Revenge of the Sith Trailer Discussion Discussion - Page 2

Its when Lucas gets a pan and smashes the camera with it making it jiggle, and years later critics salivate over the various jiggly shots calling them revolutionary and...stuff.

Hmmn. Something about Christensen's delivery kept putting me in another mumbly-voiced method actor from the '50s, Montgomery Clift.

He actually wasn't all that bad at all in Shattered Glass, especially considering that he played a similarly passive-aggressive character in a conflicted relationship with an older brother/father figure.

I thought along similar lines when I first watched the trailer. Well, the first few times I watched it. I'm not going to say that the flick is going to be replete with LOTRish cinematography, because you can't gauge a film's visual style solely on three minutes of footage being used to put an ass every eighteen inches.

I did think what I saw looked surprisingly kinetic. Whether or not that's true of the entire movie, tohellifiknow. If that quality is present, whether it causes RotS to clash with the aforementioned simple, old Hollywood aesthetic remains to be seen. Hopefully, I'll be too engaged by the concepts to bitch about the lesser shortcomings of the execution.

Its not like the PT has had slavish devotion to those principles. It would be an incredible feat if the PT had in fact been bred to replicate the visual style of the OT. Given Lucas' floating value of perfection, that was a slim chance from day one, but few of us bothered to think of such intangibles when considering the merits of a prequel trilogy.

Geez, some hardcore, hard to please motherfuckers up in here. I bet you were those kids who opened your gifts on christmas morning and asked, "What else you got?"

So...we're ungrateful? Well, I guess I should be looking forward to Fantastic Four because we all wanted a movie of that, quality be damned.

It's just a badly put together trailer, but like any trailer, can't possibly be the final word on the quality of the movie it's advertising.

If Episode I could only have been as good as the teaser poster..

I too believe Lucas has put a lot of effort into these films, I just think it would have been difficult for him (or any director for that matter) to maintain a consistency of quality over a three film arch.

More than anything I feel as though Lucas is becoming re-acquainted with himself as a filmmaker. The last picture he directed before episode I was the original Star Wars 20 years prior. He has good ideas and a definite vision of what he wants to project, they've just been executed poorly.

The Phantom Menace was, in all honesty, a mis-step. Attack Of The Clones was a big improvement, not without its problems, but still miles better than episode I in terms of execution. If this next installment fulfills any of the potential of AOTC, then we are in for a treat.

I'm a cautious geek, wary by nature. That also means I still started yelling "Star Wars!!! Trailer!!!" at the site of the Lucasfilm logo to my girlfriend whilst she smoked on the porch.

Did I neglect to mention that I watched the trailer the first time with my jaw hanging limp, with a strand of saliva just begining to creep out of the corner of my mouth?

'Cause that happened...

I'm just kind of surprised at what I saw is all.

I dunno. Peter Jackson did it, for the most part, with LORD OF THE RINGS. Robert Zemeckis did it with BACK TO THE FUTURE. Brian Singer was on a solid run with two X-MEN films before he bowed out and so far, Sam Raimi is batting a thousand with the SPIDER-MAN movies. Hell, in a way, I think Lucas has maintained a consistency of quality over the Prequels so far. The problem is, that "quality" has been largely disappointing.

I agree completely. I know his own personal family life took priority but it's a shame he didn't continue on directing features, even if he was burnt out because of the OT. When I first saw EP1, I felt as though I was watching the work of a once-great filmmaker whose creative muscles had decayed into complete atrophy. EP1 felt so awkward and unconfident, it was truly painful to behold. But then something strange happened...

...see, now, in retrospect, I find I actually prefer EP1 to EP2. For all its massive, catastrophic faults, EP1 is pure Lucas. It's obviously the story he wanted to tell, the way he wanted to tell it, completely isolated from fanboy second-guessing and hostile film critics. EP2 merely panders to the fans, weakly trying to give them "what they want." As a result, EP2 feels like it was made more by Lucasfilm's marketing department than George himself. "The geeks love Boba Fett, so let's give 'em two Fetts. You know, father and son...no, no...more than that, lets make thousands of them! And with slight color variations on their armor so that we can sell even more action figures! Oh, but George...less Jar Jar, okay? Thanks."

There's some good stuff in EP2, no doubt. But when I recently re-watched EP1, I was taken aback by how much more interesting it was than EP2. Not better...or even remotely good. But certainly more interesting. More with a life of its own. To me, anyway.

