RLM/Plinkett Review of Star Trek: Picard

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Re: RLM/Plinkett Review of Star Trek: Picard

Post by ray245 »

channel73 wrote: 2020-07-01 04:35pm Absurd. Nobody would complain about too much good CGI. If the CGI is that good, you'd barely even notice it was CGI. The Mandalorian uses CGI to depict various fauna or alien creatures, as well as to augment landscapes and locations, and in my opinion it looks amazing. Nobody complains about good CGI. You are just misunderstanding. People complain that the Prequels have bad CGI, and worse - the bad CGI is fairly ubiquitous throughout the films. Even worse, much of this bad CGI is not even necessary. They could have just used actual actors in Clone Trooper uniforms instead of using CGI.
CGI can become dated over time. People's standards of what counts for CGI changes as they get exposed to better and new CCGI graphics. The bulk of the too much CGI arguments wasn't all that prominent when the prequels were released. It's only much later that we start to hear people talking about bad CGI.

There's many complaints about TPM having too much CGI, when what's depicted isn't CGI at all. This is what actual vfx artists commented about the visual effects in the prequels.



I take their word over that of fanboys that can't tell what's practical from what's CGI apart.
Prove it's rooted in nostalgia, and not just something people like better. Otherwise I can dismiss all your arguments by saying "you just defend the Prequels because you grew up with them." This works both ways.
When you start making arguments about how the OT has a certain, hard-to-define "magic ingredient" that makes it work, and proceed to say this is "small group of characters with great chemistry who go on cool space adventures together while exchanging quippy dialogue. That's the Star Wars formula", this is nothing more than nostalgia.

It's tying the formula of Star Wars back to the nature of story the OT wanted to tell, and ignore all the ways the franchise had managed to reach out to new fans via different media. I defend the prequels because I enjoyed them, but I am not going to say the prequels had a magic formula that needs to be replicated in any other Star Wars film.
More circular reasoning. I disagree the Fall of the Republic needed to be a central focus, any more than the Fall of the Empire was a central focus in the OT.
You've not actually made a counter-argument against my point that you can't tell the story that was told in the Clone Wars series in 3 movies.
I argue the movies should be character driven, focusing primarily on Anakin and Obi-Wan. I would say leave the political intrigue stuff (which I also find interesting, BTW) to be fleshed out in the cartoons.
Your approach will end up creating the same sort of problems the sequel movies did. In which by ignoring the politics, you leave the audience entirely confused over what exactly is going on in the galaxy, and reduces their engagement in the wider conflict as a whole. If you cannot give reasons as to why your heroes are fighting, you don't have much of a story to tell.

The reason why Anakin and Obi-Wan were out fighting in the galaxy was because they were Jedi knights committed to defending the Republic and the values which it holds.
That's simply my opinion, and I argue that this type of approach better ties into the payoff at the end of ROTJ. I get that you disagree, but I probably wouldn't dismiss your opinion as "fanboyism".
Fanboyism is about making arguments on how there is only one model you can use to tell a good Star Wars story. I am arguing against the idea that you can recreate the "magic ingredient" of the OT in any new Star Wars movie. I do not think you can recapture the lighting in the bottle twice, and all franchise needs to evolve or lose ground over time.

The success of Rogue One and the Mandalorian is in part down to moving away from the kind of storytelling the OT did. Rogue 1 and Mandalorian moved away from the Jedi-Sith conflict, even if the force still plays a prominent role in the stories.
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Re: RLM/Plinkett Review of Star Trek: Picard

Post by channel73 »

ray245 wrote: 2020-07-01 05:06pm CGI can become dated over time. People's standards of what counts for CGI changes as they get exposed to better and new CCGI graphics. The bulk of the too much CGI arguments wasn't all that prominent when the prequels were released. It's only much later that we start to hear people talking about bad CGI.
Wrong. You were probably too young in 1999 and therefore have no idea what you're talking about. Early reviews complained about TPM looking like a computer-animated CGI-fest. Including this review from days before TPM was even released. Note the comment about TPM looking too much like "A Bug's Life"

"It wasn't the fact that half the film was computer generated and it was starting to look more like A Bug's Life than Star Wars, it was the embarrassing dialogue that Lucas wrote" - some guy in 1999


There's many complaints about TPM having too much CGI, when what's depicted isn't CGI at all. This is what actual vfx artists commented about the visual effects in the prequels.
Don't care. Already gave specific examples of actual bad CGI in the Prequels.

I get CGI improves over time. But then, if you're making a movie in 2002 don't use CGI where it doesn't work. Lord of the Rings is an example of good use of CGI in the early 2000s. George Lucas constantly used shitty CGI in places where it was completely unnecessary, including the Clone Troopers and even a shot of Jango Fett standing around. The complaint stands, despite how desperately you try to avoid it by talking about random people who mistook certain shots in TPM for CGI.
When you start making arguments about how the OT has a certain, hard-to-define "magic ingredient" that makes it work, and proceed to say this is "small group of characters with great chemistry who go on cool space adventures together while exchanging quippy dialogue. That's the Star Wars formula", this is nothing more than nostalgia.
Wrong. It's just a formula I like. Prove I wouldn't like it if I hadn't seen the OT as a child.
You've not actually made a counter-argument against my point that you can't tell the story that was told in the Clone Wars series in 3 movies.
I'm not making a counter-argument because I didn't even say that. I said the PT should have been more character-driven, focusing on Anakin and Obi-Wan. The story of the Fall of the Republic could have been simply backdrop/window-dressing, the way the Fall of the Empire basically was in the OT. I would have preferred that.
Your approach will end up creating the same sort of problems the sequel movies did. In which by ignoring the politics, you leave the audience entirely confused over what exactly is going on in the galaxy, and reduces their engagement in the wider conflict as a whole. If you cannot give reasons as to why your heroes are fighting, you don't have much of a story to tell.
Again another "I can't imagine how it could be done, therefore it's impossible" argument. The Sequels didn't do a good job at world-building because... they simply failed to do a good job at world building. That is entirely orthogonal to aping the OT. A few lines of dialogue in TFA here and there would have dramatically improved the world building.
Fanboyism is about making arguments on how there is only one model you can use to tell a good Star Wars story. I am arguing against the idea that you can recreate the "magic ingredient" of the OT in any new Star Wars movie. I do not think you can recapture the lighting in the bottle twice, and all franchise needs to evolve or lose ground over time.
The only "fanboyism" I see here is from you. This thread proves you can't even post an RLM video about Star Trek without a bunch of butt-hurt Star Wars Prequel fanboys complaining that mean Mr. Plinkett is picking on their childhood. (Am I doing this right?)
The success of Rogue One and the Mandalorian is in part down to moving away from the kind of storytelling the OT did. Rogue 1 and Mandalorian moved away from the Jedi-Sith conflict, even if the force still plays a prominent role in the stories.
Funny how you don't complain that Mandalorian is catering to "fan bros" by having mainly OT-style locations such as deserts and ice worlds.
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Re: RLM/Plinkett Review of Star Trek: Picard

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channel73 wrote: 2020-07-01 06:03pm Wrong. You were probably too young in 1999 and therefore have no idea what you're talking about. Early reviews complained about TPM looking like a computer-animated CGI-fest. Including this review from days before TPM was even released. Note the comment about TPM looking too much like "A Bug's Life"

"It wasn't the fact that half the film was computer generated and it was starting to look more like A Bug's Life than Star Wars, it was the embarrassing dialogue that Lucas wrote" - some guy in 1999
It's a weird complaint considering the Ep 1 made use of even more practical miniatures than any other Star Wars movie.
Filoni: "Which 'Star Wars' film has the most practical miniatures in it of any of the films, including the new ones?"

Knoll: "Episode 1."
https://www.insider.com/phantom-menace- ... vie-2020-5
Don't care. Already gave specific examples of actual bad CGI in the Prequels.


Let's ignore experts who can actually tell good CGI from bad CGi when most fans can't even tell what's CGi from practical miniatures. :roll: 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.
I get CGI improves over time. But then, if you're making a movie in 2002 don't use CGI where it doesn't work. Lord of the Rings is an example of good use of CGI in the early 2000s. George Lucas constantly used shitty CGI in places where it was completely unnecessary, including the Clone Troopers and even a shot of Jango Fett standing around. The complaint stands, despite how desperately you try to avoid it by talking about random people who mistook certain shots in TPM for CGI.
Considering actual vfx artists today still commented on how good the vfx was for the Clone trooper scenes, I think that's an opinion mostly held by the fanboys and not the general public. The people in the industry was impressed and the average filmgoer that enjoyed the movie when it was released. Even fan forums like SDN gave Ep 2 a positive review back in 2002.

http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2000

The shitty CGI argument only gained traction, much later. I recall it's only around the mid to late 2000s that those kind of criticism began to gain traction, which I think in part has to do with the improved standards of CGI. CGI advanced very rapidly in the 2000s. What is seen as Oscar-nomination worthy in 2002 is seen as extremely outdated by 2008.
Wrong. It's just a formula I like. Prove I wouldn't like it if I hadn't seen the OT as a child.
It's not my burden of proof to prove something completely hypothetical and a negative. I can argue on the other hand, that your statements about there being a formula for Star Wars film illustrate the nostalgia googles you have. Because when people often talk about things like "certain, hard-to-define "magic ingredient"", they are really just talking about nostalgia.

Why is it hard to define? What is it a magic ingredient? Why do you like that formula in particular? Why do you exclude other possible formula?

I'm not making a counter-argument because I didn't even say that. I said the PT should have been more character-driven, focusing on Anakin and Obi-Wan. The story of the Fall of the Republic could have been simply backdrop/window-dressing, the way the Fall of the Empire basically was in the OT. I would have preferred that.
Except the fall of the Empire isn't a window-dressing for the main characters. The overarching conflict between the empire and the rebels directly play a role in the character drama and conflict of our heroes. It's just that the overarching setting and conflict of the OT allows you to tell a more character-driven story. Because the heroes do not have to care about anything beyond toppling the empire. That's a simple goal. What happens after the empire fell is another story altogether.

