The most basic Star Wars question...

Exactamundo.

 

Or, as my cynical friend likes to suggest, he could care less as long as he can make a buck off it.

Watch this video and it's hard to deny:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RdB0aCQ2RQ&feature=fvw

 

The usual fictional convention regarding telepathy is that only one person needs to be telepathic for telepathic communication to take place. For example, in the X-Men, Professor X is able to communicate telepathically with all the X-Men. That certainly doesn't mean they are all telepathic... only the Professor and Jean are. In like manner, the fact that Leia can receive a message from Luke doesn't have to imply she has any latent abilities with the Force. Luke has developed telepathic ability, so he can send messages to anyone he wants. It's well documented that the decision to make Leia into Luke's sister occurred after Empire was released. Check out the Secret History.

 

I admit I've only seen Phantom Menace, not the other two, so I can only comment on that.

The biggest problems with PM are not what you list above, but the fact that the plot is incredibly convoluted and the main characters are bland ciphers with whom it's hard to feel any emotional connection. The narrative is directionless, alternating between incredible tedium and mindless action, and the characters' motivations are largely unclear. Simply put, the story makes no sense. If you disagree, summarize the plot for me as concisely as you can.

You probably haven't seen the lengthy critique of the film that guy did on youtube, but he makes some excellent points. Perhaps the most telling moment is when he asks several people to describe Star Wars characters without mentioning either their jobs or how they look. The people he asks have no problem describing See Threepio or Han Solo... they are vivid, fleshed-out characters with distinctive personalities. But when he asks them to describe Amidala or Qui-Gon, no one can come up with anything to say.

 

I admire what critic Roger Ebert says (paraphrasing): "Everybody has a favorite line or two from the first couple of Star Wars films. Now: I defy you to remember a single line of dialog from Phantom Menace." Very hard to argue with that.

Dialog is not Lucas' strongest suit. And I really, really disliked Phantom Menace, for all the reasons you cite. It's a beautiful-looking film, but the kid is just awful. When your leading character is that bad, it pretty much kills the whole film.

I always objected to the fact that the kid could build C3PO from scratch, fly spaceships, race landspeeders, and all that stuff... and was only 8 years old. If he had been, say, 13... I might have accepted it. And young Anakin was 13 in the original script draft. Unfortunately, Lucas deliberately chose to lower the age, because he felt that taking a 13-year-old kid away from his other and shipping him off to train as a Jedi wasn't as emotionally wrenching as doing it to an 8-year-old.

Me, I didn't buy it either way. And I also never believed the romance between Anakin and the Queen, either. Unless you buy into that, the whole story collapses, which it did for me. I liked the movies technically, and there are good things in them, but the story left me cold.

 

One of these days I plan on reading 1 2 3 and "rise of the Dark lord" which is 3.5 , but I don't like imagining Hayden C. as Anakin/Vader. He was so bad, I just want to erase his existence from my memory.

I try to imagine a younger David Prowse, but it just doesn't work. Damn you Lucas!

 

Yeah. It's hard to buy into any of the characters' interactions, because none of them are fleshed out enough for us to really care about what happens to them. They are more like chess pieces than real people. I think at the root of it though, the biggest problem is that the film just does not tell a coherent story. As the youtube guy points out, there is no clear protagonist in the film. The story doesn't have a clear beginning, middle, and end, and it's not clearly explained why the characters (especially Palpatine) are doing what they are doing. Star Wars may not have had the best dialogue or the most brilliant acting, but it had a tightly-plotted, extremely-focused storyline where everyone's motivations and actions were clear and made perfect sense. It's like Lucas lost his ability to tell a story somewhere along the line.

 

The YouTube guy is a total whack-job, but I have to admit, 90% of his points are valid (except for the serial killer victim at the bottom of his basement).

One big reason is that the original script for Episode 4 had a lot of input from Lucas' 1970s friends, many of whom added ideas for no credit. Five or six writers helped shape Empire, though only Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan got credited. But the later films were written mostly by Lucas. Unfortunately, I think it shows.

I personally think Lucas is a brilliant man, but he's better suited to producing and being the overseer rather than writing and directing. He's also got great instincts on editing and post. But dialog...

BTW, in other news, psychiatrists now say that Darth Vader was mentally ill, according to this actual news story.

 

The key difference is also that Lucas had to fight for his vision at the time. He had to convince people his project was good and, in the process, it helped him clarify his ideas. After Kurtz (and the guys who also worked with Coppola, including George's ex-wife) left, he mostly had yes-men at his side and it's definitely not good for any creative process.

There's killer routine by Patton Oswalt about what he would do if he had a time machine named "At Midnight I Will Kill George Lucas with a shovel"

 

yikes! I think the Phantom Menace looks awful. The CGI is just completely overwhelming

 

I agree. The digital look to the movie is awful. I think the res. of the digital camera wasn't good enough.

 

Not hard to argue at all - who'll ever forget the immortal "yippie!!!"?

 

Quit stealing my lines!

 

Qui-Gon Jin: "There's always a bigger fish."

That's a favorite line around here.

Harry

 

"Meesah peepa gonna die?"

Doesn't count, it was in the trailer. How about....

"Are you an angel? Someday I'll kill a bunch of younglings in order to save your from a bad dream I had, accidentally making you lose your will to live in the process, even though you have two new babies you need to raise. Whatever."

 

+1. I was so distracted during the Sith movie because of how computer animated Yoda looked. Then my mind started wondering off about how George Lucas only cares about money, etc. This was before the new Indiana Jones movie too!

 

Good Lord is that cheesy!

 

"Remember you most of all, I will, Chewbacca. Feeling, I have, that appear you will in Episode IV. Ask don't, tell don't. Not worth two bags of ****, this script is."

 

"His cells have the highest concentration of midichlorians I have seen in a life-form. It was possible he was conceived by the midichlorians."

 

Holy cow, is that the most embarrassing thing I've ever seen.
How could you live with yourself performing in a 'show' (term used loosely) like this?
This is exactly how the prequels should be remembered.

"May remorse be with you."

 

Or, "midichlorines ****ED his mother".....from a certain point of view.