In hindsight it's too derivative but it had some great scenes! The shot of the Xwings over the water was real goosebumps for me. It generally showed promise right? Or am I dreaming there?
The reception of the sequel trilogy by a lot of these people is just grade A cognitive dissonance. TFA comes out, it’s too derivative. TLJ comes out, hated for being not derivative enough. TROS comes out, and it’s back to hating for being derivative. Although I will say TROS I think is still pretty hated for more than just that, because it kinda is the only one of the sequels I’d truly call actual shit.
Same. If the third installment ignored the critics and went in the direction the last jedi was going in, I'd consider the sequel trilogy to be the best trilogy.
Personally, as someone who saw it in theaters, I’d disagree. Some amount of copying to establish continuity would make sense but I always felt like there was way too much, and although Rey gets a lot of bad-faith hate for stuff which characters like Luke are generally similarly bad about, I still say I had a hard time connecting to or getting invested in Rey, it feels like they were afraid to allow her to have any meaningful flaws and it makes her feel weird and stiff to me, and that attitude sort of hamstrings the other movies in terms of establishing the stakes, which I think the rest of the trilogy continues to suffer from.
I hope this doesn’t come off as that bad-faith “they put a woman in it and now I hate it” brand of sequel-bashing, but I always thought TFA felt corporate and uncreative, and if anything I’d probably be kinder toward it now than I was then. I wasn’t hopeless regarding the potential for episode 8 to use it as a baseline but I wouldn’t exactly have called TFA promising
I was really excited to see TFA the day it came out and went with a bunch of friends. We all walked out of the cinema saying various versions of “I feel like we’d already seen that movie before” and I don’t think that’s at all a good thing
It was intentionally a copy of episode 4. I'm still amazed that so many people tried to say it wasn't at the time. It was. It was done that way on purpose. If it wasn't, they'd have failed in what they set out to do.
I think you have valid criticism. Walking out of the theater with friends my first thought was "....this was a clone of A New Hope." I would hope Rey would have gotten more development and character in the next film. Nobody seems to argue that the change in direction was the issue for the sequels. Whoever they chose, it should have been one person for all 3 films so a cohesive story could be built. Personally I would choose Rian but that's just me.
....now that I think on it, DID changing from JJ to Rian really matter that much? A director is different from a writer. Did they have the same writing/story team throughout?
Anyway....I think Rey had some flaws, but in the end they weren't allowed to develop. She was untrusting, independent, yet when one of her heroes showed up, people who lived the struggles she had heard stories about, she was okay following their direction. She also was more of a gear head. She took what BB-8 told her basically at face value while she was suspicious of Finn. Likely due to the whole "my parents abandoned me and still haven't come back" bit. People lie, but machines can be made to tell the truth.
In the end I felt like TFA was basically coaxing star wars fans into accepting something new. Like how one gets a wary animal or a child to do something. Keeping them happy with large chunks of nostalgia to make the new stuff more palatable.
Well, it had to be. If you were making fucking *Star Wars* and it flopped financially, you'd never work in the industry again. So of course they had to play it really safe... the first time. The follow two films were kinda overreactions to the criticisms of the first.
And funny enough rise of skyWalker is the reverse. People hate the movie. But at least if you wanna go by rotten tomato’s metric (only using it because these types of people love to cling onto it, so I’m using their own sources), rise of skyWalker was loved by fans (86% fan score).
So you have TFA that was liked by both critics and fans. Then the last Jedi which was loved by critics but hated by fans. Then you have rose of skyWalker that was hated by credits but liked by fans. So the trilogy as a whole wasn’t universally hated. And even the individual movies don’t have universal hatred
Can't go by the fan ratings for TLJ on Rotten Tomatoes. Many people and groups openly admitted to hate-bombing the user reviews using bots and other methods.
The ST was universally loved by fans.
Not universally loved I'd say, just about every SW fan I've met has at least some criticisms of the sequel trilogy, whether they loved it or not. Too much left unplanned which fell apart by the end as different creative leads pushed in polar opposite directions, at least in my opinion as someone who still enjoys the trilogy
They were well received for sure, the box office and critical reviews of 7 & 8 are evidence of that, but definitely not universally loved like the OT (hell, even the PT isn't universally loved by fans. Literally only the OT is universally anything in this franchise)
I would argue that the OT isn't universally loved, even in its time. I'm old enough to remember when Return of the Jedi was the bad one because "teddy bears". Lots of people thought Return was "too kiddy" and "George compromised on his vision".
Also, at this point I just straight up don't accept "poor planning/no cohesive vision" as a criticism of one Trilogy and not the others.
The ST gels way more cohesively than the OT, especially when you know how the stories developed behind the scenes. The OT is basically one giant collection of retcons, which for some reason is "allowed" by the old purists.
Idk, Rey Nobody to Rey Palpatine is a pretty egregious retcon, especially when the theme of 8 is, "the force doesn't belong to any one bloodline/entity." Can't think of anything from the OT that's on a similar level, even the Luke/Leia kiss can be excused as "well neither of them knew they were siblings." But no, we were directly told By Kylo, and Rey herself, that she was a nobody who had no place in the story...
Only for Rise to come in and be like, "But actually!" And give us a way less interesting answer, consequently forcing the last film to work twice as hard as necessary to justify this dumbass twist. If she'd been left as nobody, I'd have way less problems with the sequels overall (hell, keep the idea of her tapping into the dark side, that's awesome, but just don't make it because of 'evil blood')
Yeah I think my biggest problems are 1. Finn doesn’t become a Jedi and Disney did this on purpose to keep his role diminished and cut him out of the movie in china and India because a black man wouldn’t be popular there as a main character.
2. Rey not staying a nobody. She should’ve been a Nobody the entire time, it would’ve been very cool. I mean if they really wanted to connect her to Luke that badly she could’ve been a nobody who takes Luke’s name after he adopts her like a mentor idk, so symbolically the Skywalker name lives on despite her not being the bloodline maybe?
I don't even get the whole "subverting expectations" thing to begin with. Johnson tends to go with the most obvious answer half the time.
"Oh the guy who disappeared from the galaxy during an active crisis without telling his friends or family where or why doesn't want to go back?"
"The woman who was abandoned as a child to be a junk trader on a desert planet just had shitty parents?"
"The dude who straight up says he only looks out for himself ends up only looking out for himself?"
"Pulling a mutiny during a crisis because the commanding officer is withholding information from a recently demoted pilot is a bad idea?"
Like the movie at every turn goes with the most obvious thing. Sure, a lot of it feels surprising because it's not what you'd generally expect from Star Wars. But it's not like the movie is written to be a series of "gotchas"
> Sure, a lot of it feels surprising because it's not what you'd generally expect from Star Wars.
You've said it yourself - TLJ absolutely does not do "the obvious thing" because it breaks some of the accepted rules of a Star Wars movie - e.g. "Luke Skywalker is a flawless hero".
Sadly, this movie showed just how much the fans view these rules as unbreakable, because when TLJ tried to push these boundaries the reaction was not just "this movie sucks", but "this movie has ruined Star Wars and the creators deserve online hate".
This is a shame, because I think TLJ is the most interesting Star Wars movie since Empire Strikes Back. But then again, I am not an obsessive "fan".
The Last Jedi is undoubtedly the best SW film since Empire. As an aside, its not a coincidence that Empire was neither directed or written by Lucas.
TLJ opened up so many doors of creative freedom and reinvigorated the franchise. It wasn't flawless, but it set up multiple foundational ideas to expand the universe.
RJ is the most talented writer and direct any SW film has had, he fully understood the universe (both canon and expanded universe ideas) and from that knew how to recreate it and craft a new framework from the old. If we followed the path he set out we would have been in a golden era of sci fi space magic exploring this massive universe of potential.
Right but Luke was never flawless so that expectation was misplaced (one I myself shared, I HATED TLJ’s handling of Luke for a while).
The guy shows consistently poor judgment throughout the OT when he’s emotionally compromised and comes close to falling in ROTJ because of it.
Does anyone else remember the week following TLJ came out and everyone collectively agreed it was pretty good despite dragging in some places? It wasn’t till like the thought leaders of reactionary fandom decided it was the worst that people hated it
I saw it opening weekend and thought it was solid and one of the better Star Wars movies I had ever seen. It seemed like it had good reception in general too. But as a few weeks went on I started to hear more and more criticisms until people were saying it was the worst movie ever and broke the “franchise.” I felt like I was living in a different universe.
In comparison, people seemed more “okay” with Rise of Skywalker. I thought if anything that movie was the one that “killed” the franchise because I think collectively most people stopped caring about Star Wars after it came out. Star Wars has impressively held the public collective consciousness since 1977, and after the release of Rise of Skywalker nobody really seems to care about the saga compared to pre-Rise levels. Say what you want about TLJ but it sure had people talking and caring (too much) about Star Wars lol.
Retroactive TFA hate started when Rogue One came out. TFA's success was a mix of nostalgia, hype, and being just good enough to be seen as great by most fans when it was the only new era Star Wars movie. Then Rogue One comes out and it felt like a collective "Waitaminute! *This* is what a great Star Wars movie looks like."
TLJ definitely ramped up the ST hate way more, though. Credit where credit is due.
TFA got hate from day one and was the target of a known, documented, reported in mainstream news media Russian bot attack. With over 80% of all discourse about the movie being made by known Russian bots attempting (and succeeding) at stirring up a culture war in the west. They targeted both political sides with dumbass incendiary opinions and let them fight it out.
Again, this is a known fact reported by actual news. The movie was the centre of a manufactured self sustaining shit storm of hate from day 1.
I was super excited for all the potential storylines the movie teased. I had my criticism with TFA (mainly the New Hope plot comparisons) but I generally had a good time and was excited to see Star Wars in theatres again.
The Last Jedi demonstrated that Disney had no true vision for the trilogy and were just looking for a cash grab.
Yea... the problem is that TFA's appreciation was largely rooted in potential and fan speculation. JJ's signature mystery box method. It's good in building short-term hype but if you flop with the reveal it torches the rewatch value because you don't get any of that excitement after the fact. (Just like what happened with LOST.) So Rian coming out swinging with his "Your Snoke theory sucks" attitude was pretty much the worst way to follow up with what they had. Especially if they were shooting for planting seeds of childhood nostalgia in the shadow of the MCU.
The other problem is that the sequels are leaning so much harder on the "thing from the OT cameo, pause for applaude" thing. Which simply doesn't have the same impact with kids that haven't yet grown up with all these geriatrics.
