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Is it time to accept Revenge of the Sith as "one of the good" SW films? SPOILERS

Of course it isn't, it is a terrible movie. Now it's time for the real question.


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That fight is the best thing about the entire pre-trilogy, though.

"OBI-WAN VS ANAKIN WAS THE BEST THO!"

giphy.gif


lol no

There are way more flaws with that fight than a zoomed, cropped, and looped GIF that highly exaggerates a single shot. Lazy gif posting doesn't really make for a solid argument, and in fact does the opposite.

Like, I agree with you, that fight really isn't good at all, I'm just saying to keep from doing it, because GAF does this constantly and its pretty self-invalidating, even if it's funny and people who agree may enjoy it.
 

Azuran

Banned
The Force Awakens sucking so hard made me appreciate the prequel trilogy a lot more and this is coming from someone who was already a fan of ROTS to begin with.

To me, TFA makes the prequels better in retrospect. TFA isn't a very good movie and if Lucas had never sold the franchise to Disney and had done TFA exactly as we have it, he and the movie would have been trashed for taking Han right back to his original self and undoing his character arc of the OT, breaking up the friendships between the big 3 from the ot, doing ANOTHER Vader (who completely misunderstands the person he idolizes), doing A THIRD DEATH STAR and completely redoing A New Hope. Everyone would say "See, Lucas only had one good idea ever, and he remade that idea with this ANH Remake"


TFA should not be given the 100s of passes it gets. It's such a safe, passable film that it's just there. But because it's the big new entry AFTER Lucas and it isn't awful, well it has all of the good will of society behind it and the movie gets way more praise than it is deserving of.

If Lucas had made TFA, it would be trashed as much as the prequels. And that's not right. TFA needs to be called out more on being a merely serviceable film.

You perfectly said everything I was going to say.

I believe people will look back at TFA as one of the worst Star Wars films ever made once the honeymoon period is finally over. Just another mediocre, by the book, Hollywood "epic" that didn't differentiate itself from the rest. It such a shame considering the Star Wars universe is so vast and yet they happily rehash the same story we have seen over and over again.
 

Baleoce

Member
Handwaving the weakest part of the entire plot as a minor gripe here.

To go further in selling the tragedy of Anakin turning to the dark side would have required the following:
1. Setting up a believable romance between him and Padme, so his turn and her reaction to that turn would actually be emotionally resonant instead of stupid and unintentionally hilarious.
2. Setting up a believable friendship between Anakin and Obi-Wan, so that the duel and Obi-Wan's desperate attempts to win back his friends actually felt like they had stakes behind them.
3. Setting up Anakin as an actually brilliant Jedi instead of a whiny juvenile turdling with zero patience throughout all 3 films, so that the loss of a valuable asset to the resistance to Palpatine's schemes registers as a believable surprise to the rest of the cast.
4. Making any of Palpatine's machinations remotely believable, so that he stands as a truly formidable adversary who could turn a noble jedi dark instead of just a lucky idiot whose major success comes at the failings of an inept Jedi Council and Obi-Wan simply being away and unable to interfere.

They would have had to set up all of that in the previous two films, but they couldn't because Lucas just had to start his prequels with Anakin as a stupid fucking kid for the entire first movie, blowing half of the entire screentime he could have had to establish the start of a character arc for Darth Vader. And slopping together the relationships Anakin needed to sever to really sell that turn to the Dark side in Clones was so hamfisted and dull that there was no salvaging it in time for the third film. You laugh, and laugh HARD at Vader's 'NOOOOOOOOOOOO' because of how ice cold, shitty and unearned that black hole of an emotional outburst is.

Spot on.
 

norm9

Member
The idea that it's ANH 2.0 is greatly exaggerated also. I won't deny that Starkiller base is the most egregious example but nothing in TFA outside of that is bad or nearly as offensive as the prequels.

It's literally A New Hope with a new coat of paint.
 

