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Star Wars II: Return of the Name
Mutant was among the onslaught of readers who submitted that the final name has been chosen for Star Wars Episode II. It is... Attack of the Clones. Let the sarcasm commence. I'll pass judgement after I see it.
Circa 1977:
Circa 1999:
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
all the arguments I hear go along the lines of:
"I saw episode IV-VI when I was a kid, and they were great! and now I went to see episode I, and I was shocked to find that it was made for kids!"
well... have you ever considered the fact that the first three were, too? and that you like them now because you saw them when you were kids?
I saw episode one on the premier night here in Sweden. never in my life have I witnessed such excitement. the one boo! I heard was when we saw that they had translated (!) the magical three paragraphs to Swedish!
then it was all cheers, every time a reference to the old movies were made, or a familiar character was presented.
most of my male friends thought it was great, with the exception of Jar-Jar. and I see the same consensus here. I have yet to find a single gyu that likes him, or even stands to watch him. and I would like to offer another view of that.
me and some of my female friends have discussed this phenomena. we all think he's cute. the one bone we have with him is that he's the only one in all the movies that succeeds not by doing his best, but by being chronically clumsy and equally lucky.
but he is a caricature of a lot of negative male characteristics. and maybe you guys don't like to be reminded of those.
it's the only way we could explain the extreme, one-sided hate we have witnessed. and maybe there is some truth in it...
now, flame all you like... I have mail filters, and I know how to use them.
Now, many people are ranting about how "Attack of the Clones" is a retarded movie title. I'd have to agree. Granted, I'm one of those 'saw it when I was young, fell in love with it, altered reality,' types. My parents, on the other hand, are not.
My parents recently saw Episode I. They were appauled at the horrid commericialization of the franchise and the apparent lack of effort that went into the actual film, the story, and the plot. Granted, Luca always triedmake money, but Star Wars was art when Lucas started making it. He said so himself - his opt-outs about how it's simply a childrens film and such are just that - opt outs. I mean, for crying out loud, Episode I didn't even have new music composed for it to fit the film - it simply had a compiled version done by someone else, so they could slap John William's name on it. They spent all their budget on special effects. Bastards.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Remember finding out about child abuse on Gont, and why wizards from Roke avoided girls, in Ursula Le Guin's Tehanu?
Remember when all the kids got killed, and Aslan turned into Jesus, in C.S. Lewis's The Last Battle?
Remember when Bilbo Baggins turned into an old, evil monster (if only for a moment) in J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings -- and then the "sequel" to that had no hobbits, only elf genealogy and linguistics?
If it's not what you expected -- that is, what you extrapolated from the first movie(s) or book(s) -- you're not going to like it. We build cosy little worlds from the "original" stories, then hate it when the author intrudes.
No, I don't think there's a solution. But the problem isn't unique to George Lucas. Sequels to creative works you unconditionally love will tend to suck.
Especially with speculative / escapist fiction -- part of the appeal of which is (I assume) that the "world" presented is self-contained, and the (usually young) reader can comprehend it in its totality. Unlike the all-too-confusing real world.
...that they changed it from "Revenge of the Jedi" because the upcoming Star Trek movie had the working title "The Vengeance of Khan" (Trek 2 - one of the even #'s, yay!)... The Trek people changed it to the ever cheesy "Wrath of Khan" and the Star Wars folks decided at the last minute that "Revenge" wasn't a suitable business for a Jedi to be getting mixed up in.
Or at least that's what I read in one of Shatner's "memoir" books... god only knows why I voluntarily READ that trash, one never knows how much is true and how much is 110% "Billshit"...
--=Major
One useless man is called a disgrace; two are called a law firm; and three or more become a Congress. -John Adams, 1776
> Harlan Ellison's was the sole, lonely critical voice to be raised against it, and even in his case his point wasn't so much that it sucked, but just that it wasn't quite as good as everyone else was saying.
I saw it at college age. I was disappointed because it was space opera rather than "hard" scifi of the 2001 variety. But at least it was fun. I've rented it several times, and I'll rent it again someday.
That Pathetic Movie wasn't fun, and I certainly won't be renting it.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Beware all ye who would criticize the genius of Lucas, for is it not written in the revised, updated and George (dubya) Bush approved version of The Constitution of the United States of the Multinational Corporations (now available as an Adobe(R)(TM)(C)All Rights Reserved E-book for $19.99 per view, order today! Operators are standing by!) In article I section 1 that George Lucas is hereby declared the greatest storyteller of all time and all law abiding and Bill Gates fearing citizens are required to pay homage to him by seeing any and all movies with the name Star Wars multiple times and by further paying homage by standing in ridiculously long lines at the local Wal-Mart to purchase dozens of non-biodegradable plastic toys for the betterment of our young(isn't it grand of us to think of the children?).
