Kyee7K Posted June 5, 2002 Share Posted June 5, 2002 two decades after ANH had been released, i feel that the reason the original trilogy succeeded was because at the time star wars was one of only two serious movies that used special effects to complement a decent storyline. this was enhanced by the fact that for most of us, this was perhaps one of the first movies that we recollect from our youth, and as such place a high value to it. this decent storyline was enhanced by the "spiritualist" lawrence kasden and creator brian daily. using these two as sound-boards, lucas created the elements needed to make the story, and thus the movie, successful. with the deaths of these two, in addition to lucas' two decade-long hiatus, the elements, both kasden and daily, that focused the storyline has been lost. instead of the brilliant movies that should have come, as well as the brilliant fight scenes that should have been included (i.e., the matrix, hidden tiger, etc.), what is viewed is more of a pedestrian movie hyped up to the level of ben-hur, without the level of skill of directing or in writing. during the infomercial on 60 minutes during the month leading to the release of episode one, what we all saw was a delusional/half-crazed person who conceived the notion that he somehow created sci-fi and was a god. after the 60 minutes special and episode 1 release, i backtracked as to why this movie had grown stale. i've come up with several. one is that lucas alone is not a good storyteller. the next reason is that he's a lukewarm director (he's barely directed for over two decades...it's as if while the world has changed, he hasn't). compared to his friend, spielberg, he's a complete amateur. maybe we also expect so much from the star wars genre now that we're grown up. but i expect him also to improve his skill. when all these factors come together, there is only one outcome: episode three will not be as great as we expect. the second and last trilogy will be placed at the back of the attic and forgotten. my honest opinion. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Raith Posted June 5, 2002 Share Posted June 5, 2002 Im so glad you can speak for the vast majority Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vestril Posted June 5, 2002 Share Posted June 5, 2002 Originally posted by Raith Im so glad you can speak for the vast majority No kidding. No one told me that the vast majority of the people considered the movie a failure... Most of the people I know enjoyed it Thank you for your honest opinions. Maybe when you go to see Episode III you'll walk in the theater and think to yourself 'I'm going to enjoy this movie, it will be cool. That's what Star Wars is, it's cool, neato--keen. Maybe if you walk in thinking that way rather than preparing yourself for a critical assault, you will actually have fun--novel idea, I know. I don't consider your insight's particularly remarkable, frankly aside from your reference to Crouching Tiger this entire attack looks like it was recycled from TPM... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
txa1265 Posted June 5, 2002 Share Posted June 5, 2002 It is interesting that so many people have been so quick to jump on the 'EpII is a disappointment' bandwagon. I really enjoyed it, putting it ahead of everything but Empire Strikes Back on my 'list'. It was one of my favorite movies *ever* (and, yes, I am old enough to have seen the originals in the theater ... 11 when Star Wars came out). My real gauge came from my wife, though. She is not a huge Star Wars fan, and really has no use for a lot of TPM. But she LOVED AOTC, said she'd see it again in a second (that, too, is uncharacteristic). Mike Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darth_Lando Posted June 5, 2002 Share Posted June 5, 2002 Ditto to what txa1265 said. ESB is still my fave, AOTC is my second fave. My wife is not a SW fan but loves AOTC (she likes TPM better though lol). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fallacy Posted June 5, 2002 Share Posted June 5, 2002 Ep 1 = teh fail Ep 2 = big hit You got your movies crossed? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
UberJedi727 Posted June 5, 2002 Share Posted June 5, 2002 I agree.. episode 2 was pretty lame. I'm not saying I didn't enjoy it. But it seemed really piss-poor if you think of it on the lines of your other favorite movies. Again, I pretty weak storyline that brings us the backstory to the original trilogy. The universe gets smaller by each installment of his trilogy, and is not the far reaching infinite place it once was in the earlier films. If he wanted to make a serious attempt at this why didn't he create another backstory for the prequel. At least it would of given the trilogy some of the depth that the original one had. Unfortunately, the more you flesh out a back story, the weaker the story becomes as a whole. Especially when you take cheap shots at grabbing familiar people and places from the earlier films, even when it really doesn't do the story any justice to do so. Ok Boba Fetts dad just happens to be cloned into ALL of the Storm Troopers.. wow.. what a coinky-dink. WOW.. anakin made C-3PO.. I could go on and on but I wont. Finally.. what the hell is up with that really gay laugh that obi has in the beginning of episode 2.. when him and anakin were talking about some kind of mess they had gotten into. Makes me sick. So piss on you lucas. For those of you who liked the movie.. well.. you should have walked in backwards.. would of save you some time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
