[Paladin]

I was a Star Wars fan before, but after seeing the first two prequels and reading Chefelf's 'reasons to hate them', I got an entirely different opinion. Now, I already had a poor opinion of Star Wars Episode 2 when I saw it at the movies (seriously speaking, where was the story? The whole movie was just a bunch of special effects and making Boba Fett lovers go 'wow') and now that I've analyzed more of the movie, I realized that there were far more reasons to hate it than ever.

I'll start with Episode I

Reason 1: Eat your heart out Guybrush!

When they lock the doors to the meeting room and fill the place with poison gas, Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon hold their breaths to survive. For hold long they’ve held their breaths, we don’t know. But it has to be a long time since the hologram of Nute Gunray said ‘they must be dead by now.’ So here’s what I propose: Don’t open the doors, leave them that way for, oh say, two or three hours, they can’t possibly hold their breaths for that long… and if they did, then that is a feat beyond belief, Jedi or no.

Another problem: Poison gas isn’t just something that rips your lungs out; it also hurts your eyes and your skin. I doubt that they could have survived so long, or at least come out undamaged.

Reason 2: We gas our customers habitually!

I don’t know if it occurred to anyone, but… why do the Federation have poison gas ready for immediate use in a meeting room? Unless they habitually kill their customers and clients with gas, there’s no reason to have them installed there. And none of that nonsense about having them all over the ship; that way, some saboteur could fill the whole station with poison gas.

Reason 3: The Trade Federation, the droid armies, and the possibility of winning

OK, here's the deal… You have this huge Trade Federation that supposedly controls an enormous amount of trade, shipping and manufacturing of everything from diapers to giant battle ships, and they’re so powerful that they have the ability (and astonishingly enough, the legal right) to blockade a planet and possibly starve the people there, what gives? Why is it legal in the first place to blockade a planet? Sure, I’m willing to believe they can boycott the planet and refuse to trade with it, but why go out of your way to halt all movement in and out of the planet and attack any ships coming and out? The whole purpose of the blockade and invasion was never explained in the movie either.

Now the droid army. Based on the invasion force they used on Naboo I would daresay that they have an incredible amount of troops and enough resources to fight a major galactic war. According to some ‘kid’s Star Wars’ trivia book I read many years back, the reason why the Trade Federation has an army to begin with is to protect it’s interests and business against pirates, but the ‘Trade Federations maintains an army far larger than its requirements to protect against thieves and bandits.’ OK, I am willing to believe the part about protecting against pirates. But what I’m not willing to believe is they can build an excessively oversized army and nobody (at least those in any position of authority) would care. It just doesn’t make sense.

Another problem with the droid army: If the Federation has such a huge force, then why is Palpatine so hell bent on invading a small planet with not real resources and nothing strategic? Why doesn’t he just create an insurgency like he did in Star War 2 earlier? Remember, the Republic doesn’t even have an army, and I don’t think that all the small armies of the sovereign planets and militias can stand a chance against them.

That being said about the Trade Federation and the droid armies, now comes an even more serious point: Naboo itself. What is so special about Naboo? And what would have happened if (by some miracle) the Trade Federation won and Amidala signed the treaty to make their occupation legal, what would it accomplish? Nothing! Nothing at all! The Trade Federation would come into possession of a potentially useless planet and have to deal with the rebels that want the Federation out whilst gaining nothing out of the whole ordeal. I would wish that George Lucas gave at least a half-decent explanation behind the whole blockade and intention to invade the planet.


Reason 4: Pressure? What’s that?

Although I hate to unfairly nitpick things at times, but just how deep is the Gungan city? If it is really deep underwater, then there is no possible way they could have just dove underneath the sea and swam there. Why you might ask? Simple. The pressure underwater gets stronger as you get deeper, if you go down too deep, it’ll literally crush you to death. Wearing a deep sea diving suit would help, but even that has its limitations. That being said, just how did Obi-Wan, Qui-Gon and Jar Jar survive? I doubt this can be explained by the ‘Force’.

