I member when this meme would’ve been OT vs prequels… Now I’m not bold enough to say we’ll ever see the sequels redeemed and considered at least passable/sparks joy, but I’m also old and realize they weren’t really made for me. Then again the prequels kinda were and I kinda hated them as a kid (aside from 3)…
with the prequels its mostly just the first one. Darth maul is the only good thing it had and they killed him like right off the bat. make 2 one, the clone wars cartoon as 2 and 3 stays three and it would not be to bad a trilogy.
In my opinion the bad movie is really the second one. You can cut that movie almost completely. There’s like 2-3 scenes of actually trilogi plot relevant stuff in there and so much crap. Even as a kid I absolutely hated ping-pong ball Yoda.
The majority sets up the Clone wars tv-series which is great and where you actually see Anakin develop as a character and towards the dark side, the stuff in AotC is just not it.
The dialogue is worse than any other Star Wars movie without any contest. Pretty much every line that gets memed on is from AotC.
It’s an action movie with some cool fighting for sure, but that has never been the appeal of Star Wars to me. As such it’s to this date the second worst Star Wars movie in my book.
Strongly disagree. Episode One was definitely the worst, but the whole trilogy was basically 6 hours worth of a creator having no idea what made his IP successful in the first place while desperately trying to out merchandise Return of the Jedi. They were toy commercials more than they were movies.
Also hot take: Darth Maul was a worthless character and we need to stop perpetuating the idea that he was somehow badass. He showed up for like 3 scenes, killed one equally useless Jedi, then died with a dumb look on his face because he couldn’t hit a guy jumping directly over his head. Except he didn’t die because Dave Filoni thinks he loves Star Wars while feeling the need to retcon everything about it. Boba Fett had more effective screen time and impact on the story than Maul, and we all know how useless Fett is.
Nostalgia is the only reason anyone looks back fondly on the prequels, and I dread the day nostalgia overtakes the sequels and I have to start biting my tongue on those too for fear of backlash.
You want to get back to what Star Wars originally was? Cut 90% of the budget, heavily criticize every creative decision, and treat the entire production like a goddamned venereal disease. Star Wars was a textbook example of art through adversity and benefited hugely from it. That’s what been lost and no one is talking about it.
see that is the the thing about darth maul. his look and lightsaber were so cool. he had massive potential but then as you say he was in for all of 3 scenes and killed.
People love Maul and Fett for the same reason that Alien didn’t show the xenomorph until like the second half of the movie: people’s imaginations will come up with something better than you can make almost 100% of the time. They pop on screen just long enough to look cool and maybe say one or two lines of dialogue to get the fans going, and then disappear. They’re the character equivalents of those lore-bait games that don’t have an actual story, just hints of stuff for fans to make YouTube videos about.
I watched them recently, they’re worse than I remember for sure. There are still fun things about them. But they’re not particularly good movies. I think the same thing can be said about the sequels
This is 100% spot on. They are all a lot of fun and I’ll watch them again at some point, but they’re not good movies. My bar for Star Wars properties, like for other media, comes in two layers:
Would this be a good movie/show/game/book if it wasn’t set in the X universe? and
Is this a good movie/show/game/book when compared to the better properties in the X universe?
IMHO, the first one is the more important question and the thing that Star Wars media constantly fails at. Andor was a fucking masterpiece and would have been an amazing piece of prestige television even absent any Star Wars connection. That’s the case with Rogue One and The Clone Wars, as well. The Prequels and Sequels don’t pass muster on criteria 1 and even a few don’t succeed meeting criteria 2.
Just wait until you’re old and there’s a new wave of kids for whom the sequels are a core part of the franchise. It’s been freaky to watch it happen with the prequels.
I genuinely don’t think that’ll happen. The prequels had bad parts but an overall whole narrative. The sequels have nothing but their CGI to hold them up. They don’t build on each other, they tear eachother down.
You do know us Millennials were teens when the prequels came out and grown ass fully-developed adults for the sequels, right? bruh we grew up on the OG unaltered trilogy just like you did.
The prequels suck so much arse. They are proof positive that George Lucas did not make Star Wars on his own because without his ex and Kasdan what we got was unmitigated garbage with hideous design choices, awful soporific dialogue, overwrought action scenes and terrible, racist humour.
Fuck the prequels and fuck George Lucas. He ruined Star Wars for the true fans. I saw all of the original trilogy in their first runs. The prequels took a huge shit on everything I loved about Star Wars.
Not to mention crushing the dreams of millions of aspiring Jedi.
Oh you can’t have the force, you don’t have enough of this canon-altering mitochondria allegory.
