I've got some pretty high hopes for this one. As horrendous as most of Episode II was, it all started to come together in the last couple minutes. Seeing stormtroopers running around and star destroyers in the distance made it worth the pain.

Everybody knowing the ending didn't hurt Titanic's box office.

My biggest complaint about Episodes I and II is laziness. Lucas just isn't trying anymore.

In parts IV-VI, Jar Jar would have gotten his own language, instead he gets an annoying accent. The earlier movies opened with great battle scenes--absent in the prequels. The fun, interesting toys--ex., Imperial Walkers--gone. In fact, there's nothing fun about I and II. Drab, dreary, "well, this is just a bunch of junk we have to go through to get the story to part IV."

Knowing that the Wookie battle is done in CGI leaves me little hope for Part III. Laziness will still be a problem.

I think the worst part is that I know Part III is going to suck outright, but I'm going to shell out $10.50 to go see it anyway.

"Everybody knowing the ending didn't hurt Titanic's box office."

Yeah it did, I know a lot of people who didn't see it for that very reason: a movie about a boat that sinks, whee.

But I do wonder how many times Lucas will fool people: it only took me the first movie.

it was never remotely as good as that first, wonderous preview trailer that ran in the fall of 1998.

Sigh. Those were the days.

At the time, I was working for a company doing video-mashing stuff on Macintoshes. We built our own G4 upgrades for the Beige and (later) Blue&White G3s we were using. Part of our QA regimen for a run of upgrade boards was looping that trailer overnight.

>>Everybody knowing the ending >>didn't hurt Titanic's box >>office.

Slightly off topic, but this reminds me of a college co-ed I knew at the time who asked me if the sinking of the Titantic "really happened."

Egads

Knowing how it ends is part of the fun. Seeing all the details for the first time leading up to what you KNOW will happen is also part of the funness. Kinda like Memento, when the movie played backwards. You knew the ending, just not how the characters got there.

Of course, the wooden dialog, weak plot and lack of character development is the weakness of all the latest movies. I'm looking forward to the movie though. I just want to see all the Jedi DIE.

Go Vadar!

If ya' can't write dialogue, and Lucas certainly is in that category, it is kinda' hard to make one movie about sentinent beings that holds interest very well, much less for two trilogies. Too bad Lucas wasn't wise or secure enough to farm out the screenwriting, along with the directing (is there any major director who gets less from actors?), to people who could better execute Lucas' vision than Lucas could himself.

"Which brings us to the second inherent problem, and this week's 'Episode III'--a movie in which 99% of the audience already knows the ending."

This is true for a lot of movies -- historical films and those based on novels in particular. That the audience knows the ending can be an obstacle, but it is neither insurmountable nor uncommon.

Someone already mentioned Titanic. But there are many others (e.g., LOTR trilogy, Passion of the Christ) which manage to overcome the problem with good filmmaking.

"Too bad Lucas wasn't wise or secure enough to farm out the screenwriting, along with the directing (is there any major director who gets less from actors?), to people who could better execute Lucas' vision than Lucas could himself."

Good point. I saw Shattered Glass this weekend, starring Christian Haydensen. I was astonished to learn that the kid can act, and pretty well at that. I had thought the biggest problem with Ep II, as filmmaking, was the casting of Anakin, but now I really don't think so.

I could forgive Ep I not being as good as the others. If you're going to have six movies, er, episodes, one of them is going to be worse than the others. Hell, I can even forgive Jar Jar Binks (ptooi). What I can't forgive is bad dialog delivered in a whining monotone. I didn't see Ep II in the theater and could only sit through 45 minutes of the DVD. The actors and director and writers should be ashamed. The prequels could have been like the descent in Dante's Inferno, getting progressively darker. I'll still see the last one, because, well, it's the last one.

The Bush-bashing is just another Lucasfilm marketing stunt.

It did it's job.

Slap an anti-Bush message on a turd and the MSM will sell it. I bet it was added to the script last minute to help boost sales (and MSM reviews).

I'm sorry, Darth and M&Ms is sacrilege.

He was scary, very scary and now he's just a parody.

Via Marginal Revolution:

Gray & Christmas, a Chicago outplacement firm, estimated that 51 percent of people attending opening day would be full-time workers, costing employers as much as $627 million in lost productivity.

