I must say that, while I enjoy RLM's reviews, that guy who wrote the rebuttal (yes, I read it) points out that he asks a lot of questions that he shouldn't be asking, and creating problems where none exist if he doesn't understand a scene. Also, the "describe the characters" bit was pretty stupid. I don't know how anyone could honestly describe Qui-Gon as stern.
Rohan on
...and I thought of how all those people died, and what a good death that is. That nobody can blame you for it, because everyone else died along with you, and it is the fault of none, save those who did the killing.
# Dubbed Han Solo's "See you in Hell!" line with "See you in Chaos!"
You realize what we're missing here right?
Holy shit a Star Wars/Warhammer 40k crossover series!
I would watch/read such a thing. I would watch it so hard.
In fact, in one of my old White Dwarf magazines, there was a guy who'd made a 'Star Warsy' Imperial Guard army. All the vehicle pilots/driver wore orange jumpsuits, there was one commander with a blue power sword (Luke) and another with a plasma pistol dressed like Han; and all the soldiers were painted like the Rebels on the Tantive IV
So awesome.
My brother did a star wars Necromunda gang, he trawled through their entire back catalog for models that could pass as Star wars guys, including converting a Greater Demon of Nurgle into Jabba the Hutt, who he gave a big machine gun.
Obiwan Sherlock Clousseau. I swear to god I'm not making this up. This is either the greatest thing, or the worst thing.
Witch_Hunter_84 on
If you can't beat them, arrange to have them beaten in your presence.
I've got a question that's been spinning in the back of me head for a while now.
In the CGI Clone Wars show they're doing right now, Anakin has a padawan named Ahsoka. Whatever happened to her in Episode 3? Is she gonna get killed by all the clone troopers following Order 666? Or does Anakin kill her?
Best guess, she dies before the movie.
There are some that think she might just up and leave the Order before it as well.
I mean you can't kill the poor lil girl Jedi or else the kiddies are going to be shocked right?
In other words most likely they got no freaking idea and are making it up as they go along.
But there were [strike]children[/strike] younglings killed in ROTS.
I mean, yeah it's a heavier movie but any kids watching Clone Wars would have had to see the movies by now...
I always thought there should be a special edition where the camera doesn't cut away when he goes on his child murder spree
because...they kinda gloss over the wanton slaughter of children... They kind of gloss over how the emperor got him to do it as well, seeing as 5 seconds ago he almost let the emperor die and was really on the fence about the whole "Becoming sith" thing.
yes obviously what ROTS needed was a more explicit and graphic version of the scene where children are slaughtered en masse
Well I don't literally think the movie would have been improved by showing children be decapitated. I'm just saying that the scene itself was awful, unnecessary (Isn't it enough to have the clones nuke the temple from orbit? Heck he could even have found a way to pin it on the Seperatists, like idk maybe while their fleet was in orbit), and retarded as shit with no place in a franchise that existed at that point just to sell toys, and the language they use about the event really fucking sidesteps that he sliced children into pieces while they were alive. He makes the bad guy from Seven look like a saint for crying out loud.
That's not a "Tragic character seduced by the dark side", that's Ed Gein making coats out of people
Yeah no shit... if anything it would highlight how ridiculous his supposed "redemption" was.
Oh, hey, you slaughtered all these kids, then blew up a planet, but you did throw an old man down a shaft, so all's forgiven buddy. Come be all glowey with Obiwan and Yoda.
Sentry on
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
wrote:
When I was a little kid, I always pretended I was the hero,' Skip said.
'Fuck yeah, me too. What little kid ever pretended to be part of the lynch-mob?'
I must say that, while I enjoy RLM's reviews, that guy who wrote the rebuttal (yes, I read it) points out that he asks a lot of questions that he shouldn't be asking, and creating problems where none exist if he doesn't understand a scene.
Yeah no shit... if anything it would highlight how ridiculous his supposed "redemption" was.
Oh, hey, you slaughtered all these kids, then blew up a planet, but you did throw an old man down a shaft, so all's forgiven buddy. Come be all glowey with Obiwan and Yoda.
Honestly if the emperor was going to flip Anakin, the best way would have been to do bad shit and pin it on the Jedi. With how dumb they all were it wouldn't be hard.
