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Revenge of the Sith TV Spots Revealed
Bobert@flixnjoystix.com writes "StarWars.com has unveiled three TV spots for STAR WARS: EPISODE III: REVENGE OF THE SITH!" The three spots are shorter than the longer trailer that has been seen earlier, and a little bit more pop action than the dark trailer that gave me hope. Anyway, here is Spot 1,
Spot 2, and
Spot 3.
A little more pop action? Gave you hope? *Sob!* "But I love her sooo much". Seriously. Starwars has been moving more and more to a TV soap opera type thing for a while now using tired old tools many of which have been borrowed from other films of the past. Yoda hanging on to a ledge? This seems to be a common theme in Star Wars films and perhaps action films of all kinds. Remember the quote from another geek fav? Run you fools!. Slapstick comments from C3PO and the scream of R2D2 are just stereotyped now. And the use of this particular narrator for the TV spots is just silly. Seems a little soft, like they got the narrator for a feel good Disney movie to appeal to the kiddies. I expect if I saw the film, one might find many other completely cheesy references and pop culture call outs like explaining away the Force by invoking pop culture understanding of molecular biology. That was weak as can be and completely ruined the magic of having Sir Alec Guiness explain the Force as "It's an energy that surrounds all living things.. The best films create an atmosphere that allows you to populate many of the questions with your own imagination rather than spelling everything out.
f fe cts/costume.
Don't get me wrong. I loved the first two Star Wars films.... well A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back, but it started falling off for me with Revenge....whoops, Return of the Jedi. The next two had me shaking my head in disbelief. How could they go so wrong? What happened? Ewoks and Jar Jar and lightly veiled racism combined with poor dialogue. Yeah, the modelers at ILM are still some of the coolest, the animation is fabulous, John Williams is John Williams, but as a franchise, Star Wars has lost that magic for me........
For any aspiring film directors out there, please use the following guidelines as listed in order of importance.
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Pity me....
"...and a little bit more pop action than the dark trailer that gave me hope"
:)
So should we be calling Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, "A New Hope"?
First one
Second one
Third one
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
Well, since these trailers are available on starwars.com, I guess I have no reason to watch The O.C. anymore...
One man's Funny is another man's Offtopic.
These 30-second trailers will be more fulfilling than the last two months of movie releases.
Geek Of The Day, "A geeky place for geeky faces."
Looks cool, but I could have done without the annoying auto-resizing of Firefox...
Hokey statistics and ancient misconceptions are no match for a good thought in your head, kid!
Show all the CGI in the trailers you want, doesn't make it a good film... You notice how the original star wars trailers talk about an experience where as these new ones talk about emotions that morons will find appealing (e.g. how cool is it to blow stuff up!)
Lets hope this one will be better than it looks.
But if this one is bad, luckily there is always A New Hope.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
I completed the book the other night and it was pretty good. It ties up all of the loose ends that I could think of. Yes there is some pop culture, and yes Jar-Jar is there albeit briefly. Have fun, enjoy the movies, think of yourself as 5 again, and not as a critical 30 year old, and the movies will be much better.
But again, the book was worth reading and talks about a lot of interesting topics that can't be covered withing the confining medium of cinema.
GeneralKael -- Slacker Extraordinaire
We should start right now with an innovative grassroots effort to keep Paramount from cancelling the series.
I can't wait to see what happens after Revenge of the Sith.
sigs, as if you care.
How about "What I like about you" or "I want candy" playing in the background like every other trailer. Can somebody please "mash" that up, post it, and then boing boing can blog about it.
Mod parent down -1 big fat lie. ILM's render farm consists entirely of Renderman, CompTime and Sabre (all closed source) running on a room full of SGI Origin servers. The only Lunix they use is on workstations running CompTime, and those are being pulled out in favor of Power Mac G5s. The Lunix boxen are just too fucking hard to support.
When does this game come out and what are the system requirements?
telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl
"I've got a bad feeling about this."
