PT The prequels should have been longer.

I was watching the deleted scenes from AOTC and ROTS the other day. A few of them could have been acted, but it struck me how much they added to the films. It really humanised Padme seeing her interact with her family. When I then watch the OT, it makes you realise and hope that Luke/Leia will one day meet their grandparents. It also adds to the love story.

Then the extra scenes with Obi Wan/Anakin at the start of ROTS really helps show their friendship. They are comrades fighting in arms. The political scenes with Pade/Bail/Mon Mothma were brilliant. I loved how we saw the birth of the rebellion and the growing tension politically between Padme and Anakin.

Ultimately I think there was a missing film between AOTC and ROTS. There should have been a film detailing the clone wars, just like the Clone Wars cartoon. It would have allowed us to see more of Dooku, including the excellent Christopher Lee and shown Anakin/Obi Wan as brothers.

George Lucas constantly talks about the compassion of the Jedi and heroes on both sides. It would have been nice to see heroic members of the Separitist fighting against the Jedi, instead of villains like Dooku or Grievous. A hotshot pilot to rival Anakin. A heroic general, fighting to break away from the corrupt Republic. It was the opportunity to have characters Anakin/Obi Wan liked but had to fight against.

George also likes to mention how the Jedi are compassionate. Another film could show this more clearly. They could have the Jedi rescuing and sparing their enemies. TCW cartoon are very well done, but it would have been better to see this on screen.

My biggest problem with the prequels is that they don't show enough of the things George wants to stress. We are forced to go to what was the EU. Another film would have given us much of this on screen.

 

They showed exactly what he wanted to stress.

That's why he showed them.

All the other tons of things he had in his mind were terrific but were not for the movie hence TCW series which went into other stories.

 

I maybe did not explain myself well enough.

Listening to his recent and past interviews, the films don't give enough attention to the issues Lucas want to emphasis. It's like Lucas

Example 1. The Jedi love their comrades, but are prepared to let them go when they did. We get examples of this in the films, but not enough. Obi Wan is the best example. He loves Qui Gon, but lets him go and calms himself to defeat Maul. He loves Anakin, but confronts him and defeats him when he becomes Vader. However, in my opinion the films would be much richer if we had a scenes of the Jedi doing what Yoda said "about letting loved ones go." Why not create an extra scene where a Jedi master show the correct way to get over his Padawan's death.

Example 2. Anakin and Obi-Wan are the awesome twosome, joking, laughing and working brilliantly together. It's there in ROTS, right at the beginning, but again I feel the films would be better with more such scenes.

The prequels seem to be like Lucas had a checklist of things he needed to show, to tell his story. To his credit he did have a scene for each of these scenes and that's why, I believe, the story works.

It's just my opinion that if Lucas had dedicated two, three maybe even four scenes to get some themes across then it would have made much better films. I think the prequels get overly criticised, because that's the popular thing to do.

 

I mean, you point it out yourself: The movies did include all the points he wanted to get across. I don't think he needed to show those things any more than he did. I don't think it adds anything to show the same exact thing repeatedly. That's not how Lucas has ever operated. In ANH, Luke and Han effectively only become true friends for a few minutes of screentime before Han makes his disappointing decision to leave, and yet it works. You don't need any more than that, because these aren't those kinds of movies. Relationships and character arcs are dramatically truncated and abbreviated, but you buy it because of the inherently fast-paced style of the storytelling. In AOTC, we have an entire film of Anakin's and Obi-Wan's adversarial father-son relationship punctuated by brief moments of love and friendship, and then in ROTS we have an entire first act and then some establishing their new status as essentially equal brothers-in-arms operating in perfect sync with each other and displaying a seemingly unbreakable bond of friendship and loyalty.

As long as the emotional logic is there, it works. If it's not there, it doesn't work. But for the prequels, I think it was always there.

 

I've always thought it would have been best if there had been two prequel trilogies: one set around TPM (one film before and one film after), and one Clone Wars trilogy (AOTC, a TCW movie, and ROTS).