I couldn't really articulate the general sense of fail I had with the prequels until RLM's third review. His analysis of the way Lucas shoots dialogue (he has a whopping 3 techniques for it) and made the whole series about Anakin is what killed it. The series should have been about the fall of the Republic and the rise of the Empire, not about anakin - who personally butchered more children than any real human being has.
Really how hard would this have been, Sidious orders Greivous to blow up the jedi temple and the senate building while he was there. This not only provides a reason for all the jedi children to be dead without having to show it, but gives some reason why the senate would be incapable of stopping Palpatine or realizing what he was up to (since you know, they'd all be dead and by the time a senate was reassembled he'd already have full control). Hell the movies could have been as terrible as they were and as long as I got to see a clone trooper pull Jar-Jar's charred remains out of the shattered hulk of the senate building it would have been worth it.
I wish that Gary Kurtz and Lucas's first wife were in control of Star Wars.
The franchise needs more Taoist/Hermetic mysticism and less anime bullshit.
Edith Upwards on
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KageraImitating the worst people. Since 2004Registered Userregular
edited January 2011
The Emperor didn't need to the Jedi were flipping Anakin all himself with Yoda telling him not to pay attention to his visions of his mother dying and being all condescending to him.
I wish that Gary Kurtz and Lucas's first wife were in control of Star Wars.
The franchise needs more Taoist/Hermetic mysticism and less anime bullshit.
This got me thinking about who I would have preferred write the screen play and direct the prequels. I assume that would be one of the biggest challenges of all.
So, let's say it's 1996, and you are George Lucas. Who would have gotten control of the franchise?
I mean, maybe not back then... but damn, I would love to see what he would have done with this.
Sentry on
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
wrote:
When I was a little kid, I always pretended I was the hero,' Skip said.
'Fuck yeah, me too. What little kid ever pretended to be part of the lynch-mob?'
I must say that, while I enjoy RLM's reviews, that guy who wrote the rebuttal (yes, I read it) points out that he asks a lot of questions that he shouldn't be asking, and creating problems where none exist if he doesn't understand a scene.
Can you provide any examples?
Well, there's a lot of pages to scan back through to get some examples... so I haven't found every one of them (there's a lot). But I have found a few. They're mostly reliant on images that he uses for effect (thank you, .pdf), so I took screenshots and copied and pasted the relevant parts (apologies for the differing sizes, but not all pages are equal!) -
One good example is when RLM talks about the problems Qui-Gon faces in trying to get the ship off the ground on Tatooine. The last paragraph is continued on the next page which I didn't think was worth taking a screenshot of, so I'll write it in italics.
"attacking a shopkeeper) would have to escape while hauling what could be hundreds of pounds in parts through the desert. Yeah, this is so much better than trying to subtly trick Watto into accepting Republic money."
He then points out RLM's focus on the escape from Naboo -
But the biggest thing he takes issue with, and probably the best example, is the point in the review when Plinkett talks about Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan's tactics (more continuing in italics at the end) -
"The Royal Starship they later escape the blockade with was small and fast. The Jedi got that ship on the planet's surface, without having to fight as many guards all at once. Stoklasa also conveniently let out the fact that Queen Amidala (whom the bad guys needed to sign the treaty) was on that ship. There's evidence that the Trade Fed wasn't shooting to kill then, because they were picking off small repair droids instead of blasting the ship itself. None of which even needs to be brought up, because whatever they did with the Royal Starship came later in the movie and thus didn't figure into the Jedi's decision-making, at that moment.
On the other hand, the ships that Stoklasa suggests the Jedi steal are huge, lumbering landing craft surrounded by battle droids, and being filled with even more. How fast does he think they can seize control of one of these big ships? When they reveal themselves, they'll be swarmed. The last time we saw the Jedi, about a minute ago, they were running away! And assuming that they can defeat the droid legions and steal a ship, how would they escape with it? The Trade Federation would have been long alerted that one of it's own landing ships had been hijacked, and will blast it. The stolen ship would be coming out of an even bigger ship, at point blank range to it's guns and tractor beams.
...Great plan. Somebody send this guy to Afghanistan, I bet he'd have the Taliban wrapped up within a week."
Yeah, there's a lot of nerd rage in his rebuttal, but he does make a good case for why things happen in the film that RLM points out as unnecessary or without any logical reasoning. There's a lot there to read through, but I think it's worth reading. Well, I would, I'm a fan of TPM, and all I ever get all the time is people blasting every little thing in the film (like kids saying "yippee!" - I mean, really? This ruined Star Wars?), so it's good to see someone standing up and defending it.
