Post by @jalefkowit@hachyderm.io

Oh god, the Star Wars Prequel Discourse is starting up again.

Look, all I can tell you is this: I was in one of the opening night midnight screenings of EPISODE I: THE PHANTOM MENACE. I paid and waited in a long line to see that movie at the first moment it was possible to see it, which means I was in a room full of the most rabid, loyal Star Wars fans you can imagine. And I have never felt the mood in a room deflate more quickly and violently than I did in that room on that night, before or since

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Stefan Eissing

@icing@chaos.social 3 hr. ago

@jalefkowit And we discovered that what we had loved really were the movies of Gary Kurtz and this Lucas guy was only a lost imposter.

Gary

@WiteWulf@cyberplace.social 3 hr. ago

@jalefkowit /me too. The excitement was incredible beforehand. Not so much 2hrs later.

noahm

@noahm@chaos.social 3 hr. ago

@jalefkowit I'm still waiting for a refund of the time I wasted standing in line for that movie. I'd been looking forward to it since age 8, and it was just so deeply disappointing.

Eric Likness

@carpetbomberz@mastodon.online 3 hr. ago

@jalefkowit

yOU Are so right Obi-Wan.
as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced

⁂ Fish Id Wardrobe

@fishidwardrobe@mastodon.me.uk 4 hr. ago

@jalefkowit my honest take: the first twenty minutes of jedi action was pretty damn good, if you ignore the fu-manchu aliens.

then we meet jar-jar and the fun just stops. and then they start to dismantle the canon set up in the first three movies, and, fuck that.

Jason Lefkowitz

@jalefkowit@hachyderm.io 4 hr. ago

If you search the Usenet archives hard enough, you can find a post from me a few hours after that screening arguing that it was not THAT bad. That post was pure cope. My tender young heart had been broken and I was trying desperately to convince myself that something else had happened

Gentleman Programmer

@sjjh@hachyderm.io 4 hr. ago

@jalefkowit Maybe you had grown up, and realised that Star Wars is for children

Jason Lefkowitz

@jalefkowit@hachyderm.io 4 hr. ago

@sjjh Presumably everyone else in the theater grew up with me at exactly the same moment. It was good timing

Jason Lefkowitz

@jalefkowit@hachyderm.io 4 hr. ago

But I think that just re-emphasizes my main point, which is this: even a few hours after the first screenings, the debate was not over whether or not Phantom Menace was a good movie, but over whether it was only kind of bad or epically, historically bad. That was the way people felt about it in the moment, before 25 years of nostalgia and other sickly sweet frosting were slathered on top

Dan Sugalski

@wordshaper@weatherishappening.network 3 hr. ago

@jalefkowit I was really disappointed when it came out and the movie as a movie hasn’t gotten better with age, but at least we got Weird Al’s The Saga Begins out of it so it wasn’t an entirely wasted endeavor.

https://youtu.be/hEcjgJSqSRU

"Weird Al" Yankovic - The Saga Begins (Official Video)

YouTube

Michael

@mschfr@mastodon.social 3 hr. ago

@jalefkowit Yeah - never seen a movie theater going from hype to disappointed in such a short time. That move really shattered so much sould in its first 30 minutes

Den of Earth

@DenOfEarth@mas.to 4 hr. ago

@jalefkowit
Mentioned before...
https://mas.to/@DenOfEarth/111642900863800596

Zeb Larson

@zeblarson@hcommons.social 4 hr. ago

@jalefkowit Continually staggered by how much prequel discourse runs on Lucas’ authorial intent as the sole arbiter of whether it was good. Yes, he was making points about democratic backsliding and yes those are interesting (albeit not terribly deep?). They’re also terribly executed, as is much of the content of those movies.

josef

@jk@mastodon.social 4 hr. ago

@jalefkowit i have a friend who's younger than me, who is a huge star wars fan with an encyclopedic knowledge of the franchise, and also somehow grew up completely unaware of the concept of the prequels being bad. they defend the movies, not as a contrarian gesture, but because the negative reputation bemuses them. they love episodes 4-6, and feel that 1-3 really did them justice, and consider them all valid and completely essential to the star wars story. the sequel trilogy on the other hand...

~* Sarah

@stellarsarah@mastodon.world 1 hr. ago

@jk I worked with a guy like that. He was probably 7 when the first prequel came out, so to him, they were great. He hated the sequels.

Personally, I greatly prefer the sequels to the prequels.

@jalefkowit

josef

@jk@mastodon.social 4 hr. ago

@jalefkowit i think the only explanation for this, other than "you like the things from when you were a kid", is that their love of the movies is less about them being good movies (in the way that say, 'Alien' is a well-crafted movie), but as a "Database Fandom", where the universe and its workings and details and side characters and wiki articles are the real subject. the movies are just a narrow expression of the database whole, a protruding fin above the teeming reef

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Jason Lefkowitz

@jalefkowit@hachyderm.io 4 hr. ago

@jk I think a lot depends on how old you were when you first encountered them. There are movies from my own early childhood that are objectively very bad, but I loved them because when I first saw them I was a child and I was not engaging critically with movies, just sort of letting them wash over me. And now I do engage critically with movies, but it's still very hard for me to engage critically with THOSE movies, because the little tiny child still inside me kicks me in the shin whenever I try to

FoolishOwl

@foolishowl@social.coop 4 hr. ago

@jalefkowit A friend of mine and I walked out of the theater and were commiserating about how little we liked the movie. At the time, I thought it might simply be that I was watching The Phantom Menace as an adult, when I'd seen each of the movies of the original trilogy as a child, up to Return of the Jedi when I was twelve.

But later, I was watching clips of the prequel trilogy and the original trilogy next to each other, and I thought, the writing and acting in the prequel trilogy was just not as good.

Brooke Vibber :neocat_cofe:

@brooke@bikeshed.vibber.net 4 hr. ago

@foolishowl @jalefkowit I'm still mad that George Lucas hired all these top tier actors and then insisted on directing them to act as woodenly as possible

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bunnyzombie

@bunnyhero@timeloop.cafe 4 hr. ago

@jalefkowit i was there at midnight too. i tried so hard to like it, watching it multiple times, even read the novelization to see if that helped (it made it worse, mainly due to jar-jar lol)

Jason Lefkowitz

@jalefkowit@hachyderm.io 4 hr. ago

@bunnyhero I went back to see it a second time a few days later, thinking hey, maybe I just didn’t have my expectations set realistically, maybe I was just tired and cranky from waiting in that ungodly line all night. Maybe I’d react to it differently if I saw it in different circumstances.

Nope

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