PT Red Letter Media and other Prequel Reviews

Stoklasa's misconceptions and misrepresentations are not part of the "reality" of the PT. They only reflect what substitutes for reality in his own mind. As just one example, confusing midichlorians with the Force is not the fault of the PT.

 

I probably am a bit on the defensive, maybe, but I like these discussions. I do however feel I often have to start anything I want to say with something along the "hey look, not all people who hate it are exactly mindless haters", if that's what you mean. But whatever. I did my fair share of not getting why people liked the PT back in the day. I deserve it! And I'm not alone, PT supporters often find themselves doing the same. We're all passionate about what we like in Star Wars, probably human nature not to like the feeling that others don't see what you see. But something we all have to live with.

I'll aim to think about what specific things don't work for me and why, maybe watch RLM's reviews again for reminders (that don't worry I won't take at face value the way his character presents them) and/or the PT itself and try to articulate with examples why aspects don't work for me. Homework at the age of 41! Yeesh! But obviously it will sometimes come down to just I don't like the acting/writing/directing and the recurring feeling that I'm missing something that could have been, well, basically served up better, more clearly and in a more "fun" setting. So it might be hard to always justify why I personally don't enjoy it since others maybe did get it or didn't mind not getting it right away etc.

 

Isn't it? Again, even if they are not the same thing if one digs deeper, doing lots of work to try to figure out what we do and don't know and maybe even having to go to EU to get more information, how many people did walk away from a first or even fifth screening being able to easily confuse them and not appreciate this new scientific angle to the Force?

 

No, it isn't.

"Without the midichlorians, life could not exist, and we would have no knowledge of the Force. They continually speak to you, telling you the will of the Force."

Now let's replace Force with midichlorians and see what we get:

"Without the midichlorians, we would have no knowledge of the midichlorians."

The actual quote differentiates between the Force and midichlorians. It requires no "digging deeper" or "lots of work" to not screw this up. It requires no reference to EU. It requires only the understanding that new information does not necessarily contradict older information, and the willingness to accept information at face value instead of rewriting it. Why is it the fault of the PT if some people get this wrong? If people insist on "midichlorians are the Force" they are insisting on an invalid substitution of their own invention. Just how much hand-holding was the film expected to waste time on?

 

Care to back that up? I mean I could have just typed "Yes it is" but I think I've tried my best to explain why I think a work will either communicate what it wants to clearly or it won't. And the amount of clarity will be more or less desired depending on the type of work. In this case, to my eyes, Star Wars wasn't meant to be all that dense and impenetrable. Inspiring, leaving room for the imagination, yes, but in part because of the sense of a clarity of its story, world and tone.

 

I'm sorry but it does because the addition of the midichlorians for some of us immediately changed our relationship to the concept. And so confusion was sown and the mistake of equivalency was an easy one that required work to disentangle from the previous way it was understood, however loosely and in context that may have been. Again, the reality is that it wasn't equivalent, but packaged the way it was creates an experience that is very real, one that prevents such errors from being possible.

So the fact that a somewhat abstract concept as the Force is now tied to an equally abstract though fairly scientific sounding biological thingie that channels it and basically seems like the way to tell how much Force you will have access to can't be easily misread as practically equivalents? I thought that was almost the reason George even included it so he'd have a way for one of his characters (who should have been probably able to sense the Force through the Force without the need for bloodtests) to get a positively objective "reading" of his hunch. So in a sense it does give you this equivalent reading. His midichlorian reading being off the charts sounds an awful lot like he's got massive Force potential. Now I don't have RLM's quote in front of me, but I'm pretty sure any substitution he might have made would just have been shorthand for why change the nature of how we understood the Force? As someone on another board pointed out to me once, this "Force as blood disease" began actually in ROTJ so the PT isn't entirely to blame for this. But for me it is exactly such a decision to add a dimension to something that worked just fine before that definitely opens up the possibility of being not very clearly understood or misunderstood again because of the kinds of expectations ones has of such a type of film with an established relationship with its audience. Getting a pseudo-scientific explanation to an aspect of the Force was the furthest thing from my mind when I watched TPM. It threw me, it failed to communicate clearly to me and it then after required work to get at. I didn't have the script in front of me at the time nor did I have the desire to pay that kind of attention to exposition. All in all, the midichlorian example, though again I'll have to go see exactly what RLM said in order to defend or not his take on it, is one that I experienced and it is not all on me that's for sure because I know I'm not alone!

