PT TPM 3D Has Finally Stopped The "Everyone Hates This Movie" Charade!

Seriously! I've seen it twice so far, and each time people laughed and cheered at all the right spots, even Jar Jar got a few laughs. The theaters were packed, I saw kids, young guys, girls, older men and women, pretty much every demographic out there. After 13 years of fanboy hatred, annoying critics, and pointless, useless 70 minute Youtube reviews, you know what I realized? They were WRONG. This movie kept everyone entertained. Not once, and I mean not even one time did anyone bust out a cell phone or appear bored, everyone was engrossed by it. The biggest laugh of the movie was brought upon by.........*gasp*.........Jar Jar Binks, someone these fanboys will lead you to believe is responsible for world hunger. We all clapped when Obi Wan sliced Darth Maul in half. It's amazing to me that a movie that's almost 20 years old can be re-released during our time and still have an impact, especially when people already know what's gonna happen. It goes to show how well-rounded and magical The Phantom Menace is. It's got action, kiddy humor, political intrigue, but most importantly, it's got heart, something that's been sorely lacking in movies these days. That flick with Leo Dicaprio about dreams? So cold and lifeless. When Anakin leaves his mother, you can just feel that, and that's the power and magic of Star Wars. So, I pose this question to RLM, Simon Pegg, and anyone else who hated on this movie for 13 years - what did you accomplish? Here, I'll answer it for you:

Not A Damn Thing


Thank you, George, for making us feel like happy children all over again.

 

Much of this owes to Liam Neeson IMHO. He's the heart and soul of the film and he looms over the entire prequel trilogy even though he's not in most of it.

 

I would agree with you for the most part.... except in simultaneously referring to TPM as both released 13 years ago and being "almost 20 years old".

Just because 13 years is closer to 10 or 15 years than to 20 years.

 

I have always said that it is very exaggerated on the amount of people who truly hate the prequels, not that I am saying their aren't people who were very disappointed in them. I don't care how this sounds but I will always blame the media and critics who have it in for Lucas. Their are some media publications and critics who take glee in taking shots at Lucas in anyway they can, they want the reader to believe that everyone hates the prequels and they want to give a fraudulent perception of how people view the films. I have stopped buying Entertainment Weekly and Rolling Stone magazines because I despise their anti-prequel propaganda and I dislike the way they have disdain for the die hard fan. I don't agree with Roger Ebert all the time, and I disagreed with him on his attack of the clones review, but I will say this about him, he is not a follower, he makes up his own mind, he hates movies are loved, and loves some movies that are hated he does not let his agenda's get in the way of his reviews. I have said it before many hate Lucas for him going against the guild, and many critics despise that he doesn't put quotes on the VHS/DVD/Blu-Ray box's! It may sound paranoid or far fetched but I am pretty convinced that a segment of the media is against him...

 

I'm glad that you feel that your 13 years of fighting for this movie were justified, but I had a very different experience tonight. I went to the 10:15PM show, and although I thought it was going to be crowded (so I showed up early), there were only 18 people in the entire theater. 18 people! And it was not an unpopular cinema complex by any means. In fact, I had difficulty finding parking, and the lobby was super crowded, so the other films playing tonight must have drawn the big crowds. I did not hear a single cheer during the movie, and the only laughter I heard was of the snickering variety, especially when Anakin delivered a line poorly or when Jar Jar was supposed to be funny.

TPM has always been my least favorite of the saga, but I wanted to show support to the franchise and help the cause (I want to see the later episodes in 3D). I had a bad feeling when I left the theater; I don't think it will be successful enough to justify the expense of converting the other films.

I don't want to only poopoo on it, so I will say that the pod race sequence was AMAZING. It had my heart racing. It made the film worth the price of admission.

 

Quoted for truth.

 

I don't live anywhere near a large city, and yet the theater was packed last night with movie patrons of all ages. I saw people old enough to have seen the OT in theaters, men and women in their 20's and 30's who would have encountered TPM for the first time as a younger person in 1999, there were those with little kids clearly sharing getting first experience with Star Wars in the theater. And the audience laughed at Jar Jar's antics....