My apologies for a post so uneven such as this.
Rohan on
...and I thought of how all those people died, and what a good death that is. That nobody can blame you for it, because everyone else died along with you, and it is the fault of none, save those who did the killing.
Funnyman SETH ROGEN was left stunned by a recent encounter with his moviemaking hero GEORGE LUCAS - because the STAR WARS director spent 20 minutes telling him the world would end in 2012.
Rogen was left speechless when Lucas and Steven Spielberg joined a movie meeting he was a part of - but the encounter has left him worried his life will be over next year (12).
He recalls, "George Lucas sits down and seriously proceeds to talk for around 25 minutes about how he thinks the world is gonna end in the year 2012, like, for real. He thinks it.
"He's going on about the tectonic plates and all the time Spielberg is, like, rolling his eyes, like, 'My nerdy friend won't shut up, I'm sorry...'
"I first thought he (Lucas) was joking... and then I totally realised he was serious and then I started thinking, 'If you're George Lucas and you actually think the world is gonna end in a year, there's no way you haven't built a spaceship for yourself... So I asked him... 'Can I have a seat on it?'
"He claimed he didn't have a spaceship, but there's no doubt there's a Millennium Falcon in a garage somewhere with a pilot just waiting to go... It's gonna be him and Steven Spielberg and I'll be blown up like the rest of us."
I find it hard to believe this is actually real and yet....I could almost believe Lucas thinking this at this point.
It's clear that you haven't watched Freaks & Geeks. Seth Rogen can be funny. That episode where he thought he was gay was freaking hilarious. But, yeah. What the hell, Lucas.
Rohan on
...and I thought of how all those people died, and what a good death that is. That nobody can blame you for it, because everyone else died along with you, and it is the fault of none, save those who did the killing.
I do not believe Seth Rogen is any more funny then I believe the guy who did the 108 page response to RLM did so due to anything but nerd rage. I mean come on, we're all geeks and nerds here to some level but a 108 page response, if you read his post on the forums you can tell the guy takes it all so personal it's like RLM shot his dog or something.
Yeah, it is pretty much on the side of ridiculousness. But I really don't mind, because he's passionate enough about what he loves that he can talk about it at length. I understand that passion, I know I can get obsessive enough about subjects I'm interested in. And a lot of what he has written is... well, correct. As entertaining as the RLM reviews are, if they are presenting wrong facts or asking questions that have no reason to be asked, then they should be challenged.
A 109-page response is too much for most people to take, and the nerd-rage is present in quantities enough to make you laugh, but hey... I'm glad someone is willing to not be popular in order that the truth be revealed.
Rohan on
...and I thought of how all those people died, and what a good death that is. That nobody can blame you for it, because everyone else died along with you, and it is the fault of none, save those who did the killing.
From what I read not much "truth" is spoken, mind you I didn't bother to read the whole thing, I found the whole thing absurd, I give him credit for leaping to a spirited defense but much of what he accuses RLM he does himself. And much of what he says....well, that falls upon personal opinion and what you think of the prequels for the most part. If he had handled himself better on the forums I might give him more credit but he strikes me as a very angry man who is trying to attack back at someone who many rallied around agreeing how bad the prequels were. Those that didn't think the prequels so bad tend to support him.
And a rare few agree and disagree about his view points, again it all comes down to opinion in the end.
I'm one of the few people who like the prequels. Having said that, as films they in no way match up to the original trilogy. Most criticisms heaped against them have a leg to stand on - too much CG making for sterile environments, sterile characters (to a degree), much less emotional involvement, ridiculous dialogue (though to be fair this is present in the originals, too - but the nostalgia that clouds them is so prevalent they may as well be referred to the Holy Trinity), etc etc.
I still like them, though. Not because they're great films, but because I think the Star Wars universe as a whole is much greater than the sum of it's parts... ie, the films themselves. I don't even count the films among my top favourites, yet I obsess over the details of the Star Wars universe more so than any other work, fictional or not. I get more pleasure from my mental meanderings then I do from the films that cost bazillions of dollars to make.
Rohan on
...and I thought of how all those people died, and what a good death that is. That nobody can blame you for it, because everyone else died along with you, and it is the fault of none, save those who did the killing.