 

So far so good, if we stop there. But once again we have a statement which differentiates between midichlorians and the Force. It does not support equivalency; rather, it describes a relationship between two things which are not equivalent. In fact, if we substitute equivalency in we again get a practically meaningless statement: midichlorians are the way to tell how much midichlorians you will have access to.

This is also true, but once again does not give us equivalency between the Force and midichlorians. ( Also, sensing the potential to use the Force, as opposed to sensing use of the Force itself, is not necessarily as much of a given as some might think. In the OT films we do not actually have such a precedent, because in those films any potential Jedi are known to be Jedi material due to their heritage or are actively using the Force when sensed. )

Tell that to Stoklasa, not me. You're the one saying it's the PT's fault that some people got it wrong.

People tend to forget that the Force was always pseudo-scientific. It was described originally as an "energy field".

New information is not the same thing as contradiction. It "worked just fine before" because the issue of Jedi candidate selection was not explained. Probably because it was a different topic from "it". The OT explained what the Force was; the PT explained Force sensitivity. Those are actually two different topics. Thus, there is no particular reason to interpret new information about the second topic as any kind of revision of the information we already had about the first topic.

 

In the ANH novel- the Force is a lot more mysterious- even the " an energy field" bit is precedent with

"While it has never been properly explained, scientists have theorized that it's...."

In the lightsaber training scene, Ben goes into more detail- again very mystically:

"It is an energy field and something more. An aura that both controls and obeys. A nothingness that can accomplish miracles. No-one, not even the Jedi scientists, were able to truly define the Force. Possibly no-one ever will. Sometimes there is as much magic as science in the explanations of the force. Yet what is a magician but a practicing theorist? Now, let's try again."

 

I see your point, I don't think you're wrong about what was intended by midichlorians at all. I would be curious to know if you got all that from a first viewing or not. I certainly didn't and again I'm pretty sure I'm not that thick! But maybe I am.

I guess my point is still that regardless of whether or not a logical consistency could be determined by analyzing the statements etc still does not exclude the possibility of it suffering from confusion, getting it "wrong" in terms of what the author intended, right down to just plain not caring to invest in decoding or listening in the way the author hoped because it suddenly messes with or adds in an attempt to expand upon something that seemed to work fine as it was in a relatively unchallenging way. True, I never really thought of the energy field mentioned in the OT as scientific. It still felt spiritual, perhaps because of the use of music and sentence structure that accompanied the scene. Again, not getting that it was perhaps intended to be scientific in the OT is, haphazardly, part of my point: does it work simply or does it confuse whether logical or not in the context of a space adventure film?

For me it in part comes down to what was the Force really meaning before the PT. For me it was not all about figuring out how exactly this power worked, what the mechanics of it was. It was in a way a sort of loose metaphor for something like courage and resolve and integrity. All of which could be corrupted for other purposes. The PT still utilizes it this way to an extent but I find it also treats it more as a sort of inherited superpower that you can be trained to use.

I think most of us who didn't get the communique about what midichlorians are from the film itself were most likely a bit thrown, on a gut level, by the Force suddenly being something that you just had in your blood basically (yes this is a misreading of what was intended but there is definitely a relationship that allows for such an honest misreading).

