Poll of the Day > I watched Star Wars TLJ on home video last night

(+) Yeah! (+)

It's really not that bad.

The only super poor scene is the Fin and Rose part where they are about to be executed in front of hundreds of stormtroopers and then the ship gets wrecked and there's only a couple of troopers laying there. And there's the lame fight with Phasma, plus BB8 going Rambo. The whole thing is janky and ridiculous.
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As someone who likes TLJ, I can agree with your complaints about that part actually being bad.

Phasma is still woefully underutilized.
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Some deep denial going on in this topic.
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It isnt that bad heres a list of all the parts of it that suck
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Give it time.

When I left the theater, I thought "meh, it was okay".

A few days later I was like "actually, these parts really bugged me".

Several months later, and my opinion now is "wow, fuck that movie".
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It literally killed star wars for me, I literally called the police after leaving the theatre and said I had just witnessed a murder I was so appalled, George Lucas is literally spinning in his grave right now
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Its my third favorite Star Wars movie. Maybe even second favorite.
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Andromicus posted...

George Lucas is literally spinning in his grave right now

#hesnotdead

MrMelodramatic posted...

Its my third favorite Star Wars movie

Mine, too. I have a couple issues with it, but it's still a fantastic movie.
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The movie gets worse the more you think about it

It was kind of boring overall, with what should be high octane action sequences falling completely flat.

It subverted tropes just to subvert them instead of for good reason

It also killed a bunch of possible directions the story could have gone and didn't meaningfully establish where the story is going. They haven't established an interesting threat.

Didn't hate the movie. Didn't love it either. Was a solid C+. The only part that made me cringe was the stuff in the casino, which let's be honest, was prequel level bad. Rest of the movie was ok to fine, ok?

It was easily the worst Star Wars movie
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I saw it in the theater so it wasn't my first viewing. Overall I do like the movie.

My favorite scenes are the Skywalker ones. His I don't give a shit anymore attitude is the perfect fit for a bloated and ailing franchise. It made it fun for people that weren't expecting anything overly serious and don't care if thier nostalgia is trampled upon.
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papercup posted...

It was easily the worst Star Wars movie

really? you feel that way even moreso than the prequels?

I liked it well enough. I've seen it twice so far, though none since it left theatres, dont really see my opinion changing much over time though.

Part where they go down to the planet to get the hacker was pretty boring too.

And finding Luke was pretty boring, the training was boring and rei just ended up training herself, you know since shes jesus.

Then they had the whole stupid plot where that random ass pink haired lady came out of nowhere and kept her plans to sacrifice herself so that they could have the whole stupid "mansplaining" scene.

There is one thing good with this movie though.
It made the prequels look not as bad anymore.

Seriously ever since I saw The Last Jedi, it has made me start thinking maybe the prequels weren't as bad after all.

Revenge of the Sith is still the closest of being as good as the original trilogy out of all the newer Star Wars movies.
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Firewood18 posted...

The only super poor scene is the Finn and Rose part

I'd agree with this, in the sense that literally every part that has Finn and Rose in it is super poor.

Except then I'd also have to throw in most of the Poe scenes, the Leia scenes, the Holdo scenes, and probably a few more I'm not remembering. I'd also throw in literally everything related to Benicio del Toro, but I don't think he ever has a moment outside of Finn/Rose scenes, so that's already implied.

There ARE interesting moments and elements in the Luke/Rey/Kylo/Snoke parts, and I'm not throwing tantrums over Luke being bitter and old (if anything, I kind of like that concept more than I ever would have him just being Obi-Wan v2.0), but even those aren't handled quite as well as they could have been (mainly because those scenes always feel a bit rushed, to make room for all the other hot garbage).

In a more meta sense, it's also flawed in the fact that they've openly admitted they're just making all of this shit up as they go along, so there's no real plan in mind for future story beats. Which is why some of the plot feels so disjointed and awkward (and will likely do so in the next movie as well). It feels like the whole mess could have been much better if they'd come up with specific answers and background for important characters in advance, then trickled that out through the movies, rather than trying to fill in the gaps as they go without a single unified vision.

In a way, it almost feels like they looked at everything the Marvel movies have been doing right, then deliberately did the opposite.


