Title.

  • @KommandoGZD@lemmygrad.ml
    11•2 years ago

    Purely as films? Not that great in terms of pacing and writing.

    But the world building and the overarching story they told, to me, was a million times more interesting than just the OT. It made the world so much more interesting, bigger and made it feel alive, like stuff was happening everywhere all the time, not just on the immediate screen. The politics imo were great and opened up so many opportunities to expand upon. The universe would be so much flatter and stereotypical without the world building done in these films. Just wish the actual movie-aspect of them was done better.

    • JucheBot1988
      1•2 years ago

      Theory: Palpatine is actually a Marxist-Leninist leader, and the movies as we have them are just Republic-liberal propaganda.

  • KiG V2
    8•2 years ago

    Tbh I’ve always loved them. I loved them as a kid (I was 8 when Revenge of the Sith came out, seeing a Star Wars movie in theatres after becoming cognizant of a human being enough to be a fan was maddeningly exhilarating). People hate on the script but I always liked the “wooden dialogue” as I’ve seen it be described as, I was very socially deficient as a child (to the point that most people in my life thought I had Asperger’s) and it made it easy for me to follow along and IMO lends to a feeling of it being a different culture, not to mention I always like the unironically fantastical and dramatic and…I guess for lack of a better word “removed from our world” style of writing when it comes to near-and-dear-to-my-heart sci-fi/fantasy stuff. Anakin (boy or adult) or any of the other characters never read as poorly acted to me. Jar Jar Binks was never annoying to me (I thought he was goofy and funny, even as an adult he’s so fucking annoying that is seems so obviously easy to laugh at).

    So for less defense and more offense: I think the overarching plotline is fucking awesome. It’s a totally different overarching feel than the original Star Wars, it makes something that you already know how it’s vaguely going to end up as feel mysterious and tense and fresh. There’s a perfect balance of callbacks to the original and the completely new, from planets to alien species to characters to the Force to the music to the aesthetics to the tone. Costume design was gang shit, big fat yes-sir from me. Just by virtue of evolving technology and the budget, the action and CGI completely dunks on the originals but maintaining that “quality over quanity,” “lots of love put into this” feel.

    Okay spoiling the rest of this rant because it goes off tangent:

    spoiler

    ___So then we get to the new trilogy.

    I am not the type of person to immediately scoff at any new thing. When the first trailer for “The Force Awakens” came out, I cried a little, no joke, no shame; I was super fucking excited when I sat down to finally watch it. Am I jaded with the general direction media has gone in my adult life? Yes, but there are still phenomenal, soul-invigorating, artistic masterpiece movies, shows, music, videogames, books–almost everything I love the most is from 2010 to present day (and why wouldn’t it be? This is the era I’ve grown up in).

    However, this new trilogy encompasses everything that sucks donkey farts about the worst of new media.

    People shit on the prequels, so what happened? The voice actor for Jar Jar almost killed himself, George Lucas hid his face and shame and let Disney buy out his gem with not even the ghost of a smile on his face, and the industry proceeded to completely gut this operating on a “okay, everyone hated the prequels, so let’s do everything NOT the prequels” basis.

    The plot is literally a fucking carbon copy of the originals, only with the stakes artificially puffed up in a way that should convince nobody. They play all the same music themes to illicit emotions using things we are already emotionally attached to when there is no emotional payoff in any second of these garbage movies. The action and CGI are fucking amazing, sure, but it’s cheap, there’s no sense of tension, it feels like I’m watching a Transformers movie or the 600th Avengers Marvel movie. The jokes are modern corporate gag-on-your-vomit shit, the script so perfectly manicured, doesn’t take itself seriously 90% of the time but then thinks it can play “Force Theme” and make you feel invested in these flat-ass characters–like Finn was awesome as a character the first 30 minutes of the first movie and then they just pigeonhole him as Marvel Hero #44056 comic relief. Everything feels like it was filtered through an ivory tower of focus groups, prim and proper and oh so revolutionarily Woke™, like even the sequence in the 2nd new one with “rich people island ooo I profit off of war by selling guns to both sides!” somehow felt like a plastic, cynical “our corporate studies show that 65% of millennials and zoomers respond well to themes that hit these points,” it feels like it was written not by people with ideas and imagination and a heart and soul and passion but people who just got a degree from Super Prestigious Art School that religiously adhere to 3 act structures, write with tropes in mind first and foremost and jerk off to a copy of “The Hero With 1000 Faces” in a ritual before they’re allowed to put pen to paper. The fucking otherworldly honor of writing a Star Wars movie or directing a Star Wars movie felt like it went not to who was the best fit for breathing new soul into the franchise but for whoever Disney execs owed favors to, and each writer/director felt like they approached it less as “okay, let’s make a fucking awesome Star Wars movie, for the children!!!” and more as “okay, how do I secure my legacy and make a fat bag?” and it fucking shows.

    Even without the prequel hate, huge franchises have been gutted of soul right and left and it’s no surprise with where America is culturally and politically, predictable even, I mean hey Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Star Trek, Halo, all my other mainstream nerd favorites have suffered the same fates or worse (The Hobbit, Fantastic Beasts, latter new movies and 4+ respectively). Soulless live action remakes of every childhood animated movie you ever saw, cheap nostalgia plays banking off of success, rationalizing to themselves that surely everything truly Great™ has already been made. Like whatever, the chances were never good. But I really do think the prequel hate seriously pushed George “I am jealous of Soviet directors, I mean sure they can’t criticize their government but neither can we, and at least they aren’t constrained by the profit motive, that’s the real killer of art” (heavily paraphrasing) Lucas into a deep pit of shame that led to him selling to Disney. Maybe George Lucas wouldn’t have made another masterpiece, hell he might have never made another trilogy at all, but even his worst or him doing nothing would be better than these McDonald’s ass new movies. These corporate old money ghouls couldn’t release an original thought done justice even if a hardened division of underpaid artists worked on it for any length of time, they’re constitutionally incapable of not sucking ass.

    Also just for the sake of nuance, no I didn’t hate every second of the new movies, there’s some decency amid all the garbage, but I’m just pissed and ranting and look at these fingers tear up this keyboard weeeeeehooooo

  • @Kind_Stone@lemmygrad.ml
    5•2 years ago

    Well… It tried to be something new, that’s for sure. Tried exploring some more interesting topics, while still being pretty much a fairytale.

    However, it never figured out how to pack it properly. Visually and in terms of sound the movies are great. But the writing is abysmal, Anakin Skywalker is one giant walking mess thanks to terrible acting and the pacing is all over the place.

    The 3d episode would’ve been a great movie if not for many scenes being deleted, messed up pacing and ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE DIALOGUES AND ACTING from some actors. You might observe that in Russia people treat prequels much better than in the West, for example. That’s mostly because 3d episode is considered a great movie here. Until recent years I never understood why people in the foreign communities hate it so much, but then I realised that our voice actors and translators managed to turn those shitty dialogues from Lucas into something palatable without altering the original sense. Yes, goddamit, our Russian dub managed to make those TERRIBLE dialogues sound… Fine, I guess? What’s more important they managed to fix Hayden Christensen’s performance and Anakin sounds much, MUCH better.

  • @NvMe24@lemmygrad.ml
    5•2 years ago

    i liked everything except for the new trilogy, i wanted to like the new trilogies but the movie and the people behind the movie is just hard to like