JABOOTU the bad movie dimension

OK, The Phantom Menace is certainly bad, but I rather wish people would stop beating up on it for the simple reason that the other two are worse and deserve more hatred. Get over Jar Jar, folks, there are better reasons to loathe Lucas.

monoceros4 said this on December 19th, 2009 at 10:04 am

I am an ardent defender of Phantom Menace. I’ve probably seen it as many times as I’ve seen the original SW films; i.e. many. I do claim to be an expert on it. I CRINGE at the broken-record notion that it’s considered bad universally.

I’ll make this as concise as I can. Wish me luck!

1. Nobody should expect Chapter 1 to eclipse Chapter 6. And if you didn’t see Return of the Jedi as a child, you can see that it’s every bit as bad as Phantom Menace. Be realistic. It’s space myth that’s intended to appeal to the widest possible audience. A lot of it will seem “corny” to adults. Did no one notice that the mighty Galactic Empire was swung low by squeaking teddy bears? Who also SANG over the credits of the original cut?

2. Dislike of CGI is a matter of opinion. From Lucas’ perspective, it is simply another tool for spectacle, like the macro shots of massive Star Destroyer models and miniature sets were in the 1970s. Yoda was a rubber muppet that talked like Miss Piggy after a stroke, if you tear the original SW films apart like the ‘net custom is with Phantom Menace. Not everybody turns green and vomits in rage when computer animation is on screen. Certainly, it’s okay though if you hate it.

3. Jar Jar is a loathsome, stupid idiot that nobody can stand. Why? What better way to demonstrate the superhuman patience of the Jedi, than to force them to babysit an imbecile who’s dangerous to himself and others?

4. I don’t see the “racism” in PM, just like I don’t see it in Transformers 2. That’s largely projected by detractors like Manohla Dargis. She sees Stepin Fetchit in her morning coffee. I mean, holy cats. She can’t talk about Lucas without saying “minstrel”.

There’s NOTHING wrong with hatin’ on Star Wars, as long as it’s done with perspective. But the prequels are BACKSTORY to the original trilogy. They were never intended to surpass them, and I strongly contend that they add greatly to the buildup and universe of the overall saga. (Of course I’ve watched them in order of episodes. I believe that, to a newcomer, they should be watched in the order 4-5-6-1-2-3 to best appreciate them first, and yes, special editions of 2004. Then try them in numerical order. Added shit or not, I feel it makes the entire saga visually consistent, and not like partially watching movies from the 70s.)

I have failed at being concise. Also, Anakin was 11 in PM, and Amidala was 14. Hating the prequels is all well and good, but not everybody does, and the original Star Wars movies are far from perfect in the first place. Boba Fett got knocked into a pit by a blind man with a stick at the end of the series. That’s how it goes in Star Wars’ galaxy; bad guys get a bad death. Lastly, midichlorians are simply a parallel to the mitochondria present in OUR cells, and a shorthand way to quantify Force power when there’s dozens of Jedi running around. I go now.

Matty Boy Anderson said this on December 19th, 2009 at 1:28 pm

Thanks, Ken. That was pretty funny.

Carl said this on December 19th, 2009 at 4:06 pm

When you think about it, the problem with the Star Wars Prequels is simply that we learn absolutely nothing about any character that changes our perception of them or teaches us anything new.

Wow, Anakin is a skilled pilot and warrior,but quick to anger? We knew that. Obi-Wan made mistakes? We knew that already too. Palpatine manipulated events to seize power? Oops, knew that too.

So all three movies are essentially fan-fiction, like someone writing a long history of a Star Trek Red Shirt.

DaveC said this on December 19th, 2009 at 5:14 pm

Anakin was eleven in PM? What was he, a midget? When i was eleven, I was five feet tall. Anakin actualy looked closer to six than to eight, so I was being kind.

sandra said this on December 19th, 2009 at 6:22 pm

I think….since ‘Star Wars’ means something different to every single one of its fans, ‘The Phantom Menace’ succeeds or fails in a slightly different way for everybody. Matty Boy made an EXCELLENT point about the purpose of Jar Jar, which had completely escaped me before, but it doesn’t alter the fact that I want to throw things when I see him (maybe because I lack that Zen-like patience!). I do hate CG effects, but I recognise that’s a personal opinion and nothing more.