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Also Kylo Rens goal to destroy everything old is a not so subliminal joke. It's like we've got to put this severely beaten dead horse to rest by any means necessary.
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I enjoyed the movie. It sits comfortably in the middle of the pack for Star Wars for me - not as good as the OT or Rogue One, better than TFA, and miles ahead of the prequels.

The sudden absence of troopers during the hyperspace attack was definitely jarring. Beyond that I still say the worst scene in the film is the opening battle - the conversation between Poe and Hux is just cringey bad, an awesome gigantic super-ship gets taken out by a single bomber, and the most interesting First Order character we've yet seen in Captain Cannady gets killed off five minutes after his introduction. Phasma was better used in this one, but I still would have liked to see more of her.

On the upside, I thought DJ (the codebreaker) was awesome, the visuals were fantastic, Crait was one of the most creative planets in the entire saga, Mark Hamill absolutely nailed old-and-jaded Luke, and I actually liked the way the story was constantly subverting expectations. It made Ren's overtures to Rey after Snoke's death actually somewhat compelling; in any other movie, you'd instantly know what was going to happen, but so many conventions had been ignored at that point it was by no means a given what Rey was going to do.
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Aculo posted...

papercup posted...

It was easily the worst Star Wars movie

really? you feel that way even moreso than the prequels?

Yes. The prequels are bad but at least they're watchable, in like a train wreck watchable kind of way. TLJ is just a flaming pile of shit.
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darkknight109 posted...

On the upside, I thought DJ (the codebreaker) was awesome

I found him to be the absolute worst character in the history of the franchise.

Yes, given the choice, I would easily take characters like Jar-Jar or fat 1950s space diner asshole over Benicio del Toro's over-affected and blatantly not giving a single shit performance of an entirely pointless character.

I like the fact that he betrays them in the end, but since it was a pointless moment that was the culmination of an entirely unnecessary and unwanted sideplot, it doesn't really redeem it.


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Im so glad they brought back all of our favorite characters just to make them losers and then kill them! /s

Fuck the Last Jedi and fuck Rian Johnson.
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pionear posted...

#hesnotdead

He's a walking zombie. Look how sad he was when he posed for the picture with Mickey after selling Star Wars.

Aculo posted...

really? you feel that way even moreso than the prequels?

George Lucas was involved for those so that automatically makes them better. Even shit like Jar Jar Binks.
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Revelation34 posted...

Look how sad he was when he posed for the picture with Mickey after selling Star Wars.

He's looked like that since the early 1990s.


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papercup posted...

Aculo posted...

papercup posted...

It was easily the worst Star Wars movie

really? you feel that way even moreso than the prequels?

Yes. The prequels are bad but at least they're watchable, in like a train wreck watchable kind of way. TLJ is just a flaming pile of shit.

I don't know how anyone can say that Revenge of the Sith and especially Attack of the Clones are watchable. The acting is so, so bad in both and the pacing is just wretched. And for AotC, it doesn't so much have leaps of logic in its story so much as no logic at all. The story is an incoherent mess, characters do things that make no sense, and the "masterful machinations" that underpin the plot could be resolve in about three minutes if anyone on either side of the conflict had more than two brain cells to bang together.

Say what you will about TLJ, but it will never plumb the depths that the prequels reached.

Revelation34 posted...

George Lucas was involved for those so that automatically makes them better.

George Lucas directed precisely one good movie and two mediocre ones. One look at his filmography demonstrates exactly how much the original Star Wars films were the results of other people taking his good ideas and refining out the dross (in particular his ex-wife, Marcia Lucas, who line-edited the original films and has been credited by multiple cast members for being a huge part of why Star Wars is as popular as it is).
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papercup posted...

Aculo posted...

papercup posted...

It was easily the worst Star Wars movie

really? you feel that way even moreso than the prequels?