Sephzilla

Member
To me, TFA makes the prequels better in retrospect. TFA isn't a very good movie and if Lucas had never sold the franchise to Disney and had done TFA exactly as we have it, he and the movie would have been trashed for taking Han right back to his original self and undoing his character arc of the OT, breaking up the friendships between the big 3 from the ot, doing ANOTHER Vader (who completely misunderstands the person he idolizes), doing A THIRD DEATH STAR and completely redoing A New Hope. Everyone would say "See, Lucas only had one good idea ever, and he remade that idea with this ANH Remake"


TFA should not be given the 100s of passes it gets. It's such a safe, passable film that it's just there. But because it's the big new entry AFTER Lucas and it isn't awful, well it has all of the good will of society behind it and the movie gets way more praise than it is deserving of.

If Lucas had made TFA, it would be trashed as much as the prequels. And that's not right. TFA needs to be called out more on being a merely serviceable film.
The Force Awakens is what I wanted out of the prequels. Movies that invoke the same feelings and fun as the original trilogy and a character who's torn between the light and the dark.
 

BinaryPork2737

Unconfirmed Member
Speaking of General Grievous, he was a huge disappointment in RotS. Watching him wreck jedi in Tartakovsky's series was rad, but he was underwhelming in the film. At least we got McGregor's dumb "so uncivilized" quip out of that fight.
 

Timu

Member
It's..ok at best, don't get what makes it great. It has it's moments and is more watchable than TPM and, ugh, AOTC, but it still has flaws that prevent it from being great. Still below the OT and TFA for me.
 

cj_iwakura

Member
Like most of the prequels, people gushed about it on release and despised it more over time. I still enjoy it. Especially the opera tale of Darth Plagueis.
 

Sheroking

Member
I would never say "good", but I've always maintained it was unfairly lumped in with the two FAR worse prequels.

Just like Return of the Jedi is undeservedly lumped in with the two FAR better originals.
 

Voras

Member
"Go murder all the children."

"Ok."

This, 100% this. There are a lot of issues with the movie but this one bothers me the most. There is no reason shown for the rapid turn to being evil. He has some visions of his wife dying so he confides in Palpatine. Palpatine basically admits to being Sith and suggests that he has some vague knowledge of a thing that was mentioned by a different guy that might help with avoiding the whole death problem.

So first off Palpatine can't even be bothered to promise to save her, he basically says that maybe his master mentioned a thing but who knows, gonna have to betray your friends to find out. So Anakin starts out doing the reasonable thing by actually telling the Jedi about Palpatine but then whines that he doesn't get to be involved in the arrest. He then shows up anyway and decides to interpret the scene as the Jedi beating up on poor old Palpatine, despite the fact that he has a pretty solid idea that he's a Sith Lord. So he saves Palpatine and then Palpatine immediately takes advantage of the situation to blast Sam Jackson with lightning.

Somehow none of this is a red flag to Anakin though, that maybe this might be proof that Palpatine is super evil and still hasn't really meaningfully promised anything about actually helping Anakin with his soon to be dead wife problem. So now in this moment Anakin having realized he fucked up decides it would be too embarrassing to admit that he didn't totally mean to be evil all along so he decides to roll with it and is declared a Sith. Now that he has the title it's time to murder children of course.

At no point are we given a good reason why he turns evil suddenly. Sure he was moody and had tons of force power and a whole chosen one thing but like a minute before he was literally lecturing Sam Jackson about showing mercy and now that Jackson was proven totally correct Anakin deicides that doing the right thing isn't important anymore? Yeah sure Palpatine, I was concerned about the moral ramifications of killing a dictatorial monster but I guess I can go kill some kids for you.

And then he kills his wife in anger. What an incredible plot. I can't imagine why people think it doesn't deserve to be mentioned alongside the original trilogy. Truly an underrated masterpiece.

I could understand if they played it all out with Palpatine having Padme killed and blaming it on the Jedi that it would make some sense. I could see that being the thing to turn him. You can make an argument that the Jedi and Sith are just two religious cults fighting an endless war. The morality of either side can get muddled when you consider how often the Jedi don't use their incredible power to help out the average galactic citizen. That could have been an interesting story. I want to watch that movie. ROTS is not that movie. It also doesn't help that the Padme/Anakin romance never really worked well in the prequels and also the fact that Anakin was never the least bit likable in those movies either. At least the Clone Wars series did right by Anakin. Maybe if those writers had written the prequels they would have been watchable.
 

Sephzilla

Member
I would never say "good", but I've always maintained it was unfairly lumped in with the two FAR worse prequels.

