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
Honestly, while Revenge of the Sith is a slightly better made movie than Clones, you're really not missing anything by not seeing it.
Phantom Menace had its obvious and glaring flaws, but none of it was as bad as suffering through the Anakin/Amidala "romance". And that's the part of the movie that made the *most* narrative sense, which is saying a lot.
*cries self to sleep* ;)
Re: the YouTube guy, I do have to confess that I quite like him, yeah. I do understand your criticism of him, and can see your point there because the only defense I have is that I find the character completely ironic and not in any way serious, which I know is...a very fine line. Where do you say, "I'm doing this ironically," and where do you say, "No you're just saying you're doing it ironically."
I think one thing that helps is that he does Star Trek reviews too, in fact he did them first, and I watched them in the order that he did them, so like, I experienced him building up his weird repertoire of jokes and the character much more slowly and I know the story both of where the Plinkett character comes from and also why he gets used in the reviews.
Basically the guy runs an amateur movie production company and Plinkett is a character from one of the b-movie type cinematic shorts they did. Or something. I think it was a creature film like...Critters or something. IDK. Anyway, the review guy originally did his first review - of Star Trek: Generations - straight, in his own voice. And it didn't work, it was hard to get past the fact it sounded like some dude nitpicking. So he did it "in character" and it suddenly began to work.
Now, that's not a defense of the character he chose to use. And my acceptance of that, mostly is, I think, that it sends up the reviewer at the same time as making his points. The argument that would always be leveled at any kind of nitpick review, or frankly, any kind of even non-nitpicky scifantasy review, is that it's just some twisted fanboy in his mom's basement and that's the only reason he cares; this way, the reviews kind of sidestep that criticism by going further, by being aware of that, and by using it. By making fun of themselves at the same time.
I think I would be far more intolerant of the womanhating if I felt it was shared by the reviews, but honestly, from what I've seen the reviews use Plinkett's racism, sexism and other isms to highlight racism, sexism, etc., in the movies being reviewed. And I find a kind of enjoyable, surreal irony to the fact that it's this guy pointing out George Lucas's issues with women and that Anakin is a psycho stalker.
So...yeah, I get why it would be something that turned you off of the whole thing, and I don't really have a strong defense other than I, personally, don't feel it's an excuse for the guy playing the character to have a laugh about killing women, but rather an extreme sendup of creeps. But...humour is very subjective?
As to the reviews themselves, I have, now, seen the Ep II review and probably wouldn't recommend it to you because the same things that bothered you before will bother you this time (although I will say that the hooker you see in his basement in Ep I returns frequently in Ep II and ends up by tricking Plinkett and escaping; lord only knows how that will conclude in Ep III; tangent: I was kind of disappointed based on the end of Ep I and the Ep II review trailer that he wasn't doing this one from prison).
Also it's not as good a review. It's funny and makes great points but it's not as much of an entertaining destruction of the narrative and film-editing choices as the first one mainly because, I think, Ep II is...not a movie so you really can't pick apart that stuff because it doesn't exist.
So yeah, I'd probably skip it.