Yes. The prequels are bad but at least they're watchable, in like a train wreck watchable kind of way. TLJ is just a flaming pile of shit.

there's at least something to them that makes them likable. yeah they're flawed as fuck but in a saturday morning cartoon kind of way. lucas is a crazy idiot but he at least had a vision and put it together coherently even if parts of it were batshit insane.

disney got ahold of it and everything just kind of became cold and formulaic, and so hellbent on breaking away from what made lucas's movies bad that they forgot what made them interesting.
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Nade Duck posted...

lucas is a crazy idiot but he at least had a vision and put it together coherently

I would argue that the only vision Lucas has really had for Star Wars since 1980 or so is how many unique-looking characters he can cram into each movie to sell toys of, since merchandising was always where he made most of his money.

It's part of why so many newer characters are so underdeveloped and pointless - 1970s Lucas was actually trying to tell a story (even if 90% of his ideas for it were stolen from other movies and TV shows he'd seen before), but post-success Lucas was basically far more concerned about look and appeal than minor things like characterization and likeable personalities.

It probably also ties in to why he spends most of his time worrying about CGI sequences and how things look than he does whether or not those things actually make sense or matter in the larger scheme of things. After all, the depth of Padme's character doesn't sell toys, but the fact that she wears 17 different outfits in a single movie means you can make 17 different figures! And it's way more important to shove dozens of characters into minor background cameos than it is to focus on a few major characters and develop them.

For all his talk about Star Wars being his baby or how he had a grand vision for it, he's just bullshitting like he's done in every interview for the last 40 years. Too many people spent too many years telling him how much a genius he was, and he stared believing it. So now he goes out of his way to play up to that idea when talking about something he cared about once in the mid-1970s, and which has been a merchandising machine for him ever since.

(It is kind of telling that so many ideas he had for the prequels - as well as his proposed ideas for what he would have done with the sequels - were ideas that were in his original script for Star Wars, but which were cut out because everyone he showed them to told him they were terrible. He's just recyling old shit because he doesn't really care enough to really think about it anymore (and because he's now deluded himself into believing he's a genius, so all of his ideas are clearly the best ideas, no matter what other award-winning director friends told him in the 1970s). This is also why it took him years to write the scripts for the first movie, but by the time of the prequels, he'd basically write the scripts in about a week. It's easy to write fast when you don't really give a shit about what you're writing, and are just referencing stuff you came up with 25 years ago anyway.

(Incidentally, rampant ego and self-delusion is also why he badgered everyone involved in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull to go with his idea of magic aliens in spite of the fact that literally everyone else involved thought it was a terrible idea. Because George Lucas the Supergenius is clearly incapable of having bad ideas, so he just threw tantrums until everyone else gave up and let him do it just to shut him up.)

The Sequels under Disney certainly could have been better than they are, but sequels from Lucas probably would have been even worse.


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It was an awful movie that destroyed Star Wars. Your opinion is moot from here on out.
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ParanoidObsessive posted...

I would argue that the only vision Lucas has really had for Star Wars since 1980 or so is how many unique-looking characters he can cram into each movie to sell toys of, since merchandising was always where he made most of his money.

It's part of why so many newer characters are so underdeveloped and pointless - 1970s Lucas was actually trying to tell a story (even if 90% of his ideas for it were stolen from other movies and TV shows he'd seen before), but post-success Lucas was basically far more concerned about look and appeal than minor things like characterization and likeable personalities.

It probably also ties in to why he spends most of his time worrying about CGI sequences and how things look than he does whether or not those things actually make sense or matter in the larger scheme of things. After all, the depth of Padme's character doesn't sell toys, but the fact that she wears 17 different outfits in a single movie means you can make 17 different figures! And it's way more important to shove dozens of characters into minor background cameos than it is to focus on a few major characters and develop them.

For all his talk about Star Wars being his baby or how he had a grand vision for it, he's just bullshitting like he's done in every interview for the last 40 years. Too many people spent too many years telling him how much a genius he was, and he stared believing it. So now he goes out of his way to play up to that idea when talking about something he cared about once in the mid-1970s, and which has been a merchandising machine for him ever since.

(It is kind of telling that so many ideas he had for the prequels - as well as his proposed ideas for what he would have done with the sequels - were ideas that were in his original script for Star Wars, but which were cut out because everyone he showed them to told him they were terrible. He's just recyling old shit because he doesn't really care enough to really think about it anymore (and because he's now deluded himself into believing he's a genius, so all of his ideas are clearly the best ideas, no matter what other award-winning director friends told him in the 1970s). This is also why it took him years to write the scripts for the first movie, but by the time of the prequels, he'd basically write the scripts in about a week. It's easy to write fast when you don't really give a shit about what you're writing, and are just referencing stuff you came up with 25 years ago anyway.

