*OFFICIAL THREAD* Initial Reactions for RotS

"Yoda was perhaps being optimistic in reminding Obi-Wan that they can train her too"

Bit of a stretch don't you think? Assuming thats the answer despite a complete lack of delivered lines to substaniate your position, but a good answer... but not supported by how the scene in ESB was delivered.

Also, why do the Wookies cry out EXACTLY like tarzan as they swing onto the droid water speeders???

 

Not really a stretch. Obi-Wan knows in ROTJ who Leia was, he's the one to tell Luke after Yoda dies without answering the question.

 

Well someone has to tell Luke and as you've pointed out, Yoda dies... And if you were Obi Wan... after such an enigmatic statement, contradicting your comment, wouldn't you ask for clarification?

"then all is lost..."
"no, there is another..."
"oh? what are you talking about, oh, Leia, right I forgot"

 

First of all the last line wasn't in ESB, secondly, that was mainly an exposition meant for the audience.

It's like two people talking and one person saying

"Well, we can't go to ROTS, car is broken down"

and the friend saying

"wait, no we can still go, take your mom's car"

Doesn't mean the first person doesn't know there are two cars. It's simply how people talk.

oh, and I should say again, Obi-Wan tells Luke who Leia is. Enuff said.

 

I apologize, i nit pick... excessively, but this movie is plagued, as were there first two movies, with SO many tiny inconsistancies and irritating details... that unless you're baked... you can't help but notice.

 

yeah... you did point that out, congradulations.

 

I can't help but notice May05 under your name.

I'm really having fun reading and responding to threads so time is no object to me, unless you're being paid to troll, you better move along. You're wasting your time here since you can't do much here, sorry to say.

oh btw, it's congraTUlations. LOL

 

its sarcasm moron.

the sarcasm is inferred from the incorrect spelling... just as your answer, to my question is inferred from your understanding of the movies BUT not from the movies themselves.

 

"Henceforth you will be known as Darth Vader!" These dire words, addressed to a tormented Anakin Skywalker as he crosses the threshold to the much-mentioned Dark Side, mark the definitive moment of his Luciferian journey, which will end with him in a black, neo-Wehrmacht helmet-mask, with incipient emphysema and a walk that makes him look as if he has had concrete hip replacements.

It supposedly forms the mythic heart of the gigantic Third Episode of George Lucas's colossally inflated Star Wars prequel trilogy. Yet when this moment happens - after what seems like seven hours of CGI action as dramatically weightless as the movement of tropical fish in an aquarium - I looked blearily around the cinema and sensed thousands of scalps failing to prickle. We had all been bored into submission long ago.

George Lucas is now not so much a director as chief executive-cum-potentate in charge of a vastly profitable franchise empire in which striking back is not an option. And within this empire's boundaries, Lucas is so mind-bogglingly powerful that none of his lieutenants dares tell him the truth: that yet another Something of the Something title, after Attack of the Clones and Return of the Jedi, is pretty annoying. (It's actually his fourth, if you count the original script title to the first Star Wars: Adventures of the Starkiller.) But here at any rate, finally, is the end of the road, or rather the middle of the road - the moment in 1977 where we came in. Lucas has taken three pointlessly long and artificially complicated movies to get to the point: precisely how did Luke Skywalker's father come to embrace the forces of darkness?

Hayden Christensen is Anakin, the talented but mercurial Jedi pupil of Obi-Wan Kenobi, in which role Ewan McGregor wears a big and bushy beard, to indicate the aged wisdom that we know is his destiny. Their mighty contest is to be at the centre of this movie, during which in quiet moments leading characters will gaze out over massive futuristic cityscapes resembling the photorealist artwork once used for 1970s sci-fi paperbacks: pointy buildings with swarms of pointy aircraft criss-crossing overhead, often bathed in crimson sunsets.

Once again, McGregor speaks in a simperingly lifeless Rada-English accent, a muddled and misconceived backdating of the Guinness original - the young fogey with the light-sabre. In boringness he is matched by that Jedi master of woodenness: Hayden Christensen, the flatliner to end all flatliners. As an actor Christensen must show the terrible embryo of future wickedness within himself. And how does he do this? By tilting his head down, looking up through lowered brows and giving the unmistakable impression that he is very, very cross. If Princess Diana had gone to the Dark Side, she would have looked a lot like this.

