beccatoria (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
beccatoria) wrote2010-04-04 11:24 pm
beccatoria) wrote2010-04-04 11:24 pm
Entry tags:
I Love Star Wars.
I hate the prequels.
Actually, that's not entirely true, but I mostly hate them, and I've never really written out why, at least not here. I'm not the only kid who hated the prequels. Hell, I wasn't exactly a kid when I first saw the movies, impoverished as my childhood was by parents who never thought to show them to me until the cinematic rerelease. But I did see them, as a barely-teenaged girl, and I loved them. And when my not-quite-uncle told me to read the Thrawn Trilogy, I jumped into the Star Wars expanded universe and I never looked back. At times I drifted (and yes, the disinterest the prequels was at least partly responsible at times). At times it pissed me off, or I wondered why I was bothering. But I really don't know how to quit Star Wars. It's...beautiful in its absurd enormity. I don't know of another world that is as expansive and that tries as hard to incorporate every last damn thing into a single quasi-coherent universe, everything from cracked-out 70s Marvel comics to poorly-written, bland books aimed at 7 year olds to sparsely written, epic, brainwarping philosophical novels about torture, to 100% pure-grade action-thrillers. Even in the face of Lucas endlessly trying to reinvent the stuff we love, and writing over it like the kid with the biggest paintbrush yelling that his dad owns the wall anyway.
There's such crap stuck in there, but somehow, Star Wars teaches me the meaning of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.
It even gives me some piece of mind about the prequels. Not because it makes them good, but because it helps make them irrelevant. It helps tell other stories around them that build up until in my mind, there are prequel-shaped holes, and the movies are just another hamfisted attempt to convey a piece of history. Just another Glove of Darth Vader masquerading as a Traitor.
Because dear god, those movies were awful. A lot of people think that The Phantom Menace was the worst because it had Jar Jar and a child actor who, well, got stuck with a lot of trash to say and not enough charisma to pull it off, but frankly I think it's the best of the three. It had Qui Gon Jinn and the duel with Darth Maul and a universe that hadn't quite yet been utterly subsumed by CGI. Anakin was kind of annoying and we all hate mini-chlorines and hate mini-chlorines being Anakin's dad even more, probably even more than we all hate Jar Jar which is a LOT, but at least our intrepid hero, the man even Yoda spoke of with quiet awe, wasn't courting girls by stalking them and then declaring that they'd just murdered an entire village including children.
The Phantom Menace was a shittily made movie. Someone needed to edit that sucker with a machete to take out the awful dialogue, and needed to clean up the storytelling so that shit made sense and we didn't cut schizophrenically from Jar Jar's comedy battle-antics to Anakin's quasi-comedy battle antics to Amidala's storming of the palace to Qui Gon's tragic death scene within the space of a minute. Someone needed to rewrite it to make it clear who the main character was, and preferably it would have had a less disjointed structure. But these are signs the movie was badly put together not signs it had terrible, horrible, irreparable underlying issues with its very concept.
Sure, I would have preferred that "When I met your father he was already a great pilot," not refer to a 10 year old race car driver. We all would. But it doesn't fundamentally fuck up the world as much as the epic hero of the saga leering at women who are literally saying, "don't look at me like that, it makes me feel uncomfortable," or screaming about how he just murdered a bunch of children, not even in the movie where he's SUPPOSED to be evil, only to get a hug and be told he's just acting human. UM. No, I'm sorry. Even if someone had just killed my mother and I was a great swordsmaster, I do not think I would consider it fair game to start murdering children who happened to live in the same village as the crime was committed. WTF, man. WTF.
Which I suppose is how we get to Attack of the Clones. The most disappointing movie I have ever seen.
This was the movie that destroyed Anakin Skywalker beyond repair for me. Well, I guess the next film could have saved him but I'm really not sure how.
I think Lucas forgot he was writing the story of a great hero, so that his ultimate fall to the dark side would be an epic tragedy, and instead was obsessed with foreshadowing the fact he would ultimately fall to the dark side, thereby making him a whiny, creepy, psychotic, mass-murdering stalker. You guys think Twilight sets a bad example of romance? Oy.
