Tag: Hollywood

Wicked Part 1 – Astonishingly mediocre – 6/10

You might think it odd that I went to see this movie – given that the Wicked musical is famously more popular with women than is typical for fantasy, and it’s not exactly hard fantasy either. But when it comes to movies, really I’m willing to give anything a shot if it’s sufficiently ambitious and if the basic idea is interesting.

It’s worth stating at the outset that this is a review of the movie as an isolate work. I have not seen the musical it’s based on or read the book that that in turn is based on. I detest changes from source material, and I’m sure if I knew of them and saw them I would mark the movie down for them, but here I am judging it as a movie on its own.

I have heard many great things about the musical over the years (though as I say, I have not seen it). On that basis, I was expecting this movie to be quite good. But then also, the lead-up to the release of this movie has been disastrous. The lead actress criticised a fan for making a version of the movie poster that looked more like the poster for the musical. And then we had the endless series of interviews where the two lead actresses just started crying. It was just pathetic and repulsive. On the basis of all of that, I was expecting this movie to be a complete disaster.

So I was expecting either something brilliant or something disastrous. What I wasn’t expecting was what it ultimately was: astonishingly mediocre.

I’ll start with the stuff that was actually quite good – because quite frankly that stuff is much easier to describe and so easy to get out of the way first. The costume design was excellent – quirky and novel, but just managed to avoid being cliché. The set design was also excellent – exactly what you’d expect but also filled with many new things along the same lines. That train looked amazing. (Although I think it’s more properly referred to just as a locomotive, as it didn’t pull a ‘train’ of carriages behind it.)

The casting was also excellent. Jeff Goldblum was made to play the Wizard of Oz. As he tends to do in every film nowadays he just played himself, but in this case it was absolutely ideal. Michelle Yeoh was brilliant – I’m a huge fan of Michelle Yeoh whatever she’s in. She’s a phenomenal actress – she can take even very boring, cliché lines and make them sound great (which she had to do several times in this film).

Cynthia Erivo was actually very competent. Despite her insufferable personality in real life, she was actually very skilled – never underplaying or overplaying the part (which it would have been easy to do with that part).

The real star of the show, however, was Ariana Grande. Now, I don’t think of Ariana Grande as an actress – I think of her as a singer. I understand that she did actually start out as an actress, but I nevertheless think of her as a singer, and my general assumption is that singers can’t act. (And in fairness to me, that assumption is grounded – a lot of them really can’t act.) But she absolutely stole the show in this film. On a technical level her acting was flawless – every expression was exactly right. She was able to do the Connie D’Amico trope perfectly. And she also had lots of funny moments.

Some might dislike the idea of the second-main character stealing the show, but it’s generally more possible for secondary characters to be able to do this than the primary character, because secondary characters can often have more extreme character traits and be funnier, whereas the main character has to be sufficiently neutral for the audience to be able to project themselves onto them.

Some of the core ideas of the film were very interesting too. (Some, but not all, as I shall get onto.) The basic idea of expanding the world of the Wizard of Oz I really like – I always like that sort of thing. I’m a huge fan of the ‘lost knowledge’ trope (that George R. R. Martin always did really well), and the Grimmerie is part of that. Stories about dictatorships are often fun too.

So there were a number of things to like about this film. In fact, this film was particularly unusual – usually what lets a film down is its peripherals – usually the core story is a good idea, but the film is let down by its casting, its acting, its dialogue, its visual effects, and so on (think about the Last Airbender film – fantastic source material to work from – a great core idea – but let down by all its peripherals – the casting, the acting, the dialogue, and so on). This film was the other way round. All of its peripherals were good – it was let down by its core.

The main story is just, in parts, very stupid. A girl is born with green skin. Her parents – especially her father (although it is implied that he is not actually her father) – despise her for it, even though this is a land where magic is known to exist, even though a demonstration of her raw magical ability occurs moments after birth (if I remember correctly), even though they made an entirely green city – suggesting, as it does, that there may be a connection between greenness and magical ability, and so greenness would be revered, not detested – and even though this is a land filled with people who are already different shades of brown and beige, and even though this is a land filled with talking animals.

When she’s a bit older, some local children mock her for being green, and then when she first goes to the university, the people around her are absolutely mortified at the sight of her (although they get over it extremely quickly – just watch them in the background of the shots). It’s all ‘woe betide me, no-one likes me because I’m green’, but it makes no sense – the world we are looking at is filled with far more odd and unusual things than a person with green skin. It does not make sense for these people to find it as odd as they do.

‘But that’s the whole point! It’s not supposed to be rational! Discrimination isn’t rational!’, I hear an annoying person scream at their computer screen. Yes, discrimination between individuals on the basis of something that has no effect on the situation under consideration is generally irrational – the point is that in order for a difference to seem significant enough for people to hate you for it, it must be quite a lot different to anything else those people have experienced. Being green in a land filled with people who already vastly exceed Hollywood’s diversity quotas, along with talking animals and magic, should not be all that notable. In other words, how do you notice one odd thing in a room filled with odd things? When everything’s odd, nothing is.

