Posted by David St. Hubbins at 20.westvalleycity-03rh15rt-ut.dial-access.att.net on November 15, 2002 at 23:12:55:
In Reply to: Re: Vincent! What don't you like about Episode II posted by Magnolia_Fan on November 15, 2002 at 14:07:01:
: The thing that cracks me up about this whole prequel debate is that the original trilogy is pretty bad. I went back and watched them again recently and I was pretty surprised at how different they were from how I remembered them. We tend to put those films up on a pedastal, but, in a way, they are cut from the same cloth.
: Empire is far better than any of the others and A New Hope is what got us all to like them in the first place, but the dialog is pretty bad, as is the acting. No one comes near sucking as much as Portman, but it's not great either.
: As for the whinning, now we now that whinning is a Skywalker trait since Luke whines about Toshi Station.
: I went into Ep2 with a 10-year-old and was able to watch it through his eyes, see it how he sees it (he's not yet seen the originals, so he doesn't know that Obi dies and Anikan goes bad). I have to say, all 5 films are better viewed through the eyes of a child. Hey, most of us were kids when we watched the originals for the first time.
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: (This post responds to many of the subposts, not just your main post David St. Hubbins)
You may be right about that. Being a thirty something myself, I do kind of put the original series on a pedestal, and I think that makes these new films easy for people to criticise a little more, in some respects. In other respects, people's love of the first three films gives an automatic rabid audience to these. So, it kind of goes both ways.
And, perhaps the acting in the first three wasn't stellar, there was a more modern feel to the humor, particularly in the Han Solo character. Whereas these newer films seem a little more stiff. But, I think Lucas actually is doing this on purpose, I believe he mentioned something about how he wanted to put a more "classical, 30s style of acting" into these prequels. After all, these stories are taking place a "long, long time ago". We forget that with all the "futuristic" looking space ships and such, but this is actually a fictional "ancient" world to what we are used to. And of course these prequels take place earlier than the originals do in time, so that may effect it as well.
But, Lucas has kind of lost his ability to recognize a good joke when he hears it. If the Jedis fighting the droids in Episode II hadn't been the coolest action sequence I've seen yet, C3PO's stupid jokes: "What a drag!" "I'm beside myself!" would've had me running for the exits. Your average six year old wouldn't even find shit like that funny. C3PO, however, WAS funny in the original series, as was Han Solo. Now, the supposed comic relief comes from a dumbed down C3PO and shit like Jar Jar, who was obviously given a MUCH lesser role as he was an embarassment to Lucas in the first film.