Yes indeed, its time for the anti-star wars crowd to go away and instead focus on something they like. Life is too short to dwell on things you won't allow yourself to enjoy. Star Wars is for Star Wars fans, just as Star Trek is for Trek fans, Twilight is for Twi-hards, and Batman is for Batman fans.

 

Seconded. My one disappointment with the blu-ray release was NOT completing the Qui-Gon communes with Yoda scene in ROTS. Would have given the Prequel saga a little more closure and a little more depth.


Yancy

 

Unfortunately General that will never happen.


Yancy

 

I've been a member of this board (under a few different usernames) since right after TPM came out, and can attest from firsthand experience that the 'anti-TPM/Prequel' crowd has actually been the MINORITY, at least here; it's just seemed to be the other way around because of their vocality. The people who enjoy TPM and the rest of the Prequel films tend not to talk about their enjoyment and why they are fans of the films, which gives the 'haters' more of a presence.

While the theater I went to wasn't packed (it was in the middle of the day on a school day), there were a fair amount of people there, and I was sitting next to some kids who looked to be in their late teens or early twenties and who I could hear chuckling at various points in the film, mostly during the Jar Jar scenes that seem to take the most heat from the critics and haters.

I've long held to the idea (bolstered by my aforementioned firsthand experience) - which I firmly believe - that the 'anti-TPM/Prequel' crowd has both grossly over-exaggerated the things that are wrong with TPM (it is by no means a perfect movie, but no movie is ever going to be perfect) and grossly mis-interpreted those flaws (all of which, I might add, are things that can be attributed to the remainder of the films, including the 'Classic trilogy').

 

That and re-record that "fake" Nooo! in AotC. All of this was a wasted opportunity. Liam Neeson recorded some dialogue for The Clone Wars, and I'm not sure why they didn't ask him to record a couple of lines for the Blu-ray and 3D releases.

 

Wait, now Lucas is wrong for not making additions?

*Sigh*

This is getting so confusing... lol!

 

Who said Lucas is wrong?

 

I dunno, that would have been Too Much Awesome for me to handle. I would have had a heart attack if Liam's ghost showed up in 3.

The bit with Luke being handed over to the Larseseses at the end was one of the most moving things I've seen in a movie.

 

Dammit Mond, there's never Too Much Awesome in this world!


Yancy

 

Friday night 10:00pm showing - theater was half full. A mix of all ages, both genders (though the not-so-young anymore- woman by herself category was represented solely by myself).

There wasn't a LOT of audience reaction, not anything worth mentioning; people seemed pleased when they left.

I enjoyed the movie far more than my one and only theater viewing during its first run (disappointment, I was you). I AM a prequel fan (though I've argued often that TPM is best on DVD with sections fast forwarded, or so I thought).

I still think Qui-Gon (sometimes) came off as an overbearing, "listen to ME" self-complacent man - no wonder he bonded so well with Anakin. This isn't a Qui-Gon character thread, so I'll leave it at that.

I do think the 3D gave a new clarity - I could see facial expressions far better; an aspect I really appreciate in an actor. I even saw the dust on Padme's outfit for the first time ever.

 

Oh.

 

Breaking news:

Lone Yahoo writer likes the prequels. Yahoo comment leavers heartily disagree.

 

That's pretty much the way it is on IMDb, still. There are a LOT of people who can't let go, still. A lot of carping and whining, still. A lot of smugness and name-calling, still. Basically, this is the Internet, still.

What some of you guys have experienced in actually going out and seeing the movie is that Internet geeks like thee and me don't have the final word. What matters is the audience; and the audience encompasses a lot more than a bunch of nerds exalting and defaming one man and his work.

The hoi polloi can be relied on for a few things: hating taxes, griping about politicians, and watcing Star Wars movies. Bashers can simply be relied on to, well, bash; and, apparently, not grasp the basic fact that not everyone is quite as cynical or as curiously obsessive as they are.

 

Good link, I happened to come across it myself just a few minutes ago. Big props to that guy for having the courage to express his own opinion, despite knowing that he'd get a lot of heat from the internet fanboys. He also praised the Prequel Trilogy's more nuanced and meaningful examination of morality, truth, politics, and war. That's something that I love about the prequels, and which I've been trying to tell people for years now.