It gets even stupider because as the film goes on they morph this idea of ‘discriminating against a person with green skin’ into ‘people with green skin are ugly’. This isn’t the first film to throw out this idea – I can’t remember what the other one was, but I’ve definitely seen it before, and it was stupid there too. It’s just a fundamental misunderstanding of beauty and ugliness. Skin colour doesn’t actually affect beauty at all – and I mean that in the broadest possible sense. Blue skin, magenta skin, orange skin, gold skin, multicoloured skin – literally any colour can look good. What actually matters is bone structure – just the basic shape of your face, the size and position of your eyes, and so on – this is what actually affects beauty. (Skin tone and complexion also affects it, but that’s different from colour – the actual hue makes no difference.) We all know this. Of course we all know this. But here this film is pretending that if someone were green, everyone would think they were ugly. No they wouldn’t.

(As an interesting aside, there are actually real humans with blue skin. Some people take colloidal silver (which is not a good idea), and over time it turns their skin blue – look it up. These people are a curiosity – medical and experiential – but they are not hated.)

Elphaba goes to Shiz University to support her sister as she enrols. While there, however, she accidentally gives a display of her magical power, causing a lot of disruption. On seeing that she has true power, Madame Morrible decides to admit her to the university. Elphaba just accepts this – but this is weird – didn’t she have other plans? Didn’t she have somewhere else to go after this enrolment ceremony? She’s just offered a place on a multi-year residential course and she can start then and there? Doesn’t she have to tell anyone? It’s just weird. I suspect it’s a hang-over from the musical – in a musical it would be fine because musicals always have a degree of unrealness to them, but you can’t get away with that in a film.

The film then progresses into its high school section. This section might as well just be every high school drama ever put to film or television. It’s almost unbearably cliché. The popular girl doesn’t like the girl who’s different. The girl who’s different is nerdy, and she’s ugly because she’s nerdy, and she’s nerdy because she’s ugly – because Hollywood really thinks that nerdiness makes you ugly and vice versa. Eventually the popular girl feels guilty about the way she treats the unpopular girl and decides to treat her better (because god forbid a change of behaviour be based on rationality and not emotion). But of course, now that the popular girl likes the unpopular girl, the unpopular girl cannot be allowed to remain ugly – she must be given a makeover – because you can only truly transcend into the domain of popularity if you completely conform to it and change your appearance. It’s all about appreciating people’s differences – and the way they do that is by completely squashing those differences – you must be like all of the other popular girls. And THEN, on top of that, the makeover consists of taking off the unpopular girl’s glasses and letter her hair down, because in reality this ‘ugly’ girl was played by a very good looking actress and wasn’t ugly at all – glasses and tying your hair up do not, in fact, make you ugly. So the ‘ugly’ girl was not really ugly, she already conformed to the standards of the popular girls, but the need for this conformity had to be emphasised to the audience by having her have a ‘makeover’ anyway.

I mean, it’s just so stupid isn’t it? Almost every idea is undermined by the next idea that’s presented. It’s unbearably cliché – every single part of it was parodied by Family Guy over a decade ago. There’s no meaning to it – it’s just flawed cliché after flawed cliché. I think it would be fine if the film accepted itself for what it is, but it (and its core audience) seem to think that it’s making some deeply profound statement.

We then learn that the animals in this world are discriminated against – and over the course of the film this intensifies. This doesn’t really work because when animals can talk what really sets them apart from humans? In the real world, a goat and a cat seem roughly equally different to a human, because neither can talk, but if they could both talk, surely they’d seem as different to each other as either would to a human, because speech is no longer a defining factor between the three. In other words, how does this category of ‘animal’ exist in this world? It doesn’t matter so much for the kind of easy fantasy of the Wizard of Oz, but since the film makes a big fuss about it it’s worth mentioning.

Jonathan Bailey shows up. Now let’s none of us kid ourselves – we all know why Jonathan Bailey got this part. He got it because he was in Bridgerton. Now, I tried watching Bridgerton. It was shit. Truly and utterly shit. It’s what happens when an American author tries to write about the British aristocracy. Americans do not understand aristocracy or royalty. But it is popular with women who want to fantasise about the Regency Era but who don’t care about facts or historical accuracy. Jonathan Bailey is the object of desire in the show.

And he’s the object of desire in this film too. He’s there because he’s good looking. It’s interesting how a gay actor has been selected as the object of desire for heterosexual women. I could go on a rant about the trend of gay males being treated as pets for women in media (particularly in fiction), but that’s for another post. Bailey’s character is, quite frankly, largely irrelevant in this film. (This is just part one though – perhaps that changes in part two.)

Eventually Elphaba and Glinda go to the Emerald City. I really liked the story of these kind of ancient magical beings who once inhabited the land of Oz and created the Grimmerie. I also really like all of the hints of what it is actually like to live in Oz – which is in far greater turmoil than many would have our main characters believe. All of that was great, but it did really need more worldbuilding.

And then we get a semi-conclusion. I didn’t know before going to see the film that it was only going to be part one, but that’s fine.

All of these story issues really make the film fall flat. Some of them could easily have been resolved – particularly the worldbuilding stuff – that’s easy to fix. But some of them couldn’t have been. The core story between Elphaba and Glinda revolves around the ‘popular girl’ trope, and there’s nothing you can really do with that that doesn’t change the entire story.

On top of that – and most egregiously for a musical – the music was actually pretty shit. There was A LOT of autotune used for some of the singers – I could hear its distinctive tone all the time. But even worse, the music was, quite frankly, forgettable. You can tell how good the music of a film is by how many tunes you could hum when walking out of the cinema. I could only do two: Defying Gravity and Popular – but that’s because I already knew those two beforehand. The rest I can’t remember. Pathetic, for a musical.

