[Gobbler]

Bullshit Jordan, you're not putting all that effort into a movie and your very own story without being proud of it. Maybe he thought it over after the criticisms rushed his place, but he'd never think what you think he thinks.

[Harmonica]

I do feel bad for Lucas because he failed to achieve something. I honestly believe that if he could, he'd erase the last three films from history and start all over again.

He says he did what he wanted to do, but I don't buy that for one minute.

Question!

If that's true, and he really does feel failure at whatever goal he had in mind and deserves our sympathy, then what exactly was it that he was trying to achieve through the whole debacle?

Was he trying to leech off his established franchise from years back, capitalize on a desperate fanbase, and make a ridiculous amount of money in the process? Oh, wait, he accomplished that with flying colors (and CGI).

Was he trying to break the mold he's constantly associated with and prove that he's a competent creator of movies that aren't Star Wars by making new, original movies, thus severing his name and all ties to the series? ...Whoops, my mistake. That was Alec Guinness.

Perhaps a vehicle for his own political ideals? No. Just no.

Was he trying to get the public to remember that some guy named George Lucas exists and created that one great trilogy in the Seventies with the cool special effects that was all about space? And that said public should give him awards for anything he churns out based on the greatness of that past work? ....Oh, right. He got all that and more.

Was he trying to get back into the club of people who can say they're the most powerful sons of bitches in the world? Nah, I'm reasonable sure that can't be it, but then again, he was only the 10th, 11th, and 16th ranked in Premiere's Annual power list in three consecutive years, starting 2003 (and sixth for two rows in Entertainment Weekly's Annual 101 Most Powerful People in Entertainment list).

Was he attempting to garner the approval of numerous movie critics, despite his career of claiming that their opinions don't matter to him? Unlikely, since Two out Three prequels were lauded by that tasteless lot of senile old windbags like the films were the second coming of the Christ.

Did he wish to polarize his fanbase into groups of vehement, buzzkill Puritan-esque types who will never accept his newer, inferior work regardless of whether or not his new work is actually the best thing since sliced bread, and the irrational, rabid fanboys screaming to accept anything with the Star Wars label upon it whether or not his new work makes him eligible for being tried for crimes against humanity? ...

Could it have been a cry for a People's Choice Award? No, he got that.
A spot on Discovery's "100 Greatest Americans"? No, he got that.
A Lifetime Achievement Award from the AFI? No, he got that.

Really, with the exception of a batch of fans who can see that the Emperor is completely naked, he's basically been pat on the head, toasted, and otherwise congratulated since he first announced his plans for Episode I-III.

With that much positive reinforcement, what reasons does that crazy bastard have to feel any guilt for what he has done?

This post has been edited by Harmonica: 25 February 2006 - 01:35 AM

[ion eon]

God i don't even want to read all the up there, it's so intimidating

[Harmonica]

God i don't even want to read all the up there, it's so intimidating

Sorry about that. Long story short, in the carrot/stick field of motivation, since the prequels were conceived, the public broke the stick, burned it, and then made Lucas Absolute Monarch/Totalitarian Dictator of Carrotopia, Land of the Orange. He's not feeling any sense of failure.

The only viable solution for those of us who didn't enjoy the Prequels: We destroy him.

This post has been edited by Harmonica: 25 February 2006 - 01:53 AM

[Jordan]

He tried to make films people would like. That is the problem. Fanbase pandering is seen through out the episodes. There is no substance. Watching the movies is like ticking off a 'things to be done list'.

He made the film up as he went. He had no idea what he was doing and after more than a decade he became very rusty. He did not have outside help this time. He controlled the entire event.

ANH- He had very little control, even the camera man told him off.

ESB- He was rarely on set

ROTJ- weakest of the OT, he was most involved on this film

TPM, AOTC, ROTS- full involvement, owned everything, called all the shots, worst movies ever.

The guy is not capable of telling a story without assistance. He has wonderful ideas but they fall flat without some guidance from outside experitise.

I think the first movie's panning at the box office freaked Lucas out. I think for the rest of the saga Lucas was trying to fill in things that he screwed up from the last film. Less Jar Jar, more action, etc...

The films had nothing. Heck, every villain was used as a means to service the hero's skill. They had no other role. Dooku and Maul both served their entire purpose by dieing at the hands of Jedi. It was pathetic.

[diligent_d]

Harmonica, that was an excellent post.

[Harmonica]

He tried to make films people would like. That is the problem. Fanbase pandering is seen through out the episodes.

Given that pandering to the fanbase would imply that there were moments in each movie that the fanbase had asked for, I'm gonna have to ask you to elaborate on what moments you're referring to. For the life of me, I can't think of a single moment that could have worked even on paper.