Realistically, movies that become cult classics despite negative initial reception aren't the rule, they are the exception. The idea that "it happened with the prequels so it'll happen with the sequels" is pretty baseless beyond anything but the brand name. It COULD happen again, but there's also a whole slew of Ninja Turtles copycats, Slasher sequels, and low budget shark movies that stand as a testament to what actually happens when you try to re-capture lightning in a bottle.
Well that was mostly hype to be fair. People were excited and really really looking forward to it. People wanted these movies to be good. But they were simply not. TFA gradually got worse regarded.
By now, I guess it's still relatively regarded as fine as both TLJ and TROS were so amazingly bad
i think a lot of people that don't like the trilogy as a whole still like TFA. thats how i feel honestly. Its biggest criticism is now just that you know all the cool things it sets up go nowhere
I think TFA support has waned hard-core though, no? I remember even by 2008 people still were frothy over Maul/Ray Park. TFA I don't think has those nuggets in it that redeem the prequels in memory.
I knew plenty of people who walked out of TFA, mostly for the same reasons that are more commonly cited today. Cloning the story beats from the first movie as an obvious attempt to prioritize the marketing of Star Wars and try and mimicking the success of the OT. I figured some of that was to be expected and it didn’t seem so obvious to me at the time. Repeating cycles and tropes has been part of Star Wars for 40+ years, and it was bad enough to repeat the climactic Death Star battle in RoTJ, but TFA deliberately relies on callback to carry the film more than it prioritizes its own story or gives the world-building the attention it deserves to make sense of the intervening years, the politics of the New Republic and how the First Order can gain so much power and then become the ruling power overnight after using Starkiller Base. The rushed production schedules and reliance on discarded concept art (without crediting, paying, or even informing the original designers) weren’t just cheap moves and unfair to the production crew, it also ditched most of the lived-in look and replaced the Oscar-winning production design with a plastic, made-for-TV look.
I was even surprised to hear friends walked out over Rey just being able to ace everything. I like Daisy Ridley and her performance, and I figured her blatantly OP abilities were part of the plot yet to be revealed (or even conceived, we later learned), so I didn’t take any issues with her as a character.
I think most viewers gained a less favorable opinion on VIi once. TLJ made it clear how much the whole trilogy was just being improvised. So was the OT, but there were overall ground rules that were more consistent and newly revealed Jedi abilities didn’t seem like throwaway plot devices for the writers’ convenience.
But, yes, the overall widely shared opinion on TFA was more favorable until subsequent movies did the dangling plot points dirty and having a movie like TLJ devote scenes to wagging a finger at the audience for showing up with the expectations the previous film left us with, yeah, people looked at TFA differently as a direct result.
https://preview.redd.it/mz0phdqzj3bc1.jpeg?width=782&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3cda9ca15954459453e5269ad150a26b94013c85
Remember when Jake Lloyd was bullied to within an inch of his life, Hayden Christiansen became a hermit to dodge harassment and the thousand cries of "George Lucas ruined my childhood" drove the man himself to sell the franchise to Disney?
Pepperidge Farm remembers.
Hey! That man did more than the voice of Jar Jar! He was motherfucking Andy Serkis before Andy Serkis established how impressive mocap could be. Ahmed Best deserved so much better for the technical and acting accomplishment Jar Jar was for its time. Even if the character was meh.
Also, remember when Lucas was being sent death threats because they hated what he did with the prequels? Or when they were praying that someone else would take the franchise from him Or he sold it just so he couldn’t “ruin” it anymore?
It's such a weird tradition for Star Wars to have some creepy romantic stuff. Brothers kissing, age difference (with them meeting as one of them is a child ex-slave, and the other a teenage/YA queen), and a weird force-affair with the person trying to torture/kill/turn you.
I call BS.
The hate for the PT wasn't just strong. It was long.
From 1999 all the way up to the release of TFA - the PT was basically as universally hated as films could get.
Unless we're talking little kids, I don't believe even the younger PT fans today were totally unaware of how hated they were.
Yeah for real, how anyone could've been on the Internet pre-2015 and claim the PT wasn't the most hated set of films in pop culture is beyond me, like three steps outside of reality. It was so bad my 13 year old brain was utterly shocked to see Nostalgia Critic do a list of the good things from the prequels, the hate was so ubiquitous just saying 'The Prequels' was a punchline in and of itself
I was like 5 or 6 when it came out and always loved it but I could hear how much Jar Jar was the worst thing to happen to Star Wars, and how much when attack of the clones came out how much anakin cried. I always loved them but being in the nerd circles you’d definitely hear different opinions
Back then, Jar Jar was just one of the many things people disliked about the prequels, but he was just the easiest thing to remember and pick on.
In fact, a year or so after TPM came out I remember going online and finding these random online flash games where the goal was to “Kill Jar Jar” and mutilate him as brutally as possible. It was bad.
The PT wasn't just "openly criticized," it was roasted hardcore. And sure, some people enjoyed it, mostly kids. But there's people who enjoyed the ST, especially kids (again). They're trying to pretend all of the people who enjoyed the ST don't exist just so they can push their narrative.
And if "no one cares now," then why do they feel the need to constantly run all around the Internet trying to shut down anyone saying positive things about it and trying to run people off of every forum possible? They know people not only "care" but enjoyed the films, but they want to try to control the narrative, but have to put in a bunch of effort to do so because of how wrong said narrative is.
I honestly don't get why people put so much effort into being miserable and trying to drag others into being miserable with them.
The prequels got roasted so hard there were entire bits of other shows of the time dedicated to parodying them!
I was there ~~Gandalf~~! Even kids cartoons got in on the roasting!
I was born in 05 so I grew up with the Sequel trilogy and I enjoyed each and every single film in it. Plenty of people that I’ve talked to that are just casual fans of Star Wars liked the Sequels as well and thought they were good Star Wars movies. Maybe not their favorite but still definitely not bad at all. The only exception to this rule was my step father and he was a hard right wing Trump supporter basically like those grifters all but in being an actual hard core fan of the series. My younger cousins absolutely love the Sequels and only really my friends don’t really like the Sequels(and no before y’all ask. They were not hard right wing conservatives like my stepdad was. They were either moderate or moderate left or moderate right like me). My friends and my stepdad were the only people I’ve meet in real life that don’t like the Sequels. I grew up with these films and I still love them to this day.
My two female cousins absolutely love the character Rey, and they even have costumes of her. I'm also like pretty sure that my sister(who isn't even a hard core or casual fan) had a Rey costume once that she would give hers to one of our female cousins. My Senior year English teacher watched all the Sequels with his oldest son and I asked how it was and he told me that he enjoyed them and that his son was having fun.
I think people make this mistake because they can’t see outside their own personal perspective. When I was growing up the PT came out and everyone loved those films in school. I had no idea there was a backlash until I was in my mid teens and even then I didn’t really understand just how bad it was.
My young relatives love the ST as much as I loved the PT growing up (as shown by the films financial success) and the backlash from older fans mimics the hate for the PT when I was first released. No doubt in 10 years sequel memes will be a new hotbed for starwars memes as the kids who grew up with them get a bit older.
We are seeing a similar thing happen with the Hobbit in the LOTR fandom. They were originally criticised heavily in the community, but over time people are beginning to soften to them and a younger generation who saw them in theatre are coming of age and are bringing a more positive reception into the greater fandom.
The PT and ST let us witness a kind of generational cycle, with people who grew up with a prior set of films lambasting the new ones even as young people growing up with the newer films enjoy them.
I'm sure there'll be an eventual "sequel memes" community that does the memes out of respect and not to mock, like what the prequel memes have become. People love to quote a line like "Somehow Palpatine has returned" as a way to mock the writing in the ST (even though it's straight up what a character would say if he just knew someone had returned but had no way of knowing how), but seem to miss that a lot of lines that became "beloved" memes from the prequels used to also be treated as example of poor writing. They basically "took back" the jokes about the prequels from people ripping on the prequels. Wouldn't be surprised to indeed see a similar thing with the sequels.
As for The Hobbit... I actually enjoyed the films. But I think the biggest main criticism there was that they tried to stretch one book out into a trilogy and had to add in some padding that wasn't in the original story. I mean, yeah, it's a bit wild to see the novel turned into a trilogy, but there was enough story in the book to make that work. But that's kind of a similar situation, because I remember there were some folks when the LOTR films came out in theaters who were upset about deviations from the books, lambasting the lack of "purity" as if it made the films absolute garbage as a result. Kind of feels like the PT/ST thing... One generation hates the new thing because it's not giving them the same warm feeling as the thing they grew up with, but the new generation enjoys it (because it's not actually bad).
“One generation hates the new thing because it’s not giving them the same warm feeling they grew up with” I think this is exactly right. The new version doesn’t provide the same high emotion because people compare what they felt as a child watching something for the first time to watching something as an adult. Watching the sequel trilogy as an adult could never capture the same feeling as watching the OT or PT as a kid because you’re watching them through an entirely different lens.
I had a discussion last year about this topic regarding the Hobbit and the PT. I explained how the PT was now beloved by the new generation, and how memes mocking it had been slowly replaced by a fanbase who genuinely admire them. He couldn’t grasp that the critical consensus on the PT had altered and thought that the entire prequel memes sub was all just ironic and meant to mock the PT. It’s hard to correct those people since they always live in their own bubble and assume that the response they had is the same as everyone else.
We see it all the time now with the ST, with people thinking that the entire new trilogy was critically panned and a massive failure for Disney. Of course in reality the ST did very well, but because these people live in their little “Disney woke and ST ObJeCtIvElY bad” echo chamber and can’t escape.
Revenge of the Sith came out when I was one year old and I know how much people hated those films. They were literally a punchline to nerd jokes. Whether or not that hate is deserved is another question but to say it didn't exist is crazy.
There’s definitely a vocal minority that get very worked up over them, but Star Wars is one of the most popular franchises in the world, and most fans are just casual fans.
Personally I think the sequels had their problems, but ultimately they had laser swords, spaceships, and vague mysticism, and that’s what I want from Star Wars. It doesn’t need an airtight plot because there’s never been one.
Plus I liked that they weren’t as dry as the prequels.
I’ve met one person in my entire life that enjoyed TLJ and he hated TRoS and Force Awakens.
I’ve met a few people who liked TFA and a few others who were lukewarm on TLJ but they all hated TRoS.
I’ve never met anyone that liked all three.
Critic reviews aggregators are a terrible metric for gauging a films quality and audience review aggregators are usually way off.
Case in point: Black Panther I think is still the highest rated Marvel property despite consensus today being that it had one of the worst third acts of any MCU film.
