Poll: So the romance in Star Wars Attack of the Clones. Yay or nay?

[Chemical Alia]

Ew, no. Anakin's flat affect and gigantic psychopath red flags were creepy as hell.

"I hate sand, it gets all in my butthole." What kind of compliment is that?

 

[Thaluikhain]

Uh...no. The actors had no chemistry, the dialogue between them was clunky at best, and ultimately there's a level of creepiness in the relationship that helps to torpedo the relationship again on closer inspection.

I mean let's review their romance arc for a minute. They meet in Phantom Menace wherein Anakin immediately starts crushing on Padme (His first line to her was literally described her as one of the most beautiful things in the galaxy) after which they have very little interaction. This is when Anakin is 9 years old. Cue the time skip of ten years between the end of that film and the start of Attack of the Clones, which reveals almost immediately that they have had no contact for the length of that time skip. Let me go ahead and lay that flat. At the start of Attack of the Clones Anakin had spent half his life pining for a memory consisting solely of what we saw onscreen in Phantom Menace. That's not endearing, that's obsessively creepy.

Well...yes...but given what happens to him in the end, that could have been way, way better than what he had if they went down that route. The romance would be awful, yeah, but the story could have been good.

 

[Orthodox_Reality]

What I really want to know is who the two positive voters are...

 

[Kennetic]

Anakin is extremely unlikable and Natalie Portman never does romance terribly well. I felt that she was the reason Black Swan felt so fake.

 

[Fox12]

No it was pretty awful. We learned everything we needed to know about it from the first trilogy.

Wait, Vader is Lukes dad? Vader had a wife? What happened? What made a virtuous jedi with a family into a monster?

You see, it subtly suggested that Vader wasn't a total monster after all, that someone had loved him once, and that he was capable of loving someone in return. The plot twist added multiple layers of character development to him, and subtly changed everything about him. The mystery made him more intriguing.

Then we see the films and.... it was awful. You couldn't find two people who were less suited for one another. The chemistry was non existent. I guess maybe you could argue they were just super horny and made a bad decision, but that doesn't sound like the grounded politician padme is supposed to be.

 

[Lieju]

What you have to understand is that as a man you are looking at the romance critically in terms of its writing, whereas as a woman she is approaching the romance emotionally, as in: she thinks the romance is a beautiful idea, so she looks past the shoddy writing and hideous acting and sees the beauty of the idea, and that fascinates her.

Obviously this is a generalisation and some women think more critically, but on the whole that's how women approach this kind of thing, it provokes an emotional response in them and therefore they aren't interested in 'critical' analyses like the kind you just posted.

That's exactly the same with men, though. (Or boys.)

I was bothered by all the things that made no sense in the first two prequels (by the third movie people I hung out with generally thought the prequels sucked) and there was no end to all the male fans who'd just tell me not to think about it critically and enjoy all the fights because they had lightsabers and cool effects.

Anyone who says s/he enjoyed the romance in the movies didn't enjoy the movies solely because of the romance; you just don't go to a Star Wars movie if what you want is romance foremost. So a lot of them presumably were fans of the characters or the actors and so made up a better romance in their heads. (For example by assuming they have reasons to like each other.)

Also how many of them were in fact girls rather than women when they saw the movies?

And when it comes to the romance, I hate to say it, but it is better than a lot of movie-romances in some ways.
A lot of girls liked that she was a queen and an influental figure, someone who has her own career. There are scenes where she runs around with a laser-pistol, and she had exotic and cool outfits. She was a pretty important character in the movies, which is different from a lot of scifi/action-movies where you could remove the female love-interest and nothing would change plot-wise.

I'm not saying that makes her a good female character, but a lot of girls saw her as a good female character, and so got invested in her romance.

At the start of Attack of the Clones Anakin had spent half his life pining for a memory consisting solely of what we saw onscreen in Phantom Menace. That's not endearing, that's obsessively creepy.

He wasn't allowed to love, though. I can see why she would have made an expression on him, and afterwards he had no actual relationships with girls...

Quite a lot of how Anakin handles the relationship is dumb and creepy, but I don't really blame Anakin as a character, but his screwed-up upbringing. The Jedi-order was such a BS useless bunch of creeps in the prequels.

 

[Zeldias]

It was like watching Lucas try to smash two repellent magnets together. That whole rolling in the grass bit was fucking hilarious, though (I think that happened in that one, can't recall).