Would have allowed for a more full explanation of the Sith, the state of the galaxy, and plotlines like Sifo-Dyas that didn't get wrapped up in the films. I would have had:

Ep 1 - The Phantom Menace (the plot of the Darth Plagueis novel, but told from the viewpoint of Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan)
Ep 2 - The Tragedy of Darth Plagueis (same plot as TPM, but with added scenes that show Sidious taking power from Plagueis - Sidious would have his hood up the whole time so as to preserve his identity)
Ep 3 - Rise of the Dark Side (told through lens of Anakin and Obi-Wan, this would show the beginnings of the Separatist movement and how Sidious as chancellor consolidated power)

Ep 4 - The Clone Wars (same plot as AOTC)
Ep 5 - Attack of the Clones (adaptation of the Ahsoka leaving arc in TCW)
Ep 6 - Revenge of the Sith (same plot as the real ROTS)

 

Well I'm sure Disney will do something about it (once they've done rehashing the OT into the oblivion). But only with the real clones and real droids, please

 

I don't think i could tolerate another five minuets of AOTC

 

Longer? No. We just saw a 2½-hour Star Wars film, which, frankly, could’ve been cut by about 45 minutes.

I think they needed to be restructured, though. Fix the decision to make Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999) the backstory of the backstory and you immediately have a much better structure.

 

It could use an Episode 2.5 to see Obi-Wan and Anakin having adventures during the Clone Wars together, being friends and heroes. And develop background Jedi, clones and the rest. They did make the animated show to fill the gap but not everyone watched it. I don't mind TPM at all because it shows the Galaxy before the epic conflict and Anakin as an innocent child but having more time with the adult Anakin before his turn would've helped with the perception of the trilogy.

 

Orson Welles got the childhood innocence and traumatic separation from his mother at far too young an age across in 5 minutes.



Do the stuff about Anakin being freed from child slavery and initially rejected by the Jedi Council as a 45-minute flashback, at most. Have Palpatine’s rise to power coincide with the start of the Clone Wars (this also has the effect of making the films less repetitive). Combining the first two prequels into one film honestly makes the trilogy flow much better.

 

I don't think it's about making the films longer, it's about using the time more efficiently. There are scenes in the prequels that should've been cut (i.e. the droid factory) and some scenes that should have been put in.

 

Eh..I think the prequels did enough for what they had.

But I can relate to the feeling. The prequels are gigantic potential craving storytelling monsters. There is a substantial amount to do, far more than what Lucas had achieved but I’m sure he knew this. You have to show what is important to the narrative, not sidetracking to be “bigger”. I think of what if’s everyday, wanting a 4th, 5th or 6th movie! I want more, but I shouldn’t.

What I have is a little overwhelming already.

 

Then they should just promote the TCW series more.

 

Not every movie has to do things the same way. TPM isn't just about Anakin and his mother. It's also about establishing the galaxy in peacetime, establishing Qui-Gon as the ideal Jedi archetype, showing Obi-Wan's journey from Padawan to Knight, depicting Palpatine's rise to the chancellorship, showing Padme's journey from naive young girl to true leader of her people, and telling the story of the Gungans and how they overcame their differences with the Naboo to work together to save their planet. There's a lot going on.

e: Also, Star Wars doesn't do flashbacks (or, at least, didn't used to). It's not part of the stylistic vocabulary of the series (or, at least, wasn't).

 

The problem with TCW, they contradict the movies too much. Anakin having a padawan and fights with Dooku comes to mind.

 

The two key points are Anakin and his mother and Palpatine’s rise to power. Anakin and his mother can be done via flashback. Palpatine’s rise to power can coincide with the start of the Clone Wars. All else is fluff.

I mean, if you want that stuff in there, fine. The trade-off is that you’ll mess up the pacing of the rest of the story, placing beats in the wrong places, necessitating repetition of story points, and introducing illogical or dubious plot situations, concepts and contradictions. If you’re fine with derailing the rest of the story, then by all means, show all that ancillary stuff.

