LogFAQs > #905777445

Zeus posted...

And AotC and RotS are watchable for the same reason as TLJ -- there are a lot of neat action sequences to balance out the garbage.

There aren't, though.

Hell, in AotC, there aren't even a lot of action sequences period, let alone neat ones.

There's the chase through Coruscant, which is a CGI-filled mess that has bullshit actions like people dropping 200 metres onto a speeding car with no apparent ill effects, or Obi-Wan magically catching Anakin's lightsaber and tucking it onto the seat next to him, where it neatly stays despite all the erratic manoeuvring he's doing. There's Obi-Wan vs. Jango Fett and the subsequent space battle, both of which were mostly forgettable (I'll admit the seismic charges were creative, even if they are totally ridiculousif you think too hard about why you would use a weapon with a 2D explosion) and the Geonosis battle at the end (parts of which were, admittedly, awesome - mostly anything that didn't include lightsabers). And don't even get me started on that pinball Yoda bullshit. Other than that, it's just people sitting and talking, standing and talking, walking and talking, and a romance plot that both takes up way too much screen time and is also cancer in screenplay form.

RotS has action sequences, but they're almost without exception terrible and half of them are pointless fluff. Coruscant looks like a Starfox game - at no point are we ever told who is winning, by how much, or why we should care. Every other space battle in the saga did a better job at actually having a narrative than this one. Kashyyyk is one of the worst looking battles in the series, once again we're given no indication of how the battle is going or what stakes are involved, and it just comes across as needless filler in a movie that was already trying stuff too many big moments into too short a runtime (the movie left concluding the Clone Wars, Anakin's fall, the purge of the Jedi, the march on the temple, Anakin and Obi-Wan's duel, the birth of the Skywalker twins, the rise of the Empire, Yoda and Obi-Wan's exiles, and Anakin getting the Vader suit all to the second half of a two hour movie; you could take half of those and you'd have more than enough to fill an entire film on their own). The movie had to shoehorn in Utapau to kill off yet-another-villain that the saga neither wanted nor needed (gotta sell those toys!); Order 66 was supposed to be a big tragedy but because the prequels treated the Jedi as a bureaucratic council of blithering idiots, most of whom were glorified extras, it felt flat and unemotional; Anakin's big fight with Obi-Wan seemed to do its best to try and stuff every "cool" fighting move into one action sequence (Lava surfing! Collapsing Buildings! Rope Swinging! Twirling Sabers!) and turned into a bloated mess; and Darth Vader's march on the Jedi temple - arguably the most hyped event of the entire prequel other than Anakin vs. Obi-Wan - was conducted almost entirely offscreen! That's unforgivable!

I'll never understand why RotS hold the distinction of "the good prequel" in the minds of so many people; it's better than AotC, but only because it would be difficult to be any worse. Phantom Menace basically wins the best prequel award by default, because in spite of having its own issues with flat characters and ridiculous leaps of logic, it's the only one of the three that doesn't have its head planted firmly in its own ass.
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