(Incidentally, rampant ego and self-delusion is also why he badgered everyone involved in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull to go with his idea of magic aliens in spite of the fact that literally everyone else involved thought it was a terrible idea. Because George Lucas the Supergenius is clearly incapable of having bad ideas, so he just threw tantrums until everyone else gave up and let him do it just to shut him up.)

The Sequels under Disney certainly could have been better than they are, but sequels from Lucas probably would have been even worse.

I like how everything you post is an opinion yet claim it as fact.
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Revelation34 posted...

I like how everything you post is an opinion yet claim it as fact.

I like how I've seen you try and shit on my posts in other topics in the past, yet I've never once seen you post anything worth reading.


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Just got done trying to watch this piece of shit. I made it to the hyperspace charge and said fuck this.

What a piece of garbage. I'd rather watch jar jar piss on oni wand grave for 2 hours.

rey and finn are some of the most awkward actors ive ever seen. horrible movies

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Revelation34 posted...

I like how everything you post is an opinion yet claim it as fact.

I like how I've seen you try and shit on my posts in other topics in the past, yet I've never once seen you post anything worth reading.

GOT EM!
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Noop_Noop posted...

What a piece of garbage. I'd rather watch jar jar piss on oni wand grave for 2 hours.

On a side note, I'd LOVE to watch this, ok?

Andromicus posted...

It literally killed star wars for me, I literally called the police after leaving the theatre and said I had just witnessed a murder I was so appalled, George Lucas is literally spinning in his grave right now

The misuse of the word "literally" and claiming that George Lucas is dead bugs me.
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Leia has auto-self-res, but Luke dies because he made an illusion.
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Nade Duck posted...

lucas is a crazy idiot but he at least had a vision and put it together coherently even if parts of it were batshit insane.

Coherent? Really?

Let me see if I can rehash the plot of AotC. Courtesy spoiler for a 15 year old film.

The movie starts with an attack on Padme's life done by blowing up her shuttle. This fails and we're treated to a scene of Jango Fett talking with his partner, Zam, and deciding they need to do something subtle, because they are terrible at their jobs. Notably, this is the opposite way things are supposed to go. You try subtle first, when no one is expecting anything; if you screw that up and suddenly your target is wise to the fact that you're making an attempt on your life, then you ditch subtlety and go for whatever gets the job done. Anyways, you'd figure Fett - baddest bounty hunter in the galaxy and all - would be handling this case personally, given that an assassination contract on a galactic senator is kind of a high profile job. Instead, he sub-contracts to Zam, who sub-sub-contracts to her droid.

Meanwhile, on the other side, a sensible plan would have been to put Padme in a secret location under heavy guard; instead, she gets a couple of Jedi bodyguards and just continues to stay in her apartment with the large bay window. And when one of those bodyguards turns out to be a wangsty horndog, she makes the tremendously stupid move to turn off the security cameras (and, since the Jedi are apparently just as dumb as she is, they don't immediately knock on her door, tell her to turn the cameras back on and explain that it's for her own safety).

Anyways, the droid predictably arrives and easily gains access to Padme's bedroom. At this point it should have been game over, since a bomb or a blaster or even a simple knife could have sealed the deal at that point with the Jedi none the wiser. However, between two of the most feared hunters in the galaxy, Fett and Wessel managed to come up with the one assassination method that the Jedi can detect and thwart given its reliance on living creatures. The plot is foiled and Obi-Wan then makes the bizarre decision to leap onto a flying droid, rendering himself helpless and unable to reach his weapon in the process, without having any idea of whether the droid can support his weight or has any onboard weapons it could use to eliminate him. Fortunately, instead of dropping him, carrying him off into the night, or self-destructing, this top-secret killing droid obediently flies directly back to its owner. Anakin runs off in pursuit, despite the fact that he is now leaving Padme completely unguarded in the event the assassins have a Plan B (fortunately they don't, since they're just as bad at their jobs as he is).

