channel73 wrote: ↑2020-07-06 02:38pm
Meh... it's not like either of us can get useful statistics on this, so I'm willing to just agree to disagree here. I would only reassert my main complaint which is that for the standards of 1999 or 2002, a lot of stuff in the Prequels looks shitty compared to other movies of the time (like LoTR). I think Lucas was just WAY too overconfident in his CGI technology. A CGI character like Jar Jar for example just didn't look that good in 1999. By 2002, Gollum looked significantly more realistic. (Yes, I know Jar Jar is not always entirely CGI, and Gollum is motion-capture, but the point stands).
1999 to 2002 is a long time in CGI back then. CGI was improving at a crazy rate during that time. We went from Terminator 2 gooey CGI T-1000 in 1991 to Dinosaurs in 1995 to Jar Jar Binks in 1999. I don't think you can compare Gollum to Jar Jar Binks, because audiences in 1999 had no Gollum to compare it to.
And even the LOTR team had to re-do the design and animation of Gollum from Fellowship of the Rings to The Two Towers. Within a span of one year, technology has leaped massively forward.
Regardless, my main point is that Lucas used CGI in many places where it was simply unnecessary. Would you at least agree that in 2002 an actual actor in a uniform playing a Clone Trooper would at least look better up close than what we got with the CGI troopers? Even if you are only willing to admit it would be marginally better? That is just one example, but it demonstrates how Lucas was way too overconfident in his CGI tech, and the results weren't that great at the time and certainly haven't aged well, whereas older CGI (like the original Jurassic Park) appears to have aged better because it was used much more strategically.
I can only speak from my experience as a kid and a viewer back then. At that time I was completely impressed and wowed by the fact that CGI was so real that I couldn't tell the Clonetroopers were entirely CGI. You might not have been impressed, but I was. I think the younger we are when we watched the movies, the less issues we would have about the whole CGI thing. CGI was very cool to many kids back then, and no matter how bad some CGI can be, many kids were enjoying the hell out of it.
Kids have lower expectations than adults, and given that the target audience of Star Wars has always been the kids...I think that's fine.
Again, it doesn't matter that CGI has improved. I'm talking about the standards of late 90s/early 2000s. I recall most people thinking Jabba the Hutt looked like shit in the 1995 Special Edition even back in 1995, and the same for lots of stuff in the Prequels.
Have you seen the standards of late 90s and early 2000s CGI? Look at Ang Lee's Hulk movie. Those were Hollywood standards CGI back then, done by ILM.
The ones that tend to complain about poor CGI generally tends to be the older audience, the ones that saw the OT as kids.
The difference is 1930s King King had no choice due to technological limitations to portray Kong as a shitty looking stop-motion miniature. But in 2002, there was no reason Lucas was forced to use CGI to the extent he did, where literally every Clone Trooper is animated. There's even a shot where Jango Fett is CGI when he's just standing around. Like... why??
Because someone had to do it and push CGI boundaries? CGI improve because someone pushed the boundaries. Otherwise CGI will not improve. Lucas had always wanted to push boundaries since the first Star Wars movie. He is in the same vein as directors like James Cameron, who does the same thing in his filmmaking approach. There are directors like Chris Nolan that shuns CGI, but that's merely one approach. People like Chris Nolan still benefited from the advancement made in CGI done by other directors.
As for why the Clone Trooper armours is animated, I recall part of the issue is with making every Clone the exact same height. Which is possible, but it's going to make hiring extras more complicated for the production. In addition, I know the Prequels were made with a much smaller budget than your typical Hollywood blockbusters at the time. So not having to produce mass amount of Clone armour props is likely to have saved cost.
Lucas has always been finding ways to save cost on his production, because he is not part of a major studio. The Prequels were the most expensive indie films ever made, because they weren't backed by any major studio in the first place. So Lucas opting for the cheaper option will not surprise me.