Do you want the pacing of the rest of the story to work or do you want to establish the galaxy in peacetime? Do you want story points to be concise or do you want to establish Qui-Gon Jinn as the ideal Jedi archetype? Do you want to show Obi-Wan Kenobi’s journey from Padawan to Knight or do you want to place story beats in the correct places? Do you want logical, sensible plot situations and concepts or do you want to show Padmé Amidala’s journey from naive young girl to true leader of her people? Do you want consistency or do you want to tell the story of the Gungans and how they overcame their differences with the Naboo to save their planet?

These are all tough choices you must make. You can’t have it all. Is it worth taking a wrecking ball to the real meat of the story in order to preserve the appetizer? You can’t have both the real meat of the story and such a bloated appetizer. There isn’t room. One of the other.

Hey, you guys do nothing but criticize the Walt Disney Company for doing nothing new and just regurgitating the past. Well, there’s something new that Lucas could’ve done but didn’t and it really hurt the story. In fact, I even got the idea for a flashback from Lucas himself. He insisted on opening Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade with a flashback showing a young Indy. That, coupled with the Citizen Kane flashback, fired up my imagination.

If it’s good enough for Citizen Kane, it’s certainly good enough for the Star Wars prequels.

 

Not really.

There is nothing in the films that contradict Anakin having an apprentice or dueling Dooku a few times prior to ROTS. Anakin having an apprentice actually makes sense given how the council is high on his abilities in episode II. On top of that, Ahoska's departure gave more depth to Anakin's further disillusionment with the Jedi Council in episode III.

 

I mean, I've seen this TPM is inessential complaint a lot. But by the standards given, so is ANH.

Think about it, everything we need to know for ESB and ROTJ is set-up in ESB, much like how AOTC re-iterates the basics of TPM to springboard the Clone Wars.

The start of Anakin's arc, with his mother, Qui-Gon's death, the establishing of the Trade Federation, and Palpatine's rise to power, are all essentials for the other PT episodes, which aren't covered by AOTC alone.

Add to that the various thematic threads, like the Senate corruption, the Jedi's cold nature to Anakin and their dismissal of him, their rules on attachment, the way the happy ending is subtly subverted by Palpatine in the background.

Not to mention is just perfectly enjoyable on it's own, as a self-contained narrative

 

The 1977 film establishes the setting and the environment. It establishes the central conflict of the trilogy. It establishes all the major players, their personalities, and their relationships. It actually sets up the other two films quite nicely.

By contrast, Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999) sets up Anakin Skywalker’s backstory. Qui-Gon Jinn and Darth Maul are both dead by the end of the film. The main threat is dealt with by the end of the film. Anakin has a completely different personality the next time we meet him. It does nothing to establish the Anakin/Obi-Wan relationship. The next film has to set up an entirely new threat. It’s an appetizer, not part of the main course.

Think about it, everything we need to know for ESB and ROTJ is set-up in ESB, much like how AOTC re-iterates the basics of TPM to springboard the Clone Wars.

The start of Anakin's arc, with his mother, Qui-Gon's death, the establishing of the Trade Federation, and Palpatine's rise to power, are all essentials for the other PT episodes, which aren't covered by AOTC alone.[/quote] I agree that the start of Anakin’s arc with his mother is essential. Hence, a flashback. As I said, Welles did it within 5 minutes.



Nearly every group of critics considers it the greatest movie ever made.

I also think that it's pretty damn easy to have Palpatine’s rise to power coincide with the start of the Clone Wars. In fact, Palpatine uses the secession to make Valorum look weak and uses that as the impetus for the motion of no confidence. Done.

Qui-Gon’s death is completely unimportant to the story. In fact, Qui-Gon wasn’t even in the original outline. So that falls under fluff.

And a million other corporations seceded from the Republic. What makes the Trade Federation so damn important? You didn’t need an entire movie to establish them.

