Jul 14th, 2003, 09:47 PM
Okay, let me lay this out for all you Boba Fett fans. His "badass appeal" ended the very SECOND he was killed by a blind man with a stick. I liked him when I was younger, and he certainly does look cool. But now knowing all of his past, knowing who his "father" was and how he grew to hate the Jedi makes his eventual chumpy death all the more pathetic. At least "daddy" got his head cut off by a Jedi rather than being ACCIDENTALLY KILLED by a cripple.
And don't even give me that crap about how he survived and is such a badass in the books. Most of those books are shit. Yeah, it's really cool that Dengar helped him out after he escaped the Sarlaac. And then Boba Fett was the best man at Dengar's wedding. Yeah, that's just awesome. Oh, and then there's the fact that a naked Princess Leia was thrown into Boba Fett's quarters in Jabba's Palace, so Boba Fett, being a hardcore proponant of JUSTICE, covered her with a blanket and gave her his bunk, while he slept on the floor. What a great guy! I love how the special edition of ROTJ pretty much negates all of that shit about Boba Fett being this really moralistic guy by having him macking on the scummy dancing chicks. In the movies, he is a scummy bastard.
And the fact that George Lucas felt the need to insert him into the New Hope special edition just makes him suck even more. Now, rather than being the most fearsome bounty hunter in the galaxy, he appears to be little more than one of Jabba's cronies, just hanging around the big fat slug like he's got nothing better to do. In ROTJ he was just killing off some time after dropping off a bounty, spending some cash, having fun with the ladies...but the New Hope thing was just gratuitous. And it completely changes my perception of the character.
As for the prequels, on SOME levels I enjoy them both. However, neither one of them even COMPARES to the weakest of the original three (ROTJ, in my opinion). George Lucas has done a piss poor job of fitting them seamlessly into the overall story. Rather than plan everything out ahead, it seems that he's just pulling shit out of his ass and now he's struggling to fit big square pegs into little round holes. And he's talking about going back and revising the OLD trilogy so it all fits together. That's backasswards. He SHOULD have written the new trilogy to fit with the old from the beginning.
Let's face it, George Lucas is a very poor, sloppy storyteller. He's a GREAT idea man, I'll give him that, but his ideas are best when they are actually executed by other people (as evidenced by "Empire Strikes Back", directed by Irvin Kershner and written by Lawrence Kasdan and Leigh Brackett from Lucas' ideas). If he was smart, after the complete travesty that was "The Phantom Menace", he would have admitted that he's VERY rusty and let someone else have the reins for the next two movies, while he fell into an Executive Producer role. That could have salvaged things.
As it stands now:
* Jar Jar Binks is the worst character ever made in any story ever.
* The love story between Anakin and Padme is fucking ludicrous ("you just slaughtered a bunch of women and children??? that's so hot! wanna fuck???")
* Anakin is a character for whom the audience has NO empathy whatsoever (and that was vital if we are to feel that his downfall is tragic in any way).
* Qui-Gon Jinn was a fucking useless character and it makes the whole "Yoda trained Obi-Wan" thing a bunch of bullshit.
* Darth Maul may have looked cool, but as a character, he sucked. And an old man (Count Dooku/Darth Tyrannus) showed him up, even if that old man IS Christopher Lee.
* I can accept that Artoo and Threepio don't remember any of the events in the prequels, as they can have memory wipes (though Artoo may remember since nobody can fucking understand him anyway and he's a devious little shit), but I CANNOT ACCEPT that nobody else remembers them. I've heard the whole "Droids are as commonplace as toasters and no one would remember them" argument before, but these two droids presided at Anakin and Padme's FUCKING WEDDING. I would THINK they might remember that. Oh, sure, Darth Vader may be having some huge internal monologue on Cloud City about how he remembers building that droid (a protocol droid for his mother?? why the fuck would he have made his mother a DIPLOMAT with dainty hands that can't even use tools??), but since the audience doesn't KNOW about it, it doesn't do us a lick of good. That little connection between characters is utterly pointless and serves no purpose except for giving fans a reason to give a knowing wink and nod when they see something they recognize on the screen.
* Midichlorians COMPLETELY remove the mysticism from the Force. I don't care if they were there the whole time or not, I didn't want to know about it. The old trilogy was science fantasy, the new ones are unmistakably science fiction.
* For all of Yoda's talk in TESB about how weapons were pretty much unnecessary if you were badass enough with the Force, he sure as hell throws all that out the window to give the audience a bunch of CGI eye candy. I would have been MUCH more satisfied if Yoda had just dropped the ceiling on Darth Tyrannus or something. It would have been more in-character.
* There is NO logical reason to include Chewbacca into ANY of the prequels. To do so is contrived bullshit. A cameo MIGHT be acceptable, but if he delivers Luke and Leia as Padme's midwife, that might just be the lamest thing EVER.
* Why exactly were the Seperatists in "Attack of the Clones" seperating in the first place? Why do I get the feeling we're never going to hear more about that little story?
* A four-year old child could see through Palpatine's clumsy, ham-fisted machinations. And yet the Jedi and ALL OF THE SENATE could not.
* Yoda and Mace Windu talk about how they have a really bad feeling about Anakin, Yoda says there is a great darkness surrounding him...then they both just sort of shrug and move on with whatever they were doing.
* Anakin was NOT a great warrior when Obi-Wan met him, as he said in "A New Hope".
* Whatever happened to all those alien races that seem to be quite prevalent in Episodes I and II? Even on Tattooine, we see a lot of new and different aliens that we never see again. On Tattooine. I realize that this is a problem when you create a series of movies out of order, but it makes suspending my disbelief awfully difficult. I can accept that SOMETHING horrible probably happens to Naboo in Episode 3, otherwise it's pretty insane that we never hear of it or the Gungans again.
* That "cutesy" scene in AOTC with Yoda and all the Jedi children makes me want to punch somebody.
* The Jedi, to put it plainly, suck. All they ever do is sit around on their little chairs and get their asses kicked by assembly line robots.
There's a LOT more I could go on about, and I'll probably add to this thread as I think of them. The point is, I DO enjoy the prequels on SOME basic level, they are good eye candy for the most part, but the story is weak, clumsy, sloppy, and it does NOT cleanly fit into the overall whole. I still enjoy the old movies, but these new ones are so riddled with flaws it is a lot more difficult to just sit back and enjoy them. ESPECIALLY when you try to take them into context with Episodes 4, 5, and 6.
|
. Shit, i'm not claiming to be different than other people or any of that other bullshit. What i'm whining about is how the kid they picked looked like some doofus they just picked off the street as they drove by him. I have seen at least six other people on my school alone that look just like him. His performance was awful, too. He delivered his lines with a hackney and played-out manner. Maybe it's just the way the lines were written. I don't know, but it bugged the shit out of me.
Linear Mode