And on the other side of the equation we have Obi Wan. Who...I don't even know. I can't even critique this movie in terms of its narrative structure, because it...doesn't really have one. That's the difference. Arguments can be leveled at The Phantom Menace because there are improvements to be made. Because it's a film. I...hesitate to call this POS a film. Obi Wan wanders around a cloning facility investigating a mystery that is never solved, chases a bounty hunter to another planet where we learn nothing we didn't know from the opening crawl, then everyone ends up in an arena fight...because.
The central mystery of the movie, the central conflict, is based around this mysterious clone army. But we never find out who ordered it, we're left to assume it must have been Palpatine. Fine....I guess. But then, since Obi Wan spends half the film trying to work out who the hell ordered its creation because someone used a dead dude's alias, isn't that...important? Wouldn't the Senate be like..."Um, where did this readymade army come from?"
This movie has two plots. In one of them Amidala apparently succumbs to stockholm syndrome and falls in love with her psychotic, murderous ex-childhood acquaintance and in the other, Obi Wan investigates a mystery which is never answered or even referenced ever again. And then there's an arena fight. Because.
On the heels of that, is Revenge of the Sith better? Yes, yes it is. For starters, Anakin finally looks better, physically, as Vader, has more quiet power to his voice and physique and is...sort of...if you take into account the deleted scenes, a little less creepy and whiny.
But do I buy the bullshit that it's finally a return to form? Hell no. It's still worse than The Phantom Menace if only by virtue of how disappointing it is.
I think Lucas was going for some kind of Elsinore-like claustrophobia, with Anakin finding every friend he once trusted is hiding things from him while Palpatine plays his only confidant and plays on his fears that his wife may die. But frankly a) Lucas cut all the relevant scenes in order to have Artoo Deetoo beat up a bunch of droids in a comedy sequence, among other inanities, b) I might care more about Anakin's disillusionment with the Council, with Obi Wan and with his wife if previous installments had given me a reason to believe they really cared about each other and c) the visions of his dead wife thing seems...awfully convenient, and more than slightly contrived.
c) is the issue that I know people may disagree on. I guess if you want to set up Anakin for a selfish fall to the dark side, then it's a good enough motivation. Perhaps I'm coming up against that classic fact that there could never have been a fall that would have satisfied everyone. But I always thought it would be...larger somehow. More mystical or more all-encompassing.
I don't know. I think I would have bought it if he'd just killed Mace in accidental desperation, and really was horrified, and so went off to kill the Separatists to bring about peace because, well, it was practical at that point while Palpatine went off and slaughtered the Jedi at the Temple. But then Obi Wan shows up, they fight, Padme dies, and Anakin wakes up in the suit with his wife dead, all the Jedi slaughtered and nothing left but his absolute rage. I think...I could have bought that?
And it's not like I don't want the dark side to be a corrupting force. But there's something disatisfying and, dare I say it, at odds with the initial, Elsinorian attempts at atmospheric claustrophobia the film initially seems to want to build up with "I'll be a Sith then!" leading, within minutes, to child-murdering (though given his antics in AotC maybe I shouldn't be surprised) and choking the one person he did it all to save in the first place.
I can't help but feel that Revenge of the Sith fleeced people with a superficially more "adult" veneer, and the fact we all wanted, so desperately, to feel like his fall to the dark side was epic, the Epic Music, the Emotional Yelling and the Giant Gouts of Lava kind of...shortcut over everything genuine that could have been there.
"You were my brother, Anakin. I loved you," should have broken my heart. But I find it hard to find a single moment in these films where I genuinely felt that Obi Wan and Anakin were brothers.
I'm fairly certain that even for many people who did enjoy Revenge of the Sith, a great deal of the emotional resonance they found in Anakin's final conversion to Darth Vader came from their emotional investment in the original trilogy, not the prequels.
So yeah. The prequels. I hate them. I reject them from my mythology as anything more than badly rendered versions of events.
Because Star Wars, as so many of its media tie-ins will tell you, is a modern myth. It's my mythic cycle, for sure.
But you know what kind of annoys me? The contradiction of the franchise's attempts to monetize that notion. To simultaneously tell us that Star Wars is popular because it taps into something primal and mythic in us, while at the same time telling us that this is due entirely to the genius of George Lucas.
I'm not trying to say that the guy didn't have an amazing idea, or pull off three fantastic movies, and another I can stand to watch without wanting to gouge my eyes out.
