PT The "Anti-Memes": The Overlooked and Forgotten in the Prequel Trilogy

I love reading this thread, there's some great insights.

Anyone got any other 'anti-memes'?

 

I love the sequence at the beginning of TPM when the Nemoidians try to kill the Jedi. They had never encountered a Jedi before, underestimated them and botched the whole thing. When Qui Gon tries to cut through the door he feels or senses the blast doors within closing and plunges the saber in to try to melt the entire door. "They're still coming through!" lol!. We, the audience were in the same position as the Nemoidians, we had never encountered a Jedi before. In the OT all we saw was a senior citizen who used his light saber like a blind man's cane, a half robotic asthmatic and a farm boy who"s main training consisted of carrying a muppet around on his back for a few minutes.

 

I'm a very visually inclined viewer. Something which stands out the most to me from all the films, visually, is the use of very wide angle shots and an almost fish-eye like view in many shots in ROTS. They are seen only in ROTS and make for some extremely memorable shots. When I first saw the film in the theater, it was the most distinct thing I picked out about the cinematography and it sticks in my mind to this day as some of the most impressive and unique cinematography I've ever seen. Funnily, since I saw ROTS I grew to love cinematography that used similar wide and sweeping shots like those in movies made by Peter Jackson and Zack Snyder.

I guess this could be my anti-meme since it's something so unique and memorable and not something I see a lot of talk about.

Just to clarify, I'm talking specifically about close wide shots that focus on a subject and not far wide shots like those sweeping shots of Coruscant or Naboo. The shots I'm talking about frame a subject close to the center of the shot, or have the subject go through the center of the shot, while a very wide angle is used to show a lot around the subject using a deep perspective.

I also loved the most unique shots in ROTS that can be considered inverted versions of the wide shots, the close ups.

The most distinct 'fish-eye' shots are as follows (warning, tons of 1080p images):

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Continued in following posts due to lack of space...

 

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The lesser 'strength' wide shots are as follows (using a less strong perspective):

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And then finally, the 'inverse' of the above shots, the tight and memorable close-ups:

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And at the very last, most probably my utmost favourite shot from ALL of Star Wars:

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I hope you guys enjoyed these images!

Here's the link to the Imgur album: http://imgur.com/a/rnTIG

 

This is an awesome thread. I'm going to rewatch the prequels over the course of this week and come back with a post for this thread!

 

I get where you're coming from. Revenge of the Sith was definitely Lucas at the very height of his neoclassical ambitions. Not only are such frames wonderfully complex in this regard, or at least equally elegant in simpler compositions, but the often 90° angle 'balcony' POV emphasizes a theatrical stage-like quality. Or, it's almost a form of diorama art, in motion and on a big screen macro level.

 

To repeat the final line from your fantastic post on the first page:

"Lucas' worlds are the best worlds."

Antpocalypse, you'd probably enjoy the following essay:

https://web.archive.org/web/20140101023512/http://wondersinthedark.wordpress.com/2012/02/11/notes-on-the-duel-of-the-fates/


Note that the "fish-eye" effect you mention didn't begin in ROTS. From that essay:

As the fight moves from the Naboo hangar to a series of bridges around long columns of reactor-energy, Lucas dollies a long shot forward following the fighters, making use and an extreme wide-angle lens which visibly curves the vertical elements of the picture. Along with the fixed-position pans throughout the duel, the anamorphic fish-eye effect brings a documentary element to the film, polished but not bothering to correct or cover-up any natural lens-distortion.

Second mention of fish-eye distortion:

Lucas then cuts to a low shot from within as the fighters enter the laser gate hallway, covering them from a wide-angle medium-long that quickly turns to a medium-close as they fight within, panning to follow the action. Unlike most of the close-ups throughout the duel, which were flattened from shooting from a distance and zooming in, this moment is more three-dimensional thanks to the anamorphic-lens, giving their entrance a dramatic feeling of naturalism (complete with more slight fish-eye distortion).