Reason 5: War crimes

While the Trade Federation are on Naboo, they say that the people are starving and they’re torturing the people in order to coerce Amidala to sign the treaty… umm, excuse me but… wouldn’t something like this get you into trouble with the Government? Even if they made the occupation legal, I would think that murdering and starving innocent people would make some people cry ‘foul’ and demand the Federation be brought to justice. And while we’re at the subject, just why wasn’t Nute Gunray punished for what he did?

Reason 6: Distance between Naboo and Tatooine

Just how far out is Tatooine, anyway? On Tatooine, they call Qui-Gon and his friends ‘outlanders’ and make comments like ‘they think we’re stupid because we live so far out.’ Very well now, if Tatooine is so ‘far away’ from it all, just how did the Queen get there without their hyperdrive? I’m not in any way and expert on super advanced technology, but I’m pretty sure that those ships cannot get too far without a hyperdrive on them. If they were going to make it to Tatooine without one, it would have to be pretty close.

Reason 7: Sebulba, you cheater!

Just how does Sebulba cheat all the time and win because of it and never get caught? Remember, the race is monitored with these handheld TV things. Just how can Sebulba get away with his cheating all the time?

Reason 8: I need some ‘real’ money? Right! What do you mean?

Watto refuses Republic money from Qui-Gon and says he needs something more ‘real’. Although I’m willing to believe that there could be more than one currency in the galaxy, but… Tatooine is controlled by the Hutts, and the Hutts are gangsters, why would gangsters go so far as to create a currency of their own and use them on one or three planets?

Reason 9: Screaming bugs

During the pod race, Jabba the Hutt pushes off these bugs from his balcony and they scream like humans as they fall to their deaths… huh?!?

Reason 10: You’ve been building that thing for years.

When Anakin is shown finishing his pod racer, one of his friends says, ‘You’ve been building that thing for years. It’s never gonna run.” Anakin is just 9 or 10 years old, and if he’s been building it for ‘years’, he would have had to be something like 4 or 6 years old. I’ve heard of kid geniuses, but this is ridicules!

Reason 11: Why not just bet on Sebulba?

If Sebulba always wins (by cheating of course), why risk so much in entering the race? why don’t they just put everything on Sebulba? We’ve already seen that he would have won if Anakin hadn’t entered the race.

Reason 12: Good job Darth Maul, you’ve found them… now call the army!

Darth Maul manages to discover the exact location of the Queens ship and all the Jedi, but opts to go alone. Why? Why doesn’t he just call in the Trade Federation army and have them surround the place and capture them? Remember, there was some time left before they got the parts, meaning that they couldn’t escape. (I could be mistaken about that, I haven’t watched the movie in a long time)

Reason 13: Lack of weapons

This is problem is found in two places:

1: How come the only weapon the Naboo soldiers are carrying are these big blaster pistols? Don’t they have anything else? Like grenades? This is a pretty big problem; remember when they were attacked by those two destroyer droids? If Anakin hadn’t shot them from his star fighter they would have never made it past that point.

2: This so-called ‘grand army’ of the Gungans is grand to the extent that they don’t even have so much as a pistol among them. Just look at them, the only weapons they’re armed with are these electric spears and hand grenades, and in the battle they grapple with the droids completely unarmed! Mark my words, if these ‘soldiers’ were armed with muzzle-loading muskets they would have made tin cans out of those tin men that were attacking them. Add some blasters and I daresay they would have beaten back the droid army without losing a man.

I have my own theory as to why the Gungan army sucked so bad: George Lucas could not think up of any meaningful way to make the Gungans fight the droids and lose, so he decided to use the stupidest possible way.

Reason 14: I said wipe them out, you fools!

Palpatine tells Nute Gunray to ‘wipe them out… all of them.’ meaning that he wants all the Gungans killed… but after the Gungans lose the battle, they’re just taken as prisoner. Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t ‘wipe them all out’ translate into ‘take no prisoners?’

Reason 15: A well conceived plan, but I got a better one

Queen Amidala’s plan to take over Naboo involves having the Gungans fight a hopeless battle against vastly superior droids, while the pilots from Naboo are sent on an equally hopeless mission to disable the station. The Nabooian star force doesn’t even have any bombers on them. How can you possibly expect a mission like that to succeed with only fighters?