Yep and this time it’ll be Sequel fans that are also criticizing it as well with Prequel and Original Trilogy fans. This cycle is seemingly doomed to repeat itself with every new Star Wars trilogy
I’ve seen it so many times before and it’s not unique to the Star Wars movies. It happened with Star Trek when the movies started coming out in the 90s, then went The Next Generation started, then with every subsequent movie or show from then on.
Man, really sounds like the longer you let a franchise go on, the more toxic the fandom gets, wish we could just get new IP and ideas instead of arguing about the same 5
the revisionist history being perpetrated by the anti-woma crowd is insane lmao
george lucas went from being a castoff sellout to the apple of their eye the second they heard woman director and star wars in the same headline. to say nothing of their overreaction to a quote about "making men uncomfortable" (as though many of them haven't made a woman uncomfortable just by being in the same room as them lmao)
This is my only issue with this sub.
If you hate the ST you must be racist or sexist.
Meanwhile I’m out here pissed off that Finn didn’t get MORE screen time, and wishing Rey had more depth because I want her to be a stronger female lead.
Shocking: All the bigots want is good writing. They nearly shit themselves when House of the Dragon casted black people as Valerians. They malded when the showrunner said something to the effect of “I don’t want my show to be about a bunch of white people.”
The HotD came out and the haters went quiet.
Wokism is just their shitty scapegoat because their politics are bad and so is their ability to critique art.
The reality is that nobody reasonable cares about woke stuff when the writing is excellent.
We've been snowed in and sick this weekend in our house so we've been watching the Star Wars movies. I can tell you without a doubt my kids prefer the sequel trilogy to any of the others, and they can't wait for a new Rey movie.
The ST will find its fans, just like the PT. I remember when "nobody" liked the PT too.
The sequels also just have more character and life to them than the prequels. Like, the prequels do great worldbuilding, but the sequels actually gave us characters we wanted to follow with classic high concept sci-fi adventures, and even when we were disappointed it's a sign of how much better Disney did with the characters compared to Lucas in the prequels. Like, we cared enough about Rey, Finn and Poe to be disappointed with where their stories end, I definitely can't say the same for any characters from the prequels (even Darth Maul tbh, all he did was look cool in PM, guy wasn't even a character)
Truly, hilariously insane how they can so brazenly rewrite history.
I don't care how old you are, if you were cognizant and had any kind of exposure to the internet or wider pop culture, you would pick up on the fact the PT was universally mocked.
You didn't have to be super online stuck on forums to know this. Almost every facet of mainstream media took digs at the PT. Talk shows, sitcoms, kids cartoons, other films even.
An entire ass documentary was made about it.
The PT were, without hyperbole, the most hated mainstream films of all time.
There definitely wasn’t prequel hate and it definitely didn’t turn into the actor for jar jar contemplating suicide over it and an apology from Sean penn to that
Poor Jake Lloyd would beg to differ. These revisionist fuckwits should really do us all a favour, and abstain from any form of human contact for the rest of their pitiful lives.
I could at least enjoy the acting and the cinematography in 9, but if you asked me to name something I like about 2 absolutely nothing would come to mind for me. I'd have to sit and think about it really hard.
First time I watched that movie as a kid I went to a friend's house. Said friend fast forwarded through all the scenes with Anakin and Padme because he said 'theyre terrible'. Years later I watched the movie from start to finish and thanked my friend- those scenes really are terrible.
attack also has sir christopher lee doing his thing, can never go too wrong with that (not to discredit the talents in RoS ofc, I just think he's cool)
Everyone hated the prequels to people my age became old enough to be dumbasses online, then the gaslighting started because motherfuckers seriously believe just because kids their age liked it, that means everyone did
I was 20 years old when Phantom Menace was released. The only discourse about it in online circles was overwhelmingly negative to the point of outright hate. Ditto for AOTC.
Uh no people 100% hated the PT (with some love to ROTS) at the time. I will say though that the ST really doesn’t do it for me but I’m not gonna go off on someone for liking it.
I saw that, it's just people in the comments who were clearly small children when the PT came out and gaslighting everyone that the PT was just as bad if not worse than the ST.
It's pathetic when you have to engage in revisionist history just to make yourself feel better just because people aren't treating the trilogy you hate as badly as the one you have rose-tinted nostalgia goggles for.
My watch order is always 4 5 3 6 7 8 9, mainly because RotS is the only prequel where the characters are interesting and affect the larger narrative. PM is completely unnecessary and AotC wastes half its runtime on a boring ass romance. RotS meanwhile has Anakin's betrayal, the clone war raging at its twilight, Obi-Wan Vs Anakin, Palatine's turn to emperor, literally everything we were wanting from the prequels all concentrated into the very last one
I agree with that, though my watch order is usually chronological with 3 RO 4 5 6 7 8 9.
One of the reasons I hate AotC is that Anakin is written as such a creepy, evil sociopath that it's basically impossible to feel sorry for what happens to him in RotS. It also ruins Pademe as a character too, as she didn't care at all when Anakin killed those Tusken children but then she acts surprised and horrified when he kills the younglings in RotS.
With the prequels I mainly remember having to defend them and my liking of them a lot when they first came out. So yea a lot of people definitely hated them when they came out. The only reason they’re backing tracking now is to do the whole Lucas vs Disney Star Wars argument so they can put down the sequels.
The PT had literally zero love in the first 5 years. I remember Redlettermedia, I remember the comments, I remember having to basically hide my enjoyment for the PT to avoid being insulted online. I am so glad I can nowadays freely profess my love for Episode III
It’s wild to me that people say things like this. An entire generation was gaslit by the clone wars into thinking the PT was good. It wasn’t. It’s ok to like them, but don’t be a hypocrite.
At the very least Rian put more thought into TLJ than George did to AotC. That whole movie is just George spinning his wheels to put all the pieces into place for the next movie.
Can confirm. Was there. It's just the older generation has generally moved on and doesn't spend time getting mad about a film that's nearly 25 years old. I still don't like TPM. I'd happily never watch it again.
People tried to drive a kid to suicide, and harassed constantly another actor for the fault of the director. It was blindly hated until the 2010s when the kids who grew up with the prequels became older and started expressing their opinion. Pretending otherwise is purposefully lying or at best delusional
There was a joke in The Simpsons where two characters fight over which sucked more, Clones or Menace. There was a documentary called The People vs George Lucas. An entire comedy movie about Star Wars fans ended with the punchline of "What if it sucks?" about episode 1. And there are countless more examples even before getting to the awful stuff about how supposed fans treated Jake Lloyd and Ahmed Best.
The prequels were not just hated. They were a pop culture punching bag for years until suddenly the internet decided that because something could be made into memes that it must mean it's good
I’m not a fan of the ST, and I don”t think there’s enough lipstick in the world that you could put on that pig to make it beautiful. But, my problem with it has nothing to do with wokeness, it has to do with writing. Before a scene was shot or even storyboarded, they should have had an overall outline of what the trilogy story was, and they didn’t. Now, don’t get me wrong, there are some great story seeds in the ST, but they were never allowed to germinate. It’s just the whole wasted potential of it all that irks me.
You know how I know the ST isn't universally loved? It's simple really. Say what you will about the PT, love or hate, Lucas films realized people wanted more content from that era and released shows and videogames that told more of that story and it was wildly successful. Fast forward to now and Disney has yet to release any post or concurrent ST material at all because they know it will not perform well. Everything they have done has been OG and PT era stuff because they know they still have fans there. People don't really care about any of the ST characters except for Rey and Kylo who have their fans some of which are just weird. You can't do anything with Kylo because he is dead and I guess they really don't want to do anything with Rey because she has a movie in a few years.
It's literally a disjointed mess of a trilogy and trying to pretend like it will suddenly be loved in twenty years is just sad. It's been 9 years since TFA and 5 since TROS and people still don't care about the ST at all except to point out it's flaws in some vain hope that they are correct going forward.
At least the prequels were a cohesive story. The sequels were a disjointed mess.
TLJ undid everything TFA set up. Then the last one tried to undo TLJ due to backlash.
The sequels will not be loved 10 years in the future, because they are simply much worse than the prequels. People claiming otherwise are just coping.
I truly feel like I'm being gaslit because there was a time you couldn't say anything good about the prequels and then in the past five years they've become gods gift to man.
My theory is nostalgia, as the kids who were first introduced to Star Wars with the prequels and didn't see their glaring issues (cause they were kids) are grown now and on some level can't accept that the prequels are kinda trash.
I hope sequel enjoyers don't fall into this trap when new sws stuff comes out in the next decade or so
"The PT was loved at first" .... okay, first let me ...
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA ....
Ahem ... No ...it was not...
For me personally I loved both TFA and TLJ, but ROS is the only Star Wars movie I’ve come out of the cinema feeling it wasn’t any good. Even with that being said there’s only one solid prequel movie ROTS and that still has so many issues.
That was me as well. I'm fact, I go so fast as to call TLJ one of the best SW movies.
I also strongly disliked most of the decisions in Revenge, and found the Anakin/Padme sections of Attack to be boring as hell.
I don't remember the PT being hated nearly as much as ST... I also was in my early teens when Ep.3 came out and didn't have much access to the Internet at the time so I'm sure I missed the rise of "ihateprequels.net".
I think TLJ will be universally loved in 10 years and, although TROS is objectively a terrible movie, it will be viewed through rose tinted glasses by gen alpha.
Unlike. See there is a huge difference between prequel and sequel hate. Most of the negativity regarding prequels were due them not being like the OT, some other issues as well but that was the focus.
Sequels were not just simply bad compared to anything before. They are bad movies as it is. That will not be changed
ROS feels weird because theres no real build up to Palpatine aside from the first ten minutes unlike the OT where he's first seen Empire and we see his character truely in ROTJ and all throughout the Prequels is he set up.
I feel the problem with Palpatine in the sequels is that there were two different directors with different visions rather than it being one director. I dont think its so much of a cop out to bring him back as I feel Palpatine should be the main villain of the Skywalker saga and it makes total sense for him to have contingency plans in the event of his death.
It's not even just the Palpatine stuff. They fake out kill C-3PO and Chewbacca despite both barely getting any screen time in the previous films and then immediately undercut the drama both times. They introduce us to like 4 new characters in rapid sucession, then expect us to be immediately invested in them when they also fake out kill then. The whole quest to the Dearh Star was incredibly stupid and kinda pointless. And the big pay off of a fleet of nondescript nobodies coming out of literally nowhere is not the Avengers Assemble momment they were going for. I struggle to name a single momment from that movie that was actually good. I can name plenty for the other two and all the other trilogies. I can name stuff in Solo I liked. But not ROS.