But I am saying that if you claim that your success is down to your skill at evoking wider mythic resonances, then claim credit for that skill, not for the wider mythic resonances themselves. Acknowledge your sources. (And yes, A New Hope is a fabulous movie, and I have no moral issue with him stealing large tracts of the plot from The Hidden Fortress, but, you know, he did.)
And most importantly, acknowledge that myths become public property.
Perhaps the greatest measure of the original trilogy's success is that it became so mythic, enormous parts of not only fandom, but the general viewing public, rejected his attempts to bolt on these additions so violently he became, if not an outright disliked, at least one of the most divisive figures in his own following.
So what was the point of this post? I'm not entirely sure. Mainly, I guess, that I love Star Wars. It's mine, and George Lucas can't have it.
Actually, that's not entirely true, but I mostly hate them, and I've never really written out why, at least not here. I'm not the only kid who hated the prequels. Hell, I wasn't exactly a kid when I first saw the movies, impoverished as my childhood was by parents who never thought to show them to me until the cinematic rerelease. But I did see them, as a barely-teenaged girl, and I loved them. And when my not-quite-uncle told me to read the Thrawn Trilogy, I jumped into the Star Wars expanded universe and I never looked back. At times I drifted (and yes, the disinterest the prequels was at least partly responsible at times). At times it pissed me off, or I wondered why I was bothering. But I really don't know how to quit Star Wars. It's...beautiful in its absurd enormity. I don't know of another world that is as expansive and that tries as hard to incorporate every last damn thing into a single quasi-coherent universe, everything from cracked-out 70s Marvel comics to poorly-written, bland books aimed at 7 year olds to sparsely written, epic, brainwarping philosophical novels about torture, to 100% pure-grade action-thrillers. Even in the face of Lucas endlessly trying to reinvent the stuff we love, and writing over it like the kid with the biggest paintbrush yelling that his dad owns the wall anyway.
There's such crap stuck in there, but somehow, Star Wars teaches me the meaning of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.
It even gives me some piece of mind about the prequels. Not because it makes them good, but because it helps make them irrelevant. It helps tell other stories around them that build up until in my mind, there are prequel-shaped holes, and the movies are just another hamfisted attempt to convey a piece of history. Just another Glove of Darth Vader masquerading as a Traitor.
Because dear god, those movies were awful. A lot of people think that The Phantom Menace was the worst because it had Jar Jar and a child actor who, well, got stuck with a lot of trash to say and not enough charisma to pull it off, but frankly I think it's the best of the three. It had Qui Gon Jinn and the duel with Darth Maul and a universe that hadn't quite yet been utterly subsumed by CGI. Anakin was kind of annoying and we all hate mini-chlorines and hate mini-chlorines being Anakin's dad even more, probably even more than we all hate Jar Jar which is a LOT, but at least our intrepid hero, the man even Yoda spoke of with quiet awe, wasn't courting girls by stalking them and then declaring that they'd just murdered an entire village including children.
The Phantom Menace was a shittily made movie. Someone needed to edit that sucker with a machete to take out the awful dialogue, and needed to clean up the storytelling so that shit made sense and we didn't cut schizophrenically from Jar Jar's comedy battle-antics to Anakin's quasi-comedy battle antics to Amidala's storming of the palace to Qui Gon's tragic death scene within the space of a minute. Someone needed to rewrite it to make it clear who the main character was, and preferably it would have had a less disjointed structure. But these are signs the movie was badly put together not signs it had terrible, horrible, irreparable underlying issues with its very concept.
Sure, I would have preferred that "When I met your father he was already a great pilot," not refer to a 10 year old race car driver. We all would. But it doesn't fundamentally fuck up the world as much as the epic hero of the saga leering at women who are literally saying, "don't look at me like that, it makes me feel uncomfortable," or screaming about how he just murdered a bunch of children, not even in the movie where he's SUPPOSED to be evil, only to get a hug and be told he's just acting human. UM. No, I'm sorry. Even if someone had just killed my mother and I was a great swordsmaster, I do not think I would consider it fair game to start murdering children who happened to live in the same village as the crime was committed. WTF, man. WTF.
Which I suppose is how we get to Attack of the Clones. The most disappointing movie I have ever seen.
This was the movie that destroyed Anakin Skywalker beyond repair for me. Well, I guess the next film could have saved him but I'm really not sure how.