Nothing's forgotten, nothing is ever forgotten
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VariableMouth CongressStroke Me Lady FameRegistered Userregular
edited January 2011
I think anyone who watched the video reviews from plinkett knows they are nitpicky
but it isn't the nitpicky shit that matters it's the really really good critique of the story and the characters and that stuff
I wish that Gary Kurtz and Lucas's first wife were in control of Star Wars.
The franchise needs more Taoist/Hermetic mysticism and less anime bullshit.
This got me thinking about who I would have preferred write the screen play and direct the prequels. I assume that would be one of the biggest challenges of all.
So, let's say it's 1996, and you are George Lucas. Who would have gotten control of the franchise?
I liked the original line-up of people he had already told they were going to be involved, which are Frank Darabont and Steven Spielberg.
I think Plinkett was using hyperbole with the choking thing, but stealing the part doesn't seem outside the realm of what actually happened. A Jedi can't subdue a shop keeper, take the part to his space ship, and when he's about to leave, inform somebody that lives nearby that Watto is tied up or something?
Just the smallest bit of imagination causes the next 40 minutes of the movie to seem unnecessary. Stealing vs. taking advantage of via pseudo gambling where you have sensed the outcome or alter it directly as a result of the force seems like a small window.
I wrote a whole thing about the blockade scene being bad too, but I feel like I want to wait a while before shaving my neck again.
What about the other thing he suggested, going to a dealer that would accept credits, or at least not taking Watto at his word that no other dealer would have the part - or maybe buy something with the credits at another dealer that Watto might want and use it as collateral, or maybe sell their ship in exchange for a less fancy one (which would probably make sense anyway...) - they clearly had no qualms about advertising that they were driving around in a T-14 Noobian to random merchants
I mean the RLM review was just shooting from the hip at that point, sure some of his criticisms don't hold water, but they convey the sense of how shoehorned the whole thing on Tatooine was just to get Anakin. The criticisms of his review are silly, they go after obvious hyperbole and nitpicks and straw men (RLM wasn't saying the Jedi should fight the ENTIRE ARMY, he was saying they take out the droids on one of the transport ships and then fly that, or the droids in one of the fighter bays or something.)
That screen cap posted completely missed the point. Plinkett wasn't literally suggesting the scene be conducted with Qui-Gon choking the guy. He said that the method used was as unjedi-like as just choking him. Because both are stupid ideas.
Not to mention, Plinkett is AWARE that some of what he says is nitpicking. It's part of the reasons he does the reviews in character as a rambling crazy person.
Since TPM is the only RLM review I've watched, I have to say, at the least the specific points you brought up actually seem pretty valid.
I mean, I don't think it changes the fact that TPM is not a good film (though that's hardly unique among Star Wars films, I'd argue, it just happens to be particularly bad), but the observations are valid so far as I can tell. Is Qui-Gon stupid? Yeah, probably. Is killing a shopkeeper and dragging a 3-ton hyperdrive core-whatever through the desert via the force also stupid? Yes, yes it is.
I still think the whole sequence that it leads to--podracing, ridiculous gambles, etc.,--come off as stupid anyway. And despite having apparently good shields and being tough fighters, X-Wings are repeatedly shown getting the shit blown out of them in a few brief seconds unless Luke Skywalker or the like is aboard one--part of Star Wars as emulating pre-jet fighter combat, wherein a P-47 may be significantly tougher than a P-35, but a 20 mm round will punch a hole clean through either.
Just my opinion, though. The rest of the rebuttal could be inferior.
to be fair the shield generator stuff stuff was actually a pretty good rebuttal I thought
I think the shield stuff is also kinda missing the point of the RLM review.
When the rebels are escaping Hoth, they need the huge planet defense laser to "clear a path" for ships to escape, without it, the blockade can't be passed. This allows for the battle of Hoth, and a sequence where the rebels are trying to defend the base, with the generators and the cannon(s). The stakes are high, give a clear goal to both sides of the fight, and allow for tension.
In TPM they basically say "If we have shields we can run past the blockade! Which is weird because shields are pretty common, right?"
So you might say "But the shields can be brought down by fire, all the way down to zero, to the point where the generator can be hit/damaged." Which is fine....So what you are really implying is that the tension of the Blockade is supposed to come from the fact that they can shoot you down if you are unlucky enough to get hit enough times. Basically, for both sides, the blockade is a dice roll of victory.
