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The Definitive Evisceration of The Phantom Menace *NSFW*
cowmix writes "When TPM came out ten years ago, its utter crappiness shocked me to the core and wounded a entire generation of geeks. My inner child had been abused and betrayed. I moped around, talking to no one, for almost two weeks. I couldn't bring myself to see #2 or #3, whatever they were called. Now, a decade later, comes Star Wars: The Phantom Menace Review, the ultimate, seven-part, seventy minute analysis of this mother of all train wrecks. Not only does it nail how the film blows, but tells us why. Time, apparently, does not heal all wounds." Or, if you prefer all 7 parts embedded in one page, you can check out slashfilm's aggregation.
The real problem is that George Lucas wrote it. As a generic sort of idea man, Lucas is great, but the more involved he is in the film, the worse it gets. The reason The Empire Strikes Back is probably the best of the bunch is because Lucas was at his most distant from the whole process.
Frankly, the prequels were a letdown. Episode III is clearly the best, but that's pretty relative. It still sucks a lot more than even the most dismal of the original trilogy; Episode VI, but compared to TPM and Attack of the Clones (I mean, that really is a retarded name), it's a brilliant film.
Lucas seems to have a hard time building any kind of dramatic tension. In place of a decent script and dialogue, he puts in ever more insanely huge spectacles. In Episode III, for instance, instead of a battle between Anakin and Obiwan around a lava crater (as was originally expounded in the book for Episode IV, Lucas, who seems incapable of writing the kind of chilling dialogue that would go on between a former master and pupil and friend, replaces it with a WHOLE MOLTEN PLANET. I mean, it's eyecandy to be sure, but every time I watch those scenes, I feel like I was robbed of what could have been an extraordinarily dramatic moment.
TPM lacks any kind of useful dramatic device. It holds the worst aspects of Lucas's filmmaking, with little or nothing of some of the better aspects of the franchise.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Apparently so did the rest of the world, and they seem to have taken it out on SGI. Poor SGI... it wasn't their fault!
SGI didn't fall from glory because of a three-coiled Lucas-branded turd. It failed because it made repeated strategic mistakes in the market. When 3D hit the desktop, they sat there watching people build clusters out of gaming consoles and making boards out of commodity components -- management was convinced it wasn't a threat. Then they made several attempts to change platforms to various Intel chips, and released Linux workstations. People didn't take them seriously after that (Yes, I am saying on slashdot that using Linux was a strategic mistake). They were nearly dead, delisted from the NYC, shareholders demanding they fold -- when they finally reversed course, hired a crisis team, and assessed the damage. But it was too late -- the economy didn't allow for a recovery, and the vulnerable shell of SGI was bought out, and its brand identity assumed by a company specializing in rackmount servers.
SGI died because management lost focus, got complacent, and fried like an egg in a frying pan in the recession. Besides, Hollywood was never SGI's main market -- it was the government and scientific institutions. For every CG animation you see, there's ten weather modeling simulations, and other massively-parallel graphic-intensive processes.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
People keep saying this, and I really don't agree. The prequels could have been good movies (not necessarily great, but at least good, on par with the originals which were also not great), had Lucas simply relinquished the script-writing and directorial duties to some talented people. With a movie with that kind of budget, it shouldn't have been hard to find some good writers and a director to take these roles. Lucas could have instead stuck with being "creative director" or somesuch, and come up with ideas and drawings for aliens and ships and such, which is what he's actually good at. Instead, Lucas with his giant ego insisted on doing it all himself, and it came out as a steaming pile of shit.
If he had done this, we'd have had some decent movies at least, and while some people would certainly have complained, it wouldn't be anywhere near what we see now with just about everyone over the age of 13 saying these movies suck ass.
...but I remember the hype and feelings of expectation my friends and I had about it. We paid full price for "Meet Joe Black" just to see the TPM trailer, then left immediately afterward. There were a lot of other people doing the same thing, to the point everyone was laughing and the ushers were promising the trailer would run again after the movie if everyone stayed.
After we left, we went to have dinner and talked endlessly, dissecting every second of the trailer at length, imagining what the plot would be, how they would eventually get to "New Hope", and then after dinner we went to an arcade and played video games.
I don't care a whit about the actual movie, but for me it'll always be about that evening with friends in New York and how much fun we had in total geek mode. Sadly, I can't say I've had a repeat of that experience since. So for that evening alone, I'll still say thanks to Lucas for making the movie in the first place. But, yeah, the movie itself sucked.
I've always wondered why more people can't subscribe to the notion that midichlorians don't cause the Force, they're drawn to the force. Like if someone had control over magnetism, you'd expect to find lots of iron on him... that doesn't mean that that iron caused the magnetism
I thought Episode III was good for precisely this reason: it's about a good person who turns evil for the right reasons. I and II I agree were just...eh. It's actually my favorite episode of the whole series, possibly second to the empire strikes back.
In all honesty though, all six of the Star Wars episodes (not to mention the extended mythos) is tacky science fiction with aliens being guys with masks on and a very black-and-white simplistic morality, and I chalk up most of the hate I-III get to when-I-was-your-age-movies-were-good nostalgia. That said, i didn't like them either;)
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
Wasn't that supposed to be Ewan McGregor's Obi-Wan?
I think Lucas wanted Obi-Wan to be that character, but the problem is that the Jedi are just not likable. They're all completely wooden and walk around like they have sticks up their ass. The prequels needed a rebel, and simply casting a cool actor to play a stuffy Jedi role doesn't magically turn that stuffy Jedi into a rebel.
Realistically, the one who had the most potential to become the cool likable character was Qui-Gon. So Lucas did nothing to flesh out the character, and killed him off in the first movie. Brilliant.
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
That is very true. Take the movie Jaws. The whole reason the first movie had so much suspense was that the animatronic shark wasn't working right, so they had to shoot the movie without it. If it had worked, then we would have gotten a much worse movie. The limitations forced Jaws to become clever in an attempt to scare people, and it worked.
who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain