Posted by Gremlin [65.186.201.54 - dsl-65-186-201-54.telocity.com] on 18 May 2002 at 04.32.58 ZuluTime:
In Reply to: Attack of the Clones: Stupid name, good movie posted by Jurassosaurus on 18 May 2002 at 03.20.56 ZuluTime:
Okay, first off I finally understand why Lucas didn't want to call it: Episode II: The Clone Wars. The war itself only starts here. I still think he could have come up with a much better name, but at least I can understand why he disposed of the original contender. Yeah. Still, there could have been a far better name. I've been wondering what was wrong with Lucas since I first heard about The Empire Strikes Back, and, worse, Revenge of the Jedi. There really wasn't much of an attack of the clones here, until the end. Still, I'm not sure what else it could really have been called. The proposed Rise of the Empire wouldn't have been quite accurate either. And something like The Emergence of Sidious would have been just as bad. Of course, Enter the Yoda might have been apt, if as dumb as anything else. The plot was far more interesting this time around. I like the whole hidden conspiracy, twilight of the jedi feel to the movie. I was also happy to see the return of the classic Star Wars 2 in 1 storyline. We have Anakin and Padme's adventure on one end, and Obi-Wan's detective adventure on the other end. I also enjoyed the frugal use of the very toned down Jar Jar Binks, who's amount of scenes in the movie could be counted on Yoda's hand. The one thing I actually liked about Jedi was the three-pronged style of the ending, with Vader and Skywalker fighting concurrent to Calrissian trying to destroy the Death Star concurrent to the Attack of the TeddyRuxpins. Especially in the modern world where no one has an attention span anymore, it helps to flip from one storyline to another before the audience start thinking about maybe buying new shoelaces sometime soon. The Anakin Obi-Wan dynamic was interesting. More interesting than the love story; that's for sure. I kinda wish Lucas would quit shoving his foreshadowing down everyone's thoats though. After hearing Obi-Wan say: "I swear you're going to be the death of me" I couldn't help but go: "Heh, heh, heeeeh, duh" I didn't really mind that one. It was the other oneliners that drove me to kill. Including the prerequisite I've got a bad feeling about this, which is coincidentally becoming the response most often heard to what do you think the next episode will be like. It would be one thing if everyone expected that line--like Bond: James Bond, or something; but most people never notice that the line appears somewhere in each of the five films to date. I'm just kinda hoping that, in the final film, the line will have some actual purpose. Jango was interesting and I agree with Ford Prefect in that the Boba kid was a far better actor than Jake Loyd. Of course the kid also had fewer lines and didn't start off as a little goody goody. I've never understood the interest in the Boba Fett character. I thought he was interesting, but hardly fan fic material. At any rate he's a main character now and one that got a pretty good start. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Fett was designed the way he was simply because they needed a worse badguy than Solo initially was for that purpose. As far as I can tell, Fett's appearance in Jedi occurred only because the character already had an uncanny following. He just looked kinda cool--really, he looked the way the stormtroopers shoulda looked from the beginning. I really doubt he began as anything more than a plot device. The clone makers were also interesting. Both for how clean they kept their entire factory and for giving the Close Encounters aliens some extra work :) I was working on that one for hours. I knew it wasn't the aliens from AI, and I still haven't quite worked out whether one of them was in the Jedi Council in Menace; it finally hit me when I woke up tonight that they looked roughly identical to the things in 1978. What we're supposed to make of that is still very much in question. Alright, so my main interest in this series has always been the droids R2D2 and C3P0. I was very happy to hear the witty jibing between these two return. R2 rivals James Bond in terms of hidden gadgets. He's more a swiss army knife than an astromech, but then those two might be synonymous anyway. I also see that with the return of this duo, so too came the return of classic 3PO masochism. It would just figure that he'd wind up getting stuck in a droid army. Though I found most of the quips between the two to be of the usual caliber, I could definitely have lived without the gratuitous puns towards the end. Artoo and Threepio are essentially the narrators of the whole thing. Specifically Artoo. It was kinda neat, at the end, to see Threepio turn Artoo into an armrest again; with everything else going on, you almost expected