PT The Prequel Trilogy and Historical Revisionism

That's not true.

Take a look at all these practical sets:











The actors had plenty of stuff to interact with.

 

But there are bell curves and averages. A generality speaks to those.

If you are unfamiliar with the bell curve, look it up. It will explain the concept far better than I could in this post without turning it into some mathematical lesson for no reason. HAHA!

Oh, I wholly agree. There never is and never will be 100% agreement on anything - much less Star Wars. What I was saying is that we didn't really have a forum where more casual fans could easily converse.

I am a pretty casual fan with opinions - and I'm bored at work ... so this is a nice place to converse about things. But, back in the day - I had no place to go to unless I was a hyper-fan.

 

Ack! Really. I did not know that.

 

Yeah I expanded my post a bit after you hit reply, but yeah, people are more forgiving if they movie is also really good or if they like it.
LOTR got away with a lot of bad CG shots because the visual look of the whole thing tied together and they liked the movies.

One of the PT's problems I think, even if it did have comparably good/bad mix of CG, is that the look was just not pleasing and the quality of the films are polarizing at best. But its fair to say it disappointed a lot of fans.

I still to this day dislike the bloom filled scenes on Coruscant as the principals walked and talked.

 

Thanks for posting this. I had to rely on my memory for this and a bit of speculation. I tried to find a way to search for old IMDb rankings, but couldn't.

I remembered ROTS being in the Top 250, and having a rating of 8.0 for a long time, and I remember it being higher than 8.0 at a time, and by using the "wayback machine," I did find that ROTS's score peaked at 8.4.

And, now, actually that I have the opportunity to use the "wayback machine" and look at the entire history of ROTS, it see that it follows a very weird trend. While most films slowly descend after their release, leave it to a PT film to be weird and unique even in its IMDb rating.


The day of its release RTOS had a rating of 8.0.

https://web.archive.org/web/20050518075729/http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0121766/

A few days later its vote had a rating of 8.4 and was rated #134 in the Top 250.

https://web.archive.org/web/20050521012554/http://imdb.com/title/tt0121766/

About a week after its release it had a score of an 8.2 and was rated #131 in the Top 250.

https://web.archive.org/web/20050523081248/http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0121766/

Nearly 3 weeks later it was a 8.0 and was rated #246 in the Top 250.

https://web.archive.org/web/20050606010512/http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0121766/

Then, as you point out, it dropped to a 7.9 and fell out of the Top 250.

Then, 6 months later, it's rating improved to an 8.0 and it re-entered the Top 250. Again that's very weird.

Then, about 17 months after its release, ROTS fell back out of the Top 250, though it still retained a rating of 8.0.

In my initial post, I said ROTS remained in the Top 250 for a couple of years (i.e. 2 years), then actually in the same post I then said it stayed there for 1 year (so clearly I wasn't trying to capture perfect accuracy!). The reality is that during the 1st year and a half, ROTS was in the Top 250, left it, and then returned, then left it again never to return, so I really wasn't that far off, and I was just going by memory.

September 2016: https://web.archive.org/web/20060901083803/http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0121766/

October 2016: https://web.archive.org/web/20061006014024/http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0121766/

Also, ROTS score did go from a 8.4 (4 days after release) to a 8.2 (week after release) to a 8.0 (up until December 2006, 18-19 months later -- although it did drop to a 7.9 for 6 months before returning to an 8.0 for another year).

As I don't have a perfect memory, I assumed that ROTS must have stayed at 8.1 for a long period between the time it was 8.2 and 8.0. Instead, it followed a weird pattern where it dropped and then recovered.

So, really my point is that I think that you can see that I posted in good faith with the intention of being honest and I wasn't that far off the mark. As ROTS did have an 8.0+ score after its release, and it did appear in the Top 250 until almost 2 years after its release, which is part of what I asserted. I thought it retained a ranking of 8.1 for much of that period as I assumed it followed the normal trend. That's what led to my error of saying that it spent a good period of time with a 8.0+ rating when it actually spent a long period of time at 8.0 instead.

I simply tried to piece things together that best I could from my memories, and after spending an hour trying to find archives of old IMDb ratings, I thought there was no way to gain access to that old info, so I ultimately said, "I give up. It's just a post for a Star Wars forum." Now it'll turn out that people will want it stickied at the top and it'll be a stain on my legacy forever!

Again, thanks again, for the clarification on this subject.


However, what I said here was correct:

On the 1st day that TFA had a score on IMDb, which was December 15th 2015 according to the "wayback machine," TFA's score was a 9.5 with 2,200 votes, and by its last snapshot on Dec 15th, after audiences in Australia had seen the film, TFA had a score of 9.4 with 3,090 votes. By the next day, it had fallen to 9.1 with 6,090 votes.

