Star Wars: Episode 0 (Palpatine's path to Sith)

Page 3 - Seeking answers? Join the AnandTech community: where nearly half-a-million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.

Ichinisan

Lifer
Oct 9, 2002
28,298
1,235
136
I wouldn't say quite universally.

I know kids (ie: the target audience) who actually enjoyed them... my nieces (5 and 3) pretty much only know Star Wars through the prequels and the various cartoon incarnations.

Watch the original trilogy and tell me "the target audience for Star Wars is children ages 3-5." :colbert:
 

Ichinisan

Lifer
Oct 9, 2002
28,298
1,235
136
kids (ie: the target audience)
what does star wars offer as children's entertainment?

entire races of mechanical and flesh slave soldiers
uncountable slaughter of aforementioned slave soldiers
the murder of billions of innocent civilians
many individual murders and attempted murders, including children
1 rape (to death)
fraud regularly practiced by the "good guys"
drug use
smuggling
terrorism
torture
continuous and prominent dismemberment
civil slavery
racial supremacy
nazi-themed styling

Droning political scenes.
 

mmntech

Lifer
Sep 20, 2007
17,501
12
0
1 was not horrible but not great. I think it had the best music and fight scenes. Maul was the best villian of the series. Jar Jar ruined that movie for me.

I'm going to play devil's advocate and say that Phantom Menace is actually the best of the prequels. It's goofy and campy, but that was fairly typical for summer block busters in the late 90s.

-It's well shot and looks fantastic on 35mm film. It used real life filming locations, physical sets, and practical effects. ie Yoda is a puppet and not CGI.
-The acting isn't great but it's not terrible. Jake Lloyd comes off as a goofy but relatable kid. Characters are somewhat established and developed despite wooden performances by Liam Neeson and Ewan McGreggor.
-The action scenes are pretty decent. The pod racing segment was kinda cool, and the fight with Darth Maul was epic. Played homage to Luke fighting Vader in Cloud City.

It becomes a better movie the less you take it seriously. Sort of like the 1960s Batman. It's camp. Even with Jar Jar, there's not a lot of cringe worthy moments that the later films would become notorious for. I wouldn't pay money to see it in the theatre but I would watch it on TV if it happened to be on.

I agree that Episode II is the worst of the three. The romance story is like it was written be someone who's completely alien to human love. There's a lot of cringe worthy dialogue in this movie. It's just painful to watch.

Episode III dialled it back a bit but there's a lot of awkward dialogue and performances. Plus it did away completely with physical sets and effects in favour of CGI. It's a real ugly film. I really don't get the praise that was heaped on it. The ending is absolutely terrible.
 

norseamd

Lifer
Dec 13, 2013
13,990
180
106
0vm384D.jpg
 

norseamd

Lifer
Dec 13, 2013
13,990
180
106
Honestly I thought the first half of 2 was not that bad. I just wish there was more in the film about Obi-Wan investigating about the bounty hunter and assassin and crap.
 

norseamd

Lifer
Dec 13, 2013
13,990
180
106
Also it probably took me a good 20 to 30 minutes to find that gif up above so appreciate it.
 

norseamd

Lifer
Dec 13, 2013
13,990
180
106
Actually Vader completes his turn to the dark side because she's going to die.... but otherwise yeah...

This is what I wrote about this topic earlier.

Actually from what I understand he fell to the dark side because he gave the Republic to the Sith in one act without realizing it. Although maybe that was just the straw that allowed his physical allegiance when emotional problems had been tearing at him forever. And going by natural human psychology love does count as one of the perfect influences that could cause someone like Skywalker to fall to the dark side. Basically any type of basic human emotion or psychology would be good for the story as they tend to have very power influence on the soul.
 

cbrunny

Diamond Member
Oct 12, 2007
6,791
406
126
Actually Vader completes his turn to the dark side because she's going to die.... but otherwise yeah...


..

This was actually my biggest beef with III. It took like 20 minutes for him to go from super-Jedi to fuck-the-Jedi-gonna-kill-my-best-friend. I know that they had been trying to play him up as a tortured soul barred from love and that makes him sad but they HELLA FAILED at that. The guy was an awful actor. Just stone cold. Then a raging dark-side enthusiast. Whiny pos....

