When did you first notice that Star Wars sucks?

I lost interest at Attack of the Clones. That and the next one (Revenge of the Sith?) I've only seen once and have no desire to watch again. They don't 'rape my childhood' or anything, I just didn't care for them. Oddly, I found the Shadows of the Empire storyline more intriguing (gimmie more Lando!).

I'm actually a fan of large portions of the Phantom Menace and it contains some of my favorite SW characters (Brian Blessed as Boss Nass!). Also, however bad you think Jake Lloyd was I felt that Hayden guy did far worse. I think one of the biggest crimes of the prequels was the lack of a central heavy throughout all three. In the OT we had Vader. Had Maul been in II and III, then there would be a greater adversarial tie through the prequel trilogy (Palpatine doesn't really fit the heavy mold) and perhaps a better sense of continuity. I dunno, just a thought. I could defend a lot of PM though...except the Midchlorians...threw me as well and I generally omit any acknowledgement of that plot thread. The other two...pass.

At any rate, the only SW movie I watch with any regularity now is A New Hope. It's the only one I'm interested in owning. That one movie has everything in it you need to know and experience in the Star Wars universe.

To derail the thread, for my money, the LotR trilogy is easily the cinematic trilogy to beat. Not sure how deep it resonated culturally since the book made most of the waves several decades before, but comparing the product on the screen...untouchable. Stoked about the Hobbit, but hesitant about the future of genre film epics because I really don't see any others that could top this set. Going to be downhill when all of Jackson's work is done...

I have to agree about LotR. When I saw Two Towers, I believe I actually said to my wife "Star Wars is over."

Black Barney wrote: is Mumu for real?

Star Wars is 90% a dumb sci-fi adventure flick that happens to have a couple of cool concepts. It is accidental that it can get analysed to death by people. When I watch the prequels I have the same mindset that I have when I watch the other crap genre films of the 80's and 90's. You don't hear people talking about how Big Trouble in Little China is shithouse and that John Carpenter is some sort of genius, just because it is held to different standards. I guess that is the issue here, that people demand these films be these great masterpieces of cinema, when they were never intended to be, and are demand they be held to impossible standards.

I'm with MuMu -- it's like bitching about the Spiderman trilogy or something. They were movies made for kids. The same "high-minded" adult concepts also ran through the He-Man Live Action movie -- does that mean it isn't a kids movie?

Fuck all you meta-commenters. Answer the OP's question.

I was 10 years old for RETURN OF THE JEDI, and I snagged a fucking front row seat at the Showcase (where the front row seats didn't suck--they were thirty feet from the screen). It was the greatest moment of my life. The awesomeness just washed over me. When I saw the OT again on VHS (fucking finally), I was left mildly disappointed by RotJ. "Too many muppets," was my roommate's accurate criticism. Not just the ewoks, but the band at Jabba's palace (before they got CGI'd), the little critter thing on his tail. Just muppets everywhere. EMPIRE has elements for adults to puzzle over in my opinion, but RotJ does not. It's is just kiddie bullshit.

But STAR WARS did not truly suck until TPM. About ten minutes in, with the "Me No Rikey" Trade Alliance guys, I was perturbed. Earlier SW films used alien languages beautifully--Jawa hooteenies, Chewbacca's grunts, R2's beeps presented without subtitles. That fish guy with Lando spoke backwards Swahili or something, but got subtitles. I liked that. But to just give aliens accents? What the fuck is this? This bothers me in Hollywood movies ven aktors spick mit akzentz fur German, ya? When Germans speak German--they don't have accents (don't get semantic, herren). We get it, you are German--the clothes give it away. They should reserve accents for when they are portraying Germans-speaking-English. STAR WARS, the franchise, was handling this well. Accents were tied to station (Grand Moff Taaaahkin), corruption (Palpatine), or speaking Galactese with weird mouth parts (Akbar). But come the new movies and it all turns to shit. It's most obvious when the Trade Federation guys are speaking to each other and they still do this.

Tack on the big-nosed Arab/Jew slave trader, and Pickaninny Binks and you have yourself a fucked up franchise.

I saw the others, but it was out of obligation. There have been some awesome things since then. I loved the trailer for THE OLD REPUBLIC. I heard nothing buts raves for KOTOR. The Genndy Tartakovsky CLONE WARS shorts are possibly the best STAR WARS stuff ever made. But the series has been poisoned.

That clip brings up a question I have always had.

In the OT are slow, WW1 style rifle things which fire one shot at a time. In this 'world' a lightsabre makes some sense.
However in the PT they had lazer guns which fire like fully automatic machineguns which make the concept of lightsabres even more rediculous.

Why the fuck are the guns better when we go backwards in time?

For fuck's sake:

The OT is not better than the PT because it contains less plotholes or (that much) better acting.

It's better because it's a timeless, simple (good against evil) story. It has lovable characters, and there's chemistry between the characters. It actually matters what happens to them. It has humor, but it's not over the top.

