Saga What is wrong with the SW films being of their era?

Not saying its being victimized. At least I don't mean to for it to come off that way. Just a little tired of reading a movie review and if said review is of a film the reviewer thinks is bad, the prequels are immediately brought into the review for comparison. Along with some snide remark like, "I haven't seen a movie this bad since the last Starwars."

I suppose its just something I have to live with. LOL

 

And again, this is nothing to do with singling out Star Wars. I'm sure there are Batman and Robin fans out there who have it just as bad.

Heck, I like X-men 3. I don't think it deserves to be the franchise whipping-boy, but I deal with it when other people do.

 

Its a complex that fanboys keep alive. But like i said these beloved movies are going to be released until 2017 so i hope the haters are ready to complain and resort to what they always have for the next 6 years.

 

"Horribly aged"? Did you know that even the color grader of the OT on DVD will tell you that the changes looked more dated and out of place than the rest of the original optical effects? Or that the original versions are capable of looking better than the special editions ever can?

Most comments I read on news websites and forums agreed with the "fanboys". If anything the Blu-ray release raised awareness in a positive light for the complainers. Lucas got a lot of bad press.

Can you not accept that maybe these films have some issues?

Not even Lucasfilm is sure about that.

 

I believe such a poll was conducted of viewers at theaters when the new films were released. Cinescore or whatever it's called. The films did well, getting like A- scores or so.

 

There's a fun experiment you can try to at least get some entertainment from this phenomenon:

Next time a new Star Wars related article is out and a million bashing-type comments are posted, post your own comment in defense of the new films.

If you do, at least one of the posters will accuse you of being a paid Lucasfilm operative. Seriously, give it a try, it will happen and it's pretty funny.

 

Then why are there a number of people on these forums who believe that Anakin in the PT wasn't a good person at all? I think those people tend to frequent the Lit and EU boards (Child of Winds is one such person) and I'm not sure if they ever visit the film boards. Radically different conclusions.........interesting. Were you and these people watching the same movies? And for the record, I believe the correct answer is somewhere between these two extremes.

 

LOL! Yeah, i've seen it happen too!

Pretty funny cuz that's OBVIOUSLY the ONLY reason in the world anyone would dare defend the prequels!

 

If I'm a paid Lucasfilm operative, the checks are being sent to the wrong address.

 

I couldn't care less.

 

Sure you could. You could care little enough to not bother with that response.

 

Then why are you posting here?

 

Really nothing.

Each film belongs more or less to its era. Star Wars movies belong to their era, although each trilogy was indeed a significant technical and visual breaktrough when it came out (optical and digital FX). And were in a sense a little ahead of theirs.

But films tend to become outdated with time for many people and young generations especially. Even Star Wars movies. It's inevitable. Time passes and things change...

I and other people really think that OT movies should have stayed as they were initially. Others disagree. Anyway G.Lucas thought differently and has so far the right to modify his films his way. He claims they are now closer to the way they were originally envisioned...And closer to the PT ones.

Even if only a few, but substantial, often out of tone, and conspicuous things, were actually altered and added.

 

The Star Wars movies were never "of their era." They were in fact made as films of a previous era. The Star Wars movies are modeled on the movie serials of the 1930's and 40's. This is especially true of the prequels which are like big budget Flash Gordon serials. It's almost impossible to look at Palpatine in ROTS and not see shades of Ming The Merciless.


You think so? I don't. The OT reminded me more of the old movie serials, instead of the PT. The OT seemed to have more of the simple idealization of the serials. And I don't see shades of Ming the Merciless in Palpatine. Just a powerful and manipulative politician . . . especially in the PT.

 

You too?? Hell Ive been waiting on my checks since Episode 2 came out.

 

I don't see why Lucas would have to be the one to remake them. This is likely to happen regardless in about fifty years. I agree with the premise. Films lose their classic edge when tampered with, regardless of the intent of the revision.

 

Does anybody know whether Lucas has abandoned the, "It's all my original vision" claim (debunked six ways to Sunday by 'The Secret History of Star Wars') and has now settled into the, "An artist is never done painting" stance?

With all the retcons that the CW cartoon has imposed upon the movies, especially Darth Maul's resurrection, and with all the changes to the OT that he made on the Blu-Ray that could've just as easily been made in '97 or '04, the whole "original vision" thing is now bogus on its face. You don't have to read 'The Secret History of Star Wars' to know that Lucas didn't have some Divine "original vision", you just have to have a functioning brain.