Pubcrawler.ca
.
OMFG if episode 3 doesn't live up to my ultra critical, obsessive standards I'm going to kill myself!!!
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Looks like they watched the HHGTTG trailer and followed the guide entry on how to make a movie trailer. The deep voice seems like a characture of itself somehoe.
Missed the women in bikini's but really delivered on the explosions.
Missed the women in bikini's but really delivered on the explosions.
They didn't want to spoil the surprise for the viewing public when Lucas puts squid into bikinis and has them do an ester williams routine.
"Weapons should be hardy rather than decorative" - Miyamoto Musashi
I think that goes for OS's too
...so it'll be over and there will be no more articles about it on Slashdot.
Well, based on the fact that virtually all of the Jedi are wiped out by the time of A New Hope, you ought to expect a lot of lightsaber action in the movie. Really, aside from the audio of the annoying announcer whose voice was way too happy for what was going on in the video, it's still a set of pretty dark TV spots. [I think at this point still] Chancellor Palpatine flies out of his chair with a lightsaber at the number-two Jedi for crying out loud.
That, and we see Star Destroyers. That gives me hope. My only concern is that I don't know if the movie starts with a mood-setting Star Destroyer passing over the camera. Really, judging by the past, we have a pattern. Star Wars movies opening with Star Destroyers: good; Star Wars movies opening without Star Destroyers: bad.
Best Star Wars trailer ever
...does Senator Palpatine turn out to be Darth Sidious? Does he? Damn, I bet he does. You guys just wait! You'll be saying you heard it here first, mark my words...
Breakfast served all day!
OMG, seeing Yoda hanging on to a cliff makes me want to see the movie now. How will the show continue if he dies ? *sobs*
University of Washington
Student
if you watch with a five-year old's mindset. I do watch them all the time with my five-year old, and while "we" like all of them, we like episode 6 best (I always hated those stuffed animals, but he loves them, and now I don'd really mind). And 1 and 2 are pretty cool -- we usually skip to the battle scenes in 2, which are really amazing. And, by the way, 4 is pretty lame, with lots of not-so-dramatic action.
By the way, Jar Jar is pretty funny, too.
It might be good. I hope it's good. Here's been my impression of the last few films: Ep. 1) Mostly shit. Pod race was neat. Ep. 2) Started out crappy, but got better towards the end (except that stupid romantic scene). The end, with all the Star Destroyers taking off, Palpatine looking evil, and the legions of storm troopers marching into ships was just plain f*cking awsome. Ep. 3) If the trend continues (gradual improvement), this should be sweet. We got Vader, we got dark Palpatine, we got the eradication of the Jedi we've been hearing so much about, and there should be precious few crappy love scenes.
The funny part of your diatribe is when you state "like they got the narrator for a feel good Disney movie to appeal to the kiddies." Hello! From the beginning this was a film for the kiddies. Note the PG rating. Until now its been PG all the way.
Back in 1977 I was 12 years old and what really got me excited about the film was a TV ad like one of these with a similar friendly announcer that was shown the Saturday of the opening weekend. We saw the film that afternoon.
I am now dating a woman who is 25 and had never seen any of the films. So this past week we watched all 5. Everyone has their favorites and they also have bits that they hate about the different films. Here are some interesting comments she made: She liked the Ewoks, she even liked Phantom Menace. Upon watching it with her and explaining what was going on I realized I like the structure of Phantom Menace and the part of the story that is told in it. I also realized that the "veiled racism" is really just coloring viewers add - there is nothing overtly racist in it. Its a real stretch to claim the characters *represent* real world cultures. The biggest problems with Phantom Menace are the dialog which isn't punchy enough and the acting which I think lacks the proper reaction because you have actors in green rooms talking to thin air - that type of acting will progress over time but I think classically trained actors are used to reacting to something they can see.
