Saga Why do people hate the prequels?

^^^^

 

Replying to a really old message, but am I the only one who thinks it only needed one or two?

 

I kind of which they had gone the LOTR route and made each film around three hours each. There was so much going in the Prequels which resulted in some storylines not getting enough time in the oven. Anakin and Obi-Wan's friendship was something that really needed more time and I sorely miss Padme's deleted scenes from ROTS.

 

The answer to this thread is that people DON'T hate the prequels. Star Wars fanboys are the only ones who hate the Prequels and anything SW that is at all new for that matter.

There is a problem in star wars fandom basically called "prequel/lucas haters" or "fanboys" it feeds itself by perpetuating the elitist idea that basically half of the whole thing that these so-called fans claim to like is bad and unholy and should be boycotted and constantly attacked. It is made up of a lot less actual fans than they would like to have you believe and it has become something of a forced meme in the star wars fan community.

People who are at all new to Star Wars fandom should not allow themselves to be fooled by this trend.

These individuals spend ridiculous amounts of time and energy creating smug, all out manifestos to defend their tired argument that (basically) every star wars film besides the very first two made is somehow/someway bad and wrong and unholy. This small yet very loud amount of angry, obsessed "fans" was primarily started up by Gen X'ers who have a sad, very stubborn sense of fan ownership over what they call "their movies" and today it is emulated by pretentious college age hipster types/self proclaimed film experts who enjoy the thrill of being in on the 21 century "geek chic" phenomenon getting to feel smart around other people by "letting them in on the secret" that anyone who enjoys star wars as a saga is foolish and somehow "buying into" some kind of money scheme by the creator George Lucas who in reality is a hippy philanthropist who has donated more than half his money to charity, education and liberal causes while putting the other half of his money right back into the film industry by creating many innovations and trends which go on to be used by almost every other filmmaker in hollywood.

These fanboys/hateboys (or whatever you wish to call them) have been so obsessive and persistent since around 1999 that a lot of reviewers and bloggers for certain websites have fed into it in order to gain hits for their websites and blow up their comment sections. This is why we have people like the news casters on "G4 tv" saying things like "almost as bad as jar-jar, amiright guyz!?" standing there sweating holding the mike waiting for a response from the crowd of 19 year olds and their home viewer demographic of 11 and 12 year olds. Its all hype. Its trash. And its pathetic to think that this is what are 12 year olds are being taught is "cool". People have made whole careers on bashing Star Wars, or as they call it "the prequels maaan".

Since the Saga as a whole has been released on blu-ray this trend has finally started to die down because of the fact that the Saga box set sold incredibly well (over one million copy's the first week not even counting x-mas sales) despite boycott attempts by the fanboys which were embarrassingly proven by this fact to be in the extreme minority. As well as the very respectable success of the TPM re-release --a film that has been available on every home video format for well over a decade and in the digital streaming age no less!

These people (and the Trolls who help them) will use a large (and tellingly always different) variety of arguments, hyped up complaints and basically propaganda to get others to join in with them. They look at people who are or may be new to star wars as practice to make sure they "let them know" to hold up the status quo of rebelling against the "big bad lucas". And no not the George Lucas of reality. Not the brilliantly creative liberal philanthropist who teaches young people good morals through his timeless art. No. The Lucas THEY made up. The Lucas on south park. The image of this eccentric, greedy, all powerful guy who is the reason for all their frustrations of trying to cope with the fact that the petty EU chronology and trivia might not all match up to this idea they have in there heads of what Star Wars "should be".

Sadly this all makes us quickly forget that the intended way to watch the Star Wars Saga is in numerical order, 1-2-3-4-5-6.

This is fact. This is not some kind of "conspiracy theory" or opinion. Every action in life has some kind of a reaction and this phenomenon is the simple result of new fans coping with something that their big brothers and parents are so passionate about. They don't understand a lot about it and so when they google the words "Star Wars" this drama is what they find. Bashing is a mob mentality and goes against everything the SW Saga stands for. If it wasn't for the more stubborn "fans" then a lot more new comers would find that star wars is a visually and artistically beautiful and cleverly crafted fantasy/adventure series. Something that is as timeless and family friendly as The Wizard of Oz.

 

ive been wondering this myself.... i like the prequels more, and never understood how people could hate them...

and i think ive come up with the answers...and theyre precontious reasonings


Original Trilogy

-Han Solo - the cool kid everyone loves
-Bunch of kids running away on their own ship fighting back and running from the empire (aka bunch of hyppies in their van protesting against "the man")

Prequel Trilogy
-No Han Solo type character...
-A group in power to maintain peace and order in the galaxy with rules and regulations (aka the police enforcing the laws)

at least thats what i got out of it....cause people who say the prequels suck and OT is amazing are complete hypocrites.. the things they complain about in the PT are present or even more pro dominant in the OT

-Anakin's whining - Luke's whinning
-Dropped plot points (maul/syfo dias/idk what else) - Dropped plot points (Purpose for Luke and leia being related besides for a reason for them not to hook up/why luke wants to save vader even after seeing all that hes done/HOW LUKE BECOMES SO POWERFUL WITH NO TRAINING)
-Bad acting (hayden/natalie/etc) - Bad acting ("thats not true....wahhh its impossible")

 

I never hated the prequels. There were elements I really disliked but it was more of a "not as great as it could haven been" dislike rather than thinking it was completely terrible.

