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
I was always most curious about how Mister "Highest Midichlorian Count in the History of Time" failed to even notice she was pregnant, when a blind man could have figured it from orbit with the naked eye. Or how a nobody seemed to know she was carrying twins until she goes into labor. *shakes head and laughs fondly at the absurdity* I mean, really. One of the most special plot points of the whole story had to be conveyed by a blah-voiced nurse droid?
Oh yeah, and there's that whole 'Padmé, defiant liberator of Naboo just flops over and dies of a broken heart in flagrant defiance of her established characterization and, oh yeah, of her newborn daughter's future canonical memories!!!'
I weep. I weep at the awfulness!!!
(This is disturbingly fun) ;-)
no subject
Also, if she was far enough along that (despite her insanely small size) she could give birth to twins who were perfectly healthy and no in need of medical attention, a freaking DOCTOR should have noticed it was twins. Unless she was randomly getting no medical attention which is...weird. I know she was wearing those ginormous outfits to try and vaguely hide stuff? But please, someone would have noticed and I don't really believe she would forgo a doctor.
Oh yeah, and there's that whole 'Padmé, defiant liberator of Naboo just flops over and dies of a broken heart in flagrant defiance of her established characterization and, oh yeah, of her newborn daughter's future canonical memories!!!'
OH GOD. When I heard she was "losing the will to live," I very nearly yelled out in the cinema, "SO AM I!"
I have two possible retcons for the memories thing to help me sleep at night. The first is that she's referring to Breha Organa who also died when she was very young and she didn't realise she was adopted at that point, so she thinks "your real mother" is a reference to the mother who died when she was young rather than any stepmother she later had.
Or, my preferred one, Yoda says of the Force that it will grant you visions of "old friends, long gone." I kind of like the idea of Leia's latent Force abilities manifesting themselves in dreamlike Force visions of her mother. Which, as she grew older, she began to confuse with memories. Especially since I think any manifestation of the Force on her part would be pretty quickly trained out of her by her fearful parents.
That is entirely a manufactured fanwank though!
no subject
I would totally have made out with you in a Luke/Leia siblingery fashion if you had said that in the audience. <3
Is it just me, or was the entire birth scene just kinda added on because they forgot that they had to include it? It felt like they got to the end and realized they still had this hanging plot point so let's shove a droid in there to get them babies out right quick. Hurry up and name them before you die, please.
I'd fanwank it so that she *gasp* lived but, being so depressed about Anakin becoming Darth Vader, and having all that PPD to deal with, and ultimately having to still hide the truth about these babies from everyone, especially Anakin and the Emperor, she held her babies one last time and she was the one who made the decision to send them away and gave them Obi-Wan. And if we must be rid of her for the sake of canon, then we'll blame her consequent suicide on the utter blackness that would have befallen her after making such a decision.
no subject
YOU might have, but I think most of the audience would have been more inclined to Boba Fett me into a Sarlacc pit. ;)
Is it just me, or was the entire birth scene just kinda added on because they forgot that they had to include it? It felt like they got to the end and realized they still had this hanging plot point so let's shove a droid in there to get them babies out right quick. Hurry up and name them before you die, please.
YES. It was really very odd and kind of...perfunctory. Especially the names thing. I mean, I know we don't need to see everything but did she just make them up on the spot? And if not, if Vader knew about them? Wouldn't be like, "Congrats on the new baby, Bail. I was gonna name my kid that. She'd be about her age. And look just like my dead wife. HMM." Oh, argh, I'm not going to get into how odd it is that they say they need to hide the kids where the Emperor won't sense them and then they give one of them to a major Senator.
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::DIES LAUGHING:
Or, my preferred one, Yoda says of the Force that it will grant you visions of "old friends, long gone." I kind of like the idea of Leia's latent Force abilities manifesting themselves in dreamlike Force visions of her mother. Which, as she grew older, she began to confuse with memories.
Get out of my head, woman! I just said the same thing! Only snarkier. ;)
ETA: And the frustrating thing is had Padme not died in child birth Lucas would not have, yet again, screwed up continuity AND we would have had a more satisfying ending for Padme. She has to make the heartbreaking choice to separate her children because she knows it's the best way to protect them. She then takes Leia and goes to Alderaan, living under the protection of the Organa's. Several years later she becomes ill and, I'll give Lucas this, because of her sadness and heartache she doesn't seek medical treatment and dies before her time. Meanwhile, Anakin believes she and the child she was carrying died and thus turns to the darkside. It would have worked! And been better!
no subject
SOCK PUPPET THEATRE VOICED BY FOUR YEAR OLDS WOULD HAVE BEEN BETTER!
But yes, your theory would have been too. Frankly, I always thought something like that was what had happened given Leia's memories of her.
I mean, like you say, I can accept that she ends up terribly depressed and sad and eventually that plays a part in her death, a kind of gradual, much as I hate to say it, losing the will to live until something knocks her for six and she just doesn't get better. But Lucas, dude, that doesn't happen in the space of FIVE MINUTES.
Seriously, people would be keeling over every time they got a bit bored. Maybe Vader should do an informercial.
"Hello, I'm Lord Vader and I want to talk to YOU about losing the will to live. Every year over 600,000 Imperial Citizens lose the will to live. Don't leave YOUR children motherless. Talk to your incompetent medical droid today. They may not be able to detect internal injuries due to getting choked by the power of the dark side, but every medical droid shipped from approved Imperial production facilities is fully equipped to diagnose LOSING THE WILL TO LIVE."
no subject
And don't get me started on how Ms Tiny Pregnancy Belly gave birth to twins that looked to be about ten pounds each.
Maybe Leia saw visions of her dead mother. I mean, Luke was seeing dead people all the time, so why no her too? ;p
no subject
Maybe she's a time lord and her belly's like the TARDIS. And right after they left her for dead she regenerated in a giant explosion of light and came back as Mon Mothma.
Or, we have Kev's theory that she died because after giving birth to two ten pound babies, there was only about five pounds of her left, and four pounds of that was probably her hair.