Trying to defend the Republic even as it is falling apart requires an entirely different approach, because you need to give reasons why characters are doing so. Why is the Republic worth defending? What values does it uphold? How is the Republic going to fall? Why did Anakin play a role that ended the old Republic? I don't think the prequels entirely succeed in doing that well, but I think Lucas is aware of the fact that he cannot tell the same story as the OT.
Again another "I can't imagine how it could be done, therefore it's impossible" argument. The Sequels didn't do a good job at world-building because... they simply failed to do a good job at world building. That is entirely orthogonal to aping the OT. A few lines of dialogue in TFA here and there would have dramatically improved the world building.
Show me an example of good-worldbuilding in setting dependent scifi/fantasy movies where politics is entirely ignored like the ST. Show me franchises that didn't run out of steam. The way in which you do good world-building is specific to the kind of stories you are trying to tell. The sequels tried to reboot the setting of Star Wars back to square one, but failed to do so effectively because it requires massive mental gymnastics to even set up the premise of the new rebooted settings.
The only "fanboyism" I see here is from you. This thread proves you can't even post an RLM video about Star Trek without a bunch of butt-hurt Star Wars Prequel fanboys complaining that mean Mr. Plinkett is picking on their childhood. (Am I doing this right?)
I freely admit my own bias with the prequels because I grew up with them. I can easily admit the prequels are not perfect by any stretch, and also make arguments about how the prequels way of story-telling should not be aped or replicated by someone writing a different Star Wars story.

Can the OT fanboys do that?
Funny how you don't complain that Mandalorian is catering to "fan bros" by having mainly OT-style locations such as deserts and ice worlds.
Because my complaints is never about using OT-style locations? It's about saying different kind of stories requires different approaches to storytelling? The Mandalorian is about one Mandalorian trying to survive on the outskirts of the galaxy, because that's what the story is about. It doesn't need to focus on any part of the core worlds in the galaxy because that's not what the story entails. It also don't have massive space battles or massive ground battles because that's not the focus of the show. It also doesn't have too many Jedi and Siths because that's not the focus of the show.
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Re: RLM/Plinkett Review of Star Trek: Picard

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ray245 wrote: 2020-07-01 08:51pm It's a weird complaint considering the Ep 1 made use of even more practical miniatures than any other Star Wars movie.
Episode I looks better than the other two Prequels I agree, but the Droids vs. Gunguns battle looks particularly egregious. It looks like a video game. The same article I posted (again from 1999) goes on and on about the shitty CGI, this was clearly a common complaint from the beginning.

"Watching an army of computer generated aliens fight an army of computer generated robots is boring after five minutes. None of it's real, and you can't even let yourself believe it's real because there's just too much computer generated imagery. What's Lucas got against puppets?" - random dude in 1999

I even remember thinking the Droids vs. Gungans battle looked pretty bad when I first saw it as a teenager. Of course, back then I wasn't so critical of it because the Darth Maul lightsaber battle was so awesome I didn't care.
Filoni: "Which 'Star Wars' film has the most practical miniatures in it of any of the films, including the new ones?"
Let's ignore experts who can actually tell good CGI from bad CGi when most fans can't even tell what's CGi from practical miniatures. :roll:
Absurd. Nobody cares what experts think about CGI. CGI is meant to impress common people who watch movies. If you can easily tell something is CGI to the point it distracts you, the CGI has failed. I constantly get distracted from bad CGI when I watch the Prequels. When I watch the Mandalorian or Lord of the Rings, I rarely get distracted by bad CGI.

Of course, this really applies to special effects in general. I have nothing against CGI in particular - just this "overconfidence" in CGI that the Prequels seem to exhibit. I mean, the OT had some shitty effects as well, particularly bad green screen or matte lines (the Rancor in ROTJ is really bad and should have been redone with modern CGI). Not to mention the hideously bad CGI in the Special Editions, like Jabba the Hutt in ANH. I'm pretty consistent on my feelings about this. It's just that the Prequels seem to use (bad) CGI when it's not even necessary, like the Clone Troopers.
It's not my burden of proof to prove something completely hypothetical and a negative. I can argue on the other hand, that your statements about there being a formula for Star Wars film illustrate the nostalgia googles you have. Because when people often talk about things like "certain, hard-to-define "magic ingredient"", they are really just talking about nostalgia.

Why is it hard to define? What is it a magic ingredient? Why do you like that formula in particular? Why do you exclude other possible formula?
I said it was hard to define, but then clearly defined it as best as I could. I didn't say there are no other possible formulas, just that I prefer this formula. That is completely orthogonal to nostalgia. There are some movies that I like only due to nostalgia (like the Goonies or something) which I would not bother to defend because I acknowledge their primary value is rooted in nostalgia instead of actual good filmmaking. But the Original Trilogy is almost universally beloved by at least 3 generations at this point (Generation X, Millenials, Generation Z). So clearly nostalgia is, if anything, only part of the equation that contributes to this enjoyment.

Except the fall of the Empire isn't a window-dressing for the main characters. The overarching conflict between the empire and the rebels directly play a role in the character drama and conflict of our heroes. It's just that the overarching setting and conflict of the OT allows you to tell a more character-driven story. Because the heroes do not have to care about anything beyond toppling the empire. That's a simple goal. What happens after the empire fell is another story altogether.

Trying to defend the Republic even as it is falling apart requires an entirely different approach, because you need to give reasons why characters are doing so. Why is the Republic worth defending? What values does it uphold? How is the Republic going to fall? Why did Anakin play a role that ended the old Republic? I don't think the prequels entirely succeed in doing that well, but I think Lucas is aware of the fact that he cannot tell the same story as the OT.
Fair enough. Perhaps "window dressing" is an exaggerated take on it. But I disagree you couldn't tell a story about the Fall of the Republic that isn't primarily character driven. You personally might not like it as much, but I think many of the people you call "fanboys" would like it.
Show me an example of good-worldbuilding in setting dependent scifi/fantasy movies where politics is entirely ignored like the ST. Show me franchises that didn't run out of steam. The way in which you do good world-building is specific to the kind of stories you are trying to tell. The sequels tried to reboot the setting of Star Wars back to square one, but failed to do so effectively because it requires massive mental gymnastics to even set up the premise of the new rebooted settings.
The OT doesn't include much world-building. It includes better world building than the Sequels certainly, part of which is due to the fact that it was starting from a blank slate. But when it comes to the Prequels, I disagree we really need so many scenes taking place in Palpatine's office or the Senate chamber in order to get "good world building". We certainly didn't need an entire fucking movie explaining how Palpatine got promoted from Senator to Chancellor, which doesn't even include Anakin at all (except as a kid.) Just start with Episode 2, where Palpatine is already Chancellor, or have him become Chancellor in the background during the Clone Wars, and save the details for the EU.

The fact that the actual Prequels waste an entire movie on an unrelated trade dispute that doesn't even involve Anakin is proof enough you could have had a more character-driven approach to this whole thing.
I freely admit my own bias with the prequels because I grew up with them. I can easily admit the prequels are not perfect by any stretch, and also make arguments about how the prequels way of story-telling should not be aped or replicated by someone writing a different Star Wars story.

Can the OT fanboys do that?
.
Yeah. The OT has tons of flaws. I love pointing them out. I think the entire ending to ANH is a bit problematic (why does Leia return to Yavin when she knows they're being tracked, why do they stay around to have an award ceremony after blowing up the Death Star when a Star Destroyer could easily show up and kill everyone, etc.) There are definitely many problems with the OT. But the movies are so good, it doesn't matter that much.

However, I do believe the main line movies (Episodes 1-9) should have tried to stick to the same story telling formula as the OT, if only for thematic consistency. Other formats such as the series or non-mainline movies can of course be more experimental. I think Episodes 7-9 were better than the Prequels only in the sense that they at least tried to be more action/adventure oriented and character-driven; sadly they sucked in almost every other way.
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Re: RLM/Plinkett Review of Star Trek: Picard

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channel73 wrote: 2020-07-05 08:39pm
ray245 wrote: 2020-07-01 08:51pm It's a weird complaint considering the Ep 1 made use of even more practical miniatures than any other Star Wars movie.
Episode I looks better than the other two Prequels I agree, but the Droids vs. Gunguns battle looks particularly egregious. It looks like a video game. The same article I posted (again from 1999) goes on and on about the shitty CGI, this was clearly a common complaint from the beginning.

"Watching an army of computer generated aliens fight an army of computer generated robots is boring after five minutes. None of it's real, and you can't even let yourself believe it's real because there's just too much computer generated imagery. What's Lucas got against puppets?" - random dude in 1999

I even remember thinking the Droids vs. Gungans battle looked pretty bad when I first saw it as a teenager. Of course, back then I wasn't so critical of it because the Darth Maul lightsaber battle was so awesome I didn't care.
Yes, some people might have been complaining about the CGI back in 1999, but I recall a lot of people were impressed by the technical achievement back then. The complaints started once the novelty began to wear off, but that's more of a 2005 view than a 1999 view. It's why EP 1 and 2 were nominated for an Oscar in best visual effects, but ROTS wasn't.

Absurd. Nobody cares what experts think about CGI. CGI is meant to impress common people who watch movies. If you can easily tell something is CGI to the point it distracts you, the CGI has failed. I constantly get distracted from bad CGI when I watch the Prequels. When I watch the Mandalorian or Lord of the Rings, I rarely get distracted by bad CGI.
My counter-argument to that is that CGI improved. When we revisit older CGI, we began to see more flaws because we are used to better CGI now. People's expectations changes all the time. What is seen as adequate back then is not seen as adequate today.
Of course, this really applies to special effects in general. I have nothing against CGI in particular - just this "overconfidence" in CGI that the Prequels seem to exhibit. I mean, the OT had some shitty effects as well, particularly bad green screen or matte lines (the Rancor in ROTJ is really bad and should have been redone with modern CGI). Not to mention the hideously bad CGI in the Special Editions, like Jabba the Hutt in ANH. I'm pretty consistent on my feelings about this. It's just that the Prequels seem to use (bad) CGI when it's not even necessary, like the Clone Troopers.
I am not saying the CGI in the prequels are prefect by any means. I am saying the CGI was good for its time, the same way the 1930s Kong movie had good effects for its time. This matters because audience expectation can change. The puppetry in Kong that impressed its audience in the 1930s is not going to impress audiences today ( once you removed the caveat of historical context).

CGI was a big wow factor in the the 1990s and early 2000s. Plenty of films managed to earn big box office numbers solely on the basis of having CGI back then. There was this huge crave for CGI, regardless of how bad it is. I remember plenty of kids wanting and liking CGI, no matter how bad it was. It was seen as something cool back then. By the mid 2000s, the wow factor of CGI started to wear off. And that is also when we start to hear an increase in the too much CGI complaint.
I said it was hard to define, but then clearly defined it as best as I could. I didn't say there are no other possible formulas, just that I prefer this formula. That is completely orthogonal to nostalgia. There are some movies that I like only due to nostalgia (like the Goonies or something) which I would not bother to defend because I acknowledge their primary value is rooted in nostalgia instead of actual good filmmaking. But the Original Trilogy is almost universally beloved by at least 3 generations at this point (Generation X, Millenials, Generation Z). So clearly nostalgia is, if anything, only part of the equation that contributes to this enjoyment.
Our preferences is heavily tied to our own experiences and nostalgia. The OT does not escape the pull of nostalgia because we still watched it as kids. It's still a major part of people's childhood experiences because our parents will get us to watch the OT. OT has become an entrenched cultural experience and a growing up experience for kids. However, in cultures where the audience had not been exposed to the OT when it was released, the experience is entirely different.