In retrospect, I'm happy we got any prequels. There was a time in the late '80's-early '90's where it looked like there might never be anything SW related ever again.

It's amazing how that's all changed. Now, it never.leaves.us........muwahahhaa.

 

People don't like the prequels because they don't think they're good films. Of course not everyone feels this way, but LOL at the impotent, epsychology from people in this thread. I really can't stand to watch people embarrass themselves like this.

 

Oh, go on wit' ye - there's as many reasons for liking the prequels as not liking them, and tarring either side with a "one view explains all of them others" brush is not fair to either side. Some think them bad films, some don't like they don't fit in with their view of how they should be, some think they are good films, and some think they have no more issues than the OT.

I think having a preference is fine, outright bashing one trilogy as horrible - shakes head. They're all Star Wars to me.

 

agreed. thats how ive always felt. except to be honest im starting to dislike the OT more and more. i still love it but i used to say the trilogies were about equal. i mean all the PT bashing and OT ****ing has slowly made me dislike the OT more than i should :/

i still love them they are both star wars

 

Couldn't have said it better myself.

 

There are elements of both trilogies that I find questionable. That's why I find it difficult to prefer one trilogy over the other.

 

Eh, some people don't like them because they don't like them. It has nothing to do with quality, really. If if it did, then one would see a correlation between popularity and quality and that's certainly not always the case (look at any form of media for plenty of examples). It's merely a question of personal preference in the end.

 

-The whole Jar Jar thing-I liked Jar Jar when he was younger but his type of comedy does get old.
-Not enough emphasis on Anakin and Obi-Wan's friendship. Obi-Wan was wary of Anakin in TPM, Anakin was annoyed with Obi-Wan in AOTC, then they were friends in ROTS. Way too over the place.
-No Han Solo type character. I like Han a lot in the OT but no one really sticks out like he did.
-No ship like the Falcon that is in all of the movies. Nubian ships are in all of them but different variants.
-Anakin and Padme's love story. Anakin's lines are terrible
-Kid Anakin and Kid Boba are too annoying.

I love the Prequels but they have their faults. I think people expected too much of the Prequels ex. to be similar to the OT.

 

I love both the PT and the OT. And I believe that both trilogies have their faults.

I would not have been happy with the PT being very similar to the OT. I would have hated the idea of Lucas repeating what he had done in the first trilogy. That would have struck me as a lack of originality.

 

The PT does an amazing job of paralleling and complementing the OT anyways. For any people who use the cop out of saying they wanted Anakin to simply be Luke-2 what we got was so much better in that the story of the father parallels that of the sun in such a sophisticated and dramatic way! For him to have been Luke-2 would have been so lazy the films wouldn't even have worked for their own purpose.

Its things like this that go to show just how misguided and foolish some of the anti-PT soundbites fundamentally were in hindsight.

 

Another thing that bothers me is General Grievous coughing in ROTS. I hate that his thing was broken. Not scary at all

 

Still think to this day that Anakin should have been a bit older in TPM. Twelve or thirteen, I think. Some more niggles here and there, too, but on the whole I like the prequels very much. Hell, ROTS is my second favourite SW film. Sith is truly a beautiful piece of work. The ones I would change the most are TPM and AOTC. ROTS, to me, is pretty much perfect as is.

 

That sums it all up for me

 

Agreed. Greivous should not have made any appearance in ROTS. They should have saved that for Ventress, she is a much more complex character.

 

That would have been interesting to see. I'm sure Anakin and Obi-Wan would have been shocked to see her back again. Maybe she could have replaced Dooku in AOTC as well?

 

There was actually an early sketch for Grievous that suggested the new villain might be a female droid general (along the lines of C3PO's original inspiration--the robot Maria from Metropolis). In fact this "lightsaber-wielding female droid villain" idea had been first mooted back in Episode II, during the phase of concept designs for a female Sith which would later be recycled for Ventress.

 

Poppycock. Six hours is plenty of time to chronicle the spiritual descent of three protagonists in the backdrop of a sham war. Lucas more or less succeeded, with the caveat that if he proved a more disciplined writer, there would have been some trimming of the fat.

Sadly, we live in an era of the bloated blockbuster, helmed by writers/directors so incompetent that they can't compress a narrative into a proper running time. Hence, we've been "treated" to a three-hour King Kong flick (and a prospective nine-hour Hobbit adapation, for the love of God), a convoluted Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, and a Dark Knight finale that collapsed under its own pretentious, poorly-wrought weight.


I will personally deliver a dozen roses to the next director who manages to craft a worthy genre film that clocks under two hours.