So their shields drop, meaning they should be fucked....but R2 can just fix them (back to 100%!!!) with the flick of a switch. This destroys the tension because they can take lots more hits, and seemingly fixing the shields is trivial? So basically they can take as much time as they want going through the blockade?
This is doubly crazy considering the other argument above, where they had to go through soooo much trouble just to get the "parts" to fix their other ship problem.
to be fair the shield generator stuff stuff was actually a pretty good rebuttal I thought
It was a rip-off of the scene in ESB where "artoo sticks a thing in a thing" and fixes the ship. Except in ESB it was building on a running gag and was actually kinda funny. In TPM it felt cheap and killed any sense of tension or earned merit. It's like the cliche scene in any submarine movie where the engineer has to go into an area of the ship that will be flooded and he knows he's not going to make it. Except this time he makes it, and it's in the first hour of the movie. Absolutely no tension.
Shields in Star Wars (and fuck - Star Trek and all other TV/movie sci-fi/fantasy) have never been dealt with particularly consistently I'd say, to the point where it should probably be a trope.
What about the other thing he suggested, going to a dealer that would accept credits, or at least not taking Watto at his word that no other dealer would have the part - or maybe buy something with the credits at another dealer that Watto might want and use it as collateral, or maybe sell their ship in exchange for a less fancy one (which would probably make sense anyway...) - they clearly had no qualms about advertising that they were driving around in a T-14 Noobian to random merchants
Okay, this involves a lot of text, and I'm not bothered about typing it all out, so I'll just screenshot most of it again.
"And oh yeah, it makes total sense to put the Queen in a shady criminal's hands, and ask that he take all of her handmaidens and bodyguards as well. Not quite the same thing as one old man and a farm boy."
Also, because I really didn't like RLM's part of the review where he asked people to describe characters from the original trilogy and from Phantom Menace, and because I agree with the author -
My apologies for the length. But to further explain Padmé's character (it talks about Leia also, for about five minutes total), here's an excerpt from the History Channel's documentary, "Star Wars - The Legend Revealed" -
Do I think Phantom Menace is a good film? No. Does it hold a candle to the originals? Hell no. But I also think that it's worth watching, it lays important groundwork for the development of Anakin and Obi-Wan, and without it we wouldn't have such fantastic characters as Qui-Gon Jinn, some of the best music overall throughout the saga, that lightsaber fight where we finally got to see what Jedi were really capable of...
In my opinion it's not even the weakest film - that accolade goes to Attack of the Clones.
Rohan on
...and I thought of how all those people died, and what a good death that is. That nobody can blame you for it, because everyone else died along with you, and it is the fault of none, save those who did the killing.
That screen cap posted completely missed the point. Plinkett wasn't literally suggesting the scene be conducted with Qui-Gon choking the guy. He said that the method used was as unjedi-like as just choking him. Because both are stupid ideas.
I stopped reading after that.
And frankly it would have made for a much better movie.
"I have the part."
"Here's a fair amount of money for it."
"No."
*chokes*
*dies*
*goes on to do something interesting in the film*
As opposed to:
"I have the part."
"Here's a fair amount of money for it."
"No."
*mind control*
*fix dice roll*
*bet on predictable force-guaranteed race outcome*
*stupid pod race*
*more stupid pod race*
*kinda fell asleep here*
*woke up to even more stupid pod race*
*a few minutes left for other stuff, the end*
Richy on
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Deebaseron my way to work in a suit and a tieAhhhh...come on fucking guyRegistered Userregular
I wish that Gary Kurtz and Lucas's first wife were in control of Star Wars.
The franchise needs more Taoist/Hermetic mysticism and less anime bullshit.
This got me thinking about who I would have preferred write the screen play and direct the prequels. I assume that would be one of the biggest challenges of all.
So, let's say it's 1996, and you are George Lucas. Who would have gotten control of the franchise?
If I were George Lucas, I would have found a homeless dude masturbating on a bus in Hollywood to write and direct the prequels. They still would have come out better.
Man, I can see the nerd rage dripping from those excerpts of the review of the review. Like, literally, the nerd rage is dripping from my monitor and making a small pool on my desk.
Richy on
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Deebaseron my way to work in a suit and a tieAhhhh...come on fucking guyRegistered Userregular
Man, I can see the nerd rage dripping from those excerpts of the review of the review. Like, literally, the nerd rage is dripping from my monitor and making a small pool on my desk.
Play some motown music for it. Then animate the Statue of Liberty with liquid nerd rage and an NES controller.
Deebaser on
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Deebaseron my way to work in a suit and a tieAhhhh...come on fucking guyRegistered Userregular
The "describe the characters" scene is my favorite part of the review, and the review of the review is insane in its criticism. Yea, I'm sure those guys were amateur actors feigning ignorance. People who aren't huge Star Wars fans could easily forget who Qui Gon was in the same way they probably don't remember who Grand Moff Tarkin was. Tarkin was the main villain in A New Hope, but in a poll of some kind almost all people would say Vader had been in charge.
Hell, I'm a huge Star Wars nerd and I forget shit from TPM all the time. I was in a star wars trivia contest once (won first place, hurray) and despite answering crazy shit from the original trilogies and EU (my favorite part was a series of sabacc related questions where it was clear no one else had even heard of it lol) you know what I couldn't remember? Shit like Subulba's name, or Watto's name.
Posts
And that, friends, is my biggest problem with the entire Star Wars prequels. Palpatine made all the Jedi retarded.
SteamID: devCharles
twitter: https://twitter.com/charlesewise
No wonder their tech stagnated.
Nothing's forgotten, nothing is ever forgotten
http://www.comedycentral.com/videos/index.jhtml?title=jedi-sex-scandal&videoId=213010
Hey kids, I've got spice-candy in my Millennium Falcon, want some?
Obiwan Sherlock Clousseau. I swear to god I'm not making this up. This is either the greatest thing, or the worst thing.
Well I don't literally think the movie would have been improved by showing children be decapitated. I'm just saying that the scene itself was awful, unnecessary (Isn't it enough to have the clones nuke the temple from orbit? Heck he could even have found a way to pin it on the Seperatists, like idk maybe while their fleet was in orbit), and retarded as shit with no place in a franchise that existed at that point just to sell toys, and the language they use about the event really fucking sidesteps that he sliced children into pieces while they were alive. He makes the bad guy from Seven look like a saint for crying out loud.
That's not a "Tragic character seduced by the dark side", that's Ed Gein making coats out of people
Oh, hey, you slaughtered all these kids, then blew up a planet, but you did throw an old man down a shaft, so all's forgiven buddy. Come be all glowey with Obiwan and Yoda.
Can you provide any examples?
Honestly if the emperor was going to flip Anakin, the best way would have been to do bad shit and pin it on the Jedi. With how dumb they all were it wouldn't be hard.
I couldn't really articulate the general sense of fail I had with the prequels until RLM's third review. His analysis of the way Lucas shoots dialogue (he has a whopping 3 techniques for it) and made the whole series about Anakin is what killed it. The series should have been about the fall of the Republic and the rise of the Empire, not about anakin - who personally butchered more children than any real human being has.
Really how hard would this have been, Sidious orders Greivous to blow up the jedi temple and the senate building while he was there. This not only provides a reason for all the jedi children to be dead without having to show it, but gives some reason why the senate would be incapable of stopping Palpatine or realizing what he was up to (since you know, they'd all be dead and by the time a senate was reassembled he'd already have full control). Hell the movies could have been as terrible as they were and as long as I got to see a clone trooper pull Jar-Jar's charred remains out of the shattered hulk of the senate building it would have been worth it.
The franchise needs more Taoist/Hermetic mysticism and less anime bullshit.
This got me thinking about who I would have preferred write the screen play and direct the prequels. I assume that would be one of the biggest challenges of all.
So, let's say it's 1996, and you are George Lucas. Who would have gotten control of the franchise?
SteamID: devCharles
twitter: https://twitter.com/charlesewise
I mean, maybe not back then... but damn, I would love to see what he would have done with this.
SteamID: devCharles
twitter: https://twitter.com/charlesewise
Well, there's a lot of pages to scan back through to get some examples... so I haven't found every one of them (there's a lot). But I have found a few. They're mostly reliant on images that he uses for effect (thank you, .pdf), so I took screenshots and copied and pasted the relevant parts (apologies for the differing sizes, but not all pages are equal!) -
"attacking a shopkeeper) would have to escape while hauling what could be hundreds of pounds in parts through the desert. Yeah, this is so much better than trying to subtly trick Watto into accepting Republic money."
