emersonlakeandbalmer wrote:I'm assuming you support Raynor's rebuttal so I find it odd you'd be upset by someone slicing up an argument to address each point.
I do support Raynors rebuttal-- RLM is one of two people who has managed to improve my opinion of the Prequels due to how horrible his reviews are. The other was Mike Wong for the opposite reason.
However, there is a difference between slicing up an argument into its constituent points and slicing it up into its constituent
sentences, especially when you are arguing on a forum. The first allows you to go through an argument piece by piece,
and the pieces are relevant. When you do it by the sentences, you are just arbitrarily inflating the length of the post and making it a headache to read (for the same reason as the TL;DR effect, but worse IMO). You might notice that Raynor only quotes a select few statements by Plinkett that summarize what Plinkett has to say in that section of the review, rather than every word that comes out of his mouth. Its for the same reason: its already 108 pages long, it would do no good to make it longer.
Yes, the former can be misused and unnecessary too, and that's why I stopped using it in this thread. But the latter is almost never necessary and almost always hinders communication.
Now, as for your arguments:
1) That the Trade Federation could have been anyone.
Technically, yes. They could have, but I don't see how "greedy businessmen with a private army" is a particularly bad choice. Especially considering that Lucas wanted to inject a little modern political subtext-- politicians bowing to special interests and corruption? Hmm, that does sound a lot like the modern political atmosphere. Or at least like some interpretations of it, I won't argue if you have a different one. That's beyond the scope of this thread.
2) That the taxes as a plot device added unnecessary confusion to the movie.
It has been a while since I watched the movie, but I don't remember ever really having a problem with this. It sounds like people were confused because of Palpitine's behavior and language on the Senate floor. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that scene was pretty straightforward. No one liked Chancellor Valorum. Naboo didn't like him because he wouldn't stop the Trade Federation blockade, the Trade Federation didn't like him because he wouldn't repeal the taxes they were protesting or even come to a compromise. So when Palpitine got up to speak and call for a Vote of No Confidence, the various motivations of the different parties became of secondary interest to him so long as he could convince them they had a common enemy in Valorum-- consistent with his own motives and manipulative skillset. His language was chosen to appeal to as many people in that room as possible, even those people who were enemies otherwise.
3) Lucas had 30 years to work on this, and this was the best he could do?
I highly doubt he spent all of the time between 1983 and 1999 thinking about the Star Wars Saga. He produced many other movies between that time, like the Indiana Jones trilogy, and there is the special edition release to consider. By the way, those are the release dates between RotJ and TPM-- 16 years, not 30, and the script writing process for TPM obviously started quite a bit sooner than that.
4) What
is the story of TPM?
The actual story is... well, that's a little harder to define. Star Wars has an ensemble cast rather than one protagonist, which makes things more complicated by nature. You do have the rise of Palpitine, and as I already explained its not all that complicated-- Palpitine leveraged his way into power by playing off everyone's mutual enemy, Valorum. That
involved the Taxes, but they weren't of central importance like people think. You also have the story of Anakin; how he managed to escape slavery, became a hero and ultimately a Jedi. You have the story of how Obi Wan came to be in charge of Anakin and had to suffer the loss of his mentor. Padme's story of how she learned responsibility and independence. And so on. Now, we can debate how well the movie deals with these various threads, but that would be a very different conversation than debating how confusing the taxes and politicking were or weren't.
