"Holding her is dangerous. If word of this gets out, it could generate sympathy for the Rebellion in the Senate."
"I have traced the Rebel spies to her. Now she is my only link to finding their secret base."
"She'll die before she tells you anything."
"Leave that to me."
Exactly. Then you have the Moff council scene where they're talking about the political influence of the Rebels in the Senate, and Tarkin says they don't need to worry about that because Palpatine just nuked the Senate. When one of the generals asks how the fuck Palpatine will remain in control without the bureaucracy of the Senate, Tarkin says the regional governors will retain control.
In the same vein, the political scenes in TPM aren't that intrusive either. You have a minor talk about how trade routes and taxes caused the Trade Federation to blockade the planet in the opening, which is about as well-explained as how the fuck the Rebels gained a foothold in the IMPERIAL Senate. You don't even get much of it, since the Trade Federation try to kill the Jedi ambassadors before the talks even begin.
Then you have the second scene where Palpatine shows how the Trade Federation's supporters in the Senate have made the Chancellor weak, which he then uses to push Amidala to call for a vote of No Confidence. The Chancellor, who at the time is a broken ninny who isn't loved by the senators, is unable to resist.
Most of the talking scenes I remember taking up TPM's time was Qui-Gon and the gang talking to Anakin and his mother about his life. Which has jack shit to do with politics in the least. The Republic didn't even exist out there in Tatooine, so its politics were irrelevant to them.
There's a reason it's a deleted scene and why Mike criticized similar in TPM.
Except they left Biggs in the film with no explanation why he knows Luke or why he was a rebel.
The films are inspired by WW2/old serials, they weren't full on adaptations. Lucas was trying to get as much of what he wanted into ANH because it very easily could've failed and that would've been all she wrote. But once it became a success, yeah, things changed around a bit, but the internal logic and themes were still there.
Old serials didn't have the bad guys winning or the good guy teacher telling the hero to let his friends die. Old serials didn't have mass genocide with a planet killer. They inspired SW, but they weren't a 1-1 copy. You can say the same thing with the Prequels, with the TPM podracing scene, the AOTC Coliseum fight scene, and Kenobi's fight in Utapau in ROTS being a typical Saturday Morning Cartoon fight until Order 66 pops up.
But even in things like Empire, you still had that sense of adventure. The Prequels tried to ape parts of that, but they didn't work. Take the 2 romance subplots Empire and Attack of the Clones.
You have Han and Leia being hunted by the Empire, the added stakes of the Falcon being damaged. There's little moments where you have that spark going with the two of them, which leads to their escape from a giant asteroid monster. It heightens the stakes, causes more tension in the narrative and furthers the narrative as they have to limp off to Bespin to get past the jury rigged repairs Chewie and Han managed.
It was not a sense of adventure in Empire. In ANH, it was them going off in a crusade to save the princess from the evil wizard. In ESB, they were running with their tails between their legs in a desperate escape. The former was more romantic, more nostalgic to old tropes. The latter was a darker tale where the good guys have to hide in the most desperate of places, from inside an asteroid, to a place run by someone Han openly doesn't trust, while Luke confronts his inner demons. The two are not the same, and acting like they are is complete bullshit.
It really goes to show that RLM and its fanboys see Star Wars as only the 1977 movie and nothing else.
- Force = spiritual, mystical thing, almost quasi-religious
- Empire = Nazis, which I'd argue grew more and more as we got further into the OT, see: the Emperor's arrival at the start of RoTJ
- Spaceships = Based off of WW2 aerial combat and dogfights.
- Lightsaber duels = Visual metaphors
None of that shit was challenged in the Prequels. Palpatine coming to power by election is just like what happened with the Nazis, and just like the Nazis using Communists as an outside threat to justify tyranny, so too did Palpatine use the Separatists for it. The only difference here is they added a "what if" scenario of what if Hitler was smarter and manipulated the German Communists from behind the scenes to gain absolute power before killing them off.
The Force was always in the genetics. Kenobi in the OT only bothered to train Luke, and Luke went off to tell Leia that she is the only one with his powers. Why? Because they are both Vader's children. Ghost Ben and Yoda would certainly train more Rebels in the Force if it wasn't genetic.
As for lightsabers, it makes more sense that they fought like in the PT. They would've done it in the OT if they could get away with it. Mike denying that ANH's lightsaber fight was slow and clumsy is the height of denial. There is a reason Alec Guinness wanted his character dead, so he wouldn't have to do more awkward fight scenes.
