I Waited 28 Years for This? (Star Wars movie)

Parent Cafe
1

<p>The last two Star Wars movies sucked dead fish with a straw. [That’s a
film criticism term.] I had high hopes for this one.</p>

<p>Well, it dutifully linked up all the plot threads, explaining all that
would happen later. And if you like fight scenes amid lava flows, you’d
love this movie. If you rate movies by the size of the ammunition
budget, you’ll like this movie.</p>

<p>But there wasn’t a bit of wit or character. Aside from the line about
“So this is how democracy ends,” Padme spends the whole movie whimpering
and crying, so much that you just want to slap her out of it. For a
plot that has such potential majesty and grandeur, its driving force is
Anakin’s sustained adolescent sulk; this may make sense for those who
are still adolescent. Yoda has a momentary flash of substance when he
confronts Palpatine but then that, too, is gone on the wind before it’s
even there. Poor Ewan McGregor labors manfully as Obi-Wan but doesn’t
have lines to work with and Samuel L. Jackson as Mace Windu could have
been replaced by a wooden cigar store Indian for greater dramatic
effect.</p>

<p>Millions for special effects and they got the script at a 99 cent
store. There was a rumor in the press that Lucas brought in Tom
Stoppard as an uncredited script doctor on this one. If he had, the
patient died. But it’s an easy rumor to refute: the only thing in
common between this script and Stoppard’s work is that both contain
vowels. I once saw an interview where Lucas said he doesn’t enjoy
script writing. I believe it; this one is as if it were squeezed into
being through a non-existent birth canal.</p>

2

<p>Yes, I agree that the script leaves something to be desired. The action, however, is superb and I think that’s what people have been waiting for.</p>

<p>I really liked the movie.</p>

<p>:)</p>

3

<p>But Lucas ALWAYS buys his scripts at the 99 cent store, even for the early films (which I loved). He can’t write (or direct) dialogue to save his life, and never could – American Grafitti was a huge freak occurrence. THX 1138 is much more indicative of his script skill. It’s kind of late to complain about it now.</p>

4

<p>TD, this is one where it pays to have child with the NT personality, as we have discussed before. On the night that her entire senior class went to the late showing of Star Wars she chose to baby sit for a teacher and her husband so that they could go chaperone the seniors. The teacher went with her hair up in two buns like princess Leia. I practically begged my daughter to go. “You’re only a teenager once. Why don’t you go with your friends?”</p>

<p>“Because I have figured out that whether I see it tonight or in three weeks, the plot and the ending will not change.
…also they are getting back so late they have to sleep on the floor in the student center.”</p>

5

<p>I saw the first three and enjoyed them- I saw the 4th with my youngest against our better judgement after we heard reviews.
Didn’t make that mistake for #5 & #6
I did like American Graffiti though</p>

6

<p>Agree with TD. I saw it tonight with H & S. No passion. Only 2-3 good (but simplistic) lines (liberty’s demise, turning into the evil you fear, and absolutes…). Acting was atrocious. Directing was absent. The lack of humor was a big problem. I’ll would even take a little Jar-Jar Binks (sp?) to lighten things a bit! Music wasn’t even memorable until the end when the Star Wars theme started to come in…</p>

<p>The action was average (but I still love the light sabers) – no suspense to speak of – you knew who was going to survive.</p>

<p>I was not irritable during the movie but have gotten that way as I think more about the various areas of weakness. It did cross my mind that being 17 when the first one came out may have colored my reactions… ;-)</p>

7

<p>Well, I liked 4 & 5, and hoped the reviewers were right that this film picked up when Yoda entered the scene. So disappointing, when a good script could have been had by several of the authors of the Star War books. At least my S had the pleasure of seeing film with 800 classmates, and laughing thru the cheesy dialogue.</p>

8

<p>I thought it was cool when the villain said “You are either with me or you are my enemy” - an obvious slight paraphrasing of of GWB. It couldn’t have been more pointed if they had done it in Texas drawl.</p>

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<p>I rolled my eyes through a few of those pointed political comments (particularly Padme’s “This is how Liberty dies - with thunderous applause.” <em>groan</em>), and I admit that I laughed through most of the failed tense scenes. George Lucas really couldn’t write dialogue if his life depended on it, it seems.</p>

<p>I was never a major Star Wars fan, though, so I guess there was no major disappointment. :D</p>

10

<p>MusicMomic (hi, welcome to the board), others whose opinions I respect have commented on the negligible direction. I’m not quite confident on my ability to judge. But TheMom and I have watched episodes 4/5/6 on VHS at home over the last three nights and the contrast is painful. Okay, the last half of 6 gets ponderous and winceable. (I think the order of quality on the series is 5/4/6/3/2/1.) </p>

<p>Coureur, Lucas has denied any political pointedness in the dialogue but I’m not sure whether said denial is plausible.</p>

<p>Undecided, my sadness is in that I <em>am</em> an SF fan and that the original “first” movie had such a sense of wonder, even for its flaws. (Though re-watching it, I’m reminded how at the time I looked more like Harrison Ford, whereas now I’m much more like Johnny Depp in PotC.) And in the name of the Lord God Jehovah and the Continental Congress, Ford and Alec Guiness could act!</p>

<p>lderochi, you may be right about AG being a fluke. I don’t suppose you’ve seen the spoof short film “George Lucas In Love” done by a graduate film student at USC? If not, track it down. It’s hilarious.</p>

