I have probably seen this movie hundreds of times, along with everyone else who grew up in the 90s. Today I put on A New Hope in the background while I worked from home. I looked up at the screen about once every ten minutes, while being busy doing other things, and still I've seen it so many times I can call out the next line. The music is helpful too. Try listening to the film sometime without watching. The music really tells the story as much as the dialogue does. I don't mind having this score stuck in my head all day.
Ooooh, it's an original trailer from 1977! Enjoy.
A little bit cheesy, eh? As addressed in How I Met Your Mother, this movie is a little estranging for anyone who hasn't seen it... In fact, I have a friend who never saw it until university, and when he watched it, he just didn't get it. I can see how fans build the movie up a bit too much. It was just too weird for him.
Look at his face!
I never thought much of the original Star Wars movie, the first sequel "The Empire Strikes Back" was a much better film and the 3 prequels were very good as well and very under-rated on their initial release, however (and this is where i`m really looking forward to hearing your opinion again Starlight) the second original sequel "Return Of The Jedi" is better than all the other 5 films put together and is still one of the greatest films of all time as far as i`m concerned. That movie seems to have everything: magic, charm, spectacle, incredible special effects (some of which still look impressive today especially the space battles and the truly awesome reactor chamber sequence), great characters (at the absolute peak of their popularity) and great situations. I must`ve seen it 50 times (as opposed to only 2 or 3 veiwings of the original movie) and every time i watch it the term "Christmas tree come to life" comes to mind. Return of the Jedi is and always has been breathtakingly magnificent and exhilarating entertain-girl-t of the highest quality and calibre
ReplyDeleteWhile I will concede that I have an irrational soft spot for Return and it is my favourite as well, I am incredibly angered by your comments about the prequels. There is not a single line delivered in those movies that's emotion and depth does not ride on the backs of the previous films. Those movies would not make an ounce of sense if the audience didn't know, as everyone alive in the 21st century knows, that Anakin Skywalker is Darth Vadar. These horribly unnecessary space opera flicks do nothing but develop something already known, expected and even predicted by the entire audience. They didn't even do it in a way that surprised you or brought insight. It was a wooden history.
ReplyDeleteThere is a diehard Star Wars fan in me that loves to curl up on a sick day and do a marathon from episodes 1 to 6. It's the same part of me that plays Knights of the Old Republic every few years from start to finish, that eyes the Star Wars section of the bookstore longingly even though I know it's fanfiction crap not worthy of my reading time, and that finds something of value in the prequels. It is the part of me that bawls my eyes out during the last twenty minutes of Revenge of the Sith as babies Luke and Leia are born and Padme dies, NOT because it was a well-done ending, but because the ORIGINAL series was so well done that I've formed such an emotional (if unhealthy) attachment to these characters and witnessing the beginning of it all is tearworthy, whether or not it was well done.
Even the brilliant actors they chose for those end scenes (and here I do not include Hayden Christensen to any degree) could not bring life to the wooden writing. The only line here that gets me is Padme's, "Anakin, you're breaking my heart." What a terrible line, but when Natalie delivers it through those tears she is more incredible than anything else in this movie. My dearest Ewen McGreggor is not given the slightest thing to work with, however, and since his character has become more and more of a dead shadow of the former (or later, chronologically) Obi Wan, in the last scene we get nothing but the hilarity of "It's over Anakin! I have the high ground!" from a legendary actor.
Tsk tsk, Eddie. I'm very disappointed in you.