Hermit's Journey Part III

[rickgriffin]

If that's the case though, then why was it absolutely necessary to hold onto the idea that all the Jedi were afraid of training Anakin? They were certainly arrogant enough.

And a lot of other interviews with Lucas keeps leading be to believe that Lucas's idea of the goodness of the light side was absolute, especially because his idea of "balance" (in terms of the prophecy) was to destroy the dark side forever, and he rejected the ironic interpretation that Anakin would bring balance to the force by killing all the Jedi but two. What balance is there when there's all light and no dark?

[GandALF]

And a lot of other interviews with Lucas keeps leading be to believe that Lucas's idea of the goodness of the light side was absolute, especially because his idea of "balance" (in terms of the prophecy) was to destroy the dark side forever, and he rejected the ironic interpretation that Anakin would bring balance to the force by killing all the Jedi but two. What balance is there when there's all light and no dark?

The prophecy is about destroying the Sith, not the dark side, you can't destroy the dark side. The depiction in things like KOTOR of good being 100% light and evil being 100% dark and balance being neutral is inaccurate in terms of the films/Lucas precisely because its an RPG and the player chooses to be good or evil are are not a well-intentioned person who is tempted.

Balance is the light side keeping the dark side in check. At the end of ROTJ, Luke feels anger toward Vader and wants to kill him, but he uses his compassion to temper his anger and shows Vader mercy i.e. he uses his light side to balance out his dark side. He still feels anger, he still has a dark side, it just doesn't control him.

When the Sith actively use their dark sides they unbalance themselves and destroy or cripple their light sides and their actions ripple out (hate begets hate and such) causing the Force to go out of balance, whereas the Jedi guarding peace and justice maintains the balance.

[SuccubusYuri]

If that's the case though, then why was it absolutely necessary to hold onto the idea that all the Jedi were afraid of training Anakin? They were certainly arrogant enough.

And a lot of other interviews with Lucas keeps leading be to believe that Lucas's idea of the goodness of the light side was absolute, especially because his idea of "balance" (in terms of the prophecy) was to destroy the dark side forever, and he rejected the ironic interpretation that Anakin would bring balance to the force by killing all the Jedi but two. What balance is there when there's all light and no dark?

Being very generous, one could say that the Sith will always seek to expand their influence, and thus are inherently un-balanced. The proportion of the universe ruled by the Dark Side will arc towards more and more, by their very presence because of their stated goals and methodology. It COULD be argued that the Jedi are not of the same caliber, because they are known to tolerate Dark Side users, as long as they keep to their shit and don't start oppressing neighboring systems or trying to destabilize the Force (the witches of Dathomir, as an example, whom Obi-Wan is very familiar with). But a Sith will always try to corrupt and bend the Force around him or her to exert the greatest influence no matter how trivial or threatening the surrounding forces are.

[1701EarlGrey]

IMO the weakest aspect of EpIII is the wrap up, need to get everything tied up in a neat bow so we can move into A New Hope. That and the ''high ground''...

And really, the "fall" of Anakin from noble hero to murderous villain is too fast to get invested in. Sure, he's kind of callous for a heroic character, but he's concerned about the right thing, and then two scenes later he murders a room full of children. It's supposed to be an uncomfortable visual, I get that, but we really need to see decisions stacking on top of decisions following a pattern that finally puts him in that despicable place, not watching him flip a switch into evil..

Except, he was killing woman and children before, when he wanted to avenge his mother, so this is not out of character for him. He will always do terrible things, just to protect or to avenge he's loved once. That's one of my biggest gripes with Anakin's character - he was never a good person. At best he was an anti-hero, but he was never a good guy. That's why his tragedy just doesn't work - there wasn't fall from grace, because there wasn't grace, to begin with.

[bronnt]

This is what bugged me about the prequels as well.
Alec Guinness managed to invest so much emotion into a few lines of dialogue in New Hope, where he reminisced with Luke about his old friend Anakin and the fall of Darth Vader.

We were expecting to see these two like the best of friends facing the galaxy together until Obi-Wan's failure in training him and Anakin's seduction to the dark side ended in tragedy. Instead Anakin is an awkward, whiny idiot in AOTC who resents Obi-Wan and then the two head off to different parts of the galaxy. In ROTS they have a brief heroic partnership together, then they head off to different parts of the galaxy.

There's no real relationship between the two or character investment. When Anakin takes his sharp left turn down into infanticide, it fails to both shock or to be a realistic character action. When Obi-Wan sees his fallen brother it's not as if his best friend and brother in arms has betrayed him. The whole thing lacks any real impact.

That's one of the reasons why I feel Clone wars (either of them) does a lot to buoy up RotS. It finally gives you those necessary character moments between Anakin and Obi-Wan. While Luke spends most of both Empire and Jedi separated from his companions, the big chunk of the movie he had with them in New Hope made it so you could still feel the connection between them. By both moving back the timeline and by splitting Obi-Wan and Qui Gon you basically robbed an entire film's worth of potential bonding between the two characters whose relationship should be one of the three pillars of the films, with the other being Anakin's relationship with Padme and his relationship with Palpatine (which is admittedly the only one the PT got right).

Episode II could still have made up for the fact that they didn't spend much time together in TPM, if they'd done it effectively. As you point out, Han and Luke don't spend much time together in Empire, but the first half hour establishes their relationship. There's a warmth and camaraderie in the way the two of them interact in their few scenes together at the start. We even see Han, whose primary concern was just leaving, immediately drop everything in order to risk his life to go search for Luke at the start. You don't have to have seen ANH to understand this relationship. When the final act of the film relies upon him being too concerned about Han and Leia to just leave them, we can buy that.

When we see Obi-wan and Anakin interact in the early parts of Episode II, we get a lot of awkwardness and discomfort, even some barely concealed hostility. There's a little bit of dialogue that attempts to establish them as friends, but it doesn't work because there's no emotion or connection in their words. When they argue it doesn't feel like banter between friends but a reluctant parent stuck with a petulant youth. One of the most shocking moments in the film is when Anakin starts a petulant argument while meeting with Padme because of just how uncomfortable it makes everyone, even the audience, feel. I still cringe when I think about that.

The conception of the Jedi seems to have changed along the way, and here's the mental comparison I came up with: Alec Guiness gave us the sense that Jedi are like Captain Picard at his best. They're thoughtful, wise, and self-aware enough to recognize their own emotions and have control of them. There's few overt shows of emotion but a good deal of compassionate warmth. The prequel Jedi are like badly written Vulcans, struggling to express a character beyond emotional repression and condescension. The former is identifiable and charismatic, while the latter will struggle to connect to any audience.

[TheNewTeddy]

When I actually watch objectively, the prequels are not as bad as people make them out to be, and many of the original movies are not as good as many make them out to be, however, I do notice a clear difference. Empire and Hope are certainly better than any of the prequels, and Phantom Menace is the weakest of the bunch, but I've often thought Jedi falls short of Sith.

That's pretty close to my opinions. Phantom Menace is genuinely awful, and I think that clouds peoples' view of Clones and Sith, which were significant improvements. They had their rough spots (as did A New Hope, though the nostalgia filter is strong on that one), but people tend to fixate on the flaws because of their reaction to Phantom Menace.

Empire was a legitimately great movie on its own merits. A New Hope quite good; I grade it on a curve because it was first and filmed with limited resources. I think Sith, Revenge, and Clones were all acceptable but flawed for varying reasons, and I still maintain that Phantom Menace was just plain awful.

Taking context into account is the wrong thing to do imo. If the movie is enjoyable, its enjoyable, if it is not, it is not.

[Beastro]

As I hope the Shadow's Journey already established, the goal of this series is not to praise him. But it's also not to damn him. It's to explain, not excuse.

It's a fair assessment and one that doesn't end flatteringly for him when you add everything together. To me I think so much of the issue with snowballing from all the praise he increasingly got as the original trilogy went on, that in part, inflated his ego while on the other hand he was a passive participant stuck in situations where he didn't want to answer questions in a way that might hurt his films when they were still to be released.

A good example of that would be Lost and the how passively the producers played into the self-generated fan hype. This especially so when it came to questions early in the shows run when it was becoming a sensation, like "Do you have the entire series story planned out already?" to which the producers nodded and said they did, because shaking their head and saying "Well, actually, we're just making it up as we go along..." would risk deflating the buzz the show had regardless of if it was true and would keep fan expectations in line with what was being done with the show.

In the end they passed the buck and paid for it when it came time to deliver in the final season. Their feeble attempts to make everything fit together, that every question raised in the show did have an answer and meaning that all tied together, failed miserably, screamed of being made up on the spot and ruined not only the that season but the entire show as a result.

Lucas wasn't the genius film maker he became known for in the "I had everything laid out from the beginning" way he was known for at least until the Prequels came out. Instead of being a Tolkien or a Straczynski who did have a plan (and also a knack for adapting and mending things when discontinuity hit), he was a guy that works well from a shallow base premise, and under pressure, was able to conjure a great movie up as things progressed alongside others that added their talents to his own that helped dilute his shortcomings and flat out bad ideas.

In that respect I'd rate Lucas comparable to Roddenberry and how the different courses they and their signature creation took shaped what made Star Wars and Star Trek great.

When Star Trek failed it was clear Roddenberry had to be reined in, just as he'd always been during the development of TOS, which then produced success. Instead of TOS, to the failure of the first movie, to the mainline movies success to early TNG to later TNG before the Voyager/Enterprise fall Star Wars climbed then went dormant as Lucas' hubris built before unleashing the second phase of SW films in one large delivery while Trek struggled and stumbled even before it got to The Motion Picture, much less Wrath of Khan.

As for the Special Editions: I don't like them not so much for what was added and the annoying things that were changed, but that changes in the first place. What I mean is I love the old stop-motion AT-AT and the old fighter models. They had character and style, but above all else, felt real because they were real models, something I've come to appreciate more and more as we continue to plunge into the morass of CGI, something I only appreciated early on when it was used mostly to show what couldn't be shown decently in models that helped polish films but not be made entirely from them.

Early CGI that helped back up Jurassic Park in the shots where stop-motion would have been silly, like the opening revelation near the beginning, but was in a film that still had puppetry at its core, or Terminator 2 where CGI was used for the shots of T1000 that couldn't have been done any other way, but when practical effects could take over CGI stepped aside instead of removing the need for practical effects entirely, like the use of mercury pooling together after T1000 is frozen and shattered to show him gathering himself together again instead of continuing to use the fakey looking liquid metal CGI.

Finally, the whole thing about Lucas working better with limited resources is true, but there's more it than that, the product was better. It's a fatal idea to assume that if Lucas or any other creator had gotten their way with time and money that the product would have been better. There are cases when that is true, especially when something is rushed. Often the pressure itself is what brings out the quality, and to remove that by giving that person the time and money they feel would have made things better cripples the work.

We can see that in the Special Editions where NOTHING new added improved the films and many little things changed spoiled the movies, not they they themselves ruined them, like the changes to Han and Greedo.

Creators need to realize that their work also takes place within the frame work of time and timing is important. In the end you have to make something and accept that if it's really good there's a damn good chance you coudln't have done anything better, and I feel the video game industry is going to realize the same thing with the remakes of games, like Final Fantasy VII taking place.

It's all the more reason to damn when forces meddle and destroy a work that could have realistically been better, because there is no second chance with it. Had the first Star Wars failed remaking it wouldn't have created the same reaction we got, all was a part of the zeitgeist of the times and that moment when it was perfect, or as perfect as it could be, for Star Wars to be made and released.

It's ironic, since so much of the buzz around the Special Editions back in '96 was a sense of rediscovering something special that had faded into pop culture that was incredible, and everyone could have a chance to get a taste of that again, not that we were getting the "real" releases Lucas always wanted and were somehow more truer and better than the old ones.

[GandALF]

We can see that in the Special Editions where NOTHING new added improved the films and many little things changed spoiled the movies, not they they themselves ruined them, like the changes to Han and Greedo.

What about changing the roman letters to aurebesh? Surely that was necessary to maintain consistency.

[SotF]

Hell, it's the same thing covered with some of the early TNG reviews where there was pretty much the cult of Roddenberry that combined with some of the more insane ideas.

Nah, Roddenberry and Lucas had the opposite problems: Roddenberry's (TNG) ideas were antithetical to drama and would fight with his writers when they tried to make them part of an actual story rather than a manifesto. Lucas' ideas are entirely conducive to drama, but as the self-proclaimed king of wooden dialogue he has trouble implementing them on his own. Its demonstrated by the marked improvement with The Clone Wars where he has the same role as Roddenberry and has a team of writers supporting him.

You're kind of missing the main point of what I was going at.

The issue I was pointing towards was that every writer and director has flaws and weaknesses (And the opposite as well), the issue with several people is that once you get to a certain point, well, your successes kind of make it hard for people to point those issues out in your work. This leads to many of them being surprised by issues raised by the fans when the quality suffers because of the people don't want to help fix things early on.

Lucas didn't have people to point out the issues with the dialogue, and in many cases refused to give the chance for people to go over his scripts.

[Beastro]

Hell, it's the same thing covered with some of the early TNG reviews where there was pretty much the cult of Roddenberry that combined with some of the more insane ideas.

Nah, Roddenberry and Lucas had the opposite problems: Roddenberry's (TNG) ideas were antithetical to drama and would fight with his writers when they tried to make them part of an actual story rather than a manifesto. Lucas' ideas are entirely conducive to drama, but as the self-proclaimed king of wooden dialogue he has trouble implementing them on his own. Its demonstrated by the marked improvement with The Clone Wars where he has the same role as Roddenberry and has a team of writers supporting him.

You're kind of missing the main point of what I was going at.

The issue I was pointing towards was that every writer and director has flaws and weaknesses (And the opposite as well), the issue with several people is that once you get to a certain point, well, your successes kind of make it hard for people to point those issues out in your work. This leads to many of them being surprised by issues raised by the fans when the quality suffers because of the people don't want to help fix things early on.

Lucas didn't have people to point out the issues with the dialogue, and in many cases refused to give the chance for people to go over his scripts.

The most famous example of that in fiction is what happens to novels in size and quality when they become successful. Size increases and quality over time drops, all largely due to the fact that editors become less likely, or are actively restrained, from pruning novels down.

Stephen King is the best example of that.

Creators of all kinds need to realize that they need constraint to improve quality, and they need it all the more when they become successful, since removing all barriers let's their weaknesses come forward and undermine what is good in what they do.

If they lack organic restrains, like time, budget, feasibility within the bounds of technology or a editor that still looks on them as one of many writers they're dealing with that isn't special, then they need artificial ones that revolve around a healthy dose of humility and allowing people into the process when they finally have the opportunity to get rid of them.

In both cases Roddenberry and Lucas failed in that respect. Roddenberry failed at least twice with TMP and Early TNG and both times things were saved when control was taken from him. In Lucas' case he began to develop the mentality over the course of the OT that resulted in the compromised nature of Return of the Jedi. Jedi was a let down that managed to squeak by as just good enough, but it wasn't a failure that would push everyone else involved to take a good hard look at Lucas and realize he needed to be at the very least, restrained as is what happened to Roddenberry after The Motion Picture.

Lucas' shenanigans with Richard Marquand was the big warning sign. Instead Lucas learned the wrong lesson from it, which was that by trying to have it both ways he got the worst of both worlds, not the underlying issues within himself and his desire for greater control that created the entire problem with Marquand that later came back to compromise the Prequels.

Its demonstrated by the marked improvement with The Clone Wars where he has the same role as Roddenberry and has a team of writers supporting him.

Whatever improvement there was it was making a purse out of sows ear. The way the Phantom Menace was made edged out so much that should have been the main focus of the series from that start. Chuck detailing the creative process behind Dooku shows that - Dooku should have been there in the first film to allow him more room to fulfill his crucial part in the story. Instead what we got was his big reveal as a Sith coming at the climax of the second film only for the third film to open with his death.

He is a trifle of a character, not even a secondary one and that the undermined all the symbolism and themes around his murder at the hands of Anakin in the third film. He was meant to be the face of the Confederacy and all the death of that would entail, but we never get to see him in that capacity since the Prequels as a trilogy ignored the core strengths of the trilogy format with a beginning, middle and end. The Prequels were a dilogy with a introductory movie tact on at the front that resulted in the trilogy itself being compressed and the middle being cut out of it (and shoved into other mediums at best, like the Clone Wars series).

All of this makes me wish Lucas had gone with what was at the beginning of Chuck's first video in this series. I forget if it was Chuck's idea, of Lucas' first one that he eventually got rid of, but having the first film in the Prequels be largely what we saw in Attack of the Clones, only with flashbacks interspersed to establish what was done in what we got in the Phantom Menace, the drop it for the remaining two films that would be fully immersed in the Clone Wars while at the same time having establish what was going on that would lead to them alongside such important characters as Dooku (as well as Grievous who is even more of a footnote of an important figure).

It wouldn't have been perfect, Anakin's beginnings as a Jedi would have not been looked into much detail, but the focus of Prequels was no in Anakin's origins, it was the events that would lead to his fall as a Jedi, of which all but his late recruitment as a preteen would take place in the the Clone Wars and the lead up to it.

That last bit I find annoying too, BTW. That a series of wars predominantly involving clones was turned into a monolithic one with the establishment side using clones and the other drones is infuriating the more I think about it.

When one thinks of the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars, one thinks of the repeated Coalitions formed that made the wars plural while at the same time the division into two periods marked the distinction between what made them noticeable: the breakout of Revolution in France and the attempt to spread it across Europe and then the Revolution being subsumed by Napoleon and his Imperial ambitions. In both cases the Revolutionary spirit and the Napoleonic one were the minority threat that coloured the perspective of the majority when the clones were the arm of the majority in the Clone Wars. The minority employed drones and so one would expect people both within the Republic and afterwards in the Empire to be calling it the Drone War if anything else.

When I actually watch objectively, the prequels are not as bad as people make them out to be, and many of the original movies are not as good as many make them out to be, however, I do notice a clear difference. Empire and Hope are certainly better than any of the prequels, and Phantom Menace is the weakest of the bunch, but I've often thought Jedi falls short of Sith.

That's pretty close to my opinions. Phantom Menace is genuinely awful, and I think that clouds peoples' view of Clones and Sith, which were significant improvements.

I'm the opposite. Seeing the Phantom Menace I wasn't too bothered by it and neither was my brother (who was the big SW fan back in the 80s due to be 12 years my senior but was a fan in the way I had become a fan of Jurassic Park in the 90s, it was a part of my childhood I'm really fond of, but it's not the world to me), to both of us it was good, but it wasn't great in the way the first two films were and Return of the Jedi was in providing a decent wrap up to the trilogy even though it reeked of being flawed.

I think the problem within the Prequels that tarnishes the Phantom Menance is what I described above, it's not a part of a trilogy. To me it's fine as a stand alone movie that shows Anakins background as a precursor to a trilogy and not a part of it, but as the first part of a trilogy it's utter shit that compressed the real arch of the trilogy into a dilogy. That compression and the huge changes that take place from Phantom Menace to Attack of the Clones are what ruin the later two movies for me. So much of the weight of the heart of the trilogy is contained within Attack of the Clones and so much of that is missing when the majority of the film is the discovery of the plot that leads to Civil War.

I looked forward to Attack of the Clones after Phantom Menace, but after Attack of the Clones I had no interest in Revenge of the Sith, only going to see it at the tail end of its theatrical run since some friends wanted to and it was the only movie currently playing that was of any interest to us.

Revenge of the Sith always was to me the Prequels going out with a whimper. A by the numbers rush through all the points that had to be wrapped up in the series before the trilogy could end with the gravitas that they deserved, all because they'd run out of time by wasting the entire third of the trilogy one what should have been the Prequel to the Prequels.

It's in that respect that dislike Phantom Menace, but not for what it was in and of itself which is what I see most people focusing on.

Think about if Peter Jackson decided to make his LOTR trilogy by having the Hobbit take up the entire first part, then cramming the Fellowship of the Ring and the Two Towers in together with what couldn't be done of the latter then being shoved into the beginning of The Return of the King that then prevented everything within it from having any attention given to it. I'd still love to see the Hobbit for its own sake, but I'd resent it for compromising the entire structure of the Lord of the Rings to do so.