Just like Return of the Jedi is undeservedly lumped in with the two FAR better originals.
I will not stand here and let ROTJ be slandered. It's secretly the best Star Wars movie.
 
I know it doesn't really help, but the Genndy Tartakovsky Clone Wars animated cartoon on Cartoon Network showed the abduction of Palatine from Coruscant. Grievous attacked but Mace Windu crushed his bag of organs, causing the cough.

Too bad the Canon cartoon recons it as him always that way.

Tartakovsky's Grievous was terrifying.
 

Herne

Member
Phantom Menace is fucking awful and by far the worst of all the movies. Anyone that says otherwise should be damned to an eternity with an imortal Jar Jar.

Attack of the Clones is far worse. For many reasons, but the character assassination of Threepio alone... ugh.
 

a916

Member
It's better than Return of the Jedi... the Ewoks worshipping C3PO or that nonsensical Jabba stuff.. Fett dying like a chump. The movie only really starts going during the latter half.

Since it puts a bow on the trilogy people and those nostalgia glasses, people excuse that terrible first hour.
 

Syder

Member
Is it time to accept Revenge of the Sith as "one of the good" SW films?
No, get over it.
Most people if they were young 'liked' the prequels and found ROTS to be the best but most people as adults realise it's a terrible film in many ways, people came to this consensus when the film was released and it was reinforced in the following decade with internet memes and constant discussion (Plinkett and the like), people like being contrarian, with that said though, if you enjoyed the film that's cool but that doesn't mean it's good.




The multiple daily SW threads are getting real tired too.
e5YuU.gif
 
It's literally A New Hope with a new coat of paint.
Really?
I don't remember Han Solo being born a storm trooper and abandoning their ranks because he couldn't take it, along with ending the movie getting slashed in the back by Darth Vader
I don't remember Rey using the force to blow up Starkiller base
I don't remember Darth Vader trying to emulate his grandfather or remember him killing his own father and throwing him off a bridge
I don't remember Han and Luke stealing a ship to fight of pursuing Tie Fighters
I don't remember Luke and Han traveling through space only to be picked up by their enemies father that was smuggling aliens and caught up in some dirty dealings

And soooooooooo much more.
Fuck outta here with that paper thin argument

Attack of the Clones is far worse. For many reasons, but the character assassination of Threepio alone... ugh.
It's really not.
At least AOTC has that fight between Obi Wan and Jango, progresses the story by setting the stage of the emperor playing both sides of the war and has something actually shitty happen to Anakin. In addition to Count Dooku.
All of which automatically make it much better than TPM, simply because it actually does something and isn't s complete waste of time
 
TFA has nothing going on for it. Beat by beat, it follows the same story of ANH and makes nearly everything in the OT feel so empty. What did defeating the empire in the OT even do? It seems like the good guys still have less control over things than the bad guys do. The good guys still feel like a rebel organization and the bad guys still seem to be the ones running the galaxy. I guess the plan to take out the Emperor wasn't the right plan? Because going off this movie, it amounted to about nothing. Except a third death star.


What happened to the Luke who leaves his training on Dagobah to help out Han and Leia? He isn't in TFA. He bails on his friends in TFA. Luke, Han and Leia repeatedly do the inconvenient and difficult thing to help out one another in the OT. And by the time TFA hits, it's like all three are just sick of each other and can't be bothered

I really hate what TFA did to the feeling of camaraderie between Han, Luke and Leia and find it far more damaging to the OT than anything the prequels did to the OT. That is one of the ongoing narratives of the prequels; they RUINED the OT.

What was the movie that showed that Han and Leia's romance in the OT really amounted to nothing? What was the movie that showed that taking down the Emperor really wasn't a huge step towards making the Star Wars universe a better place?


But it's those DIRTY PREQUELS THAT RUINED THE OT. Yeah, it's those prequels.


It blows my mind how TFA is propped up as some good-great movie.

But just chock up disliking TFA as being part of the alt-right movement.


The Force Awakens sucking so hard made me appreciate the prequel trilogy a lot more and this is coming from someone who was already a fan of ROTS to begin with.



You perfectly said everything I was going to say.

I believe people will look back at TFA as one of the worst Star Wars films ever made once the honeymoon period is finally over. Just another mediocre, by the book, Hollywood "epic" that didn't differentiate itself from the rest. It such a shame considering the Star Wars universe is so vast and yet they happily rehash the same story we have seen over and over again.