A short while later, Obi-Wan and Anakin track Zam to a bar. Instead of using her shapeshifter abilities to get the fuck out of dodge (abilities that were brought up, then never actually utilized in a particularly sloppy moment of bad storytelling), Zam decides the smart thing to do is to try and ambush the Jedi, ignoring the fact that she had absolutely no reason to do so (they weren't her target and the fact they saw her didn't in any way incriminate her, since - again - she's a shapeshifter). The first cycle of idiocy is brought to a close when Fett intervenes to silence Zam and prevent her from talking, but instead of using a blaster or a rocket or any one of the weapons in his considerable arsenal to do the job, he uses the one weapon that can be traced back to his current base of operations, a planet he and his employer had spent considerable time and effort keeping hidden from the Jedi. He then lets the Jedi get a good look at his distinctive armour and then flies away and the Jedi are content to just watch him go (and the idea that he could use the opportunity to kill the unguarded Padme never occurs to any of the three of them).
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The Jedi spend some time talking about how horribly out of control Anakin's emotions are, then immediately send him to spend some quality alone-time with the senator whose leg he's busy humping. They have apparently decided that the safest place for her, instead of a Republic bunker or distant Jedi monastery somewhere, is her old vacation home on her native planet. Fortunately the assassins, having been foiled twice, either decide to just give up or are too stupid to think to look for her there.

Meanwhile, Detective Obi-Wan is on the Case of the Missing Planet! After a bit of sleuthing he discovers Jango on Kamino; there he uncovers a secret army, bought by someone impersonating a dead Jedi Master, paid for by unknown means, and built on a planet conspicuously deleted from the Jedi Archives. Now this, on its own, should be ringing every alarm bell in Obi-Wan's head, because it all points to someone with enormous influence and resources working at cross-purposes to the Republic and the Jedi. Yet instead of questioning the provenance of this alarmingly convenient army, the Jedi eventually just claim ownership of it and shrug their collective shoulders. This hints to incompetence on a truly staggering scale; had anyone bothered to do any digging into who ordered these clones and for what purpose, they might have looked into how they were being made and trained and discovered that each of them has a Jedi kill-code hardwired into their brains. Whoops!

So Jango runs, Obi-Wan tracks him and he flees to... Geonosis. Why? What on Earth was he doing there? He seems to do this for no reason other than the fact that that's where the plot needed to go next, so that's where he led Obi-Wan to. This is made all the more jarring when Obi-Wan lands on the surface and somehow runs into Count Dooku and company with Jango Fett notably not among them.

So yeah... this movie is an absolute mess. Even noting TLJ's occasional dalliances with logical gaps, it is nowhere near as bad as this atrocity.
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I'm in the "it'll only get worse the more you think about it over time" crowd

- Even if Leia had The Force, there's no way she could've re-entered the ship without killing everyone by the hatch

- Poe would've been court martialed and removed from service completely after all the guilt-free deaths he caused at the start of the film

- The Finn Rose subplot had zero meaning, was way too long and their mission ended in failure.. plus if Finn kissed Rose instead of the other way around... MeToo.

- The script was just... lazy. You can't say one thing is impossible then reverse it to keep the story going (ie - There's no other way out of this cave.. oh wait, yeah there totally is) Its like Episode 7 when R2-D2 magically rebooted -_-

- Was Luke an illusion .. or...? Because I totally saw him hand over a solid object to Leia..

- Unnecessary shirt-less scene

It would easily be most inconsistent film of all time if not for Jurassic World .. yeesh
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JixHedgehog posted...

- Was Luke an illusion .. or...? Because I totally saw him hand over a solid object to Leia..

Of course he was an illusion. He had his old hairstyle from the flashbacks, he left no footprints when he walked in the salt-fields, and he never interacts with anyone. The "solid object" he hands to Leia (Han's dice) disappears when Kylo tries to hold it.
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JixHedgehog posted...

- Was Luke an illusion .. or...? Because I totally saw him hand over a solid object to Leia..

Better question is why was the illusion necessary if he was just going to end up dying of exhaustion anyway. Literally no reason for him not to have actually been there.
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faramir77 posted...

JixHedgehog posted...

- Was Luke an illusion .. or...? Because I totally saw him hand over a solid object to Leia..

