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Originally Posted by CaptainCrunch
The problem with the prequels wasn't in the story line, the story line was really good for me. The problem had to do with dialogue that often came out as forced and awkward. Some real obvious bad decisions, animal farts, Nooooooooo, I hate sand etc.
I mean George even realized his mistake with Jar Jar and made him essential to the downfall of the republic and then basically put him away in the third movie.
The other problem was time, I'm convinced that they could have made revenge of the Sith a two movie arc and really dove hard into the reasons why Anakin fell and how Palpatine pulled him to the dark side.
The other thing for me is that Phantom Menace had the wrong tone. Anakin was a slave, make him a slave, don't make it seem like slavery wasn't that bad.
I rewrote the beats of the Phantom menace a lot time ago in my head. Don't read it if you don't want to.
Spoiler!
The beginning of the Phantom menace stays mostly the same, except don't make the Nemoidians racist caricatures of WW 2 anti-Japanese propaganda.
- Obi-Wan and Kenobi escape and make their way to Naboo
- There they meet Jar Jar Binks a banished Gungan who was banned for cowardice on the battlefield. He gets saved by Quigon and swears a life debt. Meanwhile the droid army takes over the planet and seizes the Queen. The Jedi rescue her and flee.
- They land on Tatooine and go to the junk shop to buy a hyper drive. There they meet a 14 year old slave named Anakin Skywalker, Qui gon senses the force in the boy. But not the power. They can't make a deal with Watto and leave. Darth Maul arrives on Tatooine.
the next day Ben and Qui gon go back to the junk shop to try to negotiate they walk in as Watto is beating on Skywalker for some transgression, they subdue Watto. They meet Anakin's mother and she encourages Anakin to flee after he surmises that Quigon and Obi are Jedi.
They flee, but Anakin realizes that his mother in in danger for encouraging him to flee. They return to the shop to question Watto, who brags about selling her to the mines for making trouble. Anakin flys into a rage and attacks Watto, but the Jedi intervene. They goto the mine where she is has been sold by Watto to be worked to death. Anakin begs the Jedi to help, the Jedi state that they have a bigger mission and can't reveal themselves or get involved. Anakin leaves to rescue his mother. He enters the mine just in time to see her being punished by a overseer.
Anakin goes into a rage and channels the force for the first time and basically chokes the overseer to death. A riot ensues and Anakin tries to flee the slaves. Obi and Qui gon show up and Qui gon realizes that Anakin is extremely powerful and a vergence in the force, but if he leaves him untrained he will become a very real threat. The Jedi get Anakin out of there. On the way back to the ship Maul attacks, and things happen in a similar way except Anakin rescues Qui gon instinctively and unleashes a powerful force push on Maul sending him off a cliff or something.
The Jedi, Padme and Anakin and Jar Jar head to Coruscant. Maul reports to Sidious tells him about the attack by Anakin who is clearly not a Jedi. Sidious is intrigued.
We go to Coruscant, a lot of things happen the same, we see Palpatine's machinations. Padme decides to return home to save her people.
Meanwhile Anakin goes in front of the council and is tested. Yoda can see his strength in the force, but also his rage, the council agrees that he can't be trained, but he has to be detained for now because he's a very real threat. Qui Gon breaks Anakin out and they return to Naboo.
The battle happens, Anakin who has been a pod racer and learned how to fly takes a ship and show that he's the best pilot anyone has ever seen, he shows heroism and finds a way to intentionally destroy the droid control ship.
Meanwhile on the battlefield Jar Jar redeems himself by showing a great deal of courage and determiniation.
The duel between the Jedi and Maul is the same.
At the end the battle is done, Palpatine says the same thing about watching Anakin's career with great interest but it now seems more sinister.
Near the end Obi-Wan tells the council that he is going to train Anakin, he convinces him that Anakin has great power and great heroism and compassion, and left to his own devices could become a great threat. Yoda discloses about the chosen one prophesy.
At the end we get a montage, a young Anakin at the Jedi temple sparring with Kenobi. Padme returning to Theed to thunderous applause. The Jedi council talking about the darkening force. A shot of Palpatine in his office sitting at his desk as the sun goes down behind him and he becomes immersed in shadows.
Why I wanted to see it like this or something similar.
It makes Sidious' seduction of Anakin seem more planned.
It shows Anakin's somewhat unbalanced nature
It plants the seeds of Anakin's distrust in the Jedi
Jar Jar isn't a doofus.
By making Anakin older and more emotional the reason why the council not wanting to train him because he's older makes more sense. It removes the cute element and adds more weight to Anakins fall. In retrospect we could even let Anakin rescue his badly beaten mother and still kill the overseer, then we can have the Tusken slaughter in the next movie.
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The Ewoks really poisoned Lucas's mind. He became obsessed with making Star Wars orientated towards children and toys.
It was quite odd in the prequels. The story was relatively complex and involved all sorts of political banter and philosophy that children simply wouldn't get. Then he would turn to a silly cgi cartoon. It was like Lucas was trying to make two movies at the same time and ended up with the worst aspects of both. The CGI was awful and the main story wasn't fleshed out.
A lot of that goes back to success he had with the Ewoks. Having the relatively dark tone of ROTJ somehow still worked with the Ewok scenes spliced in. Lucas with the prequels instead seemed to move the focus too much to the Ewok type characters, awful effects, and zany side villains.
We all know that Palpatine is the bad guy. No one cares about his literally two dimensional General Grievous.
Grievous.