Baby Darth Vader… Cute until you think about it. And… They clearly picked Natalie Portman for the role of Luke and Leah’s mother… Why did they pick so young of an actor? Too old to start training!? It’s almost as if they wrote it with a 17 year old in mind but somehow forgot the “mah Christmas merchandising” rewrites.
The fight in the very beginning makes zero sense. There is an embargo? But why? Who is fighting who? If you are going to have a pivotal point of the story at least have a clear reason why. Sure they are bullies and they are fighting to move the story, but they kept coming back to it. Make it makes sense.
And rolling in flowers and being a “senator” isn’t a real love story. That’s a manufactured love story. Real life stories are when people are attracted to each other and deny it, and then can only admit it when you are about to be in Carbonite.
There is now a well known podcast called “Blank Check with Griffin and David”, but when it first started back in 2015 it was “Griffin and David Present”. Back then, its original premise was for two epic level film nerds to do a deep (and humorous) dive into the episodes 1-3 and try to answer the question “what is this about?” (Spoiler alert: they are as confused as you are).
The show, like all podcasts, can be divisive. Some people (myself included) love Griffin’s spastic enthusiasm for pop culture, and David’s rooted but optimistic view of cinema, and they both have a deep well of knowledge on all things cinema. Those early episodes are gold, and really made me understand things about where Lucas’s head was at with many choices he made in eps 1-3. They are still terrible movies, but it’s really eye opening to see how Lucas, on his own, makes nothing but terrible choices, and is singularly obsessed with merchandising and taxes.
I should go back and re-listen to them. I hope I’m remembering them accurately, because I remember loving that run of episodes.
This is basically my starwars story too, though I skipped book of boba fett, and watched obi wan. Obi wan was a huge miss for me, felt like it was 3 times longer than it really had the juice for.
All that said, I loved Andor and am excited for season 2, though I have basically no interest in any future Star Wars beyond it.
I’m a bit younger than you but I grew up with the '95 box set and saw the PT in theaters, similar experience, and I agree with your assessment of TFA, it’s not great but has its moments. Personally I really liked TLJ despite its flaws and it made me hope the series was finally about to go somewhere new. But yeah don’t bother with RoS, it’s a disjointed mess of a film made of IRL petty grudges played out on screen strung together with lame maguffin storytelling and “plot twists” from left field.
I fell asleep during ep 9 in theatres and have never been down to rewatch it. Mandalorian i gave up early on when a guy flew by a spaceship and gave a thumbs up… but you should check our Andor! It’s pretty good!
I didn’t actually know Cassian was from that movie! Someone else mentioned that to me when I was mid season lmao. I was watching it as a true one off kind of show with a totally new character!
I think the simple answer to why Andor, is that he is the type of character Tony Gilroy wanted to write about. His being situated in the star wars universe is mostly unimportant, aside from being an avenue to get disney funding. Andor could easily be sci-fi unrelated to Star Wars at all, there are some misc easter eggs and the Empire exists, but it’d be super easy to file the serial numbers off, and change some of the aesthetics and names.
Andor isn’t significant to “skywalker saga” Star Wars, he’s just some dude who is pretty competent who starts as a self interested disaffected lowlife dude, and who becomes radicalized to join the nascent rebel alliance. It’s just a good story, and I’m glad Tony Gilroy was able to get disney bux to fund it. Its easily the best Star Wars that Disney has made, maybe that anyone has made if I take off my rose-tinted glasses. It’s honestly kind of surprising to me that the script got past disney, given how they’ve gone about Star Wars.
People HATED the prequels when they came out, trust me. Your kids will love the new trilogy and you’ll remember it with fondness. That’s just the way it goes.
In 20 years you’re going to be trying to find something to watch and flicking through the channels/streamers you’re going to see it and realize you haven’t watched it in ages. Then the nostalgia will kick in and it won’t seem half as bad as you thought it was in 2017 (dear god 2037 isn’t as far away as it feels 🫨) and you’ll actually enjoy it. You might even have a few youngins you want to share the experience with and you’ll spend Christmas vacation watching the entire franchise with the littles.
It happens to all of us eventually. Well, a lot of us.
You have to admit, it was a very bold decision to make a trilogy about the Clone Wars and then not show the Clone Wars until someone decided to make a show about a child soldier in a tube top.
Prequels weren’t great, but they were decent. I’d recommend watching them.
There is a lot to live up to being prequels. People going to judge harshly.
7-8 were just plain bad, I enjoy Star Wars stuff a bunch. I like the prequels more than most I feel. I don’t even have one single care to watch the 9th.
I doubt it will change in 10 years.
Memes, sure, but they will be only how bad they suck. People who meme about the prequels usually enjoyed them at least a little.