Take the box office of Ep 7 as an example, because it is a movie primarily driven by nostalgia. It did very well in the West, in part because the people in the West had the disposable income to watch movies in the 70s. In East Asia, where people have less disposable income back in the 70s and 80s, the difference cannot be more stark.

The Star Wars movies not doing well in China is something we know quite well, and even when the OT was released in China for the firs time, Chinese audience are finding it boring because they find the special effects outdated. Sure, the Chinese audience might be an exception that merely isn't down to an issue of nostalgia, but we see similar patterns in the rest of East Asia.

In Hong Kong for example, EP 7 made less than Avengers 2 and Jurassic World by a mile off. And that's in one of the most westernised part of East Asia. In Taiwan for example, Ep 7 box office came below Pixar movies and Kingsmen at number 11. In Korea for example, Ep 7 ranked number 18 at the box office.

What it says about Star Wars and the OT is that it is not a universally beloved franchise, but a beloved franchise in the West. Parents who grew up with the OT introduced it to their kids and so forth. I did not grow up in the West. My Parents never even seen the OT when they were young in the 70s. The boomers and gen-Xers in East Asia do not care about Star Wars and the OT, and they did not made their kids ( millenials and gen Z) watch Star Wars when we were little.

As someone born and growing up in a very different cultural landscape from the West, I understood liking Star Wars is not common in East Asia. And this is why I often argue that people in the West simply do not comprehend just how ingrained Star Wars is in Western culture compared to its reception in other cultures.
Fair enough. Perhaps "window dressing" is an exaggerated take on it. But I disagree you couldn't tell a story about the Fall of the Republic that isn't primarily character driven. You personally might not like it as much, but I think many of the people you call "fanboys" would like it.
I can be convinced, if there is a compelling argument to convince me. There is a strict time limitation with the movies. You can tell 9 hours of stories at the most. That's barely a season worth of storytelling if we are talking about big-budget TV shows like Game of Thrones. There simply isn't enough time for you to tell the entire story about the fall of the Republic, fall of the Jedi order, the Clone Wars and Anakin's fall the way you want it to be.

In fact, I will argue the success of the Clone Wars is that Lucas simply had a lot more time to tell such stories in a multi-season long TV series. It's not that Lucas lost his touch, but more simply he was overwhelmed with the amount of materials he had to crammed in for 3 movies, and that made his flaws all the more apparent in the prequels. If Lucas can tell the story of the prequels in 6-7 movies, the prequels would have been much better.

The OT doesn't include much world-building. It includes better world building than the Sequels certainly, part of which is due to the fact that it was starting from a blank slate. But when it comes to the Prequels, I disagree we really need so many scenes taking place in Palpatine's office or the Senate chamber in order to get "good world building". We certainly didn't need an entire fucking movie explaining how Palpatine got promoted from Senator to Chancellor, which doesn't even include Anakin at all (except as a kid.) Just start with Episode 2, where Palpatine is already Chancellor, or have him become Chancellor in the background during the Clone Wars, and save the details for the EU.

The fact that the actual Prequels waste an entire movie on an unrelated trade dispute that doesn't even involve Anakin is proof enough you could have had a more character-driven approach to this whole thing.
It had to include such scenes because Anakin is a young kid and a young Jedi that simply isn't at the centre of galactic politics for the first two movies. He's only became a major leader in the third movie ( and he just got a seat on the council) They can be better executed, but you need those scenes to give a sense of what exactly is going on in the Republic and the Jedi order as institutions. Otherwise the sudden decline of the Republic will make it more of a mess for the audience as it feels like a reverse-pull from nowhere. The prequels isn't just about Anakin's fall as a jedi knight. It's also about Palpatine's rise to power.
Yeah. The OT has tons of flaws. I love pointing them out. I think the entire ending to ANH is a bit problematic (why does Leia return to Yavin when she knows they're being tracked, why do they stay around to have an award ceremony after blowing up the Death Star when a Star Destroyer could easily show up and kill everyone, etc.) There are definitely many problems with the OT. But the movies are so good, it doesn't matter that much.

However, I do believe the main line movies (Episodes 1-9) should have tried to stick to the same story telling formula as the OT, if only for thematic consistency. Other formats such as the series or non-mainline movies can of course be more experimental. I think Episodes 7-9 were better than the Prequels only in the sense that they at least tried to be more action/adventure oriented and character-driven; sadly they sucked in almost every other way.
I disagreed. I argue that all the major handicap and weakness of the ST comes directly from trying to emulate the OT and its story-telling formula. Reusing the same formula means the OT heroes had to become failures in order to repeat the same kind of storytelling. Action-adventure oriented movies work when you don't really have to care how many times the universe is in peril and a small bunch of underdog heroes can save the world/galaxy/universe.

It works for franchise like James Bond, Mission Impossible and etc, because it really does not matter how often the world is under threat of a new magical villain that can pull an arsenal of weapons from nowhere. JJ Abrams tried that with Star Wars and everyone ended up asking where the fuck did the fleet of Star Destroyers came from. It made audience questioned the setting.

The main appeal of Star Wars lies in its setting. People have to have suspension of disbelief in the setting ( called the secondary world by Tolkien). That in turn influence the kind of stories you can tell at different stages of the setting. We saw what happened when Peter Jackson tried to repeat what he did with LOTR with the Hobbit. He tried to made the Hobbit via the same kind of story-telling formula he did with LOTR. Aside from the issues with the CGI,the story ended up a mess because he forced the Hobbit to become an epic movie the way it simply wasn't.

Trying to force a story into something it is not makes a movie bad.
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Re: RLM/Plinkett Review of Star Trek: Picard

Post by Vendetta »

channel73 wrote: 2020-07-05 08:39pm
ray245 wrote: 2020-07-01 08:51pm It's a weird complaint considering the Ep 1 made use of even more practical miniatures than any other Star Wars movie.
Episode I looks better than the other two Prequels I agree, but the Droids vs. Gunguns battle looks particularly egregious. It looks like a video game. The same article I posted (again from 1999) goes on and on about the shitty CGI, this was clearly a common complaint from the beginning.

"Watching an army of computer generated aliens fight an army of computer generated robots is boring after five minutes. None of it's real, and you can't even let yourself believe it's real because there's just too much computer generated imagery. What's Lucas got against puppets?" - random dude in 1999

I even remember thinking the Droids vs. Gungans battle looked pretty bad when I first saw it as a teenager. Of course, back then I wasn't so critical of it because the Darth Maul lightsaber battle was so awesome I didn't care.
This is, of course, not remotely true. At all. People still care about animated movies.

The reason we didn't care about the gungans vs. droids fight was because Jar Jar was an unlovable goober (because his only character trait was slapstick, and despite having the trappings of an arc with his banishment and reacceptance he doesn't actually have one because he doesn't actually do anything that isn't slapstick, so there's no sense in which he is changing towards a state where his people will accept him based on his travel with these Jedi) and we didn't care about him or his perspective on the events in the movie.

If the PoV character for that battle had been a character we cared about, the fact that it was all CG would have made no difference at all.
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Re: RLM/Plinkett Review of Star Trek: Picard

Post by channel73 »

ray245 wrote: 2020-07-06 05:56am Yes, some people might have been complaining about the CGI back in 1999, but I recall a lot of people were impressed by the technical achievement back then. The complaints started once the novelty began to wear off, but that's more of a 2005 view than a 1999 view. It's why EP 1 and 2 were nominated for an Oscar in best visual effects, but ROTS wasn't.
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).

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.
My counter-argument to that is that CGI improved. When we revisit older CGI, we began to see more flaws because we are used to better CGI now. People's expectations changes all the time. What is seen as adequate back then is not seen as adequate today.
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.
I am not saying the CGI in the prequels are prefect by any means. I am saying the CGI was good for its time, the same way the 1930s Kong movie had good effects for its time. This matters because audience expectation can change. The puppetry in Kong that impressed its audience in the 1930s is not going to impress audiences today ( once you removed the caveat of historical context).
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??
CGI was a big wow factor in the the 1990s and early 2000s. Plenty of films managed to earn big box office numbers solely on the basis of having CGI back then. There was this huge crave for CGI, regardless of how bad it is. I remember plenty of kids wanting and liking CGI, no matter how bad it was. It was seen as something cool back then. By the mid 2000s, the wow factor of CGI started to wear off. And that is also when we start to hear an increase in the too much CGI complaint.
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.
What it says about Star Wars and the OT is that it is not a universally beloved franchise, but a beloved franchise in the West. Parents who grew up with the OT introduced it to their kids and so forth. I did not grow up in the West. My Parents never even seen the OT when they were young in the 70s. The boomers and gen-Xers in East Asia do not care about Star Wars and the OT, and they did not made their kids ( millenials and gen Z) watch Star Wars when we were little.

As someone born and growing up in a very different cultural landscape from the West, I understood liking Star Wars is not common in East Asia. And this is why I often argue that people in the West simply do not comprehend just how ingrained Star Wars is in Western culture compared to its reception in other cultures.
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".

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".
There simply isn't enough time for you to tell the entire story about the fall of the Republic, fall of the Jedi order, the Clone Wars and Anakin's fall the way you want it to be.
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.
It had to include such scenes because Anakin is a young kid and a young Jedi that simply isn't at the centre of galactic politics for the first two movies.
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.
He's only became a major leader in the third movie ( and he just got a seat on the council) They can be better executed, but you need those scenes to give a sense of what exactly is going on in the Republic and the Jedi order as institutions. Otherwise the sudden decline of the Republic will make it more of a mess for the audience as it feels like a reverse-pull from nowhere. The prequels isn't just about Anakin's fall as a jedi knight. It's also about Palpatine's rise to power.
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 disagreed. I argue that all the major handicap and weakness of the ST comes directly from trying to emulate the OT and its story-telling formula. Reusing the same formula means the OT heroes had to become failures in order to repeat the same kind of storytelling. Action-adventure oriented movies work when you don't really have to care how many times the universe is in peril and a small bunch of underdog heroes can save the world/galaxy/universe.
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.
The main appeal of Star Wars lies in its setting.
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.
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Re: RLM/Plinkett Review of Star Trek: Picard

Post by channel73 »

Vendetta wrote: 2020-07-06 06:29am The reason we didn't care about the gungans vs. droids fight was because Jar Jar was an unlovable goober (because his only character trait was slapstick, and despite having the trappings of an arc with his banishment and reacceptance he doesn't actually have one because he doesn't actually do anything that isn't slapstick, so there's no sense in which he is changing towards a state where his people will accept him based on his travel with these Jedi) and we didn't care about him or his perspective on the events in the movie.