I think the first movie's panning at the box office freaked Lucas out. I think for the rest of the saga Lucas was trying to fill in things that he screwed up from the last film. Less Jar Jar, more action, etc...

If that were true, wouldn't he have fixed three of the most uniformly loathed parts of Episode I? I speak here of course of Jar Jar himself, child actors, and Midi-chlorians. It wouldn't have salvaged the immense clusterfuck that was the Prequels, but it at least would have demonstrated a mind open to the will of the people who made him Richer Than God.

I mean, Jar Jar earned a Razzie for Worst Supporting Actor, accusations of racism, and the fierce, undying hatred of, on a rough estimate, just about the entire world. Now, a person who actually has a concept of what the word "Feedback" means would have taken the time (all five seconds) and removed Jar Jar from all following movies. It's not that hard to do when you're writer/director/producer/slavedriver/fully responsible for the entire movie. All it takes it a couple blots of spilled ink on the script to nullify Jar Jar forever. Instead, he just went from uncomical comic relief to important character(!) in Episode II and then finally took a drastic cut in lines and screentime for Episode III.

Though, to me, that last cameo always seemed incredibly passive-aggressive, like Lucas was purposely trying to send the message "I understand that you all hate Jar Jar and want him gone, so I'm taking away most of his presence. But he is still going to be in the damn movie!" This was eventually followed by that lovely surgical insertion of Jar Jar's Gungan brethren into the Original movies by way of DVDs. Petty punishment? Symbolism of some sort? Total insanity? The world may never know.

Everyone was also pretty clear in their opinions of Jake Lloyd as a mini-Darth Vader: Disgust. Going from crushing people's throats with your mind to hugging your (quite obviously doomed) mother and flirting(?!!) with your (quite obviously older doomed) future wife is a pretty unbalanced (and monumental) dichotomy/letdown. Okay, the kid was just that, a kid, and too much was expected from him, but that still didn't stop him from helping to make that movie even worse and(perhaps unjustly) becoming the poster boy for Episode I's mediocrity. Sure, Jar Jar was bad, but references to "YIPPEE!" being synonomous with pure, unadulterated pain are *still* embedded in the entertainment culture. You can probably stimulate a Pavlovian cringe response just by saying to anybody you see in the street. Signs don't get much more explicit than that: No one likes seeing the cool characters from the Originals before they were cool. No one had ever asked or expressed any desire to see the likes of such. Easy Fix Solution: Don't put children into the movies, especially not as characters fans of the Originals are already familiar with.

But apparently, George Lucas's wallet better judgment told him to continue the treatment he gave to Anakin and Greedo and makeover Boba "Yeah Dad! Get him! Fire! Fire!" Fett like so. (This was, we can only assume, somehow make Boba Fett really neat and full of meat. Or something like that.) And as a clone no less. After seeing Episode II, a friend of mine said to me in a grave voice, "It is a sad day for the Universal Balance of Cool now that we have seen prepubesant versions of both, Darth Vader and Boba Fett. There shall be no recovery." And after eventually watching the abysmal nightmare of Episode III, I was inclined to agree.

Yet both of those last two examples are laughable in comparison to the midi-chlorian mess. At best, a pointless throwaway line of little significance, it was at worst the part of Episode I that provoked cries of "George Lucas raped my childhood!"(He did) and "I hate George Lucas!"(I do) more than any other part of the movie. The fact that people disliked/hated it on an almost universal level should have been enough to persuade that flanneled whacko to never again mention that concept (or heck, have it revealed that Qui-Gonn and co were doing Spice at the time, and everything they said about the subject was pure nonsense). It's not like it bore any significant impact on the plot. It was just a stupid idea used so that a little kid could have more of something than Yoda to establish awe and then explain the whole "Fatherless conception" joke. He had a chance to follow the wishes of the masses and covertly Stalinize Midi-Chlorians from the script, the following movies, and Star Wars in general, but he refused to take it and kill them, thus avoiding doing his fans a single favor in the whole mess of things. Jerk.

Me, I subscribe to the theory that after the original trilogy concluded, Lucas erected a wall, denser and more powerful than if you were to fuse both the Berlin Wall and the Great Wall of China into some sort of recombinant Super Wall amalgamation. And that that wall is currently guarded by Russian cowboys, giant scary Alaskan men with chainguns, invisible undead cyborg Ninjas, and Jack Nicholson, all with orders to murder anything that approaches (especially fresh, original ideas and information). This wall is approximately 100 meters thick, titanium-plated, underground, ray-shielded, and covered in cortosis ore in case any Jedis try to attack. A wall prophesized to bring Balance to movies by creating three hideous disasters to counter the three kickass Original movies. This wall that legends speak of is Lucas's skull, which acts as a barricade to block out any perceptions of reality, outside input, criticism, and most of all reason. Inside this impenetrable vault lie the worst ideas since daytime television, the Quizno's talking baby, and Crossing the Streams. Ideas that gave rise to the prequels. He has no thoughts of what the fans want and no desire to find out. And anyway, all being rewarded for these ideas does is make the incredibly aged and stale, but chewy, nougat brain beneath the crunchy candy shell exterior spoil further.