I love giving first time watchers the machete watching order. Watch episode 4 and 5, and then watch 2 and 3 to give Vader some backstory after he reveals that he’s Luke’s dad. Then cap it off with episode 6 as the conclusion for Luke’s and Anakin’s story.
Or I can start with Rogue One. I know one of my friends became a fan after watching Rogue One.
My new favorite order is been Rogue One, 4, 5, then 1, 2, and 3 of the Hal 9000 edits, then 6. The fan edits are generally a little shorter, so the watching them all between 5 and 6 is less of a slog than the original 1, 2, and 3.
I saw the originals as a child, and thus loved them.
I saw the prequels as an adult, and was kinda meh on 1 but loved 2 and 3.
While still an adult, I felt the same way about 7 and 8 as I did about 1.
But 9? I thought there was something wrong with me at first. I literally couldn’t believe what I’d just seen. They spent hundreds of millions of dollars on that! It still hurts my brain to imagine all those people buying off on that script… It must have been an emperor’s new clothes sort of situation. Such a waste of so many things.
The Last Jedi also has a lot of problems, but The Rise of Skywalker is possibly the worst film in the entire franchise. I’m still annoyed about the fact that they had a better script with a genuinely interesting story (Duel of the Fates), and cancelled it for the shitshow that was Rise of Skywalker.
I found 9 enjoyable, but I had no expectations that it would be good or coherent. 8 made sure that there was no chance of that.
For what 9 had to do in a single movie, it did a reasonable job. Kylo had to be redeemed, Rey needed her jedi moment, an actual threat needed to be established, Leia’s death needed acknowledgement, rebels/resistance needed to be more than 20 people on a ship, poe and finn needed some sort of arc, and the good guys had to win.
What was so wrong with the Last Jedi? I see reactions like this a lot but I thought it was far from being the worst star wars I’ve seen, and as a casual watcher of this series it was one of the few of them I actually enjoyed.
The main criticism of The Last Jedi is that it threw away everything The Force Awakens had set up. By the end of it there was almost no Resistance, no Snoke, no Luke (which might be a good thing considering what it did to his character), no payoff to the setup for Rey’s past, and everyone who wasn’t Rey or Kylo went backwards in their character arcs.
Just like The Force Awakens was hated by fans for throwing away the resolution of the original movies in order to set up A New Hope 2.0.
As part two of a three part series it fails miserably, especially if you factor in meta information like Kylo will be good by the end of 9 or Carrie Fischer passing. If you pretend it’s a stand alone movie and not in an established universe, it’s a bit less bad.
It killed every thread from episode 7, and didn’t make new ones. It created major canonical problems with the Holdo maneuver and hyperspacetacking. It just copied empire, but in a slightly different order and threw in the throne scene from episode 6. It used the played out theme of the failures of the jedi, that the first 6 movies covered pretty thoroughly amd better. It declared Poe a failure, but the battle as depicted shows he was clearly right to get the dreadnought kill. The whole concept of the galaxies slowest chase, despite hyperspace existing. There’s several instances of people teleporting for the plot, notably Rose saving Finn. The casino side plot to find a one of a kind super hacker, but a random guy in jail can do it too. The leaders of the bad guys are now Hux, who was turned into comedic relief, and Kylo, who has to be good, and was bested by Rey and Luke. Rey never gets training, and never fails (other than failing to get training), remains absurdly skilled with the force. Finn’s character reverted from the growth at the end of the previous movie, and then had essentially the same arc.
The movie did have some really great looking cgi though. The holdo maneuver looks amazing. The red on crait is stunning.
A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back are fucking incredible. Return Of The Jedi has pacing issues but gets a pass for closing out the trilogy.
The prequels are enjoyable trash. Which was intended… mostly. But even as a kid at the time, some bits were rough. The parts that little idiot baby me enjoyed have not necessarily aged well. The “prequel memes” revisionist appreciation works anyway, because it’s six hours of exactly what George Lucas wanted, and that’s neither a good thing nor a good idea, but it is fascinating.
The sequels… are fanfiction. 7 thinks characters are also fans, so e.g. Finn is impressed by holograms as if you’d be amazed by flatscreen TVs. The Last Jedi is an anarchist critique of Star Wars that somehow got made into an actual Star Wars film. There’s a really great film lost somewhere in the edit. 9 is a toddler telling a story: ‘and then, and then, but nuh uh, and then…’ That’s why lil’ JJ, age 4, keeps repeating the fake-out death trope he just learned.
You might be the only person I’ve heard of who didn’t like IV and V, but liked Rogue One. I’m picturing a thread with people debating whether Terminator 1 or 2 is better, and you’re like “those are mid, Genisys is the one I like.” It’s just a fascinatingly rare take.
