The_lurkeR said:
1) If you read many of the reasons in this thread that people post for liking it, they're fanboy reasons and not actual merits of the movie*. Oooh I saw Antilles, Tarkin, Chewbacca, the Millenium Falcon, the Death Star, a Sith naming ceremony? Oooh we found out why the Emperor is deformed (maybe?), why Yoda and Obi-Wan come back as "ghosts" (but not Anakin).
Well, part of my response to this is something that might seem a bit radical, but I'm going to say it anyway: I don't think people really know why they like or dislike a lot of things. Oh, they can offer lots of reasons, that's true, but that doesn't make them the right ones, and this can play in a lot of different ways. Some of the "reviews" panning RotS I've read, for example, were clearly written by people who weren't going to like the movie under any circumstances anyway. Naturally they used a few of those old standbys people who like to sound "objective" are always trotting out--dialogue, pacing, acting, et al.--but it's pretty obvious the level of scorn they offer has nothing to do with these mythical words, which are bogus anyway.
This leads me to part two of my response. Where are these timeless standards of dialogue, pacing, acting people are always on about? Are the patches of "bad" dialogue, "poor" pacing, "uninspired" acting (what an unbearably Romantic phrase that last one is) so much harder to spot in your favorite books and movies, or even in the really "great literature" of the world? Or did that many people miss the train, around the last decade of the 19th century, where the Neo-Aristotelian unities were finally thrown out for good? I'm pretty confident neither is true. I simply think this pseudo-objectivity feeds the impulse of the "haters," to use the opposite of "fanboys," by giving them a mathematical excuse for what is ultimately as equally historical a bias
against the prequels as the fanboys have
for them. Basically, it makes their disatisfaction "add up"--but it isn't, to my mind, the source of that disatisfaction at all.
The_lurkeR said:
2) If there weren't any other Star Wars movies, nobody would be seeing this movie at the midnight showings. This movie would have to survive on it's merits and word of mouth. So what exactly would those merits be? It certainly wouldn't be the dialogue, pacing, or acting. I guess the whiz-bang special effects, but that hasn't made many other poor movies do very well lately.
While it's certainly true the movies would make less money, wouldn't have midnight showings etc., RotS--assuming a rewritten version that would actually make sense as a standalone movie--would not only survive but do quite well. People would eat it up, because it doesn't need anything abstract like "virtues" or "merits"--save that stuff for the totalizing moral systems used in facile RPG's like vanilla D&D; they have no place in aesthetics at all, much less in the aesthetics of
Star Wars, of all things. And I'm not saying all acting, all writing, all directing is equal, only that there is no
timeless standard. The question isn't whether these things are good or bad, but whether they work
in this movie or not. For those who have predecided against the movie, of course they won't work. But the movie isn't thought bad because they don't work--they don't work because the movie is thought bad.
The_lurkeR said:
If this was people first introduction to Anakin / Vader there is NO way he would be as popular as he is now. He's just a un-empathetic poorly written character in this film. The Frankenstein ripoff ending scene with the NOOOOOO! whine was hardly awe inspiring.
I found it to be the worst scene in all of
Star Wars, personally.
Besides, the girl that "played" Aayla in the films is a make-up artist, not an actress. She did no real acting in the films besides standing around looking hot. I doubt that she has what it takes to be a major character in a major TV series.
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