I felt very vindicated by the arranged marriage subplot of Andor because of this
But also star wars movies being bad movies is kind of part of the appeal to me. Analyzing star wars feels more like studying history , just like sequences of events that unfold devoid of intentionality that only become meaningful when you scrutinize it. If it’s actually competent art I feel too much like I’m just repeating what the creators behind it want me to think
oh shit
this is me but for garbage video games and trashy pulp detective novels
Yeah the prequels are really a showcase of Lucas’ own inner conflict, which is that he makes all the ostensible heroes deeply evil people that embody all the things he hates (Lucas is an ok guy with pretty good politics irl!), but also he thinks they are cool because he is an eternal child who can’t stop loving Flash Gordon pulp, so the movie just has to like… pretend that all these evil people are actually fun cool protagonists for a children’s story. An absolute tonal disaster, which isn’t even interesting to watch because it’s so boring and wooden and hideous.
Wrong
watching a new hope right after the prequels was like getting shot in the fuckin head with a shotgun I literally can’t believe how much worse he got at making these in just 20 years. Getting like annoyed seeing shit like obi-wan touch his chest and his head after alderaan gets blown up because it reminds me that thats the reason why yoda does it during the order 66 part in episode 3. He really thought that shit was important and not stuff like han being slightly drunk in all of his scenes or like, letting the actors act. i could really understand it being like. a contrast of Passion vs repression if the prequels were actually interested in that instead of explaining a bunch of shit that the first movie is already implying if you think about it just a little bit. it was even weird to see how like, everyone treats droids like theyre stupid from the bartender kickin them out for not being paying customers and imperials like basically ignoring them like theyre wild animals, the vibe is obviously that these guys are dumb and wrong cuz c3po and r2 are intelligent even heroic at times and we have no reason to believe this is any more exceptional than when humans do it, and in the fuckin prequels our heroes walk around treating droids like theyre subhuman killing them without a second thought like i can’t stop thinking about the comedy shot in ep 3 of r2 just emerging from a giant pile of battle droid corpses like its hilarious
I just can’t square how seemingly every character that lived through the prequel trilogy developed severe amnesia about events that were only 25 years ago for them.
also that the prequels aesthetically did not resemble the OT at all and I really dislike the prequel aesthetic.
I wouldn’t mind how the Prequels undermined the Original Trilogy’s narrative if it was in service of making something richer and more interesting but the prequels just come off as tawdry and stupid to me. I could buy into the whole ‘it’s like poetry it rhymes’ of it if it was good poetry, but the Prequels are doggerel to me. They do to the poetry of the OT what Pride and Prejudice and Zombies did to Pride and Prejudice; gilt and embellishments where they weren’t needed, that cheapen the whole.
That being said, the prequels do have one redeeming feature:
yeah thats exactly the impression i ended up walking away with is that he was just totally disinterested in having the prequels engage in like an actual dialogue with the original trilogy so its just like making cheap references to stuff over and over again and doing shots again (i do like how ep3 ends on the same shot as a new hope where lukes looking out into the desert but w/e) to justify “its poetry it rhymes.” in a new hope they say “I have a bad feeling about this” twice before something bad happens. in the prequels its like always in the middle of something bad happening, its super cheap, daphny kept pointing it out. and like there’s that part in ep 3 where r2 screams literally like 7 times in 20 minutes and the only time he does it in a new hope is when he LITERALLY GETS SHOT IN THE HEAD BY A TIE FIGHTER. its not like clever and poetic to keep beating me over the head with it, its childish
also i couldn’t stop thinking about how everyone keeps reminding luke that everyone needs to take their own path and the prequels are like all about how fucking fate is predetermined based on your blood purity it sucks so much ass
in clone wars there’s a bad jedi general who says “it’s treason, then” when confronted by his clone attachment and this takes place before revenge of the sith so like is palpatine quoting him?
awful hack writing
Oh, I also like how there’s just enough subtext to imply that Naboo is a colonialist narco-state that exploited its workers
What else can we say except that Nute Gunray did nothing wrong
the whole galaxy revolves around the same handful of people who cant stop quoting each other
typical jedi blaming it on labor even though the movie explains who was trying to kill fucking queen amidala. the trade federation kept it real
This is the correct opinion from me, the star wars liker
The separatists are the only honorable people in the entire prequel era and it bothers me that the Disney era stuff has not made the connection between the separatists and the nascent rebel alliance more explicit. Like all of those planets that were part of the separatist faction had no idea they were being played by Palapatine and Dooku, I want that story
Think about how fucked up it would be if the prequels were good. We live in the best of all possible worlds.
Would limp bizkit’s significant other hit as hard if it didn’t come out a month after the phantom menace.
George Lucas primed society to Break Stuff.
Fiona Apple’s “the world is bullshit” speech at the VMAs happened days after the second to last set of revisions on the script to phantom menace, and you know that changed the vision of the whole film.
i’ll never rewatch the prequels but i’ll never get tired of seeing people talk about them here
i remember the prequels had kind of an interesting double-vision effect where they were functionally like, overburdened with “meaning” in the sense of having to exist as the architecture that the rest of this big expanded universe was resting on while also being totally incapable of actually conveying anything in particular themselves. all the padme and anakin scenes were like
(INTERIOR: house from a cd-rom game. PADME and ANAKIN are looking at a CREATURE)
PADME: This is a Mipmip. Mipmips can breathe both on sea and on land.
MIPMIP: Groogoogoogoo
ANAKIN: (valiantly) They say Mipmips can reach up to 50 space miles at top speed.
PADME: (ambiguous confused / annoyed expression, leaving room) It does not do to speak of such things.
(NEXT SCENE, on a space balcony)
ANAKIN: My passions grow harder to control by the day…
and as it’s happening you’re constantly aware that this is like structurally supposed to represent x y z even if none of those things seem to be portrayed anywhere onscreen, it was kind of compelling, like watching the robots from the hall of presidents act out noh theatre
i hate that this reminded me evil clones in star wars have an extra u in their name, leading to a character named luuke skywalker cloned from his severed hand (who the fuck found that??) who gets killed by mara jade because she wants to get dicked down by luke but is compelled to fulfill the emperor’s last command to her (kill luke skywalker) and this whole stupid fucking clone thing was invented by the writer to get himself out of a tight spot. and this happens in one of the books people think is GOOD. i hate the star wars expanded universe… in the early 2000s those books were ubiquitous at every second hand bookstore and i was reading basically everything i could get my hands on so my mom would buy like 10 of em at once and id read the worst garbage imaginable. i mean some of them were good like the x-wing books but like the courtship of princess leia and literally anything written by kevin j anderson taught me what bad books were. i cant even believe i actually finished books like the one where luke falls in love with a spaceship that steals the body of one of his students or the fucking TRILOGY where han has an evil cousin named “thrackian sal-solo” who looks exactly like him but with a beard and is a neo-nazi. i could not imagine having the patience to read that shit now as an adult, after having read real books. The worst thing about watching the original trilogy for the first time since i was a kid is remembering how much i used to like star wars…i ate a lot of fuckin slop for your shit george. The star wars game thats just age of empires 2 is soo good though.
my lil brother’s consumption of extended universe content was voracious back in its day
to its very mild credit i enjoyed flicking through the vehicles and vessels picturebook which i think had a bunch of that shit in it
lmao sorry for all the BP notifications but i didn’t notice this thread til now and the last week or so is a treat
also whenever i see this i always mistake it for luke skyywalker and think the books got meta
edit: damn i didn’t know he got sued over that, not very jedi of you george 