X-Wing Explosions

Well, first off, Merry Christmas everyone. Have a happy new year can wait till next week. Second, continuing our journey through the most famous fictional part o0f the universe, we watched A New Hope last night. For future reference you can get a good idea of my opinion of a film by noticing what verb I use to describe experiencing it. "watched or saw" always means it was fun, while if I disliked it I tend to use "sat through" and if I think it really stunk I use "endured". With a trigger word in there one really doesn't have to read the rest of my post to get my thoughts. However, we continue.

• C-3PO, like it or not, is my favorite character, for reasons that are apparent to those of you who like the movies.
•  Han's banter saved the film
• Jango Fett apparently was a worse shot than everyone thinks. Since the clonetroopers are copies of him with advanced weapons training they should be able to hit something once in a while. By rights all the main characters died five times during the making of this movie.
• THINGS THAT WERE ANNOYING OR JUST SILLY
• Anikin messed up Darth Vader. By extension the prequels actually did dilute the originals. By that I mean after going through the prequels I find myself incapable of believing Vader's really as evil as he's cracked up to be, as crazy as that sounds. Also why in the world is Vader taking orders from guys in suits when he could just kill everyone with the force if they objected?
• In the opening, Luke is a bored angry kid. By the end he's a squad leader in the final attack for no apparent reason even though he just got there.
• The whole movie covers about two to three days, with riding speeders and flying at lightspeed all over the galaxy, not much more time could have passed.
• Granted, this was done in the seventies, but in retrospect, the plot point of Luke and Han Solo both falling on their faces over Leia is so cliche its painful.
• That moment when a Whovian Rebel realizes that the clarinet-playing aliens in the Mos Eisly bar look very similar to the ood.
• That pointless sequence at the beginning that was just an excuse to chop an alien arm off.

Just So You Konw...

One of my friends had been pressing me to go see Desolation of Smaug alone with him, even if both of us had already seen it once. Long story short we went back tonight and it was far more enjoyable, although still just ok. This time I sat directly under the speaker so I was able to hear 90% of the dialogue. And I was able to suppress my frustration at all the contradictions and watch the film as if it was an original story, and view

ed that way the only really annoying thing about it is the extensive use of whirly-gig pans from straight down and straight up. There is also some use of shaky cam during action sequences. It really made me sick trying to see the movie through the messed up camera. I'd like to rescind my claim that the extended version will make it worse, in part because this time I saw some shots that clearly needed more shots in between. Overall if anything stops me from sitting through this film again it will be the camera angle decisions.

And Finally...Revenge of the Plot Device

We saw Revenge of the Sith last night.I liked it better than I anticipated, mainly because I discovered to my surprise that Anikin/Vader had not in fact turned downright evil right away. even after he was deformed and locked inside the iconic Vader suit, he was still at first just the Anikin who had joined the dark side only because he thought Sidious was going to tell him how to make Padme immortal. I also appreciate that this movie explained why Luke and Leia are known by different last names and come from different home planets.
I was pleasantly surprised by the fact that up until the moment when he refused to kill Sidious, Anikin was still doing everytrhing the Jedis told him even as he got more and more frustrated at them. Even when he massacred all the Padawans he was doing it under the power of Sith hypnosis more than because he wanted to. So long story short I can see why some people like him for his tragic storyline. And anyway, episode six proves that he never entirely lost that spark of goodness he had from the beginning, even after living as the Empire's most dangerous enforcer for 20 years.
But enough about Anikin, except that his scenes alone with Padme still involved the most generic responses they could think of and went on for more than longer than we were willing to accept.
I would have enjoyed the movie a lot more, but I feel that "order 66" the executive order to assassinate all the Jedi, just came straight out of, well, antimatter, because there were exactly zero scenes in either of the two movies that showed the Chancellor/ Lord Sidious installing this order into the clones' programming, either directly or by insinuation. In which case it would be logical to assume at first glance that the clones still think Palpatine is only the leader of the Senate and a supporter of the Jedi by association and so why in the galaxy would he suddenly want them all killed. Coming with no foreshadowing or anything similar, order 66 ranks as one of the biggest and most baffling plot devices I've ever seen, although I will concede that the sequence that came out of it is in my opinion probably one of the great tragic sequences in modern movies.
Other weird things that happened were for instance when Anikin caught fire, sure he was stuck next to a lavabed, but I don't remember seeing any lava get on him and then a second later he was covered in perfectly normal fire. What did the air suddenly spontaneously combust? Since I did not see any logical progression, I decided that the explanation was that he got so angry he couldn't hold it anymore and literally set himself on fire through the power of the force misdirected, The other thing was that there was far too much chopping off of hands. It seemed to happen to everyone and it reached the point where it was ridiculous instead of surprising.