82 Reasons to Hate Star Wars: Episdoe III Tentative assessment.
#33
Posted 29 May 2005 - 10:46 AM
#34
Posted 29 May 2005 - 10:55 AM
Feel free to PM or email me any things that you thought were bad. If I haven't already included them perhaps I will add them to the list.
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#36
Posted 30 May 2005 - 05:26 PM
Anyway, I saw ROTS today and came out feeling like well that was a fun packed way to spend a coupla hours! You got the other 5 movies with whee! boom! wham! thrills! going on, and in this one I was more: Whoa! There goes Mace out the window. Whoa! There's Anakin slaughtering children. Whoa! She's pregnant! Whoa! She's died in childbirth! Whoa! There's all the Jedi dead! Whoa! He's got no legs and he's on fire and Kenobi leaves him to burn! Whoa! Yoda just pussied out and he wasn't even losing, the coward.
The film sits like a big nasty black blot on the series of otherwise harmless children's entertainment. It has to be endured rather than enjoyed. Never again will I be able to watch these movies without remembering all that going on, a bit like enjoying dragster racing until you see some dude crash and burn and screaming while they squirt him with haylon and then going to watch it again next week. It'll always be there!
Looking forward to those 80+ reasons!
#37
Posted 30 May 2005 - 06:23 PM
I think the phase: "WTF!" is not out of place here, ladies and gentlemen. If I'm not mistook, Luke in A New Hope is aged 19 or 20 at least and the Death Star finally becomes operational. A little math tells us that means it took the Empire 20-ish years to build it. Not design it - that was already taken care of by those funny looking dudes in movie 2. Just build it! 20 years!! How come? It's a recognisable Death Star shape already at the end of ROTS, so even allowing for that big green laser being wired in, being cleared by the Health and Safety executive etc etc going by how fast progress was at the end of THAT movie it should have only taken another few years tops. Luke should have been just out of diapers when Alderaan or wherever bit the big one. What happened?
EMPEROR: "How does the work progress on our new death weapon, my apprentice?"
VADER: "The foreman tells me the yard doesn't have the materials my master. Not until next month at least. Also, his men won't come out on a Sunday and that's all there is to it."
EMPEROR: "Bloody unions!"
VADER: "Yes, my master"
Labour issues must have been sorted out tho - the 2nd D-Star was bigger and that was fired up in just a couple of years. Maybe Vader force-choked some Teamsters or something. Maybe they started construction on the 2nd one at the same time. Maybe Lucas is an idiot. Maybe Lucas think's WE'RE idiots. By Jove! THAT'S IT!
Still love Star Wars tho. Despite all his best efforts! Hurrah!
#38
Posted 31 May 2005 - 12:35 AM
#39
Posted 31 May 2005 - 12:39 AM
Is it really that confusing why the fan craze isnt as high as it was at TPM? Is it really so surprising that no one is really that interested in the star wars prequils? I (a devoute star wars fan, hailing the original trilogy at the best movies ever made) am not upset by the lack of enthusiasm, in fact I praise it. You see Anon (if that is your name) people have begun to realize that after weighting eagerly for 15 years and camping out six months ahead of time to see TPM only to be rudely disgusted by Lucas's total defamation of everything that was so dear and wondeful about the star wars universe, they simply have lost faith in him as a storyteller and now see him only as the head of a giant merchandising machine that is more intent on producing cool action figures and CGI extravaganzas than beautifull stories and heart warming characters. You see, the fact that fan's have stopped loving star wars so much is not due to their lack of star wars fanaticism, it is exactly because of it! They respect and admire the TRUE Star Wars, the original series, so much that they will go out of their way to try and ignore and disregard the existance of a prequel trilogy that tarneshes and reflects badly on the sacredness of the original canon.