So why does Anakin desert the forces of light? It is his passionate love and concern for his pregnant wife, Princess Amidala, coupled with a sense of his own slighted dignity that are to be the tragic and fateful factors leading to the most unconvincing evil act you can imagine, an event weirdly neutralised by the bloodless unreality that surrounds everything. The vicious Anakin massacres - oh, horror! - a bunch of innocent Jedi children.

But that is not how Lucas's solemnly high-flown script chooses to refer to them. With sub-Shakespearian gravitas, McGregor intones: "Not even the younglings survived." I'm sorry, not even the what? Is that their surname or something? Are Mr and Mrs Youngling going to come home to find a nursery bloodbath?

One of the things about the previous film, Attack of the Clones, that made you think things might be looking up was the terrific performance by Christopher Lee as the sinister Count Dooku. Almost the very first thing Lucas does here is kill him off. It is a crippling blow that leaves us with a range of scandalously dull secondary characters. People such as Senator Bail Organa, played by Jimmy Smits, and Samuel L Jackson as the fiercely uninteresting Mace Windu. They are acting as if on some kind of medic

 

That review was posted a LONG time ago in the media discussion thread.

 

I know, sorry, I'm real slow off the mark. But it REALLY made me laugh, and confirmed that hey, that's at least 3 of us who thought the same!

 

There are zero comic moments.

--

Well DUH!!! This is a dark movie, not much time for laughs-a-plenty. Typical response from someone just nit-picking. That's like saying "This comedy I just watched had no serious moments in it". DUH!!! It's a comedy...

*sighs*

 

Another May05er, I think I can count one one hand the number of times I have visited this site before viewing ROTS, but just had to register to get my feelings about the new film, and all things Star Wars, on the record.

I am another typical 30-something who grew up with the original trilogy, and although by no means an obsessive Star Wars geek I, like most of my generation, hold the original films close to my heart. Also, like most of us non-geeks, I was frustratingly disappointed with the first two prequels, so much so that my enthusiasm for the saga had been deflated and thus I kept my expectations for ROTS down to a minimum. It didn't help (at least at the time I didn't think that it helped) that I read a few spoilers on here and also browsed over the ROTS novel in a shop one day to get a better idea of the story. After reading some of the dialogue in the book I had a 'bad feeling' (!) about the prospects of me enjoying this one.

My expectations of ROTS were that I certainly expected it to be the best of prequels, simply because of the nature of the story, but ultimately not as good as the original trilogy, and certainly not a patch on Empire Strikes back, which I believed to be untouchable.

No matter how disappointed I was in the first two prequels, my excitement for this new film has built and built, so much so that I was giddy last week when I was about to watch it for the first time.....thankfully my frustration with the prequels had not dissipated my overall love for the saga anyway.

So last Thursday I sat in my cinema seat to watch the last Star Wars film to be released.....and I have now seen it twice, and will go one more time this week. So what do I think of it?

I am blown away, simply stunned, by how utterly and completely fantastic this film is. This is the best Star Wars film of the whole six....by a long, long way. Not only do I feel that with time this will go down as the undisputed best of the Star Wars episodes, I am also sure that this will be regarded as one of the greatest films ever in its own right because of the way it impacts on so many levels. When I came out of the cinema after my first viewing I tried to rationalise what I had just watched but I couldn't help what I was thinking..."That was as good as 'Empire'"...maybe I was just suffering from a case of mild hysteria? Well, after viewing it the second time I am now sure that not only is it as good, it is infact better. It captures the emotional intensity and excitement that occurs in the final third of Empire, but carries it throughout the whole film....and at another level altogether.

ROTS is visually stunning, emotionally involving, dramatic, exciting and fun in a way that no sci-fi/fantasy film that I can think of has achieved before. There are so many wonderfull moments in it but my favourites that spring to mind are:-

1) The opening shot panning down onto the starships above Coruscant...stunning. Those slow pounding drums tell us immediately we are watching something quite different to any sci-fi film before it.

2) Hayden's first line and screen-shot. As soon as he appeared on screen and uttered his first line I believed in him, liked him. Infact as the film progressed I struggled to accept that this was the same guy from 'Attack Of The Clones'.

3) General Grievous. Fantastic character, utterly convincing uber bad guy.

4) The tears of Anakin to a background of no music, or sound, whatsoever. It captured his torment beautifully.

5) Palpatine V Windu. When his facial transformation is complete and he speaks I was immediately relating to 'Return Of The Jedi'.

6) Yoda. I hated Yoda in the first two prequels. I have no idea how Lucas has done it but he has made him genuinely 'cool' in this film. I suspect it is down to the near perfect CGI that is prevelant throughout the whole film.

7) The intertwining fights between Yoda/Sideous & Anakin/Obi-Wan. Stunning.

8) Obi-Wan's cry of depair (You were my brother!) after reducing to Anakin to an invalid, and Anakin's retort (I hate you!). So powerfull.

 

Great post Mace Wandy...



Was anyone surprised that there was no dialogue heard between Obi-Wan and Beru at the end ?
Do we just asume that Obi-Wan did actually say something, like who the baby was and where he was from ?

 

A Masterpiece! Simply... A MASTERPIECE!

 

Yes it´s a fantastic film but I don´t
agree that previous two are bad.
They are simply less good compared
the new stunning masterpiece.
I think the PT has improved with
each new movie and the story
has just gotten better
the further we got
into it.

 

Anagorn, sorry I disagree. The overall storyline as described by the first two prequels has been improved by ROTS but it hasn't made TPM & AOTC better films to watch. I sat down ayesterday and put AOTC in the DVD player and watched it to see if I would enjoy it any better. I didn't.

AOTC does start well enough (apart from the hideously wooden opening scene when Padme gets attacked) but after the scene where Obi-Wan fights Jango Fett it descends into excruciating cheese and blandness. The Jedi battle scene at the end along with Anakin & Obi-Wan fighting and riding those beasts is one of the most wooden and unconvincing I have ever seen..the CGI is truly terrible and the dialogue cringeworthy. And the film is needlessly confusing toward the end too, with talk of Sifo Dias & Dooku claiming to be a good guy and then actually being a bad guy. Infact I think Dooko is the most pointless character in the prequels (not to be confused with Binks, who is just the most annoying). If I had my way I would have kept Darth Maul in the three prequels and have him killed off by Anakin at the point where he actually kills Dooku. Maul could have been the one who employed Fett to be the host for the Clones so why he was killed off is a mystery to me, because he was a great character.

As far as TPM is concerned, if they had replaced Jake LLoyd, removed Binks, no 'Chosen One' bollocks, no dialogue that has words such as "oops" and "yippee" then it would probably have been an acceptable film. Not great, but acceptable.

 

Everyone is going to have opinions on how things should have been done. I remember reading a quote from Lucas which pretty much sums it up, he said "If I was to paint my house green, someone will say it should have been white. The thing is, I don't want it white, I want it green.".
I for one love what Lucas has done with the prequels. I have no problems with any characters or how they where acted either. I just enjoy the sheer fun and excitement of what Lucas has created, and he has created something truly amazing, all of which is from his own brain and not from any books.

 

This may well be my last post on these boards, as now the films are over, the last thing I want to do is nitpick over them. It's been fun, frustrating and incredibly geeky, but mostly fun!

Anyway, my two cents on the film. Seen it twice now, and first off, DLP is so much better. Miles better, if you can make the effort to see it digitally.

First time I saw it I was terrified it was going to suck. This was the last chance and the one that really mattered. If he dropped the ball on this there was no next time to look forward to. Straight away my fears were eased. The acting was more confident and I found myself really caring for these characters, and being drawn into the story. The quality of the effects also blew away anything else so far, although I can see why some lament the reduction of real environments. Never have I seen a film with so much going on and at such a pace. Any cringe moment that occurs (and there are a couple) is forgotten as Lucas steamrollers past it with a flurry of wow moments and sequences. I really enjoyed it. Far more emotion than anything other movie in the saga. I left the cinema satisfied and relieved that it was good.

Then a weird thing happened, as I started to doubt that the film was good. I couldn't take it all in and my mind was a jumble of reviews (I'd read all of them), expected criticisms, and the fact that I was 100% spoiled through the script, photos, clips, etc, etc. Was it just a jumbled mess of video game images?
Was it really terrible?

