For my fellow spoiler hounds…
Obviously can’t verify any of it. It’s the second time I’ve heard that this movie will be on par in terms of quality as the original trilogy.
That was a good read.
The plot sounds good.
You have disappointed me for the last time.
disturbing breathing sounds
Are these numbers adjusted for inflation?
ETA: I, too, find Episodes I-III “dreadful,” Rotten Tomatoes notwithstanding, and anyway box office take has never directly correlated with shitty or not-shitty.
Of course it can. Ep III had a stupid plot, terrible acting, shitty effects, and horrible dialogue.
It was better than the first two, sure. But it wasn’t anywhere above dreadful.
Exactly.
I have never watched any of the prequels more than once, because they are so dreadful.
On the other hand, I have watched the original trilogy many, many times (ESB the most).
The prequels are just awful, awful films.
The dude can not be confirmed, but today he posted pictures of his LucasArts stuff he got when he worked there, including some pretty convincing items. And no one could, as of yet, find those items on any other web site. Anyway, not confirmed but interesting. And part of the fun, at least to me.
For Episode III, I kept a computer file of what people speculated on the internet. If folks are interested, I’ll post the contents of it in a spoiler post(to save space, not to protect spoilers from a nearly decade old movie). It was fun to track and I am doing the same for Episode VII.
Thanks, Bruce. I clicked on the spoilers and read… and am glad I did. This sounds pretty cool. The concept-art link was worthwhile, too.
sigh My father would be proud of both of you.
Thank you for taking that one for the team. I have a complex relationship with my own Star Wars nerdiness in which I try very hard to deny it, then I read something like this thread and the voices in my head try and force me to engage. “But actually in form II of lightsaber combat…”
Ian Macdiarmid was fantastic as Palpatine, so the acting wasn’t a total loss. As far as the effects go, I would point out the space battle in the very beginning was the best in the saga so far.
Your welcome.
Some movies that are widely loved and made a buttload of money are still dreadful.
That said, I think all of the prequels benefited from the reflected light of the Original Trilogy and wishful thinking. That is, the 57% that Ep. I has on RT would be much worse had it been a standalone movie unconnected to the Original Trilogy.
Then, Eps. II and III benefited because they were each better than the previous movie, while still benefiting from wishful thinking and the desire to capture the original magic.
Ep. III has the most action, and it has some pretty cool moments with Palpatine/the Emperor, who is played by a really great actor. It’s still pretty terrible, however. The other two movies are almost totally worthless.
I’d put Ewan MacGregor in that category too.
These numbers do not adjust for inflation, which rather dramatically changes the numbers. A dollar in 2003 is not at all like a dollar in 1977. In fact, adjusting for inflation, “Star Wars” remains the highest-grossing film of your lifetime, unless you’re very old; it is exceeded only by “Gone With The Wind.” In 2014 dollars it pulled in over $1.4 billion. None of its sequels are even close.
That figure is, to be honest, a pretty accurate summary of its popularity; it was a sensation on a level no subsequent Star Wars film could hope to match.
[QUOTE=Aeschines]
That said, I think all of the prequels benefited from the reflected light of the Original Trilogy and wishful thinking. That is, the 57% that Ep. I has on RT would be much worse had it been a standalone movie unconnected to the Original Trilogy.
[/QUOTE]
Indeed, right after watching “The Phantom Menace” I remember really, really trying to convince myself it was okay. It was kind of difficult to accept a Star Wars film would be bad, and that’s coming from a guy who has always thought “Return of the Jedi” was just okay.
But it simply does not hold up, at all; there is almost nothing about it as a work of cinema that is good. It is bad more or less in every conceivable respect a movie CAN be bad. The plot and story are absurdly illogical, the characters are either flat or insanely inconsistent, the acting is bad, the dialogue is bad. The cinematography is uninspired and dull; there is no sense at all of angle, mise-en-scene, of almost any sense of cinematic art at all. The movie somehow looks cheap, which I know should be impossible and yet it is so. It’s terrible.
Indeed, the 57% rating on RT (and 57% is not good, by the way) is held up by a LOT of lukewarm reviews that are charitably counted as “Fresh.” Go ahead and read them; almost all the “Fresh” reviews amount to “well, this wasn’t a great movie, but, it had cool visuals and we finally got another Star Wars movie.”
I’ve noticed Rotten Tomato reviews are incredibly cherry picked. “This film sucked ass. Nothing redeeming about it, except that one tit scene.” 100% fresh!
And the movie is actually offensive. The racial stereotypes of trade federation dudes (inscrutable trecherous Asians) and Watto (greedy Jew)–oh and Jar Jar Binks (comic relief Negro with “funny” English).
It is an absolute disgrace of a movie.
To be fair, a lot of bad movies have been redeemed by a good tit scene, at least for this viewer. Natalie Portman could easily have pushed TPM to the top of the franchise.
So it falls close to the midpoint between the Schwarzenegger vehicles Kindergarten Cop and Red Heat (51 and 62 respectively on RT). I don’t know that I’d call it terrible exactly. It’s not exactly a rating that a good movie gets either.
Must say it’s refreshing to see a discussion of the relative merits of the films w/o someone coming along to claim that any of the prequels were better than any of the originals–though I’m sure I’ve summoned them now, and someone will be along to put II and II over VI…
I wasn’t aware anyone above the age of 14 had ever advanced such an argument.
[QUOTE=Aeschines]
And the movie is actually offensive. The racial stereotypes of trade federation dudes (inscrutable trecherous Asians) and Watto (greedy Jew)–oh and Jar Jar Binks (comic relief Negro with “funny” English).
[/QUOTE]
I deliberately left that part out, though of course it’s true. The movie’s weird offensiveness is sort of a separate issue, though - a movie can be made with skill and artistry and be offensive. “Gone With The Wind” is racist but was a magnificent production.
“The Phantom Menace,” if you took out Jar Jar entirely without changing the story somehow, and changed Watto and the Trade Federation guys so they were not grotesquely racist, would be less offensive, but it would not be a better movie. It would still be an incoherent mess featuring characters you don’t care about, and would, in the context of the prequel trilogy, be wholly redundant. (It is said Topher Grace’s radical edit of the trilogy simply leaves out almost the entire movie, since it is entirely unnecessary in telling the overall story.)
While I don’t have the time to hunt them down right now, there’ve been threads on this very board advancing such an argument. Some people REALLY fucking hate Ewoks.