Slashdot Mirror
Footage From Star Wars: Episode III
An anonymous reader writes "Leaked footage of Star Wars: Episode III is now online! Included in the 2-minute and 37-second clip are shots of the Australian set, George Lucas behind the camera, Chewbacca looking cooler than ever, and even a quick peek at Hayden Christensen (in Vader get-up!) and Ewan McGregor duking it out, all being played to AC/DC's 'Back in Black.' I've downloaded it, but am undecided as if I should watch it or not, lest it spoil something (here's hoping that it's good)."
There really aren't any spoilers in the clip. Most of it is just people fighting in front of a green screen; no produced shots at all, just actors dancing around in a studio, usually not even in costume. It barely even shows Chewy. If you're looking for a reason not to watch this, do so because the video is choppy and low quality (camcorder pointed at a monitor) and hard to watch.
Here's a Bittorrent: http://blat.info/torrent/
Some enterprising souls have already jammed this thing into After Effects and applied their own lightsabre effects and lava-planet backgrounds. Pretty cool. There are some great discussions of this over at www.theforce.net.
Kip Hawley is an idiot.
If it gets slashdotted and you are really wondering if you have missed something don't worry about it.
Somebody put a small video camera in front of a TV showing some video of the film development from about 4-8 feet away. I wonder if they where worried someone would come in and catch them doing it.
There definitely doesn't seem to be any spoilage. Everything that could be given away in this (very poor quality) video clip is given away buy the description of this story!
http://66.79.177.160/~suprnova//torrents/1032/epii i-leaked-avi.torrent
seems to be working
And by downloading it you're breaking the law?
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George W. Bush in 2004!
I've seen it, and it's not a spoiler, or a leaked workprint clip as you might be led to believe. Rather, it's just a bad cam of one of those Behind The Scenes things they show on E! and whatnot.
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Power to the Peaceful
The quicktime video is at http://www.movieweb.com/media/news/01_04/e3low.mov .
I'm getting 4kBytes/sec with wget.
Actually, a few of these questions have been answered in the books.
Anakin really becomes Vader-Vader after falling in a Lava pit while fighting a worm not unlike the sandworms of Arrakis. He survives, but needs the black suit to survive.
Padme goes into hiding after seeing that Anakin goes over to the dark side. She never tells him that she had kids.
Palpatine has a military coup, the final bit of which is seen in eps 4 with the dissolving of the senate.
The Jedi are hunted down by bounty hunters like Fett, along with Darth Vader and some other force-users that the books allude to.
A few Jedi survive in out of the way places, some of them turn up in the books. (One teaches Kip Durron a bit in the mines of Kessel, another guards a cache of lightsabers on an old library planet that's name eludes me.)
The longer it's been since the Jedi has died, the harder it is to come back. Even Obiwan stops appearing to Luke after a decade or two.
"For years, I struggled with reality... but I'm happy to say I finally won out over it." -- Elwood P. Dowd
It was a shoddily-written piece of shit that shamelessly copied from other, better Trek films. The plot made absolutely no sense. Go here for a nice, pictorial plot analysis.
Here's a mirror. Get it while they'res still bandwidth: e3low.mov
For those that don't want to bother with bittorrent here's a link to my server.
Do your fucking worst!
Here it is
share with your friends, whatever. I've got 1TB xfer/month and January's almost over!
And here's the text
TFN's Episode 3 Review
A fictional work by Joshua Griffin
would be dated April 2005
Finally there's a prequel to be proud of. Not that the others have been all that bad - they just haven't been able to cast the same spell over fans that the originals had back in the 70s. We argued that Episode 1 was misunderstood, that Episode 2 was a step in the right direction and prayed for Episode 3 to deliver.
And man does it deliver.
I'm just returning from something Lucasfilm has never done before and quite frankly something I never thought they would do. Although there is still a month before the release of the film worldwide, they showed a select group of people the movie. It wasn't finished, mind you - as always Lucas tinkers until the end. There was one minor scene still incomplete with bluescreen he filmed just the week before our showing. But even in it's nearly finished form you can see the soul of Star Wars in this one.
There are plenty of special effects in this movie - I think at last count they were approaching 2,200. But the driving force of the story captivates like the classics. For the first time we see Anakin's fall from glory to become the evil Darth Vader. You can hardly believe what he'll do even to those he loves after his Dark Side embrace. Any momentum from the prequels and anticipation from the classics lives out on screen here aggressively.