If the PoV character for that battle had been a character we cared about, the fact that it was all CG would have made no difference at all.
Please follow the conversation. I don't even know what prompted this bizarre non-sequitur response.
Nobody is saying bad CGI is the only reason the Prequels are flawed. I agree the character development is a much worse problem, but we're talking specifically about CGI in the Prequels and how it was received at the time.

Regardless, if a PoV character that we cared about was a character in that battle, it would still count as a flaw if the CGI sucked. Bad special effects (adjusted for standards of the time) is a flaw, I'm sorry to tell you, even if it's certainly not among the most significant of flaws. I mean, I really care about Luke Skywalker in ROTJ, but it's still a flaw that the Rancor has shitty looking matte lines around it.
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Re: RLM/Plinkett Review of Star Trek: Picard

Post by Vendetta »

channel73 wrote: 2020-07-06 03:03pm
Vendetta wrote: 2020-07-06 06:29am The reason we didn't care about the gungans vs. droids fight was because Jar Jar was an unlovable goober (because his only character trait was slapstick, and despite having the trappings of an arc with his banishment and reacceptance he doesn't actually have one because he doesn't actually do anything that isn't slapstick, so there's no sense in which he is changing towards a state where his people will accept him based on his travel with these Jedi) and we didn't care about him or his perspective on the events in the movie.

If the PoV character for that battle had been a character we cared about, the fact that it was all CG would have made no difference at all.
Please follow the conversation. I don't even know what prompted this bizarre non-sequitur response.
Nobody is saying bad CGI is the only reason the Prequels are flawed. We're talking specifically about CGI in the Prequels and how it was received at the time.

Regardless, if a PoV character that we cared about was a character in that battle, it would still count as a flaw if the CGI sucked. Bad special effects (adjusted for standards of the time) is a flaw, I'm sorry to tell you, even if it's certainly not among the most significant of flaws. I mean, I really care about Luke Skywalker in ROTJ, but it's still a flaw that the Rancor has shitty looking matte lines around it.
And what I'm saying is that blaming bad CGI is a misidentification of the problem.

The CGI could look fakey and unreal and as long as we cared about a character that was present, it wouldn't matter. People complained about the CGI at the time for reasons which are in hindsight wrong, the problem wasn't that the CGI wasn't good enough, it was what it was being used to show that wasn't good enough.
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Re: RLM/Plinkett Review of Star Trek: Picard

Post by channel73 »

Vendetta wrote: 2020-07-06 03:10pm The CGI could look fakey and unreal and as long as we cared about a character that was present, it wouldn't matter.
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.
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Re: RLM/Plinkett Review of Star Trek: Picard

Post by ray245 »

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.
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Re: RLM/Plinkett Review of Star Trek: Picard

Post by channel73 »

ray245 wrote: 2020-07-06 04:49pm The ones that tend to complain about poor CGI generally tends to be the older audience, the ones that saw the OT as kids.
I can only speak for myself, but generally I tend to complain about bad CGI where it's either absurdly bad, or just a little bad but at the same time unnecessary. Especially since the OT demonstrated you can pull off believable special effects that age pretty well without the need for CGI. I think nowadays CGI has gotten so good that the spaceships in the Disney Trilogy for example are pretty much equal or better looking than the models in the OT (especially because some shots of OT spaceships still have visible matte lines). But I don't believe this was the case in the early 2000s when the Prequels came out.
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.
Fine, but now you're just explaining why the CGI is bad. That's fine, I can understand Lucas' motivation, but the criticism about bad CGI itself is still valid.
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.
Again, just explaining why the CGI is bad. I get it, but the criticism about bad CGI itself is still valid.
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.
I can only speak for myself, but clearly I'm not entirely crazy because as I posted earlier, other people back in 1999 had a similar reaction. All I can say is the heavily CGI-driven scenes in Episode 1 and Episode 2 have the effect of pulling me out of the movie. It starts to look too much like a video game, to the extent that I can't really believe the events I'm seeing are actually happening (i.e. I have trouble maintaining suspension of disbelief). Like, it's easy to maintain suspension of disbelief when watching most scenes in the OT - you can easily imagine that say, Tatooine or Hoth, are real physical places. But when I see like the Battle of Geonosis, I can't easily suspend disbelief because it just looks too much like a high-polygon rendering from a video game.
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.
I basically agree with everything you say here, and in fact what you're saying fits very nicely into my overall criticism. You're absolutely right - the Prequels are a way more complex story. If Lucas had made them as like a 9-part movie series or a multi-season Netflix series or something, then yes - they would probably work very well. But he knew he only had 3 movies to pull off this story - and he also knew that you need a lot of character development time to make a "good guy turns bad" story emotionally compelling and believable. If you can't tell the story well in only 3 movies, streamline the story to make it more character focused. That is, scale down the focus to the main characters and have the whole Fall of the Republic story play out as the backdrop. It can always be fleshed out in other media. I argue that the Prequels suffered because Lucas tried to tell the wrong kind of story in the first place.

Also, Star Wars was modeled originally on the old 1930s adventure serials like Flash Gordon. The "in media res" and narrative simplicity of those serials carried over into the OT, and was likely a large reason the OT was so successful. The Prequels departed from this and decided to be a more complex political tale. Maybe a more talented director could have made it work in only 3 movies, I don't know, but I think Lucas would have done a much better job if he made it simpler and more character driven. I don't think he's necessarily capable of telling such a complex story in a high-quality manner in only 3 movies.
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.
Again, the Prequels could have easily been written to focus on a few central characters, instead of this sprawling epic where nothing is fleshed out enough. And honestly, the story of the Fall of the Republic isn't that complicated anyway. It's not too reductive to describe it as: "A large Confederation of member states wants to withdraw from the Republic due to (insert reason), so the Republic fights a civil war over it. The President of the Republic uses this war to increase his own power and curtail liberties, resulting in the Republic turning into a dictatorship in the name of state security".

I mean it's not that complex, and it aligns nicely with real world things that people are familiar with (Separatist conflict is like the US civil war, Republic turning into Empire is like the Roman Republic, etc.)
It only becomes more complicated when you introduce the whole "mystery" sub-plot where Palpatine is secretly playing both sides. But do we really need that? He could have become Emperor simply through the normal processes of accruing wartime powers, like what basically happened with Julius/Augustus Caesar. You can argue the whole Sifo-Diyas/clone conspiracy/Order-66 shit is interesting on it's own, but again we only have 3 movies to tell this story, and you can always expand the story in other media, like the cartoons.
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.
I'm not sure what you're even arguing here. I thought we both agreed that the Sequels basically are a character-driven action-adventure story that apes the OT. I mean they suck at it - but they still essentially are a character-driven action-adventure.
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.
I think the setting was the primary catalyst that got people interested back in the 70s, since it was so novel back then. But nowadays, with so many science-fiction/fantasy content, I think you can't rely on the setting alone anymore.
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.
But the Prequels were also riding on the success of the OT, which clearly accounts for some significant percentage of their success. If you were alive in 1999 and living in the West, surely you remember the insane massive hype of Episode 1. It was even more than the hype for Episode 7 in 2015. People were literally camping outside movie theaters for months like idiots.
People accepted Kong in the 1930s despite the stop-animation and the puppets looking unrealistic.
Yeah, and in ancient Greece people accepted plays performed live on a wooden platform. People will accept anything when no other options exist. But clearly standards change, and people have certain expectations when it comes to VFX. If Hollywood could get away with using 1930s technology today, they wouldn't spend hundreds of millions on enormous VFX production studios. Regardless, I argue that a lot of the CGI in the Prequels was both unnecessary and below the standards of the time. Although I admit a lot of it was also very good - particularly when it came to depicting cities.
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Re: RLM/Plinkett Review of Star Trek: Picard

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channel73 wrote: 2020-07-08 03:19pm I can only speak for myself, but generally I tend to complain about bad CGI where it's either absurdly bad, or just a little bad but at the same time unnecessary. Especially since the OT demonstrated you can pull off believable special effects that age pretty well without the need for CGI. I think nowadays CGI has gotten so good that the spaceships in the Disney Trilogy for example are pretty much equal or better looking than the models in the OT (especially because some shots of OT spaceships still have visible matte lines). But I don't believe this was the case in the early 2000s when the Prequels came out.
Except many of the space ships in the prequels was using models. Naboo fighters in Ep 1 was using a lot of practical models. The only one that's weak is Ep 2, and that's partly due to the fact that it was the first movie shot in digital. By Ep 3, the CGI has gotten a lot better, but that is also the time when the backlash against CGI started.
Fine, but now you're just explaining why the CGI is bad. That's fine, I can understand Lucas' motivation, but the criticism about bad CGI itself is still valid.
My argument is that we retrospectively recognises the flaws of early CGI the more we advance with time. Take Video games for example. What people think of as good graphics changes very rapidly over time. When the game was just released as the latest state-of-the-art game, people kept commenting on how realistic everything was. It's only when computer game's graphics improved even further that people started to comment on how outdated it looks, and how it's actually not as realistic as they remembered it.

So our experience with CGI changes depending on when we saw it.
Again, just explaining why the CGI is bad. I get it, but the criticism about bad CGI itself is still valid.
See above. But I'm giving you a reason why Lucas felt he wanted to use more CGI. Without using the amount of CGI he did, he would not have been able to fund the movies as an independent studio.
I can only speak for myself, but clearly I'm not entirely crazy because as I posted earlier, other people back in 1999 had a similar reaction. All I can say is the heavily CGI-driven scenes in Episode 1 and Episode 2 have the effect of pulling me out of the movie. It starts to look too much like a video game, to the extent that I can't really believe the events I'm seeing are actually happening (i.e. I have trouble maintaining suspension of disbelief). Like, it's easy to maintain suspension of disbelief when watching most scenes in the OT - you can easily imagine that say, Tatooine or Hoth, are real physical places. But when I see like the Battle of Geonosis, I can't easily suspend disbelief because it just looks too much like a high-polygon rendering from a video game.
But which CGI-driven scene are you talking about? Geonosis? Which uses a lot of miniature sets?