Here's a variation on the OP's point (which I think was very good): Is there a statute of limitations on claims to ownership due to the fact that old people (2011 George Lucas) are different than young people (1976 George Lucas)?

George Lucas is literally a different person than he was in 1976. Legally, yeah, he's still the owner and recognized author of the movies. But every cell in his body from 1976 is decades gone. He has a different stew of biochemicals, different life experiences, different agendas. For this rich old man to claim that he's the same as the young man is just fundamentally bogus.

So, really, the U-OT could be called the "Young George Lucas Edition" and the SEs could be called the "Old George Lucas Edition". (I used to always use those names for Lucas in a snarky, derogatory way, but I'm serious now.)

(Part of the reason I'm saying this is because a buddy was telling me about changes William Friedkin is making to 'The French Connection'. That movie is almost forty years old. What moral right does this dude have to go and alter the work of the forty years-younger version of himself? He can't be the same man now he was then.)

 

From what I understand, doesn't this merely entail a different color timing than the regular version. Granted, altered color timing can ruin a film too (as it did in Wrath of Khan's bluray), but it is no where near the level of embarassment that the SEs represent.

In fact, the only special edition that I can think of that is more disrespectful to the original version is the 30th anniversary of Night of the Living Dead version.

 

I don't have a Blu-Ray player, but my friend who told me about 'The French Connection' is a huge movie buff (he's actually a projectionist). It came up in the context of talking about Blu-Ray changes that are so extensive that they make them different movies, and he noted that William Friedkin was doing a ton of color changes and DNR to 'French Connection'. My guess would be that it has a substantial change to the movie's aesthetics, because I don't think it would've been brought up otherwise. (We were actually talking about this in my old James Cameron Fan Podcast.)

Whether the 'French Connection' is as severe as the SEs or not, the principle applies to both, I think: Men who are generationS removed from the creation go back and alter the work. Are they even the same person? Legally yes. Practically, no. That's my opinion.

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Along those lines, I came up with this list of quotes of James Cameron talking about Special Editions:

Q: Would you redo the effects in The Abyss the way George Lucas did with Star Wars?

I went back and did a special edition of The Abyss, using all the building blocks that weren't used because of time constraints, and we made it clear that this was an alternate version for people who don't mind watching a three-hour movie. But we didn't go back and change the actual imagery; we just edited it together?so it's more of a historical document. It's a little weird to go back and do all the things you wanted to do back then. It's a little like thinking through your own navel. It's revisionist history. On the other hand, when it earns you another $150 million . . .

-Premiere Magazine, 'The Territory Ahead', 1999, by Anne Thompson

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Omni: The Special Edition of Close Encounters of the Third Kind seemed to contain nothing more than a few pieces of footage cut from the original.

Cameron: Close Encounters was the model for subsequent Special Editions: let's go back and cut the film differently, add some stuff that wasn't finished and release it again theatrically. It was an interesting idea. I personally thought that it wasn't a better film. There was a certain kind of religious awe at the end of the original version of the film that was demystified in the Special Edition by going inside the saucer and seeing all the aliens. I thought that was a mistake, and with The Abyss, I didn't want to set myself up for the same criticism.

What I'm still not clear on -- and I'm sure fans of Close Encounters know -- was how much of the Special Edition was footage Steven [Spielberg] had actually shot [and left out] and how much of it was stuff he'd intended to shoot, hadn't and went back to shoot later. To me, that gets into a strange zone of revisionism I think is unhealthy. When we restored The Abyss, we had some of those ethical considerations, but they were very minor. Basically, we only put back scenes that I'd done, that were in the script, on the call list, that we had shot to be in the film and had taken out only to release it at what we thought was a commercially viable length.

-Omni Magazine. '20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: The Movie Director as Captain Nemo'. 1997. by Bill Moseley.

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Cameron on the 'Abyss' SE in the laserdisc intro in 1993:

"We didn't slavishly put back every single scrap of film that was shot, because issues of pace and style are still important. It still has to be a good mo

 

The terrible blu of French Connection was digitally de-colored and "uglied up" to make it more "gritty" and the funny thing is it has the opposite effect! The real New York of 1971 was plenty gritty and seeing it as if you were really there was much more evocative than running it through your generic "gritty filter" software. (I know there's more to the process than that but that's what it amounts to)
All this revisionism is too bad (and I don't even believe the creative reasons given are honest at all, unless the director was fired or locked out).

 

Is there something wrong with the films being "timeless"?

 

Truly timeless films stand on their own. They don't need to be updated every few years with each change more embarassing than the last.