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

Yeah, as many others in this thread have said: The dialogue was clunky and unbelievable, and Christensen and Portman had all the chemistry of a brick. (It didn't help things that Christensen was a terrible choice for Anakin- he turned what could have been a tortured descent into darkness into two movies' worth of whiny petulance and pouting.)

 

[Silvanus]

The romance was stunningly awful. Cringeworthy dialogue, acted terribly.

This is coming from somebody who, on the whole, enjoyed the prequels.

 

[Asita]

At the start of Attack of the Clones Anakin had spent half his life pining for a memory consisting solely of what we saw onscreen in Phantom Menace. That's not endearing, that's obsessively creepy.

He wasn't allowed to love, though. I can see why she would have made an expression on him, and afterwards he had no actual relationships with girls...

Quite a lot of how Anakin handles the relationship is dumb and creepy, but I don't really blame Anakin as a character, but his screwed-up upbringing. The Jedi-order was such a BS useless bunch of creeps in the prequels.

That I could handle...if they actually played off that and made it into a small character arc instead of simply giving lip service to it and leaving it at that. Instead it turned into 'Jedi aren't allowed to love, but I don't care about that and neither should you *glares at the audience*'

 

[Scarim Coral]

Definitely nay!

To me it just show George is awful when it come to writing a romance scene in general!

 

[Abomination]

I'm honestly torn between Jar-Jar Binks and the Padme/Annakin romance plot as to which is the worst thing about the movies.

I would have preferred it if he became addicted to Death Sticks and started banging twilek hookers as cause for him taking issue with the Jedi's celibacy stance. I mean, he chose a political figure for his "secret" relationship? Just dumb beyond words.

The strange thing is that in the Clone Wars series his relationship with Padme is actually pretty decent. Hell, the whole animated series is leaps and bounds superior to the trilogy.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

Yea to the concept, Nay to the execution. Like pretty much everything else about that movie aside from the color palette and the sound mix, which were nice on both parts.

Seriously, every time I re-watch that movie, I'm pretty much just watching it for the audio and the pretty colors. I honestly enjoy all five of the other movies, but I don't know what George was thinking with that one. It could have been amazing, but that would require him to hire an editor who understood how human beings interact. Although at least it gave us both of the Clone Wars cartoons, the first of which was one long, entertaining action scene, and the second of which /finally/ gave us the heroic but troubled Anakin we were promised in the original trilogy. In Star Wars you could tell Obi Wan really did have a long and positive history with Anakin. In the prequels, he was okay as a small child, but a horrible and obviously evil individual when he grew up. Why anyone was surprised that he went to the dark side, I will never understand.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

What you have to understand is that as a man you are looking at the romance critically in terms of its writing, whereas as a woman she is approaching the romance emotionally, as in: she thinks the romance is a beautiful idea, so she looks past the shoddy writing and hideous acting and sees the beauty of the idea, and that fascinates her.

Obviously this is a generalisation and some women think more critically, but on the whole that's how women approach this kind of thing, it provokes an emotional response in them and therefore they aren't interested in 'critical' analyses like the kind you just posted.

That's exactly the same with men, though. (Or boys.)

I was bothered by all the things that made no sense in the first two prequels (by the third movie people I hung out with generally thought the prequels sucked) and there was no end to all the male fans who'd just tell me not to think about it critically and enjoy all the fights because they had lightsabers and cool effects.

Oh men are worse, give them tits, ass and laser swords and they're happy regardless of the quality of the writing =) But seriously, there is a subtle difference, it's not the same thing.

Indeed, the lightsabers and cool effects were well done. It's not like we're praising Star Trek V level effects[footnote]If you don't get the joke: among its many, many other problems, the fifth Star Trek film had /terrible/ effects, either because Industrial Light and Magic (who had done all the previous films) was busy with two other movies at the time and couldn't handle a third, or because the producers thought ILM charged too much and thought someone else could do the same job for less money -- I've seen both explanations. Either way, ILM was back for the sixth one, and it was worth every penny to get them back.[/footnote] here because we're starved for action or something

The romance, on the other hand...

 

[Psychobabble]

What I really want to know is who the two positive voters are...

Well obviously they were Natalie Portman Hayden Christensen. XD

 

[Bellvedere]

It was awful!!

Padme: I'm a politician!
Anakin: I hate politics!

Padme: We used to lay on the sand!
Anakin: I hate sand!

Padme: What did you get up to today?
Anakin: I slaughtered women and children.

Anakin was completely unlikable in the 2nd movie. He was just a sulky dick throughout the whole thing and that anybody would like him, much less date him felt really wrong.