I've been saying for a while that Star Wars in general is overrated.
I still believe it's a very important movie that came along in the right place at the right time for the culture, but the amount of expanded universe content it's created and the amount of money the franchise has generated it wildly disproportionate to the objective quality of the movies.
No, you are out of your gourd. It's one thing to not like it, but saying it is fucking awful compared to the prequels which are infamous for their godawful direction and screenwriting? Absolutely not. I guarentee if you have most older people to rewatch it, it holds up. The only one that doesn't hold up from the original trilogy is Return of the Jedi primarily because of the second half.
I never said I don't like it. In fact, I love it despite those flaws, because it's a solid adventure with solid visual storytelling. Vivid and imaginative.
Like, Snow Crash is a shitty fucking book because Neal Stephenson is a mediocre writer - but his worlds are imaginative and inventive, so it has value.
The direction in Episode IV famously sucks ass. The story might be more cohesive, but the dialogue is stilted and the context is utterly absent. The reason that it was panned so hard on release was likely due to people's nostalgia for IV. Seriously, go back and watch them side-by-side; IV has poor direction and some of the worst dialogue I've ever encountered.
Who the actual fuck says "foul stench?" Carrie Fisher was spot-on about that.
Episodes V and VI are superior, clearly, but there is no denying the weakness of the first film.
What it does do is make you interested in the implied rest of the setting. It's clear that Lucas starts his story in the middle of a complex situation, and it gave them the room to expand it later on.
I feel like a traitor for saying this: the entire franchise is only good because of the ways in which it was expanded. If they hadn't fleshed out this universe more, I'm betting Star Wars would've been forgotten by now.
No, you are out of your gourd. It's one thing to not like it, but saying it is fucking awful compared to the prequels which are infamous for their godawful direction and screenwriting? Absolutely not. I guarentee if you have most older people to rewatch it, it holds up. The only one that doesn't hold up from the original trilogy is Return of the Jedi primarily because of the second half.
I never said I don't like it. In fact, I love it despite those flaws, because it's a solid adventure with solid visual storytelling. Vivid and imaginative.
The direction in Episode IV famously sucks ass. The story might be more cohesive, but the dialogue is stilted and the context is utterly absent. The reason that it was panned so hard on release was likely due to people's nostalgia for IV. Seriously, go back and watch them side-by-side;
I feel like a traitor for saying this: the entire franchise is only good because of the ways in which it was expanded. If they hadn't fleshed out this universe more, I'm betting Star Wars would've been forgotten by now.
I'll give you credit there. Star Wars's direction was done horribly during the George Lucas's first initial cut where he was supposedly laughed out of the theater. He ended up in the hospital from the shooting, but the ones who saved that film were the crew: Paul Hirsch, Marcia Lucas, Ben Burtt, and Richard Chew. Similarly, Lawrence Kasdan is the hero behind Empire Strikes Back. But I believe the first movie still holds up thanks to the crew, the actors, and the simplicity of the story.
And I've also heard people who enjoy expanded universe stuff way more than the original trilogy, just see the Tartakofsky Mini-Series or the KOTOR Games.
I prefer the Anakin trilogy. You actually get to see his internal conflict. The Original trilogy is just cowboys in space, very meh.
Anakin's internal conflict is so hideously underwritten and badly paced. All of Obi-Wan and Anakin's development was told through one-off lines and his relationship with Padme? Dear goodness, is it terrible. The prequel trilogy is all of Lucas's unfiltered incompetence with the way dialogue is written, actors are given motive, the pointless plot, the lazy direction. He nearly undercut everything he built up with the original trilogy. I don't need to shovel out the Plinkett reviews to prove otherwise.
Han shooting first is actually the most compelling reason to watch the original theatrical release. In all honesty, I actually kinda like a lot of the additional "bulking" that the Special Edition did. The original cut feels so empty - and not in a way that makes me think it was intentional.
2001 is a movie that feels empty because it's trying to evoke that feel. But Star Wars wanted to be expansive.
It's hard to fully grok the impact of the movie on a rewatch. You know what's going to happen.
A good deal of the poor writing and odd pacing only became apparent to me when I'd watched the movies again. The first time? I was so wrapped up in the what that I didn't notice the how.
The movie started in the middle of a space battle.
The movie started in the middle of a space battle.
That alone was enough to blow a lot of people's minds. No setup, no origin, no world building, no character introductions: just ships shooting plasma at eachother, stormtroopers blasting their way into a firefight, and a kidnapped princess with hidden motivations along side the second-most-badass villain in the trilogy.
I learned a psychology thing recently about how sentiment is formed and associated with memories. The short version is that people will remember an overall experience as a literal average of the peak experience and the end experience.