Better question is why was the illusion necessary if he was just going to end up dying of exhaustion anyway. Literally no reason for him not to have actually been there.

He exiled himself on that planet. In doing that he probably destroyed whatever ship he used to get there so he had no way of returning.
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Home video? How retro!

Firewood18 posted...

It's really not that bad.

The only super poor scene is the Fin and Rose part where they are about to be executed in front of hundreds of stormtroopers and then the ship gets wrecked and there's only a couple of troopers laying there. And there's the lame fight with Phasma, plus BB8 going Rambo. The whole thing is janky and ridiculous.

Pretty much everything involving Finn & Rose was garbage. It was a long, nonsensical sidequest where the *only* result was fucking up the Resistance's escape plan and getting maybe three-quarters of the remaining forces killed. Then, when Finn was going to go out like a hero in a kamikaze attack -- something that I was starting to respect the character for -- it gets stopped

Other than Finn & Rose, I really liked TLJ. Even Poe -- who seemed kinda vanilla and dull in the first movie -- wound up being pretty cool. It was a pretty fun movie. Shame Carrie Fisher died because she could have brought a lot to the last movie if things continued in this direction.

pionear posted...

Andromicus posted...

George Lucas is literally spinning in his grave right now

#hesnotdead

He died of a broken heart after TFA came out.

Firewood18 posted...

My favorite scenes are the Skywalker ones. His I don't give a shit anymore attitude is the perfect fit for a bloated and ailing franchise. It made it fun for people that weren't expecting anything overly serious and don't care if thier nostalgia is trampled upon.

tbh, all I could hear was the Joker whenever he talked.

Firewood18 posted...

Also Kylo Rens goal to destroy everything old is a not so subliminal joke. It's like we've got to put this severely beaten dead horse to rest by any means necessary.

Kek. Hadn't thought of it like that.
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Terrible, terrible movie.
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AllstarSniper32 posted...

faramir77 posted...

JixHedgehog posted...

- Was Luke an illusion .. or...? Because I totally saw him hand over a solid object to Leia..

Better question is why was the illusion necessary if he was just going to end up dying of exhaustion anyway. Literally no reason for him not to have actually been there.

He exiled himself on that planet. In doing that he probably destroyed whatever ship he used to get there so he had no way of returning.

On one of the scenes during Rey's visit to the planet she looks down and sees his X-wing sunk into the sea. So yeah, that's what happened to it.
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AllstarSniper32 posted...

faramir77 posted...

JixHedgehog posted...

- Was Luke an illusion .. or...? Because I totally saw him hand over a solid object to Leia..

Better question is why was the illusion necessary if he was just going to end up dying of exhaustion anyway. Literally no reason for him not to have actually been there.

He exiled himself on that planet. In doing that he probably destroyed whatever ship he used to get there so he had no way of returning.

why not just superman through space to get there
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darkknight109 posted...

I enjoyed the movie. It sits comfortably in the middle of the pack for Star Wars for me - not as good as the OT or Rogue One, better than TFA, and miles ahead of the prequels.

I put literally everything ahead of TFA. TFA exists to replace TPM as the most disappointing SW movie.

darkknight109 posted...

I don't know how anyone can say that Revenge of the Sith and especially Attack of the Clones are watchable. The acting is so, so bad in both and the pacing is just wretched.

I know how anybody could put TFA over anything, yet here we are. 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. However, AotC and RotS have their nonsense spread out whereas TLJ concentrates it.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

The Sequels under Disney certainly could have been better than they are, but sequels from Lucas probably would have been even worse.

Worse than TFA? Doubtful.

faramir77 posted...

JixHedgehog posted...

- Was Luke an illusion .. or...? Because I totally saw him hand over a solid object to Leia..

Better question is why was the illusion necessary if he was just going to end up dying of exhaustion anyway. Literally no reason for him not to have actually been there.

At that point, there was no way that he'd get there on time, especially since his ship had been sitting overwater for years. Plus his illusion provided a better distraction since he would have otherwise died in seconds
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Movie sucked honestly. The force awakens was okay (dont like what they did to Han Solo), but the Last Jedi was just flat out dumb.

Would not watch again.
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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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