You may also notice the use of a simulated fish-eye effect, at least once, in AOTC (look at the pillars in the panning wide shot of Yoda, Obi-Wan, and Mace discussing Anakin's assignment in that atrium environment within the Jedi Temple; one of the more notoriously "fake-looking" prequel scenes that is flagged up as "proof" that Lucas abused his digital tools and just phoned everything in; but I like it).

And Ingram, good word choice, as ever.

I've previously described the Order 66 montage as having a "diorama" composition style; what with its arresting blend of man (and alien), technology, nature, and murder.

Also, that cycloramic bas relief in Palpatine's antechamber -- the one that appears when Palpatine "reveals" himself to Anakin -- is like Lucas paying homage to himself: to this constructed space epic of reconstituted ancient myth. Among many other tensions, Anakin and Palpatine, the "living", are framed against the petrified, the frozen: suggesting the intertwining of history with myth, widening the scope of possible meaning, and placing a stamp of authorial self-awareness on this, the most propulsive of B-movie escape dramas.

Such touches also work on more localized scales, too, of course. The sudden, strange appearance of that relief weirdly turns Palpatine into a bit of an art appreciator (what with the opera sequence as well), as well as, perhaps, a student of history (which goes well with him apparently knowing all about Sith legends). One absurdly inclines to think of Palpatine like some wealthy patron of the arts; or a curator of rare antiquities. A kind of aristocratic, "respectable" Indiana Jones. That close cousin of the Star Wars series is always bleeding through (especially in ROTS: otherwise the grimmest and most Shakespearean, and most estranged, of the sextet).

How everything is shaded, ringed, and inflected in the Star Wars movies speaks, I think, to Lucas' broad ambitions, firstly as a storyteller and mythicist, but also as an architect and design wizard par excellence. What was it you said before? The movies are like an endless parade of concept art? Star Wars is concept art defined?

But yes, what a wonderful sense of largess...

The clarity and confidence with which Lucas delivered everything: from the most intimate and matter-of-fact to the most impersonal and galaxy-spanning of scenes!

These movies are a ridiculous visual feast; served up with astonishing technical precision and an immense self-assuredness. A total command of the visual field.

 

To this day that essay remains an achievement in film analyses and, moreover, Lucas-Prequel appreciation. Too bad Bob Clark hasn't produced anything (on any film) in recent years, that is unless he's found some other outlet unbeknownst to me.

 

Well, there was his penetrating (if slightly less focused) write-up on AOTC:

https://wondersinthedark.wordpress....rikes-back-at-attack-of-the-clones-naysayers/

(I don't need to use an archive.org link for that one. The pictures all appear intact).

I suspect he works under a variety of pseudonyms.

These essays read like his work (to me):

http://www.ferdyonfilms.com/2015/st...episode-three-revenge-of-the-sith-2005/26568/

And the one I think you posted before:

http://www.ferdyonfilms.com/2015/star-wars-episode-vii-the-force-awakens-2015/26723/


One more from the original "Bob Clark" (his TFN account: Jedi_Ford_Prefect ):

https://web.archive.org/web/20090902123052/http://www.theaspectratio.net/phantommenace.htm


I'll offer you a speculative proof it's the same guy:


On Jar Jar (the Ferdy link) as "Roderick Heath":

The much-hyped, first-ever, completely computer-generated character in a feature film proved to be Jar Jar Binks (voiced by Ahmed Best), a floppy-eared, lizard-like alien from a Naboo race called the Gungans who seems composed of a few hundred different comic-relief figures (and ethnic clichés) from old movies. I generally side with popular opinion here: Jar Jar is an annoying figure who nudges the material too close to the cartoonish, lacking the fierce-cute appeal of the often derided but lovable Ewoks. That said, although Jar Jar grates badly in early scenes, his involvement in a climactic battle through which he careens like Jerry Lewis trying to be Errol Flynn, bringing terror and destruction to both the enemy and his own fellow Gungans, blends comedy and action well in a sequence that calls out directly to a lot of classic swashbucklers, like Nick Cravat darting through danger in The Crimson Pirate (1953) or Herbert Mundin amidst the throng at the end of The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938).

