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alarmingrick wrote:

Henners91 wrote: Sure we get a nice CGI fight at the end but up till then it's Lucas-tries-to-do-romance.

Did we watch the same movie? The duel in AotC was the worst of all the films? And for that to have followed the Duel in TPM
was even crazier. Obi/Qui-Gon/Maul was very physical and intense. even with the stupid random force field high jinx. The one in AotC
looked like 2 actors swinging flashlights infront of themselves, just out of camera view. WEAK!

The Battle for Geonosis was what I was referring to

The people decry the crap dialogue in the prequels as if the dialogue in the original trilogy was on par with Shakespearian sonnets.

Got news for you folks, the dialogue in ALL of the movies is equally dire. Even the actors said so ("You can write this crap, George, but you can't make people say it.").

All in all, there is almost enough good bits from all 6 movies to make one good one.

George understands the BUSINESS of making movies. This is how he got rich. Merchandising and farming out his stuff to other directors/production companies for a fee (THX was developed because he didn't want to pay Dolby Labs - like everyone else did - to use their surround sound system.)

chromedog wrote:The people decry the crap dialogue in the prequels as if the dialogue in the original trilogy was on par with Shakespearian sonnets.

Actually no one is making that comparison. There is a whole myriad of levels between prequel gakky and Shakespeare. The original movies dialogue was better, if for no other reason there was input on it from the other people involved. Just being serviceable dialogue is still a step above the prequel dialogue.

He's a much better producer than director.

The problem with prequels is that its all a bunch of green screened garbage with no character to it. Its just a bunch of CGI garbage without any of the character that the first films had. The final fight in ROTS was so boring,fake and other bad things when compared to any of the lightsaber duels in the original trilogy.

<friendly moderation note; some pejoratives are unacceptable for use on Dakka --Janthkin>

Bleak_Fantasy wrote:The problem with prequels is that its all a bunch of green screened garbage with no character to it. Its just a bunch of CGI garbage without any of the character that the first films had. The final fight in ROTS was so boring,fake and other bad things when compared to any of the lightsaber duels in the original trilogy.

Agreed. Compare it to ESB's big fight. Dark, foreboding, real atmosphere. ROTS just went on and on and on and on and on and on. Oh look they're fighting all around. oh lok they zapped each other at the same time. Oh look now they're fighting with the rig going down. Oh look now they are balancing on robots or some such and still fighting. Oh look Obi's on the ground and babbling some more AND SUDDENLY ANAKIN'S GETS MURDERIZED. er....ok....

Compare the fights of ROTJ and TPM. When Luke loses it he just starts beating down on Vader like the bitch owes him money. When Qui-Gon Jinn gets killed Obi-Wan just continues to fight Darth Maul in the lame choreographed fashion. Emotion and Character are so lacking, thats why I just bought the original trilogy on blu ray and not the complete set. Hopefully after Lucas dies we can get someone to make a real prequel trilogy.

Bleak_Fantasy wrote:Compare the fights of ROTJ and TPM. When Luke loses it he just starts beating down on Vader like the bitch owes him money. When Qui-Gon Jinn gets killed Obi-Wan just continues to fight Darth Maul in the lame choreographed fashion. Emotion and Character are so lacking, thats why I just bought the original trilogy on blu ray and not the complete set. Hopefully after Lucas dies we can get someone to make a real prequel trilogy.

Well it's also part of the Jedi training of controlling your emotions that luke lacked which is why he goes off. The problem with the prequels was not just that the dialogue was bad, but that it was all done on green screen sitting on couches, or just strolling down halls, seriously look at it they are on couches like half the movie.

gorgon wrote:Lucas has openly acknowledged it as an inspiration. The parallels have been talked about for years and years. Here's a list of just some of the similarities.

http://moongadget.com/origins/dune.html

That list is pretty weak, mate. The name similarities and references to spice do a bit to establish Dune as being in Lucas’s mind when he started thinking of Star Wars, but that’s all. The plot structure, moods and themes are entirely different, something your link straight up admits.

Yeah, Lucas borrowed from all over. And y'know, that's okay...is anything truly original?

Yeah, nothing is original. What matters is if what you’re doing with it stands as its own thing. Star Wars obviously does.

The issue for me is how as Lucas' ego has grown, it seems like he's been more and more willing to embrace high-falutin' notions like that he "tapped into ancient myths," rather than just borrowing from other filmmakers and authors.

