Mr Plinkett's 'Phantom Menace' Review.

it's actually not.

the end fight between Qui-Gonn, Obi-Wan, and Darth Maul is the best part of the movie, but while it's fun to watch the first time, and entertaining maybe even after that, it completely lacks real stakes for us as viewers.

• we know Obi-Wan will survive even if he doesn't win, so there's no mortal peril.
• Qui-Gonn getting killed is sorta interesting, but it's standard formula, so even if you didn't see it coming, after the fact it's the obvious end result.
• Darth Maul being dispatched by Obi-Wan wasn't even gratifying; destroyed a perfectly cool villain who could have served the whole PT, but who ended up being kinda irrelevant.
• and then it's so exquisite, it's less of a fight and more of a dance (possibily a personal preference, but i don't feel any suspense whatsoever here).

but the worst part of all of this is that Obi-Wan was fridged so bad in this film that caring about him as a character/person is actually really hard.
his relationship with Qui-Gonn is barely developed, he spends most of his time on various crafts spewing incoherent technical jargon, and he has no relationship with Anakin at this point. so what are we watching? really?
we're watching Anakin's mentor get killed (where Anakin doesn't even see it happen), and his mentor's partner (who we only care about because we know he'll be important later on) avenge this death with a nicely choreographed, well-scored ballet fight.

yeah, normal and rather dull actually.

there's higher stakes and more emotion between Luke and Obi-Wan and Han negotiating over a price for passage to Alderaan.

fake is fake. if you don't believe there's actual peril there can be no suspense.
when it looks like two fighters have planned out every move, there appears to be no risk, no accidents of chance.
compare this to the fight in ESB or even the one in TFA; people who have never battled figuring one another out, being outclassed for various reasons.
those fights have very real emotional stakes and very real physical ones too.

the same cannot really be argued for TPM.

 

Cheers to that.

I mean, the music helps a lot with that scene but, I reckon Darth Maul was terribly underused. He could easily become the villain of the PT rather than being disposed and then "oh guess what? he didn't die!" thing.

TPM should have focused a little bit on how Anakin entered the Jedi order but then fast-forward to his padawan years, to see his interactions with Obi-Wan. Then Episode II would have included a greater extent of The Clone Wars, so we get to meet the legendary Jedi General and his interactions with his former master Obi-Wan, his padawan Ahsoka and his secret wife Padme. (Just a comment, from what I've seen so far in TCW: I guess Obi-Wan strongly suspected his former padawan secret dealings but chose to say nothing about it LOL).

 

i won't complain about TCW making a mess of the PT since it seems like TCW improves a lot on the mess the PT already is. hahahaha

 

So true. Hard to admit but its true...His review of AOTC its even better...hahaha

 

Ah, that's more nonsense - we're talking about execution here, not your inability to feel tension when:
-you know the spoilers
-you know a trope.

If that destroys tension for you, then the same should go for any other case where that happens, and it's useless as a specific criticism of any specific movie.


Also... you talked about stakes. Well... their survival would be a "stake", so your claim that there aren't any, was false.

The execution was gratifying - if you can't get over the fact that it resulted in killing a villain you would've preferred to carry on, then you'll react the same way no matter how dramatic or exciting the execution, hence this judgement is irrelevant.


So... the original claim was that it was "inhuman", but it "actually isn't nonsense", because... you already know the spoilers and didn't want Maul do die? No.

The only part in the entire sequence that looks like a "dance", is a short segment in the last 1v1 that lasts no longer than 5 seconds.

Until he gets unfridged... which happens when the duel starts.

A correct statement.

A nonsense statement - it's only one craft, and he says no technical jargon (except maybe during the blockade run... but pretty sure not).

Eh... a supporting character I guess?

Correct.

That, and he has a very mischievous grin.

There actually is no score during the "revenge fight".

As I said - 5- seconds of it.

Well, the original claim was SUBnormal, i.e. 3 guys no one cares about or knows anything about - which wouldn't have been normal

What, it's a life or death question you mean?

As in, if you can't get over knowing the outcome from an outside source, then there can be no suspense

Except it doesn't look that way?

That doesn't automatically make your statements about TPM valid all of a sudden

Well, it can't because the good guys in it have actually battled, and are only being outclassed for 2 reasons - the rest of that paragraph can be argued for TPM, though... in fact, not so much argued, as the obvious pointed towards.