The Senate corruption is easy enough to handle if you actually structure the films properly, as is the Jedi’s cold nature to Anakin. Episode II actually established the rules on attachment much more than Episode I did, so you’re not losing anything.

It isn’t far from a thoroughly entertaining stand-alone space opera. The trade-off is that it throws off the pacing and all the story beats. As soon as we see Anakin and Obi-Wan together for the first time, they’re already at each other’s throats. It looks less like a friendship gone south and more like an enmity gone lethal. Instead of coming across as a flawed but good man who was tragically seduced to the dark side, Anakin comes across as a rotten, petulant little punk with severe anger issues who routinely commits mass murder.

Here’s how I’d handle Episode I. I’d cover the first four plot points in a flashback.

1) Obi-Wan discovers Anakin as a child slave.

2) He discovers that Anakin is a skilled pilot and is amazed at how strong the Force is with him.

3) Anakin is traumatically separated from his mother at a young age leading to severe attachment issues and separation anxiety that eventually results in Darth Vader.

4) The Council initially refuses to train him. Only after Obi-Wan convinces them of the danger of NOT training someone this strong in the Force do they reluctantly agree.

5) Palpatine uses the secession to call for a motion of no confidence instead of the blockade.

There. Everything in Episode I that I didn’t mention can easily be jettisoned…and should be jettisoned.

 

"Ah but you forget to focus on the moment my young padawan"

"Hey, you guys do nothing but criticize the Walt Disney Company for doing nothing new and just regurgitating the past."

Lucasfilm and Walt Disney
George Lucas and Rick Mcallum

The quintessential partners in crime. Who's the more ironic duo?

I wish that weren't true Kuro. And yet all of what they have done is just going back and forward, as JJ Abrams put it, at a berserk pace. TFA? R1? TLJ? That god be damned Han Solo film? Just observing the visual choices, much less their mentality behind them is all proof.

TLJ's uses of flashbacks was quite the rehash from Rian's Looper(the entire Luke Skywalker/Kylo sequences are directly from that movie) nor did he try to fit flashbacks with Star Wars. I'm not going to get into a TLJ argument but Rain-Man decided to make a Rian Johnson movie while not making further attempts to make creative decisions like with Flashbacks. Instead of going by the typical film-making standard(because Star Wars is far from typical) Luke should have had a moment to use his force abilities to show his past to Rey. This sequence would be sort of like Rey's vision moment in TFA, just with more subtle communication rather "aggressive negotiations". It can be both in the moment of the film and showing the past simultaneously with no compromise.

Anyways, from what I gather of the suggestions you made, it sounds like this is the description of a Star Wars 77. If Lucas would have done it this way, you'd might end up more similar to TFA than it's own film.

 

Qui-Gon's death is important. It's the spark that leads to Anakin's downfall. Without the strong father figure of Jinn, Anakin is forced to study under Obi-Wan, resentful of his master's dying wish. That sets up the dynamic throughout AOTC, which is predicated on the relationships of the characters in TPM. TPM is also a greater opportunity to show the Old Republic, un-mired by the Clone Wars and Empire forming, that wouldn't work if it was in the same film as the CW starting.

Look, ANH is no different. Cut it out and what do you lose? Obi-Wan's death, but we find out most of the same info from Yoda, and the Obi ghost is present too. There's no real references back to Alderaan, Owen and Beru, Tarkin, or the Death Star. Vader's motivation is different, focusing on Luke. It's just as inessential to the trilogy as TPM is, if not more so.

 

It's not fluff. It's called "story."

The pacing's good, the beats are good, no story points are repeated, there are no illogical or dubious plot situations. The story is not derailed. It's not ancillary. Ehhhhh. Try again, buster.

I want to do all of it and have it work just as well as it did.

Actually, we can have it all. And we did. And it all worked beautifully.

You're really not doing too hot here. You got basically everything wrong.