Click here to see TFA with a score of 9.5: https://web.archive.org/web/20151215003056/http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2488496/

What you've included is definitely important additional data, but again, even though I was going by memory, TFA's initial rating was exactly what I said it was -- a 9.5. Sure, that 9.5 score may be attributable to vote rigging, but that is something else that must be taken into account when comparing scores of recent films with those of the past. IMDb has been targeted with vote rigging now that studios recognize that it could influence public opinion.

 

Yeah I knew the council chamber was a real set but man does it look bad ; all the CG bloom lighting made it look terrible.

A surprise to me is the bridge of the INVISIBLE HAND, I had assumed it was mostly CG, as did many people, becaus so much of the elements there were CG, including Grevious and the droids controlling it.
It's not good when you spend all the money building a set for people to think its all CG. But the issue may have been most of those scenes did not actually show the bridge, the camera was shot mostly showing the obviously CGI space battle and very obvious CG glass/shielding

I do like the Palpatine/Chair/ROTJ call-back set, that one is nice and closer to the look I would have preferred to all of the PT.

 

ucdex I just edited my previous after seeing yours in which you expanded it a little more.

To each to its own regarding their preferences towards the special effects. But I'll never get what some people have against CGI, except maybe if some are nostalgic regarding stop-motions and the grotesque puppets made of rubber used in the 1950's, 1960's 1970's or 1980's.

CGI is just another additionnal tool for movie-makers today since the success of the original Jurrasic Park. It allowed to explore new possibilities and do things that would not have been possible before. Whether which special effect is the best to use or not, that's the film-makers and the crew's decision and it's up to their judgement and knowledge, not the audience. It's not the audience that makes the movie...

 

Well Lucas did rape a lot people's childhoods, so there's that...

It may be the effect of digital photography, not CGI. I personally like the crisp look of digital photography, at least for a film like ROTS. For me, the graininess of traditional photography suits grittier subjects like a war film or a film like Raging Bull, but that's my personal taste.

 

Yeah, a lot of people have even sung about it as in this video :

 

I'm not PT hater, but was disappointed in the PT. I also didn't mind the supposed CGI use as much as some of the prequel haters you might find trolling about, but generally I agree with the point that PT could have had a different aesthetic had George been more strategic in his use of CGI. I know he said he couldn't make the PT with the old optical compositing /miniature techs pre-digital. I just think he went overboard when he finally could. There are a lot of scenes which could have looked better had he just restricted himself to real sets with minimal to no blue screens (or using CG for set-extensions only)

The jedi council chamber is a prime example. Never liked how it looked. The large windows looking out into the cityscape is a good idea, but most of the time, its just bloom lighting.

 

Where have I mentionned that you were a PT hater?

 

You're welcome! It's very interesting, to be able to retrieve this information. It can also be used to find old RT scores, and metacritic scores. ROTS indeed showed a very odd pattern. What's also interesting is that it stayed on a rating of 7.9 for almost 4 years, before declining to 7.7, while the final decline appears to be related to the release of TFA. It's also clear that it has suffered from the bashing of the PT in the media, which to me seems to be the only explanation for it's sudden decline after 4 years.

 

Want to have your mind blown?

"It sounded great to me – a big Sci-Fi adventure with these short furry creatures called Wookiees. Richard Dreyfuss and I kept begging George to let us play them. […] Then, he turned around and made the Wookiees seven feet tall, which knocked me out of the running for that part."

--Charles Martin Smith, Starlog, #120: p.42.


Paul Scanlon: Which bring us to the Ewoks. Where do they come from?

George Lucas: The idea was just a short Wookiee. In the original film, the giant end battle was the crux of the whole movie: a sort of primitive society overcoming this huge technological society. In the early versions of the script, those primitives were Wookies. Since I couldn't do that battle, I took one Wookie, and he ended up being Chewbacca, who became a more technological person. So in this one I said, ''I can't make them Wookies, so I'll make them short Wookies and give them short hair and give them a different society and make them really primitive, the way it's intended.''

Scanlon: There's one major difference, though. They're lovable small creatures, and you haven't done that before. Jawas are small, but they aren't lovable.

Lucas: Well, they evolved and started getting cute. [Smiles] Dare to be cute. The worst we could do is get criticized for it.

Scanlon: I think you may.

Lucas: I'm sure we will. A lot of people are going to be offended by Ewoks. A lot of people say the films are just an excuse for merchandising: ''Lucas just decided to cash in on the teddy bear.'' Well, it's not a great thing to cash in on, because there are lots of teddy bears marketed, so you don't have anything that's unique. If I were designing something original as a market item, I could probably do a lot better.

Scanlon: But you are marketing Ewoks anyway.

Lucas: Oh, yeah, we market everything in the movie. That's what keeps funding the other things we do – the computer research and all the other things. Again, people tend to look at merchandising as an evil thing. But ultimately, a lot of fun things come out of it, and at the same time, it pays for the overhead of the company and everybody's salary.

