Well, yeah. They don’t really go anywhere and they don’t have anything to say.
I just rewatched the prequels. Sure, they can be criticized but they do tell a rather cohesive story about a dying democracy’s inability to deal with emergent totalitarianism, while also exploring Anakin Skywalker as a character.
The new trilogy starts with ideas that might be interesting to investigate but then completely fails to do so.
“a rather cohesive story about a dying democracy’s inability to deal with emergent totalitarianism”
Which is why the Prequel Trilogy regained popularity given the horrors we’re living through.
Plus Darth Maul is awesome
The Prequels were during Bush II’s wars. They were relevant then as well.
The dialogue is the problem with the Prequels. It looks good, the stories track and all nearly fit into the wider Star Wars universe, it’s just that George Lucas has no idea how actual humans communicate. There was also an absolute tsunami of 3rd party content around the Prequels from comics, video games, YA novels, TV shows, and toys that cemented the Prequels into the cultural Zeitgeist that Disney was completely unable to replicate.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, quite the opposite really, but I do want to point out that Hayden Christensen’s portrayal of Anakin got way too much flak when the movies were still fresh. Yes, his dialogue (especially with Padme) was the cringiest thing in Star Wars at the time, but honestly I think that fits his character. He was a slave boy, not even ten years old, taken from his mother (with permission), had the closest thing he had to a father die very shortly after, and was then raised by a religious order who put “minimizing emotion” as one of their core tenets while also letting it be known that he was probably ‘the chosen one’. Didn’t help that they assigned him to Obi-wan, he was literally still a Padawan when they met and therefore had zero experience in training one of his own (plus they weren’t too dissimilar in age). It’s no wonder Anakin grew up not knowing how to talk to girls, getting into fights with his Master who never passed up an opportunity to belittle him (from Anakin’s perspective), and doing emotional, impulsive acts of bravado to prove himself
Another problem with the sequel trilogy is the few things they did try to explore were already done better by the existing films. The other trilogies really hammered home the flaws of the Jedi order. Rich people play both sides, just like the Lando.
I always got the sense that Lando only worked with the Empire because he was forced to; “They arrived just before you did”. He then betrayed them at the earliest opportunity and never did anything for their side afterwards. Yeah you can make the argument that Tibana Gas was being sold to both sides but that in itself wasn’t really shown.
I still agree that the older trilogies did a MUCH better job at exploring their ideas. The sequel trilogy really felt like they just wanted to make audiences giddy by referencing the older properties first. Everything else–characters, story structure, dialogue, any potential deeper meanings or staying power, etc–were all put on the back burner just to try to get the most amount of laughter and applause during opening night
7: Mystery box/A New Hope again
8: Controversial character assassination but honestly the only one with any real value cinematically
9: Cowardly trash with no payoff for the mystery boxes
I wonder why. Fuckers couldn’t even figure out they should have made the Knights of Ren matter as villains.
…or any villain besides Temu Darth Vader and (sigh) The Emperor II, zombie boogaloo
I understand the thematic purpose of Kylo, he’s supposed to be the edgy wannabe Nazi, it’s a commentary and so on and so forth.
Probably shouldn’t have used your female lead as a sexual reward for the redemption arc of the Neonazi incel though. Bro literally negged her and abused her…
Kind of makes you think any female empowerment message spread by Disney is a mere marketing decision or something.
Temu Darth Vader
😂
I remember starting 9 in the theater, excited to see how Star Wars ends!
Then the movie happened, and I just couldn’t shake the feeling of “oh so JJ is pissed that Rian did his own thing with the last movie, and we’re literally just going around retconning the very previous movie?”
ETA: I actually laughed out loud when they tried to invite Rose on their little adventure again and she’s just like “nah, I gotta stay here”
Honestly 8 has no value cinematically either. It is just as much a mystery box that “could” go somewhere as 7. It has nothing interesting to say or deconstruct about Star Wars, it’s just “what if all of that was bullshit?” What do you mean what if? My brother in Christ, you are writing the movie, you are supposed to tell or imply that in the story. The character assassination is just an extention of that. “What if this character acted completely different now?” Ok let’s pretend I’m fine with that. Why? What are you trying to say with that? What happens as a result of the change? Oh, no reason, nothing, and nothing? K then. KOTOR 2 was leaps and bounds better at deconstructing Star Wars, and it was notoriously unfinished. It’s not a high bar, and Star Wars IS bullshit in some ways, as much as I like some of them. So it would have been cool if Johnson gave a shit.
Yoda’s line about Masters is the only thing that stuck with me in the whole Trilogy though, so I guess you are technically correct. But it’s like 1% value vs 0% value.
I got as far as them using their hyperspace to launch a small ship and destroy the bigger ship, like why don’t they just make a ton of dummy ships and blow everything up that way, would have taken out the death star so easily.
It was cool to see but right after that’s all I could think about, like why even bother building a death star, just hyper launch things all over the place
a ton of dummy ships
We usually call those missiles. :P
You’ve reminded me of a bit of flavor text from Starsector that I particularly like, from the missile specialization skill:
My colleagues don’t appreciate their whimsy. You get all these little spaceships and you break all the rules 'cause they don’t need to survive landing.
Smacking one ship into the other creates a large debris field with unknown vectors. Allowing debris to enter a hyperspace window is dangerous according to the laws of physics that I just made up.
That’s literally the explanation given for why there’s a chunk of Death Star on that one planet in 9.
I’m not even kidding.
I feel like the problem with 8 was how ham-fisted it was. Like, I get wanting to break the norms, go a different direction, and not rely on nostalgia to direct your story. But maybe taking what everyone loved from the first movies, going “actually all this stuff you loved is SHIT and you were stupid for ever liking it” and then literally burning it all in front of everyone was the wrong way to go about that.