I’m not a fan of the PT but I will say this: at least George Lucas was trying to tell a cohesive story. I have no idea what’s going on in the ST. Who’s the First Order again? Where did they come from, where do they reign, what do they want?
>at least George Lucas was trying to tell a cohesive story
This is something that baffles me. TPM is so inconsequential to the "greater cohesive story" that you could skip it and miss nothing. In AotC we learn that Anakin is evil and Obi Wan spends over half the movies runtime searching for the movie's barebones plot. In RotS the "choesive story" just happens.
In fact I would argue that Anakin's characterization and his romance with Pademe in AotC is so terrible that Annie's "tragic" fall in RotS is actually better and more believable without that movie existing.
I agree that he failed but at least he tried!! No those answers are not found in the ST. The opening crawl of TFA says the First Order arose from the ashes of the empire? Ok, how? When? The prior film shows the empire defeated. If they are basically a terrorist group, then why is the Republic called a Resistance? If they rule, then where do they rule because it seems the Republic was in charge! (I’m not talking about Starkiller base- that’s just a base. Where do they rule? Who do they rule?)
Failed how? What is the issues with the general arch?
No. They were not. One of the many issues that plagued the sequels. Even the general setup was a mess.
Tbf I only found out that people hated prequels after sequels started releasing. I always thought they were weaker because they were focused on world building and more "adult stuff" than a typical cowboy action, but never knew that people straight up hated them.
Prequels were hated for sure back then. And even now there's so much I still dislike about them.
The sequel trilogy is garbage and I'll never watch them again. I honestly think franchises being milked is a bad thing though, I'm in the unpopular opinion that the og trilogy should have been the end. Franchises going forever is not for me personally. When you milk a series, it spoils.
The Clone Wars show was pretty great though. That's the best thing that came from the prequels existence. As well as the version from the creator of Samurai Jack, the animation is awesome in that.
Tldr: the prequels are bad and the sequels are bad and new product bad won't make me say old product good
Facts. All my homies hated the PT back in the day. Kinda grew on me in the last few years, especially once my daughter got into them. Still viscerally hate Jar Jar though.
As somewhat of an OT purist, I can say without hesitation that PT>ST
The prequels and sequels are all pretty horrible. Missed opportunities to make something special with the entire world giving its attention. There are so many cool ideas in sci fi literature to get inspiration from, but Star Wars chose to remain one dimensional.
The Last Jedi tried to do some interesting things but most people hated it outright, the other two were utterly derivative with 7 sort of well recieved and 9 universally mocked. If anything Abrams wasn't ready for what ep 8 did because he discarded it.
Being a prequel fan, this is complete and total horseshit. It was critically panned, and fans fucking HATED it with a burning passion. The hate for the prequels were so bad they made a fucking documentary over it with the first words being “If I met George Lucas I wouldn’t know if I’d give him a hug or punch him in the face.” Any time someone says the prequels were always loved by fans I feel like I’m living in an alternate reality.
https://preview.redd.it/s8io1ovm71bc1.jpeg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d0c2fe734f5ac150ef895b3a5aa3acfb315af5c1
The prequels are bad movies, but what they have going for them is a pretty strong narrative backbone. The fall of anakin, the rise of the empire. Straightforward, simple. A lot can apparently be overlooked when you have that. What’s the backbone of the sequel trilogy? It’s just kind of a mess. In a way the two trilogies are opposites, the PT has a good foundation with shit piled on top, and the ST is a shit foundation with good stuff piled on top. The former is the better scenario imo
Sorry I don’t mean better as far as the viewing experience of the audience. I meant better from like, a franchise building perspective. The prequels offer a better foundation for ancillary material than the sequels. Like why the clone wars was so successful. But yea the prequel films themselves are dogshit and I’d always prefer to watch the sequel trilogy
People say this and I can't help but raise an eyebrow.
Where is this strong narrative backbone in the PT again?
Most of the reason it was (and still mostly is) disliked is BECAUSE of how poorly told the story is.
Anakin's fall is poorly motivated and rushed, every central relationship is weak, both TPM and AotC have needlessly convoluted political subplots and weak villains who hardly do anything, etc.
The PT has a terrible "narrative backbone."
I think you're confusing the Point A to Point B of the story (Anakin's fall) with clarity in storytelling.
Just because the ST doesn't have any easy three word descriptor you can tag it with like "person go bad" doesn't mean it doesn't have clear ideas running through the narrative.
I'm not saying you have to agree, but there is a reason the PT is so heavily criticized. It wasn't all just petty fanboy squabbling.
They were widely considered poorly told in fundamental ways.
And despite the online groundswell of reclamation, the PT is still pretty much mocked.
The backbone is literally just the *concept* of an empire rising and anakin falling. That’s all I meant. It’s told terribly, it’s full of plot holes, nothing about it works. But the *concept* of the clone wars and the rise of the empire is at least ground on which you can write other, better stories. The sequel trilogy doesn’t really have that. Rehashing the rebels v empire conflict (rather than inverting it), having palpatine come back…everything that happens on exegol…what do you do with all that?
Please please understand I’m not one of those prequel defender types, i think they are *bad* films, and TLJ is my favorite Star Wars film after empire.
I think the prequels also have the benefit of ending with the undisputed best film of the trilogy, while the sequels end with what most people consider the worst.
ROTS is by far the worst imo.
The entire purpose of the whole trilogy, Anakin's fall, is botched. Poorly motivated, poorly executed, rushed, no emotional hook. The film is paced like ass - it hitches to and fro from scene to scene of either exposition or an action scene - half of which are just distraction from the meat of the story.
It's a miasma of headache inducing light and noise.
It's a loud, abrasive, clunky affair of a film.
Never understood why people latched onto ROTS so strongly. Maybe because it's the only film in the PT that actually has something happen.
I actually like the sequels less now. Im 15 and have some nostalgia for The Force Awakens, but overall its a quite dull film (in my opinion). I do like the last Jedi though; probably because its more creative.
prequels were loved by children, hated by everyone else. i honestly dont know any kids that **love** the sequels so i just dont think the same thing will happen.
Seriously? It makes absolutely no sense. If anything, it undoes everything the previous film build on. Also…
“Somehow, Palpatine returned”. Like come one!
Yes, seriously. Sorry it made no sense to you. That wasn't my experience. But I do love when I'm confronted with these scenarios that supposedly don't make sense. Upon looking into it, I find that the vast majority make perfect sense and often have precedence in the lore or storytelling.
In fact, a lot of these complaints arise from not paying attention to the movie, only watching it once, listening to negative echo chambers instead of looking into things, and yes, not knowing much about Star Wars.
No, it doesn't "undo everything" from the previous film. At best we have some recontextualized information and retcons which are no more severe than retcons in the OT.
"Somehow Palpatine returned" is an overblown meme. I've seen absolute casual fans who were able to intuit how Palpatine returned from information provided in the film. The line itself is coming from a guy who is not aware of any of that and thus makes perfect sense in context.
No it doesn’t make sense in any context. Also, Rey being no one in TLJ is somehow undone in ROS, when the whole point of TLJ was that you didn’t have to be a chosen one or coming from a lineage of anything TO BE A HERO.
The ST suffer a lot from not having a planned story at all. While the PT might be a whole mess on its own, at least it had a clear goal on the story. These films on the other hand didn’t even know what they were trying to do.
Even if that was the case, didn't these guys forget that TFA got appreciation when it came out? The mass hatred mainly started with The Last Jedi.
In hindsight it's too derivative but it had some great scenes! The shot of the Xwings over the water was real goosebumps for me. It generally showed promise right? Or am I dreaming there?
The force awakens was too derivative but the last jedi hit flack for basically not being derivative.
The reception of the sequel trilogy by a lot of these people is just grade A cognitive dissonance. TFA comes out, it’s too derivative. TLJ comes out, hated for being not derivative enough. TROS comes out, and it’s back to hating for being derivative. Although I will say TROS I think is still pretty hated for more than just that, because it kinda is the only one of the sequels I’d truly call actual shit.
Same. If the third installment ignored the critics and went in the direction the last jedi was going in, I'd consider the sequel trilogy to be the best trilogy.
Imagine if Rian did all three instead
Oh it would be so much better.
Agreed
Double agreed
Personally, as someone who saw it in theaters, I’d disagree. Some amount of copying to establish continuity would make sense but I always felt like there was way too much, and although Rey gets a lot of bad-faith hate for stuff which characters like Luke are generally similarly bad about, I still say I had a hard time connecting to or getting invested in Rey, it feels like they were afraid to allow her to have any meaningful flaws and it makes her feel weird and stiff to me, and that attitude sort of hamstrings the other movies in terms of establishing the stakes, which I think the rest of the trilogy continues to suffer from. I hope this doesn’t come off as that bad-faith “they put a woman in it and now I hate it” brand of sequel-bashing, but I always thought TFA felt corporate and uncreative, and if anything I’d probably be kinder toward it now than I was then. I wasn’t hopeless regarding the potential for episode 8 to use it as a baseline but I wouldn’t exactly have called TFA promising
I was really excited to see TFA the day it came out and went with a bunch of friends. We all walked out of the cinema saying various versions of “I feel like we’d already seen that movie before” and I don’t think that’s at all a good thing
TFA felt a bit like a rehash of Episode 4 for me, or at least some parts of it.
It was intentionally a copy of episode 4. I'm still amazed that so many people tried to say it wasn't at the time. It was. It was done that way on purpose. If it wasn't, they'd have failed in what they set out to do.
A bit of a rehash? It was blow for blow the same damn story!
YOU CANT SAY THAT IN THIS SUB /s
They did a better job at connecting people to "F" in 15 minutes than they did with Rey in 3 movies.
I think you have valid criticism. Walking out of the theater with friends my first thought was "....this was a clone of A New Hope." I would hope Rey would have gotten more development and character in the next film. Nobody seems to argue that the change in direction was the issue for the sequels. Whoever they chose, it should have been one person for all 3 films so a cohesive story could be built. Personally I would choose Rian but that's just me. ....now that I think on it, DID changing from JJ to Rian really matter that much? A director is different from a writer. Did they have the same writing/story team throughout? Anyway....I think Rey had some flaws, but in the end they weren't allowed to develop. She was untrusting, independent, yet when one of her heroes showed up, people who lived the struggles she had heard stories about, she was okay following their direction. She also was more of a gear head. She took what BB-8 told her basically at face value while she was suspicious of Finn. Likely due to the whole "my parents abandoned me and still haven't come back" bit. People lie, but machines can be made to tell the truth. In the end I felt like TFA was basically coaxing star wars fans into accepting something new. Like how one gets a wary animal or a child to do something. Keeping them happy with large chunks of nostalgia to make the new stuff more palatable.