My only concern with EP3 is that the pandering will continue. All of this tub-thumping about its darkness and potential PG-13 rating sounds like more marketing rhetoric. I'm less interested in a film being light or dark in tone than I am in it being simply good.

Exactly. It's not newsworthy at all. And yet, between LFL presentations at conventions, long-lead magazine articles and now 60 Minutes, it seems like that's ALL that's being discussed. "Ooooohh...this is the DARK one." And that scares me because the last time, McCallum, Ward and all the other Lucasfilm blowhards kept bragging about how we should forget about EP1 because EP2 is really the film STAR WARS fans wanted to see. Yeah...not so much.

See, this is why this stuff is all subjective. To me, Raimi is (at best) batting .500 with the Spidey films... though the one he nailed (SPIDER-MAN 2) was a grand-slam home run.

Same here.

I envy you, I guess. For a while, I felt the same way. I was still unimpressed with EP2 when I first saw it but I admit, it felt more like an old school STAR WARS film to me. And I think it probably still does. Then I revisited EP1 and realized that I was strangely more engaged by its clumsy uniqueness than I was by the cheap, easy STAR WARS porn that EP2 is.

I want to be taken on a journey. I want to be led on an adventure. I want to have a guide I can trust. For the most part, the OT overwhelmingly provided me with that experience. So far, with the Prequels, I haven't enjoyed the journey nearly as much nor have I trusted the guide like I used to. I feel like he's lost the map and is just making up the path as we go, getting us lost and going around in circles. For better or for worse, at least EP3 will finally bring us home. (I hope.)

I actually watched TPM a week or two ago for the first time in at least 4-5 years. To an extent, the film already has an air of nostalgia to it that AOTC clearly lacks at this point. But I think that has more to do with time and distance than anything else.

That said, Qui-Gon Jinn was a great Jedi character.

I've had this weird thing where I've turned on TPM and AotC while I've been ironing. I think I've done it 6 or seven times in the last nine months.

As time has worn on my opinion of the existing prequels is that I want to really like them, but I find them to be inadequate, not because they don't conform to my own expectations, but because most of the storytelling falls flat. There certainly are a few truly great SW moments, but they can't carry the whole movie in either case. As we approach RotS, we start to get a better sense of the story Lucas intended to tell with prequels- and this honestly excites me. EP3 could easily fall on its face regardless of concepts that lie at the base of the this movie. As much as happened the last two times. I'm hoping for goodness. I'm not starting a vigil, but I'll probably be there at midnight.

I have to agree with you completely. EP1 is *so* bad, *so* bad...but at least it's a directors 'vision'. It's like his Waterloo, like, it was *his* colossal failure. When it's a bunch of teenagers dictating what would be 'cool to see', well then it's already sucking at it's core. I sometimes wonder what would happen if Lucas kept going in the EP1 direction with EP2/3...it would obviously become a crazy LSD trip where the Jedi Council all became kids, but that's the funny thing about EP1. I hate the movie like crazy, but man it's so weird.

That's exactly how I feel about Ep. I. It's not all that good a movie, but I've always kinda admired the fact that it feels so far removed from the other films in the series. The OT films feature battered, gunmetal-grey spacecraft, monochromatic costumes, and take place largely in dark, claustrophobic settings like the Death Stars or Cloud City's basement. Ep. I is full of shiny, polished vehicles, gaudy, colorful costumes, and many sequences take place in open sunlight, often in pleasant surroundings like Naboo (or, as I like to call it, the Marin County Planet). There's an sense of innocence to the movie that marks it as a kids' picture, which I think Lucas intended. Unfortunately, the overall tone is more childish than naive.

I too have found myself more attracted to TPM than AOTC these days. As far as the new trailer goes, I had managed to keep my enthusiasm down for ROTS until it debut. Now, for better or worse, I'm getting that old SW-excited feeling again. Let's hope it doesn't disappoint as much as the others.

After scrummaging through the 349068302468376.34676 threads on Star Wars, I figured this would be the one to post this certain diddy in.

A couple of laughs. Gets a little old after awhile.

On the real trailer, yeah I think it showed a tad too much. I was kind of expecting that though.

Why does a guy who´s so obsessed with bitching about SW, have to do news-items on the last one? Can´t you just ask for a replacement?