PT So, I Recently Re-Watched Attack of the Clones

Yes! One of my favorites is R2 and his boosters!

 

There is nothing wrong with R2 having rockets at that time. It's C-3PO from Droids that is the problem.

The original Jar Jar.

 

C-3PO was way more cringe and annoying in ESB to me. Hes in the movie all the way through. He doesnt show up till more than halfway through AOTC and barely plays a role until Geonosis.And so what? ROTJ has more gags in 2 hours than the entirety of AOTC.

I guess the last hour of ESB is bad because Chewbacca played hot potato with a bunch of munchkin aliens over 3PO's head

 

I think if a new viewer started with AOTC the only thing they've really missed is how Palpy became Supreme Chancellor .

 

None of the humour in the OT was ever unrealistic or out of character though. It never felt forced. Compare that to C-3PO in AotC holding himself up by his hands, swapping heads with a battle droid? We saw in ESB that his head doesn't function without being attached to his body and that Chewie had to reassemble and retune him. AotC ignores this fact for cartoonish slapstick humour and unfunny one liners.

 

I look at that the same way TLJ gets hate............. People that hate something have a louder voice than those that don't. Cause those that like something Dont give to smegs what some guy yelling "raped childhood" Thinks

 

Wait, holding up his hands is "cringe" now? Hm. Ok. Well I guess 3PO's dance moves in ROTJ are cringe. I guess 3PO falling upside down in the sand is cringe now.

And no we don't know that. 3PO was blasted to bits in ESB effectively shutting him off for good. A robot hand swiped 3PO's head clean off. Didn't shock him, or blast him, leaving his body completely intact and functioning.
Unfunny? SW one liners have always been tongue in cheek. Was I suppose to be laughing till I cried over "Aren't you a little short for a stormtrooper?" Not to mention I don't think C-3PO was ever meant to be Richard Pryor funny. He was always tongue in cheek like Lucas's dry sense of humor. Not to mention I think alot would agree he had some funny lines like "DIE Jedi Dogs!"

And Chewbacca only gets 3PO back online. That's it. R2 is the one who assembles 3PO completely.

 

There are funny lines in the OT but it never feels like they are only there to make you laugh. Leia saying that to Luke in his disguise was completely in character for Leia. 3PO being pushed off the sail barge and being picked up by his feet was also completely believable as well as funny. There are no cartoonish elements in 3PO wanting to celebrate their win with the Ewoks.

AotC on the other hand has 3PO in cartoon humour. Head being knocked off while body remains standing? Were his feet welded to the ground or something? 3POs head being compatible with a battle droid body and vice versa is unbelievable seeing as the connection points look completely different. 3POs head remaining powered without his body just feels wrong to me. Why would being shot in TESB matter if his head could function independently? And Why does the battle droid body effect 3PO's actions and vice versa for the Battle droid? Are they controlled wirelessly from the original head? Finally "Die Jedi dogs" is a terrible line. Why is the body's actions effecting 3PO's character? It's not funny, and is clearly only included to be laughed at.

 

Well I just watched the film (hadn't watched it for a few years) and to be fair it's not as bad as I remembered. I still really hate the Droid factory and C3PO in the arena, and Boba Fett during the asteroid chase is painful, as is some of the dialogue. Dooku riding his speeder bike still looks ridiculus, and his fight with Yoda is just as silly. But I did enjoy it, most of the visuals are great, as are the sound effects, and the music is some of Williams' best. I do really like the scene with Dooku returning to Sidious on Coruscant. I can tell that it isn't a good film, but it was much more fun watching it again than any of the recent Star Wars stuff.

Apology for double post

 

C-3PO exists to be put into silly situations and to engage in ridiculous comedy. I like his bits in AOTC because it's 100% old-fashioned humor, unapologetically straightforward and completely lacking in self-consciousness. It basically is a stage routine, complete with Vaudevillian slapstick, farce, and corny puns. Like everything else in the best Star Wars, it reminds you of a simpler, less cynical time.

 

I could talk about a great many things but one of the many aspects of Lucas' movies is the whimsy ie playfully quaint (old-fashioned) humor.

I don't know which of his movies have the most of this but AOTC has it's fair share. Now depending on how you react to that then it can either enhance or detract from your viewing.

Like so many things Lucas knew exactly what he was doing and whether the audience bought it or not was up to them.

 

Lucas even said it himself: One of the main uses C-3PO serves is to be a sort of Humpty Dumpty or Tin Woodman whom you can abuse and mangle and break apart in various ways and have it be humorous, where with any other sort of character it would be horrifying in the extreme. Put C-3PO in a battle droid factory and it almost becomes an inevitability that he'd be body-swapped with a killing machine and undergo a comically literal crisis of identity. As a child watching it in the theater, I specifically remember seeing him get his head knocked off onto a conveyor belt full of battle droid heads and becoming positively giddy as I realized what was surely about to happen. It's an obscenely dire predicament only someone with C-3PO's variety of well-meaning haplessness could get into.

 

I absolutely hate C-3PO...but I kinda like his Geonosis stuff. It's good fun.

Agreed with The Phantom Calamari. You could easily see the 3PO factory scenes in Looney Tunes, accompanied by Raymond Scott's Powerhouse theme.

