I was ecstatic when Kylo told Rey that she was just the daughter of some junkies who abandoned her. I really hoped they would stick with that version. But unfortunately they didn't.
I stuck with it until the end of "The Force Awakens", they lost me after that one. Just plain stupid film, with actors who couldn't deliver.
Choosing between the Prequels and Sequels is like having to choose if you would rather be stabbed to death or set on fire.
The sequels were carbon copies (at least the first and third) of the OT so, in that sense, they were OK. The second film was the only one that was good and didn’t imitate the OT. I give Rian Johnson credit for trying some new ideas. J.J. Abrams is a creative but imitative hack. I did quite like the casting and performance of Ewan McGregor as Obi-Wan and Liam Neesom was perfectly cast as well.
JJ Abrams is a great director from a technical stand point and knows how to direct actors (unlike George, who was infamous for not being a good director of actors even during the original Star Wars). The casts and crew he works with loves the guy. He runs a good set and the movies he makes from a visual and technical stand point are eye candy. They always look impressive and you can see where the money went. His issue is when he's directing his own a scripts or scripts based on his stories...which he is obviously trying to be Spielberg or Lucas but without the wild creative spark he often had in their heyday. It's in that way that he does come off as a hack. He's always been big on nostalgia and memberberries often to the detriment of the projects he touches. And of course the infamous "mystery boxes" he seems to be obsessed with. Personally I'd like to see a scenario where someone else wrote the story/scripts and JJ just handled the directing side of it. Bringing that vision to life. I don't know if it would ever happen, but it would be interesting to see. I often wonder what would have happened with the sequels had Rian Johnson and perhaps Lawrence Kasdan had handled the stories of all three films while JJ directed all three. I think they would have been much more consistent over the trilogy and probably would have been much better for it.
Stabbed. Seems like it'd be less painful - assuming you mean killed by being set on fire. If someone just lights my shirt sleeve and I get to put out the fire right away, that's preferable.
My problem with Abrams I think has to do with the fact that he loves to hook you with this massive mystery and he himself has no idea how to get out of it effectively or satisfyingly. I also think as a director he’s not really great enough to justify being a guy you would turn to to pull off the technical aspect in an impactful way. I recently was going through the Mission Impossible movies again and his for example seems like the weakest entry, just the least substantial one in terms of story and scope. It feels like a season of Alias compressed to two hours. MI2 isn’t especially good in a lot of ways but it has a lot of panache and sizzle, and its absurdity is part of the Woo formula. The other four are top-flight Hollywood thrillers especially, I think, Rogue Nation.
Been rewatching the sequels and it strikes me that the search for Luke is such a major plot driver. What exactly does the Resistance think finding Luke is going to do? When he finally makes his long-hoped-for return at the end of The Last Skywalker, he basically buys them time to hightail it out the back of a cave. This does not seem well thought-out.
The first sequel got me stuck when they make a complicated bet or whatever such that he HAS to win the land speeder race or they can't get off the planet, meaning the movie would stop. So you know he WILL win, spoiling the whole thing. Jar Jar Binks I didn't mind so much. I don't remember the prequels OR sequels so much which I guess says something, huh? Though I've enjoyed them all, and the series on Disney+ (The Mandalorian, The Book Of Boba Fett, Andor, Bad Batch...Obi-Wan Kenobi not quite as much).
That's like asking, would I prefer this dog sh!t sandwich or that dog sh!t sandwich. They're both sh!t sandwiches. I've got the dvd's that were released way back with the original trilogy films as a bonus disc. I gave away the main discs and am happy with the 'bonus' dvd's.
Definitely the sequels. The Force Awakens is unimaginative but a lot of fun. The Last Jedi is one of my favorite SW movies. Also one of the most visually striking SW movies. I could watch it over and over. I forgot all about the third one right after I watched it but the other two more than make up for that
You refer to the 1st prequel, not the 1st sequel. And I don't think Anakin necessarily needed to win the pod race for them to leave the planet - Qui-gon's a Jedi and would've had a plan B. But given that Anakin was the "chosen one", I don't think there would've been much suspense behind the outcome of the race anyway.
They are all fun films. I'm in my 50s and lve watched them all countless times and will watch them many times more.
oh jeez you're right, first PREquel. "Plan B"...it just seemed like he HAD to win, maybe because already by that point in the film I didn't feel the script would be clever enough to find some tortuous way out. I mean sure we know somehow they must get off planet, and we know Anakin is NOT going to die etc. But HOW you get there is what makes prequels clever, like the totally excellent Dune prequel books, the things they bring in and the way they twist and turn to get up to the timeline of Dune, wow! Or like Titanic which I did not want to see because "we already know the boat sinks!" My wife badgered me into going and OK yes the boat sinks but there are many twists and turns which make it cool (except when Spoiler the old lady drops The Heart Of The Ocean into the sea, no sane human being would EVER do that, sorry, no, not romantic, just dumb, especially as she has a granddaughter. However at the start the phone call with "Have you found The Heart Of The Ocean" is great so I'll forgive James Cameron...who has some interesting documentaries about going to the bottom of the ocean by the way). Still waiting for the episode where (to paraphrase a screamingly funny thing I cannot find online any more) the Empire exploits a security vulnerability in C3PO and turns him into an agent of the state...