And, it has better visuals. And by "visuals" I don't mean special effects (although I like models better than CGI): I mean the design of the world. In the PT everything's so clean, smooth and boring, the interiors, the exteriors, the ships, the clothes, the hairdos. In the OT, every single building or machine looks like people actually use them, they look functional, they are worn-out, there are millions of little details on them. I fucking love the Millennium Falcon, the Tie Fighters, the X-Wings, the Star Destroyers, the Death Star. I fucking have no clue what the ships in the PT are called, and I fucking don't care. I want a Millennium Falcon (or a Tie Fighter, etc.), you can have that that ship from Episode I that looks like a MacBook Air.

exactly. as plinkett kept inserting Rick McCallum "every shot is so dense" like thats a good thing, its not. It is like different people made the trilogies, one is primarily a (if cheesy) classic story that we can emotionally invest in, the other is throw as much CGI into every shot as possible, try to tie every single shot into a retarded foreshadowing of the OT, and is totally clean and sterile. Anybody who has not sat through the admittedly long red letter review should, its not just about whether were bitching about a popcorn kids movies, its more detailed than that. The OT for all their faults work in so many ways, some of the cinematic stuff with the lighting (Luke half dark/half light) and tone/atmosphere in the OT is great. Its NOT just "we were kids then". The OT didnt have thousands of explosions, violence, murders etc, nowhere near the level of fucking INANE dialogue (seriously the 45 minute fuelled romance between Anakin and Padme is one of the biggest crimes in cinema history), and nowhere near the boredom because they didnt contain 86 minute mass light saber duels every 3 fucking minutes interspersed with lame sat on the couch dialog in hyper clean green screened pretend locations.

I get that kids today probably still enjoy the new trilogy, I don't see why that doesn't mean we can't point out that they fucking suck compared to the OT in every possible fucking way it is for a film to suck. Its not just rose tinted glasses that let me watch The Empire Strikes Back and be able to enjoy it not just for the nostalgia but because 30 odd years later it still IMO stands up to any modern film today in its genre.

Frankly when you look at the clips of Lucas in those reviews, its hard to understand what happened to the guy, but its kind of embarrassing to watch him now, he just sounds like a fucking idiot and his scripts would be laughed out of a 5 year olds school play. I'm honestly not sure how that's not obvious to anyone... over the age of 5.

But, its not like we give an actual fuck, I realise times change. Kids like all sorts of shit now, and TV is full of more and more shit catered to the lowest common demominator. What pisses people off is he seems to be flipping the finger at the fans who've filled his wallet by continually fucking up the originals as well but most of all by simply not including the originals as is to those who want them.

But hey, it is just a popcorn kids movie, so despite my impassioned rant here I honestly won't be losing any sleep over it, but as the threads here, sure, I can enjoy calling Lucas a fucking idiot, fuck the prequels etc. YMMV

Mr Skeletor wrote:

Black Barney wrote: It's like I strongly dislike the screenwriter of Alien 3 because Aliens is my favourite movie of all time and now the ending is kinda ruined because I know that Newt and Hicks don't wake up.

Grow some balls you baby.

No, Barney's right. This is a fucking cinematic crime. The guy who wrote it needs to spend a few years in prison. He can share a cell with the same prick who wrote Terminator 3.

Star Wars is the king shit. Sure, Lucas' continual toying with his old stuff is annoying because it takes away from what was, at the time, groundbreaking cinematography. Nobody had done that shit before.

The story arcs were great. From the whiny farmboy hero-to-be to the old sensei looking for redemption to the mercenary scoundrel who turned out to have a heart of gold.

All of it was great.

Then....

The prequels. Sure it was nice to see a young Obi Wan and his master Qui Gon (who, for some reason, got not a single fucking mention by name in the original trilogy) kicking some droid ass and whatnot. But it was all so contrived.

Then the real crime....

Enter the Binks. The person who approved putting Jar Jar Binks should be castrated and then sodomized through his ballsack hole. Not only was the attempt at humor incredibly misguided, the controversy over the "racism factor" stained the entire series. I don't really think that there was a racist overtone or "sambo" reference in there, I just think it was shit writing from an old, washed up man looking to complete his legacy. Oh, and a washed up old man who thought he could develop a sense of humor 30 years after making his magnum opera.

I didn't even really mind the stiff-as-rigormortis acting by the Hayden "Career died with Jumper" Christiansen. Sure, the guy couldn't act his way out of a paper bag, but the movies overall were still decent. Shit, put Natalie Portman in anything and I'm pretty much sold.

But the prequels tarnished what should have been left alone. They are the "Enterprise w/ Scott Bakula" of Star Trek. Why technology was better BEFORE the clone wars than after makes no sense just as why the Enterprise was so much more bad-ass, with touchscreens and flat-screen HD displays 100 years BEFORE Kirk was fucking the tentacles off of green bitches.

The one saving grace in all of this is that Industrial Light and Magic was the product of Lucas, and they changed filmmaking forever.