Star Wars IV had a few very high peaks, and a deeply satisfying end. The entire rest of the movie could have been garbage garbage Jar Jar Binks musical numbers: the remembered sentiment would be the same based solely on the peaks and the end.
From the time I was in middle school until some time while living in Beacon, every day I drank a specific brand of Pineapple Orange juice. It tasted amazing. The power of orange juice, added sweetness of pineapple, extra acidity from a bit of lemon. Good shit.
It wasn't gourmet food. It wasn't fancy steak. But as something I drank every single day, perhaps it was more important, more significant. It had a great effect on my life. That juice is the original Star Wars trilogy. I could just keep drinking glass after glass and it would be great every time.
So when they changed the recipe so that the lemon was gone, and it consisted mostly of Apple Juice, despite still being called Pineapple/Orange, it was bad news. This was the prequel movies. I could never taste that original flavor again without being reminded of this new awful formulation.
Episode 7 is the real new hope. We know the new flavor will not match either of the two existing ones, but it could still be good. We want something fresh and tasty while still not straying too far from the original greatness. Can it be? Can it be?
You're absolutely right about the "average" experience thing. I remember talking with my dad about the movies, some time around the 1993 VHS release, before the "special edition" dropped and polarized geeks everywhere.
He knew it was bad. People I know who were around in '77 to watch the original release knew it was bad. The dialogue was awful then, the direction was awful then, the story was just barely coherent enough to follow, and were it presented any other way, they probably would've hated it.
But motherfuckin' space battles, yo. Nobody had seen that. Everybody remembered that. They didn't care about stilted dialogue because fuck yeah we blew it up!
What they remembered was a good romp, and a validation of their wild and misspent youth of pulp novels and comic books. My dad was blown away because Star Wars marked a turning point in popular culture, where it started to be acceptable to like nerdy shit in public. Everybody saw the grandeur of those shitty pulp novels.
And despite all of this, everyone I talk to recognizes now (and recognized then) that the movies were bad, and that they consciously chose to remember the best parts.
I kind of like to think that the public became George Lucas' editor; people looked at this half-formed seed of an idea that had some good bits and a whole lot of shit and said, "Y'know, I'm just going to remember this the way I wanted it to be."
Who the fuck is more bad-ass than Vader?Boba Fett.
You never learn what his fucking deal is (in the original). Silent, ultra-professional, immune to emotion, and largely a mystery. Boba Fett is a force of nature. Anakin has a change of heart. Anakin is conflicted. Boba Fett does the fucking job.
I'd take Darth as my enemy any day over Boba Fett.
You never learn what his fucking deal is (in the original). Silent, ultra-professional, immune to emotion, and largely a mystery. Boba Fett is a force of nature. Anakin has a change of heart. Anakin is conflicted. Boba Fett does the fucking job.
I'd take Darth as my enemy any day over Boba Fett.
So how do you account for Boba Fett's unceremonious death in the Sarlac pit? He's not coming back.
You never learn what his fucking deal is (in the original). Silent, ultra-professional, immune to emotion, and largely a mystery. Boba Fett is a force of nature. Anakin has a change of heart. Anakin is conflicted. Boba Fett does the fucking job.
I'd take Darth as my enemy any day over Boba Fett.
So how do you account for Boba Fett's unceremonious death in the Sarlac pit? He's not coming back. Nope. He survives.
You never learn what his fucking deal is (in the original). Silent, ultra-professional, immune to emotion, and largely a mystery. Boba Fett is a force of nature. Anakin has a change of heart. Anakin is conflicted. Boba Fett does the fucking job.
I'd take Darth as my enemy any day over Boba Fett.
I knew you would go with the Fett.
The problem is that Boba Fett is too single-minded. He's not a compelling villain in and of himself. He's not an antagonist. He's an obstacle. A hurdle. A lock on a door that you shoot open.
Vader is working against you all the time. He's plotting and manipulating and maneuvering. No matter what you do, he will stop you. He is inexorable.
That scene in Cloud City where Han shoots him and he just stops the blaster bolt with his hand? That's Vader saying, "No, I am not like the other things in your world."
Vader is an omnipresent oppressive reality. He's Sauron.
The One I Love is a very weird movie. I had no idea what it would be when going in, except I'd been told it was fun and worth watching. It is both. So just check it out on Netflix (and ignore the Netflix description and rating).
Finally caught Furious 7 recently - fun movie, exactly what it says on the tin, and pretty much what you want in a fast and furious movie. The bits with CGI Paul Walker aren't too bad, except one bit near the end where the CGI looks a touch plastic and they do this strange modulation on his voice(to alter a prior line to the appropriate tone), that bit gave me the purple custard fears.
Nozomi recently put up all of the Dirty Pair movies and OAVs on their Youtube channel. I watched Project Eden with some of my internet friends, and we had a blast. The story is basic, but gets the job done. The real star here, however, is the gorgeous animation. Watch it full screen on a TV of a decent size if you can.