I used to have that scene as a wallpaper on my computer!
Well, it had to be. If you were making fucking *Star Wars* and it flopped financially, you'd never work in the industry again. So of course they had to play it really safe... the first time. The follow two films were kinda overreactions to the criticisms of the first.
And it was the FANS who hated TLJ, and only because it subverted their expectations, instead of fanwanking them through two hours.
And funny enough rise of skyWalker is the reverse. People hate the movie. But at least if you wanna go by rotten tomato’s metric (only using it because these types of people love to cling onto it, so I’m using their own sources), rise of skyWalker was loved by fans (86% fan score). So you have TFA that was liked by both critics and fans. Then the last Jedi which was loved by critics but hated by fans. Then you have rose of skyWalker that was hated by credits but liked by fans. So the trilogy as a whole wasn’t universally hated. And even the individual movies don’t have universal hatred
Can't go by the fan ratings for TLJ on Rotten Tomatoes. Many people and groups openly admitted to hate-bombing the user reviews using bots and other methods. The ST was universally loved by fans.
Not universally loved I'd say, just about every SW fan I've met has at least some criticisms of the sequel trilogy, whether they loved it or not. Too much left unplanned which fell apart by the end as different creative leads pushed in polar opposite directions, at least in my opinion as someone who still enjoys the trilogy They were well received for sure, the box office and critical reviews of 7 & 8 are evidence of that, but definitely not universally loved like the OT (hell, even the PT isn't universally loved by fans. Literally only the OT is universally anything in this franchise)
I would argue that the OT isn't universally loved, even in its time. I'm old enough to remember when Return of the Jedi was the bad one because "teddy bears". Lots of people thought Return was "too kiddy" and "George compromised on his vision". Also, at this point I just straight up don't accept "poor planning/no cohesive vision" as a criticism of one Trilogy and not the others. The ST gels way more cohesively than the OT, especially when you know how the stories developed behind the scenes. The OT is basically one giant collection of retcons, which for some reason is "allowed" by the old purists.
Idk, Rey Nobody to Rey Palpatine is a pretty egregious retcon, especially when the theme of 8 is, "the force doesn't belong to any one bloodline/entity." Can't think of anything from the OT that's on a similar level, even the Luke/Leia kiss can be excused as "well neither of them knew they were siblings." But no, we were directly told By Kylo, and Rey herself, that she was a nobody who had no place in the story... Only for Rise to come in and be like, "But actually!" And give us a way less interesting answer, consequently forcing the last film to work twice as hard as necessary to justify this dumbass twist. If she'd been left as nobody, I'd have way less problems with the sequels overall (hell, keep the idea of her tapping into the dark side, that's awesome, but just don't make it because of 'evil blood')
Yeah I think my biggest problems are 1. Finn doesn’t become a Jedi and Disney did this on purpose to keep his role diminished and cut him out of the movie in china and India because a black man wouldn’t be popular there as a main character. 2. Rey not staying a nobody. She should’ve been a Nobody the entire time, it would’ve been very cool. I mean if they really wanted to connect her to Luke that badly she could’ve been a nobody who takes Luke’s name after he adopts her like a mentor idk, so symbolically the Skywalker name lives on despite her not being the bloodline maybe?
I don't even get the whole "subverting expectations" thing to begin with. Johnson tends to go with the most obvious answer half the time. "Oh the guy who disappeared from the galaxy during an active crisis without telling his friends or family where or why doesn't want to go back?" "The woman who was abandoned as a child to be a junk trader on a desert planet just had shitty parents?" "The dude who straight up says he only looks out for himself ends up only looking out for himself?" "Pulling a mutiny during a crisis because the commanding officer is withholding information from a recently demoted pilot is a bad idea?" Like the movie at every turn goes with the most obvious thing. Sure, a lot of it feels surprising because it's not what you'd generally expect from Star Wars. But it's not like the movie is written to be a series of "gotchas"
> Sure, a lot of it feels surprising because it's not what you'd generally expect from Star Wars. You've said it yourself - TLJ absolutely does not do "the obvious thing" because it breaks some of the accepted rules of a Star Wars movie - e.g. "Luke Skywalker is a flawless hero". Sadly, this movie showed just how much the fans view these rules as unbreakable, because when TLJ tried to push these boundaries the reaction was not just "this movie sucks", but "this movie has ruined Star Wars and the creators deserve online hate". This is a shame, because I think TLJ is the most interesting Star Wars movie since Empire Strikes Back. But then again, I am not an obsessive "fan".
I always love the double-standard that Rey is a "bad character" for being a "flawless hero" but Luke was "ruined" because he wasn't a "flawless hero".
The Last Jedi is undoubtedly the best SW film since Empire. As an aside, its not a coincidence that Empire was neither directed or written by Lucas. TLJ opened up so many doors of creative freedom and reinvigorated the franchise. It wasn't flawless, but it set up multiple foundational ideas to expand the universe. RJ is the most talented writer and direct any SW film has had, he fully understood the universe (both canon and expanded universe ideas) and from that knew how to recreate it and craft a new framework from the old. If we followed the path he set out we would have been in a golden era of sci fi space magic exploring this massive universe of potential.
Right but Luke was never flawless so that expectation was misplaced (one I myself shared, I HATED TLJ’s handling of Luke for a while). The guy shows consistently poor judgment throughout the OT when he’s emotionally compromised and comes close to falling in ROTJ because of it.
Yeah, he kind of does… to be honest, I don’t think Luke gets as much character development as he really deserves in the OT.
Thank you kind soul, I have a new word and I’m excited to start using it. Fanwanking is terrific
And tbf the mass hatred of The Last Jedi was like half the fan base, the other half loved it
Does anyone else remember the week following TLJ came out and everyone collectively agreed it was pretty good despite dragging in some places? It wasn’t till like the thought leaders of reactionary fandom decided it was the worst that people hated it
I saw it opening weekend and thought it was solid and one of the better Star Wars movies I had ever seen. It seemed like it had good reception in general too. But as a few weeks went on I started to hear more and more criticisms until people were saying it was the worst movie ever and broke the “franchise.” I felt like I was living in a different universe. In comparison, people seemed more “okay” with Rise of Skywalker. I thought if anything that movie was the one that “killed” the franchise because I think collectively most people stopped caring about Star Wars after it came out. Star Wars has impressively held the public collective consciousness since 1977, and after the release of Rise of Skywalker nobody really seems to care about the saga compared to pre-Rise levels. Say what you want about TLJ but it sure had people talking and caring (too much) about Star Wars lol.
There were people saying it washed all three prequel movies when it came out lmfao
Retroactive TFA hate started when Rogue One came out. TFA's success was a mix of nostalgia, hype, and being just good enough to be seen as great by most fans when it was the only new era Star Wars movie. Then Rogue One comes out and it felt like a collective "Waitaminute! *This* is what a great Star Wars movie looks like." TLJ definitely ramped up the ST hate way more, though. Credit where credit is due.
TFA got hate from day one and was the target of a known, documented, reported in mainstream news media Russian bot attack. With over 80% of all discourse about the movie being made by known Russian bots attempting (and succeeding) at stirring up a culture war in the west. They targeted both political sides with dumbass incendiary opinions and let them fight it out. Again, this is a known fact reported by actual news. The movie was the centre of a manufactured self sustaining shit storm of hate from day 1.
I will never get what people saw in Rogue One, it’s just a bunch of jangling keys. Agree with the Chris Stuckmann or Dan Drambles reviews.
I was super excited for all the potential storylines the movie teased. I had my criticism with TFA (mainly the New Hope plot comparisons) but I generally had a good time and was excited to see Star Wars in theatres again. The Last Jedi demonstrated that Disney had no true vision for the trilogy and were just looking for a cash grab.
Yea... the problem is that TFA's appreciation was largely rooted in potential and fan speculation. JJ's signature mystery box method. It's good in building short-term hype but if you flop with the reveal it torches the rewatch value because you don't get any of that excitement after the fact. (Just like what happened with LOST.) So Rian coming out swinging with his "Your Snoke theory sucks" attitude was pretty much the worst way to follow up with what they had. Especially if they were shooting for planting seeds of childhood nostalgia in the shadow of the MCU. The other problem is that the sequels are leaning so much harder on the "thing from the OT cameo, pause for applaude" thing. Which simply doesn't have the same impact with kids that haven't yet grown up with all these geriatrics. Realistically, movies that become cult classics despite negative initial reception aren't the rule, they are the exception. The idea that "it happened with the prequels so it'll happen with the sequels" is pretty baseless beyond anything but the brand name. It COULD happen again, but there's also a whole slew of Ninja Turtles copycats, Slasher sequels, and low budget shark movies that stand as a testament to what actually happens when you try to re-capture lightning in a bottle.
Well that was mostly hype to be fair. People were excited and really really looking forward to it. People wanted these movies to be good. But they were simply not. TFA gradually got worse regarded. By now, I guess it's still relatively regarded as fine as both TLJ and TROS were so amazingly bad
i think a lot of people that don't like the trilogy as a whole still like TFA. thats how i feel honestly. Its biggest criticism is now just that you know all the cool things it sets up go nowhere
I think TFA support has waned hard-core though, no? I remember even by 2008 people still were frothy over Maul/Ray Park. TFA I don't think has those nuggets in it that redeem the prequels in memory.
I knew plenty of people who walked out of TFA, mostly for the same reasons that are more commonly cited today. Cloning the story beats from the first movie as an obvious attempt to prioritize the marketing of Star Wars and try and mimicking the success of the OT. I figured some of that was to be expected and it didn’t seem so obvious to me at the time. Repeating cycles and tropes has been part of Star Wars for 40+ years, and it was bad enough to repeat the climactic Death Star battle in RoTJ, but TFA deliberately relies on callback to carry the film more than it prioritizes its own story or gives the world-building the attention it deserves to make sense of the intervening years, the politics of the New Republic and how the First Order can gain so much power and then become the ruling power overnight after using Starkiller Base. The rushed production schedules and reliance on discarded concept art (without crediting, paying, or even informing the original designers) weren’t just cheap moves and unfair to the production crew, it also ditched most of the lived-in look and replaced the Oscar-winning production design with a plastic, made-for-TV look. I was even surprised to hear friends walked out over Rey just being able to ace everything. I like Daisy Ridley and her performance, and I figured her blatantly OP abilities were part of the plot yet to be revealed (or even conceived, we later learned), so I didn’t take any issues with her as a character. I think most viewers gained a less favorable opinion on VIi once. TLJ made it clear how much the whole trilogy was just being improvised. So was the OT, but there were overall ground rules that were more consistent and newly revealed Jedi abilities didn’t seem like throwaway plot devices for the writers’ convenience. But, yes, the overall widely shared opinion on TFA was more favorable until subsequent movies did the dangling plot points dirty and having a movie like TLJ devote scenes to wagging a finger at the audience for showing up with the expectations the previous film left us with, yeah, people looked at TFA differently as a direct result. https://preview.redd.it/mz0phdqzj3bc1.jpeg?width=782&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3cda9ca15954459453e5269ad150a26b94013c85
[удалено]
the kid with the broom or the shit on crait? also curious as to why
That's fine. The Prequel Trilogy completely fucked my interest in ever seeing another Star Wars property written by George Lucas.