I’m not so sure it’s ego as much as constraint over his process. Filmmakers hate the idea of producers and financiers ordering re-writes of their script, but as much as the filmmakers may love his script, rewrites really are necessary to throw out the junk scenes. The most telling bit comes from the way in which the force was described in the early script;
“One hundred thousand years in the past, a holy man called The Skywalker became aware of a powerful energy field which he believed influenced the destiny of all living creatures…The “Force of Others”. After much study, he was able to know the force, and it communicated with him. He came to see things in a new way. His “aura” and powers grew very strong. The Skywalker brought a new life to the people of his system, and became one of the founders of the Republic Galactica. The Force has two halves, the Ashla (good) and the Bogan, or para-Force (evil). The Skywalker knew that weaker beings could be seduced by the Bogan. Therefore, he entrusted the secret of The Force only to his twelve children, and they in turn passed on the knowledge only to their children, who became known as the “Jedi Bendu of the Ashla”: “the servants of the force”. The respected Jedi were the most powerful warriors in the Universe. For a hundred thousand years, generations of Jedi Bendu knights learned the ways of the mysterious Force of Others, and acted as the guardians of peace and justice in the Republic. There were once several hundred Jedi families. The Republic spread throughout the galaxy, encompassing over a million worlds.”

Compared to the final draft;
“Well, the Force is what gives a Jedi his power. It's an energy
field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us.
It binds the galaxy together.”

That second piece of writing is actually good, and Lucas wrote it, but only after years of working with his script and working with people like Copolla that really knew film, refining his ideas down to focus in on what’s actually good.

That process didn’t take place with the prequels, and it shows. Hell, the first draft of AotC was completed just days before principal shooting began.

chromedog wrote:The people decry the crap dialogue in the prequels as if the dialogue in the original trilogy was on par with Shakespearian sonnets.

Got news for you folks, the dialogue in ALL of the movies is equally dire. Even the actors said so ("You can write this crap, George, but you can't make people say it.").

The dialogue has a strangely formal, awkward style to it in every movie, that’s true. But dialogue is only one part of a script, and the quality of the Star Wars script isn’t in what’s said, but how little is said, and how little it matters, because the structure of the story is so well refined.

George understands the BUSINESS of making movies. This is how he got rich.

Also because Star Wars is among the highest grossing and most popular movies of all time. And don’t forget he stumbled into the merchandising goldmine of Star Wars because he wasn’t happy with planned advertising schemes, so he thought he could print off a load of t-shirts to build word of mouth.

Bleak_Fantasy wrote:Compare the fights of ROTJ and TPM. When Luke loses it he just starts beating down on Vader like the bitch owes him money. When Qui-Gon Jinn gets killed Obi-Wan just continues to fight Darth Maul in the lame choreographed fashion. Emotion and Character are so lacking, thats why I just bought the original trilogy on blu ray and not the complete set. Hopefully after Lucas dies we can get someone to make a real prequel trilogy.

I agree that Obi-Wan McGregor in TPM is fine; he's disciplined. You can still see a little bit of passion/higher energy level after Qui-Gonn dies, but he keeps his cool because he's been well-trained to keep his cool. The fights in TPM still have good character and story, much like the ones in the original movies. As Dogma pointed out, that's in large part because they were still using a good fight coreographer. AotC and RotS are lacking this, I agree.

first to make a movie about the Tuskegee Airmen.

That's funny because the shelf next to me with tons of movies on it is a movie titled "The Tuskegee Airmen."

DickBandit wrote:

first to make a movie about the Tuskegee Airmen.

That's funny because the shelf next to me with tons of movies on it is a movie titled "The Tuskegee Airmen."

I think he actually said first all black cast action movie or some such.

If original theatrical release versions of the original three films were available I wouldn't be mad at the guy at all.

After the CGI dance break in Jedi...

I won't say that I'm mad. I'm just disappointed.

While the prequels are not great films, they are going to rather entertaining to see in 3D. Avatar was very predictable and boring but the 3D made for a great movie experience and I am sure the Star Wars films will fallow suit.

The reviews are coming in for Red Tails now, and they aren't good. All the problems of the prequels. Who would have thunk it.

Should we wait for Nolan to "reimagine" Star Wars?

Nolan could make a better clone war trilogy and tell a better story about Anakin being seduced by the dark side.

"I am your father" was a bomb that could only be felt once.

Yeah, and as a ten year old sitting in the family room with my dad watching his VHS copy of SW IT. fething. LEVELED. ME. I still remember the feeling of it, the shock on my face. The goofy grin on my dad's. I don't care how many times I've heard it since I still remember how it felt the first time and it was awesome.

sebster wrote:Star Wars really was an exceptional story. The reason it doesn't feel so amazing now is because it's been copied over and over again.