Thanks, I appreciate your thoughts
 

Timu

Member
People really just need to see lightsabers on screen for 20 minutes to think a film is good, don't they?
Lol.

Phantom Menace had the best visual style.

Revenge of the Sith had the most tolerable story.

Attack of the Clones had my money and I couldn't get it back.
Agreed.

Anakin vs Obi-Wan is everything thats wrong with the prequels. All flash, no substance
The fight gets worse somehow.

Nah. Attack of the Clones though.
Oh god no!!!

To me, TFA makes the prequels better in retrospect.
Because it's more original? TFA blows them away in terms of how well made it is.
 

Jawmuncher

Member
I don't care what anyone in here says.

ROTS is easily the most enjoyable Star Wars film. Not even the original trilogy is better than it.
 

Crossing Eden

Hello, my name is Yves Guillemot, Vivendi S.A.'s Employee of the Month!
Handwaving the weakest part of the entire plot as a minor gripe here.

To go further in selling the tragedy of Anakin turning to the dark side would have required the following:
1. Setting up a believable romance between him and Padme, so his turn and her reaction to that turn would actually be emotionally resonant instead of stupid and unintentionally hilarious.
2. Setting up a believable friendship between Anakin and Obi-Wan, so that the duel and Obi-Wan's desperate attempts to win back his friends actually felt like they had stakes behind them.
3. Setting up Anakin as an actually brilliant Jedi instead of a whiny juvenile turdling with zero patience throughout all 3 films, so that the loss of a valuable asset to the resistance to Palpatine's schemes registers as a believable surprise to the rest of the cast.
4. Making any of Palpatine's machinations remotely believable, so that he stands as a truly formidable adversary who could turn a noble jedi dark instead of just a lucky idiot whose major success comes at the failings of an inept Jedi Council and Obi-Wan simply being away and unable to interfere.

They would have had to set up all of that in the previous two films, but they couldn't because Lucas just had to start his prequels with Anakin as a stupid fucking kid for the entire first movie, blowing half of the entire screentime he could have had to establish the start of a character arc for Darth Vader. And slopping together the relationships Anakin needed to sever to really sell that turn to the Dark side in Clones was so hamfisted and dull that there was no salvaging it in time for the third film. You laugh, and laugh HARD at Vader's 'NOOOOOOOOOOOO' because of how ice cold, shitty and unearned that black hole of an emotional outburst is.
BOOM

I'm convinced that trying to make ROTS good and make TFA bad is an alt-right agenda.
It is really odd like goddamn guys, TFA was great, it got all that praise for a shiot ton of well explained incredibly valid reasons both in terms of the film's quality and how it moves the medium forward in terms of representation, the cinematography and dialogue alone elevate it to the above the other films aside from ESB. If a film about romance completely and utterly fails at making a romance convincing, after three films, then how are people even remotely supposed to care when that romance falls apart and the main character turns evil, unless you relate to Anakin, in which case you're creepy AF and think staring at a woman to the point that she actively says you're making her uncomfortable is romantic and that being as charming as a block of wood will get you a comically devoted wife who'll dress in strange BDSM like outfits when you're alone. Honestly fuck the prequels. If the best thing you can say about the climactic ending of a trilogy is "at least it's not as bad as the other two," then that trilogy has absolutely failed. TFA can at the very LEAST say that it's a competently made film and was written by someone who has some idea about how humans interact with each other.

TFA has nothing going on for it.
You don't need to lie to yourself this hard man.
 

btrboyev

Member
It's got a lot of issues, but yes, I consider it a good Star Wars film.

The only thing really bothers me is the Vader turn scene.
 

MMarston

Was getting caught part of your plan?
While we're at it, after rewatching it last year, The Phantom Menace is just incredibly mediocre as a film. I'm fairly certain its reputation as a terrible SW movie stems purely out of the gargantuan disappointment it was to people in 1999, which I wouldn't blame people for.
 

Sephzilla

Member
Also, just gonna throw this out there, the whole "at least the prequels were original" argument falls apart really fast when you step back and look at all of the imagery and themes that the prequels straight up lift from the original trilogy.
 
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