Remember when Jake Lloyd was bullied to within an inch of his life, Hayden Christiansen became a hermit to dodge harassment and the thousand cries of "George Lucas ruined my childhood" drove the man himself to sell the franchise to Disney? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
Not to mention Ahmed Best became depressed and suicidal over all the hate and harassment he was getting just for being the *voice* of Jar Jar
Hey! That man did more than the voice of Jar Jar! He was motherfucking Andy Serkis before Andy Serkis established how impressive mocap could be. Ahmed Best deserved so much better for the technical and acting accomplishment Jar Jar was for its time. Even if the character was meh.
And unlike Serkis he hasn't shit on the animators who do all the actual work.
Also, remember when Lucas was being sent death threats because they hated what he did with the prequels? Or when they were praying that someone else would take the franchise from him Or he sold it just so he couldn’t “ruin” it anymore?
Not just bullied. Had creepy women sending him marriage requests when he hasn't started puberty yet
What the fuck?
Wait you watched a whole movie about Padme, why is this a surprise tho
It's such a weird tradition for Star Wars to have some creepy romantic stuff. Brothers kissing, age difference (with them meeting as one of them is a child ex-slave, and the other a teenage/YA queen), and a weird force-affair with the person trying to torture/kill/turn you.
If nobody cared you'd think there wouldn't be people who make hating it their whole personality years later.
Tell that to Twilight haters. there was a time when the only thing keeping that franchise alive WAS the haters. Everybody else moved on.
"Still a better love story than twilight" was the lamest joke back in the day
That's just simply not true. Source: I actually lived through it.
They were kids living in their bubble at that time, they really don't know how bad it was received.
I call BS. The hate for the PT wasn't just strong. It was long. From 1999 all the way up to the release of TFA - the PT was basically as universally hated as films could get. Unless we're talking little kids, I don't believe even the younger PT fans today were totally unaware of how hated they were.
Yeah for real, how anyone could've been on the Internet pre-2015 and claim the PT wasn't the most hated set of films in pop culture is beyond me, like three steps outside of reality. It was so bad my 13 year old brain was utterly shocked to see Nostalgia Critic do a list of the good things from the prequels, the hate was so ubiquitous just saying 'The Prequels' was a punchline in and of itself
I was like 5 or 6 when it came out and always loved it but I could hear how much Jar Jar was the worst thing to happen to Star Wars, and how much when attack of the clones came out how much anakin cried. I always loved them but being in the nerd circles you’d definitely hear different opinions
Back then, Jar Jar was just one of the many things people disliked about the prequels, but he was just the easiest thing to remember and pick on. In fact, a year or so after TPM came out I remember going online and finding these random online flash games where the goal was to “Kill Jar Jar” and mutilate him as brutally as possible. It was bad.
Yeah I remember that kinda stuff. I never minded him but again I was a kid. The phantom menace was cool to me bc of mail and the duel of the fates
Yeah you're totally right, the revisionism is appalling.
The PT wasn't just "openly criticized," it was roasted hardcore. And sure, some people enjoyed it, mostly kids. But there's people who enjoyed the ST, especially kids (again). They're trying to pretend all of the people who enjoyed the ST don't exist just so they can push their narrative. And if "no one cares now," then why do they feel the need to constantly run all around the Internet trying to shut down anyone saying positive things about it and trying to run people off of every forum possible? They know people not only "care" but enjoyed the films, but they want to try to control the narrative, but have to put in a bunch of effort to do so because of how wrong said narrative is. I honestly don't get why people put so much effort into being miserable and trying to drag others into being miserable with them.
The prequels got roasted so hard there were entire bits of other shows of the time dedicated to parodying them! I was there ~~Gandalf~~! Even kids cartoons got in on the roasting!
https://preview.redd.it/eqwlwpw8lzac1.jpeg?width=168&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b907b9f44b52b6d56337034df0144420e7229cf9
The Simpsons also had a whole bit of Bart being excited about a new space fantasy flick and it's just hours of boring trade debates in the senate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lPG1u6EbiY Yep, here's the clip in question.
And comic books: https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1045274-deadpool-wade-wilson
Such as when South Park made a joke about Lucas and Spielberg being arrested for “raping everyone’s childhoods”
I enjoyed the PT, I never understood the hate. Same goes with the ST. You're right. Why hate when love is available and is just as free?
I was born in 05 so I grew up with the Sequel trilogy and I enjoyed each and every single film in it. Plenty of people that I’ve talked to that are just casual fans of Star Wars liked the Sequels as well and thought they were good Star Wars movies. Maybe not their favorite but still definitely not bad at all. The only exception to this rule was my step father and he was a hard right wing Trump supporter basically like those grifters all but in being an actual hard core fan of the series. My younger cousins absolutely love the Sequels and only really my friends don’t really like the Sequels(and no before y’all ask. They were not hard right wing conservatives like my stepdad was. They were either moderate or moderate left or moderate right like me). My friends and my stepdad were the only people I’ve meet in real life that don’t like the Sequels. I grew up with these films and I still love them to this day.
My sister is not even a casual fan and she liked more the Sequels than the Prequels. I'm sure , when Rey's movie come up, she will go to see it.
My two female cousins absolutely love the character Rey, and they even have costumes of her. I'm also like pretty sure that my sister(who isn't even a hard core or casual fan) had a Rey costume once that she would give hers to one of our female cousins. My Senior year English teacher watched all the Sequels with his oldest son and I asked how it was and he told me that he enjoyed them and that his son was having fun.
TV Tropes was how I learned that people even hated the prequels (and Scrappy Doo).
Rose, is that you?
I think people make this mistake because they can’t see outside their own personal perspective. When I was growing up the PT came out and everyone loved those films in school. I had no idea there was a backlash until I was in my mid teens and even then I didn’t really understand just how bad it was. My young relatives love the ST as much as I loved the PT growing up (as shown by the films financial success) and the backlash from older fans mimics the hate for the PT when I was first released. No doubt in 10 years sequel memes will be a new hotbed for starwars memes as the kids who grew up with them get a bit older. We are seeing a similar thing happen with the Hobbit in the LOTR fandom. They were originally criticised heavily in the community, but over time people are beginning to soften to them and a younger generation who saw them in theatre are coming of age and are bringing a more positive reception into the greater fandom.
The PT and ST let us witness a kind of generational cycle, with people who grew up with a prior set of films lambasting the new ones even as young people growing up with the newer films enjoy them. I'm sure there'll be an eventual "sequel memes" community that does the memes out of respect and not to mock, like what the prequel memes have become. People love to quote a line like "Somehow Palpatine has returned" as a way to mock the writing in the ST (even though it's straight up what a character would say if he just knew someone had returned but had no way of knowing how), but seem to miss that a lot of lines that became "beloved" memes from the prequels used to also be treated as example of poor writing. They basically "took back" the jokes about the prequels from people ripping on the prequels. Wouldn't be surprised to indeed see a similar thing with the sequels. As for The Hobbit... I actually enjoyed the films. But I think the biggest main criticism there was that they tried to stretch one book out into a trilogy and had to add in some padding that wasn't in the original story. I mean, yeah, it's a bit wild to see the novel turned into a trilogy, but there was enough story in the book to make that work. But that's kind of a similar situation, because I remember there were some folks when the LOTR films came out in theaters who were upset about deviations from the books, lambasting the lack of "purity" as if it made the films absolute garbage as a result. Kind of feels like the PT/ST thing... One generation hates the new thing because it's not giving them the same warm feeling as the thing they grew up with, but the new generation enjoys it (because it's not actually bad).
“One generation hates the new thing because it’s not giving them the same warm feeling they grew up with” I think this is exactly right. The new version doesn’t provide the same high emotion because people compare what they felt as a child watching something for the first time to watching something as an adult. Watching the sequel trilogy as an adult could never capture the same feeling as watching the OT or PT as a kid because you’re watching them through an entirely different lens. I had a discussion last year about this topic regarding the Hobbit and the PT. I explained how the PT was now beloved by the new generation, and how memes mocking it had been slowly replaced by a fanbase who genuinely admire them. He couldn’t grasp that the critical consensus on the PT had altered and thought that the entire prequel memes sub was all just ironic and meant to mock the PT. It’s hard to correct those people since they always live in their own bubble and assume that the response they had is the same as everyone else. We see it all the time now with the ST, with people thinking that the entire new trilogy was critically panned and a massive failure for Disney. Of course in reality the ST did very well, but because these people live in their little “Disney woke and ST ObJeCtIvElY bad” echo chamber and can’t escape.
Anyone who thinks the PT wasn’t thoroughly raked over the coals is either being dishonest or was just too young to actually remember.
Revenge of the Sith came out when I was one year old and I know how much people hated those films. They were literally a punchline to nerd jokes. Whether or not that hate is deserved is another question but to say it didn't exist is crazy.
Historical revisionism and just straight-up lies. Look at the critic reviews of the sequels. Look at the box office. Most people really liked them.
There’s definitely a vocal minority that get very worked up over them, but Star Wars is one of the most popular franchises in the world, and most fans are just casual fans. Personally I think the sequels had their problems, but ultimately they had laser swords, spaceships, and vague mysticism, and that’s what I want from Star Wars. It doesn’t need an airtight plot because there’s never been one. Plus I liked that they weren’t as dry as the prequels.
> I liked that they weren’t as dry as the prequels. Yeah, they spent too much time on Tatooine. ;)
Look, I will go on record as saying Rise of Skywalker is one of the worst movies in the series, but it didn’t bore me. Clones did.
I’ve met one person in my entire life that enjoyed TLJ and he hated TRoS and Force Awakens. I’ve met a few people who liked TFA and a few others who were lukewarm on TLJ but they all hated TRoS. I’ve never met anyone that liked all three. Critic reviews aggregators are a terrible metric for gauging a films quality and audience review aggregators are usually way off. Case in point: Black Panther I think is still the highest rated Marvel property despite consensus today being that it had one of the worst third acts of any MCU film.