On Jar Jar (the Aspect Ratio link) as "Bob Clark":

Unfortunately, there is one piece of the picture which threatens to disrupt that carefully composed balance, and that piece is the now infamous Jar-Jar Binks, an alien creature of digital smoke-and-mirrors, its voice and wildly gesticulating antics supplied by performer Ahmed Best. Joining the Jedi’s party on Naboo, the clumsy Gungan provides what can only be described as the lowest variety of common-denominator comic relief through pratfalls, slapstick and English that is hopelessly broken even by pidgin standards. A hopeless cross between village-idiot tomfoolery and silent-film era cluelessness, Jar-Jar has since become an infuriating figure among the critics and fans of Star Wars alike. Most troubling, many even accused the film of racism, in the character’s creation and Best’s performance, mixing a muddled dialect with an alleged Caribbean accent to produce a CGI-assisted minstrel show, raising the painful memory of blackface’s prominent role in the film industry of ages past.

Disliking Jar Jar is hardly a rare phenomenon; but the way the author takes time out to rant about Jar Jar strikes me as surprisingly similar.

The prose style, too, is remarkably similar -- right?



Anyway, just before diving into the pleasures (and demerits -- in his eyes) of the prequel trilogy, the Roderick fella offers this concise assessment of the original trilogy, which I feel I must share:

Stripped down to constituent parts, the original Star Wars films seem simple, even infantile, and yet there’s something incredibly powerful encoded in them, defying reduction if not dissection. Almost inimitable amongst modern special-effects-driven movies, they maintain the rarefied quality of fable, combining cheeky but essentially straitlaced heroism with a quality, in their evocations of places seen and visited, their alien cities dancing on clouds and death machines the size of moons and taverns littered with denizens of two dozen species, that resembles the apparatus of dreaming.



Quoting this Roderick guy some more:


Facing a new trilogy with much darker and less commercial subject matter than his first series, Lucas at first courted a new generation of young viewers as fans by conceding to them excessively. Trouble is, the people who already loved Star Wars weren’t kids anymore: they were 20- and 30-somethings who wanted, whether they knew it or not, two completely divergent, yet equally necessary, concessions: the feeling of being thrust back to childhood while simultaneously reflecting their evolution. The Matrix, released a few months before The Phantom Menace, became the film the latter singularly refused to be: a superman fantasy dressed up in pseudo-grit and cyberpunk quotes that fitted the mood of the time. The Phantom Menace was a huge hit, but soon became a byword for the cultural equivalent of a fumbled touchdown. I was and still am bewildered by the level of invective the prequel trilogy receives. In some ways, I even prefer those films today.



And again:

I don’t say this just for the sake of contrariness. Some criticism levelled at the trilogy is legitimate and feelings of dashed expectations are honest enough for many. But I also feel this cult of disdain was an exemplification of something notably obnoxious about the dawning age of the internet, a deeply spoiled capacity to judge with distinction or consider with a sense of history that refers outside of the bubble of fandom, or the opposite, charmless snootiness turned on popular cinema. I think of how lumbering and overhyped a lot of modern franchises have been—The Dark Knight, Pirates of the Caribbean, Transformers and Twilight and Hunger Games series, even to a certain extent the Marvel superhero films—all are testimonies to a kind of professional smoothness and anodyne brand of fun that has no low points like Lucas’ films do, but also none of the high points. Peter Jackson’s Tolkien adaptations, great as they are, remade the epic and the fantastic in a manner that remains resolutely concrete, sapped of relevance as parable, and the more they try for the ethereal, the less they are. So I’ve found myself returning often to the colour and expansive glee apparent in even the least of the Star Wars movies.


