Category: Star Wars

I’m actually hearing surprisingly good things about Revenge of the Sith. And not even just “Well, it sucked less than Phantom Menace” sorts of things, but “Holy crud, Lucas actually produced a movie that makes me glad I didn’t boycott it after the last two grotesqueries” sorts of things. And even, “Best film since Empire — and maybe better than that.”

Yikes.

And, hrm.

Right there with ya, Darth, buddy!

(via Stan)

A major Douglas Adams biographer was invited to a pre-screening of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. His (non-spoiler) review:

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie is bad. Really bad. You just won’t believe how vastly, staggeringly, jaw-droppingly bad it is. I mean, you might think that The Phantom Menace was a hopelessly misguided attempt to reinvent a much-loved franchise by people who, though well-intentioned, completely failed to understand what made the original popular – but that’s just peanuts to the Hitchhiker’s movie. Listen.

And so on…

It’s bad on a big scale because enormous swathes of the story have been dispensed with – most of the Guide entries, whole scenes – or changed beyond all recognition. And it is bad on a small scale because many, many wonderful lines have been cut or in some cases actually rewritten to make them less funny. Whatever your favourite line from Hitchhiker’s, there?s a good chance that it won’t be in the film. Even if it’s really well-known, widely-quoted, much-loved, very funny – it will probably be absent from the movie. Or if it is there, it might have been changed.

Douglas Adams was a dialogue writer. That was his skill – writing great dialogue. And when he had written it, he would rewrite it again and again and again, changing a word here or there because he knew that good comedy writing is like poetry. It has a meter to it and when you get the right words in the right order it just sounds right and nothing else will do. Douglas’ dialogue was perfect. However, the makers of this film, despite all their talk of being faithful to Douglas’ intentions and ideals, have seen fit to piss about with his carefully crafted, wonderfully quotable lines.

To put it bluntly, they have cut most of the jokes out. I’m not being metaphorical here, they really have, in a very literal sense, removed the jokes from the story. There are scenes where all we’re left with is the set-up dialogue, there are jokes where we get the feed-line but not the punchline. It?s astounding. Occasionally, the filmmakers have actually bothered replacing the jokes but they have replaced them with really, really pisspoor, unfunny jokes; they have replaced them with stupid playground humour and pointless slapstick.

[…] The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie is an abomination. Whereas the radio show, TV show, books and computer game are all recognisably variations on a theme, this is something new and almost entirely unrelated. It’s not even a good film if viewed as an original work: the characters are unsympathetic, the cast exhibit no chemistry, the direction is pedestrian, the pace plodding, the special effects overpowering (lots and lots of special effects, none of them funny mind you) and above all the script is amazingly, mindbogglingly awful. Oh, and they have taken most of the jokes out.

This is a terrible, terrible film and it makes me want to weep.

And so on.

Oh, my.

The long, spoilerish review is here. The things-not-in-the-film are here.

(via Solonor)

Watched Star Wars IV with Katherine last week. Since all she knows about SW is (a) somebody brought Phantom Menace to her day care and she thought it was boring, and (b) endless Star Wars – Clone Wars ads on Cartoon Network, I thought it would be fun, some “Daddy/Kitten” time.

A mixed success.

She watched along with me for most of it, but her attention began to wander, paradoxically, as the Millennium Falcon is escaping from the Death Star, and her body followed suit as the Rebel ships headed for their mission toward same.

She seemed to be generally entertained prior to that. She liked the trash compacter scene. She liked the idea of Princess Leia, though she wondered why she didn’t wear a crown. She didn’t quite distinguish between the Death Star and the Imperial Star Destroyers. She liked the robots, though she wanted to know more about the silver Threepio at the very beginning. She thought the Jawas were creepy, thought the Sand People were scary, and was entertained by the Cantina.

My own impressions were more mixed. The DVD, of course, has all the latest-greatest digital tweaking that Lucas has done. My thoughts:

The movie varies between cheesy, exciting, and pretty. The lighting is, in many places, very 70s (shadows are a lot more common these days). The ships fly around improbably close to each other (we see much better space dogfights these days, too). The physical acting (the Darth/Obi-wan light saber fight, the shooting being done by Luke and Han) is often clumsy. There’s an awful plastic nature to so much you can see.

On the other hand, the dialog and acting are actually not too bad. The various talking heads scenes, Alec Guiness, and the Han/Luke/Leia bits are all enjoyable (even if Luke still comes off as a whiny, overemotional brat). The story is a classic. And some of the 70s clumsiness in fx has been masked by the digital updates. Though, while the Jabba scene has been improved from the original inclusion, it still doesn’t quite work (Han’s eyes and body don’t focus on him correctly). And, while some of the control panels have been digitally changed to show imperial typography and characters, there are still shots with numeric displays (the macrobinoculars, the “The Death Star Is Coming!” display) that have arabic numerals.

Speaking of fx, it’s not clear to me whether the various 70s computer graphics have been minimized to avoid the embarrassment to modern eyes, but it sure felt like it. It seemed like there were fewer shots of the various computerized targeting systems. I’m honestly surprised that, while they were tweaking other bits, they weren’t improving those. Not sexy enough, perhaps.

Oh, and I’ll chime in to echo that, no, Han shoots first. He doesn’t do it unprovoked, mind you, but he’s not going to wait for Greedo to pull his gun and fire first (or even simultaneously). But I digress.

That all said, Star Wars IV still works. It’s still a fun movie. It has a fundamental joy, drama, tragedy, and comedy that the more technically complex first trilogy has, so far, lacked. And I’ll have to try watching it again with Katherine in a few years …