No. Not to me. I was blown away on my second viewing. The opening is superb. The acting is much better, the characters are the ones I imagined form the way they were talked about in the OT, and finally evil emerges to centre stage. I still feel it is a bit rushed in places, but that is more a case of I would gladly sit through more of the spectacular battles than anything else, and on the whole any shortcomings the film has can be laid at the door of TPM and to a much lesser extent AOTC. ROTS is about as good as can be expected considering everything he had to fit in after dawdling, story wise, with TPM. I also feel the QGJ scene would have tied the two trilogies together very well, but I'm hoping for that to be added into the DVD. There are nits I could pick and the odd moment let down by poor acting when you felt there must have been a better take (Aayla Secura's death is so badly acted it's not true, the youngling undermines the power of that scene with his line reading (I know he's only a kid but it's not impossible) and I can't work out if Mcdiarmid's Nooo, Noooo before he unleashes the lightning is appalling or brilliant (either way it's hilarious). But to concentrate on the few things I don't like would be petty. There is so much I love about this film. So much. Most of all I love the way Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi are handled. Obi-Wan is a legend. R2 is a legend. Yoda is great. Hell, I even liked Padme in this one.

I completely agree with Hudnall about the acting in this one. I don't know what film some of these people were watching. I guess at this stage if you hate SW you really hate it, and everything about it is like someone driving needles into your eyeballs. I'm glad I don't feel that way, and it pisses me off the way some critics act as if you need to be mentally incompetent to enjoy these films. How one eyed can you be? ROTS has a great story, strong characters, is solidly acted (it's not Mamet) and most pleasingly it has real emotion.

More than anything else I have genuine respect for the story that Lucas has told. Sure there are mis-steps along the way but I can't think of a saga that works as well over such a span. Thanks, George. And see you guys and gals, have fun!

 

I kind of agree with you MW about TPM but
I think the latter half of AOTC is one
of the best in the entire saga.
Not when it comes to acting perhaps
but definitely action wise.

 

Mcdiarmid's Nooo, Noooo before he unleashes the lightning is appalling or brilliant

--

I think it's brilliant. It's like Sids is mocking Mace. As Mace is screaming, Sids starts to join him "Nooo! Noooooo! Noooooooo!". I thought it was great!

 

i have always found AOTC entertaining. i know some people loved it when it came out, then got on the blast it band wagon, but i have always loved it. it has the most action of any star wars movie before since the first one. i personally think its a great fun movie. i try to look past the dialogue, though, maybe that is whats giving people so many hang ups. and maybe thats why i love ROTS so much.

 

I was really interested in what my friends that are not big Star Wars fans would say. Most of them were luke warm. My one friend called ROTS the "Full Metal Jacket in Reverse" of Star Wars films. He said the first half sucked beyond belief, but from when Anakin turned until the end was fantastic.

 

Yesterday I heard a real gem of audience reaction:

Two girls- around 15- walking out of the cinema had this discussion:
First girl: "WOW! It was great! I just don't know what was going on with those babies... Are they important?"
Second girl: "Oh, I think you have to watch Ep IV to know it! You know the "old films!"

Well, although they lacked some essential SW knowledge, at least they realised that those babeis might be important It's good news that ROTS managed to show what's important to even the "SW virgins"

 

I liked it a lot. Some parts made me laugh yet I doubt they were intended to but other parts made me cry and that only happens a couple times throughout the other movies.

I thought Ian McDiarmid, Frank Oz and the Animators of Yoda totally stole the show. Ian was so good at completely pulling you in and his lines were just right.
There is one line which we hear in ROTJ and it made my skin crawl. So great.
And when Yoda says his farewells to Tarfful and Chewie I can't help but think to myself, "Poor little guy."
The piggie back ride was fun too.

A couple questions.

Does Sidious have a surplus of lightsabers? He lost it against Mace. Then had it against Yoda. Curious.

Also.

Has your point of view about Vader's death changed at all? If Padme can die from losing the will to live then is it possible that Vader did the same? Being stuck in the body of a mangled freak is no life for a Jedi.
Just a thought.

Holla back


And I DID NOT see James Earl Jones in the credits. I looked for it the second time but didn't see his name. Did I miss it or is it not there?
I think Ben Burtt may have perfected the Darth Vader voice modulator.