The 5th movie is a blast. It is a lot of fun and there is a lot of action. The dialog is much better and the acting is a lot better. Hayden Christensen actually does a decent job with the script and I think the main issue is not his acting range (which should improve over time) but the script itself. He does emote frustration, anger, happiness, joy, brooding, etc. The script itself could probably tighten up the transitions though and it doesn't.
Even with that said, episode II moves along a lot faster and doesn't have some of the more difficult plot complications of Episode I. When you look at a book like Dune you see an interesting and complex interconnection of science and mysticism. We have that here too in the Star Wars saga. One thing stands in contrast though - Frank Hurbert can include appendixes and go on for several pages about the subtlties of these concepts. In a 2 hour movie Lucas can at best hope to give us a hint of what he means. Things like the symbiosis of the Midi-chlorians and the immaculate conception of Anakin are difficult enough to explain on paper let alone in 15 seconds on film. In going over the additional information available from the official sites it becomes more clear what Lucas means when he inserts this stuff. It is a question for film makers: how do you do it differently without affecting the tone of the story or slowing it to a crawl while you lecture?
Lucas was inspried a bit by watching Japanese films. He enjoyed them without having to fully understand them. In those films the Japanese don't explain everything about their culture (actually quite the opposite they explain nothing) and its up to the viewer to interpret or just accept and move on. The problem initially I had with the Imaculate Conception of Anakin is its too close to Christian beliefs about The Christ. The Will of the Force thus becomes an intelligence and one that is all pervasive much like God. Its hard to escape that conclusion. The problem with the alegory is that Anakin isn't Jesus but a person who has a hard life, becomes corrupted into a force of Evil and 25-30 years later finds partial redemption and perhaps does bring balance to the Force by getting rid of the Sith Master.
I am looking forward to this 6th installment of the series. Mainly because it wraps things up. In many ways the story is already well known. We know all the roads that get to here.
"It's dead, Ji...". OOPS, wrong story. Sorry.
That is all.
There was a scientific american article some years back about Murphy's law. The article was trying to prove that Murphy's law was a universal constant and was using the fact that bread always landed butter side down as the start of its proof. in order to prove this, the writers went into a great deal of detail about rotational speed of toast falling off a table, the range of table heights that were required for a 180 degree turn of the bread, and the beings that might sit at such a table.
= A3B20D65-8339-4260-A5D1-4E6E083116A&methodnameCHAR =&interfacenameCHAR=browse.cfm&ISSUEID_CHAR=C2A9E0 84-7CAA-4ABC-9BAE-BF9C44829FB&ArticleTypeSubInclud e_BIT=0&sequencenameCHAR=itemP
The end result of the article was a proof that the maximum height of a bipedal being, (one that would not crack its skull and die every time it fell over,) was about 9'8", and such a being would use a table that was of a height that fit into the previously described range, therefore Murphy's law, (as it applied to bread landing butter side down,) was in fact a universal truth.
I think the article was printed around '95 so you have to buy the archive... http://www.sciamdigital.com/browse.cfm?ITEMIDCHAR
(for those who read this far, it wasa joke...)
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)
Yes, and deliberately so. That's what Lucas was trying to do was to return to the form of the old film serials of the past, and to use the usual Campbell Myth plots to tell that story. Of course this stuff is familiar -- it's meant to be!
SF can be innovate in writing, but only when doing something innovate in design. When you deliberately set out to resurrect the cheesey serials, you get high cheese factor as a matter of course. As for getting away from the High Quest themes, good luck buddy. Ain't nothing new there since Homer. Good writing or bad writing, all stories are going to revolve around a handful of plot archetypes.
"But the CGI was frelling fantastic."
Yes, it was frelling, but it wasn't fantastic.
Myself and quite a few other professional 3d artists have NOT been impressed by the CG in this movie. Not only is the color palette nauseating, but the effect is far from realistic. It's a step BACKWARDS from Episode I. The space scenes in particular... blerg.
Believe me, we've nitpicked the shit out of EpIII. Hehe.
"Derp de derp."