>when it hits you that James Earl Jones' slow, Shakespearian vocal cadence, when spoken with the softer, higher-pitched voice of a younger man, sounds EXACTLY like how Hayden delivered his lines in the PT
>When it hits you that he wasn't being wooden, he was trying to deliver his lines the same way thst Vader/JEJ talked in the OT for, the sake of Lucas' autistic sense of continuity, even if they sounded stilted as-delivered.
Mind: blown
You just made that up, didn't you.
Yeah, but I could totally see it, especially given all the evidence that's come out about Lucas wanting the PT to be shot and acted like a 1930s or 40s drama.
I'm not saying that the films were successful, but it's becoming increasingly clear, in this era of MCU capeshit, just how absurdly ambitious the prequels were.
kys yourself
Fuck off, op is based. The prequels are masterpieces.
Except he's right.
And it's still bad acting.
i've unironically said this since day one. anakin was portrayed flawlessly in the prequels, as well as obi wan.
>masterpieces
OP here. I wouldn't go THAT far, but I'd definitely consider them to be some of the most ambitious films ever made, and a ton of the hate that they got for not feeling like the OT was because of people who just didn't get what they were trying to be.
Basically, the OT was a series of Kurosawa plots adapted to a re-imagination of a Buck Rogers/Flash Gordon-type setting, filmed with an attention to detail that paid homage to Kubrick, with cinematography based on 1950/60's WWII movies, and acted like a 70's American New Wave film.
When Lucas decided to set the prequels ~25 years before the OT, he made a conscious decision to make films that felt like they were 25 years older than the OT, with acting and cinematography to match, which is why the PT has some of the best action cinematography/editing of all the Star Wars films, while the non-action shots include lots of flat panning "walking and talking" shots, because that was the exact sort of static camerawork that one would have seen in a 1940's character drama. Furthermore, the "flat" acting again is meant to mimic the tone of the stage-acted films of that era (compared to the much more method-acted work that you see lots of in the OT).
Even the CGI work, PS3 jokes aside, was ballsy AF. Lucas basically wanted to do what it took Cameron the better part of another decade to pull off, which was a composited film seamlessly integrating real-life actors with digital characters and backgrounds. It was a case of Icarus flying too close to the sun, and Lucas essentially tried to film Avatar twice, a decade before the technology was really mature enough to pull it off.
It honestly kills me that post-Disney we'll never see a Special Edition of the prequel trilogy with all digital work re-done to bring it on par with Avatar in terms of textures/lighting/motion. Those movies would be fucking incredible to watch.
>obi wan
>flawless
Fucking this. The PT wasn't Ewan trying to act like the 90's-trained Ewan we've seen in just about every other movie, it was Ewan acting like a 1940's-trained actor like Alec Guinness.
Turn on TCM some time and leave whatever moldy oldie they're playing on in the background, and you'll notice that everyone speaks, intones, and emotes just like Hayden, Hershlag, and Ewan Macgregor did.
The backgrounds weren't CGI
They were blue screened onto a toy set.
there's still a chance we might see a spin-off movie with Hayden GOATenson reprising his role
I've love to see a survival-horror style movie from the perspective of some jedi temple padawans during Vader's massacre
So what you're saying is, Lucas tried to make a movie that looked old by inserting massive amounts of CGI?
Makes no sense.
McGregor's Obi Wan is probably the best character in Star Wars next to Han Solo
>When Lucas decided to set the prequels ~25 years before the OT, he made a conscious decision to make films that felt like they were 25 years older than the OT
But this doesn't make any sense, the technology in the prequels was more advanced than the OT
Hayden got the cadence right, but not the inflection.
I was talking more about the clones, though some of the sets really were CGI backgrounds, and those are mostly the ones that truly look like shite today.
Now, imagine the clones/droids re-rendered and re-animated to the standards of 2010's CGI, which is the sort of result that Lucas probably held in his mind's eye until he realized that the processing power wasn't up to rendering that level of complexity on the scale he wanted.
