Topic: Episode III

Revenge of the Sith.

Yeah. So, that happened. We got our prequel trilogy, guys. How was it for you?

I think, you and us, we're on the same page. We're kinda okay with this one, after what I and II did to us. That being said, god damn it.

Also, check the blog for Dorkman's take on how this whole black parade should have gone. (Trust me, you'll dig this.)

Teague Chrystie

I have a tendency to fix your typos.

Thumbs up Thumbs down

Re: Episode III

Sweet! I thought we would have to wait until christmas to finally get this gem! and speaking of which, i have my DiF hoodie arriving in time for christmas.

Thumbs up Thumbs down

Re: Episode III

Awesome, sir. Hope you like it.

Teague Chrystie

I have a tendency to fix your typos.

Thumbs up Thumbs down

Re: Episode III

Great episode. I especially liked the "Darth... e.. STAPLER!" part of it. Great fun indeed.

I think you guys should do the OT though. Maybe then it'd be less bashing, and more loving instead. For once. wink

Thumbs up Thumbs down

Re: Episode III

But where is the fun in a giant love fest? Well maybe once the guys get a girl on the show, then we'll talk. But I want to see heads bashed in!!

Well more specifically it's really the head bash episodes that teach me more. I mean yah you can learn from the love fests but I learn a hulluva lot more from the guys convos over why a film DIDN'T work. That being said, I learned A HELLUVA lot on this episode. Great job guys, loved it.

ZangrethorDigital.ca

Re: Episode III

I agree, but sometimes it's nice to hear why a film did work too tongue

Thumbs up Thumbs down

Re: Episode III

Fair enough, I still prefer head bashing episodes.

Anyways, I was watching Sith again...I'm a glutton for pain what can I say...and specifically I was looking at the Grevious fight, and maybe I'm just imagining it but when Obi Wan goes into to stop the Quadruple Blender of Death he stabs like right in the middle and if you look at Grevious he kinda seems to stop and meet him at that point. So it's not so much of a Obi Wan throwing a blade in there and it stopped, but that Grevious was wanting the fight to continue.

I'm not trying to defend it, far from it. I'm just try to rack my brain to figure out if that is even whats going on. Why?!?

It's just a weird little thing I noticed, and since you guys were going off on it so much.

Last edited by BigDamnArtist (2009-12-01 18:03:39)

ZangrethorDigital.ca

Re: Episode III

I found this neat little article from a few years back as  I was "stumbleupon-ing" my way through the net. Since you guys were really talking about the whole idea that the prequels should change the way we see the originals. This guy takes what you guys were joking about and turns it into a really serious breakdown of it. It's a really cool way he looks at it.

http://www.morningstar.nildram.co.uk/A_New_Sith.html

ZangrethorDigital.ca

Re: Episode III

Wow, cool. Thanks for the link.

Teague Chrystie

I have a tendency to fix your typos.

Thumbs up Thumbs down

Re: Episode III

All I can say is Ep.1-3 never happened.  Now yes give or take that some of them have there perks but really.  The OT is where its at.. i mean come on a girl in a gold metal bikini that is being held by a giant worm, that is pretty f-ing cool.

Thumbs up Thumbs down

Re: Episode III

PunBB bbcode test

Re: Episode III

Well finally listening all of the STAR WARS commentaries I must tell a small story.

Being born in 1986 I haven't been around for the original trilogy. At least when it came out to theaters. I really can't tell when I saw the originals first time, but I have clear memory of liking them every time I have seen them. I had some toys when the re-releases came out. I have ALWAYS liked them very much.

On 19th of May 2005 Revenge of the Sith opened in Finland 00:02 AM. It was midnight opening. I went to see it with my now ex-wife. I didn't like Phantom Menace or Clones at all. I thought they were badly made and it was a real shame that they fell under the name STAR WARS. Yes I did like them visually and I think there are few nice scenes on them but I hated the fact that there was no story to tell. So the opening titles came on Revenge and I had decided that I will give the movie a change to start all over again.

So the two hours went and I was sitting in my car and driving home. While seeing Phantom Menace of Clones I did have strong feeling of dislike from the start. Now I was sitting in the car and I had to ask my wife; What do I think about the movie? I didn't ask what she thought of it but I asked what I thought of it. I just couldn't made my mind. My mind was saying it was a bad film and it never made a good story. It felt like the three new ones where total waste of time. At the same time my mind was also saying that maybe you didn't just understand it. So problem continued to next morning. I woke and realized it sucked. I didn't like it. My mind wasn't just able to understand that they had f*cked up so badly.

Then I had an idea. George Lucas took one boy as an example. Let's say he was at the time of the Phantom Menace only 10 years old. So he made a movie with droids and lightsabers. COOL! Next one came. Now the boy was 13 years and George decided that he can give the movie a little bit more action and darker tone. Anakin losing hand and so on. Then came the Revenge. Now the boy was 16 years and there could be death and all that. So I think Lucas made the movies to a specific age group and totally forgot the rest. I think it was way to bring a lot of people to STAR WARS and that group of people was all young. He just completely forgot the rest of us in the process.

I think this was done in the Harry Potter books. Maybe Dorkman can correct me if I am wrong. The feeling of Harry's loneliness and dying around him came step by step. Which is natural cause the story took some time play itself. Still I think my theory is well explained here. The people who loved the first Potter book when it came out in 1997 were gown ups when the last one came out. So the story and the darkness grew up with the reader.

I think Lucas tried the something similar but forgot that the story didn't work enough for the majority of fans that already existed.

Watching movies is like being drunk. First it is great but most of the times it ends poorly.

Thumbs up Thumbs down

Re: Episode III

"Now the boy was 16 years and there could be death and all that"

Your "and all that" encompasses those fuzzy teddy bears which are the love of all 16 yo, right ?!  tongue

Jason doesn't teleport.