Midichlorians are prone to breed confusion IMO. Their very inclusion says "These things are important or else I wouldn't be inventing them!" But then their use value seems to be simply to determine how much Force you have in you. They are used as a way of pointing towards solidifying in our imaginations the level of Anakin's Force abilities and indicate how he is really a superhero in waiting. Therefore our focus is on THIS very aspect and our focus begins to merge the two...midichlorians = strong in the Force...this is the point we are meant to take away I think, and for those that had never heard them mentioned in the OT it gets even more disorienting I think. The amount of Force is read by the amount of midichlorians, ergo they do come close to being equivalent especially since not much more is made of them and therefore their purpose seems to be served. They also seem to be basically the objective indicator therefore they are literally one step away from actually being the Force, we can detect them but apparently not the Force by scientific means.

To me though the reason it ultimately doesn't work, and why someone like RLM can dismiss it as something like the Force in your blood or however he does it, is because it just doesn't have the simplicity and immediacy of the Force as it was previously described. When I reread the quote from the film I feel like I am not only suddenly no longer sure what the heck the Force even is and how these little microbes speak to me or channel or whatever and how close their ties are to the Force, I am also feeling like I'm reading something for a Zen text. It just doesn't sink in with any sort of concreteness or solidity for me. This is my honest reaction. It therefore makes it easy to dismiss it as silly and I resort to saying, ok, so these things are like having the Force in your blood and you can measure them? I don't know how else to explain it. It just feels like it isn't too difficult to understand why

 

It wasn't really that sudden; as you previously mentioned, the "inherited superpower" thing already appeared in the OT.

But that would be everyone, and not everyone was equally disoriented.

But it doesn't try to create a description of the Force, so there is no reason to assume that the way the Force was described in the OT, with whatever good qualities it had, no longer applies. It's describing a mechanism for Force sensitivity.

That quote doesn't say what the Force is, other than to say it is something that has a "will". That part is new, but we just have to add on the concept of the Force having a will to what we already knew about the Force itself.

 

I'll be honest here and say that my reaction on first watching TPM was "why are they trying to explain the force?" But after a couple of viewings I realised that was not the case and that the midichlorians was actually a very clever way for Lucas to show how strong with the force Anakin was, and to explain why some people are more force sensitive than others, because it provided something that could actually be measured.

I don't think you can blame people for misunderstanding that on their first viewing but it is annoying that many PT bashers stick to their initial (wrong) impression even after it is explained to them.

 

I wouldn't say I stick to it but I do recall the error and see why I had it every time I have watched it. Just like I don't forget my first impressions of the ones I like. And frankly I don't buy that it doesn't alter what the Force was before they were introduced, even if there is a certain "logic" to it that can be gleaned by pulling out the actual dialogue and comparing which is not something I as a movie goer normally do while I am engaged with a story. The introduction of midichlorians makes it seem that some scientific research was being done and this was how close they'd come so far, that they had narrowed it down to a certain microbe or whatever it is that is found in larger or smaller quantities in all living things. So in a way it does say "you might have this blood condition and the perk is that these things funnel the Force into you...now maybe we'll find out what exactly the Force is someday while the scientists keep working on it". It changes our relationship tonally, regardless of whether or not one could say "Well, of course in a galaxy with both this very real thing called the Force and that also has scientists of course they'd be looking into it!" And that's not illogical. But is it necessary or even conducive to telling a great Star Wars adventure film? Or does it change our approach to the galaxy on a pretty fundamental level. I come down on the side of the latter. That was my first impression.

Again, it comes down to the presentation of the information combined with performance, context and visuals/music. So that sure, in ANH you can call it an energy field and have someone not feel it is something that scientists detected with equipment confirming what the Jedi have always known but if Kenobi had whipped out a device, held it up, showed Luke a picture of the room but with all these wavy lines that was this hidden energy field and said the exact same lines? It would not have felt spiritual at all. It would have been moved from the esoteric realm to the positivistic. And it would have made SW a different ball of wax. But thankfully, it didn't. It would be a lot harder to use the Force to bring the audience to that gut level feeling that the Force was tied in with the quality of ones character since it would just be this energy you could be trained to tap into or that you were born with the ability to access, like you're an athlete with webbed toes and are encouraged to take up swimming. Now instead of just getting the metaphor of Force ability equals "resolve, personal struggle, believing in yourself" we have to see that metaphor at one level removed, we have to see it as something that can be "read that way" but that is only after shrugging off the newly attached layer of scientism.

