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.
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.
I am trying to re-watch all of the Star Wars movies again, now that we caved and got Disney+ again. Man alive, the worst part about all of them was how they tried to create alien equivalencies for earth items/places/situations. So unimaginative. Some of the worst examples that made me cringe:
Space Diner/Greasy Spoon with alien in wifebeater a la "Alice"
Campy Sports announcer guy
Nightclub with dude selling "Death Sticks"
Times Square looking Coruscant with like advertisements everywhere?
Even the dialogue is brutal. Not just the big stuff, the little one-liners.
The originally trilogy looked like a world built imagined from the ground up. I wish they could have a do-over and have it in the hands of Favreau or someone.
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For me I just pay attention to the relationship between Palp and Anakin and that makes the prequels great. Obi-Wan is another bright spot, but focusing in on how involved and in depth Palpatines plan is from the very start makes them an ingenious creation.
__________________ "In brightest day, in blackest night / No evil shall escape my sight / Let those who worship evil's might / Beware my power, Green Lantern's light!"
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.
Yeah, like I said there was some bad story telling and characters, the Ewoks and their magic arrows was cringe worthy. I get the logic of it, but the execution was wrong.
They really could have fleshed out Grievous more, and they did in the Clone Wars, he was a pretty tragic character, duped and constructed by the Trade Federation to be a flat out genocidal killer. The book in terms of Labyrinth of evil and Revenge of the Sith did this great job of talking about Grievous from the viewpoint of Dooku and Sidious. He was a essential part of the plan to draw the Jedi into the final jedi trap and a sacrifice eventually to elevate Palpatine and his new order.
I think that some of the problem as well was that Lucas was locked on the three movie formula in the prequel while the story could have easily added an additional movie and added more depth to things.
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My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Yeah, like I said there was some bad story telling and characters, the Ewoks and their magic arrows was cringe worthy. I get the logic of it, but the execution was wrong.
They really could have fleshed out Grievous more, and they did in the Clone Wars, he was a pretty tragic character, duped and constructed by the Trade Federation to be a flat out genocidal killer. The book in terms of Labyrinth of evil and Revenge of the Sith did this great job of talking about Grievous from the viewpoint of Dooku and Sidious. He was a essential part of the plan to draw the Jedi into the final jedi trap and a sacrifice eventually to elevate Palpatine and his new order.
I think that some of the problem as well was that Lucas was locked on the three movie formula in the prequel while the story could have easily added an additional movie and added more depth to things.
Grievous definitely had potential. The problem was they made him into a total buffoon and an excuse to show off lame CGI.
It would have been great if he'd been built up as a character. They also missed a big opportunity to use him as a predecessor for Vader. Palpatine could have used him as a test subject for building the Vader suit. It would have added to the evil of Palpatine, essentially steering Anakin towards his disfigurement and into the suit himself. Palpatine also had some ability of foresight, and he seemed to have the Vader suit ready. So he might have already known about the disfigurement. Either way it would have been nice to have a character like Grievous fleshed out and more tied to the bigger story.
Grievous was the perfect villain for Palpatine's plan. He was a ruthless killer made that way by the Trade Federation after they arranged for Grievous to have a unfortunate shuttle accident. They basically put him in the suit and stripped away all of his emotions, compassion and mercy. But he was the perfect general for the CIS because he was such a killer, on top of it and more importantly he was an alien. Palpatine saw a Empire of Man, he saw the various aliens as the biggest problem in the republic. He actually saw people who couldn't use the Force as needing the rule of one enlightened Force User.
Palpatine knew in the end that Grievous like Dooku was a sacrifice, a pawn on the chess board to be sacrificed to draw the Jedi in, and the make the people not mind the fall of the Republic and rise of the Empire.
Sidious had something that had been lost to the Jedi as the Force went grey and then dark. He could look at the currents in the force and see the possibilities.
Though he knew that Vader when he sent his to Mustafar was kind of in between worlds, conflicted, still wanting to save Padme, still seeing Obi-Wan as a friend (He offered Obi-Wan a chance to flee or hide in the book). He was not yet Vader the Sith. Palpatine knew that Obi-Wan represented a real danger to Anakin, but not to the extent of what happened.
Palpatine also felt a bit of fear of a unblemished chosen one level Darth Vader and knew that Anakin would make a move against him at some point. So when Anakin fell on Mustafar he was over joyed by it. He knew that Vader debilitated would still be powerful, but lose his peerless power and abilities, not only that he knew that Vader in a suite would be mentally debilitated and lack confidence. In Dark Lord though Palpatine decided that he needed to help Anakin get over his choices and begin to take advantage of his anger and rage to call on the Dark side at his own peril while at the same time Palpatine talked about the option of finding a new apprentice if Vader failed to become whole.
