If the Star Wars Prequels used negative reviews in their promo photos
Not to be bitter, but a ton of the wanking around things like the dialogue in these films has to do with Western media canon’s complete and utter obsession with ‘naturalistic’ dialogue and complete dismissal of other forms of dialogue writing that don’t follow this convention.
I grew up with the disparate influences of the LOTR and Dune books and Bollywood films and all of those have received varying levels of hatred for their dialogue not following modern Western storytelling conventions (“smooth” naturalistic dialogue, pop-culture quip laden exchanges, etc. The latter I’ve started to call “Whedonism” writing, because it was particularly popularised via Joss Wheldon’s work). Just recently I was reading a review of the first Dune book that was complaining about the “stiff” dialogue and the “sterile” characterization and I realized that a lot of people just don’t know what to *do* with writing that falls outside of a narrow band of style.
Me, I immensely enjoy forms of dialogue that follow grand, opera-like conventions, with nary a quippy “Whedonism” in sight. Dialogue that works like a tone-poem. Dialogue that’s allowed to kick “smoothness” straight to the curb, in service of rawness (and anyone who whinges about Anakin’s dialogue seriously hasn’t gone through a love-confession by way of inexperienced teenage boy. ‘Awkward’ is their default mode of communication. It’s just that Western cinema canon trained viewers to expect smooth, suave leading men, not broken youths with little interaction outside of a monastic order and more trauma than a combat veteran).
Also, these film critics completely and utterly missing the entire point of what the Jedi are supposed to be in the PT (the ossified remnant of a once-great monastic order, now immensely diminished and disconnected from the social and political realities around them) is supposed to make me say “oh, these people have FANTASTIC reading comprehension and I’m going to trust them for media analysis?” This is what happens when your critics are people who spent dscades masturbating themselves to a froth over their fantasies of what the Jedi / the Old Republic / Anakin would be like and were faced not with grand romantic ideals, but highly flawed people and broken, barely-functional institutions.
Honestly, Lucas *should* have used these lines as marketing material, but I can see why he didn’t, it takes a special kind of chutzpah to sneer at the Western cinema critic class. In any case, I respect him enormously for sticking to his vision and the story he wanted to tell and how he wanted to tell it. I don’t know if this last point is specifically a failure of Western society or of hyper-capitalistic “media-as-products-for-mass-consumption”, but more people should be immensely unsettled by the enormous pressure on creatives to follow a particular mold and sand off all edges or outright allow their work to be modified by committee, so it has mass-market appeal.