You're right. Maybe the next Star Wars movie should be done in claymation. It would be a bold new direction for the series and therefore beyond reproach. If it's good enough for Wallace and Gromit....

 

I think each of the prequels could honestly have been shaved down in runtime, with maybe just a tiny bit added to RotS. TPM runs in at 136 minutes, which, in my opinion is about 10 minutes to long. AotC runs at 142 minutes, and could have cut down some subplots cough cough Anakin and Padmé cough cough so that the final film ended up at just a little less than TPM’s runtime. RotS, being the most important film in the trilogy, could have actually used a little extra runtime, such as another 5-10 minutes or so, to not rush things as much. You have to remember, this isn’t Lord of the Rings we are talking about, Star Wars doesn’t need to run for 175 minutes + per film.

 

Well, you’re simply wrong about this one. In the original outline, Obi-Wan Kenobi arrived, discovered Anakin and his great potential with the Force, and decided to take the boy as an apprentice. During this time, he’d meet up with his own former master, Qui-Gon Jinn, who was a minor character in the story present in the Jedi Temple. However, as he went on, Lucas thought that, to better show how rebellious a character Anakin was as an apprentice, he should first show what a normal Master-Padawan relationship was like. He could show Obi-Wan with a different apprentice, one who dies or completes his training, but neither option worked. The former would have a severe impact on the character of Obi-Wan, make him, if anything, even more cautious about taking on another apprentice, and the latter undermines the idea that he was arrogant to presume that he could train Anakin, since he’d already done a fine job of training others in the Force. Obi-Wan was written in the script as being a somewhat rebellious Jedi compared to the others, rather than being more in lockstep with the Jedi leadership. If that sounds more like Qui-Gon Jinn, well, that’s because that’s the change that Lucas decided was the only option open to him- take the character of Qui-Gon and put him in place of Obi-Wan and then insert Obi-Wan into the script as his Padawan.

But this solution was not without its own problems. Not only would this marginalize Obi-Wan, because the original script had nothing for an apprentice to do except follow his Master around and there was no room for anyone else to join the party heading into Mos Espa, so he would be completely out of the film by that point, it also would require him to be de-aged. He could hardly be a middle-aged man and training to be a Jedi if Anakin was argued to be too old, and this would be a continuity glitch, as the Obi-Wan played by the 63-year-old Alec Guinness was intended to be at least a decade older than the man playing him was. If the prequel Obi-Wan was a young Padawan, it meant that the aged hermit was approximately the same age as Brad Pitt. Not young, certainly, but hardly what you’d call an “old fossil”. And even the man who said this line, Harrison Ford, when he was approximately this adjusted age for “Old Ben”, was playing a skull-cracking action hero President in Air Force One.

It sets up the characters of Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Princess Leia and Darth Vader, and their relationships with each other. It sets up the conflict between the Rebel Alliance and the Galactic Empire.

By contrast, once you remove the essential elements from SW99 that I already mentioned, it doesn’t set up much of anything. Qui-Gon does at the end of the movie. Darth Maul dies. Anakin changes so much in between movies that he might as well be a different character. We don’t see him interact with Obi-Wan at all. We don’t meet Count Dooku until halfway through the next movie. It actually forces the story to become repetitive, by doing the whole “Palpatine manufactures a crisis in order to gain power” plot twice in a row. The plot of each film is kickstarted by putting Padmé in peril. It would’ve had a nice poetic rhyming if they’d only done that in the first and third films. By doing it in all three films, it just gets annoyingly repetitive.

Yeah, you’re simply factually wrong about this one. Deny it all you like, but you’re wrong. Let’s just go with repeated story points and illogical or dubious plot situations for right now, since they dovetail nicely into each other.

