fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2272 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2272 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Anon below got into some of it, and there's also a fairly well-known, hour-long video deconstruction of it (it's unfortunately packaged with a weird, unfunny framing device, but it's a fairly competent piece of work in itself; it's also very popular and probably the canonical account of why people don't like Phantom Menace).

But on the most basic level, it's a story that doesn't work. It has a basically dysfunctional plot. The central driving plot of the movie, nominally at least, is "A trade disagreement leads to the hostile occupation of a planet; the main characters defeat the enemies and liberate the planet." But a huge amount of the movie doesn't actually have anything to do with that - think about how much time the movie spends on Tatooine, and how much time the movie spends on dealing with Anakin's storyline (which is much more important than the Naboo storyline to the series as a whole), when that has almost nothing to do with the Naboo storyline. And the amount of stuff that's going on in the movie really hurts it - it makes it confusing, in the sense that it's easy to get lost and forget about why the main storyline matters and why the characters are doing it, and it makes it weak, in the sense that the force and the impact of everything that happens is divided because there's so much going on. It's a movie where a bunch of unrelated shit is going on at the same time.

This leads to a problem with the characters where their motivations, their characterizations, and their actions get mystifying because of the confusion in the plot. For instance, you have Qui-Gon having two motivations, which have nothing to do with each other - dealing with Anakin and dealing with the trade blockade. This also leads to the problem that the movie doesn't really have a central protagonist, because it doesn't really have a central problem - is Amidala the central protagonist? But she doesn't do much for most of the movie. Neither does Obi-Wan, really. Is it Qui-Gon? But he obviously doesn't have his whole attention focused on either problem, or a strong motivation.

And these aren't nitpicks, I don't think. I think they're fundamental problems with the way the story is told. The movie doesn't have anything that it's about. It doesn't have clearly-defined characters with identifiable desires. And that leads to a movie where lots of things happen for poorly-defined reasons, and characters react to them for reasons that we're not entirely certain about. The movie is kind of a confusing morass. All of this is exacerbated by dialogue and cinematography and such that a lot of people feel is pretty fatally flawed. But it's a bad movie on a pretty fundamental level, in my opinion.

Sorry, I hope that wasn't too tl;dr.

No, it's perfectly fine. If anything, I feel happy reading walls of text about something interesting.

Thank you, now this is much clearer to me. Indeed I agree that plotwise the second trilogy is a mish-mash; but it doesn't repulse me from it: I guess it makes the films more like... real life.

And yes, there are many immature characters. Hell, most of the time Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan behave like five-year-olds. Then again, I wasn't exactly adult when I first saw Star Wars, so it wasn't a problem. Still isn't; perhaps I haven't grown up as much as I thought after all.

[Yeah, I hated Padme and Anakin. Qui-Gon, Obi-Wan, Yoda and Mace Windu were the only characters I actually liked.]

[ SECRET POST #2272 ]

Re: Moves you loved, that everyone else laughed at.

Re: Moves you loved, that everyone else laughed at.