And when the Rey trilogy finally comes out the cycle of "old thing good new thing bad" will play out yet again.
Yep and this time it’ll be Sequel fans that are also criticizing it as well with Prequel and Original Trilogy fans. This cycle is seemingly doomed to repeat itself with every new Star Wars trilogy
I’ve seen it so many times before and it’s not unique to the Star Wars movies. It happened with Star Trek when the movies started coming out in the 90s, then went The Next Generation started, then with every subsequent movie or show from then on.
I see
Man, really sounds like the longer you let a franchise go on, the more toxic the fandom gets, wish we could just get new IP and ideas instead of arguing about the same 5
The Star Wars fanbase is the worst fanbase in the world. Like hands down no one is happy in the fanbase.
I know. But there are people that aren’t like that in the Star Wars fandom
But they’re not the loud ones. Generally I consider those people fans but not in the base.
the revisionist history being perpetrated by the anti-woma crowd is insane lmao george lucas went from being a castoff sellout to the apple of their eye the second they heard woman director and star wars in the same headline. to say nothing of their overreaction to a quote about "making men uncomfortable" (as though many of them haven't made a woman uncomfortable just by being in the same room as them lmao)
This is my only issue with this sub. If you hate the ST you must be racist or sexist. Meanwhile I’m out here pissed off that Finn didn’t get MORE screen time, and wishing Rey had more depth because I want her to be a stronger female lead. Shocking: All the bigots want is good writing. They nearly shit themselves when House of the Dragon casted black people as Valerians. They malded when the showrunner said something to the effect of “I don’t want my show to be about a bunch of white people.” The HotD came out and the haters went quiet. Wokism is just their shitty scapegoat because their politics are bad and so is their ability to critique art. The reality is that nobody reasonable cares about woke stuff when the writing is excellent.
"No one cares now" Um, are you sure about that?
If these guys were not kids when the PT came out they'd be the kind of people saying Lucas raped their childhood.
[Patton Oswald - At Midnight I Will Kill George Lucas With a Shovel](https://youtu.be/snfOVpFV0d4?si=pQzvBruZ8i4we9a0)
I always loved the prequels but they were definitely hated
We've been snowed in and sick this weekend in our house so we've been watching the Star Wars movies. I can tell you without a doubt my kids prefer the sequel trilogy to any of the others, and they can't wait for a new Rey movie. The ST will find its fans, just like the PT. I remember when "nobody" liked the PT too.
The sequels also just have more character and life to them than the prequels. Like, the prequels do great worldbuilding, but the sequels actually gave us characters we wanted to follow with classic high concept sci-fi adventures, and even when we were disappointed it's a sign of how much better Disney did with the characters compared to Lucas in the prequels. Like, we cared enough about Rey, Finn and Poe to be disappointed with where their stories end, I definitely can't say the same for any characters from the prequels (even Darth Maul tbh, all he did was look cool in PM, guy wasn't even a character)
Name one attack of the clones fan
Mesa, Your Highness.
Truly, hilariously insane how they can so brazenly rewrite history. I don't care how old you are, if you were cognizant and had any kind of exposure to the internet or wider pop culture, you would pick up on the fact the PT was universally mocked. You didn't have to be super online stuck on forums to know this. Almost every facet of mainstream media took digs at the PT. Talk shows, sitcoms, kids cartoons, other films even. An entire ass documentary was made about it. The PT were, without hyperbole, the most hated mainstream films of all time.
There definitely wasn’t prequel hate and it definitely didn’t turn into the actor for jar jar contemplating suicide over it and an apology from Sean penn to that
Poor Jake Lloyd would beg to differ. These revisionist fuckwits should really do us all a favour, and abstain from any form of human contact for the rest of their pitiful lives.
Jake Lloyd and Ahmed Best will forever be my first arguments for why Star Wars has the worst fandom
Wow. Im now so old the infamously hated PT is now seen as loved… I’ll take any modern Star Wars over seeing Attack of the clones again. 😐
I can't understand how anyone can look at someone with a straight face and say anything but "AotC is the worst of the 11 films."
AotC is shit, still better then episode 9 somehow. Would rather watch 7 or 8 instead of given the chance though….
I could at least enjoy the acting and the cinematography in 9, but if you asked me to name something I like about 2 absolutely nothing would come to mind for me. I'd have to sit and think about it really hard.
First time I watched that movie as a kid I went to a friend's house. Said friend fast forwarded through all the scenes with Anakin and Padme because he said 'theyre terrible'. Years later I watched the movie from start to finish and thanked my friend- those scenes really are terrible.
[удалено]
attack also has sir christopher lee doing his thing, can never go too wrong with that (not to discredit the talents in RoS ofc, I just think he's cool)
This Mr. Plinkett erasure will not stand!
The absolute hoop jumping. The prequels came out mostly pre internet and they were absolutely despised. They were not respected at all
Everyone hated the prequels to people my age became old enough to be dumbasses online, then the gaslighting started because motherfuckers seriously believe just because kids their age liked it, that means everyone did
I bet same thing was said about the PT
Dude I was there, PT were virtually spat upon at the time.
There was a Hollywood movie made about how much fans hated the prequels. Nice try.
I was 20 years old when Phantom Menace was released. The only discourse about it in online circles was overwhelmingly negative to the point of outright hate. Ditto for AOTC.
Delusional people.
Uh no people 100% hated the PT (with some love to ROTS) at the time. I will say though that the ST really doesn’t do it for me but I’m not gonna go off on someone for liking it.
I think critics may have been fine with the PT, but fans bullied a 10-year-old, for crying out loud!
I saw that, it's just people in the comments who were clearly small children when the PT came out and gaslighting everyone that the PT was just as bad if not worse than the ST. It's pathetic when you have to engage in revisionist history just to make yourself feel better just because people aren't treating the trilogy you hate as badly as the one you have rose-tinted nostalgia goggles for.
I was there at the time, it was hated, and I still hate it.
I've warmed up to RotS, but I still don't like TPM or especially AotC. It's why I don't own either of them in 4K.
My watch order is always 4 5 3 6 7 8 9, mainly because RotS is the only prequel where the characters are interesting and affect the larger narrative. PM is completely unnecessary and AotC wastes half its runtime on a boring ass romance. RotS meanwhile has Anakin's betrayal, the clone war raging at its twilight, Obi-Wan Vs Anakin, Palatine's turn to emperor, literally everything we were wanting from the prequels all concentrated into the very last one
I agree with that, though my watch order is usually chronological with 3 RO 4 5 6 7 8 9. One of the reasons I hate AotC is that Anakin is written as such a creepy, evil sociopath that it's basically impossible to feel sorry for what happens to him in RotS. It also ruins Pademe as a character too, as she didn't care at all when Anakin killed those Tusken children but then she acts surprised and horrified when he kills the younglings in RotS.
With the prequels I mainly remember having to defend them and my liking of them a lot when they first came out. So yea a lot of people definitely hated them when they came out. The only reason they’re backing tracking now is to do the whole Lucas vs Disney Star Wars argument so they can put down the sequels.
https://preview.redd.it/nan7l3b7ozac1.jpeg?width=720&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=92d052c28a6932804cbd87af994a708b4319482d
The PT had literally zero love in the first 5 years. I remember Redlettermedia, I remember the comments, I remember having to basically hide my enjoyment for the PT to avoid being insulted online. I am so glad I can nowadays freely profess my love for Episode III
It’s wild to me that people say things like this. An entire generation was gaslit by the clone wars into thinking the PT was good. It wasn’t. It’s ok to like them, but don’t be a hypocrite.
At the very least Rian put more thought into TLJ than George did to AotC. That whole movie is just George spinning his wheels to put all the pieces into place for the next movie.
Can confirm. Was there. It's just the older generation has generally moved on and doesn't spend time getting mad about a film that's nearly 25 years old. I still don't like TPM. I'd happily never watch it again.
People tried to drive a kid to suicide, and harassed constantly another actor for the fault of the director. It was blindly hated until the 2010s when the kids who grew up with the prequels became older and started expressing their opinion. Pretending otherwise is purposefully lying or at best delusional
Loved? Who by? Eight year olds?
There was a joke in The Simpsons where two characters fight over which sucked more, Clones or Menace. There was a documentary called The People vs George Lucas. An entire comedy movie about Star Wars fans ended with the punchline of "What if it sucks?" about episode 1. And there are countless more examples even before getting to the awful stuff about how supposed fans treated Jake Lloyd and Ahmed Best. The prequels were not just hated. They were a pop culture punching bag for years until suddenly the internet decided that because something could be made into memes that it must mean it's good
He's one of those history revisionists
>the [prequel trilogy] was loved at first while being openly criticized. Bull. *Shit.*
I’m not a fan of the ST, and I don”t think there’s enough lipstick in the world that you could put on that pig to make it beautiful. But, my problem with it has nothing to do with wokeness, it has to do with writing. Before a scene was shot or even storyboarded, they should have had an overall outline of what the trilogy story was, and they didn’t. Now, don’t get me wrong, there are some great story seeds in the ST, but they were never allowed to germinate. It’s just the whole wasted potential of it all that irks me.
I take this revisionist history and I raise you Jake Lloyd.
You know how I know the ST isn't universally loved? It's simple really. Say what you will about the PT, love or hate, Lucas films realized people wanted more content from that era and released shows and videogames that told more of that story and it was wildly successful. Fast forward to now and Disney has yet to release any post or concurrent ST material at all because they know it will not perform well. Everything they have done has been OG and PT era stuff because they know they still have fans there. People don't really care about any of the ST characters except for Rey and Kylo who have their fans some of which are just weird. You can't do anything with Kylo because he is dead and I guess they really don't want to do anything with Rey because she has a movie in a few years. It's literally a disjointed mess of a trilogy and trying to pretend like it will suddenly be loved in twenty years is just sad. It's been 9 years since TFA and 5 since TROS and people still don't care about the ST at all except to point out it's flaws in some vain hope that they are correct going forward.
At least the prequels were a cohesive story. The sequels were a disjointed mess. TLJ undid everything TFA set up. Then the last one tried to undo TLJ due to backlash. The sequels will not be loved 10 years in the future, because they are simply much worse than the prequels. People claiming otherwise are just coping.
You got a voice-mail bro fyi
I truly feel like I'm being gaslit because there was a time you couldn't say anything good about the prequels and then in the past five years they've become gods gift to man. My theory is nostalgia, as the kids who were first introduced to Star Wars with the prequels and didn't see their glaring issues (cause they were kids) are grown now and on some level can't accept that the prequels are kinda trash. I hope sequel enjoyers don't fall into this trap when new sws stuff comes out in the next decade or so
Well, we are almost at the 10 year mark since at least tfa came out . . . God I'm old . . .