But do you know what really, really narked me about the prequels? The fact that there had to be a Prophesy and a Chosen One, just because Prophecies about Chosen Ones always yank my chain, especially when Absolutely Nothing in the story calls for a prophesy about a chosen one.

Long ago, on the Stomp Tokyo podcast, there was an interview where the interviewee bemoaned the fact that all putative heroes now had to be tortured and conflicted and Driven By Destiny, and he regretted the demise of the character who simply CHOSE to be a Hero and to Battle Evil. I completely agree with that sentiment; my favourite heroes are the ones who had a choice to have unremarkable, guiltless lives as farmboys or multimillionnaires or auto-mechanics but CHOSE to put themselves in harm’s way or to search out adventure. You start having prophesies and destinies and you rob your character of ever having had the ability to make that choice, which diminishes the character greatly in my opinion.

professorKettlewell said this on December 19th, 2009 at 7:37 pm

The problem with the Prequels is that they had to be a tragedy and Lucas was too dense to see that.

From 4, 5 and 6 we know that something so ghastly had happened that Luke and Leia were separated, their mother was dead and their father had turned into a monster, Obi-wan was basically a bum living on a backwater planet, Yoda was hiding out in a swamp and the Jedi had gotten stomped flatter than a pancake.

The first three should have used Obiwan and Anakin’s friendship, and how it deteriorated along with the Jedi losing, as the framework to lead up to Anakin flipping to the darkside and everybody else having to flee into hiding, except the mother — who apparently got killed or worse.

What Lucas put together was so bad i never bothered to watch the 3rd episode. I just didn’t care a bit about any of it by that point.

ambisinistral said this on December 20th, 2009 at 1:23 am

“Of course, in these days where six Harry Potter films can reach theaters in less than a decade while no private eye films can.”
Correction, Gone, Baby, Gone reached theaters, but that serves as a rare exception.

PB210 said this on December 20th, 2009 at 12:19 pm

monoceros4… The interesting thing is that this video critique hardly mentions Jar Jar at all. The “reasons to loathe Lucas” begin & end with critique #1: there is no protagonist in Phantom Menace. Except maybe Palpatine; that would’ve been an interesting movie.

Grumpy said this on December 20th, 2009 at 7:22 pm

Couldn’t agree more with hating prequels for being prequels. Also love how Lucas can’t see how pointless they are he’s making a show bridging the gap between the second and third movies and plans to make 100 episodes regardless of ratings.

hk6909 said this on December 20th, 2009 at 9:37 pm

@BeckoningChasm: yeah, pretty much this. And the worst part is, the entire focus of the story was ON people whose fates we knew. They didn’t even throw in a few extra major character to focus on that we didn’t know about from the OT. Granted, I’m not sure if there’s a better way to do a prequel, which is one of the problems with them…

fish eye no miko said this on December 20th, 2009 at 10:20 pm

I don’t get the Star Wars hate. The fact is that few movies could withstand the sort of anal exams that often pass for movie reviews. And they are just movies. Movies originally meant as light entertainment. Too bad that so many people have decided to take Star Wars so seriously.

I love SciFi movies and in this regard I am easily pleased. So even though I thought JarJar Binks was stupid and Hayden Christensen more of a whiny biatch than a Jedi I still enjoyed the Epsodes I, II & III and never expected them to equal the original trilogy. The original was juvenile in the first place, but coming after a decade of increasingly “realistic” (read pretentious and depressing) Hollywood output were a breath of fresh air. Yes, I stood in line for 3 hours at the Grauman’s Chinese Theatre to see Star Wars IV and hear the sound system shake the theater when the Star Destroyers flew by.

Sure there are plenty of things to be irritated by with Lucas and his incessant tweaking of the originals. Why, for example, is Anakin young at the end of ROTJ but Obi Wan is still Alec Guiness? And should Yoda look more like a tadpole? Why weren’t those two young? And having Han solo fire in self-defense during the bar scene has to qualify as one of the classic blunders. Frankly, from the last time I heard Lucas on an interview he struck me as just another crazy Hollywood multi-millionaire who, if not for the huge amounts of money he possesses, would probably be locked up with the other nuts.

