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The prequel trilogy The checklist

#16 User is offline   AdmiralViscen Icon

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Posted 26 April 2004 - 09:03 PM

QUOTE (Mike Mac from NYU @ Apr 13 2004, 02:35 PM)
Nice try but no cigar!! Anakin would be 20 something years old when the emperor finally seduces him to the dark side in Ep. III. So he is a "man" technically.

They weren't stressing that he was too young. Their main point was that he's an asshole, not tje good person and a close friend that elderly Obi Wan describes.
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#17 User is offline   civilian_number_two Icon

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Posted 27 April 2004 - 02:59 AM

QUOTE (Mike Mac from NYU @ Apr 13 2004, 02:35 PM)
That being said, I still don't think it was a bad idea to make Anakin a young boy in TPM. In many ways it is a stroke of genius and creates more interesting ideas. if TPM was done right, which it wasn't!!!! :angry:

I'm getting tired of hearing about what a stroke of genius you think the adolescent Anikin was. You may as well say it would be a stroke of genius to work in time travel to the STAR WARS series, or some kind of microscopic symbiote that actually played a role in the story and communicated with the characters in some relevant way. Or to have worked OT characters into the PT in ways that did not seem desperate and obvious. YES, such things would be genius, were they done well, since to do such things well would have been virtualy impossible.

Making Anikin a kid is not of itself genius-grade work. Frankly, it's something a kid could have come up with, and by that I mean a kid who got kicked in the head by a horse, not some idiot savant who can wipe his ass and leave the screenplay to CHINATOWN on the roll. The sort of praise you throw around like so much confetti surely is something we should reserve for works that actually use their ideas well.

-civ (feeling kinda snarky)
"I had a lot of different ideas. At one point, Luke, Leia and Ben were all going to be little people, and we did screen tests to see if we could do that." -George Lucas, in STAR WARS: the Annotated Screenplays (p197).
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#18 User is offline   Just your average movie goer Icon

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Posted 27 April 2004 - 03:48 AM

I'm with you, Civilian. I didn't want to say anything because I thought I'd stirred up enough trouble recently with my attacks on Return of the Jedi.

But I hated having Anakin as a little kid. When I first heard about it, I didn't want to watch Episode I, because finding out this information was enough to put me off. This told me very early on that Episode I was going to do some huge deviations from the information we'd been given in the Original Trilogy regarding the young Anakin. And I didn't want to have the ideas in my head assaulted by this crap.

Unfortunately, I was dragged along to the cinema (quite reluctantly) and needless to say, saw one of the most shitty films I've ever seen in my life (and I've seen MANY).

I burst out laughing (quite audibly) during the opening text scroll when they mentioned "the greedy Trade Federation". Wow, epic stuff is coming!

But Anakin as a little boy really irked me. I especially hated his little mannerism of saying "oops" every two minutes. We shouldn't hear this or see this kid in the first place. This is Darth Vader we're talking about. You can't show the imposing villain of the Original Trilogy as a silly little child. It's not right and when I was watching it, it was just impossible to convince myself that this was the young Darth Vader. Come to think of it, it was impossible to convince myself that this was happening in the same galaxy. Damn the prequels!

And it was equally impossible to imagine that Hayden Christiansen was the future Darth Vader in Episode II. Darth Vader is mature and he is a large, well built man, intelligent and calculating... all things that Hayden Christiansen's portrayal of Anakin was not.

If Anakin really was like either Jake Lloyd or Hayden Christiansen then his becoming Darth Vader is the best thing that ever happened to him. Sure, Darth Vader was evil. But he was a lot more stable than Anakin Skywalker - and a lot more pleasant for all involved.

Jake Lloyd's young Anakin does not work. Lucas took the whole scene with Yoda saying that Luke was too old to begin the training and used it in an inexcusable way here. Yoda said Luke was too old because he didn't want to train him.

Also, Star Wars, while appealing to children, appealed to adults as well. The prequels do not. And almost their entire audience is under 13 years of age. We need adult characters. Children characters are annoying - they weaken movies so often. Very rarely do children in movies work. I liked the little girl in Aliens. She worked well within the story. Although I didn't like The Sixth Sense, the boy was very good. And the little boy in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was good (but not good enough to save that dreadful, awful, stupid piece of shit).

But apart from that, kids in movies generally are annoying. Check out the kids in Jurassic Park movies ("Yay! I'm a kid in a Jurassic Park movie! I am invincible!").