The character of Padmé Amidala ran into her own problems because there were two characters whose plots defined the events of the prequel trilogy- Palpatine and Anakin. Palpatine was to rise to power before the end of the first film and become Chancellor. Anakin was to marry his one true love before the end of the second film. The mechanism for both these events was the same thing- the assassination of Padmé. Her death, or near death, would allow Palpatine to receive a strong sympathy vote to be elevated to Chancellor, and because she survived, Anakin would be made her personal bodyguard to begin the path of courtship, but because Palpatine’s rise to power couldn’t be delayed until the second film, and because Anakin as a 9-year-old boy was not a Jedi, not a bodyguard, and a little young to begin courting anybody, Lucas had to introduce a second peril in order to justify the sympathy vote.

But the problem was that in the first film, Padmé was only a child, remember, not a Senator, so that was not going to work. She had to be somebody of great importance, but who could it be? Well, a child leader would’ve made sense in a system with hereditary leadership, and Princess Leia’s involvement in the Imperial Senate showed that there was no reason that she couldn’t serve in both roles, but there was one fly in the ointment. Leia could be in the Senate because her mother, the Queen, who was part of Leia’s backstory before the first film was even made, was off ruling Alderaan while she was in the Senate. If Padmé’s in the Senate, it means that somebody else is off ruling Naboo. Otherwise, she’d be neglecting her people by being on Coruscant. Thus, you would need to have more members of the royal family around, which would only complicate the plot even further and leave the audience to question either why these great leaders weren’t there to help save their world or why Padmé’s so great if she’s willing to abandon her responsibilities to someone less capable. This would lead to a decision that would get Lucas a lot of criticism. She’s not royalty in the second film because her time as ruler is over. Therefore, the position of Queen would be an elected one.



Given that it also involved the electing of a child to the role…well, it’s understandable why people might take issue with the logic of that. But as you can see, Lucas had no choice. Anything else would require either scrapping his ideas and starting over or structuring things as is and hoping that if he glosses over the details, it won’t bother people much. Writing a work as complicated as the prequels was akin to mapping out a game of chess by playing both sides but without touching any of the pieces until you’ve already figured out every move that is going to be made. Perhaps his gameboard will require one player to make a deliberately foolish move and, if so, that’s not ideal, but recalculating the whole game was just time he didn’t have.

But now that you see all the mechanisms there, you can see this rather strange connection. Naboo elects child Queens for limited terms. Why? Because Lucas chose to set the entirety of the first film when Anakin was 9 years old. It doesn’t sound connected, but once you line up all the dominos, you can perfectly see how knocking over the first knocks over the last. Much like Leia being made Luke’s sister, it wasn’t part of a grand plan. It was simply the best option Lucas had out of a whole lot of bad options.

It’s already half animated anyway, so why not?

Newton’s third law of motion states that every action will have an equal and opposite reaction. You can refuse to see the flaws in the trilogy. Just don’t act shocked when people refuse to see anything good about it.

The politics and scheming still would’ve been there. It wouldn’t have replicated the Rebels vs. Empire dynamic. Anakin’s character arc and attachment issues remain intact. All I’ve done is trim it down and try to focus on the best elements of the story, whilst weeding out the stuff that frankly didn’t need to be there.

As is, the prequel trilogy sorta feels like a rough draft that accidentally got committed to celluloid. You can see the nuggets of a really great story in there, but it still needs to be processed.

I wonder how many of you have read Lucas’s original prequel outline. I’m basically advocating a return to that. Going by Lucas’s outline, the only important elements of SW99 are Anakin’s separation from his mother and the rise of Palpatine. Everything else was constructed out of whole cloth because he only had a half hour’s worth of material for a film about Anakin’s childhood.

 

Dude, I can't be factually wrong about stuff like that. It's all subjective, not matter how much you want to pretend it's a matter of objective fact. I get it. You didn't like the movies, and you want your opinion to be objectively validated somehow. Well, it's not going to happen.

I'd respond to the rest of your points in more detail but honestly it would be a real hassle to format and I just don't care that much.

I have my criticisms of the films. Just because they're not the same as yours is no reason to take such a self-righteous, lecturing tone. But hey, we're all friends here, right?