star wars 9 grim resignation thread

Attack of the Clones is up there with Woody Allen's 'Whatever Works' for me in the extremely small club of films that I'll always remember as "non-student films that were so badly made i couldnt believe i was actually seeing them in a real movie theater".

haha "Whatever Works" is so shockingly bad

Before I leave bg to c+p, the best illustration of Dr Who's attention to canon is that they destroyed Atlantis three different ways in five years. And two of them were in season finales, in successive years, written by the same two-person team. One of whom was the producer in charge of the show. But anonymously, bcz BBC policy didn't allow you to write for the show as well as working on it.

sic otm above

I think it's fair to say that the sequels and the prequels are both disappointing, but the prequels are just disappointing in a much more fascinating way. And I don't even hate the sequels, they're just...OK. TLJ has flashes of brilliance.

if this was 1985 we could be complaining about how ESB was too much of a thematic departure and ROTJ sucked

No

people did that!

I would rank AOTC above ROTJ (that's my "challop," I guess?)

due to when I came of age, my subjective stance is entirely tainted by having seen the original trilogy on VHS overly too many times. we'd have it running on a tv while playing board games until the wee hours of the morning when I was in high school at a friend's place

completely ruined my ability to judge anything star wars-related through any lens other than that of inflated cultural importance and locked the aesthetic into a particular set of characters and stylistic choices

my stylist had Star Wars playing (on VHS) during my last haircut, I wasn't there very long but I was taking note that the whole middle part of the movie, between the somewhat emotional beginning and the action-packed end, is just a lot of hijinks and one-liners.

TLJ has flashes of brilliance.

In my TLJ rewatch, I noted how some of the movie is truly bad -- just bad dialogue, clumsy plotting, etc. -- but it also has these scattered moments of creativity and excitement where you get a jolt: This really works.

I guess that's how I responded in the theater, too... I remember being kind of bored for the initial stretch; but then when Leia did her Mary Poppins thing, I sat straight up -- like, "Oh, this is gonna be that kind of movie...."

lol Fred that is *literally exactly what happened*

http://www.acriticalhit.com/fans-react-empire-strikes-back-1980/

make sure you click through and read the piece David Gerrold wrote for STARLOG. Its criticism after criticism.

My hot take is that I watched the original again a few years back with my kid and my reaction was, it's nicely nostalgic to see this stuff again but this movie kind of sucks, and I'll bet if I ever watched Empire Strikes Back or Return of the Jedi again, I'd feel the same way, which is why I won't.

Very similar to when I last saw the original trilogy with my kids, their one and only time (they're just not that into Star Wars). I thought, yeah that was okay, but I'm out.

If Leia had only worn her Force Awakens costume no-one would've made the Mary Poppins connection.

Having been raised on the cultural afterbirth of two preceding films that I was barely old enough to remember as films, the release of ROTJ was an epochal depth charge at the most perfect point in my youth. A handful of years out, though, after the trilogy had become more accessible via cable and home video, I was able to recognize it as fairly flimsy in comparison to what came before but still an undeniable feast for the senses. It makes for a great reel of visual and sound design, and also there's some people talking and doing things.

The Luke/Vader/Emperor scenes are great, I'll give it that.

tbh i think for me (38yo) the lasting impression of the original sw movies wasn't the memory of how *good* they were, it's the world they opened up for daydreaming and make-believe and such.

I do think the first two are truly good movies, fwiw

gbx otm

for kids of a certain age all the toys, comics, trading cards, merchandizing ephemera, etc. made the first two films just feel like a window onto a much larger universe that you had been invited to wander around in with your imagination. It didn't have much to do with the actual quality of the films.

needless to say any joy/interest in this "universe" was subsequently crushed/sucked out of me via over-exposure long ago. My son wanted to watch Empire over the Thanksgiving holiday, I didn't even bother to watch it with him, I went off to do something else.

I watched the de-specialized versions of the first trilogy a few christmases back, and they are most of the time legitimately beautiful.