BTW, Yahoo comments are best ignored. Enraged fanboy comments on many forums are bad enough, but Yahoo comments in general make them look positively reasonable. That's an opinion that I've formed before, which has nothing to do with Star Wars. I'm not kidding when I say that the people who comment on Yahoo seem to be disproportionately hateful, obsessive, and even sociopathic. An article about President Obama almost always draws hardcore right wingers and conspiracy theorists, who accuse the President of being a terrorist or communist sleeper agent. Articles about deaths and tragedy often draw people who come in just to jeer at those who have suffered.

Most people who bother posting online tend to be negative, no matter the subject. Hate is a powerful motivator, which is funny since that ties into the overall message of the Star Wars series. Negative feelings lead to rants, as people post all of their reasons for disliking something, justified or not. Someone who has a positive opinion is far more content and at peace, lacking the motivation to spend more time on the subject than is normal. Opinions like "That was awesome!" or "Darth Maul was so cool!" don't usually lead to prolonged rants. In my own experience, I usually have far more to say about the movies that I don't like.

And it makes sense if you think about it. Movies are entertainment, and while they can comment on life they aren't life itself. A movie that does its job will thrill or touch someone, but most people will not spend long amounts of time dwelling on it. Well adjusted people are more likely to have lives, which they get back to when a movie is over. Ranting about a movie or holding hateful opinions about it for over a decade is NOT a normal activity.

I'll even go as far to say that merely posting online (something that I'm doing myself right now) is an irregular activity. None of my friends or family spend time on forums. My 32 year old coworker once saw me checking out some forums, and she said that she never knew there were things like that. Regular people use the internet to watch videos on YouTube, or check up on their friends through Facebook and Twitter. They don't generally post on forums. And they certainly don't obsess about and hate on now 13 year old movies.

Even the internet itself reveals that the hardcore bashers are a vocal minority. The people who bother posting comments would have you believe that the prequels are the worst movies ever, complete flops that were hated by all. But take a look at the Yahoo page for the Episode I 3D trailer:

http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/star-wars-episode-i-the-phantom-menace/trailers/star-wars-episode-i-3d-re-release-trailer-27533747.html

Over 61,000 people gave the movie an overall rating of 3.5 stars out of 5, which is not bad. And that INCLUDES all the ridiculous 1/5 voters who drove down the score because Episode I "raped their childhood." The IMDB page for TPM has nearly a quarter-million votes, and the movie's rating there is 6.4/10. Again, that figure includes all the hateful outliers who probably voted 1/10. Yet it still leans positive.

I just saw TPM 3D this afternoon. It was packed, even though Saturday afternoons at my local theater are usually pretty empty. Most of the people there were kids and their parents, two major groups which have almost no representation in online fandom (which has a large percentage of single male geeks, by most accounts). Almost everyone there enjoyed it, except for maybe three literal toddlers who needed to go to sleep or go to the bathroom. When the movie ended, the audience clapped in applaus

 

Speaking of links, could you upload your rebuttal to another file host?

 

Ha, you're the third person who's asked me that in the past week. Brings a smile to my face to know that not everyone has jumped on the prequel basher bandwagon.

The closing of Mega Upload is frustrating, because that was such a reliable file hosting site. I've put the PDF in Rapid Share for now:

https://rapidshare.com/#!download|610|1735047526|Red_Letter_Media_s_Episode_I_Review_-_A_Study_in_Fanboy_Stupidity.pdf|1750

Annoyingly, Rapid Share doesn't seem to offer permanent hosting. That link is temporary, and it will deactivate if no one downloads from it for a period of time. Anyone know of a safe, reputable, and permanent file hosting service that won't require me to pay money for an account?

 

You've got PM.

 

I read about 50 comments down and I'm already to the third "paid LucasFilm operative" accusation.

Did y'all know that if you post something positive about the prequels on the internet, there is a probability of 1 that someone will accuse you of being paid to do so by Lucas/Lucasfilm?

If you don't believe me, conduct an experiment. It WILL happen, and it's funny.

BTW, nice to see you posting here Mr. Raynor.

 

Oh no, the Prequel bashers are defeated. We have one last WEAPON....."THE VOW."

15 million on Friday to TPM 8 million. YIPPIE, a stupid love with the bad DUKE is defeating Star Wars.