--Rolling Stone interview, 1983.

 

Nowhere, but i feel defensive when posting critiques of the PT.

 

Yeah, I think the revival of PT-bashing before TFA on the Interwebs probably hurt its score some.

At the same time, all films tend to trend down over time. IMDb gives some explanation for this pattern, but I think there are a few additional factors. If you vote right after watching a film, then you have that big fun experience fresh in your mind. All voters for TFA right now or any new film have that experience fresh in their mind.

If they forget to vote immediately or they vote after seeing the film multiple times, then that "wow" factor has worn off some. They've grown used to it. It seems less special. Then later voters may have only watched it on TV, diminishing the experience further. These are the types of voters who are voting for ROTS now.

Then, you have people voting who don't even remember the film very well. Many voters today: Was TPM or ATOC the one that had Jar Jar in it? Oh, I can't really remember, but it may have, so I'll give it a "3."

I think Spider-Man 2 has suffered from this effect. It was initially much better received than Spider-Man 1, and Spider-Man 2 had a IMDb rating of (I believe) a 7.7 for a long period of time and this was well above its predecessor's ranking, but I think a lot of people who have voted since have just lumped it in with Spider-Man 1 and the 3 less well-received Spider-Man films that have followed it. Now its IMDb score is exactly the same as Spider-Man 1's score. (Tried to "wayback" Spider-Man 2, but it only has 2 entries for its whole history.)

Also, studios don't bother with trying to vote rig results years after a film's release, though they do apparently care enough to boost things right before a film is released on blu-ray. The viewer reviews on IMDb for AoU were mostly negative (7 or 8 negative out of 10 at one point), then by the time it was time for its blu-ray release, all but 1 review (the top one, another sign that the "weaker" negative reviews had been taken out by vote riggers) was positive. Maybe Marvel fanboys decided to go in there in a big bunch and up-vote positive reviews, but my guess is that the studio got its employees to do it. It's a pretty easy thing to do.

This is just speculation on my part, but I think one of the best indicators of the effect of PT-bashing on the IMDb scores of TPM, ATOC, and ROTS is that their US scores are all lower than they "should be" in comparison with the international scores in their IMDb rankings. US scores tend to be .3 to .4 points higher on IMDb for entertainment films than the international scores for those films. I looked at a ton of MCU, HP, recent Bond, Hunger Games, etc and found this to be true 95% of the time.

However, for the PT, the opposite is true. The US score is .3 lower for TPM for instance. Bashing is an English language phenomena. I've seen posters from Germany, France, Russia, etc say they had never heard of PT-bashing before coming to this site. Also, films that have been heavily bashed -- X-Men 3, Godzilla '98, Transformers 2, Fantastic 4 (2015), After Earth -- all conform to this pattern of lower US rankings than International rankings. I think this divergence from the regular pattern where US votes are higher than International votes is another sign of the effect of PT-bashing.

 

Imagine how some of us feel when we post defenses of it elsewhere!

In re: the CG and/or the use of miniatures. I get why it bugs some people. I LOVE physical puppets, for example (I am huge, huge Jim Henson fan,) so I'm always game for some creature shop work, and I know why some people prefer the sensation of "this is an actual full-size physical thing taking up space in the real world". CG can be pretty convincing (to me), but I would also agree with those saying it doesn't always pull that off the way something tangible would.

For me, I kind of feel like the universe Lucas was explicitly trying to create in the prequels could not have been done the way he wanted to do it any other way, though. This wild, grandly expansive Old Republic with all kinds of impossible locations and textures and such? The kind of place that would have people like Padme and the full order of Jedi Knights running around in it? I just think that's the way he felt he had to go. There's a sheen over everything that I think rubs a lot of people the wrong way about the PT, but I feel like it works for me because to me that time period should have that feel of being...almost hyperreal and glossy. It was the last days before everything falls apart and becomes grittier and darker and sadder and broken.

Also, as an IT nerd I always have to give extra points to the geeks who made it all in the first place. Some of the effects may not have aged perfectly well, but some people do forget sometimes that this was frequently pretty cutting-edge stuff when it was released. I vividly recall being a kid and knowing people who didn't even like Star Wars back in the 70s/80s who would still go see every new film in the PT just because "you at least have to see what new effects they came up with this time". I give the parts of it that look more dated now points for creativity and novelty if nothing else.

 

Darth Nerdling

I just wanted to commend you and say Thank You for taking the time to put this together! Definitely an interesting read!

 

Wow, what a nice thread!
Indeed, thank you Darth Nerdling for making this incredible post with a lot of information!

