Obi-Wan Kenobi

Very controversial

Possibly but it also makes Padme look like an idiot for immediately marrying a mass (child) murderer so, again, on balance nothing of value would be lost

Also deffo kids movies

Ooh, that’s Episode 5 done.

What will a certain person do with that info?

Exciting!

We’ll probably watch the final one tomorrow.

Yeah, that did make me laugh. The real evil thing to do is ‘prove it then. Throw him into a volcano’ rather than leave a Jedi powerful enough to consistently banish Vader to the shadow realm wandering around.

Jedi code of attachment, they’re supposed to discard all that stuff.

Well, we’ve just watched the last episode and blimmin’ loved it.

So there.

It’s got the three of us talking passionately about what we’ve seen and what the creators might be planning next.

Star Wars.

STAR WARS.

I felt like the finale of OWK was a microcosm for the series as a whole. Broadly, I liked it a lot; it had some very well-done action scenes; every single second of Princess Leia was fantastic; Ewan acted his beard off; but it had a very strange pace, it seemed curiously stage-bound in a way I didn't feel Mando did, and every move forward it made to harmoniously tie together disparate strands of the saga was also a half-step backwards. So whilst there's a lot to love and I did enjoy it, it had a slightly unsatisfying feeling too.

What did I want from a Kenobi project? Something that suggested a personal evolution from defeat post-Sith to optimism pre-New Hope (yeah, I think we got that); something that genuinely made him realise Anakin was lost so that he'd eventually believe Luke had to kill him no matter what (yep, that too); Ewan McGregor performing lots of cool lightsaber moves in well-lit environments with relatively static camerawork to show off the choreography (no, I was generally pretty disappointed with all the lightsaber stuff); and a confrontation with Darth Vader that ends with Vader thinking Obi-Wan is dead, which seems to be the status quo in ANH (er, no). So like I say, a mixed bag.

Back a couple of pages, but only just finished the series and caught up on the chat.

Actually, the conference room scene where Vader chokes someone for going off on one about the silly force religion opens with Tarkin announcing that the Emperor has just disbanded the senate and taken complete control. Obviously, he has been in power for longer, but the technical full on open dictatorship of the galaxy is literally only complete right from that moment in ANH.

It is weird that lots of people believe the Jedi just a myth after quite a short time though.

Really enjoyed Obi Wan. Some of it felt like watching a real Star Wars thing at times, whilst the worst moments were more niggling or just unnecessary. Special ghost appearance at the end, for example, felt like it was just there for the sake of it and I also felt that the Third Sister's side plot in the final episode was just a means to drag Luke into it, when really she shouldn't have been a goner at the end of the previous episode.

Was surprised at how good Christianson was as Vader. First scene or two I thought he wasn't as imposing as he needed to be, but by the end of episode 3 he was as menacing as I could hope for. I particularly loved him striding through the not-rebels base, echoing his walk through the Hoth base in ESB. The battle sequences were great too, both in the suit and out of it.

The Third Sister I know has had lots of complaining. I did find some of her line delivery to be off, but I thought the physical performance was really great. As already said, I would have preferred her story to end in episode 5, but there wasn't much that was actually terrible about her ending. I sense they might be thinking a spin off for her, but the backlash to the character might put them off.

Obviously, McGregor was great. Some nice lightsaber twirling going on. His voice still sounds weird in the role, but he gets away with it as it is basically a character trait.

Also surprised at how much I enjoyed mini-Leia. If only child Anakin could have been this much fun.

As for prequel rankings, 1 > 3 > 2 is obviously the right choice. They are all bad but 2 is painfully awful. It is also the film that should have cemented the Obi Wan/Anakin friendship, but they spend the whole film apart. 1 isn't great, but Darth Maul and pod racing are legitimately great sequences.

Prequels as a whole are kind of frustrating though, as there is a good template of an arc there that could be great. Lots of themes ranging from the personal (betrayal, not living up to expectations, friendship, etc) to the political (the fall of a civilisation, growing fascism from within, complacency in power, ignored underclass in the outer rim, etc). Some of it is touched upon, whilst others are completely ignored. With a few re-writes and a different director it could have been great.

That works better than what they came up with. At least they didn't spend 16 years coming up with their version...

I assume the logic of starting with Anakin as a kid was that it's supposed to be a kids movie. But kids like watching movies about protagonists a bit older than them, so they could have easily made him 14-18 and it'd have worked fine. 
I think he's supposed to be 9 in TPM, but Padme is 14... so it'd have made more sense from that angle as well. 

Lucas said he's nine in TPM because he needed to be young enough for the separation from his mother to have felt traumatic. But I still feel if they'd made him older, and more of a cocky Han Solo type flirting with Padme, the Jedi refusal to free his mum could have brought on feelings of resentment/injustice so it could still have worked.

I'm a big prequel fan but I do think everything would be better if he'd been older.

So, what you guys are saying, is that Lucas kinda fucked it?

The only good thing was it made for a cool teaser poster.

They should have done the prequel in his teens/early 20s then they could have done a prequel prequel where he starts as a baby.