There will always be idiots who criticize something, some people think Hong Sang-soo isn't the filmmaker of the decade. So sure, there were some people who thought Empire Strikes Back sucked back then, and it might seem the same as thinking The Last Jedi sucks now. But no. Right now, wrong then.

a lot of those 1980 comments are pretty funny, especially david gerrold's objection to "fast-paced cross-cutting" between characters in different places:

Crosscutting also implies simultaneity — a concept which most modern physicists say is impossible, especially on an astronomical scale. Sorry.

Last Jedi and Empire Strikes Back are the only two better-than-okay Star Wars films

applying star trek nitpicker "THAT COULDN'T REALLY HAPPEN" logic to star wars is a recipe for endless comedy

just reverse the polarity etc

the ships in star wars are actually boats

like the spaceships are boats and the planets are islands, that's all that's going on

god I need to do some work but I may have used up all my rope today

the only two better-than-okay Star Wars films

creature design and models and sound design in the first three are all fantastic obv

Honestly I find some of the production photography more evocative than what showed up on film. Like some of the photographs they used on the action figure cards? Them shits is badass.

I used to be mildly obsessed with the Ree-Yees card photo. Dude freaked my shit out a little.

just a guy with three penis eyes coming out of his forehead

James Carville?

I had a C3P0 toy as a kid before I ever saw any of the movies -- I think it was some deal where you mailed in cereal box tops and got the toy. It had removable arms and legs and a plastic netting to mimic the way Chewbacca carries him around when he's blasted apart in ESB

I was only vaguely aware of Star Wars but it was so cool. What's up with this robot guy? Why would someone be carrying him around, and what happened?

I had that C3PO too, and the plastic netting seems so much more "space-like" than the string bag in the actual movie

xps yeah watching the unspecialised version a while back i was really struck by how interesting and creative it was visually, if perhaps not in other ways. (i guess i was less struck by the sound because gl couldn't think of as many ways to ruin that for the special edition.)

I for one wasn't thrilled with Lucas dubbing over the work of Ben Burtt with the work of Michael Winslow but ymmv.

i wish it were easier to see the non-specialized versions

just look inside your heart

I need to check, I think I salvaged the VHS tapes that were (crossing my fingers) the letterboxed version that I got around the rerelease time? They might be the late 90s edits which... ehh... could be worse

we did have the previous box as well that was pan-and-scan, which I'd love to watch again for nostalgic reasons. might even argue that it's my personal canonical version

Man, I don't want to belabor this point, Fred, but the "X is ruining Star Wars" and "movie Y is too much of a departure" takes go all the way back to 1980. I was there, I lived through this stuff. STARLOG was not just some randos, it was *the* publication for SF/Fantasy fans of the era, and the official line on ESB was very "meh."

But even in the non-fandom press, for example, Vincent Canby -- who LOVED Star Wars -- was very lukewarm (no Pun):

Confession: When I went to see "The Empire Strikes Back" I found myself glancing at my watch almost as often as I did when I was sitting through a truly terrible movie called "The Island."

The Empire Strikes Back" is not a truly terrible movie. It's a nice movie. It's not, by any means, as nice as "Star Wars." It's not as fresh and funny and surprising and witty, but it is nice and inoffensive and, in a way that no one associated with it need be ashamed of, it's also silly. Attending to it is a lot like reading the middle of a comic book. It is amusing in fitful patches but you're likely to find more beauty, suspense, discipline, craft and art when watching a New York harbor pilot bring the Queen Elizabeth 2 into her Hudson River berth, which is what "The Empire Strikes Back" most reminds me of. It's a big, expensive, time-consuming, essentially mechanical operation.

Gone from "The Empire Strikes Back" are those associations that so enchanted us in "Star Wars," reminders of everything from the Passion of Jesus and the stories of Beowulf and King Arthur to those of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, the Oz books, Buck Rogers and Peanuts. Strictly speaking, "The Empire Strikes Back" isn't even a complete narrative. It has no beginning or end, being simply another chapter in a serial that appears to be continuing not onward and upward but sideways. How, then, to review it?

The fact that I am here at this minute facing a reproachful typewriter and attempting to get a fix on "The Empire Strikes Back" is, perhaps, proof of something I've been suspecting for some time now. That is, that there is more nonsense being written, spoken and rumored about movies today than about any of the other so-called popular arts except rock music. The Force is with us, indeed, and a lot of it is hot air.

