Not at all, I rather enjoyed it. And the reasons the stuff looked better in JP are
a) They cared about atmosphere as much as they did the breathtaking scenery. They made the mighty T-Rex dark and shadowy and kinda hard to see because the scene happened at night in a hurricane. There can be no dark “at night in a hurricane” in the beautiful, digitized Lucas universe.
and b) The JP crew built life-sized, relistic models that moved in a life-like manner and enhanced them with the CGI techniques. Lucas just splattered totally CGI characters onto the film. Someone should tell the guy he isn’t the silver screen’s Jackson Pollok.
But beyond that… yes, I agree with you. Some things, Lucas just had to do with CG (like the army of battle droids). But as far as aliens go… he makes the Gungans CG, he makes Watto CG, he makes Sebulba CG (hell, he makes EVERYBODY in the podrace scene CG)… yet, when it comes to the Neimodians, he chooses animatronics? And COMPLETELY makes everyone miss the point about the battle droids, which were originally designed to resemble their Neimodian masters? (The Neimodians were supposed to be CG, and were to look dog-faced, like the droids, but Lucas changed his mind). Can we please get some consistency?
Oh, and one of Threepio’s first jobs was programming binary load-lifters (very similar to your vaporators in most respects).
About the lightsaber scenes… I like the different styles. In the originals, it portrayed lightsaber duels as being “honorable” fights, like fencing. In TPM, it showed that there were no rules… probably prompted by Darth Maul’s ruthlessness, and Q-G and O-W followed suit.
And about the Podracing scene… am I the only one who felt that it was an attempt to combine the speeder bike scene in ROTJ with the cantina scene in ANH?
Best: Star Wars. Fun, un-self-conscious, self-contained, and the characters have well-defined dramatic arcs. The Empire Strikes Back does has many things going for it, including vastly superior photography. Ultimately, though, TESB is the middle “To be continued…” chapter, and therefore not dramatically satisfying. (It also gets docked points for convincing a generation of aspiring screenwriters that storytelling can be reduced to following the Cliff’s Notes version of Joseph Campbell.)
Worst: I’ll go out on a limb and say Return of the Jedi. Sure, there are many, many things wrong with Episode 1, but at least it tried to initiate a new storyline. ROTJ just re-hashed the plot of the first two movies and called it a conclusion. For example: since their last Death Star was a horrible disaster with a fatal flaw, what does the Empire decide to do? Build a new, bigger Death Star that also has a fatal flaw. No wonder the entire Empire can be brought down by a handful of rag-tag rebels with shag haircuts.
In addition to Yet Another Death Star, we have Yet Another Bar Full of Wacky Aliens, Yet Another Rebel Mission Briefing Scene, Yet Another Death Star Run, Yet Another Light Saber Battle, etc. The only significant action scene that wasn’t a rehash from earlier movies was the speeder chase scene (which was admittedly very cool at the time.)
Other minuses in ROTJ:
-Ewoks, the demon seed that later would spawn Jar Jar.
-The feared, tragic Darth Vader turns out to be some pudgy, pasty bald guy from the accounting department.
-Too many cutsey references to old movies (especially the Ewoks-defeat-the-Empire scene, cribbed from the 1938 Robin Hood.)
-The democratic you-can-do-it-if-you-try Force of Star Wars was transformed into the only-those-of-the-proper-breeding-can-do-it Force that people despised in Episode 1.
-Key TESB elements are glossed over. Yoda’s prophecy about Luke not being ready to become a Jedi is conveniently forgotten, as is the fact that Luke has an artificial hand. The events of TESB were supposed to make Luke a deeper character, but in ROTJ he’s the same old Luke he was at the beginning of TESB.
Most of Need of a Remake: Hard to say. ROTJ had a crummy plot, but great characters and OK dialogue. Episode 1 had a decent outline for a plot, but the characters were uninteresting and the dialogue was totally flat.
SPOOFE: The podracing scene does have similarities to the speeder chase, but both of them were ultimately inspired by the chariot race in Ben Hur.
The podrace in particular is a virtual shot-for-shot recreation of the chariot race in William Wyler’s 1959 Ben Hur. The similarities are so close (check out the way score is kept in both movies) that it crosses the line from clever homage to uninspired copying, IMHO.
Star Wars (yes, that’s the movie’s name) was the only one capable of standing alone, so I’ll argue that it was the best. As good as Empire was, it was really only building on Star Wars, and building to Jedi.
Most in need of a re-make, I’d say Return of the Jedi. The difference between Jedi and Menace, you see, is that the former actually could be fixed by a re-make. You’d gain a lot just by replacing Ewoks with Wookies, and hardly anything else would need to be changed to accomodate that. To fix Episode I, though, you’d need, at the least, to:
[ul][li]Totally re-vamp the Gungans (Especially Jar-jar)[/li][li]Come up with a new origin for Threepio[/li][li]Totally eliminate all reference to midichlorians[/li][li]Give Yoda back at least three of the brain cells he had in Empire[/li][li]Spare a few neurons for the other Jedis, while you’re at it[/li][li]Cut all of the "Yippee!"s and "What does this button do?"s of Annakin’s[/li]Put in a villain (I’m sorry, a tattoed freak that doesn’t do anything but growl is not a villain)[/ul]It’s not that it doesn’t need the re-make, it’s just that it wouldn’t do any good.