BTW, I'm having trouble finding RLM's exact quote on midichlorians, but if it is something along the lines of what I found someone roughly quoting him on: "we didn't need to know that the Force is made of those little things in everyones bloodstream"
Well, I see the shorthand in that as "we didn't need the Force further explained" and the nitpicking that he got it wrong is really trying too hard I think to undermine his basic point that it was adding complexity for no good reason, adding a new tone to the SW universe that wasn't necessary, perhaps even detrimental and that was just one more drop in the bucket of odd choices. His not getting that they were an organism that properly defined only channels the Force is pretty irrelevant to that thrust of argumentation. If anything he's actually using his "confusion over things in the film" to illustrate his point that it isn't made clear, just as he gets character names wrong, etc. It is meant to ruffle feathers of those that do want to defend them. It is a tactic and obviously not one anyone has to respect.

 

But he's wrong and there was a good reason; it was to show the viewers why Anakin was so powerful and why he was thought to be the "chosen one". That's the whole point of the midichlorians and it works very well.

 

why does there have to be a "chosen one" story line at all?

for me, ROTJ works because Vader sacrifised himself for his son,

the PT tells us he was destined to do this anyway, so no suspense there then

if you watch the PT first, you already know by the first film "oh this guy is the one to defeat or the bad guys, the rest must be in competent or snuff it"

 

Well that's kind of getting off the point but I believe the idea of the prophecy was to explain why Qui Gon became so interested in Anakin.

 

well it would only be off topic if the thread was about midichlorians

as for the actual subject of the thread I'm amazed that one persions review can generate so many replies, Now I don't know much about film critics other than Ebert and some others, but this guy (whatever you want to call him, I'll stick with RLM) seems to get a lot of attention, my question is why? is he the next big thing since Stanley Kubrick? is he the man who has made Spielberg and Cameron successful? or is it because he uses a meme of a psychpath that has a character abducting girls and putting in random pictures of dirty toilets to make his point? or is he one person on the internet with an opinion? would Doug Walker aquire his own thread on his opinion on star wars?

 

From the way I see it he is not wrong, it did do what it was supposed to do while simultaneously adding an unnecessary layer of complexity. So I guess it is right or wrong depending on what you believe his point was. If Anakin had demonstrated ability that Qui Gon felt and commented on, "I've never seen anything like it! The boy is unbelievably strong in the Force!" Kenobi- "I sense it too master, we must inform the council."

Period.

I would have got it since I already figured Jedi (and Dark Lord's in space station battles) could figure it out without running a blood test and making me think of science when I should be thinking of character and mysticism.

 

1. We don't know what the prophecy exactly means.
One could definitely assume Anakin fulfilled the prophexy by destroying the Jedi Ordner.
Main film source: "A prophecy that misread could have been." (Yoda in Revenge Of The Sith)

2. There are different interpretations of destiny. Some see destiny as something set in stone. Others see destiny as a path that was placed before you, but it remains your choice to follow it, or not.
Main film source: "Anakin, this path has been placed before you. The choice is yours alone." (Shmi in The Phantom Menace)

3. If your familiar with The Making of The Phantom Menace, you will know the following quote, where Lucas explains exactly this interpretation of the "chosen one" story line:
The midi-chlorians have brought Anakin into being 'the chosen one' who will balance the universe. The mystery about that theory is that we don't know yet whether the chosen one is a good or a bad person. He is to bring balance to the force, but at this point, we don't know what side of the force needs to be balanced.
The overriding philosophy in Episode I - and in all the Star Wars movies, for that matter - is the balance between good and evil. The Force itself breaks into to sides: the living Force and the greater, cosmic Force. The living Force makes you sensitive to other living things, makes you intuitive, allows you to read other people's minds, et cetera. But the greater Force has to do with destiny. In working with the Force, you can find your destiny and you can choose to either follow it, or not. George Lucas

4. Like the "chose one" story line or not, but it doesnt take away any suspese - at least if you haven't already seen ROTJ.