So what’s my plan? Jam the signals coming from the station. That way, the droids will drop dead and they can just waltz into the palace (with the whole Gungan army) and capture the Viceroy in no time. As for Darth Maul, he won’t stand a chance against some thousand plus soldiers with guns.

Reason 16: Droids falling apart!

I can understand the droids shutting down after the station being destroyed, but why did they start falling apart?

That concludes this list. I’ll be back tomorrow or later to give more reasons to hate episode two, but this took quite a few hours to write. Thanks for reading this.

[A Mighty Pirate]

Good job, nerd.

[Paladin]

Good job, nerd.

Is that an insult or a compliment?

[civilian_number_two]

Here's some of my own, not represented (in this way, at least) on Nate's fine list:

REASON A: Jedi Negotiators. I've never bothered to find out what Lucas thought was going on at Naboo, but it looked to me like a private army, controlled by a multiplanetary corporation, was blockading a planet, presumably to force that planet's elected government to accept undesirable trade measures. Apparently, a galactic governing body saw fit to challenge this blockade. How did it choose to do this? It sent two soldiers to talk to the leader of the blockade. Wouldn't it have been more fitting and realistic to have sent in the fifth fleet?
I don't even understand what they were there to "negotiate." Shouldn't such a conversation have taken place back in Coruscant, among politicians? Is there any sort of historical model for this sort of nonsense?

REASON B: Coincidence that would have made Dickens blush. Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon bump into Jar-Jar, who turns out to be useful in getting them to the queen of Naboo, something they would never have achieved without his help. They literally save his life. Normally, you save a guy's life, and he'll respond by wishing he could help you. If what you need is to be ferried from Denver to China thorugh the centre of the planet, he'll be very sad to disappoint you. Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon happened to rescue the very guy who could get that job done.

REASON C: Lame action scenes. Forget the pod race, the stupid land battle, the chase through Naboo, the dogfight in space, the awful three-way lightsaber duel. The action is flagging near the beginning, so the heroes are chased by big fish. Even Qui-Gon is all bored, telling everyone not to worry (which of course makes no sense). But if the only character apparently worried is the goofy comic relief guy, is there any believeable tension? Does the big fish scene serve any purpose other than to make the movie longer?

REASON D: The past is more advanced than the future. I think it would have been really cool, even in this dumb movie, if the soldiers in the robot army had looked like IG-88. Instead, they appear more human and thereby more advanced. Add to which they're all shiny and move with CGI precision. So what is IG-88? Is he even older than the droid army? Am I expected to accept that?

REASON E: Hyperdrive as plot device. Boy, did the action run great in EMPIRE. Boy, the suspense rocked the house. And yes, the running gag of the hyperdrive not working, and the ship needing to make pit stops, worked like a charm. I'd say there ought to be a rule, when you've used a device like that in a way so central to one of your stories. You should never use it again. Just the same as there should never have been a second Death Star, we should not have been given second a plot dependent on hyperdrive failure.

REASON F: Bright centre of the universe. Tatooine? There are going to be six movies, and five of them will have scenes on Tatooine?

REASON G: Darth Vader is a cute kid. I don't think any move could have been lamer than this one. Seeing as I'm asked to like the kid in the first film, then I'm sure I'll be expected to watch him turn evil in the later films. This is a wonderful idea, if it's going to be handled as a kind of epic tragedy, but since I already know it's just going to be a bunch of silly escpaist action (I've already seen the last three chapters, George), it's basically impossible to go along with this. I think a better move would have been to have little Anikin be an ugly kid with a mean temper, or better yet, a fully grown man.

REASON H: Slave dignitaries. Anikin built C-3P0, a droid skilled in etiquette and protocol, and versed in 6 million languages, to "help mom." His mom is a slave who works for an auto mechanic. How often do you think she needs to know where to put the fork when serving fried nerf to a Calamari? This is one of many terrible character introductions, right up there with every single other introduction in the entire film.