Finally caught Furious 7 recently - fun movie, exactly what it says on the tin, and pretty much what you want in a fast and furious movie. The bits with CGI Paul Walker aren't too bad, except one bit near the end where the CGI looks a touch plastic and they do this strange modulation on his voice(to alter a prior line to the appropriate tone), that bit gave me the purple custard fears.
Yeah I watched this yesterday to unwind but it was on 11 from start to finish in the silly way that Fast and the Furious films are and then escalated for the finale.
I have to say the minivan scene was just as memorable as driving through 3 skyscrapers and playing hacker hot potato.
Finally caught Furious 7 recently - fun movie, exactly what it says on the tin, and pretty much what you want in a fast and furious movie. The bits with CGI Paul Walker aren't too bad, except one bit near the end where the CGI looks a touch plastic and they do this strange modulation on his voice(to alter a prior line to the appropriate tone), that bit gave me the purple custard fears.
Yeah I watched this yesterday to unwind but it was on 11 from start to finish in the silly way that Fast and the Furious films are and then escalated for the finale.
I have to say the minivan scene was just as memorable as driving through 3 skyscrapers and playing hacker hot potato.
My review of that movie is that it had a lot of problems, but they can all be ignored because The Rock flexes his own cast off and crashes a stolen ambulance into a drone.
Finally caught Furious 7 recently - fun movie, exactly what it says on the tin, and pretty much what you want in a fast and furious movie. The bits with CGI Paul Walker aren't too bad, except one bit near the end where the CGI looks a touch plastic and they do this strange modulation on his voice(to alter a prior line to the appropriate tone), that bit gave me the purple custard fears.
Yeah I watched this yesterday to unwind but it was on 11 from start to finish in the silly way that Fast and the Furious films are and then escalated for the finale.
I have to say the minivan scene was just as memorable as driving through 3 skyscrapers and playing hacker hot potato.
My review of that movie is that it had a lot of problems, but they can all be ignored because The Rock flexes his own cast off and crashes a stolen ambulance into a drone.
OMG I couldn't stop laughing when he stood up and the camera panned to the cast because I knew what was going to happen.
Mad Max: Fury Road was even better the second time around, even though I watched it on a plane this time, not a massive 3D cinema screen. I wasn't expecting to get so into it on the second viewing, as I knew what was going to happen, but it was just incredible to sit in a deliriously tired state with tears of joy in my eyes.
Comments
I still believe it's a very important movie that came along in the right place at the right time for the culture, but the amount of expanded universe content it's created and the amount of money the franchise has generated it wildly disproportionate to the objective quality of the movies.
Like, Snow Crash is a shitty fucking book because Neal Stephenson is a mediocre writer - but his worlds are imaginative and inventive, so it has value.
The direction in Episode IV famously sucks ass. The story might be more cohesive, but the dialogue is stilted and the context is utterly absent. The reason that it was panned so hard on release was likely due to people's nostalgia for IV. Seriously, go back and watch them side-by-side; IV has poor direction and some of the worst dialogue I've ever encountered.
Who the actual fuck says "foul stench?" Carrie Fisher was spot-on about that.
Episodes V and VI are superior, clearly, but there is no denying the weakness of the first film.
What it does do is make you interested in the implied rest of the setting. It's clear that Lucas starts his story in the middle of a complex situation, and it gave them the room to expand it later on.
I feel like a traitor for saying this: the entire franchise is only good because of the ways in which it was expanded. If they hadn't fleshed out this universe more, I'm betting Star Wars would've been forgotten by now.
And I've also heard people who enjoy expanded universe stuff way more than the original trilogy, just see the Tartakofsky Mini-Series or the KOTOR Games. Anakin's internal conflict is so hideously underwritten and badly paced. All of Obi-Wan and Anakin's development was told through one-off lines and his relationship with Padme? Dear goodness, is it terrible. The prequel trilogy is all of Lucas's unfiltered incompetence with the way dialogue is written, actors are given motive, the pointless plot, the lazy direction. He nearly undercut everything he built up with the original trilogy. I don't need to shovel out the Plinkett reviews to prove otherwise.
2001 is a movie that feels empty because it's trying to evoke that feel. But Star Wars wanted to be expansive.
A good deal of the poor writing and odd pacing only became apparent to me when I'd watched the movies again. The first time? I was so wrapped up in the what that I didn't notice the how.
The movie started in the middle of a space battle.
The movie started in the middle of a space battle.
That alone was enough to blow a lot of people's minds. No setup, no origin, no world building, no character introductions: just ships shooting plasma at eachother, stormtroopers blasting their way into a firefight, and a kidnapped princess with hidden motivations along side the second-most-badass villain in the trilogy.