whitedragon Posted June 5, 2002 Share Posted June 5, 2002 i have to say that ep 2 has now become my faverot SW movie. the fight sceans were awsome Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Trahern Valley Posted June 5, 2002 Share Posted June 5, 2002 It's Star Wars, and therefore incapable of failing. On the other hand, there are things that are wrong with it. Attack of the clones...from Mars! (Every time I read the title, I get the urge to add those last two words.) The problem is that enough little things turn into one big annoying thing...thank smeg there are good things too. I don't think Yoda's duelling technique is one of them, but there you go. The original trilogy made me think about the whole good/evil thing, among others. The new trilogy, I can't think and enjoy at the same time, unfortunately. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vestril Posted June 5, 2002 Share Posted June 5, 2002 Attack of the clones...from Mars! (Every time I read the title, I get the urge to add those last two words.) Star Wars A New Hope Empire Strikes Back Return of the Jedi The Phantom Menace Attack of the Clones Take a long look at those other titles, and then tell me how 'Attack of the Clones' doesn't fit in. It's a horrible title, it's just that the other titles are really campy too...you're just used to them. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Divine Spirit Posted June 5, 2002 Share Posted June 5, 2002 Originally posted by Fallacy Ep 1 = teh fail Ep 2 = big hit You got your movies crossed? you thought Ep2 was a big hit??? isa yousa crazy? Divine Spirit Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Russk Rijann Posted June 6, 2002 Share Posted June 6, 2002 Man I thought I was the only one who thought Obi-Wans laugh was gay! Everyone ive talked to didn't notice it? It really made me cringe! I think he was trying to do a sort of nostalgic laugh, but it just came out as reeeally bad overacting. I think one of the reasons Eps I failed to make such a big impact is that the character interaction was so terrible as opposed to eps II.The cast in EpsII interacting seemed more belivable where as EpsI's seemded to fake, in EpsI they were like: "Yes master that is true" "quite young padawan" "look a droid" "Yes it is hmmm" "lets go to corucant now" "Yoda I am" "Yousa bad bombad" "Yes" "Oh no a sith!" "Arghhhhh" (not quite like that heh ) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darth_Lando Posted June 6, 2002 Share Posted June 6, 2002 You know what, I think all of you guys are bored with life and don't know what real problems are. It is just a friggin movie. If you lower your expectations from being a Star Wars fanatic to merely a SW fan you may find yourself actually enjoying the movies. Sheeesh. I am not saying there isn't bad acting or bad scripting in some parts, I notice those. But I don't friggin write off an entire movie because "obiwan had a gay laugh in scene three of Episode 2". Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vestril Posted June 6, 2002 Share Posted June 6, 2002 Man I thought I was the only one who thought Obi-Wans laugh was gay! Everyone ive talked to didn't notice it? It really made me cringe! I think he was trying to do a sort of nostalgic laugh, but it just came out as reeeally bad overacting. I thought it was a laugh at the fact that Anakin went down to rescue him, like the laugh was suggesting that he had staged the whole thing as a test... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Russk Rijann Posted June 6, 2002 Share Posted June 6, 2002 could be.....more likely that he was overacting though. Darth_Lando, I wasn't saying I didn't like the other two movies, I really enjoyed EpsI but felt it lacked somthing. And AoTC really felt like a Star Wars movie as opposed to EpsI, it had all the one liner type jokes that the first trilogy had, and as I said before the characters seemed to co exist much more convicingly.......Plus Yoda used a lightsaber Could of done without those Super battle droids though...there more lost in space than star wars. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chastan Posted June 6, 2002 Share Posted June 6, 2002 Hey, Ep2 may not be the greatest movie I've ever seen, but I really liked it -- "your honest opinion" is not the vast majority of people. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Russk Rijann Posted June 6, 2002 Share Posted June 6, 2002 really its just the view of the mindless outomaton's who follow the critics like a sheep to a shepard. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Kensai Posted June 6, 2002 Share Posted June 6, 2002 All right, my turn at some pompous punditry. I agree wholeheartedly with Kyee and UberJedi. Deciphering what is missing from the prequel trilogy can be quite elusive. The prequel trilogy's constant allusions to and forshadowing of the latter trilogy does cheapen the story as a whole. A good contrast would be The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. Sure, The Hobbit is a prequel, but the story stands on its own. Each book expands the world of Middle Earth in its own way. What if the characters of the Hobbit were constantly alluding to Frodo and the lengend of Sauron? What if all of the Rings characters were introduced in The Hobbit? Doing such a thing would remove focus from the story and characters at hand and turn the whole thing into a narrative chore. Episodes 1 and 2 have little significance outside of the latter trilogy. Insetead of simply fleshing out the characters of Anakin and Obi-Wan in the context of an original saga, Lucas decided to create one big backstory that explains the origins of people and places that don't really need explaining (at this rate, episode 3 is going to feature baby Han Solo and dedicate a scene to explaining why wookies don't wear pants:p). The potential for a great original story was certainly there. The Sith manipulate powerful leaders into fighting one another in order to facilitate Darth Sidious's rise to power. The Jedi make a heroic but futile attempt to keep the republic together. A young padawan tries to make things right, but his passion and frustration lead him to darkness. Man, that could be so COOL. Politically, the story is not without precedent (Julius Cesars' rise to power and corruption comes to mind, as does the American civil war and the subsequent rise of the federal government as we know it today). The reason the latter trilogy's political dimmension worked so well was because it was portrayed aesthetically, not with drawn-out explanations. Once we saw Vader and the stormtroopers in action with all of the oppression and conformity and such, we KNEW right away that the Empire was bad news, and could infer why. We knew the emperial leaders were corrupt because the prestigious Admiral Tarkin was a weasely, backstabbing a-hole. Leia's character represented the boldness and defiance of the Rebellion. I am sure you see where I am going with this. If the Trade Federation and Old Republic of the prequel trilogy were depicted in a similar way, with exciting characters instead of drab political dialogue, we could have had a great epic conflict for the heros and villans to play a part in. Just my unsolicited opinion. Comments? Critisisms? Abrasive, poorly spelled tirades? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kyee7K Posted June 6, 2002 Author Share Posted June 6, 2002 i'm back. i didn't think that this would be a divisive issue. in any case my main points of my rant was that george lucas is really a average-amateur level movie director. in addition, because daley (sp) and kasden aren't available (they're dead), george doesn't have the inputs of both the creator and spiritualist that would have made the movie better. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Kensai Posted June 6, 2002 Share Posted June 6, 2002 EVERYTHING is a divisive issue on a net forum. (even Jar-Jar) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fallacy Posted June 6, 2002 Share Posted June 6, 2002 The critics liked episode 2. The newspapers liked episode 2. MTV liked episode 2. To me that = big hit. And also, earlier today your daughter came to my house and she kicked my dog and now it needs surgery. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chastan Posted June 6, 2002 Share Posted June 6, 2002 Originally posted by Fallacy And also, earlier today your daughter came to my house and she kicked my dog and now it needs surgery. You bastard!! Why you kick my dog? Back on topic: Kyee, my main point is that the "vast majority of people" didn't consider Episode 2 a "failure". Otherwise you have your right to your opinion. ~Later Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lord_FinnSon Posted June 6, 2002 Share Posted June 6, 2002 What makes AOTC a great movie in my eyes is that it stays so true to the characters. Obi-Wan's gay laugh? That is actually one of the best scenes that shows how well Ewan has got into imitating Alec Guinness. That and the scene in club, where he orders drink. He had best witty lines in whole movie and they were delivered in right spot. Anakin. Those scenes of pure hate and sadness are adding real depth into his character. Vader had few quiet moments in ESB and RotJ when he was pondering something aboard his Star Destroyer(as a reference look at the scene in AOTC where Anakin is meditating after nightmare). Yoda, Yoda, Yoda. This movie makes Yoda even more interesting character and explains why he really is the master. Pulling cane back to his grasp is a classic! Palpatine. He had his subtle scenes, but you should have been in that midnight premiere where I attended to. People were laughing when he stated that he loves democracy. Some people have been criticizing scenes where C-3PO loses his head and is replaced by battle droid head and vice versa. Actually, people were laughing out aloud in midnight premiere, when C-3PO(now his head has been put into battle droid corpse) is shooting at the Jedi and shouts out something like: "Die, you Jedi dogs! Oh no! What am I saying?!" Or battle droid commenting that its C-3PO