Image

Or the space battles of Ep 1?

Image

Image

Image

Or the Kamino scenes?

Image

A lot of what people call heavily-CGI scenes are actually not that heavily CGI at all. I seriously don't think the issue people had with the scenes is the CGI, but rather the cinematography and the composition of miniature sets onto blue-screen.

This video is worth a watch if people didn't realise just how much practical models were used in the prequels.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toFOhKVo ... =emb_title[/youtube]

I basically agree with everything you say here, and in fact what you're saying fits very nicely into my overall criticism. You're absolutely right - the Prequels are a way more complex story. If Lucas had made them as like a 9-part movie series or a multi-season Netflix series or something, then yes - they would probably work very well. But he knew he only had 3 movies to pull off this story - and he also knew that you need a lot of character development time to make a "good guy turns bad" story emotionally compelling and believable. If you can't tell the story well in only 3 movies, streamline the story to make it more character focused. That is, scale down the focus to the main characters and have the whole Fall of the Republic story play out as the backdrop. It can always be fleshed out in other media. I argue that the Prequels suffered because Lucas tried to tell the wrong kind of story in the first place.
I'm arguing that you cannot water it down any further. The prequels are already as watered-down as they could, even trying to make it more of an action-adventure film in Ep 2. The problem is Lucas thought he could achieve it, and it's a matter of over-ambition rather than telling the wrong kind of story. Instead of telling a 3 film movie, because you cannot create an Episode 4, Lucas should just admit defeat and say he has to shift the numbers around once again.
Also, Star Wars was modeled originally on the old 1930s adventure serials like Flash Gordon. The "in media res" and narrative simplicity of those serials carried over into the OT, and was likely a large reason the OT was so successful. The Prequels departed from this and decided to be a more complex political tale. Maybe a more talented director could have made it work in only 3 movies, I don't know, but I think Lucas would have done a much better job if he made it simpler and more character driven. I don't think he's necessarily capable of telling such a complex story in a high-quality manner in only 3 movies.
I seriously don't think any director could. Not even Peter Jackson as his height with his 3-hours long movies. The story of the prequels requires either you make more movies, or you end up with a series with a lot of issues and flaws. Making it simpler and more character driven would have made the problem worse, because that was the problem the prequels had.
Again, the Prequels could have easily been written to focus on a few central characters, instead of this sprawling epic where nothing is fleshed out enough. And honestly, the story of the Fall of the Republic isn't that complicated anyway. It's not too reductive to describe it as: "A large Confederation of member states wants to withdraw from the Republic due to (insert reason), so the Republic fights a civil war over it. The President of the Republic uses this war to increase his own power and curtail liberties, resulting in the Republic turning into a dictatorship in the name of state security".

I mean it's not that complex, and it aligns nicely with real world things that people are familiar with (Separatist conflict is like the US civil war, Republic turning into Empire is like the Roman Republic, etc.)
It only becomes more complicated when you introduce the whole "mystery" sub-plot where Palpatine is secretly playing both sides. But do we really need that? He could have become Emperor simply through the normal processes of accruing wartime powers, like what basically happened with Julius/Augustus Caesar. You can argue the whole Sifo-Diyas/clone conspiracy/Order-66 shit is interesting on it's own, but again we only have 3 movies to tell this story, and you can always expand the story in other media, like the cartoons.
Palpatine secretly playing both sides is barely much of a sub-plot, considering how little development we got anyway. But the challenge is not to show the separatist conflict, but to show just how corrupt and weak the Republic has become by the time of the prequels. It's also a challenge trying to show just how the Jedi Order is utterly blind to what's going on in the Galaxy and the Republic.
I'm not sure what you're even arguing here. I thought we both agreed that the Sequels basically are a character-driven action-adventure story that apes the OT. I mean they suck at it - but they still essentially are a character-driven action-adventure.
I'm saying one of the reasons it became so poor received is because they can't figure out what to do with the OT cast, which to be honest, is what audience are paying money to see. So making a character-driven-action-adventure story will result in taking the focus away from the older characters. Because now old Han, Luke and Leia suddenly have to be out running around at the front lines to make fans happy, even if it doesn't work well for the characters at that point in their lives.
I think the setting was the primary catalyst that got people interested back in the 70s, since it was so novel back then. But nowadays, with so many science-fiction/fantasy content, I think you can't rely on the setting alone anymore.
The Mandalorian did very well because it has the Star Wars setting. KOTOR did well as a video game because of the SW setting. Same with many other spin-off SW materials. The setting is what makes the franchise last and continue, not the characters. The franchise needs to be able to draw people towards new characters. By that can only be achieved if people are interested in the setting to see different stories of new characters.
But the Prequels were also riding on the success of the OT, which clearly accounts for some significant percentage of their success. If you were alive in 1999 and living in the West, surely you remember the insane massive hype of Episode 1. It was even more than the hype for Episode 7 in 2015. People were literally camping outside movie theaters for months like idiots.
Yes. But I also remembered despite the backlash from some quarters by the time Ep 2 came out, both 2 and 3 still made very impressive sums at the box office.

Yeah, and in ancient Greece people accepted plays performed live on a wooden platform. People will accept anything when no other options exist. But clearly standards change, and people have certain expectations when it comes to VFX. If Hollywood could get away with using 1930s technology today, they wouldn't spend hundreds of millions on enormous VFX production studios. Regardless, I argue that a lot of the CGI in the Prequels was both unnecessary and below the standards of the time. Although I admit a lot of it was also very good - particularly when it came to depicting cities.
I'm saying we need to go back to the standards of its time in our discussion of the prequels' SFX. Our current retrospective views of the prequels' VFX is not how we view the VFX back in the 90s and 2000s.

You know what got nominated for best vfx in the 90s and 2000s?

This:



Image

Image

Image

And these are the Oscar-nominated works. There were plenty of other CGI SFX that looked even worse than that.

Shots like these were considered Hollywood standards:

Image
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Re: RLM/Plinkett Review of Star Trek: Picard

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The amount audiences care about CGI quality is inversely proportional to the audience's investment to the story. If TPM were better written, most complaints about its non-story elements would be mere quips instead.
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Re: RLM/Plinkett Review of Star Trek: Picard

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Bob the Gunslinger wrote: 2020-07-08 09:35pm The amount audiences care about CGI quality is inversely proportional to the audience's investment to the story. If TPM were better written, most complaints about its non-story elements would be mere quips instead.
Exactly. People are perfectly willing to suspend their disbelief and not bother about bad CGI if the story is good enough. Look at Babylon 5, a series with some poor CGI even by the standards of its time. But no one really cared about its quality of the CGI because the story is well-written.

This is why I find issues with a lot of criticism of the prequels. Yes they are not perfect movies by any stretch, but the idea that they are bad because they are using too much CGI tends to be the kind of fanboy criticism that doesn't really do anything to improve the movies.

Would people find the prequels better movies if they used less CGI? The issue with the writing and acting are still going to be there.
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Re: RLM/Plinkett Review of Star Trek: Picard

Post by channel73 »

ray245 wrote: 2020-07-08 06:42pm My argument is that we retrospectively recognises the flaws of early CGI the more we advance with time. Take Video games for example. What people think of as good graphics changes very rapidly over time. When the game was just released as the latest state-of-the-art game, people kept commenting on how realistic everything was. It's only when computer game's graphics improved even further that people started to comment on how outdated it looks, and how it's actually not as realistic as they remembered it.
Yeah I get it, you said that many times. I'm saying that even in 1999 people complained about it. I thought the Droid/Gungan battle looked bad the first time I saw it. I posted a review from 1999 that said the same thing. That's my only point.
But which CGI-driven scene are you talking about? Geonosis? Which uses a lot of miniature sets?
You're just downplaying the CGI usage by posting images of some practical sets or miniatures that also exist. I never said it was 100% CGI. Yes, the Colosseum was partially a practical miniature in some shots but almost the entire battle afterwards in the open field is CGI. There's a particular shot where Mace Windu and a bunch of Clone Troopers hops off of a Republic transport in the open desert, which really looks like video game graphics, especially with the CGI troopers.

You also post a model of the hallway set in the Kamino scene, while downplaying that every single thing Obi Wan sees through those windows as he walks through that hallway is CGI!

Again, nobody said everything was 100% CGI, just that there is a LOT of it, on top of some practical sets yes. And the fact that you've identified some random people who sometimes can't tell the difference is not really relevant. Yes, with the overall "glossy" look of the digital film, sometimes it's difficult to tell if a particular shot was a composited miniature or CGI or a combination of both. Who cares, if it still looks like crap?
I'm arguing that you cannot water it down any further. The prequels are already as watered-down as they could, even trying to make it more of an action-adventure film in Ep 2. The problem is Lucas thought he could achieve it, and it's a matter of over-ambition rather than telling the wrong kind of story. Instead of telling a 3 film movie, because you cannot create an Episode 4, Lucas should just admit defeat and say he has to shift the numbers around once again.
Again, all of Episode 1 is mostly irrelevant to the overall story. The few bits of story-telling elements that carry over (Anakin's mother, whatever) could be easily written into the story without the need for an entire movie that is so disconnected from the main story line. Any argument you make about how "it couldn't be done, etc." is hard to take seriously when Lucas wasted an entire movie on non-Anakin material.
I seriously don't think any director could. Not even Peter Jackson as his height with his 3-hours long movies. The story of the prequels requires either you make more movies, or you end up with a series with a lot of issues and flaws. Making it simpler and more character driven would have made the problem worse, because that was the problem the prequels had.
I completely disagree. The Prequels are a "good guy turns bad" story. These are extremely hard to tell convincingly. How do you write a character who is a good guy in the beginning, and by the end is going around murdering people? It's very hard to do, unless either you have a lot of time to slowly develop this character (like Breaking Bad), or you make the whole story very character focused (like the Godfather, Part I).

Lucas had 3 movies to tell this "good guy turns bad" story. He basically wasted the first movie on peripheral material. Okay, down to 2 movies. So now he portrays Anakin as already kind of troubled. Then Anakin murders an entire indigenous tribe, at which point he is basically already completely evil. Then in the beginning of Episode 3 he's back to being a good guy, doing heroic shit in his starfighter - which is probably something we should have seen way earlier. Then he panics over his vision of Padme, cuts off Maces hand, and then just gives up and starts murdering children. Yes, I know I'm simplifying this but the whole arc is just a mess. I'm pretty certain that while any "good guy turns bad" story is going to be difficult to tell - it can be done convincingly in 3 movies.

