Outstanding!!
THANK YOU, Mad Old Lu! Very well stated! And I completely agree with you.
I enjoy reading different SW opinions, but sometimes things get posted in a thread like this that I find so bafflingly unrelatable that I can't possibly take the thought seriously. The suggestion that Jar Jar was a better character than Rose is one such opinion.
Jar Jar is not only the worst character in Star Wars, but quite possibly the worst character in the history of movies. That's because Jar Jar single-handedly undermined the entire tone of what had been the most successful movie franchise of all time. What had been a universally-enjoyed space-based fantasy saga that appealed to adults who wanted fun escapism which didn't insult their intelligence, got turned into something that anyone with a brain more developed than a 10-year-old's would find insultingly compromised.
Putting Jar Jar in the fourth SW movie would be like making a fourth Godfather movie, trying to appeal to the same audience who were fans of the first three, but sticking Pee Wee Herman in it. Phantom Menace was a movie that on one-hand tried to pass itself off as having pseudo-intellectual themes like all of the political intrigue and covert corruption of an entire system of government by way of manipulation to gain more power. But that same movie decided to have an over-the-top buffoonish cartoon character get more screen time than anyone else in the film. Jar Jar made it impossible to regard TPM as anything other than a regrettable re-direction of a once-proud franchise. It became a joke. Star Wars became something for people to ridicule, largely because of Jar Jar. So, I can't overstate how bad that character was.
In contrast, Rose annoys me because people like her in real life annoy me. But that's the thing: people like her
actually exist, and she doesn't undermine the general tone and atmospherics of either the film or (more importantly) the entire franchise. I roll my eyes at Rose the same way I roll my eyes at self-righteously naive people like her in real life. But her presence in the film doesn't insult my intelligence. Her presence in the film doesn't completely alter and derail the tone and intended general appeal of the entire saga. Jar Jar did! The awful joke that was Jar Jar, simply to cater to younger (or dumber) audiences, did damage to the franchise that Rose couldn't possibly begin to.
Rose was annoying. But Jar Jar was destructively ill-conceived, deeply regrettable, and very unfortunate. He was Pee Wee Herman in the Godfather.