Yea and those who dare not to venerate the name of Lucas and pay the required homage shall be stricken from the rolls of the nation. They will be outcasts in their own land of birth. Denied bland conversation with their fellow citizens about the masterworks of Lucas, they will wallow in their anguish. They shall be stricken from the lists of people to be protected in time of war and their names will be added to the lists of those who will not recieve the bounty of this great land in the form of Blue Light specials and the occasional Buy one Get one FREE sales at the local Piggly Wiggly. They shall be stricken from the rolls of every good and beneficient policy this great conglomerate bestows upon it's consumers. Moreover their name shall be dupliated in all databases related to taxation and if they ever contest this clause, they are subject to auditing by the BSA, RIAA, MPAA and Rectal-Probers-R-Us.
So let it be written(in tiny print behind an encryption scheme which may not be broken under article two of this constitution, formerly known as the DMCA) so let it be done.
Now if you missed this update to the supreme law of our land, that isn't my fault. I suggest you rush right out to your computer and fully enable all the update packages you can and register any and all software you have. I got this preview of our new constitution as a bonus when I downloaded the latest version of Minsweeper, the official game of the land. Baseball isn't bringing in enough money it seems.
Steven
-- I have marked myself unwilling to moderate-- I don't have other accounts to artificially inflate the karma of
Say it ain't so, George!
That does sound better, but as someone else pointed out, the title would then become:
Star Wars: The Clone Wars
That sounds dumb.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
Go back and watch the asteroid scenes in ESB. What was that? I'll tell you: it was every hackneyed car chase scene ever filmed, except this time with space ships. It didn't have to be deep, it just had to be incredibly cool. And it is.
Not to give anything away, but from what I've heard, we get to see Anakin learn the long-distance choke thing, which he spends the last fifteen minutes of the movie practising on Jar Jar...
--
THE GOOD HUMOR MAN CAN ONLY BE PUSHED SO FAR
Bart Simpson on chalkboard in episode 2F18
Not that I'm ragging on the choice of topic here, but I'm genuinely curious: Do adults (>=16 yrs) really care about the Star Wars franchise? I would think that Star Wars as it has become wouldn't be of any more interest than Pokemon here.
Do people who enjoyed George Lucas' original trilogy (well, minus the last half of RotJ) really care about the George Lucas' current focus on ten-year-olds?
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
but Blue Harvest was already used....
Most importantly is that we all have to remember that the new movies will never live up to our ideas of the old movies. Most of us were 10 or under when we first saw and we didn't question the motivations in the movies or their titles. I'm sure that most kids are going to take "Attack of the Clones" in stride and not question it...
In one regard, I wish I could still think like that, and not have the need to think like an adult. The price we pay for growing up, I guess.
Now, after typing about this, I'm really starting to like the name...guess we'll just have to wait till May...
How many freaking "Send in the Clones" jokes do I have to read? IT'S BEEN DONE! READ THE THREAD BEFORE YOU POST! Gaaack!
Of course, someone else has probably already posted this sentiment by now...
Has anyone ever seen a Sci-Fi movie about cloning that did not portray them as evil or used for evil purposes? How much do you want to bet the clones in this movie are absolute evil and are fighting versus a cast of lovable, fluffy, obnoxious absolute good characters. Of course the bet is moot since I for one will not be watching this tripe nor giving Lucas one more cent.
Well, just remember... you can never go home again...
The high will never be as good as the first time, no matter how much you do...
and it'll never be 1977 again, with your easily impressioned pre-teen brain being permanently changed by every laser blast... feeling pure joy at every slash of a light saber...
It's for your kids. Stop complaining and let them enjoy it.
Lucas will be sued by God with penalties of 10 years in jail, a $5,000,000 fine or both. However a plea bargain may be possible if Lucas agrees to please kill off Jar Jar.
The Phantom Menace
Attack of the Clones
???
A New Hope
The Empire Strikes Back
Return of the Jedi
They're all silly unless you've been conditioned as a child to think they're all amazingly cool. Fortunately, I have. :-)
sig fault
A New Hope is loosely (and admittedly) based on The Hidden Fortress. Given that Lucas was good friends with Joseph Campbell, the man who wrote The Hero With A Thousand Faces (and rumors I've seen around that Campbell actually consulted on the film), I certainly don't fault Lucas for using existing source material. Hell, Twelfth Night and Romeo and Juliet were both pre-existing stories when Shakespeare wrote his own versions...
People have been borrowing stories from each other for a long, long time--I don't think The Magnificent Seven is any less of a movie simply because it's Seven Samurai set in the old west. And I always laugh my ass off at Strange Brew despite it's ties to Hamlet.
