AdmBone2Pick wrote:Raynor then gives us a list of character attributes for Q-G. For example: he calls him compassionate for taking in Jar-Jar. He calls him trusting for allowing Anakin to race. And he calls him wise for accepting Obi-Wan's apology.
Q-G isn't compassionate, trusting or wise. At least, those aren't his defining character attributes. The underlying commonality in all these situations is Q-G's passivity as a character.
Qui-Gon is the strong but silent father figure, who knows how to assert himself without acting up like a wannabe badass. Some of his
earliest lines are him criticizing Obi-Wan's narrow understanding of the Force, and implicitly questioning the teachings of Yoda as well. He clearly goes over Obi-Wan in the Gungan City, when Obi-Wan stated his desire to just leave Jar Jar to his fate. He didn't put up with Padme's crap whenever she repeated that "The Queen would not approve" line. In fact, his words and actions clearly expressed that he didn't care what the Queen would think. The movie also practically beats the audience over their heads with the fact that Qui-Gon has not, and will not yield to the Jedi Council's pressure for him to conform.
Q-G does not seem to have strong motivations, passions or goals.
Refusing to cave in on the issue of training Anakin isn't a strong motivation or goal?
This is why people call him calm or stoic. He does a lot of talking and advising, and comparatively little doing.
He kicks ass all across Naboo, tricks Watto into freeing Anakin, and goes back to fight on Naboo again.
He is a mentor figure, like ANH Obi-Wan. His death scene is a clear parallel to the death of Obi-Wan (the mentor dies while the student is forced to helplessly watch).
Old Obi-Wan was not introduced at the very beginning of the movie, did not receive a majority of the screen time, and did not die near the very end.
A mentor is a supporting character by definition.
Nice made up definition.
Who is Q-G a mentor to? Well, no one really, because neither Obi-Wan nor Anakin can qualify as the protagonist hero of the film.
Make up your mind. First Qui-Gon is a mentor figure, then he's no one's mentor?
The movie clearly INTENDS for Anakin to be the protagonist, because his is the character that participates in the most action scenes, and grows the most during the film (from slave to padawan). However because Lucas made Anakin a preteen, he can only get involved in the action of the movie through extraordinarily contrived situations. And because the script focuses on the relationship between Q-G and Anakin, Obi-Wan becomes a third wheel. Obi-Wan receives almost no characterization in TPM, and would practically be a cipher of a character to anyone who didn't know the original trilogy.
Obi-Wan says a few wise mentor-like things in ANH and handles himself in a couple fights, before dying. Then he's a ghost who shows up for a couple minutes in the following movies. I think people have a distorted view of the originals once again.
I already stated my opinion that Obi-Wan was very underused in TPM. Very little screen time. However, almost all of his lines were used to characterize him. He's a conservative, by the book guy, who's mission focused and not that compassionate for people whom he happens to come across. NONE of this is shown in the original trilogy.
RLM is right when he says “If you ask me, Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi should have been combined into one character, called Obi-Wan Kenobi." As it exists on screen, TPM is an awkward mess, with neither of the three male leads qualifying as a hero or protagonist.
Stoklasa's alternate universe fanfic was horrible, and stripped the movie series of any depth, meaning, or nuance. It basically boiled down to
Obi-Wan being such an idiot that he can't operate without Qui-Gon's advice, leading to him giving Anakin crappy training. In Stoklasa's suggestions, Anakin doesn't fall because of his inability to release his emotional baggage, the lack of compassion from the Jedi Order, or the conflicts stemming from Obi-Wan's well-intentioned but stern and uncompromising mentoring. No, Anakin fails because he and Obi-Wan are stupid.
I don't remember any instance in the RLM review where Stoklasa demonstrated a basic awareness of the Star Wars saga's main themes.
These are the kinds of big-picture criticisms that RLM lobs at the prequels. Raynor doesn't have an answer.
Uh, I kind of answered it when I explained how shallow Stoklasa's understanding of Qui-Gon (and his thematic role) was.
Later on RLM makes two other big-picture criticisms. First RLM says that the OT lightsaber fights are about the internal emotional state of the characters, while the PT duels lack any emotional dimension. Raynor lets this point slide.
First of all, no I didn't let it completely slide. I explained how bogus his evaluation of Old Obi-Wan vs. Vader was. It was two guys calmly and mechanically dueling over things that they had 20 years to get over.