Skip to 1:16 for the conveyor belt gag, with classic theme.

 

I can see how someone would find the gags in AOTC a little cringe worthy but when you compare it to the attempts at humor in TLJ, they're actually well timed jokes for the most part. AOTC was one of several big budget films that were shot in Australia instead of the UK during the 00's. I thought that gave the movie a unique style and for the first there were Polynesian actors in a Star Wars movie and I believe this was Joel Edgerton's first appearance in a major movie.

Most of the criticism comes from the dialogue and acting between Hayden Christensen and Natalie Portman and the complaints that movie looked too artificial (hence the too much CGI baseless whining). I always found it funny though that there so many complaints about Yoda's fight scene but when ROTS came along, I heard hardly any Yoda complaints.

 

Indeed... and if they had used John William's original music for the droid factory scene (which seems appropriate for a Looney Tunes sequence) it would work even better in that sense.

 

I think there is a big tonal difference between the gags in TLJ and the gags in the Lucas Saga. Lucas uses old-fashionate humor, which may not work for some, but gives his movies a unique not-contemporary feel. On the contrary, I found that many of the gags in TLJ (and TFA too - Finn asking Rey about his boyfriend) were way too contemporary, too modern for SW, and they took me out of the movie (Finn feels too much like a millenial kid for my taste). It's a kind of humor that I like in other shows, but I feel that doesn't belong in SW.

 

The C-3PO sections of the Geonosis battle are entirely limited to the 'Jedi arrive the arena' section of the battle. This is intentionally a sort of giddy thrill of an action scene. It's not a tense close-quarters engagement like the 'Monster' section, or a serious war movie section like the 'Plains battle'. So 3PO's comic beats fit well with the heightened excitement, and slightly lighter tone.

Notably, we don't cut to 3PO during the 'Mace Vs. Jango' part of this section, that confrontation is kept entirely straight. This seems to me to indicate that Lucas was well aware of a potential tonal clash in this scene.

The rest of the battle is largely a serious affair, besides the hundred Jedi dash part.

 

Attack of the clones is my least favorite film, but I still love it, even with some cringe worthy moments.......To me, its where Hayden totally solidified himself as the future vader for me. Now I understand people moan about his performance .but quite frankly he was spot on as to what I would imagine someone in Anakin's situation would be...young, naive, cocky, confused, unsure angry, and mostly in love. I have never understood the hate the love story in AOTC has gotten. It is probably one of the most "believable" things in any Star Wars movies.

 

I've seen this raw strength only once before

I remember seeing it at the cinema a few times because it looked so awesome in digital. It's easy to take it for granted now but it really did look pretty spectacular. I wish the 3d version could have gone ahead. 2d is better but I enjoyed TPM in 3d just for the experience.

The murder-mystery aspect of it makes it quite unlike any of the other films and Lucas has such a great visual imagination that there's loads to sit back and lap up. I also don't mind the romance. Seems typical young-love stuff to me. The moment when Padme and Anakin enter the arena on the chariot with their theme in full tutti is great.

My favourite moment is when Anakin takes his hot ride into Hades on Tatooine to rescue his mother and the Duel of the Fates theme kicks in. Her harrowing death plants an equally tragic seed that will become Vader. When he returns with her body on the speeder bike I always feel desperately sad for him.

 

What do you think about the Amidala family home deleted scenes? I think it actually has the cutest part as Padme and Anakin arrive, R2 starts playing with two children, spinning around and making them laugh. That is the only bit of the film that made me smile, and its not in the film

With these scenes included I think the romance would be a lot more believable for people also. And Padme's dress at dinner, Anakin = lol

 

They're great scenes but they slow down the pace too much for a Star Wars movie.

 

Yes. I guess that is the difficulty in making a love story over the space of a single star wars film.

 

I think that in this kind of fairy-tale stories, it's not really "necessary" to make the romance believable. In a story about good heroes, bad villains, wise masters, comic sidekicks and so forth, "the princess" is always the love interest; there is a kind of magical, predetermined, "fateful" quality in these kind of love stories: the hero and the princess are meant to be together, they are meant of love each other. I think it has always worked like that, and the audience gets the romance as a part of the genre.

 

Actually, the love story in the broadest sense began in TPM and "ended" in ROTS with Padmé's death. There would be no love story in AOTC if Anakin hadn't become infatuated with Padmé 10 years earlier. Here their relationship or rather Anakin's feeling doesn't begin, it only grows and is acted on after a long "dormant" phase, or rather a "medieval knightly (unrequited) love" that has been in Anakin's heart all along. It's exactly this that makes things so complicated and confuses Anakin.

 

Yes Anakin's love for Padme is understandable. It's more Padme's love for Anakin that is problematic when a lot of the scenes where they are together consist of Anakin complaining about Obi-wan or looking at Padme in his rather perverted way.
The deleted scenes are some of the few scenes where Anakin is actually interested in listening to Padme talk about herself a bit and her past, and I think Padme saw that Anakin was upset about the dead alien children in the photo and was sad for Padme that she couldn't save them. These kind of things make it far more believable for Padme to fall in love with him.