Returning cast for the final theatrical Star Wars movie include Ewan McGregor (Obi-Wan Kenobi), Hayden Christensen (Anakin Skywalker), Natalie Portman (Padme Skywalker), Ian McDiarmid (Palpatine), Samuel L. Jackson (Mace Windu), Robert Coleman/Frank Oz (Yoda), Jimmy Smits (Bail Organa), and Christopher Lee (Count Dooku). Joining the prequel veterans in the last installment are notables Peter Mayhew (Chewbacca), ILM (General Grievous) Wayne Pygram (Tarkin).
The movie starts with a bang - we're in the middle of a giant space battle - the climax of the Clone Wars. When I was a kid I imagined how this would play out, and this exceeds even those expectations. There's the epic capital ship battles moving in side by side like pirate vessels maneuvering for strategic position on each other, while intimate skirmishes that will define the outcome of the war take place nearby. As these huge ships rip apart you see clones being sucked out into space to their doom.
Palpatine is shackled to a solitary chair inside one of these weapons of war, a fully ironic and iconic image since it is he that has orchestrated these very events frozen in the starfield behind him. You can tell from these early moments several key elements are at last coming together. Lucas' Episode I introduction of characters and Episode 2 development of the plot are mere footnotes to the script and acting of this final film. We are on a whole new level of Star Wars here.
I remember the first time I watched Hayden Christensen as Anakin Skywalker in Episode II. I felt he was a bit stiff and wooden like the others, but after watching Episode III I think I understand it better. He is cocky - full of pride as Yoda predicted - and it would eventually be his downfall. You can see it as he slices through separatist forces or flies his Starfighter and it peaks as he's saving a huge cruiser from destruction over Corusant. Even as they hang on for dear life as the ship careens in circles you can see him slipping deeper and deeper into pure evil.
Portman returns to the film a bit later than expected, and this time also delivers her best performance of the prequels. Yoda is amazing yet again - you'll see him do more than you ever imagined again this time, and Ewan McGregor still shines as the venerable and protective Obi-Wan. There's a new and temporary villain named General Grievous, another disposable bad guy in the prequel tradition of Maul and Dooku. But he's a fantastic character with lots of lightsabers and exciting moments. Another part of his defense is that he is central to the plot of the film - think of him as
.sig
I thought Yoda was Frank Oz (aka "Fozzy Bear", et al).
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
I'd just like to back up the above comment with some figures: here is the IMDb's all-time top grossing movies. Episodes I and II are placed 3rd and 19th respectively. I don't think these numbers include merchandising profits either.
qntm.org
i think lucas has pretty well said that the books aren't influencing his writing of these movies at all.
shame, really.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
There's a HTTP mirror working quite fast for me here
Actually, more people remember that than remember that it wasn't exactly his movie; unlike Star Wars, Indiana Jones, American Graffiti, THX 1138 and Willow, which were all his creations, Howard the Duck was based on a Marvel Comics character, and it was both written and directed by other people (longtime Lucas associates Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, to be specific; Huyck directed, Katz produced, and they co-wrote it together, so the couple - they're married - are pretty much responsible for Howard as a film. Lucas was incidental).
I personally think Lucas' creativity took a turn for the worse around 1993. His works prior to that were mostly fine, with several excellent works; his worst works (of his own creation, as opposed to the various movies he executive-produced for other filmmakers) from before the early '90s are probably Willow and the made-for-TV Ewok movies, and even those were Ok for what they were meant to be. After 1993, though, he brought us Radioland Murders and the Star Wars prequels and special editions. I think most of us would agree all those efforts are at least fairly flawed, and perhaps worse. I'm personally inclined to attribute the fact there may be anything worthwhile in any of them to all of them having been at least "on the drawing board" since before '93 or so, when he was still having good ideas.
In other words, yeah, I'm afraid he's not quite what he was (and I hate to say it; I grew up a pretty serious Lucasfilm geek), but I wouldn't pin his decline as far back as '86 just because of Howard. That was just one movie out of a bunch he served as executive producer on, usually for friends or other filmmakers he admired or wanted to help out, and many of those other movies are quite worthwhile (Kagemusha, Body Heat, Twice Upon a Time, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, Latino, Labyrinth, Tucker: The Man and His Dream), and include movies made concurrently with or following Howard the Duck.
http://severdia.com/ Click on the "Star Wars 3" link or the Vader head. . .
http://www.kontentdesign.com/