Imagine if the clones and droids looked like pic related, or even like the Na'vi. It would be a completely different film experience.
I'm not sure if it was so much the inflection as it was the jarringly different timbrality of his voice compared to JEJ's. JEJ has probably the greatest stage-trained voice this side of Orson Welles or Patrick Stewart, and part of what makes his voice so special is that its depth and tonal richness means that even subtle variances in intonation can have a tremendous impact, compared to someone with a much flatter and less-rich voice like Hayden's.
>just how absurdly ambitious the prequels were.
Upon rewatching them, I've gained a new appreciation for what Lucas tried to do. He could have taken the Disney route and given people fan service, lens flare, and explosions. Instead he tried to give people a meaningful, complex story. In some cases, he was very successful. That being said, Lucas is fucking retarded when it comes to writing dialog or telling human beings how to act, and decades of being world famous and wealthy beyond imagination rendered him out of touch enough to think anyone would like Jar Jar Binx. Hayden suffered from being young, untrained, inexperienced, and having absolutely no direction to hide those things. Watching the performances of Christopher Lee and Ian McDiarmid compared to almost everyone else in the cast is like watching Mike Tyson box a small child. The truly talented, experienced actors gave amazing performances because they simply didn't need direction. Hayden was just a deer in the headlights.
The problem wasn't in the acting, it was boring as fuck
>portrayed flawlessly
>patience Anakin, use the force!
>now watch me soar out this window when it will probably mean my certain death
>also watch me jump in the middle of this droid army like 5 minutes before the clones arrive, even though grievous could've just easily given the order for the droids to just obliterate me
>It honestly kills me that post-Disney we'll never see a Special Edition of the prequel trilogy
So basically tons more CGI shit shoved in wherever possible, like the OT special edition?
Hershlag also sucked, and she's been fantastic pretty much everywhere else.
I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that Lee and MacDiarmid were classically-trained in the acting styles of the 50's and 60's, pre-new wave and all the post-Brando ideas about how an actor should approach their role. So when the director called for this older, completely obsolete form of acting, they knew exactly what to do.
Neeson and MacGregor, though younger and trained in much more modern and "real"-looking styles, at least had the experience and street smarts to have a sense of what Lucas actually wanted, and probably spent weeks watching old Alec Guinness movies and Hammer Horror films to have a sense of how they were supposed to be delivering their lines. Samuel L. Jackson has always been a stage actor who does movies, and so he also had no problem adapting since he approaches his roles the same way that a 40's or 50's actor would (play the stage version of himself playing the character, vs trying to play the character as an actual independent person).
But yeah, the teen actors who had known nothing but late 90's acting styles/training were clearly in WAYYYY over their heads.
Yeah, but take a look at Rogue One's CGI work and tell me with a straight face that in the late 2010's that WOULDN'T actually be a good thing.
It wouldn't be. I'm not some idiot pleb who wants to see fancy visual effects plastered all over the screen. More often than not that shit is just used to trick rubes like you into thinking the movie was good without a solid plot or without good acting
For all his ambitions he still failed to deliver a coherent conspiracy plot to turn the Jedi's Republic into a Sith Empire. He failed to coach some of the actors in their delivery.
I guess he choked on his aspirations.
>I've love to see a survival-horror style movie from the perspective of some jedi temple padawans during Vader's massacre
I would gladly pay to see this film, Hayden-Vader and all.
Hell, I'd pay to see a Vader spin-off where we get to see a force vision of Hayden Vader talking with Qui-Gon's force ghost about the nature of good and evil.
That wasn't Ewan's fault, retard. It was Lucas' shitty writing.
Hayden is too short. Vader is 6'7, Hayden is 6'2; he would need RDJ-tier lifts to do it.
Lucas directed them to act poorly. So in truth the acting is good...from a certain point of view.
>Implying Vader wasn't wearing RDJ-tier lifts in the first place.