star bore
so, without planning on it, i ended up seeing the opening midnight showing of star wars last night. Oli IM’d while i was wrapping up at work, and amazingly, it wasn’t sold out. in fact, there were plenty of seats left.
my star wars background: as a kid, i freaked out over part 4, 5 and 6. i had star wars trading cards, stickers, x-wing models, etc. i was blown away by the fact that darth vader was luke’s father, and when luke’s hand was cut off. as a grown up, i hated part 1 & 2. detested them. horrible acting, inane plot, only worth watching for the eye candy.
this time around, it’s getting good reviews. after seeing the flick, i KINDA see how it’s the best of the last three, but it still pretty much blew. whenever hayden christensen is on-screen, i feel like kicking him in the balls. lucas has a rare talent for extracting crappy performances from great actors: mcgregor, jackson, portman. christensen was just bad casting.
the effects, of course, are great. but it’s all way too fast and there’s too much going on. in the originals, you really had a feel for the battles because there weren’t that many ships on the screen and they didn’t cut away nearly as quickly as they do now. now there’s like 50 things going on at once, and you only get to glimpse it for about 1/2 second before it cuts away.
r2d2 and c3po were too cutesy pie comic reliefs. there’s absolutely no explanation or backstory to the wookies. the godfather-like scene where the jedi’s are all assassinated could have been done much better.
what i did like was the last 20 minutes, showing the transformation into darth vader and how it pretty smoothly ties things into part 4, amazingly made 28 years ago.