I mean, I've seen any number of obvious outlines from random Internet people of how it could be done better. Ep 1: Anakin is straightforward good guy, analogue to Luke, goes on adventures with Obi Wan etc. Ep 2: Anakin is getting worn down by the ongoing Clone Wars, seeing his friends die, etc. He does some slightly darkside shit like force choking a prisoner during an interrogation, whatever. He develops some resentment over how the Jedi handle the war effort and his fellow soldiers continue to die, etc. Ep 3: Anakin is now really worn down and cynical from the war, turns to Palpatine who he believes is a strong leader, etc. Eventually some series of events or revelations makes him turn completely against the Jedi, he believes the Jedi have betrayed the Republic in some way, he sides with Palpatine and attacks the Jedi temple, etc, blah blah.

I mean a "good guy turns bad" story is always going to be extremely challenging from both a writing, pacing and acting perspective. But Lucas didn't even have a workable outline of a proper arc for fuck's sake! A lot of that stems from trying to focus too much on the political side of things, or the "mystery" subplot with Jango Fett and Kamino, or basically wasting the entire first movie on non-Anakin stuff.
Palpatine secretly playing both sides is barely much of a sub-plot, considering how little development we got anyway. But the challenge is not to show the separatist conflict, but to show just how corrupt and weak the Republic has become by the time of the prequels. It's also a challenge trying to show just how the Jedi Order is utterly blind to what's going on in the Galaxy and the Republic.
The "mystery subplot" is a substantial chunk of the second movie, beginning with chasing Jango Fett, going to the Jedi library, finding the clones, etc. And really the Separatist conflict can just be explained in the opening crawl, the way the Galactic Civil War is explained in the opening crawl of Episode IV. It can be further fleshed out here and there via a few lines of dialogue.
I'm saying one of the reasons it became so poor received is because they can't figure out what to do with the OT cast, which to be honest, is what audience are paying money to see. So making a character-driven-action-adventure story will result in taking the focus away from the older characters. Because now old Han, Luke and Leia suddenly have to be out running around at the front lines to make fans happy, even if it doesn't work well for the characters at that point in their lives.
Just have Leia commanding a capital ship and directing space battles against the bad guys. I mean they sort of did that with Episode 8 anyway, it just sucked. Luke would of course be like the Obi-Wan figure. As for Han, I admit it's hard to find a convincing use of Han that is both (A) cool to watch and (B) doesn't degrade his character, but whatever. You can still have the OT characters and do an action/adventure style story.
The Mandalorian did very well because it has the Star Wars setting. KOTOR did well as a video game because of the SW setting. Same with many other spin-off SW materials. The setting is what makes the franchise last and continue, not the characters. The franchise needs to be able to draw people towards new characters. By that can only be achieved if people are interested in the setting to see different stories of new characters.
The setting is awesome, but not sufficient. The Mandalorian was actually good for the most part. Not all Star Wars content is nearly as well received as the Mandalorian. I mean, the Sequels have the Star Wars setting as well, and they kind of suck.
I'm saying we need to go back to the standards of its time in our discussion of the prequels' SFX. Our current retrospective views of the prequels' VFX is not how we view the VFX back in the 90s and 2000s.
I agree - I'm not saying otherwise. I already said I thought use of CGI in the Prequels was way too "overconfident" for the state of the technology at the time.
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Re: RLM/Plinkett Review of Star Trek: Picard

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ray245 wrote: 2020-07-09 11:31am This is why I find issues with a lot of criticism of the prequels. Yes they are not perfect movies by any stretch, but the idea that they are bad because they are using too much CGI tends to be the kind of fanboy criticism that doesn't really do anything to improve the movies.

Would people find the prequels better movies if they used less CGI? The issue with the writing and acting are still going to be there.
This is a misrepresentation of what anyone actually says. Nobody says the Prequels suck because and only because of bad CGI.

Like, are we not allowed to discuss relatively minor flaws at all?
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Re: RLM/Plinkett Review of Star Trek: Picard

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channel73 wrote: 2020-07-09 02:26pm Yeah I get it, you said that many times. I'm saying that even in 1999 people complained about it. I thought the Droid/Gungan battle looked bad the first time I saw it. I posted a review from 1999 that said the same thing. That's my only point.
I'm not denying those complaints didn't exist back then. But looking back at various threads on forums on the prequels when they were released, that's not a commonly brought up point.
You're just downplaying the CGI usage by posting images of some practical sets or miniatures that also exist. I never said it was 100% CGI. Yes, the Colosseum was partially a practical miniature in some shots but almost the entire battle afterwards in the open field is CGI. There's a particular shot where Mace Windu and a bunch of Clone Troopers hops off of a Republic transport in the open desert, which really looks like video game graphics, especially with the CGI troopers.
But by what metric do we consider something as having "too much CGI"? We know that many other Hollywood blockbusters used more CGI shots than the prequels. The scenes that are nearly entirely CGI also happens to be shots when it's difficult to create a practical or miniature set for them.
You also post a model of the hallway set in the Kamino scene, while downplaying that every single thing Obi Wan sees through those windows as he walks through that hallway is CGI!
It shows they are using practical sets whenever possible. The scenes that Obi-Wan saw outside of the windows are those that were a lot more difficult to built with miniatures. How are you going to create sets that shows millions of fetus in tubes without CGI?
Again, nobody said everything was 100% CGI, just that there is a LOT of it, on top of some practical sets yes. And the fact that you've identified some random people who sometimes can't tell the difference is not really relevant. Yes, with the overall "glossy" look of the digital film, sometimes it's difficult to tell if a particular shot was a composited miniature or CGI or a combination of both. Who cares, if it still looks like crap?
It is relevant because it shows they're not grasping their issues with those scenes. Clamouring for more physical props doesn't address their real heart of their complaints, which is things looked different from the OT.
Again, all of Episode 1 is mostly irrelevant to the overall story. The few bits of story-telling elements that carry over (Anakin's mother, whatever) could be easily written into the story without the need for an entire movie that is so disconnected from the main story line. Any argument you make about how "it couldn't be done, etc." is hard to take seriously when Lucas wasted an entire movie on non-Anakin material.
Ep 1 isn't really Ankain's movie. The main character of EP 1 was Qui-Gon, and he's the character which allows us to see the problems that is beginning to unfold in the Jedi Order and in the Republic.

I completely disagree. The Prequels are a "good guy turns bad" story. These are extremely hard to tell convincingly. How do you write a character who is a good guy in the beginning, and by the end is going around murdering people? It's very hard to do, unless either you have a lot of time to slowly develop this character (like Breaking Bad), or you make the whole story very character focused (like the Godfather, Part I).

Lucas had 3 movies to tell this "good guy turns bad" story. He basically wasted the first movie on peripheral material. Okay, down to 2 movies. So now he portrays Anakin as already kind of troubled. Then Anakin murders an entire indigenous tribe, at which point he is basically already completely evil. Then in the beginning of Episode 3 he's back to being a good guy, doing heroic shit in his starfighter - which is probably something we should have seen way earlier. Then he panics over his vision of Padme, cuts off Maces hand, and then just gives up and starts murdering children. Yes, I know I'm simplifying this but the whole arc is just a mess. I'm pretty certain that while any "good guy turns bad" story is going to be difficult to tell - it can be done convincingly in 3 movies.
Except that's not the story. It's not a good guy turns bad story. It's a story about decline and fall of a galactic Republic, the Jedi Order and one of its leading members. Just like how the OT is not merely a story about Luke becoming a Jedi, but about how Luke AND the entire rebellion overthrowing the empire. It's why we had the story in ROTJ, where Luke is an almost peripheral figure in the final battle of Endor. Luke barely did anything in the film that affected the outcome of the battle.

Yes, the EU novels tried to explain how the death of Palpatine somehow magically changed the tide of the battle, but that is a recognition that in the film itself, Luke barely did anything that change the outcome of the entire war. The problem is "blowing up bad guys" is a far simpler subject to tackle than a subject about the decline and fall of a democratic republic and the Jedi Order.

The Godfather movies doesn't focus on the wider politics of the entire Mafia system, and breaking bad had several seasons to tell its story.
I mean, I've seen any number of obvious outlines from random Internet people of how it could be done better. Ep 1: Anakin is straightforward good guy, analogue to Luke, goes on adventures with Obi Wan etc. Ep 2: Anakin is getting worn down by the ongoing Clone Wars, seeing his friends die, etc. He does some slightly darkside shit like force choking a prisoner during an interrogation, whatever. He develops some resentment over how the Jedi handle the war effort and his fellow soldiers continue to die, etc. Ep 3: Anakin is now really worn down and cynical from the war, turns to Palpatine who he believes is a strong leader, etc. Eventually some series of events or revelations makes him turn completely against the Jedi, he believes the Jedi have betrayed the Republic in some way, he sides with Palpatine and attacks the Jedi temple, etc, blah blah.

I mean a "good guy turns bad" story is always going to be extremely challenging from both a writing, pacing and acting perspective. But Lucas didn't even have a workable outline of a proper arc for fuck's sake! A lot of that stems from trying to focus too much on the political side of things, or the "mystery" subplot with Jango Fett and Kamino, or basically wasting the entire first movie on non-Anakin stuff.
But that entirely doesn't show us why the Republic fell, and the reasons why Anakin might feel compelled to turn against the Jedi Order other than saying he's worn down by the war. Stories about good guys turning bad are strong when we can see enough things from their point of view to understand why they might feel the way they did. Why did Anakin turn against the Jedi Order? Why did the Republic fail to prevent the rise of Palpatine? These are issues that needs to be tackled.

I don't think the prequels did the best job at tackling those issues either, but I think that's because it's simply impossible to do it within three films. No amount of changing of focus will be able to resolve the issues. The only way to "fix" it is to make more than three movies.
The "mystery subplot" is a substantial chunk of the second movie, beginning with chasing Jango Fett, going to the Jedi library, finding the clones, etc. And really the Separatist conflict can just be explained in the opening crawl, the way the Galactic Civil War is explained in the opening crawl of Episode IV. It can be further fleshed out here and there via a few lines of dialogue.
The mystery subplot is to give Obi-Wan a more character and action driven story. The whole mystery is a macguffin, the same way finding the lost map to Luke was a macguffin in EP 7. It's the kind of story you are asking for, which is to move away from the politics. But doing that meant we lost valuable screentime in actually depicting the problems arising in the Jedi Order and the Republic.