I first saw TPM when it came out on video in 2000. I really liked it very much.
We didn't have internet back then, so I only saw the news that said a lot of fans went to the cinema.
Then in 2001 we got internet and I read mostly the things concerning AotC. I was a bit disappointed with AotC, it was not what I thought.
But I was only then I read some things about fans being not happy with how the PT went. I never really got that. Ok, AotC is my least favorite Star Wars movie, but it still has cool aspects. I like the PT, and now its only 'seems' that everybody hates the PT, especially in the media.

 

In order to expand a little bit my previous comment regarding the use of CGI vs practical effects on the prequels, I've recently found a behind the scenes video of the Blu-Ray set of The Complete Saga from 2011.

Myth: "George Lucas went mad on the prequels by relying heavily on computer graphics. His prequel movies were made just in order to test his new technology which were mainly computers. He should have relied more on practical effects in order to make things look "real" on the prequels".

Reality: While it is true that Episode II, in particular, seems to suffer from an abuse of digital effects and sometimes from bad incrustations and, because of that, its effects don't hold up very well, Episodes I and III show instead a very honest balance between traditionalism and modernity. The crew behind the making of the prequels was always trying to take into account this balance between what looked "real" and what could look "synthetic" and tried to avoid as possible the latter. Dennis Murren, the visual effects supervisor who was behind the making of the Original Trilogy and the Prequel Trilogy has said the following thing regarding their work on The Phantom Menace:

"The work was always conceived from beginning to not so much do synthetic CG backgrounds, but to try to have those all be real, you know, real locations, real miniatures that we can do some work on. But the CG was used for the characters and for the compositing. And that's a good way to go because on that time we didn't really have the tools to make landscapes and all look very real."

"I still feel that at any time, if you can start with something real, you should use it, because it forces the work up to that level. I think that the combination of the two always keeps you sort of on your toes: "is this real or is it fake?" and buy it and believe it".

You can listen to Dennis Murren during the first 5 minutes of this video:

 

Another one about the perception of the new Disney/Lucasfilm regarding the prequels.

Myth: "J.J. and Lucasfilm are now rejecting the prequels out of the Star Wars legacy. They have clearly demonstrated it with all the promotion, by using practical effects and real sets and relying heavily on the original trilogy and kicking out everything prequel era related things from the future of Star Wars. They've even trashed Lucas' treatments for the Sequel Trilogy. JJ Abrams even said that he hates the prequels. Disney rules!"

Reality: Despite a speech and a promotion which were at the limit of criticism, and many interrogation points regarding Disney's motivations for rejecting Lucas' story treatments for the Sequel Trilogy, the new Disney/Lucasfilm has already made it clear, despite what the media wants people to believe, that they do not share the vision of the embittered fans and the media. The Sequel Trilogy is a sequel to the story told in the Original Trilogy, so it is their base for the new stories taking place after the classic era. The prequels and The Clone Wars series don't bother them in their creative decisions, unlike the old Expanded Universe, so they keep it and they dig up everything they want from the prequel era and put it in the new Expanded Universe comics and books and in Rebels series taking place between the prequel era and the classic era.

In addition, the fact that J.J. said that he hates the prequels is simply a big lie. In an interview with Rolling Stones, just before the release of The Force Awakens, he had only kind words towards the prequels and even said that he likes these movies:

Link: http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/...ed-about-star-wars-the-force-awakens-20151211

 

I think this may be the best Star Wars post I have ever seen on TFN. I'm going to link it in my sig if you don't mind.

 

Now that you say it, I'll do it too.

 

Can I have a go?

Myth: The Prequel trilogy is objectively bad.

Reality: The Prequel trilogy is objectively great.

I learned you could say things are objectively this or that and state it was fact.

Thanks PT despisers!

 

People reasonably dislike the films, and I completely respect that. But it can't be denied that most of the anti-PT furor you see on the internet is purely bandwagon. It's downright insulting when people try to convince me why I'm wrong by reciting off the same tired template. I feel more strongly on that because I've known people who truly enjoyed the movies suddenly jump on the bandwagon without so much of an explanation.

 

Exactly.

The fact that the prequels used enormous amounts of practical effects but through digital composition that optical couldn't do is the difference.

Lucas couldn't even attempt to do the things he tried on the PT in the first place before.

Which is what he did so often (real sets digitally extended with miniatures and/or CGI) it's just that for whatever reason they couldn't accept his used epic universe aestethic. For some reason they wanted the universe to look much smaller more like a bunch of sets than real places.

You can't physically build the hundreds of sets each PT movie had. That would be impossible. So you can do a portion of them as physical sets (some 70+ for ROTS akin to any of the OT movies) and extend them out as well as doing sets that can't be built at all expect in miniature, matte painting or CGI.

TFA for all it's nonsensical practical effects yarn did build more sets than any other Star Wars film if what I read is correct but they also had more VFX shots that TPM at some 2100 so almost as many as the 2200 for AOTC or ROTS.

They still had to do this though: