Official Star Wars Thread

[Randall]

The old 1970s-1980s Marvel Star Wars comics are fun, too. You can find them affordably in Dark Horse's Omnibus collections. Marvel has also put out a couple of larger, more expensive Omnibuses of the same material recently.

Most of Dark Horse's Star Wars comics were quite well done, from what I've heard. But Dark Empire, their first SW series and serving as a sequel to the original trilogy, is a good place to start.

[Dan]

Marvel has now also been releasing some of the stuff previously published in Dark Horse in paperback as Legends Epic Collections.

[LastActionHero]

Can anyone recommend me good comics of Star Wars?

With the purchase by Disney, it obviously meant SW was going back to Marvel. And this year has seen the first batch of new books, all under the official canon. I read the first issue of the Princess Leia mini and liked it (Mark Waid is a very good writer and I think he did a fine job setting up the story and staying faithful to the SW universe). So I'd say check out the new Marvel books and see what you think.

Thanks for your suggestion...
I read the comic, and liked it very much..
And that twist at the end...

[Dacey]

Strong language, but a pretty fascinating read...

http://www.vice.com/read/ahmed-best-jar ... -interview

Say what you will, but I've honestly never understood the extreme "hate" that Jar Jar Binks gets. At this point, I think people bash him because it's "cool" to do so, not because they're actually genuinely annoyed by him (at least in the ways that they claim). Granted, I saw Phantom Menace five years after the film's release (around the time the original trilogy came to DVD, meaning I became a Star Wars teen in 2004), but after all of the "worst character in movie history" talk...well, he just didn't live up to the "hype" for me.

I do think that Ahmed's been a good sport overall, though, voicing Jar Jar not just in some episodes of Clone Wars, but also in a couple of Robot Chicken sketches. It's also notable that, in the 2004 Special Edition, George Lucas added a "Weesa free!" to the final scenes of Return of the Jedi, as though to stomp on fan "theories" that the character had died on Alderaan. And the article doesn't give full credit to the character's popularity with children (when Revenge of the Sith came out in 2005, Jar Jar Binks was ranked as the franchise's third best selling toy).

But at the end of the day, I see no reason to get upset over Jar Jar, especially fifteen years after the movie''s release. Now, the holiday special, on the other hand...

[Randall]

Jar Jar was an annoying character from the typically tone-deaf Lucas. Every time he tried to inject humor or romance in the prequels, it fell totally flat. I have nothing against Best, who seems like a good guy. And I don't adhere to the charges of racism in respect to Jar Jar; but that character's silly antics were too broad for Star Wars. I cringed every time he spoke. He hurt the movie for me more than Anakin.

[EricJ]

I had to reassure myself it was Best doing Jar Jar's voice, and not Frank Welker doing that same strangled voice he used to do on the Superfriends and Punky Brewster cartoons.

(In fact, Best was supposed to get his own Saturday morning spinoff, "Jar Jar and the Pod Racers", but you can guess what happened, and Lucasfilm came up with a better animated idea.)

[ShyViolet]

The truth is (IMHO) that Jar-Jar didn't kill Star Wars, it was all George Lucas. Liam
Neeson admitted in an interview that when first reading the PM script he was like "(expletive), (expletive), me, (expletive), me, me, (expletive), me, (expletive), (expletive), me." He thought it was a pretty good part, so he accepted it despite his disdain for the, um, plot.

I mean really, did anyone (even fans of the film) care about the "tax problem" Naboo and Tatooine had? (Or something like that, anyway.)Or whether or not "Anni" would get to go podracing or not? This was all George Lucas' doing, not Ahmed Best's. I truly believe if the writing and especially the directing had been better on PM, people wouldn't have hated Jar-Jar so much, even though he was quite a silly character. I mean look at how Neeson and McGregor "interact" with him! They obviously could care less about the plot, and it shows. This makes Jar-Jar's flaws stand out even more.

Jake Lloyd was also Lucas's fault all the way. He was so obviously wrong for the part and it was Lucas' responsibility to hire a competent actor who fits the part (and who doesn't spit out that ridiculous "Yippee" dialogue from Lucas' script).

I know some have said that Clones and Sith were an improvement over PM, but that is such a relative comparison. Those two films may not have had Jar-Jar in them (except for his cameo in Clones of course) but altogether they were dull, passion-free excercises in just plain bad writing--again, Lucas' fault. A lot of people blame Hayden Christinson and Natalie Portman, but IMHO they are just as blameless as Best. (Watch Christenson's excellent film "Shattered Glass" to see a sample of his real talent.)

Again, it was Lucas' responsibility to craft a genuinely intriguing saga that takes us to new places, both emotionally and story-wise. They don't. Best's "silly" performance as Jar-Jar is no more to blame than Neeson's dull one, Portman's lifeless one and Christinson's two-dimensional one. (McGregor is the only one who comes out of these films unscathed, much to his credit.)

In my opinion, let's lay blame where it's due--it was all George.

[Dacey]

Actually, for me, PM is actually the best of the prequel trilogy. And I don't mean that in a condescending way. From the visuals (an actually astonishing mix of practical effects and CGI), to the action, to the tone, it just felt the most "Star Warsy" to me.

Then again, I'm a fan of all six films, so...

[Ben]

Clones was easily the most SW of the prequels...but I guess you just had to be there the first time around to really have responded in the "right" kind of way...



Personally, the prequels felt entirely fudged up to me. Nothing happens in Phantom Menace, so scrap that. Start it off with a bit of a younger Anakin in Clones and make that the first part (essentially, with a bit of set-up, etc, natch). This one ends with Anakin showing his darker side but ultimately remaining in the light.

Then chop Sith into two: too much had been left unanswered by the third film anyway and it's less a structure than a series of plot points that have to happen in around two hours of film. So, make it the final two movies: the first part is the second film, with Anakin turning to the dark side and just about to become Vader for the end credit cliffhanger...!

Film three allows for more of a structured wrap up. Now, we've all heard what a badass Vader is and how he's the most feared person in the galaxy by the time of A New Hope - the very next film - but we have never seen any actual proof of this. Why should anyone really fear him when he arrives on Leia's ship at the start of Hope? Fix this by having Anakin become Vader at the start of the third film and then have him rampaging through it while the Jedi scatter and more time is given to what we need to see, done right (Yoda and Kenobi going off with more dignity than just giving up, etc, Kenobi meeting Vader for a proper duel so that his words in Hope make more sense, etc)...

Really, Lucas started too young with Anakin as a kid. He could have been discovered a little younger than he was in Clones, making that the first film, and a little older than he was in Sith, making that the last two films. Really, go back and watch Sith again with structure in mind: it's really pretty poor. The last hour is a compressed movie in itself: Lucas simply ran out of time and really needed an extra film to lay it all out properly, but unfortunately he'd squandered the first one on stuff that had nothing to do with the actual plot and was really all about selling toys.

Which brings us back to the original trilogy and all the stories as to why Jedi isn't really the film it could have been, but I'm not going back over all that again...!

[Dan]

Personally, I thought Clones was the weakest of the prequels, and probably my pick for weakest of all the films to date. I had a problem with the pacing, which moved really slow. I'm not asking for balls to the wall action all throughout, but I just didn't feel interested or fascinated with the non-action scenes going on outside of whenever Count Dooku showed up (Christopher Lee could make any scene lovely to watch, even if he's just sitting in a chair talking nonsense). It didn't help that much of the movie hinged on the blossoming relationship between Anakin and Padme, which was poorly executed. I feel one of George's biggest weaknesses as a storyteller is that I don't think he's good at romance.

But that's just me. And I like all six films.

[Randall]

Clones is my favourite of the Prequels by far, despite the excruciating love scenes. PM was mostly a waste of time, despite some cool production design. I wouldn't have minded seeing PM condensed into the first 10 minutes of Clones. Sith had a great set piece or two, but doesn't flow like it should. Ben has solid ideas for how this all could have gone.

Yes, the prequels are George's fault to be sure. I hate Jar Jar, but that ain't Best's fault at all. He only gave Lucas what Lucas wanted. The rest of the (sometimes) terrible acting in the Prequels is down to George's script and directing largely, but I can't see Christensen's performance being anything less than awful under any circumstances.

[ShyViolet]

Funny how the last few scenes of Sith are the only ones with even a flicker of some kind of drama. (Or maybe it's the memory of the OT that makes them seem "good.")

Anakin/Lord Vader gets his suit. Spoiler lol! (Love how he starts talking like James Earl Jones right away! )



(Hope it's ok to post--it's four minutes long.)

Copyright LucasFilm/20th Century Fox

[Ben]

This was one of the most disappointing scenes in the film after having read the script and seeing how it was described in that.

In the script Anakin's transition to Vader even *read* painfully...on film it was strangely lifeless and imbued with that awful TV movie "nooooooooooooooo...!" at the end.

Fumbled...on so many levels...

[Dan]

If any one hasn't seen it, I highly recommend watching the documentary The People vs. George Lucas, which is currently available on Netflix last I saw. It's a great examination on the whole Star Wars fan culture from all sides.

[Bill1978]

Reading through on all these critques of the Prequel and discovering that my gripe about the entire prequels is trivial and really doesn't impact on anything. The one time I felt that Lucas really dropped the ball was not insisting that Williams use the Luke & Leia theme during the birthing scene. To this day, I don't understand why Williams wrote a generic children motif for that moment, instead of linking that moment with a prominent theme from Jedi. Every time I watch Sith, I get annoyed with that segment, I know I shouldn't but I think the fact that not long after we are treated to Luke's theme an Leia's theme. Or maybe I'm the only one who actually remembers Luke & Leia Theme from Jedi.