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Star Wars Episode 2 Starts Shooting
Star Wars Episode II has started shooting in Australia. Comments on it being filmed fully digitally. Mentions that Jar Jar will be back (along with McGregor, Jackson and Portman). Millions of fans hold their breath and hope this one is good (it'd be tough to go downhill, that's for sure).
It could have Ewoks, you know.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
At least JJ's people had energy weapons when they took on the Empire... Ewoks fought the 'crack' troopers who were supposed to be guarding the Emperor's life with sticks and rocks...and won!
Not totally preposterous. The battle scenes looked like the Empire's army had been dealing only with energy and particle-beam weapons for so long that their "armor" designers had sacrificed strength for weight and/or other factors, leaving them wide open to a kinetic energy attack.
A silly mistake, of course. But battlefields are littered with the remains of armies whose leaders and weapon designers made silly mistakes.
Of course the armor wasn't very effective against energy and/or particle beam weapons, either. And lots of the civilians they were called on to oppress were unarmed, and could be expected to improvise with clubs and the like. So why WERE they wearing that armor, anyhow?
Perhaps it was to be intimidating, ala the Nazi's crisp uniforms or the Klan's hoods. Perhaps it was as a weapons-system platform or remote-sensing countermeasures.
(Next question: Why didn't they have any thermal imaging, thus letting overgrown teddybears ambush them?)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I'm already seeing a ton of posts basically saying the same thing. They basically say this, "George Lucas sucks and he's only in the franchise to make money. The story is going to be written for 10 year olds and all the aliens will be stupid and plastic. The origin trilogy will be soo much better than these."
I would like all of these people to sit back and watch the original trilogy again. Now watch it again. Pay attention this time and ignore any nostalgia you had from when you saw this when you were ten.
Back yet? Good now did you notice anything? Right you probably noticed that the original trilogy has most of the flaws your criticizing Episode One for.
The acting in all of them was dubious at best. Ford was wooden. Hamill was just plain bad ("You're not my father! Its not true!"). Carrie Fisher was high through most of the second and third. Lots of dialogue sucked. Quite often the best actors were the Brits playing minor roles.
They weren't written that well. Why is an astromech droid a great security hacker? Thats one helluva back door in the system. How can a farm boy crop duster turn into a ace pilot with no training? And don't give me lots of "the force" crap. Why can't an ace pilot successfully land a ship in a swamp? Especially if it can hover? "Only Imperial Storm Troopers are so precise"? Please. There are lots more, especially that god awful Tarzan yell in Jedi.
Oh and by the way, lots of aliens looked stupid or plastic in the first movies too. Especially Jedi where the band looked like muppets. Can you honestly say Greedo looked convincing in Star Wars?
Oh and Lucas is almost richer than God so he doesn't need the money. He has ILM pulling in money constantly. He has all the other Star Wars stuff. He doesn't need to spend 200 Million of his own money to make another movie.
The basic problem isn't that Lucas is making bad movies. He isn't, episode one isn't significantly worse then Jedi. The problem is he made another Jedi when people wanted another Empire or A New Hope. And he doesn't have anyone to tell him something is stupid and it should be left out like the overly gratuitous trip through the core in Ep 1. And he's not an especially good director, have you seen his other movies?Remember the horn joke from the set of Star Wars?
His real problem isn't that he's making crappier movies, its that he's making the same level of movies when we want them to be so much better. We want more believable aliens and better writing. We want better acting. So its us who really have to deal with it, not him.
So far I've gotten all my Karma from telling people they are wrong... :)
No way - it could turn out to be the key to the series. Consider:
What if the Jedi are wrong? What if those germs aren't the Force, but rather inhabit those who have the Force? (Like detecting anti-bodies to something rather than detecting the something itself...)
These little guys could be the key to the eradication of the Jedi. If you're going to try and kill off the Jedi, how would you do it? Hand to hand combat with every single one? Bomb the annual JediCon? What if you could attack the one thing that distinguishes Jedi from the rest of the populace? What if you could turn the symbiotic relationship into something harmful?
Darth and Co. decimate the ranks of the Jedi sometime between now and when Luke comes on the scene. Wanna bet how they do it? I bet those idiot little germs have something to do with it.
And it could be played as one of those 'spiritual enlightenment' scenes for Obi-Wan... "Those germs have died - I no longer have The Force. Wait! I have The Force still! The Force must be inside me, more than something physical..." and so on and so forth until we all barf.
But, then again, I could be wrong and Lucas could play it out straight and drive us even further away...
RinkRat
Did I miss something, or did Lucas just slip up? :)
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
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"I find your lack of faith disturbing." -- Darth Vader
... to gouge yet more money out of fans who are so dedicated to the original series that they'll still go and watch anything with the Star Wars moniker on it, even though it's aimed at ten year old kids who think that Jar Jar Binks is actually cool, rather than being the alien equivalent of slashdot-terminal on crack.