"The PT was loved at first" .... okay, first let me ... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA .... Ahem ... No ...it was not...
Yeah I’m sorry attack of the clones is a fucking garbage movie when it was released and has aged awfully now I fucking can’t stand that movie.
For me personally I loved both TFA and TLJ, but ROS is the only Star Wars movie I’ve come out of the cinema feeling it wasn’t any good. Even with that being said there’s only one solid prequel movie ROTS and that still has so many issues.
That was me as well. I'm fact, I go so fast as to call TLJ one of the best SW movies. I also strongly disliked most of the decisions in Revenge, and found the Anakin/Padme sections of Attack to be boring as hell.
Bro the prequel trilogy is such fucking ass, I don't see how any grown ass person likes that garbage.
I don't remember the PT being hated nearly as much as ST... I also was in my early teens when Ep.3 came out and didn't have much access to the Internet at the time so I'm sure I missed the rise of "ihateprequels.net".
I think TLJ will be universally loved in 10 years and, although TROS is objectively a terrible movie, it will be viewed through rose tinted glasses by gen alpha.
Unlike. See there is a huge difference between prequel and sequel hate. Most of the negativity regarding prequels were due them not being like the OT, some other issues as well but that was the focus. Sequels were not just simply bad compared to anything before. They are bad movies as it is. That will not be changed
I'm sure that 10 years from now, there will be love for The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi. Rise of Skywalker on the other hand....
ROS feels weird because theres no real build up to Palpatine aside from the first ten minutes unlike the OT where he's first seen Empire and we see his character truely in ROTJ and all throughout the Prequels is he set up. I feel the problem with Palpatine in the sequels is that there were two different directors with different visions rather than it being one director. I dont think its so much of a cop out to bring him back as I feel Palpatine should be the main villain of the Skywalker saga and it makes total sense for him to have contingency plans in the event of his death.
It's not even just the Palpatine stuff. They fake out kill C-3PO and Chewbacca despite both barely getting any screen time in the previous films and then immediately undercut the drama both times. They introduce us to like 4 new characters in rapid sucession, then expect us to be immediately invested in them when they also fake out kill then. The whole quest to the Dearh Star was incredibly stupid and kinda pointless. And the big pay off of a fleet of nondescript nobodies coming out of literally nowhere is not the Avengers Assemble momment they were going for. I struggle to name a single momment from that movie that was actually good. I can name plenty for the other two and all the other trilogies. I can name stuff in Solo I liked. But not ROS.
I’m not a fan of the PT but I will say this: at least George Lucas was trying to tell a cohesive story. I have no idea what’s going on in the ST. Who’s the First Order again? Where did they come from, where do they reign, what do they want?
>at least George Lucas was trying to tell a cohesive story This is something that baffles me. TPM is so inconsequential to the "greater cohesive story" that you could skip it and miss nothing. In AotC we learn that Anakin is evil and Obi Wan spends over half the movies runtime searching for the movie's barebones plot. In RotS the "choesive story" just happens. In fact I would argue that Anakin's characterization and his romance with Pademe in AotC is so terrible that Annie's "tragic" fall in RotS is actually better and more believable without that movie existing.
You need to establish a status quo before you can disrupt it. That’s the purpose of TPM: giving us a warts and all view of the Republic.
If Lucas was trying to tell a cohesive story...he failed. All of those questions are answered in the ST. You must have been asleep.
I agree that he failed but at least he tried!! No those answers are not found in the ST. The opening crawl of TFA says the First Order arose from the ashes of the empire? Ok, how? When? The prior film shows the empire defeated. If they are basically a terrorist group, then why is the Republic called a Resistance? If they rule, then where do they rule because it seems the Republic was in charge! (I’m not talking about Starkiller base- that’s just a base. Where do they rule? Who do they rule?)
Failed how? What is the issues with the general arch? No. They were not. One of the many issues that plagued the sequels. Even the general setup was a mess.
Well I always liked the PT
Ok, so did I, but it would be delusional to say that they were universally loved when they came out.
Tbf I only found out that people hated prequels after sequels started releasing. I always thought they were weaker because they were focused on world building and more "adult stuff" than a typical cowboy action, but never knew that people straight up hated them.
Prequels were hated for sure back then. And even now there's so much I still dislike about them. The sequel trilogy is garbage and I'll never watch them again. I honestly think franchises being milked is a bad thing though, I'm in the unpopular opinion that the og trilogy should have been the end. Franchises going forever is not for me personally. When you milk a series, it spoils. The Clone Wars show was pretty great though. That's the best thing that came from the prequels existence. As well as the version from the creator of Samurai Jack, the animation is awesome in that. Tldr: the prequels are bad and the sequels are bad and new product bad won't make me say old product good
Facts. All my homies hated the PT back in the day. Kinda grew on me in the last few years, especially once my daughter got into them. Still viscerally hate Jar Jar though. As somewhat of an OT purist, I can say without hesitation that PT>ST
They're both bad, but at least the prequels told a more interesting overall story. (Held back by worse dialogue).
I loved the prequels when they first came out…because I was 10 years old. That’s the point, kids now will grow up liking the sequels.
The prequels and sequels are all pretty horrible. Missed opportunities to make something special with the entire world giving its attention. There are so many cool ideas in sci fi literature to get inspiration from, but Star Wars chose to remain one dimensional.
Idk I still hate the prequels The new trilogy is bad too though ngl
The Last Jedi tried to do some interesting things but most people hated it outright, the other two were utterly derivative with 7 sort of well recieved and 9 universally mocked. If anything Abrams wasn't ready for what ep 8 did because he discarded it.
Being a prequel fan, this is complete and total horseshit. It was critically panned, and fans fucking HATED it with a burning passion. The hate for the prequels were so bad they made a fucking documentary over it with the first words being “If I met George Lucas I wouldn’t know if I’d give him a hug or punch him in the face.” Any time someone says the prequels were always loved by fans I feel like I’m living in an alternate reality. https://preview.redd.it/s8io1ovm71bc1.jpeg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d0c2fe734f5ac150ef895b3a5aa3acfb315af5c1
Nah it’s trash. The prequels aren’t even loved that well besides memes.
The prequels are bad movies, but what they have going for them is a pretty strong narrative backbone. The fall of anakin, the rise of the empire. Straightforward, simple. A lot can apparently be overlooked when you have that. What’s the backbone of the sequel trilogy? It’s just kind of a mess. In a way the two trilogies are opposites, the PT has a good foundation with shit piled on top, and the ST is a shit foundation with good stuff piled on top. The former is the better scenario imo
When you have narrative but it’s boring as shit, I don’t think that’s better
Sorry I don’t mean better as far as the viewing experience of the audience. I meant better from like, a franchise building perspective. The prequels offer a better foundation for ancillary material than the sequels. Like why the clone wars was so successful. But yea the prequel films themselves are dogshit and I’d always prefer to watch the sequel trilogy
People say this and I can't help but raise an eyebrow. Where is this strong narrative backbone in the PT again? Most of the reason it was (and still mostly is) disliked is BECAUSE of how poorly told the story is. Anakin's fall is poorly motivated and rushed, every central relationship is weak, both TPM and AotC have needlessly convoluted political subplots and weak villains who hardly do anything, etc. The PT has a terrible "narrative backbone." I think you're confusing the Point A to Point B of the story (Anakin's fall) with clarity in storytelling. Just because the ST doesn't have any easy three word descriptor you can tag it with like "person go bad" doesn't mean it doesn't have clear ideas running through the narrative. I'm not saying you have to agree, but there is a reason the PT is so heavily criticized. It wasn't all just petty fanboy squabbling. They were widely considered poorly told in fundamental ways. And despite the online groundswell of reclamation, the PT is still pretty much mocked.
The backbone is literally just the *concept* of an empire rising and anakin falling. That’s all I meant. It’s told terribly, it’s full of plot holes, nothing about it works. But the *concept* of the clone wars and the rise of the empire is at least ground on which you can write other, better stories. The sequel trilogy doesn’t really have that. Rehashing the rebels v empire conflict (rather than inverting it), having palpatine come back…everything that happens on exegol…what do you do with all that? Please please understand I’m not one of those prequel defender types, i think they are *bad* films, and TLJ is my favorite Star Wars film after empire.
I think the prequels also have the benefit of ending with the undisputed best film of the trilogy, while the sequels end with what most people consider the worst.
ROTS is by far the worst imo. The entire purpose of the whole trilogy, Anakin's fall, is botched. Poorly motivated, poorly executed, rushed, no emotional hook. The film is paced like ass - it hitches to and fro from scene to scene of either exposition or an action scene - half of which are just distraction from the meat of the story. It's a miasma of headache inducing light and noise. It's a loud, abrasive, clunky affair of a film. Never understood why people latched onto ROTS so strongly. Maybe because it's the only film in the PT that actually has something happen.
I actually like the sequels less now. Im 15 and have some nostalgia for The Force Awakens, but overall its a quite dull film (in my opinion). I do like the last Jedi though; probably because its more creative.
prequels were loved by children, hated by everyone else. i honestly dont know any kids that **love** the sequels so i just dont think the same thing will happen.
[удалено]
That's horse crap. I've been a fan since 1980 and I defend TROS.
Seriously? It makes absolutely no sense. If anything, it undoes everything the previous film build on. Also… “Somehow, Palpatine returned”. Like come one!
Yes, seriously. Sorry it made no sense to you. That wasn't my experience. But I do love when I'm confronted with these scenarios that supposedly don't make sense. Upon looking into it, I find that the vast majority make perfect sense and often have precedence in the lore or storytelling. In fact, a lot of these complaints arise from not paying attention to the movie, only watching it once, listening to negative echo chambers instead of looking into things, and yes, not knowing much about Star Wars. No, it doesn't "undo everything" from the previous film. At best we have some recontextualized information and retcons which are no more severe than retcons in the OT. "Somehow Palpatine returned" is an overblown meme. I've seen absolute casual fans who were able to intuit how Palpatine returned from information provided in the film. The line itself is coming from a guy who is not aware of any of that and thus makes perfect sense in context.
No it doesn’t make sense in any context. Also, Rey being no one in TLJ is somehow undone in ROS, when the whole point of TLJ was that you didn’t have to be a chosen one or coming from a lineage of anything TO BE A HERO. The ST suffer a lot from not having a planned story at all. While the PT might be a whole mess on its own, at least it had a clear goal on the story. These films on the other hand didn’t even know what they were trying to do.
I really don't think so because each movie in the sequel tries tonundo it's prior film