the only thing Star Wars I have to look forward to now is the Mr. Plinkett video.
I can't wait for Half in the Bag! I'm expecting facetious, but not really, apologies to Rian Johnson.
This trilogy was squandered by slap-fighting hacks.
Might be the best summation of the making of this "trilogy." How different might things have been had Johnson come back and finished it himself? After this though be careful what you wish for! I still think the first two movies are good in their own ways, just not together or to the standards of the OG trilogy, but this one is such a bad movie and slapdash story it makes the whole thing look worse, except by individual comparison. This is like a full referendum on JJ and TFA. If you were in the TLJ > TFA camp, congrats, you won (but we all lost).
Smells a lot like a bad case of Game of Thrones season 8.
This makes season 8 of GoT look like a slow burn. It would be like if they shoved season 8's plot into two hours. I think the Night King arc would be resolved in the opening crawl. =)
Went on a dive to watch most of my favorite moments from the series and realized it had been years since I rewatched the entire series (maybe I did before episode VII came out but it felt like a long time).
Ever feel like your opinion on these movies might change over time or do they stay the same Griffith?
They change, in particular the last time I rewatched the Star Wars movies (first time since I saw the prequels in theaters), but more the order and my understanding of why I felt certain ways than something crazy like, "The prequels are good now!"
The most dramatic shift is Attack of the Clones went from the worst to the best prequel in my eyes, just because I thought it was the best paced movie. So it wasn't that it was good, or the most satisfying Star Wars material in the prequels, I didn't really like anything in it, but it was just the objectively least bad, or most normal, as a movie. Conversely, a lot people like RotS because it's full of Star Wars wish fulfillment, but that's just sugar, otherwise it's a really badly paced movie and story that doesn't execute any of those ideas well (same thing this time).
I similarly jump back and forth on Hope vs Empire, and, like many, as I got older Jedi went from a contender to solidly third. There was a point when I realized all the depth of the characters really came from Empire, so I liked it most, but then in recent years I've come to appreciate the original more for its charm, world building and overall historical significance, which is why I didn't mind TFA essentially remaking it in the process of reinventing the franchise (it's one of the most significant films in history, you could do worse than paying tribute to it like that, as I found out last night =).
It's funny, I always thought the prequels would be the worst, that Disney's movies would always be better by default through sheer production value, but I do find myself respecting the prequels, or the idea of them more in comparison to what's happening now. It's like I'm discovering new understanding or nuances of badness as I age; great. =)
Now I appreciate the prequels as technical cinematic milestones if nothing else. They're still unwatchably bad, like cringeworthy, but Lucas did reinvent modern blockbuster filmmaking with them, he just didn't validate the process with the results at the time for other reasons; namely, his limitations, and degeneration, as a traditional writer/director. But then again, he was reinventing the wheel on the fly... so, basically, while those movies are still arguably the worst of their kind in film history given the money and expectations involved, I've forgiven him for that and come around again on his achievements and genius otherwise.
Now Disney is outright making the prequels look almost like good ideas, or at least ideas, that were just executed poorly! I'm totally wishing we'd gotten George's weird sequels now, and wonder if Disney won't one day think the same, or that they should have hewn closer to the EU, because they seemed out of ideas from the start (they dumped the bad old EU for THIS!? =). The tragedy of this trilogy, and even this movie, isn't that it's all bad, it's that none of its good ideas got a chance to breath and develop, let it grow a beard as the TNG-inspired saying goes, and in this case the movie's ideas weren't executed/presented in a viable package, a decent movie, so whatever was or might have been good was simply wasted among the dreck.