And a fitting epitaph:

There’s real beauty and great invention to be found in the prequel trilogy. At their best, they exemplify the creed of the project as it began to explore complicated ideas and motifs through apparently cheery and unpretentious figurations. Lucas had originally drawn on nearly a century’s worth of space opera scifi and pulp storytelling as well as more serious sources.

Cogent, eloquent, able to make simple but powerful observations -- a string of 'em in the same sentence -- vaguely dismissive, yet laudatory at the same time, and aware of the slightly high-minded reader he seems to be writing to.

And exactly the same kind of opinions formerly expressed by Jedi_Ford_Prefect. Go through the Bob Clark essays. He isn't afraid to be negative, but he articulates that negativity well, and clearly, above all, wants people to reconsider the prequel trilogy and approach it on its own terms.

What really singles the author out, in my opinion, is how he fights himself, somewhat, to champion the good, to unlock and chant the beauty of the the single-minded uniqueness of the prequel trilogy, which he obviously has real intellectual admiration for. He clearly finds the prequels worth championing, against both the "fable"-like original trilogy, and the surferit of homogeneous contemporary entertainments of the past fifteen years. Don't ignore the prequels, he says: they have things about them that no other movies do.

I remember getting into it with JFP, before, in several threads here, including one about "blockbuster double standards". We seemed to have had similar disdain and apathy toward other franchises like LOTR, Batman, Harry Potter, et al. That was one of the things that really stood out about JFP: not only a love of the prequels, but a love of the prequels set against all the rest. He wasn't afraid to take any of them on: well, yes, they offer X, and Y, but none has the XYZ-ness of the prequels.

I'll eat my Jar Jar hat if it isn't the same guy.

 

Cryogenic

Well, in the Ferdy on Films essays Clark shows up in the comments section, and with Heath responding directly. So, that would be kinda weird if they were the same guy, but who knows...

In any event, from the same site, I also dig both the review and madcap comments debate over Return of the Jedi: http://www.ferdyonfilms.com/2012/star-wars-episode-vi-return-of-the-jedi-1983/15948/

 

Yeah. A lot of people have double identities online.

I dunno. Maybe the simple answer is that the guy was inspired by Bob Clark.

They seem to have such a similar take on the films. Kinda weird.

New to me!

I'll have fun checking that one out later!

 

I like all the Jedi Council scenes,

And all scenes in the Jedi temple.

The Temple as a whole I have a strange fascination with, I even made a massive and crazy detailed version of it in Mind Craft.

 

Your arrogance blinds you PT haters now you will experience the full power of the Prequels

 

More of a general reflection stemming from my last post if anyone wishes to read it (it's mercifully brief):

http://boards.theforce.net/threads/...oring-or-rehash.50039735/page-3#post-53466891


A distinguishing characteristic of the two completed trilogies concerns the antagonists.

In the OT, broadly speaking, it's Darth Vader and foot soldiers. Masked organics in opposing black and white (dichromatic) colour schemes.

Hobbled, disabled, hidden, you might say, and locked in a simple inverted colour-coded clade. Even the crooked Emperor inhabiting his technologic Death Star continues the motif.

In the PT, Lucas introduces something more interesting:

A series of ceramic off-whites, tawny browns, and, yes, greys and blacks, which define Anakin and the Battle Droids (and accompanying droid taxa). These are now the new/ancestral forms of the old: begetters of the begotten.

And, further, the organic and the mechanic are largely estranged, but constantly threaten to merge, as merge they must (Anakin in the podracer, Anakin having built Threepio, Anakin being tested with technology -- e.g., the blood sample test and Mace testing Anakin's Force abilities with that testing screen -- and, ominously, a massive droid army meeting its organic mirror army, the Gungan "Grand Army", at the climax of the first episode).

This is pretty weird.

I know, it's just the man-machine motif, right?

But look how much more baroque it becomes with the prequels!

The most iconic pairing in the galaxy -- droids: Artoo and Threepio -- are made to become the "true" heroes of the OT; after Anakin has become "more machine than man" and all those droid armies have disappeared from view.

