General grievances (random fan rants)

Apparently, Screenrant is hiring visually impaired people now.

I probably should create a new thread for this, something like "Hilarious Hater Comments" or "Fans Say The Dumbest Shit", but it could be controversial to have a negativity thread here. So I'm just gonna stick this here for now -- hopefully, it produces only mild irritation, followed by a hearty laugh at the blazing stupidity of it:


That was someone opining on the IMDb TPM board in 2017, only a few weeks before the boards were closed permanently.

Ambiguity is bad, apparently. Although, interestingly, the rest of the time, the prequels were apparently just "dumb movies full of explosions" or "stupid kiddie flicks" that "only morons enjoy".

Anyone else got any other comments they've happened on like the following (preferably sourced)? I was going back through my IMDb archives and there that little gem was (among many other incredibly derogatory and empty-headed remarks).

Cryogenic
ok picking up what i said earlier the are some fans who think the prequels lack tension because we know where the characters end up (again the aforementioned yoda palpatine fight) and also that The Clone Wars Should have spanned the entire PT needless to say it's annoying and irritating.

Good advice in almost any situation, especially when one is a hardcore Prequel Fan.

Although, Joe:

Wanting a film to have "tension" is a pretty childish demand in and of itself. Tension resides in the telling, not the destination. To be honest, when I was watching ROTS for the first time, I felt the film was full of tension. I almost believed that Mace could have possibly killed Palpatine somehow in their encounter. It felt like all these events were staged and happening in a way that slightly said, "Fuck the OT". I truly believed that almost anything could happen sitting in that theater back in May 2005. And there were plenty of surprises. I mean, yeah, the main events were sort of predictable, like Qui-Gon dying, Anakin doing something bad in Episode II, Anakin and Padme marrying, Anakin and Obi-Wan duelling on a lava planet, etc. But this barely affected my investment. Heck, I was mad at my friend, who saw TPM before me, for telling me on the phone that Qui-Gon died! Lack tension??? Were these people even there? Films bereft of tension do not elicit moments like another friend of mine turning to me, when those blast doors opened up on Darth Maul on Theed, rubbing his hands with glee, telling me he'd been waiting for this moment since whenever.

On your other point:

I think some fans only wanted the Clone Wars to span the entire PT because they have a very simplistic attitude to Star Wars. They see the word "wars" and they think, "Show me some wars." Never mind Lucas showing the things that lead up to war and cause it to break out. Of course, that is far more interesting. He already did the whole war thing in the OT. I suppose it's fair to feel disappointed that there wasn't more Clone War action or something? But then, if you think about it, there was actually quite a lot: a huge battle at the end of AOTC, a big opening battle at the start of ROTS, Yoda going to Kashyyyk, Obi-Wan bringing the clones to Utapau, and the Order 66 sequence. It's just these characters were never on the run the same way the characters were in the OT. Instead, they were part of the establishment, and Lucas wasn't going to focus on the same thing twice. On the other hand, hey: Disney gave them what they wanted in the ST. War, war, war. Because that's all Star Wars is, right? On that note, I wonder why a pacifistic Jedi would boast to Kylo that "The war is just beginning", in an echo of Dooku in AOTC to Yoda. Kinda weird. Again: war, war, war. I guess that's why I have such a hankering for Episodes I and II. And why LOTR, especially TTT and ROTK, are so tedious by comparison -- which is just the opposite of what the Internet tells me I ought to think.

Well, it was IMDb. People were asses there all the time. They'd pick apart anything just to complain and troll the one or two prequel fans that tried posting there and making reasonable points.

I do think the title is a little ambiguous, but that's not a bad thing -- yet those mentalities would seize on a lack of clarity, in their minds, as exactly that when it suited them. Of course, you're right that it mostly refers to the return of the Sith, and how all the characters miss the real threat rising from within.

I like how the title and the first words of the crawl could be considered linked: "The Phantom Menace" and "Turmoil has engulfed the Galactic Republic". Interestingly, the title can even refer to trialities generally, if paired with the opening crawl in this way:

www.etymonline.com/word/turmoil


What almost nobody seems to get is that the films encourage reading and interpretation, and exploring the roots of things/words, right from the start. Because they begin with reading ("A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...."), and then paragraphs of floating text, Lucas is presenting the universe as lines of intersecting, concatenated text.

He was likely influenced, in some way, by Robert Smithon's famous work, "A Heap Of Language":

holtsmithsonfoundation.org/heap-language-0


www.moma.org/collection/works/149054


Heck, The Phantom Menace can be language itself -- as imperialistic and enslaving mechanism ("The ability to speak does not make you intelligent"). Note that three languages (trialities again) are explicitly spoken in the film: Galactic Basic, Huttese, and what you might loosely term Gunganese. Qui-Gon, for example, tries using a worthless currency on Watto (Republic credits), but Watto tells him he needs something "more real". The Republic, or one master controlling language, isn't the great unifier in all parts of the galaxy. But many assumptions about "lesser beings" (the words "pathetic lifeform" and "primitives" are spoken by heroes and villains alike) are made by those with a connection to central power. It's a more interesting film when certain tensions are glimpsed in the telling -- like "outskirts vs. the central region". Idiots who say the film is full of "racist stereotyping" have no clue what they're saying.

Well, in fairness, "The Phantom Menace" doesn't necessarily refer to the government or some immediately identifiable thing. It's more intangible.

But there's nothing wrong with that. In fact, it perfectly fits the overall "mission statement" of the PT and murky Galactic Republic era:

stampidhd280pro
one idiot post on saltier than crait suggests that anakin didn't kill the younglings while also saying that the scene was unnecessary one of the comments on the post said it made vader's image less intimidating and more sadistic and cowardly saying it made his redemption in ROTJ unworthy saying how do you redeem yourself after slaughtering children twice and saying that those scenes should not have been in the movie that really pissed me off!

I don't know what this thread is on, but I want some.

You might have...


LOL! Does it matter?