If III was about two hours longer, and the actual conflict between anakin, padme, death, and the emperor was better flushed out, it would have been a substantially better movie that was still limited by shitty acting in Anakin's role. I mean we are talking full polar opposite in 20 minutes or less. Light to dark. Jedi to sith. That's like being an upstanding citizen for your entire life, donating time and money to charity, sacrificing pleasure in your life to benefit others, and then having lunch with a friend, leaving that lunch, and then - because someone said it was a good idea - you decide to go on a shooting rampage, rob banks, and basically kill everyone. Very very poorly portrayed on screen in all fronts.
 

BlitzPuppet

Platinum Member
Feb 4, 2012
2,460
7
81
This was actually my biggest beef with III. It took like 20 minutes for him to go from super-Jedi to fuck-the-Jedi-gonna-kill-my-best-friend. I know that they had been trying to play him up as a tortured soul barred from love and that makes him sad but they HELLA FAILED at that. The guy was an awful actor. Just stone cold. Then a raging dark-side enthusiast. Whiny pos....

If III was about two hours longer, and the actual conflict between anakin, padme, death, and the emperor was better flushed out, it would have been a substantially better movie that was still limited by shitty acting in Anakin's role. I mean we are talking full polar opposite in 20 minutes or less. Light to dark. Jedi to sith. That's like being an upstanding citizen for your entire life, donating time and money to charity, sacrificing pleasure in your life to benefit others, and then having lunch with a friend, leaving that lunch, and then - because someone said it was a good idea - you decide to go on a shooting rampage, rob banks, and basically kill everyone. Very very poorly portrayed on screen in all fronts.

I bet if Episode 3 was released today they'd follow the trend of splitting the movie into two parts. That would actually do this film justice as the prequels seemed TOO compressed.

"Hi I'm little kid Anakin, Hi I'm a teenager Anakin I like you, Poof you're pregnant, oh no I'm Darth Vader."
 

nageov3t

Lifer
Feb 18, 2004
42,808
83
91
I feel like if 1-3 were made by a better director/writer, they would have started off with Anakin and Padme both teenagers or 20-somethings, rather than devoting an entire movie to 10 year-old Annie drag racing in the desert with Jar Jar, giving way more room to flesh everything out.
 

destrekor

Lifer
Nov 18, 2005
28,799
359
126
This was actually my biggest beef with III. It took like 20 minutes for him to go from super-Jedi to fuck-the-Jedi-gonna-kill-my-best-friend. I know that they had been trying to play him up as a tortured soul barred from love and that makes him sad but they HELLA FAILED at that. The guy was an awful actor. Just stone cold. Then a raging dark-side enthusiast. Whiny pos....

If III was about two hours longer, and the actual conflict between anakin, padme, death, and the emperor was better flushed out, it would have been a substantially better movie that was still limited by shitty acting in Anakin's role. I mean we are talking full polar opposite in 20 minutes or less. Light to dark. Jedi to sith. That's like being an upstanding citizen for your entire life, donating time and money to charity, sacrificing pleasure in your life to benefit others, and then having lunch with a friend, leaving that lunch, and then - because someone said it was a good idea - you decide to go on a shooting rampage, rob banks, and basically kill everyone. Very very poorly portrayed on screen in all fronts.

In the prequels, it seemed like everyone had terrible acting.

Hayden Christensen isn't terrible at all, but even great actors like Ewan McGregor and Natalie Portman can appear to be terrible when given bad direction and bad scripted dialogue.

There were plenty of moments in A New Hope that had some pretty bad acting. Lucas is not a director who can pull out strong performances from his actors. Great actors still mostly rely upon at least competent directors to pull out their best acting.
 

zinfamous

No Lifer
Jul 12, 2006
111,095
30,038
146
In the prequels, it seemed like everyone had terrible acting.