He then points out RLM's focus on the escape from Naboo -
But the biggest thing he takes issue with, and probably the best example, is the point in the review when Plinkett talks about Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan's tactics (more continuing in italics at the end) -
"The Royal Starship they later escape the blockade with was small and fast. The Jedi got that ship on the planet's surface, without having to fight as many guards all at once. Stoklasa also conveniently let out the fact that Queen Amidala (whom the bad guys needed to sign the treaty) was on that ship. There's evidence that the Trade Fed wasn't shooting to kill then, because they were picking off small repair droids instead of blasting the ship itself. None of which even needs to be brought up, because whatever they did with the Royal Starship came later in the movie and thus didn't figure into the Jedi's decision-making, at that moment.
On the other hand, the ships that Stoklasa suggests the Jedi steal are huge, lumbering landing craft surrounded by battle droids, and being filled with even more. How fast does he think they can seize control of one of these big ships? When they reveal themselves, they'll be swarmed. The last time we saw the Jedi, about a minute ago, they were running away! And assuming that they can defeat the droid legions and steal a ship, how would they escape with it? The Trade Federation would have been long alerted that one of it's own landing ships had been hijacked, and will blast it. The stolen ship would be coming out of an even bigger ship, at point blank range to it's guns and tractor beams.
...Great plan. Somebody send this guy to Afghanistan, I bet he'd have the Taliban wrapped up within a week."
Yeah, there's a lot of nerd rage in his rebuttal, but he does make a good case for why things happen in the film that RLM points out as unnecessary or without any logical reasoning. There's a lot there to read through, but I think it's worth reading. Well, I would, I'm a fan of TPM, and all I ever get all the time is people blasting every little thing in the film (like kids saying "yippee!" - I mean, really? This ruined Star Wars?), so it's good to see someone standing up and defending it.
My apologies for a post so uneven such as this.
Nothing's forgotten, nothing is ever forgotten
I find it hard to believe this is actually real and yet....I could almost believe Lucas thinking this at this point.
And no Seth Rogen is not funny at all.
Nothing's forgotten, nothing is ever forgotten
A 109-page response is too much for most people to take, and the nerd-rage is present in quantities enough to make you laugh, but hey... I'm glad someone is willing to not be popular in order that the truth be revealed.
Nothing's forgotten, nothing is ever forgotten
And a rare few agree and disagree about his view points, again it all comes down to opinion in the end.
I still like them, though. Not because they're great films, but because I think the Star Wars universe as a whole is much greater than the sum of it's parts... ie, the films themselves. I don't even count the films among my top favourites, yet I obsess over the details of the Star Wars universe more so than any other work, fictional or not. I get more pleasure from my mental meanderings then I do from the films that cost bazillions of dollars to make.
Nothing's forgotten, nothing is ever forgotten
but it isn't the nitpicky shit that matters it's the really really good critique of the story and the characters and that stuff
I liked the original line-up of people he had already told they were going to be involved, which are Frank Darabont and Steven Spielberg.
Just the smallest bit of imagination causes the next 40 minutes of the movie to seem unnecessary. Stealing vs. taking advantage of via pseudo gambling where you have sensed the outcome or alter it directly as a result of the force seems like a small window.
I wrote a whole thing about the blockade scene being bad too, but I feel like I want to wait a while before shaving my neck again.
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I mean the RLM review was just shooting from the hip at that point, sure some of his criticisms don't hold water, but they convey the sense of how shoehorned the whole thing on Tatooine was just to get Anakin. The criticisms of his review are silly, they go after obvious hyperbole and nitpicks and straw men (RLM wasn't saying the Jedi should fight the ENTIRE ARMY, he was saying they take out the droids on one of the transport ships and then fly that, or the droids in one of the fighter bays or something.)
I stopped reading after that.
http://www.audioentropy.com/
Since TPM is the only RLM review I've watched, I have to say, at the least the specific points you brought up actually seem pretty valid.
I mean, I don't think it changes the fact that TPM is not a good film (though that's hardly unique among Star Wars films, I'd argue, it just happens to be particularly bad), but the observations are valid so far as I can tell. Is Qui-Gon stupid? Yeah, probably. Is killing a shopkeeper and dragging a 3-ton hyperdrive core-whatever through the desert via the force also stupid? Yes, yes it is.