Here is the story. And will it also be a slow day in the economics blogosphere? -- "Nobody contacted for this article wanted to discuss their planned absences."

Some critic commented on Shakespeare's tragedies that part of their emotional punch comes from the fact that you know what's going to happen, and you're basically yelling "Don't do it!" even when you know the character is going to do it: Is going to make that appalling choice that leads to much tragedy. We know things aren't going to end well for Macbeth or King Lear, etc., yet somehow that doesn't diminish the impact of it all. I actually think - am I the only one in the world? - that taking advantage of this fact has the possibility of making Ep III the best of the six. Lucas has said, "I know how to make a hard Star Wars movie," and I think Empire proved that true.
Whether he still has it is the question.
I nothing else, we get to see Palpatine bust out a lightsaber.

The largely concurrent LOTR trilogy managed to overcome the known ending problem, come up with great CGI characters (especially Gollum), and maintain enormous interest from geeks and non-geeks. Face it, George Lucas' writing talents haen't ben up to snuff for quite some time now. Sure, they are better than mine, but what's that really worth?

The unabashed greed that has Darth Vader choking an M&M has perhaps been taking up too much of the great man's time instead of focusing on a story and its exposition. To much time passed, not just between the second and first trilogies, but between the movies within the first trilogy. And as I wrote elsewhere, Mr. Lucas messed up by doing the first trilogy instead of the third.

Hayden Christensen is always flat and whiny with an annoying nassally voice. It just happens that those characteristics worked really well when portraying Stephen Glasss, who may or may not be like that, but if he's not then he ought to be.

I always thought the kid that played Pyro in X2 would have made a better Anakin.

I remember when Ep I first aired I asked my husband, "Who is this Jake Lloyd kid? Can you imagine what a great movie this could've been with a kid who could actually act, like Haley Joel Osment?" It pains me even now to hear that HJO was swept aside for Jake. He's probably a nice kid, but he really sucked in the role.

As Hayden Christensen has done, so far. My affection for the franchise has been greatly stoked by the Clone Wars animated shorts on Cartoon Network (I was quite ticked when my daughter accidentally deleted it off the TiVO the other day), and from Matthew's Darth Side blog.

We're going Thursday afternoon -- my kids have finished all their homework early just so we don't have to wait until Friday.

It may suck, but we'll all be there anyway.

I was 13 when "Star Wars" came out. Now I'm 41. If I didn't think the new ones sucked, there'd be something wrong with me. And it would be one thing if, say, half the movies released between May and September were targeted to teen-agers. But every f**kin' one?

I liked the alternate title to Episode One supplied by Warren Bell at NRO's The Corner: "How a Bill Becomes Law in Space."

...who asked me if the sinking of the Titantic "really happened."

I can almost top that. A horrified shriek arising from the back of the ticket line, "What do you mean, the boat SINKS???"

Will needs to finish this 100 words or less story, concerning as it does, the impending desecration of a Han Solo action figure.

And from a Slate Review: In the end, there's a breadth, a fullness to the Star Wars saga. It's so much more than the sum of its clunks.
Schmaybe there's hope for it, huh? Be positive. Look what all us LOTR types got for waiting so long.

Uh, oh... just saw it last night. The first word in the scroll clunks right in your lap:

"War!"

Hmmm, for what good is it? Absolutely nothing... again, say it!

Some of it is actually enjoyable... yet several elements just don't feel like Star Wars at all. The last half feels entirely obligatory, no passion, no flair, but fairly quickly paced.

I have another big issue with Eps I and II - too much reuse from previous movies. Why the heck do we have to go back to Tatooine? Why not invent a whole new world or environment where they find Anakin? This is a sci-fi movie set in a vast galaxy - why does Anakin's mother have to get killed by sand people? Show some imagaination here!

After the prequel yawners and comments by a few adults (http://thirdworldcounty.blogspot.com/2005/05/venting-spleen.html for link to a collection) I'll sit this one out, just wait for the household hardcore fan to play the inevitable DVD over and over when it comes out and sit down with a gag firmly tied to avoid thrown objects resulting from my likely comments.