Ordinarily when one reviews a movie one attempts to tell a little something about the story. It's a measure of my mixed feelings about "The Empire Strikes Back" that I'm not at all sure that I understand the plot. That was actually one of the more charming conceits of "Star Wars," which began with a long, intensely complicated message about who was doing what to whom in the galactic confrontations we were about to witness and which, when we did see them, looked sort of like a game of neighborhood hide-and-seek at the Hayden Planetarium. One didn't worry about its politics. One only had to distinguish the good persons from the bad. This is pretty much the way one is supposed to feel about "The Empire Strikes Back," but one's impulse to know, to understand, cannot be arrested indefinitely without doing psychic damage or, worse, without risking boredom.

. . . I'm not as bothered by the film's lack of resolution as I am about my suspicion that I really don't care. After one has one's fill of the special effects and after one identifies the source of the facetious banter that passes for wit between Han Solo and Leia (it's straight out of B-picture comedies of the 30's), there isn't a great deal for the eye or the mind to focus on. Ford, as cheerfully nondescript as one could wish a comic strip hero to be, and Miss Fisher, as sexlessly pretty as the base of a porcelain lamp, become (is it rude to say?) tiresome. One finally looks around them, even through them, at the decor. If Miss Fisher does much more of this sort of thing, she's going to wind up with the Vera Hruba Ralston Lifetime Achievement Award.

The other performers are no better or worse, being similarly limited by the not-super material. Hamill may one day become a real movie star, an identifiable personality, but right now it's difficult to remember what he looks like. Even the appeal of those immensely popular robots, C-3PO and R2-D2, starts to run out.

In this context it's no wonder that Oz's contribution, the rubbery little Yoda with the pointy ears and his old-man's frieze of wispy hair, is the hit of the movie. But even he can be taken only in small doses, possibly because the lines of wisdom he must speak sound as if they should be sung to a tune by Jimmy Van Heusen.

I'm also puzzled by the praise that some of my colleagues have heaped on the work of Irvin Kershner, whom Lucas, who directed "Star Wars" and who is the executive producer of this one, hired to direct "The Empire Strikes Back." Perhaps my colleagues have information denied to those of us who have to judge the movie by what is on the screen. Did Kershner oversee the screenplay, too? Did he do the special effects? After working tirelessly with Miss Fisher to get those special nuances of utter blandness, did he edit the film? Who, exactly, did what in this movie? I cannot tell, and even a certain knowledge of Kershner's past work ("Eyes of Laura Mars," "The Return of a Man Called Horse," "Loving") gives me no hints about the extent of his contributions to this movie. "The Empire Strikes Back" is about as personal as a Christmas card from a bank.

And then he reviewed "Jedi":

"Return of the Jedi,'' written by Lawrence Kasdan and Mr. Lucas and directed by Richard Marquand, doesn't really end the trilogy as much as it brings it to a dead stop. The film, which opens today at Loews Astor Plaza and other theaters, is by far the dimmest adventure of the lot.

All of the members of the old ''Star Wars'' gang are back doing what they've done before, but this time with a certain evident boredom. They include Harrison Ford (Han Solo), Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia), Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker), the voice of James Earl Jones (the voice of Darth Vader) and Alec Guinness Ben (Obi-Wan) Kenobi, who died a picture or two back but won't get off the screen).

. . . The film's battle scenes might have been impressive but become tiresome because it's never certain who is zapping whom with those laser beams and neutron missiles. The narrative line is virtually nonexistent, and the running time, though only slightly more than two hours, seems longer than that of ''Parsifal.'' . . .

This is obviously just one critic, but these are not outliers -- this was pretty typical of critical and moviegoer reaction. Don't take my word for it, look it up!

Fred has never looked anything up in his life

i mean he's the smartest one on here, he doesn't have to

iirc he's closer to the arctic circle so you only have to tilt your head upwards slightly to see the very top

Canby otm in those quotes, fair play to the lad

Having just recently rewatched these with my super-fan 7-yr old son, I can confidently rank them as follows:

New Hope >> Empire Strikes Back >>> Return of the Jedi >>>>>> Force Awakens >> Attack of the Clones > Phantom Menace >>> Revenge of the Sith

Still need to see Last Jedi.

xpost Tbf he might be right that the Empire has no plot.