And also rather sickening was the dancing. God the dancing was shit throughout. It was that typical ‘Yeaaahhh I’m dancing so hard because I’m so passionate and emotional and kewwwlll!’ style of dance that only Hollywood actors who are desperate for their big break can do. It’s a style of dance that only someone who thought the word ‘rockstar’ was aspirational would come up with. Utterly dreadful.

And you know the film that this one most reminded me of was High School Musical. It’s easy to see why this story is more popular with women: it’s a story about someone being accepted by a social group despite her differences, and winning an attractive male over the (ostensibly) more attractive female.

So overall: not great. Not outright shit either – there were some interesting and fun parts to it – but it was flat, and gave itself much more credit than it deserved.

I probably will watch it again at some point. I put it in the same category as a film like Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets – that wasn’t a good film – it had a huge number of core errors – but it had a few interesting ideas – particularly visual ideas – and I like to return to it every now and then.

So it’s a 6/10.

I’m going back to DVDs

Streaming is just so annoying now.

In the late 2000s and early 2010s I built up a large DVD collection. Well – it seems large to me, but I suppose compared to some collections it’s actually quite moderate. I don’t know the exact number, but I think it’s about 200 DVDs.

I was quite pleased with it, but by the mid 2010s it seemed quite pointless. Lots of what was in my collection was available on Netflix, and anything that wasn’t was likely an old-ish movie – 90s or early 2000s – and not something I was likely to rewatch that often. Also, I was running out of space. I have two shelves for DVDs – both of which have long been full, and I’ve just been stacking up the rest on top. It’s at risk of falling off the wall.

So I stopped adding to it. All was fine for a few years, but I’ve now decided to (mostly) abandon streaming for DVDs once more.

Streaming was fine when it was just Netflix. Now, though, in order to maintain access to the movies and television shows I like to watch, I have to have a subscription to Disney+ and Amazon Prime Video too, as well as buying some movies and shows through YouTube. When BritBox still existed I had to have a subscription to that too, and when Game of Thrones was on and still good I had to pay for NowTV (which was the shittest service I have ever encountered – I wasn’t so much watching a television show as enduring a PowerPoint presentation).

What’s even worse is that half the time I don’t even know where something’s going to be available. (I think most people get around this via their ‘smart TV’ – but I don’t have one – television for me is just something that’s open on a different browser tab.) And things come and go from different platforms. Something that I think is going to be available somewhere often turns out to no longer be.

And the most egregious sin of Netflix: when only the second movie of a trilogy is available. Why would I want to watch only the second movie of a set of three, Netflix? I will watch all three or none at all.

Streaming is now neither cheap nor convenient. (Add to that Hollywood’s burning desire to edit old movies and television shows to delete anything that doesn’t fit their latest extremist ideology and soon I’m paying a lot of money not to watch a heavily-censored movie.) DVDs nowadays seem to be very cheap (if you’re still on the old pre-Blu-ray ones as I am (yes I realise that makes me seem very old)), and they also allow for the wonderful surprise of rediscovering a movie you had otherwise forgotten about.

So I’m swapping back. Time to put up some more shelves.

New Term: Autolobotomite

‘Lobotomite’ is a great word. It refers to someone who is brainless, stupid – as though they have been lobotomised. It’s a great insult that I like to use to refer to Hollywood writers.

We are living through the Great Age of Stupidity, and the demand for insults for stupid people greatly exceeds the supply. Much of the idiocy we see in the world today seems to be self-inflicted – people who have achieved great antisagacity (there’s another new word) by choosing to believe quite obvious nonsense, by refusing debate and discussion, and by rejecting anything that has even the slightest whiff of their enemy’s benodorous scent. There are people who seem to adore their own un-knowledge – and then they also resent anyone who criticises their own adoration of their un-knowledge. Instead of turtles all the way down, it’s just wilful stupidity supported by even more and stronger wilful stupidity.

For these people I can only use the term ‘autolobotomite’ – a person whose intellectual injuries are self-inflicted – a person whose lack of intelligence or knowledge is a result of their own beliefs.

Also, ‘antisagacity’ = ‘the opposite of sagacity’, and ‘benodorous’ = ‘nice-smelling’ – i.e., the opposite of ‘malodorous’.

Kenobi – Episode 2 – A Complete Disaster

This review is only going to be about the first fifteen minutes or so of the episode, because that’s all I could stomach watching. I couldn’t watch any more – it was that bad. It’s rare that I can’t finish watching an episode of a television show if I intend to review it, but this episode was so bad it was repulsive.

Let’s dissect this episode moment-by-moment.

Kenobi lands on a city-planet called Daiyu. It’s like Coruscant, but not. As soon as Kenobi comes out of the spaceport terminal, he looks around at the busy environment as though slightly scared of it all. Already, this is bollocks. Obi-wan Kenobi has been in environments like this for most of his life. He’s spent a huge amount of time on Coruscant; he’s been all over the galaxy as a Jedi Knight, to countless different planets with different peoples, cultures, and technologies. He would not be scared of a busy street. ‘But he’s been living in isolation on Tatooine for ten years! He’s changed!!!’, I hear the Twitterati scream. No. When you’ve had that much experience of all these kinds of places, ten years on Tatooine is not enough to make you scared of it all again. What is this bizarre obsession with diminished characters that Hollywood and idiots on Twitter have nowadays? They relish in the idea of making great characters shit. It’s grotesque. Kenobi is a Jedi Master – he didn’t stop being that just because the Jedi Order was disbanded. He should still be an extremely powerful Jedi. He does not have this timidness at the end of Revenge Of The Sith; he doesn’t have it at the start of A New Hope. This is bollocks.

