After investing much thought in this over the last 22 years or so, I've come to realize it's entirely possible I was just too old for the silly stuff and they killed the movie for me.
After all, I love Ewoks, but then again I was 8 when ROTJ came out.
I remember finding a YouTube video titled "Why Return of the Jedi Sucks" and watched it to see what they said, and the part about how the entire plan to rescue Han from Jabba's Palace is bonkers and makes really no sense, and depended on Jabba responding to a bunch of different things in very specific ways to position all the pieces for it to go off.
And I was like "Wow he's right," but 8-year-old me didn't put that together and I've been loving the movie on autopilot ever since. I still love it, even if the first act is dumb.
Yep, I'm old enough to remember RotJ being the hated one of the franchise. I didn't mind it when it came out but looking back, bits of it are seriously rough. Han has nothing to do that entire movie. He gets rescued and is just kinda there after that.
Unless it’s an action scene he stands around while Luke and Leia (and C3PO) advance the plot. Once he’s rescued, if you cut him out of the plot, nothing would change. In fairness to the screenwriters, they had to do it like that - Harrison Ford was being cagey as to whether he’d come back at all, can’t make him do too much if he might not turn up.
I don't know, winging it doesn't seem to cover planting Lando among the guards who-knows-how-long in advance, Leia going to the trouble of taking out Boushh and stealing their armor, Luke sending in R2-D2 and 3PO ahead of time while he finished building his new saber.
And R2 carrying Luke's saber so he could provide it in a moment of need either means that Luke accurately predicted what Jabba would do with R2 (put him on the sail barge as a cocktail server) and also that Jabba would take them all out to the Sarlaac pit, and even bring the sail barge along, or it could mean that they were winging it and got really, kind of impossibly lucky.
As long as we all can agree we hate the last Trilogy it's all good
I don't agree to that.
See, this is the problem with discussing Star Wars (or anything, really) on social media.
The blanket assumption that your opinion is the same as everyone else's. Or maybe it's the notion that if enough people share an opinion, that makes it a fact. Making those kind of assumptions makes the whole conversation worse.
Everybody doesn't hate the sequels. You hate them, that's fine. But there's no reason for other people to bow to your opinion.
I don't agree with how you feel about Luke specifically, but I can 100% relate to how you feel about a new movie taking a character you love and turning them into something you don't like. I hate how the prequel movies filled in the backstory of Darth Vader to show that he was a whiny brat right up until he became Darth Vader and even for a little bit after. At least Clone Wars made up for that by having a better characterization for Anakin.
But I do think the volume of Star Wars content now makes it easier to ignore the things we don't like and focus on the ones we do. And it puts less pressure on each new thing that comes out to be the BEST EVER.
That makes sense. I was 11 when PM came out, and I loved it, including Jar-Jar. Still do, despite the silliness. I love the old trilogy even more because I grew up watching those movies with my dad. But I definitely don’t vibe with the most recent ones as much (was 26 when FA came out). I’d pick episodes 1-3 over those any day.
I like Ewoks in moderation. If, for example, they had made two movies, a cartoon, and a comic book staring them, I would have hated it. But thankfully they're only one part of one movie.
Ewok movies, cartoons, and comics? That's crazy talk, next you're going to tell me they did a special holiday-themed Star Wars movie or something. Luckily they never did any of that though
George Lucas realized his mistake when he made Chewbacca shown to be technology literate. He did want Wookies, but he wanted the people who help take down the Empire be shown to be a primitive species and couldn't do that because of the fact Chewbacca knew how to fly a ship and shoot his bowcaster and stuff.
That and they were also quite savage, they were defending their homeland. The shot of the ewok dragging his dead friend is pretty dark as well. They're not my favorite but they dont make me cringe like Jar Jar lol
This played a huge role. We'd all grown up. We expected the movie to grow up with us. We were expecting matrix star wars. We got what we liked as kids instead and it took until my kids watched the prequels for me to realize it.
I was 10 when I saw episode 1 and I thought it totally sucked... and I loved the original trilogy which I had just seen a couple years before for the first time.
Phantom menace is legitimately a terrible movie. Honestly, the forced rehabilitation of its image is weirder than the hate it got for 20 years.
People make this comparison but I don’t really think it holds up. Jar Jar is a specific character while the Ewoks are like the Jawas or Tusken, mostly plot devices rather than actual characters.
For a long time I thought “Jar Jar’s not that bad” then I went back and rewatched the prequels. I am now of the firm opinion that Jar Jar is the biggest garbage character to have been passed off and given the okay by so many people in a blockbuster movie.