Just have Leia commanding a capital ship and directing space battles against the bad guys. I mean they sort of did that with Episode 8 anyway, it just sucked. Luke would of course be like the Obi-Wan figure. As for Han, I admit it's hard to find a convincing use of Han that is both (A) cool to watch and (B) doesn't degrade his character, but whatever. You can still have the OT characters and do an action/adventure style story.
Having Leia in command still puts her in a secondary/supporting character role. Because she's not at the frontline doing stuff, and is stuck in the command post doing all the talking and commanding. Luke as the Obi-Wan figure would overshadow the new Jedi-knights-to-be. That was an acknowledged problem when they were making Ep 7. It's why JJ Abrams bump off the problem to RJ because he wants to ensure the new cast can get screentime to develop themselves, instead of audience merely focusing all their attention on Luke as this awesome Jedi master.

As for Han, he's already a general in ROTJ. And they sort of gave him a chance to be an action-hero by leading a commando task force. Which is still fairly reasonable at his age back in ROTJ. But by the start of EP 7, if he's still in the military, he would be occupying a very senior desk-job. When they didn't do so for Ep 7, they basically unwind all of his character development.
The setting is awesome, but not sufficient. The Mandalorian was actually good for the most part. Not all Star Wars content is nearly as well received as the Mandalorian. I mean, the Sequels have the Star Wars setting as well, and they kind of suck.
The setting is the hook and not the story. The problem with the sequels is they mistook the setting AS the story. Hence the return to the rebel-vs-empire dynamic even when it is not needed at all.
I agree - I'm not saying otherwise. I already said I thought use of CGI in the Prequels was way too "overconfident" for the state of the technology at the time.
I'm saying it's not overconfident because the vfx is actually of a good quality by the standards of its time. The vfx didn't last as well as some other movies, but very few movies can have effects that last well with the test of time.

For every 2000 space odyssey, you have Star Trek TOS. Far every Gollum, you have the Scorpion King in Mummy 2. The prequels effects didn't age as well as the effects in LOTR, but that's also why the LOTR movies won best Oscar in vfx. And why the prequels were merely nominated but fail to win best vfx.

They are not the best, but they aren't the worse. Instead, they are simply serviceable by the standards of its time.
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Re: RLM/Plinkett Review of Star Trek: Picard

Post by ray245 »

channel73 wrote: 2020-07-09 02:28pm This is a misrepresentation of what anyone actually says. Nobody says the Prequels suck because and only because of bad CGI.

Like, are we not allowed to discuss relatively minor flaws at all?
You're also misrepresenting what I am saying. I am not saying people are saying the prequels suck only because of "bad" CGI. But the disproportionate focus on CGI tends to reveal a failure to identify their real issue with the films, and allows nostalgia to have even more of a influence than it ought to have in critiquing a film.

By making "bad" CGI a big focus of their criticism, it basically acts as a vehicle for saying "look at how bad the new films look compared to good old fashioned practical effects" It's similar to how many of the criticisms about the new Sequel movies ended up being distracted by people saying how they are bad because of "SJW". Complaints about how the new films are bad because it's too "SJW-friendly" is driven by the same reasons that led to people focusing too much attention on "bad CGI". It's basically because of the influence of nostalgia, and those fanboys trying to find new ways to talk about how the newer films are bad because it's not the same as the old films.

The fanboys can't complain about too much CGI anymore because the sequels made practical effects a big marketing point in the behind-the-scene videos. So they turn their attention to other stuff that feels different from the old films, which is supposedly the "SJW movement".
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Re: RLM/Plinkett Review of Star Trek: Picard

Post by channel73 »

ray245 wrote: 2020-07-09 03:20pm But by what metric do we consider something as having "too much CGI"? We know that many other Hollywood blockbusters used more CGI shots than the prequels. The scenes that are nearly entirely CGI also happens to be shots when it's difficult to create a practical or miniature set for them.
It's too much when it's unnecessary and would have looked better otherwise, like with closeup shots of the Clonetroopers for example.
Again, nobody said everything was 100% CGI, just that there is a LOT of it, on top of some practical sets yes. And the fact that you've identified some random people who sometimes can't tell the difference is not really relevant. Yes, with the overall "glossy" look of the digital film, sometimes it's difficult to tell if a particular shot was a composited miniature or CGI or a combination of both. Who cares, if it still looks like crap?
It is relevant because it shows they're not grasping their issues with those scenes. Clamouring for more physical props doesn't address their real heart of their complaints, which is things looked different from the OT.
I don't buy that "looking different from the OT" was ever a problem for most people. In fact, Coruscant looks nothing like anything in the OT (except for that one Special Edition clip), and Coruscant is fucking amazing and awesome looking. Does anyone really not like Coruscant? Even Disney was going to bring it back in Episode 9 originally.

On the other hand, the open field battle in Geonosis should look a bit more similar to the OT, because there's no reason to generate the desert landscape and so much imagery with computers when it would look much better if it were shot on location in a place like Tunisia or Death Valley or Utah or somewhere with a similar real landscape.

It doesn't need to necessarily "look like the OT" - I actually appreciate many of the different aesthetics in the Prequels, like the "retro sci-fi" look of the Naboo ships, and obviously Coruscant. I only get annoyed when something that could have been done better with real locations ends up looking like shit.
Ep 1 isn't really Anakin's movie. The main character of EP 1 was Qui-Gon, and he's the character which allows us to see the problems that is beginning to unfold in the Jedi Order and in the Republic.
I know. I think that was a big mistake and waste of time, since it was so divorced from the rest of the story. You don't need a whole movie to explore these problems with the Republic/Jedi Order. It's not that complex: the Republic is corrupt due to corporate interests, the Jedi Order is too complacent and dogmatic due to centuries of peace. These are things that can be established efficiently in a few minutes with good writing and direction. You don't need a whole movie.
I completely disagree. The Prequels are a "good guy turns bad" story. These are extremely hard to tell convincingly. How do you write a character who is a good guy in the beginning, and by the end is going around murdering people? It's very hard to do, unless either you have a lot of time to slowly develop this character (like Breaking Bad), or you make the whole story very character focused (like the Godfather, Part I).

Lucas had 3 movies to tell this "good guy turns bad" story. He basically wasted the first movie on peripheral material. Okay, down to 2 movies. So now he portrays Anakin as already kind of troubled. Then Anakin murders an entire indigenous tribe, at which point he is basically already completely evil. Then in the beginning of Episode 3 he's back to being a good guy, doing heroic shit in his starfighter - which is probably something we should have seen way earlier. Then he panics over his vision of Padme, cuts off Maces hand, and then just gives up and starts murdering children. Yes, I know I'm simplifying this but the whole arc is just a mess. I'm pretty certain that while any "good guy turns bad" story is going to be difficult to tell - it can be done convincingly in 3 movies.
Except that's not the story. It's not a good guy turns bad story. It's a story about decline and fall of a galactic Republic, the Jedi Order and one of its leading members.
I guess this is just the root of our disagreement. For me the main point of interest in the PT story was Anakin's fall to the Darkside. This story inverts Luke's hero's journey and makes the payoff at the end of ROTJ even more amazing. So it is very much a "good guy turns bad" story at its core. That doesn't mean we need to remove ALL context or peripheral subplots - just portray it more efficiently within the story of Anakin. The Republic is corrupt due to corporate interests, the Jedi order is dogmatic and complacent due to centuries of peace, etc. These are things that can be portrayed efficiently in a few scenes with good writing.
I mean, I've seen any number of obvious outlines from random Internet people of how it could be done better. Ep 1: Anakin is straightforward good guy, analogue to Luke, goes on adventures with Obi Wan etc. Ep 2: Anakin is getting worn down by the ongoing Clone Wars, seeing his friends die, etc. He does some slightly darkside shit like force choking a prisoner during an interrogation, whatever. He develops some resentment over how the Jedi handle the war effort and his fellow soldiers continue to die, etc. Ep 3: Anakin is now really worn down and cynical from the war, turns to Palpatine who he believes is a strong leader, etc. Eventually some series of events or revelations makes him turn completely against the Jedi, he believes the Jedi have betrayed the Republic in some way, he sides with Palpatine and attacks the Jedi temple, etc, blah blah.

I mean a "good guy turns bad" story is always going to be extremely challenging from both a writing, pacing and acting perspective. But Lucas didn't even have a workable outline of a proper arc for fuck's sake! A lot of that stems from trying to focus too much on the political side of things, or the "mystery" subplot with Jango Fett and Kamino, or basically wasting the entire first movie on non-Anakin stuff.
But that entirely doesn't show us why the Republic fell, and the reasons why Anakin might feel compelled to turn against the Jedi Order other than saying he's worn down by the war. Stories about good guys turning bad are strong when we can see enough things from their point of view to understand why they might feel the way they did. Why did Anakin turn against the Jedi Order? Why did the Republic fail to prevent the rise of Palpatine? These are issues that needs to be tackled.
This is more of "I can't imagine how it can be done, therefore it can't be done".

The Republic fell because a savvy politician accrued wartime powers to turn himself into a dictator in the name of state security. The Jedi failed because they grew too complacent and arrogant over centuries of peacetime. It's not that complicated, and has many relatable real-world analogues. You can portray this efficiently while focusing mainly on Anakin's story.
The mystery subplot is to give Obi-Wan a more character and action driven story. The whole mystery is a macguffin, the same way finding the lost map to Luke was a macguffin in EP 7. It's the kind of story you are asking for, which is to move away from the politics. But doing that meant we lost valuable screentime in actually depicting the problems arising in the Jedi Order and the Republic.
I was just bringing up the mystery subplot as part of the larger plot thread around Palpatine playing both sides in the war. I argue you don't even need to have Palpatine playing both sides - he can just take advantage of a naturally occurring civil war to accrue wartime powers and become a de-facto dictator like Julius Caesar.
Having Leia in command still puts her in a secondary/supporting character role. Because she's not at the frontline doing stuff, and is stuck in the command post doing all the talking and commanding. Luke as the Obi-Wan figure would overshadow the new Jedi-knights-to-be. That was an acknowledged problem when they were making Ep 7. It's why JJ Abrams bump off the problem to RJ because he wants to ensure the new cast can get screentime to develop themselves, instead of audience merely focusing all their attention on Luke as this awesome Jedi master.
I never expected the Sequels to have the OT characters running around in action scenes. They're obviously too old. They can still play secondary roles, as they did. I think that's fine. I just don't like how it was actually implemented in practice.
As for Han, he's already a general in ROTJ. And they sort of gave him a chance to be an action-hero by leading a commando task force. Which is still fairly reasonable at his age back in ROTJ. But by the start of EP 7, if he's still in the military, he would be occupying a very senior desk-job. When they didn't do so for Ep 7, they basically unwind all of his character development.
I agree, the way they portrayed Han really sucked. It was done purely for nostalgia and marketing.
The setting is the hook and not the story. The problem with the sequels is they mistook the setting AS the story. Hence the return to the rebel-vs-empire dynamic even when it is not needed at all.
I agree.
I'm saying it's not overconfident because the vfx is actually of a good quality by the standards of its time. The vfx didn't last as well as some other movies, but very few movies can have effects that last well with the test of time.
I think a lot of the Episode 2 effects were subpar even at that time. The fact that many other movies also have shitty CGI is not relevant. I would likely criticize those as well. And again, it would be a very minor criticism. I've never argued that this whole CGI thing is particularly important relative to other issues, just that it's a completely valid thing to criticize.
By making "bad" CGI a big focus of their criticism, it basically acts as a vehicle for saying "look at how bad the new films look compared to good old fashioned practical effects"
Except sometimes the Prequels DO look way worse than old fashioned practical effects. I keep pointing this out. Landscape on Geonosis. Closeups of Clonetroopers. Grassy landscape with Gungun/Droid battle (that one I think is based on photographs and augmented with CGI, but still it looks so glossy and fake).
The fanboys can't complain about too much CGI anymore because the sequels made practical effects a big marketing point in the behind-the-scene videos. So they turn their attention to other stuff that feels different from the old films, which is supposedly the "SJW movement".
The stupid CGI octopus monsters in Force Awakens look pretty bad. The CGI horse aliens in TLJ also look pretty bad. I hear people complain about it all the time. There's less complaints in general about CGI in the Sequels because a lot of the CGI is very good, and they used more outdoor shooting locations and actual actors in suits for closeups of Stormtroopers. Jakku looks way more realistic than Geonosis, for example. The Sequels still suck though for other more significant reasons.
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Re: RLM/Plinkett Review of Star Trek: Picard