Kenobi goes and asks a random person about a ship he’s tracking. Why? Why does he go and ask this person? It isn’t apparent. And then we get some more insanely expository dialogue – the person replies ‘You’re in Daiyu now. All signals in or out are blocked. People like their secrets out here.’. This is just pathetic. A real person, in this setting, would not talk like this. This line reeks of the writers wanting to say something to the audience, but not having the talent to do it in a naturalistic way. The line is also performed in a way that only Hollywood actors can do – as though this one line is going to be their big break into television, if only they can perform it with enough over-the-top American brashness.

We see a lingering shot of a street on this planet. It lingers too long, suggesting that this street is somehow central or important – it’s one fucking street on a city planet – this street is not important. We see Kenobi wandering down the street, looking at the others on it. The framing of the shot and the primary-school-level acting of the other actors make you painfully aware that this is just a set (somewhere in Los Angeles, I assume). It’s a caricature of a ‘bustling street’ – makes you wonder if the writers and directors have ever even been down a busy street. (Perhaps this is enduring effects of America’s car-centric, non-walkable cities.) Kenobi just wanders around – you’d have no idea he was on a time-critical mission at all.

There’s a homeless clone army veteran at the side of the street. This allegory isn’t just on-the-nose – it’s kicking me in the head, I collapse, unconscious, and then it’s kicking me on the ground out of baseless spite.

A lot of people nowadays accuse television shows of being ‘political’. Now, this isn’t really a correct use of the word ‘political’, which ought to mean ‘having to do with polity’, where ‘polity’ means ‘the organisation and governance of human society’. This is a television show – it has nothing to do with organising society. But I know what these people mean – the term their looking for is ‘social commentary’. This is social commentary – it’s making a comment about society.

Now, I’ve written many allegorical stories in my life. In some of them the allegory is very obvious – deliberately so – and in others it’s a bit more obscure – also deliberately so. Now I would hope that my stories have never come across as preachy or patronising. (I would like to think that I could tell if that were the case, and edit that tone out, but it might be that when one is writing an allegorical story, one just can’t tell if it’s going to come across that way.) Because it is bad when stories or story elements come across as preachy. I think it’s particularly bad when the message is something that’s so obviously true (yes, it’s bad that there are so many homeless people – this isn’t a revolutionary thought), and when so little effort is put into the metaphor (I mean, here, they just have a homeless veteran in the street – that’s it – that’s the extent of the allegory – put some fucking effort in). It comes across as someone thinking they’re a genius for coming up with something everyone already knows and putting in very little thought or effort.

I think it’s fine for stories to have social commentary in them, but if it comes across as preachy, it completely pulls you out of the story, and you realise you’re just hearing the opinions of the writers. And I think in order to not be preachy, it’s got to be more deftly done than this.

We are 1:30 into the episode, and there has already been THIS much wrong with it.

Some Stormtroopers walk along the street saying ‘Clear a path.’. Why?

Then we get an absolutely disgusting scene. A random person comes up to Kenobi and says ‘You wan’t some spice, old man?’. This is very obviously a reference to the ‘deathsticks’ scene in Attack Of The Clones, but this time, rather than Kenobi instantly telling this person to go away and rethink their life, this person just gives him one of the substances she’s selling – Kenobi doesn’t even agree to take it – she just puts it in his pocket.

The sheer arrogance of the writers to do this. Apparently they were so insulted by a scene in the prequels telling a drug dealer to maybe stop selling that shit (I would guess because some of these writers are obsessed with consuming a particular intoxicant themselves), that they wanted to put in a new scene where instead Kenobi is just given some of this shit – doesn’t even get a choice. I have had the misfortune to meet a lot of very arrogant people in my life – I have never seen arrogance like this. It’s pathetic, disgusting, and grotesque. To be so self-obsessed, smug, and self-righteous that when given the opportunity to write a sequel to another writer’s work, all they can do is think about how they can undermine and displace what that writer did, to put their own vapid, self-centred, immoral worldview into every corner of it. There are few things in this world that I have been more revolted by.

We are then introduced to a fake Jedi who is some kind of people-trafficker. This allegory is harder to not notice than a used dildo in a public library. This scene tries to be funny, but it’s a style of humour that is very un-Star-Wars.

Kenobi then goes through some kind of drugs factory – again, this allegory is harder to not notice than a condom in a bride’s hair. This scene looks more like something out of a contemporary Marvel action show than something out of Star Wars.

Kenobi then finds his way further into the building / complex. It’s not really very clear where he is (other than a film studio somewhere in California). It’s a bit weird that the first street he tried on this city planet just happens to be the one with the building where Leia’s being kept, but that’s what happens when the writers are thinking more about shoving a message down the viewers’ throats than worldbuilding.