I'm sorry, but whilst the orignal Star Wars trilogy had its appeal at the time, this time around the dubious moralising, dumb looking aliens and slushy character relationships just don't really cut the mustard with me. And a whole series about how great the kid who grew up to be Darth Vader, killer of the innocent, is - what the fuck is that about? What's next, Charles Manson - The Childhood Adventures?
Now lets watch as this post get moderated into oblivion by slashbot moderators who still think that George Lucas is something other than a tight-fisted money gouging bastard. These are the same kind of people who will buy each film on video, then each as "Director's Cut", the collected version with a 32-page commerorative booklet and then finally, in about 2020, the DVDs with amazing "enhanced" features - subtitles and an interview with The Man himself.
Nope, I just can't wait for this film.
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Jon E. Erikson
Jon Erikson, IT guru
Lucas has reiterated numerous times after being given heat about Jar-Jar that Jar-Jar is integral to the story. There are a number of rumours circulating around the Internet concerning this.
One is that Jar-Jar is unconciously weilding the force, and is on his own path to becoming a Jedi. This rumor speaks about how Jar-Jar, although clumsy, still seems to win battles despite his clumsiness. This kind of story line could speak to the nature of the force, how it is far reaching, even to the meek.
Another rumour is that Jar-Jar is a character from the later movies, and is currently "disguised." This rumour speaks about how Jar-Jar is pretty similiar to Human in size and weight (some other stuff too I'm not sure of.) I even saw one website suggesting Jar-Jar was Bobafett(!).
Lucas is a master of weaving storylines. I can't wait to see how Jar-Jar fits in based on Phantom Menace.
Just my $.02
Execute? [Y/N] _
Now that's a headline.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
It feels pretty weird
To type "Natalie Portman"
And not lose Karma.
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master."
We pretty much know what happens to most of the characters from Episode I, unless they throw us any major curves.
Anakin: Becomes Darth Vader, is talked about in second trilogy, dies on second Death Star.
Obi-Wan: Lives through slaughter of Jedis, becomes crazy old coot, lives on Tattooine, dies on first Death Star.
C-3PO: Eventually gets built.
R2-D2: Remains an ash can.
Queen Amidala: The assumption is that she becomes Luke/Leia's mother and gets killed.
Really, the only character with room for development, who can have the kind of character arc that Luke had in the first movies, is Jar Jar. He's the one we know least amount, and he's the one who apparently has the farthest distance to travel, in the George Lucas/Joseph Campbell sense. Don't you get it yet? Star Wars, Episodes I-III, is the story of Jar Jar Binks!
He starts out as a bumbling, outsider nobody who can't get anything right. By the end of Episode I, he's proven himself to be an okay guy. In the next couple movies he'll continue to mature and advance, will become a major general or other figure, until finally by the end of the third movie...
(SPOILER ALERT)
Breakfast served all day!
First of all, he established the groundwork for what are sure to be two very dark and combat-filled movies.
Also, the lightsaber fight at the end was the best filmed so far.
Even during a second viewing, I was still laughing every time I saw the "thin client" attack droids in action. IMHO, anybody who doesn't think an entire army of Crow T. Robots getting their asses kicked by lizzard men is funny needs to lighten up a little. That battle alone was worth my seven bucks.
On the downside, turning The Force into super-intelligent germs was a huge mistake. In two brief scenes, he ruined the whole series by turning a beautifully impossible fantasy into a very implausable sci-fi load of crap.
This was even less forgivable than the cartoony Jar Jar, the Bat-Grapling-Guns that Amidala's royal guard used, or the fact that Brian Blessed (voice of the Gungan King) put in the corniest performance of his carreer since his hammy appearance in Flash Gordon.
Alright, I'm going to shut up now, because I'm starting to sound like the "Comic Book Store Guy" from The Simpsons.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
1. Jar Jar is a major comic relief in Episode I, comic reliefs are usually needed to help compliment the heroes
2. Putting Jar Jar in EII tells me that Lucas is going to continue to direct HIS vision, despite all the public scrutiny that he got in EI with Jar Jar's alleged references (leave it to people these days to find something to get angry over in something so harmless)
3. I thought (after watching the character for the 3rd time) that Jar Jar's character is a bit more deep than one might first appear, and his character has quite a bit of growth potential (despite the speech impediment of his entire race)
Cheers
Tenement.
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I heard rumors on some fan site that the Empire is going to use bounty hunters to freeze Queen Amadalia the same way that Vader froze Hans Solo in Empire. Is the script released?
Is this true?
because if so PETRIFIED NATALIE PORTMAN! OH YAAAAAAAAAAAA!
-hee. sorry. begin karma burn.
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What happens when you outlaw guns