P Stroud said this on December 21st, 2009 at 8:07 am

I don’t know if “hate” is the right word. I’d say monumental frustration. The first one was bad enough that I didn’t even go to see the second. I finally took it home on DVD from the library when I saw it sitting there one day. There was a big flying car chase early in the movie that was so long and boring (an exact illustration of the YouTube Guy’s observation that I used as the title of this post*) that I nearly turned the movie off. The last forty minutes were better, though. Not great by any means, but I watched them without remorse.

[*Great follow-up observation from the guy, too, about how the revamped special editions of the old films imposes the flaws of the newer films on them. He says something like, "You start getting into the story, and you're then yanked out of it because Lucas crams a pointless new special effect in there." I nodded my head a lot watching this film; that was one of those times.]

The third film was probably the best of the prequels, if only because as the closer they neared the old ones they reflected more of the original films’ glory, like the moon reflecting the light of the sun.

I think what’s so particularly obnoxious about Jar Jar is Lucas’ arrogance in his own, rapid diminishing instincts. The Ewoks were pretty much universally loathed, and then Lucas stuck a worse Ewok-like presence in the new movies.

I don’t think it’s so much that the recent Star Wars movies are the worst films ever, but that rather like a zillion new movies–say, the last two Matrix films–they blow so much effort on getting the looks of them right while all attention to the important elements goes right into the toilet, so that the average viewer looks at it and moans, “How the hell did you screw this up?”

I’m not saying some people don’t like the films, and I’m not saying they are wrong to do so, because that’s the way art works. However, the structural problems this guy elucidates are still correct. Indeed, the people who made the film clearly thought so. That scene of the major powers watching the film for the first time and looking devastated at the results spoke volumes.

What sadly spoke more volumes: Lucas didn’t really apply any of those lessons to the next two movies.

Ken Begg said this on December 21st, 2009 at 11:24 am

Yeah, that midichlorian thing is both crazy bad and crazy weird. It did kind of ruin the whole Jedi thing.

Robot Chicken captured it well when Vader explained midichlorians to Luke and Luke walked off, noting, “Look, if you’re not going to take this seriously…”

Ken Begg said this on December 21st, 2009 at 1:20 pm

anders, I hate to disillusion you even further, but, in actual canon, boba fett didn’t die in rotj. in the star wars books he escapes the sarlac(sp, but then if you care enough that I’ve misspelled a name from star wars, your head has already exploded from what everyone else has said up to this point anyway). I don’t know what ultimately happens to him, but him getting out of the pit is in a collection of short stories set in and around jabba’s palace.
there’s also a really good site somewhere titled 52 reasons to hate the phantom menace, and the author of that site has companion pieces for the other 2 movies. my favorite point made is how in attack of the clones, the clones are still nominally on the side of the old republic, so effectively the title actually reads “attack of the good guys”.
thanks for the link tho. very hilarious, and his star trek reviews are equally good. in fact, ken, I’m surprised you never considered insurrection jabootu-worthy.

tim said this on December 21st, 2009 at 10:13 pm

Everything about the prequels was bad. They are quite simply indefensible.

Blackadder said this on December 22nd, 2009 at 11:54 am

I caught about 10 minutes of this, from near the end of the film. It just seemed soulless, and then I realized that Anakin was apparently winning the war by sheer accident and plot contrivance, and decided I was done. I’ve not watched any of the prequels in their entirety, and am quite content with my old VHS copies of the originals (and I mean ORIGINALS, no special editions). What I’ll do when those finally die on me, I do not know.

This review is hilarious, and thank you for posting it.

In a similar vein, has anyone seen that online comic using stills of this movie? The idea is that a kid has come up with a completely new RPG campaign, in a world with no Star Wars, and is running it for some friends. Jar-Jar is explained by having one of the player’s little sister come up with him and his speech patterns, which is pretty much genius.

The Rev. D.D. said this on December 23rd, 2009 at 8:19 pm

That was it! Thanks, good sir, for the assistance!

The Rev. D.D. said this on January 11th, 2010 at 10:21 am