Hayden Christiansen's Anakin Skywalker did not work either because he was such a fucking jerk. I hated him so damn much and I kept wanting him to die in some horrible way (and quickly). He was whiny, arrogant, annoying, rude, extremely adolescent, bland and uninteresting.

We are supposed to care about the characters we see on-screen. If not, how can we care about the movie? How was I supposed to watch the prequels when I didn't care if anyone lived or died? And honestly, a few times, I wanted these people to die - I wanted all the Gungans to be killed by the droid army and I wanted Obi Wan to slash Anakin to pieces with his lightsaber. I'm sure he was thinking about it.

In Star Wars, one of the most important things Obi Wan said about Anakin was "And he was a good friend."

It seems clear to me now that he must have been talking about another Anakin Skywalker.

- Movie Goer (feeling kinda snarky too)
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#19 User is offline   Just your average movie goer Icon

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Posted 29 April 2004 - 03:33 AM

Wo... I was kind of disappointed by this. I thought we would have got a couple of fiery reactions, Civ. Or maybe this means nobody disagrees. Well, that's always good. smile.gif

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#20 User is offline   Supes Icon

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Posted 29 April 2004 - 04:11 AM

Well I feel as if I've said it all before and didn't need to add any more to Civ's post. I also hated the idea of Anakin as a kid. Straight away it made a complete bollocks of scenes that already established character interactions in the OT. It makes a complete mockery of Obi-Wan's"fond" memories of Anakin and casts serious aspersions on Obi. He will now come across as being a senile old bastard because he can no longer remember when it was that he actually met Anakin for the first time.
Luminous beings are we... not this crude matter.
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#21 User is offline   Just your average movie goer Icon

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Posted 29 April 2004 - 04:45 AM

QUOTE
It makes a complete mockery of Obi-Wan's"fond" memories of Anakin and casts serious aspersions on Obi.


Ah, but only if we accept the prequels... which leads me to a thought. If more people realised how bad the prequels truly were and refused to acknowledge them as Star Wars movies (in short, if more people came to our ways of thinking), perhaps they would disappear into obscurity.

I am hopeful that after Episode III is released, goes to video and gets its first airing on TV, that the hype will die down and these dreadful movies may well disappear.
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#22 User is offline   HK 47 Icon

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Posted 29 April 2004 - 10:04 AM

QUOTE
I am hopeful that after Episode III is released, goes to video and gets its first airing on TV, that the hype will die down and these dreadful movies may well disappear.


Hope springs eternal, but look at the legions of morons on the official boards for another opinion tongue.gif Wonder what it would take to disappoint them...
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#23 User is offline   AdmiralViscen Icon

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Posted 29 April 2004 - 01:53 PM

We should go over there and actively disillusion them.
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#24 User is offline   Supes Icon

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Posted 29 April 2004 - 06:41 PM

QUOTE (Just your average movie goer @ Apr 29 2004, 04:45 AM)
Ah, but only if we accept the prequels... which leads me to a thought. If more people realised how bad the prequels truly were and refused to acknowledge them as Star Wars movies (in short, if more people came to our ways of thinking), perhaps they would disappear into obscurity.

Unlikely to happen with the buy in from all the other merchandise. Not to mention that the PT have been included in the roleplaying games & comics as Canon also. They have polluted, beyond redemption, the sun drenched shores that were the OT.
Luminous beings are we... not this crude matter.
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#25 User is offline   CowboyCurtis Icon

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Posted 29 April 2004 - 10:51 PM

Barend, you are absolutely right! That is the way the prequels should be done! I had the same thoughts for Anakin, too, when I was younger, but now the prequels Lucas gave us have tainted my thoughts... as I think now.. my true thoughts about the prequels instead of trying to fit what Lucas has created into it all.

Your version sounds much more mature, fits the precepts better, and would be a more enjoyable, if not 'darker' film, which is not a bad thing.

Oh, if only some crazy rich bastard would make the prequels for himself (as you've written), and then release copies of it onto the internet, and... okay, I'll stop dreaming now....
Flying Ferret

Battle for the Galaxy--read the "other Star Wars"

All I know is I haven't seen the real prequels yet.
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#26 User is offline   Just your average movie goer Icon

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Posted 30 April 2004 - 12:19 AM

QUOTE
They have polluted, beyond redemption, the sun drenched shores that were the OT.


Supes, I think that sums it all up beautifully.
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