Cannot be said enough. It's not that Star Wars isn't well written, it's that it's been ripped off so many times by so many uncreative hacks that what a revolution it was in cinema has been diluted. When this movie came out NO ONE had seen anything like it. How many movies do you know of now a days that had people watching it two or three times in a row on the same day?

Any one that likes the prequels watch this guys vid's, The startrek ones are good too, never realized how bad some of my favorite series are.
http://redlettermedia.com

There's a lot of nostalgia and hope that make people ignore the flaws in a series they like. Let's face it, for most Trekkies any Trek movie gets an automatic +3 on a 1 to 10 scale. Of course that means V and X are both still 3's even to Trekkies. RLM does disect the prequels incredibly well. Even if you like the prequels it will give you a lot of food for thought. And the way he makes some fans flip right the feth out is amusing. A guy wrote a 100+ page rebuttal to RLM's Phantom Menace video. You wanna know how good it is? Ebert was sick of people talking about Phantom Menace but someone got him to watch RLM's vid about it, and he loved it. A professional movie critic loves the guy's analysis.

The only thing he could do to vindicate himself is release the original theatrical release on DVD or blu-ray. Which won't happen.

He's too invested in the edits to do it. It's funny, Lucas is usually all about the money but he's so entrenched in a "them vs me" with his own FANS that he won't release that and rake in the cash he would simply because it would be admitting that people HATE his special editions. Good lord, if he actually made more off the theatrical release on DVD and Blu-ray than he did off the Special Editions, well it'd likely kill him.

Agreed. Compare it to ESB's big fight. Dark, foreboding, real atmosphere. ROTS just went on and on and on and on and on and on. Oh look they're fighting all around. oh lok they zapped each other at the same time. Oh look now they're fighting with the rig going down. Oh look now they are balancing on robots or some such and still fighting. Oh look Obi's on the ground and babbling some more AND SUDDENLY ANAKIN'S GETS MURDERIZED. er....ok....

There's so much subtext to the ESB fight. Vader never really seems to take it all that seriously. He's just sort of wading in there, laughing at this kid as he flails around like he's even got a chance. Luke starts off all cocky and in less than 60 seconds he's on his heels and then running like a scared child. Look at the confident way he strides towards Vader at the start. Contrast that to the way he's doing his best to get away from him at the end. Then there's the casual way that Vader starts to rip the room apart to chuck it at Luke. Luke never even imagined that was going to happen. The ESB fight has them actually cross lightsabers six, maybe seven times in the whole thing? Yet there's so much more atmosphere, so much more substance to it than any one of the prequels managed in their entire run time. The RotS fight, I won't lie, in the theatres I was amazed by it. It's watching two Jedi in their prime really, truly, trying to fething kill each other and pulling out all the stops. On subsequent viewings... it's all flash and no substance. By the time they are Erol Flynning each other you realize Lucas wasn't trying to say anything with the fight scene, he's just having two people wailing on each other. By the time Anakin actually loses you just want the damn thing over already. If they'd cut out the middle 70% of that fight it would be better just for that. With a talented director it could have been amazing. He could have communicated Obi-wan's despair at fighting his friend, his regret at doing it, even have Obi reluctant at first and Anakin getting the upper hand. We could have seen Obi finally realize that his friend is no more and that the only thing he can do is end it. We'd have seen Anakin's rage, how he's given into the dark side, and turned on his friend. Maybe even seen some of his own despair and some regret if he realizes what's happening. Finally when the fight ended we'd have seen Obi-Wan emotionally torn up by the sight of his friend laying there hacked up, to the point where he can't even stomach finishing him off. Instead... we get eight minutes of these two flailing away at each other and obi finally getting bored with the whole thing and walking off.

Hell, the first draft of AotC was completed just days before principal shooting began.

Does it ever show. That movie more than any other left me with the feeling they were shooting a first draft. Not until Dark of the Moon came along and topped it.

One would have thought that Cuba Gooding Jr. would have told Lucas about the last one. He's in both Red Tails and The Tuskegee Airmen film.

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000421/

George Spiggott wrote:One would have thought that Cuba Gooding Jr. would have told Lucas about the last one. He's in both Red Tails and The Tuskegee Airmen film.

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000421/

Cuba Gooding Junior has a very short memory. It comes from years of trying to forget all the crap movies he has made. How does he even get gigs anymore?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WFoddLKWlw&feature=related