The only prequel that even needed to be made was Revenge of the Sith. You can completely get by just watching that one, and the first two aren’t even necessary. I also thought the first two were just really hard to sit through. I found The Force Awakens to be entertaining and I liked The Last Jedi a lot. I liked that Rian Johnson took risks and tried to push in a new direction. I was entertained when I saw Rise of Skywalker at the theater but I forgot about it immediately and have never felt like watching it again. So in that sense the sequels “beat” the prequels for me, although none of them were on the level of the original movies.
I don't understand this. I think a lot of us are unnecessarily harsh on the prequels. If we watched them in narrative sequence (and not production order) - especially if we started with The Phantom Menace about 10 years of age - the series would be applauded as a brave, unexpected tragedy that influenced the huge amount of grimdark epic TV stuff that's all over subscription services these days. The Phantom Menace is simplistic and almost childlike, but at the same point, it's told / seen from a childs viewpoint. Attack Of The Clones / Revenge Of The Sith are more adolescent (and no, Hayden Christensen isn't a bad actor, he's very good at portraying a childish, immature brat and convinced many of us), but in the end, the bait-and-switch where the classic hero succumbs to the temptations of his powers and becomes evil isn't the kind of narrative that was seen in then-contemporary blockbuster material. The prequels aren't perfect - none of the SW films are - but they're much better than people give them credit for. The Force Awakens was JJ trying to second guess what people wanted to see from Star Wars - lightsabers, Star Destroyers, spaceships - and not being smart enough to grasp that all of that is wrapping, and not the gift. The sequels? Two of them are incoherent, idiotic garbage that feel like they made up by children when the story gets one sentence written by each of the children in the class. If they'd followed through with the path set by The Last Jedi, we might have had a fascinating offshoot/diversion with a flaky first part in The Force Awakens, but instead, we got one of the stupidest films ever made in The Rise Of Skywalker.
In fairness, I will say the following. I was seven years old when the first Star Wars movie came out. Absolutely nothing can compare to seeing the original trilogy in the theater during my pre-teen years, and seeing the prequels and the sequels did nothing to change that. HAVING SAID THAT... I watch a lot of reaction videos on YouTube. In the pivotal scene where Obi-Wan and Anakin duel on Mustafar, and it does not go great for Anakin, every one of these Gen Z YouTuber starts weeping hysterically. They are all the way up in it. There was even a compilation video of different YouTubers reacting just to the "You were chosen one" bit, and all of them are in a state of total despair, like it's happening to people they know personally. So maybe George Lucas didn't make the prequels for Gen X?
I have nice copies of the theatrical versions of the OT that I got by "other" means and that is all the Star Wars that I need. The prequels are painful to watch, I shouldn't being squirming in my seat every time a human character opens their mouth to spout that dialogue. Lucas managed to make Ewan McGregor, Sam Jackson and Natalie Portman look bad. The Sequels take everything good about the OT films and just crap on them. I am still not convinced that Rian Johnson has even seen a Star Wars film before.
I think the story of the prequels is great. The execution was terrible. Bad scripts, mostly bad acting, and generally boring. They’re not fun or engaging except for a handful of scenes across the entire trilogy. The end of episode III is pretty excellent. They nailed that conclusion way more than the conclusion of the sequel trilogy. But the path to get there is a lot more interesting in VII & VIII than I, II, and the majority of III
An interesting path that led to a dead end. At least the prequels didn't make me feel like I wasted my time.
Funny this thread should pop back up as I — god help me — just watched Attack of the Clones again recently. Anakin's visions of Shmi dying and her subsequent death plant the seed that Palpatine will eventually use to convince him he can prevent it from happening again, once the visions of Padme's death start. The awful dialog present in both II and (some of) III aside, that's actually not bad writing. It makes total sense Anakin would jump on the chance to do anything to prevent a similar tragedy from happening around him again and, in the face of an unsympathetic Jedi Council, would turn to darker means of prevention. It occurred to me that, despite all of their flaws in the Prequels, that single plot device shows at least some thought went into telling a cohesive story. This is far more than can be said for the Sequels, which feel far more like Disney spent $4 billion on Lucasfilm and needed to recoup their investment with some additional entries to the saga, despite having no overarching purpose or even a singular vision to helm a continual story. For all of the crap thrown at George Lucas in the early 2000s, at least he was trying to tell a story. All of that said, I still think society would've turned out just fine if the "Star Wars" franchise were limited to Star Wars and its sequel, The Empire Strikes Back.