Kenobi is immediately found by some goons. They fight. We see that Kenobi has gotten a bit out-of-practice. Again, what the fuck is this obsession with diminishing characters?! This guy is a very skilled Jedi Master – taking on two goons should be piss-easy, even after ten years. Why? Because this guy is an incredibly skilled force user, and that doesn’t diminish with age (see Yoda). Bizarrely, Kenobi doesn’t use the Force or his lightsaber at any point in this fight, despite both being available.

There’s another fight. Kenobi continues not to use the Force or his lightsaber, for no good reason. Another goon comes in; there’s some pointless dialogue. Then the goon says ‘You’re not a Jedi anymore, Kenobi.’, and here once again we are hearing the voice of the writers, not the characters. The writers are thinking about Kenobi as ‘no longer being a Jedi’ – that thought was in their head when they were writing this show. But this just shows how utterly misguided they are. You don’t stop being a Jedi just because the Jedi Order has been disbanded. That would be like saying you stop being a Christian if the Vatican shut. Jediism is a way of life, and a belief system. As long as you continue to live the Jedi way of life, or continue believing in its tenets, you are still a Jedi.

We see a bit more of the Inquisitor – not the main one – the other one – Reva, I think she’s called? This actress has absolutely no ability to come across as menacing or threatening whatsoever. (And this time it can’t be put down to bad writing – she has some very short, simple lines, that should be easy to deliver well, but they are weak and ineffectual. This is what happens when your understanding of evil is merely a caricature of evil.)

Kenobi finds Leia, and once they’re out in the street again, Leia says ‘You seem kinda old and beat up.’ – once again, this is just the thoughts of the writers. This is such basic shit – I don’t think I have ever seen such bad writing in a television show. (I might even include the ending to Game of Thrones in that.)

The inquisitors talk to each other for a bit – the main one and Reva, with a few throw-away lines from the others. The whole thing comes across like an annual review in a big corporation, not like two dark side users talking to each other – it’s quite comical. The main inquisitor guy tells Reva that she’s the ‘least of us’ because she ‘came from the gutter’ – for fuck’s sake – when have force users ever cared about class? Dark side users care about one thing: the accumulation of power for its own sake. Your status is determined by your power, not your class. They don’t give a shit about where you came from.

The main inquisitor guy then puts Reva on leave, promising that HR will speak to her later.

And that’s it. That’s the first fifteen minutes. I couldn’t watch any more, and won’t. I mean, bloody hell, almost every frame of those fifteen minutes had an issue. It’s so bad it’s almost nauseating – I feel like throwing up.

This show is quite possibly the worst television I have ever seen, and I will not be watching any more of it. This isn’t Star Wars, or even remotely connected to it. This is artistic defilement.

Do I even want to go and see The Matrix Resurrections?

This week, the official trailer for The Matrix Resurrections – supposedly the fourth film in the Matrix series – was released, and despite really liking the Matrix trilogy (I’m one of what seems like a minority of people who like the second and third films), I find myself wandering whether I should even go and see this film at all.

In recent years, Hollywood has created a lot of sequels to films and series’ that had seemed to be over and complete many years or even decades ago: Disney’s attempt at a Star Wars trilogy, the new Jumanji films, the Jurassic World films, the Fantastic Beasts films, Independence Day: Resurgence, and more that I can’t remember.

Many (but not all) of these haven’t been very good, and some – like Disney’s Star Wars films – have been absolute garbage. (You’d think that, given how obsessed Hollywood seems to be with sequels, that they’d have gotten good at them by now.)

And at this point, I have very little trust in Hollywood that they can make a sequel to a film or series – particularly one that was made over a decade ago – that doesn’t just completely ruin the whole thing. This is no longer a per-franchise problem – it’s no longer ‘Oh well that sequel film wasn’t very good but sequel films for other franchises will probably still be great.’ – I think we’re at the point (well beyond the point, some would argue) where we just cannot trust Hollywood with any sequel to any film or series.

This problem does seem to be particularly prominent for films or series’ made over a decade ago. (Unbelievably, The Matrix Revolutions came out in 2003!) I think this is partly because filmmakers don’t want to imitate the style of older films (even though they could do so very easily) – either the style of storytelling or the technical style. This is one of the apprehensions I have about The Matrix 4 after seeing the trailer – it seems very apparent to me that they have not tried to reproduce the visual style of the original three films. This will make it very difficult for this film to sit alongside the other three.

But even more important than that, the ending of The Matrix Revolutions was conclusive – the end of a war – it doesn’t get much more conclusive than that. Continuing the story after that necessarily means that you either have to have a ‘quieter’ period within the world of the story, where the necessary world-building can happen to build up to a more dramatic time period, or you have to undo something about the previous ending. Hollywood always seems to go for the second option, which is the incorrect option, as it undermines the previous story, and any character development that happened in it. (This is the option that Disney went for with the Star Wars films, and it’s a big part of what killed the franchise.)

Based on the glimpses that we get from the trailer, it appears that the matrix is still running, and Neo and Trinity are somehow back inside it, despite both dying at the end of the last film. (Now, it’s generally not a good idea to try to work out the story of a film like this based on its trailer – the trailers are designed to confuse you as to what the actual story is – but this is what appears to be true.) While the conclusion to the last film was that the matrix would continue, but anyone who wanted out would be freed, it does look like something is going to be undone with this new film.