REASON I: The Queen is in Danger. I know this has been dealt with, but I have to throw in my two cents. The Queen of Naboo is in danger. She can't get to Coruscant because her planet is being occupied by Trade Federation soldiers who are commiting atrocities that noone knows anything about. She needs to get to Coruscant so she can plead her case, and she doesn't dare even make a phone call about it, in case the bad TF droids intercept the call and send assassins. Wow. Now that's a lot for me to swallow, all to motivate a dumb pod race. How the hell did this Trade Federation get such power? There are no armies to rival theirs? They can send queens into hiding like that, any time they want? Frankly, this is too much, and I'm going to say it: I need a prequel to TPM, to explain how all this stuff got set up.

REASON J: Bank Machines. There are none. Nor are there credit cards, or any way for the Queen of Naboo to get any money. Naturally, the "they are stranded" device was necessary to motivate the pod race, but first off, it's entirely unconvincing, and second, it's flat-out impossible that these people don't have any money or way to get any. Two of the party are supposed to be professional negotitors of some kind; they should have been able to work out a plan that didn't involve cheating at dice.

REASON K: Foreign exchange. There isn't any. The queen apparently does have a pile of money, and it's common to thousands of planets, but it's no good on Tatooine. This is a problem the Empire will resolve, when traders on Tatooine can freely negotiate the sale of goods with off-worlders. God bless the Empire, but those days are not upon us yet. Sadly too, the queen has nowhere to turn with her pile of worthless currency. Noone will even trade it for the local dollar.

REASON L: Buses. There are none. Once it's established that the Queen has no money, and that she has nothing to sell that is worth the cost of a hyperdrive repair, the desperate queen really has no recourse but to sell her spaceship and book passage on a bus, or with any of a number of merchant pilots who could take her where she wants to go. Sadly, either there are no such resources, or noone thinks of this.

REASON M: Darth Maul. Everything about this stupid bastard. He is not a character in any way. He is barely even acceptable as a plot motivator, but that is exactly how he's used. he shows up on Tatooine just in time to remind the heroes that there are bad guys who want them dead. Then the heroes don't see him until he arrives to remind the Jedi that sometimes they have to die. Then he himself dies, so we can see a bad guy die and feel like we've won (but at what cost?). Honest to God, I think Sebulba made a better villain. At least he had a motivation. What's DM want? "Revenge," he says. For what? This is the first chapter! Do we need that other prequel?

REASON N: The Jedi Council. Are these the guys that sent the negotiators? And they ... work for the senate, or something? And the senate works how exactly? Seems to me the Jedi council served only one purpose: to make it seem like the Jedi Knights were't knights at all. Instead they're a bunch of goofs of assorted races who sit about making vague predictions to one another. I liked Jedi more when I thought they were and Order, like Samurai, and that different Jedi worked for different people, and that there were dark Jedi who served the Sith. I was really hoping for something like that in a prequel, not the guy with the long neck and Yoda repeating training-age arguments from EMPIRE.

REASON O: Planet-wide city. Coruscant is a city that spans an entire planet. I'll ignore all the basic complaints, like how the Trade Federation would ruin them with outrageous prices on food and waste disposal. That's just childish. Lucas's universe is one of single-theme planets: desert planet; gas planet; ice planet; forest moons. I hear for the next movie he's got a planet that exists entirely in cyberspace, powered by the dreams of humans who are "jacked in" to it like batteries. No. I kid. But seriously, he *will* have a planet made entirely out of porn.

REASON P: Day Care facilities. On the planet-wide city, there is no day care. Qui-Gon has to return to Naboo to wage a war and help capture an enemy leader. He has in his care a nine-year-old kid, and nowhere to put him. So he takes him along to the war-torn planet. Either there's something wrong with Coruscant, or Q-G is the cheapest bastard the Jedi have ever known.

REASON Q: Day care faciltites. The Gungun have none either.

REASON R: Places to hide. Naboo seems to have Earth-like gravity, so I'd wager there are about 200 million square miles of surface area, and the war zone is about the size of Manhattan. Qui-Gon decides that the safest place to hide the child is in a hangar inside the occupied city.