.... ahem

 

your calling my statements nonsense and irrelevant doesn't make them either of those things.

knowing a trope and knowing spoilers doesn't mean a movie still can't deliver a high-stakes action sequence full of tension.

we know Luke isn't going to die in TESB, but we don't expect him to lose his hand and discover that Vader is his father.
we know Rey isn't going to die in TFA, but i'm guessing by all the talk we weren't expecting her to Force pull that saber or trounce Kylo Ren.

Obi-Wan duels with Maul and defeats him.

where's the surprise? where's the tension? what's at stake? Anakin is safe, Qui-Gonn is dead and we know Obi-Wan lives.
why do we care about this fight at this point?

 

You seem to be confusing "high-stakes action full of tension" with "additional twists and turns" - no, the fact that you know someone's gonna survive, DOESN'T remove the tension and hence require additional wizardry to make it tense again.


That's how it is for you, but not for people in general, and it's not what I'm really talking about here.

 

no, i am asking you a very straightforward question:

why should we care about this fight?

 

Plunkett can kiss my green ass.

 

What kind of question is that - if you don't, then you don't.

All I'm talking about here is what the movie does to create investment or tension, and how well it executes that.

 

and yet you can't explain how that scene creates investment or tension, or how well it executes it?

 

What do you mean "I can't explain"? So far your arguments were just "we already know what happens, and they don't throw in addtional twists like Maul hacking off his member and saying he's his invisible roomate", and I'm like well yea that doesn't really mean there's no tension there you know?


So how did you conclude from that that I can't explain anything beyond that

 

because i asked you a question and you didn't answer it. you just mischaracterized what i said as if that was the whole of your argument.

you said "i'm talking about what the movie does to create investment or tension, and how well it executes that."
but then you didn't actually give any reasons or examples.

so, again, what creates tension for you in that fight scene? what do you think is at stake? how does the scene work for you?

 

Well I'd say that they're really really accessible.

Firstly Plinkett doesn't use thesis statements or formal language. Rather he says things like "it's satisfying when our hero gets ahead from where they started off from." If I wrote a sentence like that on an English essay, my proff would dock marks for using a colloquial saying instead of a technical term signifying a clear and specific meaning. But "gets ahead" is the sort of thing any reader without professional critical training easily understands. All the swearing and toilet humour and "I murder people in my basement" humour are jokes that most humans find shocking, so those jokes probably resonate with more viewers than Nostalgia Critic's portrayal of Michael Bay as a porn director (a subtle and intellectual way of joking about Michael Bay's tendency for making films that appeal to base human desires and that "satisfy" audiences, while not being quality stories or character portraits).

Secondly he jumps on the hate train. Angry Joe (who like Plinkett I enjoy for comedic rather than critical value) got over 3,000,000 views on his No Man's Sky review in less than a month (which is more than usual for him) and his video is almost entirely a scathing chastisement of the game's designers for being untruthful. Plinkett for his part starts out his video with the phrase "Star Wars the Phantom Menace is more disappointing than my son." Since many fans have come to hate the prequels in recent years, to such fans Plinkett is someone who 'gets' them. Hating Star Wars is popular, Plinkett made a video doing just that, so its easy to find people who agree with him and would like reviews like his to substantiate their own opinions.

Just my personal thoughts.

 

Why is his review so important that it had to be posted on this message board?

 

Nah I mean I don't have trouble understanding why a lot of irrational people with a dog in the fight would latch on to it - but it's gotten nigh-universal acclaim among all the "thinking internet critics", who "analyze movies" all the time and even do so intelligently in most other cases (just like RLM themselves)... even though it's such an OBVIOUS pile of horse.

That bit's slightly baffling - on a visceral level at least

Well apparently it's just barely notable enough for this message board (which is much more famous than Plinkett, obviously).

 

my view is, If you enjoy the prequels as a flawless work Plinkett will just seem like an unnecessary attack.
If you feel like the prequels had some shortcomings plinkett will go along way as to explain how and where those shortcomings were.

 

Not really - most of the real shortcomings he actually misses, in favor of a bunch of invented ones.

The reason this review series doesn't work, isn't so much that it's not "fair and balanced enough", but because it even fails at its own game.

 

So nice to see RLM reviews still stirring up the muck at the bottom of the toilet, almost 20 years after the fact.

I used to lock these trollish quote-fests fantastic discussions, regularly. And with the quickness.

So glad I can just sit back & chuckle at reading the exact same things, ad nauseum.

For the seven-hundredth & eighty-third time.

 

Hey, I said nothing about this forum being the bottom of a toilet!

--- Double Post Merged, Sep 28, 2016, Original Post Date: Sep 28, 2016 ---

I was discussing on that other forum the other day, a real ******* BOWEL OF THE TOILET


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Not like this place here - no, that place was real bad.