Hayden Christensen isn't terrible at all, but even great actors like Ewan McGregor and Natalie Portman can appear to be terrible when given bad direction and bad scripted dialogue.

There were plenty of moments in A New Hope that had some pretty bad acting. Lucas is not a director who can pull out strong performances from his actors. Great actors still mostly rely upon at least competent directors to pull out their best acting.

They were also acting in blue rooms trying to interact with nothing, while Lucas was over there barking orders for those meatbags to just do their jobs so the real talent (his cartoons) could come in later and make everything work.

He's a terrible person to work with, supposedly, and absolutely dreadful when directing actors.
 

nageov3t

Lifer
Feb 18, 2004
42,808
83
91
They were also acting in blue rooms trying to interact with nothing, while Lucas was over there barking orders for those meatbags to just do their jobs so the real talent (his cartoons) could come in later and make everything work.

He's a terrible person to work with, supposedly, and absolutely dreadful when directing actors.
yeah... ever since reading how working on The Hobbit almost drove Ian McKellen to quit acting because of how awful it is to shoot in front of a green screen, I've got a lot more sympathy towards actors.

The veteran actor says, “I got absolutely miserable and had a little cry to myself. I didn’t realise that the microphone I was wearing was open so everybody could hear me muttering to myself about how I wanted to go home and so on.”
And Jackson admits, “He truly had such a miserable time on the first day or two of the shoot, we felt sorry for him being dumped in green screen land.”
In fact, Sir Ian tells behind-the-scenes cameras, he actually considered leaving the production.
“It was so distressing and off-putting and difficult that I thought ‘I don’t want to make this film if this is what I’m going to have to do’. It’s not what I do for a living. I act with other people, I don’t act on my own."

http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2013...the-hobbit-made-me-think-i-should-quit-acting
 

destrekor

Lifer
Nov 18, 2005
28,799
359
126
yeah... ever since reading how working on The Hobbit almost drove Ian McKellen to quit acting because of how awful it is to shoot in front of a green screen, I've got a lot more sympathy towards actors.



http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2013...the-hobbit-made-me-think-i-should-quit-acting

I have a healthy respect for the quality actors who craft laudable and mesmerizing performances even in movies/scenes where you can tell it is almost entirely green-screen. There are plenty of movies were entire sequences, if not the entire movie, are on green-screen, and I've seen quite a few behind the scenes shots where they are going through their routines in a completely green room with green obstacles and whatnot.

To be able to create a character presence that feels natural in a world that the actor can only imagine in their head, that's a skill that goes beyond standard acting. Believable acting in heavily-CGI movies IS possible, but damn, it cannot be easy. Some actors make it appear so easy but who knows what it as like on set to get that performance out of them.
 

norseamd

Lifer
Dec 13, 2013
13,990
180
106
Ewan McGregor

Funny because with my limited understanding of each actor just remembering the films in my head I concluded he was quite good as an actor and shit. Also I concluded that love him or hate him Samuel Jackson was also quite good going off what I remember and shit.
 

BoberFett

Lifer
Oct 9, 1999
37,562
9
81
I'm a Star Wars fan. I have a freakin' Boba Fett tattoo for crying out loud. But honestly, the Ep 7 trailer was meh. Let it end. The story is complete.

I tire of the way American media has to milk every last penny out of every idea. Some of the greatest British TV was two seasons. Twelve episodes. We take The Office and manage to turn it into a decade of TV, most of it completely unnecessary. And now we're getting a 7th Star Wars movie?
 

BoberFett

Lifer
Oct 9, 1999
37,562
9
81
You are so alone on that its not even funny.

And that's why Hollywood continues to crank out lowest common denominator garbage. I'm sure you'll all help make box office history with Fast and Furious 48.
 

nageov3t

Lifer
Feb 18, 2004
42,808
83
91
And that's why Hollywood continues to crank out lowest common denominator garbage. I'm sure you'll all help make box office history with Fast and Furious 48.
since time immemorial, watching shit go fast with occasional explosions has been considered a highly enjoyable activity.

Fast and Furious is just modern-day chariot races ;) plus, they're pretty much the most racially diverse movies out there.