I still think the whole sequence that it leads to--podracing, ridiculous gambles, etc.,--come off as stupid anyway. And despite having apparently good shields and being tough fighters, X-Wings are repeatedly shown getting the shit blown out of them in a few brief seconds unless Luke Skywalker or the like is aboard one--part of Star Wars as emulating pre-jet fighter combat, wherein a P-47 may be significantly tougher than a P-35, but a 20 mm round will punch a hole clean through either.
Just my opinion, though. The rest of the rebuttal could be inferior.
I think the shield stuff is also kinda missing the point of the RLM review.
When the rebels are escaping Hoth, they need the huge planet defense laser to "clear a path" for ships to escape, without it, the blockade can't be passed. This allows for the battle of Hoth, and a sequence where the rebels are trying to defend the base, with the generators and the cannon(s). The stakes are high, give a clear goal to both sides of the fight, and allow for tension.
In TPM they basically say "If we have shields we can run past the blockade! Which is weird because shields are pretty common, right?"
So you might say "But the shields can be brought down by fire, all the way down to zero, to the point where the generator can be hit/damaged." Which is fine....So what you are really implying is that the tension of the Blockade is supposed to come from the fact that they can shoot you down if you are unlucky enough to get hit enough times. Basically, for both sides, the blockade is a dice roll of victory.
So their shields drop, meaning they should be fucked....but R2 can just fix them (back to 100%!!!) with the flick of a switch. This destroys the tension because they can take lots more hits, and seemingly fixing the shields is trivial? So basically they can take as much time as they want going through the blockade?
This is doubly crazy considering the other argument above, where they had to go through soooo much trouble just to get the "parts" to fix their other ship problem.
It was a rip-off of the scene in ESB where "artoo sticks a thing in a thing" and fixes the ship. Except in ESB it was building on a running gag and was actually kinda funny. In TPM it felt cheap and killed any sense of tension or earned merit. It's like the cliche scene in any submarine movie where the engineer has to go into an area of the ship that will be flooded and he knows he's not going to make it. Except this time he makes it, and it's in the first hour of the movie. Absolutely no tension.
Okay, this involves a lot of text, and I'm not bothered about typing it all out, so I'll just screenshot most of it again.
"And oh yeah, it makes total sense to put the Queen in a shady criminal's hands, and ask that he take all of her handmaidens and bodyguards as well. Not quite the same thing as one old man and a farm boy."
Also, because I really didn't like RLM's part of the review where he asked people to describe characters from the original trilogy and from Phantom Menace, and because I agree with the author -
My apologies for the length. But to further explain Padmé's character (it talks about Leia also, for about five minutes total), here's an excerpt from the History Channel's documentary, "Star Wars - The Legend Revealed" -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oW7dlsNPUPM
Do I think Phantom Menace is a good film? No. Does it hold a candle to the originals? Hell no. But I also think that it's worth watching, it lays important groundwork for the development of Anakin and Obi-Wan, and without it we wouldn't have such fantastic characters as Qui-Gon Jinn, some of the best music overall throughout the saga, that lightsaber fight where we finally got to see what Jedi were really capable of...
In my opinion it's not even the weakest film - that accolade goes to Attack of the Clones.
Nothing's forgotten, nothing is ever forgotten
"I have the part."
"Here's a fair amount of money for it."
"No."
*chokes*
*dies*
*goes on to do something interesting in the film*
As opposed to:
"I have the part."
"Here's a fair amount of money for it."
"No."
*mind control*
*fix dice roll*
*bet on predictable force-guaranteed race outcome*
*stupid pod race*
*more stupid pod race*
*kinda fell asleep here*
*woke up to even more stupid pod race*
*a few minutes left for other stuff, the end*
If I were George Lucas, I would have found a homeless dude masturbating on a bus in Hollywood to write and direct the prequels. They still would have come out better.
Play some motown music for it. Then animate the Statue of Liberty with liquid nerd rage and an NES controller.
Hell, I'm a huge Star Wars nerd and I forget shit from TPM all the time. I was in a star wars trivia contest once (won first place, hurray) and despite answering crazy shit from the original trilogies and EU (my favorite part was a series of sabacc related questions where it was clear no one else had even heard of it lol) you know what I couldn't remember? Shit like Subulba's name, or Watto's name.