I learned a psychology thing recently about how sentiment is formed and associated with memories. The short version is that people will remember an overall experience as a literal average of the peak experience and the end experience.
Star Wars IV had a few very high peaks, and a deeply satisfying end. The entire rest of the movie could have been garbage garbage Jar Jar Binks musical numbers: the remembered sentiment would be the same based solely on the peaks and the end.
It wasn't gourmet food. It wasn't fancy steak. But as something I drank every single day, perhaps it was more important, more significant. It had a great effect on my life. That juice is the original Star Wars trilogy. I could just keep drinking glass after glass and it would be great every time.
So when they changed the recipe so that the lemon was gone, and it consisted mostly of Apple Juice, despite still being called Pineapple/Orange, it was bad news. This was the prequel movies. I could never taste that original flavor again without being reminded of this new awful formulation.
Episode 7 is the real new hope. We know the new flavor will not match either of the two existing ones, but it could still be good. We want something fresh and tasty while still not straying too far from the original greatness. Can it be? Can it be?
Maybe.
You're absolutely right about the "average" experience thing. I remember talking with my dad about the movies, some time around the 1993 VHS release, before the "special edition" dropped and polarized geeks everywhere.
He knew it was bad. People I know who were around in '77 to watch the original release knew it was bad. The dialogue was awful then, the direction was awful then, the story was just barely coherent enough to follow, and were it presented any other way, they probably would've hated it.
But motherfuckin' space battles, yo. Nobody had seen that. Everybody remembered that. They didn't care about stilted dialogue because fuck yeah we blew it up!
What they remembered was a good romp, and a validation of their wild and misspent youth of pulp novels and comic books. My dad was blown away because Star Wars marked a turning point in popular culture, where it started to be acceptable to like nerdy shit in public. Everybody saw the grandeur of those shitty pulp novels.
And despite all of this, everyone I talk to recognizes now (and recognized then) that the movies were bad, and that they consciously chose to remember the best parts.
I kind of like to think that the public became George Lucas' editor; people looked at this half-formed seed of an idea that had some good bits and a whole lot of shit and said, "Y'know, I'm just going to remember this the way I wanted it to be."
I'm so jazzed for VII it hurts.
You never learn what his fucking deal is (in the original). Silent, ultra-professional, immune to emotion, and largely a mystery. Boba Fett is a force of nature. Anakin has a change of heart. Anakin is conflicted. Boba Fett does the fucking job.
I'd take Darth as my enemy any day over Boba Fett.
You never learn what his fucking deal is (in the original). Silent, ultra-professional, immune to emotion, and largely a mystery. Boba Fett is a force of nature. Anakin has a change of heart. Anakin is conflicted. Boba Fett does the fucking job.
I'd take Darth as my enemy any day over Boba Fett.
So how do you account for Boba Fett's unceremonious death in the Sarlac pit? He's not coming back.
You never learn what his fucking deal is (in the original). Silent, ultra-professional, immune to emotion, and largely a mystery. Boba Fett is a force of nature. Anakin has a change of heart. Anakin is conflicted. Boba Fett does the fucking job.
I'd take Darth as my enemy any day over Boba Fett.
I knew you would go with the Fett.
The problem is that Boba Fett is too single-minded. He's not a compelling villain in and of himself. He's not an antagonist. He's an obstacle. A hurdle. A lock on a door that you shoot open.
Vader is working against you all the time. He's plotting and manipulating and maneuvering. No matter what you do, he will stop you. He is inexorable.
That scene in Cloud City where Han shoots him and he just stops the blaster bolt with his hand? That's Vader saying, "No, I am not like the other things in your world."
Vader is an omnipresent oppressive reality. He's Sauron.
Boba Fett just shoots stuff.
His backpack's got jets, though.
Fuck with the Jar?
Nozomi recently put up all of the Dirty Pair movies and OAVs on their Youtube channel. I watched Project Eden with some of my internet friends, and we had a blast. The story is basic, but gets the job done. The real star here, however, is the gorgeous animation. Watch it full screen on a TV of a decent size if you can.
Damn, what a fun movie! If you like 80s action movies, this will make you feel like a kid again. I had a freaking blast watching this!
Its theatrical run is very limited, so the easiest way to watch it is through digital download (buy or rent).
iTunes - Amazon - Google Play - VUDU - PlayStation Store - Vimeo
I have to say the minivan scene was just as memorable as driving through 3 skyscrapers and playing hacker hot potato.
Has the right combo of character wits, tropes, level of sci-fi and CGI that made this Marvel film enjoyable. Comparable to Spiderman 1.
Most Marvel films are mostly tripe, although they maintain a high level of CGI across all films, which at least makes them a curiosity.
Blade 1 is still my favourite.