(Also, Laurence Fishburne is not returning for this film, despite the character of Morpheus being in it. I don’t know why this is – it’s possible that he simply didn’t want to. But Laurence Fishburne was iconic as Morpheus, and it really lowers my confidence in the film that he’s not in it.)

So I really don’t know if I want to go and see this film at all. It seems likely that this film is going to undo part of the ending of the previous films. That will in turn make this film unpopular, reducing the chances that a subsequent film or two are made to complete what will almost certainly be a new trilogy of films (because how can you follow a big trilogy of films with just one more film – surely you have to have another trilogy?). That will leave us with the original trilogy, plus one, maybe two more films that undermine the original trilogy, and which aren’t in themselves complete. It seems to me like this series is likely to end up a mess.

I will probably decide closer to the time whether I actually want to see it or not.

Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope – Review

On to the originals. My posts about these films aren’t really going to be reviews, so much. Almost everyone already agrees that these are good films, so there’s no need for me to go through them and point out the good things in them. Instead, in these posts, I’m just going to make some observations about the films, and point out that some of the things that the prequels are criticised for also exist in the originals, but a lot of people are much more forgiving of them.

Watching the films in the order that is chronological for the internal universe really highlights that the original Star Wars films were very simple films. The prequels are a lot busier by comparison – a lot more happens in them, over far greater scales, and it happens a lot faster. In fact I think the complexity of the prequels is part of the reason why a lot of people don’t like them (not that I ever really hear anyone say that), whereas the simplicity of the originals is partly why they are so successful. The originals don’t try to do too much – why, in Episode V, Han, Chewbacca, and Leia spend most of their time just trying to avoid capture. In this way the originals are also unlike the main Disney films. Those films are also very busy – it seems to be a very common thing with modern Hollywood films – they don’t like to have a scene with just two characters talking or trying to solve a problem – they like to have five characters all talking to each other while trying to solve one problem while walking to another location where there’s another problem.

An example of the simplicity of this film is right at the start. When C-3PO and R2-D2 land on Tatooine in their escape pod, they land in the middle of nowhere. This is very likely, given that Tatooine is mostly desert. Their first objective is to find their way out of the desert. Even this goes wrong, and they end up being captured by the Jawas. They do eventually find Luke and get to Obi-wan, but all of this takes quite a bit of screen time. If this were a Disney film, I expect the droids would land right outside wherever it is that Obi-wan lives.

In the original films, C-3PO and R2-D2 get a lot more to do, and are a lot more interesting. They don’t get as much to do in the prequels – partly because those films are just so busy – and they are merely accessories in the Disney films. The banter between them is much better in the originals – it’s great that R2-D2 plays the fool in order to get his way, and that we can tell that simply from what he does and what C-3PO says.

Peter Cushing is just amazing. He has such extraordinary presence. Just from the way he walks into the room in his first scene, you can tell that he’s in charge – the way he walks is brisk, confident, and assured, but not arrogant – which is what you would expect from someone near to the top of the empire, and who has a lot of power and authority. Despite there being other people playing similar parts in Star Wars films since then, no-one has managed to equal that portrayal – no-one else has had that presence.

Even though it was actually different in the original version of A New Hope, when it came out in cinemas, I really like the concept of Jabba the Hutt. I really like the idea of giant slugs being the mobsters of the universe. This shows the raw creativity that went into the original Star Wars films. Again, if this were a Disney film, Jabba the Hutt would probably have been humanoid. The Disney films seemed to be very against having any characters that deviated much from humans.

As with the prequels, there are some bad reaction shots in this film. In fact there’s one particularly egregious example, and that’s Luke’s reaction to seeing his aunt and uncle incinerated. This reaction is nowhere near strong enough. This reaction is so underplayed that the first two or three times that I watched this film (many years ago now – back when I was about twelve or something), I didn’t even realise that those skeletons were his aunt and uncle. I just thought that they were two other random people who happened to be in the area – precisely because Luke’s reaction isn’t very strong. Luke is looking at the bloody skeletons of his aunt and uncle, and his reaction is to just slowly look away. It’s not strong enough.

There are also several bad lines in this film. The dialogue between Luke and Han when Luke tries to convince Han to rescue Leia is a bit unrealistic. And the dialogue between Luke and Biggs is – I dislike the word ‘cheesy’, but that’s the only word that really describes it. The performance of that dialogue is amateurish. It’s bad in the same way that some of the dialogue in the prequels is bad.

They convey the sense of scale in this film very well. This is something I’m very interested in with films that have very large objects or environments in them. In this film, the Death Star genuinely feels big. This is something that they failed to do in The Force Awakens – in that film, Starkiller Base did not come across as something planet-sized. Conveying scale well is all about physics. Large objects in large environments work differently to everyday-sized objects. Another example of a film that failed to convey scale well was Jupiter Ascending. In that film, ships go in and out of Jupiter’s Red Eye storm. The ships are shown as being comparable in size to the storm itself, but in reality, the Eye of Jupiter is 1.3 times the width of planet Earth – far bigger than the ships.

Part of how the scale of the Death Star is conveyed is the final battle of the film. The final battle has a lot of screen time, and we see a lot of the surface of the Death Star in it. This close, the surface of the Death Star appears flat. This is what shows its scale – we’ve seen that the Death Star appears spherical from afar, but when you get close to it, it’s so big that you can’t tell at all – and we see lots of positions in between these two extremes throughout the film.