legs aren't moving properly. RD- D2 also had those rockets, which I heard some people were cheering when they saw him using them. There's so much else, what makes me wanna see it again and again. Visually, some scenes are realized so beautifully like Anakin and Padme on the meadow picnic(waterfalls on the background), Anakin driving through Tatooine desert while sun goes down, moonlight above Tusken camp(homage to one specific scene in John Ford's The Searchers), clonetroopers shooting at droids through thick smoke, Anakin and Dooku duel when only lightsabers illuminate their faces briefly and finally, clonetrooper armies boarding Star Destroyers(pre?) while Palpatine and other senators watch them from the balcony. BTW, all clonetroopers were CGI models which used motion capture and there were not one actual armour created for the movie, which alone is quite remarkable. At least I didn't know this while watching AOTC first and second time, so I though there was a real actor inside(at least in close ups, while bigger groups of them would be numerous copies of one guy) although Temuera Morrison obviously delivered lines for each one of them. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Homosexual Ewok Posted June 6, 2002 Share Posted June 6, 2002 Go back and watch the original trilogy sometime. "Laugh it up fuzz-ball" "Laser-brains" "Get this walking carpet out of my way" The dialogue was just as corny as it is now; the difference was you and I were roughly 2 decades younger. The special effects? Look at the OT saber fights, compared to the ones in the past two films. If Lucas would of put a fight in the past two movies as lame as the one from ANH between Ben and Vader people would have gone ballistic. What about the ESB Wampa? Wait, I mean the Wampa you never even saw until the special editions. Bottom line is everything we hoped to see in the OT (Fett fighting, Jedi fighting, Sith Lords, Coruscant) Lucas has given us, but instead of enjoying it we have, as "fans" sat here and picked apart every tiny little detail we thought should have been done differently and bashed both the films and the filmmaker. I admit I was one of these people, who as a die-hard fan was more vocal in what I didn't like than what I did. The day AotC opened I like a lot of you, went to see it. I enjoyed it, but found myself spending more time looking for things to dislike rather than just sitting back and watching the movie. I went back and saw it a week later, and quite frankly for two and a half hours I was totally engrossed. As a "stand alone movie" neither of these films are really that great. That's the key though, they are part of a larger picture, and if the purpose of these films was a build-up to the final climactic ending, Lucas has more than hit the bull’s-eye in my opinion. I am just as excited now to see "what happens next" as I was all those years ago when I sat in a dark theater with my parents on the night RotJ opened. I think the reason it "failed", (after talking to friends and people I work with who are not really fans) is this past movie had lots and lots of...words. Ask a person to tell you about any movie they saw, any movie, and 99% of the time their first comment will be about how good/bad/lacking the special effects were. To make this movie a sure fire hit all Lucas had to do was have Jedi running around chopping crap up for two hours. Throw in an occasional fireball throwing Sith Lord and a couple of slow-motion back flip scenes and there you go, number one with a bullet. This movie was designed to give a story to the faces we saw in the OT, and it has done so, quite well. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Russk Rijann Posted June 6, 2002 Share Posted June 6, 2002 I suppose being 15 made watching AotC a much more rewarding experience for me. Yes the jokes where bad some of the time, but to be fair they arent meant to be that funny, really their supposed to be groan jokes, the sort you either groan or laugh. From the minute I sat down in the theatre to the moment the credits finally dissapered and the women with the rubbish bag told me us to leave I thourghly enjoyed the movie. I had to say I didn't find myself crytesisizing anything as it fit into the Star Wars universe very well. Whats more several events from AotC made me enjoy tFM a little more after re-watching it. It was like when I'd seen tESB for the first time. I enjoyed it so much because the characters where fammiliar, you wanted to know what happened to them. I knew roughly what was going to happen in AoTc, Obi-Wan won't die, now will Padme or Anakin, and most obviosuly there will be clones....and they will be attacking, but that still didn't distract from the fun, there where some un-expcted twists (**SPOILER**) like when I found out the clones where actually the good guys (for this movie at least) and the Death Star bit near the end was good. If you guys want to enjoy the fianl movie that comes out then leave the critisizing till the second time youve watched it and just sit back and enjoy the show during the first time! (P.S, are all the clones really computer animated!?!??!?!) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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