(I'm also not sure that's . . . a problem? If your actors have chemistry, surely you want to mine that, not minimize it?)
I didn't pick up on this aspect of AOTC until I rewatched it this time with The Discourse about TLJ and TROS fresh in my mind. I think both movies were trying to reflect this aspect of ESB (which on the face of it is a really weird movie, and especially weird for a blockbuster sequel) but didn't fully manage to imitate the way that splitting the trio in ESB fuels the conflict of the story for all three of them. And in the specific case of AOTC keeping the stronger actors in a room together would have done a lot to make the wooden dialogue less noticeable.
As for TLJ, Rian Johnson has specifically said the Finn/Poe chemistry was too powerful (read: too gay) to keep them together. He's very clearly taking the fall for Lucasfilm and Disney there, because it's very clear that there was no way they would have allowed Finn and Poe to be boyfriends. When they were reunited in TROS, JJ Abrams shoehorned in Keri Russell as an old flame of Poe's to prove his heterosexuality (note, this fails, the chemistry is just That Strong and Finn and Poe basically are married), while Finn spends a good chunk of his time either with Jannah or…semi-mooning over Rey? It's literally not clear from the script, though I prefer the interpretation that he's trying to tell her that he's a Force-user too.
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regna
(no subject)
Date: 2020-02-25 08:29 (UTC)I didn't pick up on this aspect of AOTC until I rewatched it this time with The Discourse about TLJ and TROS fresh in my mind. I think both movies were trying to reflect this aspect of ESB (which on the face of it is a really weird movie, and especially weird for a blockbuster sequel) but didn't fully manage to imitate the way that splitting the trio in ESB fuels the conflict of the story for all three of them. And in the specific case of AOTC keeping the stronger actors in a room together would have done a lot to make the wooden dialogue less noticeable.
As for TLJ, Rian Johnson has specifically said the Finn/Poe chemistry was too powerful (read: too gay) to keep them together. He's very clearly taking the fall for Lucasfilm and Disney there, because it's very clear that there was no way they would have allowed Finn and Poe to be boyfriends. When they were reunited in TROS, JJ Abrams shoehorned in Keri Russell as an old flame of Poe's to prove his heterosexuality (note, this fails, the chemistry is just That Strong and Finn and Poe basically are married), while Finn spends a good chunk of his time either with Jannah or…semi-mooning over Rey? It's literally not clear from the script, though I prefer the interpretation that he's trying to tell her that he's a Force-user too.
In terms of the prospective love triangle in AOTC, I am glad they didn't do it because I don't think the writing would have been up to snuff to make it believable, based on the evidence of AOTC. I also think that there would have been (justifiable) criticism of its similarity to the semi-love triangle in the back half of A New Hope and the front half of ESB. I also think that part of it has to be that Ewan McGregor was just way too popular and too good-looking at the time (when he'd just come off Moulin Rouge and was on the walls of college and high school students across the country) for anyone to really believe that Padmé would choose Anakin over Obi-Wan, and that even George Lucas, who clearly does not have a romantic bone in his body, was able to figure that out. And part of the point of Anakin in AOTC is that he is a callow youth (not quite as callow as Luke, but still). Putting him into competition with Obi-Wan like that wouldn't have reflected favorably on either character and would potentially have undermined their connection with each other, especially since their deathless bond was already shown to have been the engine of Vader through the end of the OT.
Plus it would have made it a lot harder to write my OT3 fanfic all these years later, lol.