I think Lucas forgot he was writing the story of a great hero, so that his ultimate fall to the dark side would be an epic tragedy, and instead was obsessed with foreshadowing the fact he would ultimately fall to the dark side, thereby making him a whiny, creepy, psychotic, mass-murdering stalker. You guys think Twilight sets a bad example of romance? Oy.
And on the other side of the equation we have Obi Wan. Who...I don't even know. I can't even critique this movie in terms of its narrative structure, because it...doesn't really have one. That's the difference. Arguments can be leveled at The Phantom Menace because there are improvements to be made. Because it's a film. I...hesitate to call this POS a film. Obi Wan wanders around a cloning facility investigating a mystery that is never solved, chases a bounty hunter to another planet where we learn nothing we didn't know from the opening crawl, then everyone ends up in an arena fight...because.
The central mystery of the movie, the central conflict, is based around this mysterious clone army. But we never find out who ordered it, we're left to assume it must have been Palpatine. Fine....I guess. But then, since Obi Wan spends half the film trying to work out who the hell ordered its creation because someone used a dead dude's alias, isn't that...important? Wouldn't the Senate be like..."Um, where did this readymade army come from?"
This movie has two plots. In one of them Amidala apparently succumbs to stockholm syndrome and falls in love with her psychotic, murderous ex-childhood acquaintance and in the other, Obi Wan investigates a mystery which is never answered or even referenced ever again. And then there's an arena fight. Because.
On the heels of that, is Revenge of the Sith better? Yes, yes it is. For starters, Anakin finally looks better, physically, as Vader, has more quiet power to his voice and physique and is...sort of...if you take into account the deleted scenes, a little less creepy and whiny.
But do I buy the bullshit that it's finally a return to form? Hell no. It's still worse than The Phantom Menace if only by virtue of how disappointing it is.
I think Lucas was going for some kind of Elsinore-like claustrophobia, with Anakin finding every friend he once trusted is hiding things from him while Palpatine plays his only confidant and plays on his fears that his wife may die. But frankly a) Lucas cut all the relevant scenes in order to have Artoo Deetoo beat up a bunch of droids in a comedy sequence, among other inanities, b) I might care more about Anakin's disillusionment with the Council, with Obi Wan and with his wife if previous installments had given me a reason to believe they really cared about each other and c) the visions of his dead wife thing seems...awfully convenient, and more than slightly contrived.
c) is the issue that I know people may disagree on. I guess if you want to set up Anakin for a selfish fall to the dark side, then it's a good enough motivation. Perhaps I'm coming up against that classic fact that there could never have been a fall that would have satisfied everyone. But I always thought it would be...larger somehow. More mystical or more all-encompassing.
I don't know. I think I would have bought it if he'd just killed Mace in accidental desperation, and really was horrified, and so went off to kill the Separatists to bring about peace because, well, it was practical at that point while Palpatine went off and slaughtered the Jedi at the Temple. But then Obi Wan shows up, they fight, Padme dies, and Anakin wakes up in the suit with his wife dead, all the Jedi slaughtered and nothing left but his absolute rage. I think...I could have bought that?
And it's not like I don't want the dark side to be a corrupting force. But there's something disatisfying and, dare I say it, at odds with the initial, Elsinorian attempts at atmospheric claustrophobia the film initially seems to want to build up with "I'll be a Sith then!" leading, within minutes, to child-murdering (though given his antics in AotC maybe I shouldn't be surprised) and choking the one person he did it all to save in the first place.
I can't help but feel that Revenge of the Sith fleeced people with a superficially more "adult" veneer, and the fact we all wanted, so desperately, to feel like his fall to the dark side was epic, the Epic Music, the Emotional Yelling and the Giant Gouts of Lava kind of...shortcut over everything genuine that could have been there.
"You were my brother, Anakin. I loved you," should have broken my heart. But I find it hard to find a single moment in these films where I genuinely felt that Obi Wan and Anakin were brothers.
I'm fairly certain that even for many people who did enjoy Revenge of the Sith, a great deal of the emotional resonance they found in Anakin's final conversion to Darth Vader came from their emotional investment in the original trilogy, not the prequels.
So yeah. The prequels. I hate them. I reject them from my mythology as anything more than badly rendered versions of events.
Because Star Wars, as so many of its media tie-ins will tell you, is a modern myth. It's my mythic cycle, for sure.
But you know what kind of annoys me? The contradiction of the franchise's attempts to monetize that notion. To simultaneously tell us that Star Wars is popular because it taps into something primal and mythic in us, while at the same time telling us that this is due entirely to the genius of George Lucas.