It's this strange thing of "never the twain shall meet". In so many ways, the trilogies are radically separate. Yet they deepen and enrich each other all the same. In large part by being so separate! Such separation brings a pleasing unity and uniformity.

So it's interesting to see the technological "swallowing up" the organic, from TPM to ANH; and the organic, in part, destroying the technological.

You can see a strange dialectic being played out. One that is communicated in a comprehensible -- yet also highly abstract -- visual code.

And that is the appeal of Star Wars writ large. A ravenous form-glyph satire. A richly-encoded colour odyssey. A meta-cognitive game.

Stormtroopers and Vader? Or Battle Droids and Anakin?

Why not both? And neither?

The tension between the two is where all the fun lies; or starts to get going. As Anakin himself notes, somewhat ironically, at the start of the third episode -- the one pressing up directly against the OT -- "This is where the fun begins".

It does, it does. It exists at the borders of the artwork, rather than "inside" the artwork itself. Star Wars lays siege to itself at the fringes! "The Outer Rim Sieges". Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate.

Ask yourself, in part -- or in full! (no, no, make it in part!) -- why is Roy Batty's speech at the end of "Blade Runner" (and the title of the movie) so poetic? "Off the shoulder", "near", "blade". Edges, fringes, borders. Things happen beautifully along some border or edge. The imagery of Roy's speech (himself a being at the "edge" of his mortal life) seems to be tweaking something deep in the human mind.

So delight in the tension of the trilogies! But you need the prequels for that panoramic tension to instantiate. The "boom" only happened in 1999.

The Millennium Bug *did* happen. It was the beginning of a new paradigm in movie-making. The Star Wars Prequel Trilogy! Itself situated on a border, precipice, lip of a new age!

 

Many spoke about the darkness in Anakin but I would emphasize on his light side which is often forgotten in PT because many fans see Anakin just as pre- Darth Vader (actually I see him vice versa: Anakin is the real person and Darth Vader is something that is left of him). One simple fact: Anakin never cover face till the moment when he becomes Darth Vader. But a difference from Obi Wan, Mace, Qui Gon Anakin never cover his face with the hood, as he hates to be in the dark. We first see him with the hood on in the famous and I would say one of the scariest scenes in ROTS: the attack of the Jedi temple, as is here:

Then with Padme he uncovers his face because he is not completely Darth Vader , not yet. In ROTS is as the hood covers her real person and behind this emerges the dark persona of Darth Vader.
The most symbolical scene for me in that aspect came in Mustafar where Anakin said to R2 : 'Stay with the ship' and put his hood on: even watching the movie for the first time then I was sure that something awful will happen again.
Then again his real face appeared, half covered by the hood: half

Anakin, half Vader:
And of course, the end of ROTS where his face is covered completely and the most important thing, we never see his eyes again till his redemption. Many fans think that the mask of Vader is just menacing and scary: no, it completely dehumanize him, he has no face, no eyes. And in the end of ROTJ when is human again we can see his face and eyes and they are normal human eyes: changed by the injuries, yet still human.
I would say, underappreciated, but important detail.

 

Probably not an anti meme. But m favourite shot from TPM is when the doors open to reveal Darth Mail.

30 soldiers all with blasters but none dare take a shot at him!!!

Pure awesome scene!!!

 

Okay here it goes.

TPM. The scenes on tattoine before the podrace. I strangely like it when they're on this backwater planet as I've grown to appreciate the slow pacness of the scenes, which I never used to. Plus the interactions between Shimi and Qui-Gon have grown on me as well, as both actors play their parts well.

AOTC. The night club scene is cool as it's sort of a a mos eisley cantina in the city. Its a surprisly tense scene but mixed with humor, with "you want to buy some deathsticks" line.

ROTS. The conversation Obi-wan and Anakin have when Kenobi tells Anakin to spy on the Chancellor. Not a massive scene, just thought it was well acted, especially from McGregor.