May The Force Be With Us

With the recent announcement of several new Star Wars series and a movie or two Meg & I decided to watch all of the Star Warseses from the beginning in chronological order. We've both seen most of them but have never really cared about them as much as some people do.  Nor did we pay much attention to the over-arching story.   We’ve been watching The Mandalorian and figure we’d get a refresher course for the backstory on those characters, places and mythology.   Also I figure it will be good to learn more about this epic saga that's about to be peppered with new cannon by all the new shows and movies coming out.   

So far we’ve watched Episode I The Phantom Menace and Episode II Attack of The Clones.  For all the shit people gave Jake Matthew Lloyd for his portrayal of young Anakin Skywalker, I’ll have to say that watching I and II back to back I feel like Hayden Christensen has gotten a pass on his garbage acting.  I'll come back to that later.  Don't think I'm giving Lloyd a pass here because he's pretty terrible too.  Stiff delivery, lack of  feeling.  A lot of the scenes felt like a school play.   But overall Episode I wasn't as bad as I remember.  The movie was basically politics and a pod race.   The entire pod race/ Anakin story was almost half the movie it seemed like and all of that just so that they could get some spare parts to fix their ship.  Sidetracked much?   Was there no other place to get parts?  But if you ask Qui-gon-jin, it was all fate and The Force led them there to find Anakin, so he could be a dick to everyone and become Darth Vader.  Good job, The Force. 

How can I do a review of The Phantom Menace and not talk about how much Jar Jar Binks sucks?  I thought maybe people were over-reacting but no,  after all these years he still sucks for no reason at all.  Granted, his character was important to the story and they had to have a reason for him to be outcast from Gungan society so that they meet him in the middle of nowhere.  But did they have to make him annoying as fuck?  A lot of his humor seemed to be written for little kids which is probably why there seemed to be references to the 21st century Earth.  He says "Muy muy"  at one point. That's fucking Spanish George.   It's lazy and takes the viewer out of the fantasy world.  There were a few times they reference "humans" too which I don't remember being referenced ever in Star Wars. They say Anakin is the first human to pilot a pod racer, and that threw me off.  There's no humans in Star Wars as far as I knew.   Humans come from Earth.  There's not supposed to be an Earth in Star Wars. 

And now back to Attack of The Clones and Hayden's shitty acting.  Maybe I just wasn’t paying attention to the naysayers back then but … WOOF  he’s fucking horrible.   I’m sure a lot of that has to do with the very forced love story between him and Senator Amadala.   I couldn’t stop singing a line from the Weird Al classic  The Saga Begins in my head where he parodies American Pie by Don McLean.   It goes “Do you see him there hitting on the queen, even tho he’s just nine and she’s fourteen…”   This is all I could think of while he keeps saying shit like “I can’t stop thinking about you”  “I love you -why don’t you love me”  “how could she not remember me like I remember her”   BARF.  You were a little fucking kid and you barely had a connection in the movie.  She gave you your first boner and you haven’t seen another girl in 10 years.  Jesus fucking Christ, dude get over it.  I’m not sure if a better actor could have saved any of the first 2/3 of the scenes with them together because it’s such a forced union.   I mean, we all know by the time this movie came out that Anakin ends up being Darth Vader and that his son is Luke Skywalker but why did they have to make him a little kid in Phantom Menace for this story line to work?  All he had to be was a gifted young person who had Force abilities.   The Jedi Council didn’t want to train him because he was too old.  But Luke was a teenager when Yoda trained him.   I know I’m probably stirring the pot with Star Wars nerds here but I think it was stupid writing for Anakin to be eight years old and have a romance with Padmé who's fourteen be not totally weird in the next movie. Make both Anakin and Amadala twelve and it would have still worked and the love story would have been less awkward for everyone 10 years later.  Who crushes that hard as an eight year old?   It was like George Lucas came up with the idea that they hook up after he's already written the first movie but for some reason decided to not fix it after he writes the second one.   Fast forward 30 years and still not fix it when you make a major motion picture trilogy.   Combine all of that that with Hayden’s horrible delivery and it just ruins all the cool stuff with the clones.  You know the title of the fucking movie.  After all they didn’t call it Episode II: Statutory Rape.  

"Anakin Skywalker does nothing but be shitty after Qui-Gon Jinn takes him under his wing. Anakin sucks from the moment he lands on Coruscant all the way to the end of Return of The Jedi.  They should have just left him on Tatooine..."

All of the foreshadowing of Anakin being turned to the Dark Side in this movie is forced and painful.   All he does is bitch about not being noticed by some teenage camp counselor he met at summer camp when he was in 3rd grade.   He constantly whines that Obe Wan is holding him back and brags about how good he is a being a Jedi.    Oh and the stuff with his mom.  One of a Jedi's most important powers is being able to let shit go.  He defied his Master's orders by going to Tatooine and then he murdered a whole village of Tuskens.  What the actual fuck?   Yoda said he had too much fucking baggage to train as a Jedi... and he was right.  Anakin Skywalker does nothing but be shitty after Qui-Gon Jinn takes him under his wing. Anakin sucks from the moment he lands on Coruscant all the way to the end of Return of The Jedi.  They should have just left him on Tatooine to live a simple life as a gifted child slave and save the universe from all the bullshit he causes.  How many gifted kids are just left the fuck alone by overzealous Jedis  and nothing bad happens?   Yea, yea I know.. no Luke or Leia or Star Wars as we know it but I think it would have been worth it.  Nothing but drama with that godforsaken family.  Later we get stupid, troubled, spoiled kid Ben Solo and his cry-baby Kylo Ren bullshit. Why are we rewatching these movies again?

Well, we’ve been watching The Mandalorian series on the regular and are enjoying it immensely but Meg isn't as versed in Star Wars lore as I am.  Not that I am an expert but I have many friends who haven’t shut up about it since 1986 so I know … some.    While watching Attack of The Clones I kept having to pause it for Meg to explain who Jango Fett was and that the little kid Boba Fett was the guy that showed up in The Mandalorian this season.   To be honest I’d kind of forgotten how Boba was a clone but also Jango’s son.  And the lineage of the armor and all that.   So it was interesting to see all of that in this movie.  Too be honest, I fell asleep last night and missed pretty much from the Jedi battle in the arena and woke up for the stupid wedding scene and the credits.   Maybe there was more good movie in there but other than the Mandalorian tie-in and a vehicle to set up the original trilogy story, this movie was a stinker.   I don’t know if I can sit through the next one.   A Star Wars fan who I was talking to about 1, 2, and 3 with said out of all of the Star Wars movies Episode III Revenge of the Sith is his all time least favorite.  That doesn’t bode well.   Meg want’s to skip it but even tho I know I’m going to hate it I think we need to endure it for continuity’s sake.

We’ve been told we need to watch all the animated Clone Wars series too.   There’s like 500 of them apparently…  May The Force be with us.