Lets face it, the CGI (which never looks life-like or majical and always reminds the viewer of a video game) overloading, horribly dull acting and god-awfull dialogg ("Ive been dying a little bit each day since you returned," - eeew) as well as an air of self-concious pomposity (this is starwars, we are great and we know it) create horrible movies. Some people are willing to call them good simply because they are star wars fans and the prequels are also titled "star wars." However, i am assuming you are smart (as many star wars fans are) you know they are nothing like the original-they never captivate your imagination, fill you with a sence of wonder, and make you jump up and yell and become emotionally involved with the characters. They dont carry you through emotionally, they simply bombard you with hords of nicely rendered CGI, unload tons of exposition ( a fatal mistake that lukas makes: he tells us instead of shows us i.e. we only find out annikin loves padme because he says it so many god-awfull times. the Han-leia dynamic was movie like because the audience was seduced along with leia by han solo's charm and subtle effectionate and carring "actions." Trust me, the fans agree with me (oh so many fans) the critics agree with me (oh so many) and even many workers at ILM and Lucas arts have expressed their dissatisfaction with the new films (contact me for articles and information). Not even the mediocrity of Episode III can redeem the failures of the prequal as a whole. (Anakin turns to the dark side and screws over everyone in the entire GALAXY because, possibly, "maybe" he and the emperor can "work together" to one day "discover" the "1000 year old secret" behind saving a person's life and thus padme's) What the hell?! He turns because of this? And he just accepts it as fact, he doesn't think maybe the "sith lord" (everything he has been trained to know as decietfull and evil) is lying!? Come on!!!! That is what we waited for for 25+ years. I could have written a better turning (a less abrupt and more emotional) to the dark side. Hell! Francis Ford Copola did it correctly for Don Corlion in The Godfather, and he only needed one movie! He also had enough creative talent left for an awsome sequal! Are you starting to see my logic pal!? Because i love star wars, i love the original series. There will always be an empty seat with my name on it in a prequel trillogy theatre showing. Its just that, me and the rest of the sensible fans will never be poisoned by corporate, pretentious money making over-hyped and hollow rehashes of our sacred Star Wars.
#40
Posted 31 May 2005 - 12:47 AM
so you're mad because Lucas didnt make the movies according to the way you had imagined them in your head for the last 20 years? You dont see anything wrong with this line of thinking? oh and what's all this "we we we we we" shit? Speak for yourself, dude.
I love couch critics such as yourself. Tell me then, since the prequels are such an embarrassment and Lucas has no talent or imagination at all (considering we wouldnt even be here having this discussion if that were the case), how would you have written the prequels? Matter of fact, what kind of engrossing, loveable characters have you worked out in that ticker upstairs of yours? I'm not being a smartass either, I really want to know how you would have approached this thing from the get-go.
#41
Posted 31 May 2005 - 12:53 AM
Hell, she came of as the same pampered, harvard-student, hyper-liberal, that natalie portman really is! Damb, I even think GL realized this and so didn't spend nearly any time placing significance on padme's death in ROTS: he's like, "damb, i don't even like the bitch at this point....fuck it Rick (McCallum), lets just kill her and jump to scene 84"
hell, Anakin could even have used a light saber to cut out her uterus out (with the babies still inside) right before her eyes while she lay bloody and screaming in agonizing pain and the audience would probably feel absolutly NOTHING for her, ZERO pity and ZERO remorse.
#42
Posted 31 May 2005 - 01:21 AM
To be honest with you! Absolutely honest, I would never (if I were GL) have produced prequels. The prequels are bound to be a failure. He sais he was always planning to, but that is no excuse for bad movies. The divide in the fandom over the interpretation of the prequels speaks for itself. I would have taken all that mony and focused on an absolutely different project. Im sure Lucas would be brilliant at Pixar/CGI animated movies like toy story and finding nemo. He could make other great adventure and sci-fi movies. He could do anything he liked. But not star wars. When you enter the realm of star wars, which has become such a cultural phenominan and loved so dearly by so many people, any attempts to come out with a knew movie which is based solely on EXPLITIVES and is different in approach than th OT will alter the way people view the OT. And I am saying that while GL has the right to make the PT, because they will interfere often extremely negatively with the way people view the OT, he is "working against" himself. After all "shadow storm," do we really need to know how darth vader got the mask and became evil, who leia and lukes' mother was and was from, do we really need to see how the chancellor becomes the emperor. Whats the point? how is this entertaining? After all, these were wonderful mysteries which gave the OT such depth. They are best to go unexplained. Think of it, each fan and each audience mamber can extrapolate his own imagination of what the republic was like and what anakin was like--but by simply showing us LUCAS's vision, he has interfered with one of the majical aspects of the OT and degraded its imaginative and mysterious qualities. More over, Robert McNemera once stated that wars ought to be faught under the "laws of proportionality." The same is true for movies. The simple fact that more that 80 MILLION dollars was spent on making each movie in the PT, and yet they could not generate better movies, more captivating and imaginative ones, is simply a DEPRESSING waste. The origninal star wars cost a mere 11 million (in an inflated economy)! and we love it (we both do..now there's some common ground). Keep in mind that most of that money comes from loyal fans and people who have devoted themselves the the love of the OT. Also...one last thing...please don't call me a "couch critic," I am honestly just a 15 year old kid who has grown up playing star wars in the back yard and now find the new "medichlorian enhanced" star wars prequel trillogy to be a letdown. I do not dream of the PT. And...Yes...I have read many creative books and have known many creative people in my life who (if they had the capital resources) could create a much better star wars. That is why, because Star Wars has reached such an iconographic level, it should rest in peace and never intefere rudely with our imaginations.