It felt like the writer held some deep seeded hatred for Star Wars and its fans, and went out of their way to make that known.
It’s not saying “you are stupid for ever liking it”, but a lot of old star wars fans are taking it that way. Not everything is a personal attack.
The person you’re referring to is JJ Abrams. JJ Abrams thinks he knows everything about movies and doesn’t need to know anything about the source material, it’s a fairly well documented fact that he was neither a Star Trek fan nor a Star Wars fan before making either movies. I have so many problems with JJ Abrams going all the way back to Lost and I don’t think I will ever forgive him for ruining two of my favorite franchises and TV storytelling for the time being.
The writer of 8 was Rian Johnson. He threw away everything JJ blindly set up in 7, then JJ came back for 9 and tried to revert what 8 did. JJ has his own issues like you say, but the reason people hate 8 is Rian Johnson.
JJ was the executive producer of 8 so I think we can probably blame both of them.
They both walked back everything the previous movie did, I don’t know why you’re insisting that Abrams was involved in the writing for 8. Abrams’ position as executive producer on 8 doesn’t mean what you think it means, he only gets that credit because he did the movie before that as part of the franchise, it’s not always an active role.
I thought this was the one he didn’t do.
On 8? He was the executive producer.
Admittedly, I’ve never actually known what an executive producer does.
I think they are supposed to represent the money but that usually gives them more power than they are supposed to have.
For instance, quite famously in The Matrix executive meddling is the reason that humans are batteries and not augmentations to the machine’s computing power. Which is why there are some things that don’t make quite as much sense until you realize that everybody still in the matrix is supposed to be having most of their brain power used elsewhere.
With this context, your initial comment now makes complete sense to me. Thanks for explaining.
What were the things you liked they shit on?
9 made me so angry.
7, 8, & 9 were mid movies because they were produced by people who do not understand the franchise or what the lore/world permits. And movie 9 was such a hack job that I’m shocked there weren’t Alan Smithee credits.
9 is objectively a bad movie. The big bad reappears off screen and it’s handwaved with “somehow”. Fuck that movie. Literally the worst one by a long shot. Absolute garbage.
I’ll never understand why, when they brought the original trio of actors back and one of them sadly passed away, they decided to kill off the two living ones and keep the one who died in all three movies as increasingly weird stock footage.
@ChicoSuave @movies I liked 7, actually, but was really disappointed by 8 throwing the build-up away again and 9 was just a mess, cleaning up nothing at all.
I liked 7 at the time, but it’s been retroactively ruined by the whole package
I liked 7 when it came out and was excited by where the story and characters were going. Then I was very disappointed by 8, and didn’t even bother watching 9 when I heard what a train wreck it was. And I consider myself to be a SW nerd.
IMO they should pretend they never made those 3 steamers and try again. Full retcon.
Life is too short to rewatch garbage films
I’m perfectly happy to watch the first two as a duology. The Last Jedi is my second favourite Star Wars movie, after RotJ. But Rise of Skywalker is dead last, insanely bad for the amount of money behind it. Hard to imagine anyone looked at that and thought it was ready to be released.
Edit: for some reason I wrote “RotJ” above, when I meant to write ESB. Obviously.
Give me more movies about trade disputes!
Lmao.
I’m legitimately curious to see the Nielsen ratings between the sequel trilogy vs the Family Guy Star Wars trilogy
I watched the first one and it seriously sucked. Just way too many cameos, I felt like I was watching a revival episode of some 90s comedy. It could have had a laugh track and it wouldn’t of felt out of place.
I didn’t even bother witb the the next ones.
So many direction they could of gone with but they decided to treat the franchise like Noem treats her pets.
Disney killed all my fan energy. Never trust the mouse.
I actually didn’t mind the second one. They tried to do something different and it didn’t really work, but I appreciated the attempt at least. The third one is incomprehensible trash.
Needed more midichlorians.
This was recently posted in the science fiction instance and i will post the same thing I posted there.
The first two-thirds or so of The Force Awakens was pretty good. All after was utter dogshit.
I will always remember the line that stopped 7 in it’s tracks. Them deciding their plan of attack on Starkiller.
What about the shields?
We’ll disable the shields.
Oh. Okay. Thanks han that sounds like a super duper plan. Yes, master smuggler and their in sure infiltrating the first order’s most top secret facility that’s brand new in every way will have a button that says disable shields. What a lazy line.
Compare that to “many bothans died bringing us these plans”. You know, actual stakes.
I agree. It hook you in the beginning, then tosses ideas around… and nothing happens
That would be because it is impossible to create a beloved movie franchise through AI generated and ad revenue driven drivel.
Which parts of the trilogy are ai generated?
deleted by creator
Didn’t they resurrect some dead actors in these ones?
Rogue One had FX inserted versions of Tarkin and Leia, and Ep9 had existing footage of Carrie Fisher written in. It was pre GenAI, though, and more likely programmatically generated in the former case, and the latter was just pulled from the cutting room floor from Ep 7 and 8.
As I said elsewhere, I thought they were “deepfakes” which could already be produced back then and used neural networks…
CGI is not AI generation
I don’t remember for sure what techniques they used for the recreation, but I had thought they used some deepfake technology (which was in use well before “from scratch” image generation by AI model was feasible). Maybe I’m wrong - though I’d bet that’s what OP meant, regardless.
OP responded and then deleted thier response. They’re trying to say the script was ai generated, and the deepfake was ai, which didn’t happen for either thing.
lol OK then.
I suspect the deepfake did use AI though. The “deep” in “deepfake” comes from “deep learning” i.e. deep neural networks. That was the technology used at the time, though as I say, they could have used a different technique.
Thats a lot different than the generative ai slop that’s used now
Which parts of the movies were AI again? I didn’t catch that answer
