
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i refuse to further speak to the value of the prequels until i see that Topher Grace edit
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I just watched Episode 4, it holds up very well imo. As this thread has of late become my kind of live blog of star warring I feel like I should write more, but iām sure you can already imagine how happy it makes me to hear people talk about the dissolution of the republican senate in this movie
Also on the real, the scene when Luke says essentially āWhat does it matter, Iām never going back to that planetā after witnessing several people get murdered in a bar is probably my favorite moment in the entire series
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Yoda and Windu do describe there being a shroud over the force (or something to that effect) towards the end of AotC, but I take that statement to be indicative of their own spiritual blindness, rather than the Force itself being a problem. (Likewise, I consider it more of an interpretive than a plot point that needs resolution.) Essentially, the point I take from it is that the prequel-Jedi arenāt woke ā theyāre idiots.
I mean, Count Dookie literally told Obi Wan the big old evil Sith plan, and he didnāt believe a word of it because of course not. And then thereās Yoda, who did all sorts of stupid stuff. I mean, it was his idea to give his horniest Jedi the task of being alone with the object of (10 years of) his infatuation indefinitely and without any supervision ā and that nothing about that idea set off any alarm bells in his muppet brain. While both of these characters are Cool Jedi, their stubbornness and dogmatism prevent them from receiving any force-derived spiritual discernment that would have prevented the prequelsā tragedy from happening.
(For the recordās sake, I think that the romance stuff with Anakin in AotC provides a distressingly accurate depiction of the tortured psyche of a socially and emotionally stunted adolescent failing to develop healthy attitudes towards his own infatuation, horniness, etc. By that I mean that past-me finds Anakin relatable in ways that terrify present-me. It gives me a very particular feeling of revulsion that I rarely find elsewhere.)
So yeah, spiritual decadence/spiritual blindness is one of the major themes I take away from the prequel trilogy. I might elaborate more later, but looking at your other posts I feel like weāre close enough to the same page, and the amount of time Iāve spent on this post already is embarrassing.
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Now if only Padmeās response to Anakinās adolescent hornblast made any sense at all.
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