There was certainly a wow factor for Jurassic Park, and some movies that followed... but I think the novelty had certainly begun to fade even by TPM. Again, there were early complaints about it, as I posted before. Personally, I remember being amazed by Jurassic Park and also by Gollum in LOTR, but I was never too impressed with the CGI in the Prequels. I remember the lightsaber battles being impressive at the time, but not really the CGI depicting landscapes or creatures. I guess TPM was certainly the best, but parts of TPM and AOTC really starts to look like a video game, especially during the Gungan Battle, the Battle of Geonosis and pretty much any time they show the Jedi Temple hallway. I did think Coruscant mostly looked awesome though, probably because CGI is better at depicting artificial structures (like buildings) than it is at depicting organic things.
At the time loads of smaller budget films and TV shows were trying to show off with their CGI as well. I recall watching the Power Rangers movie with utterly horrible CGI even by the standards of the time, and all I and many other kids can think of when we saw the CGI is "oh cool! It's CGI as opposed to costumes and miniatures!".
But looking back at the SDN threads about Ep 2 when it was released, people were saying they were awed by the Geonosis battle. The novelty factor only starts to wear off when people started rewatching the prequels on DVDs and etc. And the advent of HD really shows some of the flaws of the CGI, because things were not rendered in such high of a definition, especially for Ep 2.
The Sequels failed miserably in China yes, but they also suck in general. And in other Asian countries like South Korea, The Force Awakens did quite well, even if it wasn't the number one at the box office. Yes, I know South Korea is way more in touch with Western culture, but the point is the story in East Asia is way more complicated than "nobody in East Asia cares about Star Wars".
It's more complicated, but the fact of the matter is Star Wars and the OT was a cultural event in the West the way it wasn't elsewhere. Some people like me did grow up caring about Star Wars, but it is not popular the way it is in the West. I'm now living in a Western country, and all I can say is the way people in the West like Star Wars is the way East Asian like anime.
In the West, liking anime is a relatively niche thing despite its increasing popularity in recent years. Whereas everyone grew up with anime in East Asia. Liking Star Wars in the West is "normal" the way East Asian likes anime.
And to match your personal anecdote, I can tell you anecdotes of my close friends who grew up in the Middle East, and saw the OT for the first time as adults after they emigrated to the United States, and absolutely loved Star Wars. And again, we don't have any actual real statistical data here that we can pull to demonstrate some percentage of non-Western immigrants who saw Star Wars as adults and embraced it, so it's completely useless for you to speculate about people's underlying motives when they say "I think the OT did X better than the Prequels". You're just assuming nostalgia is always the dominant factor in any statement, and making baseless generalizations abstracted behind lame Internet phrases like "fan bros".
I am a non-western immigrant who now lives in the West. I love Star Wars. But I am very aware that I am the exception and not the norm. In fact, it's more common amongst people from East Asia who moved to the West to like Star Wars than the people who didn't migrate to the West. Most of the time, the people who do move to the West are the people who are far more likely to enjoy various aspects of Western culture anyway.
Bullshit. They wasted an entire movie depicting events that didn't even involve Anakin at all. There was no need to waste a movie seeing Anakin as a little kid and learning how Palpatine got a stupid promotion.
Because the fall of Anakin was not the only story Lucas wanted to tell. He very clearly wanted to tell the story about the fall of the Old Republic as well. Basically the prequels wanted to tell the kind of stories Game of Thrones tried to tell, but only in 3 movies as opposed to 8 seasons of TV.
It's jumping around perspective the way Game of Thrones shifted around people's perspective. Game of Thrones could do better than the prequels ( in the early seasons anyway) because it had a lot more time to jump around different characters to tell different stories. EP 1 only comes across as a waste to some people mostly because it simply couldn't be part of a long-running TV series the way Game of Thrones is.
Again this boils down to: "I can't imagine how it could have been done differently, therefore it couldn't have been different". Do you really have no imagination? Obviously, we could rewrite the story so that we don't need to have Anakin as a little kid, anymore than we needed to see Luke as a little kid.
I do think it might have been a mistake to made Anakin a young kid. But I think having Anakin as a young kid could have worked, in the same way you have the growth of the younger Stark kids from child to adult over the course of several seasons. If the prequels were say 7-8 movies long like the Harry Potter series, but with longer time gap between the movies, you can slowly see how Anakin grow from a child to an adult that eventually got corrupted and fell to the Dark Side.
