Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (J.J. Abrams, December 20, 2019) Movie • Page 71

In my attempt to become a more positive person, I promised myself to stop bashing the prequels. I've done it so much that it's just me being a broken record at this point. I'm doing a full rewatch of all the movies before IX comes out with my girlfriend (a deal we made if I watched all of GoT. She's only seen the OT as a kid and barely remembers it.). So if I'm committed to watching them again, I'm going to try and have fun with them.

 

All of the Star Wars movies have flaws, the prequels are just made for kids so it's harder to get past that.

 

There’s some great stuff in there. Just, a lot of bad too. I don’t hate them as much as some do around here.

 

Lots of movies "made for kids" don't absolutely suck though.

 

I agree

 

Yeah, dry scenes of intergalactic bureaucracy, discussions of trade taxes, soap opera romance scenes, and brutal child murder. You know, kids stuff.

 

Movies made for kids can be awesome, but when they have bad acting, bad writing, bad special effects, etc... it's just easier to shit on it than normal.

 

You're specifically not mentioning all the kid stuff, so this isn't an accurate description of those movies.

 

I dunno about that, I shit on made for adult movies with bad acting, bad writing, bad effects, etc., pretty easily.

 

I think I can still admit they're bad while watching them with a positive attitude. They are canon in my favorite franchise and I can't change that haha (and I probably have criticized them more than any other bad movie because of that). Each movie has scenes and elements I like so I'll just enjoy those aspects as much as I can and then try to laugh all the corny and head-scratching elements. I guess I'm going to approach them like I would The Room.

 

Right like complicated on-and-offscreen political machinations, beheading of a father right in front of his young son, a 1950s-style diner, borderline problematic alien races, and watching someone get burned alive screaming

 

I'm not interested in a conversation if you're going to continue to ignore half the movies to make some kind of statement.

 

I'm just illustrating how crazy it is for the excuse that the movies are "for children" to have ever been used in this context. Just because the movies have elements that are "for children" doesn't mean the movies themselves are. And besides, after Jar Jar and Jake Lloyd, the "for children" elements were toned down significantly in Episode II and III. Anakin snaps and murders a village of sand people in Clones. Episode III was rated PG-13 instead of PG. It's just not accurate.

 

I think the prequels are cool because they are such a representation of the outer world . George was almost the Emperor with too much power and consumed by the dark side with being too attached to his vision to let anybody else touch it and collaborate. the result was extremely unbalanced movies. It went too far on each end of the spectrum. Too adult with the politics and violence and all that and then too aimed at kids.

 

They're textbook examples of trying to appeal to everybody and ending up appealing to nobody.

 

Yeah who cares about any fan's opinion on a forum thread open for discussion? What was I thinking.

 

Just because they realized how big of a mistake it was to make these movies for kids and ended up slowly steering away from it doesn't mean that my original statement was wrong. When the entire first movie is filled to the brim with children characters, Jar Jar shit, and shit like over the top unfunny goofy alien creatures at the podrace and a farting puppet for crying out loud, etc... it's hard to say that this being the opening film in a trilogy that's supposed to set the tone isn't supposed to lean towards being made for kids. They had to try and correct the ship but it was already too late and they couldn't make up any ground and ended up being even worse by the end of it all.

 

George referred to Jar Jar as a comedy character, not necessarily a kids character. Jar Jar was clearly supposed to be a new form of comic relief that he went far overboard on. He wasn't just intended to appeal to children. Ahmed Best was convinced he was going to be a huge star after PM came out, he clearly didn't view his role as just "for the kids." As for the goofy alien creatures, I mean, there have been goofy alien creatures since the beginning of Star Wars so if you wanna argue that all Star Wars movies since the original are "made for kids" then I guess you can do that too, but they weren't.

George saying these movies are "made for kids" was always a cop-out after the fact. He tried to excuse his poor decision-making by making people feel stupid for getting worked up about three "kids movies." And it's largely worked too, because people are still throwing that out there to this very day. But it's not true. He tried to make the prequels appeal to everyone, of all ages, just like the originals, but in trying to replicate that success (in which success he did not actually play that big of a role) he wound up making what we got.

The sequels, in contrast, replicate the feeling of the originals so well because they understand that all it takes to actually appeal to everyone is to make a good movie.

 

Agree to disagree. Episode I obviously is infinitely more geared towards children than any of the other movies and I don't know how you could watch it and not see that.

 

We weren't talking about just Episode I, though, we were talking about "the prequels." And also I would say that Episode I is arguably the least made for children because all of the kids stuff is balanced out by the driest adult stuff of any of the three movies.

 

The first movie in a trilogy is responsible for setting the tone for what to expect and when a kids movie came out and everyone hated it (for more reasons than just being a kids movie, to be clear) they realized how big of a mistake it was and did their best to alter the remaining two movies. Do you really think that the plan from the beginning was for Jar Jar to be a goofy idiot in Episode I and then go on to be in the Senate or whatever the hell it was for II and III introducing bills or some shit? Of course not.

 

You're the one who said "the prequels are . . . made for kids", I was just responding to that statement. If you want to amend your position to "Episode I was made for kids" that's fine but it wasn't what the original discussion was about.

 

The intention of the prequels going into it was to make movies for kids and the first one utterly failed, so they backed out of that and had to run in a different direction and the results were poorly written, acted, and directed messes.

 

Ok well if that's your position now then that's fine. It's certainly a more defensible one than what you originally said. Although it relies on the assumption that George intended to make the prequels for children, rather than simply desired to prove to the world that he could replicate the OT's success all by himself this time and failed spectacularly, then tried to excuse it by saying the movies are all for kids, which is what I assume happened.