I'm not trying to say that the guy didn't have an amazing idea, or pull off three fantastic movies, and another I can stand to watch without wanting to gouge my eyes out.
But I am saying that if you claim that your success is down to your skill at evoking wider mythic resonances, then claim credit for that skill, not for the wider mythic resonances themselves. Acknowledge your sources. (And yes, A New Hope is a fabulous movie, and I have no moral issue with him stealing large tracts of the plot from The Hidden Fortress, but, you know, he did.)
And most importantly, acknowledge that myths become public property.
Perhaps the greatest measure of the original trilogy's success is that it became so mythic, enormous parts of not only fandom, but the general viewing public, rejected his attempts to bolt on these additions so violently he became, if not an outright disliked, at least one of the most divisive figures in his own following.
So what was the point of this post? I'm not entirely sure. Mainly, I guess, that I love Star Wars. It's mine, and George Lucas can't have it.
no subject
It really hit me when I rewatched the original trilogy and heard the flat-out awe in Yoda's voice, "Mmmm, powerful Jedi was he, powerful Jedi." When I heard Obi Wan's sorrow at failing him.
I...didn't want the prequels to be about Anakin Skywalker, psychopath. That, in itself, undercuts a lot of the majesty and wonder and terror and redemption of the character in the original trilogy?
It's a consistent, plausible reading of what the prequels gave us, but also a fundamentally disappointing one. Especially since the movies don't acknowledge his psychosis which makes watching him as the main character a very disjointed experience. In addition to wondering why such wise people as the Jedi are presented as didn't know that Anakin needed a lot of help.
So idk, I do share your old trilogy nostalgia; we want so badly to feel that epicness. Ep III almost got me too - Duel of the Fates is one of the few times the new Williams' score hits it out of the park. But ultimately, I guess I just couldn't sustain the suspension of disbelief. :(
no subject
Does it? I was never so much interested in Anakin/Darth Vader as a person, but in how other people related to him, even before I'd seen the first prequel movie. Who he is doesn't matter to me, so I didn't even blink at the notion that he was always screwed up. And what rang true about all these "wise people" missing his problems throughout the series was that they were all willing to be blinded by the (apparently positive) prophecy about him. And that makes sense to me because it's very human, and the cornerstone of many human tragedies.
Though, I do have a talent for suspending disbelief when something tries to play on my emotional heartstrings, because I like feeling that something is epic even if some people can point out reasonable ways in which it's only trying to be epic. So my opinion is going to be severely biased regardless.
no subject
As to the prophecy, to be honest, they regard that with trepidation and a lot of concern rather than hope. There is constant talk of it being misread, or one person will raise it as a possibility and another will parry by talking of how arrogant Anakin's abilities have made him. They didn't even want to train him, even knowing the prophecy initially. It's far from presented as some wonderful, blind hope.
Star Wars is space fantasy myth and suspension of disbelief doesn't require absolute logic. I just find the idea of a great hero losing his way and becoming a villain - in broad, mythic terms - far more tragic and epic than a psychopath continuing to be a psychopath, just under a slightly different guise. Which I find...not really that epic at all.
Which also brings into play the contrast between the originals and the prequels again. Which I kind of touched on in my original post; even if ROTS achieves some emotional resonance based on the original trilogy, the reading of him as a psychopath from start to end robs the prequels of narrative punch, certainly in terms of Lucas' much-vaunted attempts to invoke the 1930s action serials against the background of the monomyth.
Believe me, the amount of Star Wars material I've consumed in my life, I've suspended my belief over some pretty bizarre stuff that was only trying to be epic, because I wanted that feeling, even though I understand, logically, it wasn't actually that well done. Probably the most recent example of this would be the Legacy of the Force series. Another would be my bullheaded devotion to the character of Nomi Sunrider. Hell, I defend Planet of Twilight because it makes me feel all pseudo epic and spinetingley and most people hate that book and think it's boring as cheese.
But I honestly feel that making Anakin a psychotic character, against the apparent intentions of the text, is a decision so bizarre and so incongruous that in the context of the prequels I can't see it as anything other than a narrative failure and in the context of the originals, it adds absolutely nothing and, in fact, takes away a great deal since many of the statements and beliefs about the character now no longer make sense.