Before I get into the meat and potatoes of Part 5 of my rebuttal, let me remind everyone that May 19th is Prequel Appreciation Day and I’ve got something special planned. And we’re also going to be having a contest to give away a 2gb Star Wars mimo-bot in the next few days, with a winner announced on Prequel Appreciation Day, so be sure to check back frequently this week.
Since it’s been a while, I’ll offer a quick recap. Red Letter Media published a mildly humorous, 70 minute”take-down” of Phantom Menace on Youtube. The arguments made in the video were pretty thin, but a legion of screaming fan boys decided to make it their clarion call to institutionalize the hatred of a pretty great film.
I’ve been asked repeatedly to come up with logical responses to it and have been doing so on a semi-regular basis. Click the links to read Part One, Part Two, Part Three, and Part Four of my rebuttal. To watch the original review,” target=”_blank”> click here.
Now:
Part Five:
Mr. Plinkett starts his review by positing that Qui-Gon Jinn should have been non-existent (or forced into the background) and Obi-Wan Kenobi should have been the lead. And while I think that story would have worked to some degree as well, I really feel like the point of Qui-Gon being in the lead was two-fold: The first is we’ve never seen a traditional Master-Padawan relationship and have no idea how it works and seeing Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan interact is very telling of Obi-Wan’s training of Anakin. The second part to that is that there is something wrong with this lineage of Jedi. As was revealed in Attack of the Clones, Qui-Gon’s master was Count Dooku who turned into Sith Lord Darth Tyrannus. There’s a logical sense to it. Yoda trained Dooku and lost him to the Dark Side, Dooku trained Qui-Gon and Qui-Gon insisted that Anakin be trained before his death. Was the taint of the dark side what caused this? It’s an interesting question, to be sure.
But at the end of the day, the reviewer is judging the movie not on what it is, but what he wished it would have been. But it’s not that. I’ve said this plenty of times before and it’s worth saying again: there are a lot of Star Wars fans who don’t like the prequels because they spent 16 years building up what they should be in their heads that they were too blinded by that to enjoy what they were. I don’t think Mr. Plinkett is any exception.
The next portion of part five is an indictment of Qui-Gon’s character.
The first argument is that Qui-Gon is devoid of morals because he’s willing to use the force to influence outcomes in the film that seem questionable. But I think that’s part of Qui-Gon’s charm. He’s constantly defying the council, the Jedi code and tradition. Could it be that he was trained unsuspectingly by a Sith Lord? Oh…yeah… he was…
Next is that he’s “stupid” for not just killing Watto and taking the parts he needed, or trying to exchange the Repuiblic currency at other junk dealers. And sure, this might be a halfway legitimate point, but the reason he didn’t do that is the same reason you don’t see people circling the block for hours looking for a parking spot in New York in the movies. In real life, or logically, they’d never find that parking spot right of the bat, but for the expediency of the story and for the sake of the audience, we just suspend our disbelief and move on.
Then, while I would have liked to have seen Qui-Gon just hire a smuggler like Han Solo to get them off Tatooine, that would require a lot of trust of some random outlaw in a bar. Qui-Gon has very little experience with Tatooine and doesn’t want to risk attracting extra attention that explaining his situation to a rogue or outlaw in a bar would create. And getting on board an unknown freighter with the Queen and a whole bunch of “security guards” not trained in combat could end extraordinarily badly. They could have sold them out to the Hutts, to the Trade Federation, to Sidious, anybody. When Obi-Wan did it, he was familiar with the cantina he went to AND was able to go off the word of Chewbacca, a friend to the Jedi during the Clone Wars.
So, trying to finagle the part they needed seemed like the best course of action, and he used the force to help get him there because his situation was dire.
I’m not even going to get into Mr. Plinkett not being able to understand the bet between Qui-Gon and Watto. I was going to write about it ad nauseum, but I asked my 7 year old to explain it to me. When he understood it perfectly, I realized that Mr. Plinkett was either just moaning about it because he simply didn’t like it, or because he has the mental faculties of a toddler.
And so we move on to: Anakin.
His first point is that people hate kids and they are the kiss of death in a movie. And instead of proving him wrong by listing a dozen incredibly well recieved movies with children in them, I’ll just take that one as a punchline.
But then he has problems with Anakin building his mother a protocol droid. “Protocol droids are diplomats” he says, but we know that Threepio specifically can be useful in way more ways than that. His first job (after his mind wipe) was programming binary load lifters and he could also be used quite easily as a butler droid. And kids do lots of things because they want to, and then give ridiculous reasons for doing it. It would be no surprise if Anakin simply became fascinated by how the droid worked, wanted to build one, then his mom was like, “Anakin, you can’t have this thing here.” And then he was all like, “But mom, it’s for you!”
Then he complains that if you’re a little boy with a knack for building things, why would you waste your time building the same droid that everyone has… My first assumption is that he would have after he learned how droids work better after building Threepio, and my second assumption is that he works for a junk dealer, those were the parts most readily available for him to learn with.
Then we have the midi-chlorians.
I never understand why people have such a problem with this. It baffles me. Just because you have something in your blood that helps you talk to the force doesn’t mean the force isn’t still a mystical energy field created by all living things. Some people are just better tuned in to listening to the will of the force. This is actually incredibly interesting, because Anakin has this legacy of being a Jedi with more midi-chlorians than anyone has ever seen, he grows into this feeling that he deserves to be more powerful and can determine the will of the force better than others. But Qui-Gon also tells him that he needs to learn to quiet his mind to do it. But he never really does. And between his poor training and Palpatine’s meddling, he never realizes his potential as a Jedi. It’s quite tragic really, and I think the midi-chlorians prop that up nicely.
Again, it wasn’t a big deal and I wish people would get over the midi-chlorians thing.
Then Mr. Plinkett spends about 20 seconds complaining about the ending with no real arguments, so my assumption is that the ending will be the subject of Part Six.
Until next time, try not to take things too seriously in the comment section.