This final battle also shows the simplicity of the film – which is part of its success. The rebels make multiple attempts to blow up the Death Star, and several of them fail. This raises the tension. As the battle goes on, fewer and fewer ships remain to make the attempt, and the more times they fail, the harder we understand it to be. The fact that the film takes its time in this battle is what makes it successful.

And finally, my favourite scene in this film is the final one – for one reason: the music. The music in the final scene is just fantastic. Of course, this film being the first Star Wars film, it gets the credit for all of the main music in the series, but I particularly like the music in that final scene. It’s not just triumphant, but a true finale.

So this film is good, but not without its flaws. Its main success over the prequels comes from it giving enough time for the various scenes and sequences – it doesn’t rush anything. In terms of raw creativity, world-building, performances, music – this film and any of the prequels are roughly equal, I think.

Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith – Review

So, Episode III. I get the sense that this is the prequel film that people like the most. It does have a great many excellent moments – particularly after the half-way point, where Anakin becomes Darth Vader. I like almost everything in the second half of this film.

As with the review for the previous film, in this review I’m going to have to go through the events of the film in mostly-chronological order. (I would prefer to split the review by the different aspects of filmmaking, but that’s not really possible with this film.) A lot happens in this film, and a lot of the scenes we see build very rapidly on previous scenes.

The opening sequence is excellent. Such a complex, low-altitude space battle is not something we’ve seen before in this series. And George Lucas putting it over Coruscant leads to many interesting questions – if anything of sufficient size falls to the ground, it will cause A LOT of destruction – there’s nothing but city down there – anything that falls WILL kill a lot of people. Since Palpatine is ultimately orchestrating this entire war, and could stop it at any moment, it shows how little regard he has for the people of the soon-to-be empire.

The buzz droids are also not something we’ve seen before. They are an interesting new weapon, and an example of good world-building. In a universe with droids as clever and common as R2-D2, buzz droids would definitely exist.

We even get some good character moments in the opening sequence. Anakin’s determination to save Obi-wan from the buzz droids makes the ending to this film all the more tragic. But then despite Anakin saving Obi-wan, Obi-wan still berates Anakin – as he did throughout the last film – that Grievous’ ship’s shields are still up.

Ian McDiarmid and Christopher Lee are brilliant as always. If this film were released today, I’m sure the way McDiarmid plays Palpatine would be described as over-the-top, cartoonish – or even slightly flamboyant. There is a trend at the moment for gritty villains. But McDiarmid playing the character in this way is what makes it enjoyable – the character isn’t supposed to be some pretentious mIrRoR tO tHe AuDiEnCe – he’s supposed to be the embodiment of pure evil – someone who is devious and cunning – and McDiarmid plays that perfectly.

Like with the last two films, there are some odd lines of dialogue in this film. Some very noticeable examples are in the conversation between Anakin and Obi-wan after they have gotten the chancellor back, and just before Obi-wan goes back to the temple. This entire conversation is a bit off – the whole thing sounds like two actors acting rather than two people who are actually friends talking to each other. Once again, I think this is a writing problem – the lines just haven’t been written in a very natural way.

We then get many scenes that are great setup for Anakin’s fall. Anakin starts getting visions of Padmé’s death and he goes to Yoda for advice. (As a side note, I really like that Anakin can go to Grandmaster Yoda – this again shows how Yoda is not just the leader of a martial order, but a spiritual one too – he has to be involved as much in the moral training of the Jedi as the day-to-day running of a martial school.) The advice that Yoda gives Anakin is ‘Train yourself to let go.’.

This is the worst possible advice to give Anakin at this moment – he is never going to follow that advice. This shows how even if the Jedi’s teachings are correct, they did not adjust how they taught them for Anakin – who of course, was older than most people are when they join the Jedi Order – they knew he had already formed attachments – they needed to adjust his training based on that. And here, Yoda doesn’t know the exact details of Anakin’s situation, of course, but as soon as a Jedi as powerful as Anakin – and the Chosen One – came to him talking about fearing someone’s death, Yoda should have inquired more. This should have been a red flag for Yoda.

Anakin keeps getting bad instruction and bad advice from the Jedi Order – Obi-wan constantly berates him, and now when he goes to Yoda he doesn’t get the right advice. They are not good mentors for Anakin.

At the same time, Anakin sees Palpatine as an excellent mentor – his true mentor. There are several scenes in the previous film and this one that show that Palpatine has befriended Anakin over the time he’s been on Coruscant. (In truth, these scenes have told us this rather than shown it – through off-hand lines of dialogue. Seeing Palpatine befriend Anakin should probably have been a more major component of these films, given how important it is – it could certainly have replaced some of the overly-long action sequences – but I’m not sure it could ever have been given enough time given that this is just three films – this is perhaps another reason why the story of the prequels might be better told through a long-form television series than a film series, but at the time the prequels were made, such series’ were less common.)