REASON S: Trade Federation defences. When Qui-Gon's ship is docked aboard the Viceroy's ship, we see these big guns inside the hangar, whose purpose apparently is to blow up ships docked inside. Seriously. They have guns mounted right inside their own hangar, and they sometimes blow up ships that are docked right inside their own hangar. I would conclude from this that there's no way an exploding ship could trigger any sort of chain reaction that would destroy the Viceroy's ship. I mean, that hangar must be pretty damn secure.
When Anikin's little fighter accidentally lands inside a similar hangar, we can see these guns hanging limply in the background. They don't even come to bear on the intruder, let alone blast it to smithereens. What the Christ; does Lucas think we've become so bored that we've already forgot the guns were there? And seriously, when Anikin's fighter blasts off a couple of torpedoes, it destroys the entire ship! How the hell did that happen, when we know damn well that anything blowing up in that hangar had no chance of hurting the ship as a whole?

-----------------------

I have no comment about the other prequel, since I haven't seen it and never will.

[Paladin]

Very good, and very amusing too!

[Chefelf]

Good job, nerd.

There is something amusing about one person that posts on a Star Wars message board calling someone else that posts on a Star Wars message board a 'nerd'.

Good job on those lists, guys. I can't believe I missed so much.

Paladin, good point about just leaving them trapped in the room with the gas for like three hours. Apparently the Trade Federation is using the same method that people often employ to kill Jason Voorhees. Whack him once then assume he must be dead, and run away. It is also ridiculous that Watto wouldn't take Republic credits. That's like some evildoers in another country not taking US dollars.

civilian_number_two, I agree. It is a pretty tiny battlefield for the war to decide a planet's fate. I don't think it's even as big as Manhattan as you said it was.

[Despondent]

good criticism, now that's what I REALLY wanted for Christmas!

[Despondent]

Civilian, I really appreciate your moral fiber on this boycott.

If that could be turned, you'd become an even greater ally.

I'd look the other way if you got real lit sometime and subjected yourself, pen in hand. for the good of the alliance, of course.

[Jordan]

My only question was what exactly was the trade federation blocking? How can you starve a planet? Why is Naboo is scarely populated?

Nice list guys, very comprehensive.

The scripts were written in haste, you cannot expect much.

[Paladin]

The scripts were written in haste, you cannot expect much.

Given the fact that George Lucas had roughly 20 years to get a good idea for a plot (and never mind the fact that he could have hired literally hundreds of smart-asses to make a good plot, too), it's astonishing that he made something so lame.

[Jordan]

His vanity played a major part. He did have twenty years, didn't he. The prequels could've been so good. Unfotunately they are ruined forever. Episode 3 can't save the franchise. We already talked about this however in another post. Some one should make a spoof on the movies.

New game What should Episode 3 be called.

Starwars Episode 3: In search of plot

[civilian_number_two]

New game What should Episode 3 be called.

Starwars Episode 3: In search of plot

Likely Choices:

Episode III: The Rise of the Empire

Episode III: The Fall of the Republic

Episode III: The Dawn of Terror

Episode III: September 11th


Choices I'd Like:

Episode III: Look! Boba Fett!

Episode III: Star Wars Six

Episode III: I am so Fucking Sorry

Episode III: Story by David Brin, Directed by Steven Spielberg

[Paladin]

Rise of the Empire would be a good title. Let's just hope that Lucas doesn't get any funny ideas and make some totally retarded title like he did with AOTC.

[Despondent]

here are some more. love the hate speech.


Star Wars Episode III: The Fellowship of the Force

Star Wars Episode III: You pays your money, you takes your chances

Star Wars Episode III: There’s a sucker born every minute

Star Wars Episode III: I wrote this

Star Wars Episode III: the Dark side effects

Star Wars Episode III: Even better than Episode II

Star Wars Episode III: Straining a third

Star Wars Episode III: Less Jar-Jar; satisfied?

Star Wars Episode III: The Rise to disappointment

Star Wars Episode III: Come to this it has

Star Wars Episode III: The Failure of the Franchise