#43
Posted 31 May 2005 - 01:42 AM
EXACTLY!
Prequels are a bad idea. The Star Trek prequel "ENTERPRISE" failed because of that very reason! see...nobody wants to see this so called federation of planets formed in some corny little conference room set at paramount studios because 20 years have gone by to allow fans to concretize their imaginings of the beginings of star trek! The same is generally true for all prequels even for the likes of "youn hercules!" thats exactly it! any attempt of GL to exert his creative vision over the preconcluded imaginings of the audience is bound to leave limitless amounts of fans to be dissapointed! that is the philosophy. Now, had he come up with a totally different trillogy or he had called the PT: "Star Wars: Republic age" or something with no refrence or relation to the OT, this problem would not be in effect and fans (including myself) would view the PT more favorably. But....even with this philosophy....the prequels still sucked in their own right. No one would really pay attention if there had been no OT. that speaks for itself.
#44
Posted 31 May 2005 - 01:58 AM
Still it was a nice argument save one bit: "I love couch critics such as yourself. Tell me then, since the prequels are such an embarrassment and Lucas has no talent or imagination at all (considering we wouldnt even be here having this discussion if that were the case), how would you have written the prequels" from Storm Shadow.
Its a cheap tactic, and an unecessary one. It shifts the footing of the argument and all it does is shake the point without rebutting it.
Besides, Storm Shadow... if you weren't being a smartass with that point - how would you have done it?
#45
Posted 31 May 2005 - 02:14 AM
LESS IS MORE. SUBTLTY SUBTLTY SUBTLTY. I believe lucas has forgotten this. He has simply been too tempted to go over the top and lay "everything" in his mind out with CGI. This is one of the reasons why PT is dissapointing. He effectively lays the whole galaxy (the framework of it) out for you on a pretentious and grandios CGI scale. There it is..."this is...MY VISON IN ALL ITS GLORY..YAHA HAHAHA" -GL. But OT was great because the universe truely seemed limitless, mysterious, and even majical--this is because the audience had more of an active imaginative roll in the films. It was up to the audience to imagin the universe, the galactic senate and the hunting down of the jedi by vader. Another problem is the over-stretching of "suspension of disbelief." The OT was truely unique in that it was sci-fi and fantasy, not one or the other. The audience truely believed that the universe could have actually existed, that is why the escapist effect was so pure and strong. Just view the OT and PT side by side. PT stretches the imagination into total fantasy. Just look at Yoda's sword fighting and the Clone factory on that ocean world. In the OT, things were filmed in a more gritty and intimate fasion. Aliens wherent randomly created just to be cool looking, but had some purpose be it a tone or an emotion to set in a scene. Look at the snow battle on Hoth and how simple yet awe-inspiring and believable it was. Even scenes with the force in the OT are properly restrained. Stones are slowly lifted and people are chocked, yet still they exist in a realm all the more believable than the PT, which is more like the lord of the rings. This creats a detrimental "disconect" between the PT and its viewer. This is why the PT will never be as captivating as OT.
This post has been edited by Darth Sane: 31 May 2005 - 02:39 AM