 

with things like midis (my shorthand for midichlorians) is to do a process of elimination of sorts to figure whether the subject fits or not as a story telling device

OT:

we are told that the force is an "energy field" we are told it surrounds us "You must feel the Force around you; here, between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere, yes."

this is fine, I understand it, what more needs to be said? the force is an energy field or a mysterious entity (whichever suits your tastes) that can be used for good or bad,

PT: we are told living cells speak to us telling us the will of the force,

ok so this is saying:

Man A: has 18, 000 midis in his cells..he has the power to leviatate 10 x wings if he was intune

Man B: only has 500 midis: bummer for him, he might be able to lift half an x wing, oh well "judgme me not by my size, juge me by my midis you should hmm, poor Han Solo, not a mutant is he"

---

OT tells us what the force is, PT tells us practically nothing who the sith is and why they are out for revenge


I'd have much prefered

Anakin: I heard master Yoda talking about the Sith I was wondering who are the Sith?

Qui-Gon: the sith are an ancient sect of force users who use the force for terrible things, hundreds of years ago, the Jedi managed to defeat them, now they want revenge

but thats just me

 

Samnz

i'll go through your points (quiting for me is a killer, and something I don't do well so I'll only butcher it up, )

1. That is true, Yoda did say that, however he did do both things, he destroyed the order and he destroyed the sith order, it doesn't need be complicated, by one line from a stressed out Yoda

2. absolutely correct, but to argue this would take a whole seperate thread, and more time

3. well from a story of good overcoming evil (unles it's a horror movie which star wars isn't) then it's pretty obvious which sides needs to be balanced to me.

4. not everyone has seen ROTJ first, especially not the younger generation

 

Whatever "a film must only do things that are necessary" ( or, more properly, "a film must only do things that Stoklasa thinks are necessary" ) is, it's not meaningful criticism or universally recognized as a legitimate viewpoint. And getting the facts wrong does undermine film criticism. If people want their analysis of a film to be taken seriously, they should get the facts right, or else they're not really criticizing the actual film, just their own funhouse-mirror distortion of it.

 

I find it legitimate when I take it in the context of the Star Wars phenomenon and not as some sort of post-secondary film criticism text. By this I mean that the expectations some of us had, the potential the franchise had based on what had come before and what we were familiar with does open up a reboot/expansion to a constrast and compare and even the ability to speculate on what could have been again based on the previous material that some of us are now extremely familiar with.

Given this context, a criticism that says, it didn't work for me (and others I know), and after a lot of thinking and frustration here's what I think could have helped, for example, is absolutely legitimate. He then throws in some film criticism to help explain some of why things that didn't work for him didn't and how they might have worked better.

And also this isn't "only things Stoklasa thinks are necessary" because in the end, it isn't only him. Some people were already thinking these things, or struggling to figure out why they felt the way they did and are agreeing with him on many of his points and sentiments to some degree.

Well, I agree parts of what he criticizes may not be what was actually there in the script but to again attempt to denigrate it as "funhouse-mirror distortion" is from the outset problematic and not allowing for the "how" of a work, how it reaches and communicates what it hopes to communicate to the audience. You are clearly dismissing out of hand any counter opinion that might ask one to consider the phenomon of these films in particular and film-watching in general from a more nuanced approach.