In AotC you have that shit in Naboo (with the bounty hunter subplot that goes nowhere) with Padme and Anakin going to Geonosis to rescue Obi Wan. It's poorly executed and disjointed compared to the OT which is fucking efficient as hell with it's pacing, writing and delivery. And lots of CGI fights which Mike is pretty well established for hating (I'll admit, they're guilty pleasures for me, personally, even if they are somewhat dumb looking back at them.)
Really? A lot of people complained about ESB's pacing, which slowed to a crawl after they got off Hoth and only picked back up once Lando sold Han out to the Empire. And of course, Mike hating CGI from a late 90s-2000s film series is stupid, especially since CGI was everywhere in that time, and the Prequels did it better than most.
Also, each Prequel movie had more practical effects than the OT combined. You just weren't able to tell because they seamlessly blended both practical effects and the CGI, which is what a good director is supposed to do.
The only folks who really cared about this shit were Kevin Smith-era nerds in the 90s. Yes, the Ewoks were blatant merchandising grabs, but there was no 'dark atmosphere' in ANH (comparatively speaking) so you could argue that ESB is the odd duck out...or just understand that it follows a basic three act story arc and not be bothered by it. There were still dark elements in Jedi, and there was still an influence on the old serials (Chewie does a fucking Tarzan yell for fuck sake's.)
False. Many fans hated the Ewoks because they were so jarring. To the point where some later games in the SW franchise allowed you to vent your anger at them by killing them.
And one can say the same for Prequel-hating fags. They were a minor group of nerds that now, are even growing smaller as Prequel love is continuing to blossom. Gen Z and Millennials as a whole are more favorable towards the Prequels. Prequel Hate is more of a Gen X thing. Note that it reached its height when Gen X reached theirs, and now that they're in decline, Gen Z and the Millennials are making "Prequels Good" videos.
Their complaint wasn't that they were in the fucking film, but that it was blatant fanservice to try and distract from a do-nothing story and (in their opinions) and unentertaining film. I do think it's a fair criticism, too, because what do CGI Tarkin and Leia add to the film besides being online talking points for nerds like us? You could literally have Random_Imperial_Nonce_004 and some shots of a body double dressed up in Leia's outfit from behind do the same shit. It was pandering fanservice and it's something Mike has always bitched about (eg, his tackling of the long opening shot in Episode 3.)
Tarkin and Leia lived around that time period being big shots in their respective factions. And yes, Rogue One is the result of their bitching towards the Prequels. They wanted more OT, Disney gave it to them. Them bitching at the fruits of their labor goes to show that they are unwilling to take responsibility.
Rogue One was just them trying to produce something in conjunction with the sequel trilogies. I'd argue that the planning and concepting for them were happening in tandem and that production definitely overlapped. (Force Awakens came out December 2015, Rogue One December 2016.) It wasn't in response to anything, but just them trying to produce different 'eras' of Star Wars and milk the most out of the franchise.
Nope. It was an ANH fanservice film since at the time, Prequel hate still occupied the Disney board, and RLM told them they wanted more OT, so all they did was make ANH tributes by making a soft reboot film and a prequel film that are tributes to ANH.
Remember that the original plan was to have the Obi Wan film along with the Han Solo film and Rogue One, so you had them taking a 'risk' (for a big ass corporate group like Disney) with unknown characters in Rogue One, and 2 films dealing with PT and OT events with recognizable names.
That was after TLJ and the Prequel Renaissance. While the Han Solo films had been in the works for some time, since Han is an OT character, Kenobi was a PT nostalgia bait show, especially since they even brought back Hayden and Ewan for the job. By then, Prequel love had shown itself to be potent, and Disney was attempting to capitalize on it with the Kenobi show and TCW season 7.
I'm really confused how you are so passionate about Star Wars yet continually just misunderstand huge segments of it, assuming you aren't going for comedic effect.
You're the one who doesn't get anything about Star Wars. It's like, your views on Star Wars begin and end in ANH. ESB and ROTJ are far different from both it and each other. Trying to say that they all had the same theme is stupid. Hell, ROTJ's second half on Endor was even lighter than ANH, while ESB eclipses them both in darkness, both thematically and in some cases, literally.
The super-efficient bad guys led by a dark wizard, who commit mass genocide and own the galaxy, suddenly loses to teddy bears and the power of love. That is not a consistent theme. Star Wars got away with it because people love the characters and universe, but if you tried that with any other franchise, you'd get laughed out of the room. Even actors like David Prowse felt that it was wrong for the big bad Empire to lose to teddy bears.
At least with the PT, the theme was more consistent, with a slowly-rising darkness that grows stronger until it stops pretending and shows itself in full.