Post by ray245 »

channel73 wrote: 2020-07-09 04:43pm It's too much when it's unnecessary and would have looked better otherwise, like with closeup shots of the Clonetroopers for example.
You could have gone without CGI for the Clone troopers in some close-up shots, but I don't really think it's as CGI as some people are saying. I was fully convinced it was real until I saw the behind-the-scenes footage.
I don't buy that "looking different from the OT" was ever a problem for most people. In fact, Coruscant looks nothing like anything in the OT (except for that one Special Edition clip), and Coruscant is fucking amazing and awesome looking. Does anyone really not like Coruscant? Even Disney was going to bring it back in Episode 9 originally.
It certainly is for some fans like JJ Abrams, who did everything to pretend Coruscant did not exist. Down to making the effort of creating another brand-new Coruscant-like planet to blow it up.
On the other hand, the open field battle in Geonosis should look a bit more similar to the OT, because there's no reason to generate the desert landscape and so much imagery with computers when it would look much better if it were shot on location in a place like Tunisia or Death Valley or Utah or somewhere with a similar real landscape.
Shooting on real location is expensive. Shooting on a desert is even more expensive because you need to drag loads of equipment to the middle of nowhere AND ensure your crew and extras don't faint from overheating. Disney spent loads of money in order to shoot on location. Sure, if Lucasfilm had the money to literally shoot the battle at a real location with a massive cast of extras, it will look impressive. But that is going to require some serious financial backing from a major studio. The prequels were made relatively cheaply by Hollywood standards.

But I'm fine with the CGI we got in the battle. It looks fine for me, and it looked fine for many people back then. Look at the threads on SDN and other forums and what they say about AOTC when it came out. Most comments are impressed by the battle in some way or another.
It doesn't need to necessarily "look like the OT" - I actually appreciate many of the different aesthetics in the Prequels, like the "retro sci-fi" look of the Naboo ships, and obviously Coruscant. I only get annoyed when something that could have been done better with real locations ends up looking like shit.
See above. There are logistical reasons why that did not happened.
I know. I think that was a big mistake and waste of time, since it was so divorced from the rest of the story. You don't need a whole movie to explore these problems with the Republic/Jedi Order. It's not that complex: the Republic is corrupt due to corporate interests, the Jedi Order is too complacent and dogmatic due to centuries of peace. These are things that can be established efficiently in a few minutes with good writing and direction. You don't need a whole movie.
I think it's a lot harder to do so than you think. Because there is a balancing act between showing the corrupting within the Republic, but at the same time showing that the Republic is still worth defending. Otherwise, merely showing off the corruption that is going on is only going to make the audience feel let's end it all together and happily go along with Palpatine's plan to turn it into an empire.

It's a tricky act to balance.
I guess this is just the root of our disagreement. For me the main point of interest in the PT story was Anakin's fall to the Darkside. This story inverts Luke's hero's journey and makes the payoff at the end of ROTJ even more amazing. So it is very much a "good guy turns bad" story at its core. That doesn't mean we need to remove ALL context or peripheral subplots - just portray it more efficiently within the story of Anakin. The Republic is corrupt due to corporate interests, the Jedi order is dogmatic and complacent due to centuries of peace, etc. These are things that can be portrayed efficiently in a few scenes with good writing.
You want to show Anakin's perspective, but at the same time you want to ensure you don't completely fall into portraying Anakin's fall as justified, because you'll end up justifying everything Anakin is doing. It's about showing while Anakin's reasons for his falling is understandable, it is not justified. So showing why his actions are not justified requires you to show off more of the world around him. It's what the character of Obi-Wan and Padme were supposed to do. They are there to act as contrast to Anakin, and to show the audience that the Republic and the Jedi Order should not fall. Whether it is well-done in the prequels is another issue altogether.
This is more of "I can't imagine how it can be done, therefore it can't be done".

The Republic fell because a savvy politician accrued wartime powers to turn himself into a dictator in the name of state security. The Jedi failed because they grew too complacent and arrogant over centuries of peacetime. It's not that complicated, and has many relatable real-world analogues. You can portray this efficiently while focusing mainly on Anakin's story.
See above. The complication lies not in the fact that those institution fell, but in why they should not fall. You have to make a case that those institution are worth reforming.
I was just bringing up the mystery subplot as part of the larger plot thread around Palpatine playing both sides in the war. I argue you don't even need to have Palpatine playing both sides - he can just take advantage of a naturally occurring civil war to accrue wartime powers and become a de-facto dictator like Julius Caesar.
The rise of Julius Caesar is actually a compelling case for why the Roman Republic ought to fall. That's really not the message or the theme you want to be sending in a Star Wars film. I see Palpatine playing both sides as Lucas' attempted solution to that, even if it comes with its own set of problems.
I never expected the Sequels to have the OT characters running around in action scenes. They're obviously too old. They can still play secondary roles, as they did. I think that's fine. I just don't like how it was actually implemented in practice.
I'm saying there is a big fan expectation that wishes for those kinds of focus. They do want the OT trio to be running around again saving the Galaxy. The problem is making the sequels an action-adventure film will end up sidelining the OT cast, which did piss off the fanbase ( especially with Luke).
I agree, the way they portrayed Han really sucked. It was done purely for nostalgia and marketing.
Hence my argument against the OT-style of storytelling, if we want to do the OT characters justice. The primarily appeal of EP 7-8-9 is NOT amongst the fans is not having new Star Wars again. ( They already do with the Clone Wars). The appeal is in seeing the OT cast again.

In order to tell an OT-cast centric story when the actors are in their 60s and 70s, it's important to follow up on what those characters could be doing at that point in their lives. it's about getting close to retirement, making sure their replacement and successors are able to take over and etc. That story wasn't told.
I think a lot of the Episode 2 effects were subpar even at that time. The fact that many other movies also have shitty CGI is not relevant. I would likely criticize those as well. And again, it would be a very minor criticism. I've never argued that this whole CGI thing is particularly important relative to other issues, just that it's a completely valid thing to criticize.
I think other movies mattered because they were the standards we were using to judge what is good CGI from bad CGI. We didn't have more advanced CGI at the time. Now, we have CGI in TV shows that's better than big budget Hollywood movies. Just look at the CGI of His Dark Materials TV show and compare it to the Golden Compass movie. I'm saying it's key to understand what people can often end up doing is to compare modern CGI with past CGI, and let that cloud our own perception and memories of what we feel is good or bad CGI when the films were first released.
Except sometimes the Prequels DO look way worse than old fashioned practical effects. I keep pointing this out. Landscape on Geonosis. Closeups of Clonetroopers. Grassy landscape with Gungun/Droid battle (that one I think is based on photographs and augmented with CGI, but still it looks so glossy and fake).
And I didn't think they look glossy and fake at that time. I think of it as looking better than many old fashioned practical effects. The general audience also did so as well back in the 90s and early 2000s. CGI was seen as something so new and so much better than older practical effects that almost every Hollywood studio are pushing for as much CGI as they can add in movies, and selling that as a gimmick to the audience. I remember the media actively listing how many CGI shots there were in the latest Hollywood movie, as some sort of competition to engage the audience.

The cultural zeitgeist and attitude towards CGI was radically different from what it became much latter. It was in the mid-2000s that the cultural zeitgeist began to shift and there were more backlash against CGI. The cultural zeitgeists from the 90s-early 2000s is very different from the cultural zeitgeist from 2005-onwards. I think Chris Nolan was the one that really began to lead a push against CGI in Hollywood movies, and his views had really began to gain traction from many of his peers ( mostly because they were the same generation that grew up in the 70s and 80s).
The stupid CGI octopus monsters in Force Awakens look pretty bad. The CGI horse aliens in TLJ also look pretty bad. I hear people complain about it all the time. There's less complaints in general about CGI in the Sequels because a lot of the CGI is very good, and they used more outdoor shooting locations and actual actors in suits for closeups of Stormtroopers. Jakku looks way more realistic than Geonosis, for example. The Sequels still suck though for other more significant reasons.
The CGI scenes are very good, by modern standards. But that can and most likely will change as we have even more advanced SFX in the future. As for having more practical effects, it doesn't enrich my experience of the movie in anyway.

Jakku? it's another boring desert planet. It doesn't look like anything out of the ordinary. Stormtroopers having actual suits? It's still not going to make me care about the new stormtroopers the way I ended up caring about the Clone troopers.

As for the puppets? Other than baby Yoda, I find all the new puppets in the new movies to look too much like fake silicon/rubbery puppets than actual aliens and monsters. Personally, I always find the movement of puppets to be so limited that I never see them as realistic in any way. I can tell if something is a puppet right from the get-go, and I could not suspend my disbelief if I am seeing a puppet.

Puppetry has advanced massively since the OT, but I don't think they've advanced enough for me to really buy into them as living and breathing creatures.
Humans are such funny creatures. We are selfish about selflessness, yet we can love something so much that we can hate something.
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