And on hindsight, I gave Stoklasa too much credit in my response. As someone else brought up a couple dozen pages ago in this thread, Luke hardly had any emotional or thematic purpose in going to fight Vader on Cloud City. Luke showed up to kick ass and save his friends. That was basically it.
Having Luke scream after seeing Obi-Wan's sacrifice (then get over his mourning a couple minutes later while he
smiles and has fun blowing away TIE Fighters like he's in a big video game) is hardly the big emotional deal that Stoklasa talked it up to be. Vader's "I am your father" revelation doesn't change how the fight actually went,
before. Don't watch the originals with rose tinted glasses and talk things up beyond how they actually went.
Secondly RLM says that the ending of the film is an emotional mess that whiplashes around with no clear tone. Again the "rebuttal" does not rebut this.
Cut the crap already. Stoklasa didn't just say that the end of the film (which I had no problem with in the theater, and whether they worked or not is opinion anyway) was disjointed. He called the ending of ANH, in which the entire ensemble cast steps aside, sits around, or disappears, "perfect" and used that as the standard by which to bash TPM. Which I defended by stating that TPM gave everyone in the ensemble something to do.
I also pointed out the complete distortion and smear tactics that Stoklasa resorted to, when selectively displaying (and talking over) behind-the-scenes clips of Lucas and his employees trying to edit the movie.
Raynor seems to think it's much more important to address the plot-hole parts of RLM's review.
No, I made a comprehensive response to nearly every single thing that Stoklasa said in the course of his 70 minute review.
Too bad if the vast majority of those 70 minutes were devoted to senseless nitpicking that only displayed his ignorance.
1. If you fix plot holes by constantly pretending that the characters mean something other than what they say (as you do with the Boss Nass dialogue on pages 49-51) then you fail.
Take your own advice, because I have already seen you distort and make things up numerous times in this post of yours.
And that cherry picking of the Boss Nass "planet core" line is really amusing. The movie didn't treat it like the actual planet core, at all, but that's neither here nor there.
The vast majority of the time I didn't even have to defend unclear dialogue like that, because Stoklasa was the one making things up, acting stupid, and possibly even misportraying things on purpose.
It's the same with characterization: if the audience doesn't pick up on what you say Q-G's character is, then the movie has characterization issues even if you are exactly right about what Lucas intended.
If someone, like a certain fanboy reviewer, actually sums up Qui-Gon with the single word of "stern," then that person's opinions don't deserve to be respected.
2. Many many people have made hay of the plot holes in the Star Wars movies.
And who are these "many many people?" Because in my experience, most of the people whining endlessly about the supposed "plot holes" are just being unbelievably dense. Like Stoklasa.
RLM's video reviews became hugely popular because he made big-picture criticisms that people hadn't thought of. In particular he showed that these were the REAL problems with the prequels, and not Jar-Jar, or R2D2's rockets, etc (the TPM review spends less than 5 minutes total on Jar-Jar, whereas your average internet whiner will list Jar Jar as reason #1 that TPM sucked).
Enough of this "big picture" or "main point"
excuse already. You don't get to praise Stoklasa for spending "less than 5 minutes" on Jar Jar as if he wasn't nitpicking little things, when the vast majority of his 70 minute review was nothing but stupid nitpicks. Nitpicks about the practical usefulness of a child's gift to his mother, how the Royal Starship wasn't shot by lasers while escaping the blockade (when in fact it was shot multiple times according to the SAME exact footage that Stoklasa used), or Stoklasa's inability to differentiate a hologram from a technical read out. Yeah, so focused on the big picture of story telling there.
Raynor doesn't seem to have a convincing answer to what RLM said in the TPM review
Maybe to someone who glosses over every single stupid nitpick in the RLM review, pretending that they don't exist.
so I doubt he would have an answer to, for example, the way the ROTS review criticizes the lifeless blocking and editing of the prequels.
I haven't seen his ROTS review. Don't know if I will bother seeing it. Writing up my response to TPM review took long enough, and it's about half the length of his ungodly long 2-hour ROTS review. But judging from the few parts quoted from it that I have seen, it's more of the same stupid nitpicking and ignorance of the movie's characters and themes. Like not understanding why Anakin would want to save Clone pilots.
I've also written up a response to the first part of his AOTC review, which looked like the same exact garbage that I saw in TPM review.
And I shouldn't have to go through all of this guy's stuff, after already seeing so much crap from him. I've already done my part to expose how overrated he is. People who don't want to just fall in line with his fanboy sheep now have something to point to, if they don't agree that RLM is the last word on the prequels.