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My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Ah I liked the overarching story line of the prequels a lot. It had some great elements. I would argue that the acting of people like Ewan and Ian and Liam to be far better then the acting in the sequels which ranged from flat to in a lot of cases uninteresting, and sure a lot of that had to do with how the characters were written. In the end by the last movie Finn's role was stripped down to woo's and excited shouting, but he had nothing else to do and no real story in the end. Poe wasn't good from the start, and his story line of growing as a leader in the second movie wasn't that well executed. I think Daisy and Adam were the best of the lot, but Kylo's character was really not great.
At the same time, they wasted so many great opportunities. Gleason is a great acting who became a flaming idiot in the second movie and a wasted second in the third movie. Ian coming back as Palpatine should have been amazing, instead he was really a monster of the week throw in who really wasn't Palpatine at all.
The thing with the prequels is that the story was interconnected across the three movies, with the fall of the republic and the end of the Jedi and the machinations of Palpatine to get there and get his apprentice. Even in the second movie we really only saw Sidious for 8 seconds at the end, but you could see his finger prints over all of it and I loved that.
When you go back and watch the Sequels, the story is so unconnected between the three movies because of the awful writings and throw aways of the second movie that they might as well have been three separate stand alone movies.
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My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Out of Poe, Finn, and Rey, Rey is my least favorite. Poe got some character development in Star Wars Resistance. Not much, but some. Finn is a bit intriguing because of his background and force potential. But his character was handled terrible.
Rey isn't as much of a Mary Sue anymore because of Paplatine her heritage. But she still doesn't have much personality to offer. Not when you compare her to a character like Ahsoka. Part of the problem with the sequel trilogy is that we also knew Rey wouldn't fall to the dark side, rather, she would defeat it. There was never any suspense there.
Are any of you subscribed to any Star Wars youtubers? If so, which ones?
There's a girl named Gaxelle who just got hooked on Star Wars a few years back and has done reaction videos to Clone Wars and Rebel episodes as well as walkthroughs of games etc.
Timothy Olyphant is being reported to appear in season 2 in an unknown/undisclosed role.
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So far, none of the casting rumours have been officially confirmed by Lucasfilm/Disney, but there's no reason to doubt their accuracy. The entire second season finished shooting in early March, just before everything shut down and is currently in post-production for a scheduled October release.
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Turn up the good, turn down the suck!
I wanted to post this here, there's a Star Wars fan and animation artist working on a fan film, it looks really cool and his youtube channel is basically a step by step look at the work he's done and its really good
Being reported by various outlets that Ahsoka Tano is getting a Disney+ Series. I haven’t seen details if it’s live action or animated, before the announcement of her appearing in Mando S2 I would have just thought animated... but now I’m thinking live action?
We kind of figured this was coming as there was rumours a female led show was in the works, but the source seems official now.
__________________ "In brightest day, in blackest night / No evil shall escape my sight / Let those who worship evil's might / Beware my power, Green Lantern's light!"
It would be weird for me to have Ahsoka without Ashley who's done such a great job. I'd amost prefer an animated series just for that reason.
We had been watching this series called The Good Doctor and this one actress on it, her facial expressions and look and the way she sounds and talks keeps conjuring up Ashoka.
The third part of the Manalorian Gallery is up on Disney and focuses on the actors, who seemed so invested in the role. There was a funny backstage video of a test of strength for Gina that earned her a holy shyte moment
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My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Being reported by various outlets that Ahsoka Tano is getting a Disney+ Series. I haven’t seen details if it’s live action or animated, before the announcement of her appearing in Mando S2 I would have just thought animated... but now I’m thinking live action?
We kind of figured this was coming as there was rumours a female led show was in the works, but the source seems official now.
Yeah, it seems more and more likely that the female-led series being run by Leslye Headland will be a live-action Ahsoka-centric show starring Rosario Dawson. It will also likely feature Katee Sackhoff as Bo-Katan, Temuera Morrison as Captain Rex, and possibly Sasha Banks as Sabine.
The Banks rumour hasn't been as widely reported as the others, but she did have a storyline injury in WWE earlier this year that would have lined-up with the shooting schedule for season 2 of Mando. Also, I wasn't sure if they'd cast someone without any traditional acting experience in that role, but after seeing the praise Favreau and Filoni have for Gina in this week's Disney Gallery episode, I'm more inclined to think they wouldn't have a problem casting a wrestler.
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Turn up the good, turn down the suck!
I was watching a panel discussion with Dave Filoni and Ashley from a few years ago, I think 2015, and they asked him about Ashoka's story between the end of Clone Wars at the time and Rebels, and he pulled out page after page of finished amazing drawings that mirror the last arch of Clone Wars, so he had this story for a while
What was funny was this was the first time that Ashley heard what happened to Ahsoka at the end of Clone Wars and she started bawling.
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My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