11

<p>

George Lucas, as the story goes, originally wrote one script. It was too long, so he divided it in half. Each half was still too long, so he divided each into thirds. All of the scripts were written waaaaaay back in the '60s and '70s, before the first one was released. Now, that’s not to say that the movies have not been slightly tweaked… but the theory that the whole movie is a commentary on President Bush seems a little, well, catawumpus.</p>

<p>

Is that the one with Lucas and his girlfriend/sister riding bikes, being laughed at by the man on the beach blanket?</p>

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<p><a href=“I%20think%20the%20order%20of%20quality%20on%20the%20series%20is%205/4/6/3/2/1.”>quote</a>

[/quote]

Nope. Number 6 is always the lowest. Always. Anything with Ewoks and an ending as cheesy as the Holy Trinity smiling down on Luke . . . Aargh. It’s painful just to think about it. Yes, it’s a tough call between the Ewoks and Jar-Jar, but in the end that idiotic Ewok battle trumps everything.</p>

<p>My order is 5-4-3-2-1-6 Although 3 is tentative, I haven’t seen it yet. </p>

<p>I gotta get the Lucas in Love film.</p>

13

<p>TheDad,
I agree with you. I thought it was awful. The only good point was that after the movie, I realized that I don’t have to worry any more about dying and therefore missing out on book and movie sequels and other similar things. </p>

<p>I’ve now learned that the future may be far less interesting than was the past.</p>

<p>My other thoughts about the movie:</p>

<p>Too darned much violence. I don’t go to movies or watch TV much, so clearly I have missed out on how much violence has become part of those media. I had to close my eyes to the seemingly endless streams of slaughter. Death without reason. Death without emotion. Death of faceless beings whom I didn’t care about.</p>

<p>At least in the first Star Wars movie, when people died, they had some personalities and characterization even if they were only on screen for a minute. This latest movie just had endless slaughter to apparently show off special effects, not to make the audience care at all.</p>

<p>I cared far more about the planet that was blown up in the first movie (was the planet “Tattooeene?”) than I did about all of the people – including younglings – slaughtered in the last one.</p>

<p>As for the younglings’ death, that is the one violent scene that should have been shown. That was, after all, Anakin’s definite turn to the dark side. I assume that the violence was not shown so as to keep the movie accessible to children. Another possible reason was that the actor playing Anakin couldn’t act his way out of a paper bag or into a slaughter of innocents scene.</p>

<p>Stuff that didn’t make sense: Padme allowing herself to die despite giving birth to twins. Her lack of mother instinct made her character empty. It would have been far better if she’d died due to the choke hold Anakin had had on her. That would have made sense.</p>

<p>I sat throughout the film grieving that I’d wasted my money and had wasted my time by anticipating this film for so long. </p>

<p>It is sad to me to see on the kids’ cafe board that so many young people liked this hollow movie. Movies should have more going for them than special effects, pretty faces and nice sets.</p>

14

<p>I, of course, living in a famiily where logic is raised at every turn, and having a medical background to boot, I have a few questions. In a society where the technology exists to make an alien a cyborg and bring a terribly burned human back to a semblance of life, why can’t they put one woman with post-partum depression on Elavil or Zoloft until she can come back to herself - what about life support? Blood transfusion? Do you know how hard it is to will yourself to die? You just keep waking up in this bad movie, darn it?
Also, obviously it is a rite of passage to get a cool artificial arm - so why not put a communicator in it? or a watch? or, better yet, a blaster??? If it looks so great, why doesn’t it have some great attachments.
Finally, what’s with the Jedi powers - Luke and Obi-wan could do anything, these people can’t even tell that someone is about to shoot them in the back?! No one else except Yoda felt the disturbances in the Force???</p>

<p>Nowits is right, part of it is we are old. My 13 year old loved it. I feel sad because nothing can recapture the feeling of watching Episode IV for the very first time - the thrill, the humor, the amazement (even if the effects look a little cheesy now, they were breathtaking then). I’m too young for the Sat serials at the movie, so Star Wars was my measure of sheer fun at the movies. It would have been OK for Episodes I-III to have been dark and sad, the problem is they are dark, but sad as in lame, not sad as in tragic.
Oh well, I’ll keep my trilogy DVDs - “May the Force…” Oh, you know!;)</p>

15

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<p>They did a lot more than “tweak” it. For example in the original Lucas story the Ewoks didn’t exist. The story called for that planet to be peopled with Wookies, but since in Episode IV Chewbacca had shown the Wookies to be capable of technological sophistication, Lucas realized that to turn them back into spear-toting primitives wouldn’t work very well. So he created the much-maligned Ewoks to fill the role.</p>

<p>The Wookie planet later got re-added to the current movie. So if they can create whole new worlds and new creatures that didn’t exist in the original story, I don’t think it’s much of stretch to think that it would be possible to insert a couple of topical references in the dialogue.</p>

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<p>NSM - Yeah, and with Natalie Portman being a Harvard grad to boot… :-)</p>

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<p>I find this thread disturbing. In fact, I feel a disturbance in</p>

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<p>TD - Think of all the fun you’ve had in the 28-year interim. ;)</p>

19

<p>I am having more fun reading metaquoted ROTS spoilers on live journal than I think I would ever have at the movie</p>

<p>Warning spoilers</p>

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<p>And some more</p>

<p>Spoilers!</p>

<p>although how you can say that the first three movies didn’t already kind of give it way is like saying you didn’t know the ending of Titanic.

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