Thumbs up Thumbs down

Re: Episode III

Yeah, because if I were making a movie for 10 year olds, I would definitely center the plot on space taxes and government bureaucracy.

The Harry Potter stories do mature as Harry does (although considering the entire story starts with the murder of his parents and his inexplicable survival, I don't think we can say that the loneliness and dying stuff comes later); Rowling has said that she thinks the minimum appropriate age for a child to read each book is the age that Harry is in the book.

The difference is that Lucas seems to have taken your hypothetical young boy's age for each prequel film as the maximum target age, which is very different.

Thumbs up Thumbs down

Re: Episode III

I know this makes me weird, but Sith is my least favorite of the prequels.

I'm pretty sensitive to the tone of a story, and though Phantom and Clones were terrible movies, they were at least consistent with the OT. This is a subtle thing to describe, but I felt like they took place in the same universe. Sith went over some invisible line, and just became a cartoon. Everything was just too crazy and silly. Not grounded enough.

Did anybody else feel like that?

Thumbs up Thumbs down

Re: Episode III

Agree completely on ROTS, but my admittedly irrational hatred for AOTC makes it hard for me to accept that it shares any genes with the OT... for example, the danger and terror of Luke in the rancor pit becomes the slapstick and completely ridiculous antics of the monster arena.

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere. - Carl Sagan

Thumbs up Thumbs down

Re: Episode III

Yeah, you are Dorkman right. I just always felt that the plot on Phantom Menace was so astonishing that kids wouldn't care about it anyway. They just have to save the Queen. I know it is stupid assumption but it just comes to mind. Harry's parents and the survival somehow feel much more easier to cope with when it has happened in the past. You don't see Harry give any emotion cause it has happened so long ago. At the moment at least.

Have to think this thru. Again.

Watching movies is like being drunk. First it is great but most of the times it ends poorly.

Thumbs up Thumbs down

Re: Episode III

TheMikaelT wrote:

Yeah, you are Dorkman right.

People can be right. But only the rightest people have the distinction of being Dorkman right.

"The Doctor is Submarining through our brains." --Teague

Thumbs up Thumbs down

Re: Episode III

One can only hope to aspire to that level of correctness.

Hey! I never said anything about this movie!

All three of these movies drove me insane, purely from a special effects point of view. When they'd come out, people would say "oh, those movies suck, but they have really neat special effects" to which I would scream "NOOOOOOO!" while thrusting my arms upward and crushing the surrounding scenery with my brain powers. They don't have really neat special effects. They have horrible awful special effects. Granted, the artists put in a lot of work and the resulting shots look, I'm sure, exactly the way Lucas wanted them to look, but none of the effects are really successful at all. And when you're entire film is basically a nonstop string of effects shots, that lack of success is going to drag the movie down a lot.

Yoda looked like crap, the lighting was off, there was no fine detail, there was little to no depth of field going on in a shot, just foreground and background plates with different blur settings, the CG camera moved too much and too often while the real camera was apparently bolted to the floor, the lighting was bad, the specular was blown out on just about everything, the models didn't deform properly at all - AT ALL, the lighting was just flat and even and dull in most scenes, the color pallets were muted and nasty looking, everything looked like plastic.

The movies looked the way those shitty FMV games used to look back in the early 90's. You know, the ones where they'd shoot their actors on a green screen saying cheesy, poorly written dialogue, and then they'd add extremely fake looking CG backgrounds that never matched. The prequel trilogy is like a bad FMV videogame knock-off of Star Wars. I could never stop thinking about how bad the entirety of every one of the prequels looked every time I saw them. I don't honestly think there's one single successful shot in any of those films. Not even the live-action stuff on location. Even those shots fail in some way. Maybe a coupe of the Tatooine shots in Episode 2.

Thumbs up +1 Thumbs down

Re: Episode III

/agree, Squiggly_P.

/agree.

Thumbs up Thumbs down

Re: Episode III

Squiggly is so incredibly wrong I don't even know where to start.

Posted from my iPad
http://trek.fm

Thumbs up Thumbs down

Re: Episode III

Kinda with Greg here.  Say what you want about the story or the directing, the guys pushing the pixels in post did a heck of a job.  Wish George had put them to work doing clean-up for the Blu-ray release.  At least we still have the "Revisited" editions to look forward to.

Re: Episode III

Squiggles, can you elaborate? I know it was an elaborate post already, but maybe put together some screengrabs of the prequels next to screengrabs of effects you find successful.

<- interested

Teague Chrystie

I have a tendency to fix your typos.

Thumbs up Thumbs down

Re: Episode III

To be honest, the third one isn't nearly as bad and has stuff that doesn't feel fake, but there's still quite a bit of it in there. Phantom Menace gave me a headache. I will have to acquire copies of these movies in order to demonstrate, as I don't own them or have copies of them.

I totally agree that the artists and effects guys did a hell of a job and stuff looks really really good, but it doesn't look really really real and doesn't mix well with live action, in my opinion. The constant contrast between live action and CGI stuff just bothers me a lot. I'll post further when I have acquired the films and can take shots of them.

EDIT: As far as finding effects shots that work, I can find some in these films, but finding them in other films seems a bit unfair, as there aren't many films that do quite so much in every shot. There's Avatar and maybe certain sequences in the LOTR films and King Kong. Many of the films that do this sort of stuff end up looking fake to me, anyway. I will try to comply, tho.

Last edited by Squiggly_P (2011-09-30 00:07:43)

Thumbs up Thumbs down

Re: Episode III

*shrug*

Just curious to see if there's any really glaring stuff I'm forgetting.

Teague Chrystie

I have a tendency to fix your typos.

Thumbs up Thumbs down