to see the Falcon pull away into a nebula somewhere. It was neat to meet the future godparents of Luke and Leia as well, though I see that Tatooine senility seems to effect them later in life too. Here they have C3P0 in use on their moisture farm for all these years, and then in episode IV the first thing that goes through his head upon seeing 3P0 again is: "I have no need for a protocol droid." I swear it's like the continuity folks completely forgot about the droid's parts and future relationships in the movie. All I can say is that these two better wind up in the hands of Captain Antilles by the end of Episode III. I'm not quite expecting that. I'm actually assuming that the final film will be set roughly eighteen years before the first. It might be later than that, of course; but it could work if the twins were actually infants during the height of the CloneWars. Then the Death Star plans could begin to go into effect, Yoda could flee to Dagobah [which may or may not be Naboo] and Kenobi could return to or get stranded on Tattooine. There might be a couple of little cameos here and there--Ensign Tarkin or something. But I'm really not expecting the final film to close with a stardestroyer locking on to the TantineIV to get the plans back; there will be a bit of downtime between the final film and the first. For that matter, James Earl Jones has already leaked that Lucas has given him a few minutes' of dialogue for the end of the final film, suggesting that the last thing we'll see before Episode Four's opening scroll will be Anakin Skylwalker becoming Darth Vader. Personally, I'd think that having more than a simple, ominous introduction for Vader would really wreck things in the final film. Alright, so with that minor quibble aside, what else is there? Heh. Lots of stuff. But whatever hasn't been covered yet should start showing up over the week end. Seeing the Jedi in their prime was cool. Lots and lots of light sabre action in this movie. That was almost disappointing. If you ever saw the faked trailer a couple of years ago, with hundreds of jedi running down the hill with hundreds of lightsabres, the actual battle was a bit of a letdown. I was expecting to see thousands upon thousands of jedi, along with thousands of clonetroopers and thousands of battledroids. While all the fights in these prequels are far more fast paced and kinetic than the first three, I thought it was rather interesting to note that the most kinetic fight in the movie, the one right on par with Obi-Wan and Darth Maul's duel, was the fight between Yoda and Lord Dooku (Darth Tyrannus if I must use that name). As I stated in the non-spoiler version, I was a little afraid of how corny a CG Yoda battle was going to turn out. Thankfully it didn't turn out bad at all. Sure people were laughing during the beginning, but it was more of a "hah, hah, that is so cool/cute." than a derogatory laugh. When Yoda was battling back and forth (both before and after the duel) I couldn't help but think of him as an old gremlin (Dante's version, not the webmaster :). If Gremlins had been CG'd and had moved that quickly, the film might have done a lot better than it did. Henson may have died at the right time, because this would have killed him if he'd lived to see it. The Muppets have gone extinct, along with GoMotion. Oh yeah, I so didn't need to read the script to see that Anakin was going to lose the same hand as Luke's. With Lucas giving this whole "before they were stars/destiny" treatment to the prequels, I was hardly surprised to see Anakin losing the same appendage as his son (give, or take an arm). In fact, the Death Star plans surprised me more than Anakin's loss. Yeah. We kinda knew about that in 1980. And it was a cinch by 1983. Which leads to one more thing we'll have to be told once and for all in the final film: that the prophesy isn't about Anakin at all--there will have to be another jedi out there somewhere. In the end I found Episode II to be better than Phantom Menace, but with a dumber name. Anyone know if "The Clone Wars" is a contender for Episode III's subtitle, or is it going to be more along the lines of: "The Fall of the Jedi?" Calling Episode Three The Clone Wars can't really work anymore. One of its original problems was 'Wars' in a Star Wars subtitle; and now, following 'Clones', it would look even worse. As for the Fall of the Jedi or Rise of the Empire, I'm not really sure about those either, for the same reasons. One thing Lucas may have noticed by now is that you can actually identify these films by single keywords: Hope, Empire, Jedi, Menace, and Clones. The operative noun in the next film will have to be something original and reasonably nonspecific. If I had to guess, I'd watch for The New Order or Rise of the Emperor or something. Although I haven't fully ruled out The Journal of the Whills, or something like it. --Gremlin