With all the kudos he's managing to get for all our trouble, I don't even want to think about what he's planning next for Star Wars.

[Zatoichi]

*round of applause for Harmonica*

That was beautiful.

[civilian_number_two]

Given that pandering to the fanbase would imply that there were moments in each movie that the fanbase had asked for, I'm gonna have to ask you to elaborate on what moments you're referring to.

The opening line of TPM being "I've got a bad feling about this." Later, "R2-D2, meet C3P0." Introducing child version of Greedo )yes, it was Greedo). The interconnecedness of all the main characters with events in the films that would follow, including basing the entire universe on Tatooine. Despite changing the backstory, introducing Owen and Beru as younger people. Young Tarkin. Chewbacca. Yoda. Fuck, Yoda, who should have lived on Dagobah sitting in an Ivory Tower on some "Jedi Council." Repetition of notion that someone is "too old" to train, despite being 15 years younger than the last guy we heard that of. Young Boba Fett. The young Death Star. ET, Willow. Anikin in the Vader suit, yelling "nooooooo."

Lucas thought fans would like these things, but they're not actually there to service the stories they're in: they're nods to the fans of the other films. They're a series of piss-takes, and while one or two might have been fine, the series is weighed down by them, so that you can feel the clunkiness of the references. Lucas messed these prequels up. He would have done better to write a completely separate trilogy, and then as an afterthought worked out a way to connect it with the OT, and do all of the integration after the first bit of writing. Figure out which characters could and should be used, which couldn't and shouldn't.

I'm not saying he wasn't successful. I didn't see the second or third one, but I know they have their fans and they made their money. The argument that they were good because they made money is a weak one. By that account THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT is the greatest horror film ever made, and ... well, come on.

This post has been edited by civilian_number_two: 28 February 2006 - 06:16 AM

[Harmonica]

The opening line of TPM being "I've got a bad feling about this." Later, "R2-D2, meet C3P0." Introducing child version of Greedo )yes, it was Greedo). The interconnecedness of all the main characters with events in the films that would follow, including basing the entire universe on Tatooine. Despite changing the backstory, introducing Owen and Beru as younger people. Young Tarkin. Chewbacca. Yoda. Fuck, Yoda, who should have lived on Dagobah sitting in an Ivory Tower on some "Jedi Council." Repetition of notion that someone is "too old" to train, despite being 15 years younger than the last guy we heard that of. Young Boba Fett. The young Death Star. ET, Willow. Anikin in the Vader suit, yelling "nooooooo."

This is all true, but the point I was trying to establish was that fans had never asked to see any of that junk and that few, if any, of these concepts worked even on a theoretical level. Hell, even communism works on paper. The stuff above? That all fails spectacularly. There was not a single reason for any of it. I imagine the closest fans got to actually requesting any of that was when some fan at some convention commented to another "Y'know, I wonder how R2-D2 met C3P0." On the other side of the world, Lucas no doubt paused in the middle of his daily gambol on his mountain of cash to say "...Georgy Sense... TINKLING..." and then rushed to include that completely unnecesary scene in the movie. No doubt fans the world over felt.... A disturbance... At that point, any screenwriter worth his salt would have performed emergency surgery on that script and removed every single one of those cancerous references, even if it required torching the entire thing. The fire would have been justice.

Lucas thought fans would like these things, but they're not actually there to service the stories they're in: they're nods to the fans of the other films. They're a series of piss-takes, and while one or two might have been fine, the series is weighed down by them, so that you can feel the clunkiness of the references. Lucas messed these prequels up. He would have done better to write a completely separate trilogy, and then as an afterthought worked out a way to connect it with the OT, and do all of the integration after the first bit of writing. Figure out which characters could and should be used, which couldn't and shouldn't.

Oh, I agree with you 110% on the fact that each nod is completely extraneous and entirely pointless. However, I'm speculating that the intent of these was not "to please" but instead "to alienate". Throughout the whole trilogy, I got the feeling that Lucas had recently watched Hans Gruber saying to John McClane "If I kill enough hostages, sooner or later I am going to get to someone you *do* care about" and had adopted that mentality for totally unraveling whatever intrigue any characters from the Original Trilogy did (Bastard!).

I come to this conclusion primarily because all those little self-references did was remind the audience that they were watching a Star Wars movie. Unfortunately, this backfired since, when one has a movie on shakey ground, it's a bad idea to constantly remind the audience of vastly superior movies. Sure, all prequels and sequels do this to some extent, but he sacrificed a significant chunk of possible quality he may have had and any chances of the Prequels standing alone and being good in their own right by fettering it to movies they could never compare with. And the completely ludicrous ways he made these references (at least it's possible to occasionally overlook "1138" in the older movies) suggests to me that these were less attempts to satisfy, but more like attempts to sucker in an unreasonable quantity of fans with lures of "But a character you know is in the movie! And has seven versions of its own toy! Regardless of if it defenestrates concepts that came before!

For example, I imagine that conception of Episode III's most lackwitted scene involved an exchange like this:
Lucas: Hey, Darth Vader?

Vader: Yeah?

Lucas: Remember, Vader, when I promised to ruin your character last?

Vader: That's right, Lucas! You did!

Lucas: I lied.

Vader: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!

I mean, seriously. In what universe was James Earl Jones screaming that a good idea that enhanced the character? It was so bad, I missed the next several lines because the audience I was with was roaring in laughter like they were going to keel over and have badly animated angel versions of themselves fly off. And this was an audience that cheered when Obi-Wan magically randomly exploded General Grievous and gasped in shock when Anakin got triple-dismembered and set on fire, making it the ideal audience. Somehow though, I doubt any test audiences were involved in the creation of that scene. Moments like that are created to raise red flags that let a director know there are problems. Lucas? Too busy David Farragutting his way through movies.

Anyway, the abundance of superfluous additions, pointless plotpoints, lack of any regard for fanbase-based criticism, and utter dismantling of characters indicates, to me, volumes of contempt for his fans. Like he purposely wanted to con them in and then disappoint them. Spiteful lunatic. At this point, my mind goes to a quote from Rembrandt. "Paint with the same joy that you would use to make love to a woman." And if that's how Lucas creates movies, it's no wonder that he had to adopt his kids.

[CowboyCurtis]

I had a free rental today and I finally---just as lark---rented ROTS. I really tried to sit and watch it. I really did, I really tried to give it the best benefit of the doubt as I possibly could---honestly, I did, and I just couldn't get through that initial battle.

I do have to say, there is some amazing SFX in it, but it is so chaotic! It's impossible to figure out what's going on. This is so anti-original Star Wars, I can't even describe it. Is it because Lucas based the ANH trench run on an established film make that sequence so much better than the ROTS battle--which is based on...??? what? And I find it so much less engaging.

I'm really trying to be more embracing of CGI because I really have no choice. It is the way of the future. It is the future of filmmaking whether I wish we could backtrack a bit and go back into models and great sets. I just have no voice in the matter other than not supporting it with my hard earned money.

Anyway, as I was saying, I was trying to give ROTS a chance and had to stop. I popped in "Land of the Dead" and watched that for awhile---actually enjoying it.

I will get back to ROTS when I feel the mood again, but is so difficult. I just know when I get to the scene with Jar Jar in it, it's going to be impossible to not switch it off.

God, I really do envy the gushers. I wish I could see the film through their eyes, but I just can't. I don't see what they see. I'm glad they enjoy it. They have so many years ahead of them discussing it and the television series which I have zero interest right now. I've just got to drop this whole Star Wars shit. I've just got to, but... are other people as obsessed about it as I am? Even if I think the prequels suck? Something's wrong there. Very wrong. Maybe I need to see a shrink and learn why.... then get over it and move on... (yeah, I 've said that before, but here I am again...)

Thanks for your time.

[Despondent]

Oh, I hear you. Both of you and countless others. I also heard the guy two seats down wet his pants to the tune of "R2D2, meet C-3PO".

The PT is like an unenviable neigborhood I once visited. There's no desire to go back for sightseeing.

That SW Insider rag has a portion devoted to people who turn rooms of their house into SW collections. Primarily I suppose it is to bolster future sales of an inexhaustible supply of molded plastic, but to THESE jaundiced eyes, these people come off as SAD. Any cajones they have ought to call for spring cleaning. But like post-NNNOOOOOOO Vader, mindless saps cling to the brand.

[sargon1955]

No, I own none of the PT DVDs. I have no particular desire to see any of them again. Like the Matrix and Highlander sequels. I prefer to think they don't exist.

[barend]

They shouldn't even share fan conventions.

if only nerds could fight, eh?