He is criticizing the film based on his experience of it, the clarity of which can be thwarted by poorly executed work. This is is his major beef. He often says things like "At least I think that's what I'm supposed to get here" or "Maybe, maybe I'm missing something..." The experience of it was lackluster and frustrating and disappointing and didn't automatically engage him such that he may very well have automatically paid more attention and gotten what the author hoped he would. This is his take on it and then he critizes aspects fused with this experience. Getting hung up on him saying "midichlorians are the Force" as if he said "the Force doesn't work now at all if it is just something in your blood because...." and then people say, ah but see, the premise is wrong, the midichlorians aren't the Force. All he'd then have to say is, oh, ok, but my point still remains. The Force no longer works because it has something to do with the blood because..." But ultimately he's not even saying this. It's his character getting it wrong because he doesn't care to give that much credence to this new 'stupid addition that really doesn't add much of anything good'! He's saying the Force further explained in this way was unnecessary and killed something special. And this is true for him and some of us regardless of how sloppy he was being in getting his equations right (intentionally perhaps even) with the 'facts'. Because the 'fact' doesn't matter, or rather sticking to the facts is to get the equation he's working on wrong it is the mere expansion and mentioning of this aspect that is his issue. By not caring to dig deeper he is also demonstrating a disgust for even trying to get this new and to him useless aspect. A point he makes when he says he should not have to go to EU sources to dig around for what he should have just understood in the first place. Are we also going to dismiss his other criticisms when he gets a character name wrong on purpose, or even just makes something up that someone didn't do both for humour, but again, also to demonstrate how he was so very much not into films that his (character's) memory is cloudy on the details? That's part of the humor. People not getting this is odd IMO even if they don't find it funny.

I rewatched the TPM review and I think he's pretty bang on for most of it. I'm quite able to tell when he's being facetious to make a point, like when he says "I don't like things that are different." Anybody who would try to quote him on this and take him seriously is seriously missing a funny bone or two. He's obviously just playing up his angry, hair-trigger, close-minded character and again, extracting from that, his point is, I didn't like Star Wars to get this "different". Which in my mind is a very fair criticism given what some of us had experienced of the franchise up to that point.

I also think he's right when he points out how odd characters act, how boring they are such that the illogical nature of some of the editing, timing, plot points, character reactions do start to seem much more apparent. I do think however that some of his better points, the lack of the everyman protagonist to guide us through the weirdness, combined with the jumping into the comprehensible action that the OT had, tend to get lost in his spending a lot of time on what doesn't make the best sense in the films. But again, I would argue, he is able to do this because the other two elements were lacking and did not suture him into a story and world that he cared much about that would have perhaps allowed him to roll with a lot more of the illogic. I'm with him on that.

 

In regards to midichlorians, weren't these already planned out back in 1977? If I recall correctly, the Making of Star Wars book included Lucas' notes to EU authors which had references to midichlorians.

To be honest, though, one of the things I find depressing about the whole midichlorians debate is that it often seems to imply:

science = bad
magic = good

And that's just sad to me. Maybe I'm taking it too seriously, but when I think the state of affairs in the United States concerning science and religion, I just find it enormously depressing (we just had a congressman decry embryology of all things) and so I've always appreciated what Lucas did with the midichlorians. I'm not religious myself, but I thought their inclusion showed how science can inform your religion and how religion can inform how you look at science. All too often, it seems like they have to be placed on opposing sides, and while deep and fundamental differences do exist, they are also both important to people seeking answers to questions in life, big and small.

I've always felt there was a lot of beauty in the concept of midichlorians, not simply because they are derived from mitochondria/chloroplasts, but also because they're a wonderful way of demonstrating the interconnectedness of life. Plus, it helped develop the suggestion that Palpatine may be Anakin's "father" which I think is a rather brilliant idea.

 

Not bad, just different. Not every work needs to address all issues. I don't know of anyone who leaves Star Wars with the impression that science sucks!

 

When I hear the complaints, I agree that people aren't saying that science "sucks," but it does imply that it's not as interesting as a "mystical" solution. And that where there's magic, there's no place for science.