But it would have required a stroke of luck to get a child actor that can mature into a strong adult actor and convey the fall from grace well. If Lucas lucked out and basically got his hands on a young Leonardo from the age of 10 and don't require good direction from the director to act well, it would have been a very successful gamble.
And my entire argument is the Prequels should have been primarily about Anakin's fall and his friendship with Obi Wan. I argue that Palpatine's rise to power should be very peripheral. I mean there's no reason to dwell on his backstory because he's basically just like Sauron: a stand-in for pure evil. We don't need another complex character here, we already have Anakin who should be very complex. You can disagree, obviously, but you can't argue it would be impossible to tell the story that way.
I disagree because the fall of the Republic is far too central to the overall story. We know that the old Republic's fall is closely connected to the rise of the Emperor and the fall of Anakin. This makes it hard to be a peripheral event. The story of the prequels isn't a story of LOTR. It isn't a simple quest of the good guys defeating the big evil wizard and everything will become nice and peaceful right after. The story of the prequels is more similar to Game of Thrones, in that it is a messy and complicated world where actions have consequences and are interconnected.
You cannot tell LOTR the way you tell GOT. It will make the story an utter mess and utterly destroy the central themes of the story. Similarly, trying to tell GOT the way you tell LOTR would leave out far too much information to stay invested in the world as a whole. Imagine GOT is told the way LOTR, focusing on a simple quest of Bran. By the time Bran returned back to the wall, audience will just be utterly confused and ask WTF happened during the time he was gone.
You are mixing up aping the OT political landscape with aping the OT aesthetic/story-telling style. They are totally different. I agree aping the OT political landscape was a really bad idea. It was so bad, I literally lost interest in TLJ during the opening crawl. But that is NOT the same thing as aping the OT story-telling style, i.e. a character-driven, action-adventure story. The Sequels could have been an OT-style character-driven adventure that included a conflict between the New Republic and some Imperial Remnant, where the good guys are not rebels but simply officials or soldiers of the New Republic.
What would you do with the OT cast? A very character-driven, action-adventure story will exclude the OT cast from most of the storytelling. Which is something not what the audience wanted. Have too much of the OT cast and you'll end up overshadowing the newer and younger characters. Have too little of them and you end up with grumpy OT-fans.
That's debatable. I think it's more like 45% setting, 55% characters/story. Honestly, that alone probably accounts for most of our disagreements. I mean, of course the setting is amazing - but in the OT the setting serves primarily to grab your interest so you can become attached to the characters and their struggles.
I think we have fundamentally different views about what makes Star Wars successful. To me, I see the setting as its main success, which is why you can make a big budget animation show about the Clone Wars and still be very successful amongst fans and new viewers. It's why you can create a comic-series set centuries after the OT and fans will still buy the comics.
It's also why the prequels, despite having a lot of issues with regards to character-development, still drew a legion of fans to the cinema and made a massive profit at the box office.
channel73 wrote: ↑2020-07-06 03:21pm
This is self-evidently wrong. Clearly it matters at least
slightly. Again, a bad special effect is a
flaw, just not usually a very significant flaw. Otherwise, there would be no reason to even bother spending millions of dollars on these movies when you could just record people reading their lines on an empty sound stage with a couple of cardboard props in the background. Obviously, VFX do matter - even if they matter
less than story/characters, and even if our standards for good VFX change over time.
I do agree though that bad CGI was among the
least significant problems with the Prequels - but the bad CGI kind of just compounded the other problems.
People accepted Kong in the 1930s despite the stop-animation and the puppets looking unrealistic.
Humans are such funny creatures. We are selfish about selflessness, yet we can love something so much that we can hate something.
Let's ignore the fact that people in the industry feels the CGI in the prequels is good enough to be nominated for an Oscar. Most of the complaints about bad CGI comes from fanboys, and not from the people in the industry nor from the causal audience that allowed the prequels to made a tidy profit. 