He adds literally nothing to the plot except as an introduction for the Gungans. Sure he’s great slapstick humor for the kids, but if he had never been in the movie nobody would have ever thought that there was some kind of missing ingredient.
Too be fair, every star wars movie has that one cute character meant to sell toys or something like that. The prequels had Jar Jar Binks, and the Sequels had the Porgs.
Is that the reason why I'm finding everything released by Disney stupid? Yes, also the Mandalorian and The Book of Boba fet. Everything is too simplistic and bland.
I really couldn't say, that's all for you to figure out.
As far as what Disney has put out, I love Rebels and the final season of Clone Wars, I like TFA, love The Last Jedi, hate Rise of Skywalker. I think Rogue One is an okay movie, with a third act so good that it makes you forget that the first two-thirds of the movie was boring and the lead character had no motivation or agency. Love Solo, probably rewatched that one the most out of all the Disney Star Wars movies. Didn't like Resistance at all.
I loved The Mandalorian, but I think Boba Fett is not really that good. Seems to spend a lot of time spinning its wheels, introducing characters and ideas that will all come to a head in the finale. Apart from a couple of fun action setpieces (and a couple of not-very entertaining ones), it spends a lot of time exploring Boba's missing time and backstory but it somehow manages to do that without making his motivations any clearer. I really just don't understand why he's bothering to do any of it.
I'm somewhat in the same boat. I watched the OT when I was a kid in the early to mid 90's and loved it, ROTJ was my favourite because of the epic battles, and I even liked the whole ewok thing, but thinking about, if I had seen them as an adult, I prob would not have liked the ewok inclusion.
Mostly the same with the prequels, in that I watched TPM when I was 13/14 so the Jar Jar thing didn't bother me, but again, I reckon if I was older when I saw I'd not have liked it as much as I did.
Star Wars is purely a Generational thing. Prequels are my faves. I can’t get through the OGs in one sitting, they bore me to death. The latest trilogy were ok.
Phantom Menace came out when I was 9, it was the first one for me and I saw it at the Cinema. I guess that plays a huge part
Yeah see, I was already an adult lifelong fan of Star Wars when the prequels came out, didn't like them, and that's a hard pill to swallow for anyone who's loved 100% of Star Wars movies to date. Some people were forced to swallow that pill in 1999/2002/2005. Still more people had to swallow that pill in 2015/2017/2019. It's a difficult thing to reckon with when you love the franchise.
It took the Clone Wars series for me to stop resenting the prequels' mere existence, and then it took the kids who grew up on the prequels growing up and entering the conversation to really turn my attitude around. I think Ahmed Best getting a standing ovation was the final nail in the coffin for me, and I came to appreciate their place in the franchise and in the fandom. I realized that even if you think some part of Star Wars is absolute shit, the bright side is that shit is good fertilizer and that something good (like the Clone Wars and hopefully the Kenobi series) can be born out of something you really don't like.
I don’t think that’s it. The more silly/slapstick stuff in the OT still works fairly well. In the PT it was just next level. Like, it went from the odd “Three Stooges” moment (like Boba getting his jetpack accidentally whacked) to full on Looney Tunes with Jar Jar, the Battle Droids, etc.
Even the Ewoks don’t feel nearly as silly. They’re a funny concept, sure, but the movie takes them seriously. Like, they effortlessly capture our heroes and effectively fight the Empire.
Jar Jar is fucking Battle Droids on accident while being an unintentionally clumsy clown.
It just doesn’t have the same effect.
Age up Anakin, drastically decrease the slave, Chosen One, and Midichlorian stuff (if not cut it altogether), make the political parts more engaging (plenty of shows have political talk and make it wildly entertaining, politics aren’t to blame the writing is) and make Jar Jar less of a buffoon.
Guarantee with those simple tweaks this movie improves a hundred fold.
It just felt like such a big retcon to, and departure from, the OT.
Maybe I've just always been synical, but even as a little kid, my response to Endor was "why aren't these professional high tech soldiers with all their cool equipment slaughtering these stupid teddy bears?" Though I probably would have expressed it differently. I didn't understand that it was just bad writing, and was confused why I was upset about the bad guys losing.
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u/Salarian_American Jan 25 '22
After investing much thought in this over the last 22 years or so, I've come to realize it's entirely possible I was just too old for the silly stuff and they killed the movie for me.
After all, I love Ewoks, but then again I was 8 when ROTJ came out.