In all honesty, anyone could apply a rehash of the Lancelot/Galahad tale (where a father falls and a son redeems) to practically any situation. It's all in the telling of it.
I can nary think of any piece of JMS dialogue that doesn't sound like it was written by a erudite speechwriter. The man has some plotting skills, but he can't compete with Joss Whedon, Kevin Smith, nor Quentin Tarantino (What's he been doing lately??) for realistic dialogue and character.
"My God...It's full of ads!" -Fry, about the Internet, Futurama
Recap:
3PO: anthropomorphic robot, comical
Chewbacca: unintelligible, cool alien, badass cool character
Jar Jar: unintelligible, annoying as shit
Due to now being an uncle I saw the re-releases of the first 3 movies a few years ago, and they hold up pretty well, allowing for the shrinkage of theater screens and auditoriums in the interim. Then my nephew and I went to see Phantom Menace. He liked Jar-Jar just fine. I wanted to see Darth Maul grab his tongue and garrotte him with it. Slowly.
Jar-Jar aside, Phantom Menace was the quality I'd expect from a movie made by the same person that made the 1977 movie, but if he'd made it 25 years earlier, not 25 years later.
How old you were when you first saw any of the movies has nothing to do with the shortcomings of Phantom Menace.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Right... society will accept that right after they accept that one identical twin has no rights and the other does. After all, one is just the clone of the other. I would hope they'd have the decency to at least let twin #1 be the master of slave twin #2. You'd hate to sepatate siblings. :)
Lucas was a devotee of Joseph Campbell, the late comparative mythologist, and he used Campbell's work as a paint-by-number set for generating the plot of the first movie, by his own admission even if not in so many words. (By "first movie" I mean the first one that was actually made, now called Episode 4 but originally called just "Star Wars".) It's filled with motifs we expect to see in great stories, so our minds naturally associate it with being a great story. Aided by the admittedly competent cinematography, we are presented with the semblence or illusion of a good movie. This blinds us to the plot holes, the shallow characterization, the cliched dialog, and the shoddy acting that it typical of the series.
Plot Holes: Try, for example, to reconcile the timeline of ANH with what is now known to be required for even the beginning of Jedi training. Luke can't have had time to learn much on Tattooine, and he only has the time during the trip to Aldaraan for serious instruction. How long does this take? There's nothing in the movie to suggest that more than a day or two passes in transit, possibly less. And Luke's starting out as a teenager, when even Anakin at 8 (or is it 10? I forget) is thought by Yoda to be too old to begin.
Shallow Characterization: All the characters are very close to their archetypes. There are many assumptions we therefore automatically make about them, and Lucas doesn't have to do very much work at all to make them "pass" for deep ones. And he doesn't.
Cliched Dialog:"I can't believe he's gone." (Luke about Obi-Wan. He'd known him, what, a week or less?) "Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid." (Han about the Jedi. Substitute the appropriate weaponry and it could have come from a spaghetti western.) "The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers." (Leia to Tarkin. How many times has the plucky revolutionary said something similar to the dictator in numerous other settings?) Et cetera.
Shoddy acting: Alec Guinness' opinions on this are well known, but even so he and the other few competent actors deliver even the most hideously bad lines in a credible manner. Unfortunately, they don't have enough screen time to make much of a difference. Seen Mark Hamill in anything lately? There's a reason for that. He was bad enough in ANH, but he really showed he didn't have it in RoJ. When he tries to sound mystical he sounds stoned. For serenity we get vacancy. Instead of firm resolve we get a sort of vague assurance. Man he was bad. Carrie Fisher wasn't much better in the first movie, but at least she improved in the craft after a few years. Harrison Ford might have been good enough, but he failed to rise to the level of genius it would have taken to break Han out of the "rogue with a good heart underneath it all" mold.
If after thinking about it all in these terms I had any doubt about the quality of the story, I simply have to think about TPM. If Lucas ever had it, he's lost it. There just isn't any enthusiasm left any more. He should have been thinking of the people who'd been waiting almost 20 years for that film, not the 10 year olds the promotional tie-ins were designed for.
Or maybe he was, and this was the best he could do. Oh well. It could have been a lot better.
And the brethren went away edified.
If I ever got 5 minutes with George Lucas -- I would spend the first minute letting him read this comment and then say -- "George this is how we all feel..." -- But anybody who remembers the Ewoks smashing Stormtroopers in ROTJ had to see this coming....I mean hell even Jar Jar aint so bad when you figure the Ewoks paved the way for him.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
Boo hoo, my submission wasn't posted and now I can't brag to my moth^H^H^H^Hfriends about how my story was posted on slashdot.