Empire Strikes Back is pretty universally acclaimed as being in the top 2 of star wars movie, and most people’s #1. I’m curious what didn’t do it for you. Is it just too old now? Overhyped? Do you think the pacing is bad and you get bored? Genuinely, I would expect that if somebody didn’t like that one, they didn’t like any of them except maybe one of the new shows like Andor and/or The Mandalorian, mostly because they are tonally different and appeal to a different, wider audience.
Not even close. T1 is innovative and good, T2 have even better action scene, then stop, nothing else is worth mentioning in the franchise. Rogue one give a new and fresh “spy story” view of the SW story, it shows more complex side of the conflict and both the story and the characters are interesting. I like Andor for the same reason. I find the first and second season of the Madalorian nice too, for the way they show a new “road-side view” aspect of the SW universe, sadly it becomes quickly too “bigger than life” in the third season.
That makes sense. It did feel a lot more grounded than the main entries. I think a lot of my apprehension to the characters was knowing that they couldn’t possibly matter beyond that movie because it’s a prequel to a trilogy that doesn’t mention them, so I knew they would probably just die soon. That just made it harder for me to get invested. But you’re right, it’s cool to see the seedy side of the galaxy and it sells that the rebels are scrappy regular people who are justified in their rebellion.
I tried something new a few weeks ago to kick off an update machete order that I thought worked surprisingly well. I started with the start of act 3 of Rogue One. Going into that blind, not knowing the characters or what specifically they were trying to accomplish, seeing some blind monk guy walk and act by faith instead of sight to do something at a console, they sacrifice all to beam some kind of signal, and then this towering menace in all black just shows up and slaughters a bunch of dudes… It perfectly leads into IV and enhances it without the time commitment or pacing issues of watching all of Rogue One. I love Mads but we really just don’t need to even see him for the important bits of the story. Vader becomes even more mysterious and threatening this way, the “plans” in IV are given more weight and don’t just seem like a macguffin to give the empire a reason to give chase, and Luke becomes relatively more of an unlikely hero because he’s just a kid caught in the middle of a star war.
I’m not gonna say that Rogue One is bad, but for watching the entire saga it feels like a slog to watch the whole thing. As somebody who considers IV to be a 10/10 masterpiece, (especially for 1977 before anything like this existed, and before George Lucas changed shit for no reason,) I gotta know which half of IV is the half that sparks joy for you. Maybe my favorite moment in the entire franchise is when Luke storms out and looks at the twin sunset, yearning to leave his small and inconsequential life, John Williams’ score swelling into the frustrated sobbing that only a teenager trapped in a small town with a small life could truly understand. It’s his Disney princess moment.
Is the “ugly friend” effect. People are even starting phrasing The Hobbit now after the abomination of Amazon. Also, a good story is a good story despise the “PS2” CGI of the old trio.
Just wait until the next Lord of the Rings thing, then people will be saying that Ring of Power was underappreciated at the time.
Actually I already think that, it’s a solid “okay” but people are acting like it broke into their house and burned their copies of The Lord of the Rings
Nah, man. The prequels were mercilessly assaulted on the internet for a long time. There must be a new generation of fans praising them now, or maybe the newer movies are so bad that they make the prequels seem good in comparison, so everyone’s revised their opinions.
For me the sequels were bad enough that the prequels got a lot of slack. The prequels were awkward and had some continuity issues that were troublesome, but at least there was a plane and a somewhat cohesive plot between the 3 movies.
It’s the former since it started before the new ones came out. Tbf there was a lot about the prequels that was catering to children, especially the first one, so it makes sense it would go that way.
This is some dumbass elitism. Let people enjoy what they enjoy. Star Wars is a space fantasy. Rey gets Jar Jar pregnant in the lost 10th movie. It was glorious.
Regardless of genre any work of fiction should have cohesive plot and characterization. It’s not elitism to say that the new trilogy is hobbled by numerous, avoidable writing pitfalls.
The other films had writing problems as well but not nearly as many as the new films. People are free to enjoy the new trilogy but they are poorly written.
And yes, I’m aware of how fucking cringe the dialogue in the prequels was.
Art and entertainment must always fall within my predetermined understanding and preferences. Anything straying from this template is bad and must be opposed. Anyone who doesn’t think this way is morally wrong and also must be opposed.
Stop taking your entire life this seriously. Not everything’s perfect. You alone cannot steer how the film industry depicts Star Wars. Boo hoo.
People are allowed to like things you don’t like. I feel sorry for people like you who literally work yourselves up into such a rage because some piece of entertainment didn’t pan out the way you wanted. Best of luck in life with that attitude!
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