Palpatine often compliments Anakin. In the previous film, Palpatine tells Anakin ‘You are the most gifted Jedi I have ever met.’. Later in this film, he says that Anakin is the obvious choice to be the one to hunt down General Grievous, and at around this point in the film he tells Anakin that he is appointing him to be his personal representative on the Jedi Council. Anakin immediately assumes that this means he will be a Jedi Master, and from his reaction it is apparent that he has always wanted this (and probably believes that he already should be one). For the entire time that Anakin has been training to be a Jedi, he has been told that he is the Chosen One – he is expected to be a great Jedi, and he has always wanted to meet that expectation. After years of feeling like Obi-wan has been holding him back, it is now Palpatine who allows him to progress. Anakin keeps receiving good sentiments from Palpatine, and now Palpatine is giving him the opportunity to do something he’s always wanted to do – Anakin sees Palpatine as a good mentor. This is all excellent setup for Anakin’s fall.

The Jedi give Anakin a seat on the Council, but they do not grant him the rank of master. Anakin is angered by this. He sees it as unfair, and as the Council deliberately holding him back. This adds to Anakin seeing the Jedi Council as being in opposition to him (something which started when Anakin first met the Jedi Council in Episode I – they did not want him to be trained as a Jedi – his first impression of the Jedi Council was as something that would get in the way of what he wants to be and do).

Then the Council asks Anakin to report on what the chancellor is up to. Anakin strongly dislikes this – it goes against the Jedi Code – it goes against what he has been taught that it means to be a good Jedi. Anakin first being denied the rank of master and then being asked to spy on Palpatine are more excellent setup for Anakin’s fall. First he is prevented from being the great Jedi he wants and is expected to be, and then he is asked to do something that a great Jedi would never do. It puts Anakin in direct conflict with the Council, and he realises that they are not the moral paragons that he has been taught that they are (which leads into the later line of ‘From my point of view the Jedi are evil.’). The Jedi Council asking him off-record to do this makes it worse – they are being secretive and deceptive – qualities that are associated with the Sith. The line from Obi-wan at the end of the scene ‘The Council is asking you.’ is the perfect line to end on – this makes it clear to Anakin that it is the Jedi Council – and thus the institution of the Jedi – that is the problem.

This scene also shows Anakin’s naïveté when it comes to politics. Palpatine putting Anakin on the Jedi Council was him trying to get Anakin to spy on the Council for him, but Anakin didn’t see it that way, because it wasn’t put that way (and because Anakin was blinded by ambition). Anakin should have disliked the idea of reporting on what the Council was doing to Palpatine as much as the idea of reporting on what Palpatine was doing to the Council, but he didn’t, because he couldn’t see what Palpatine was up to.

All of this is a master stroke of writing. We see how the Jedi are not good mentors to Anakin, while Anakin increasingly sees Palpatine as his true mentor. We see Anakin increasingly see the Council as being opposed to him, preventing him from becoming the great Jedi that he was told he would be and that he wants to be. We see the Jedi Council ask Anakin to do something against the Jedi Code – the moral code that they teach as the way to act – and spy on the very person who Anakin sees as his true mentor. This is all brilliant setup for Anakin’s fall.

After this we get the famous scene in the opera. This scene is so memorable that most Star Wars fans can quote it word for word. The best thing about this scene, of course, is Ian McDiarmid’s performance – again, maybe it’s a little bit over-the-top, but I think that’s good – that’s part of what makes it memorable. When I rewatched this film, one line that struck me as great was ‘If they haven’t included you in their plot, they soon will.’ – what a deliciously manipulative line for Palpatine to say to Anakin.

Shortly after that we get the final scene between Obi-wan and Anakin before Anakin turns to the Dark Side. Now, there’s nothing about the scene that suggests that this will be the last time they speak before Anakin turns to the dark side – there’s nothing foreboding about it – you only realise that it is the last scene when you rewatch the film, but that makes it all the more tragic. This final scene shows a very ordinary conversation. This means that from Obi-wan’s point of view, everything seemed fine, and it’s only when he returns from Utapau that he starts to see what’s happened.

What’s also interesting about this scene is that we finally see Obi-wan praise Anakin – ‘You have become a far greater Jedi than I could ever hope to be.’ – after berating him almost constantly for years. Had Obi-wan not berated Anakin so much, Anakin might not have started seeing Palpatine as his true mentor, but this praise is too late.

The world design of Utapau is excellent – we’ve not seen a world like this before in Star Wars. The prequels are excellent in how many new worlds and species are introduced. Grievous has an interesting character design – once a completely biological lifeform, he is now mostly machine – good foreshadowing of what Anakin will become. The fight scene between Obi-wan and Grievous is perhaps overly long (or perhaps other parts of the film are not long enough), but at least it incorporates elements that we’ve not seen before.

The scene where Anakin realises that Palpatine is a Sith Lord is good, but it needed to be a bigger moment. This is a pivotal moment in the story of the prequels – this moment and the moment where Anakin becomes Palpatine’s apprentice are possibly the two biggest moments – but it doesn’t entirely seem like the big revelation that it should be for Anakin. For that I think there needed to be more focus on Anakin’s reactions to every line Palpatine said, and more tension in the scene overall. The success of this scene depends not on the audience realising that Palpatine is a Sith Lord – we already know that – but on us seeing Anakin realise that, and understanding how he reacts to it – which we don’t get enough. Anakin has been told he is the Chosen One who will destroy the Sith for years – we should have seen a reaction from him of deep suspicion and indecision.

And then we get to the most important scene of the prequels – the scene where the Jedi try to arrest Palpatine, and where Anakin turns to the Dark Side and becomes Palpatine’s new apprentice.

As has been commented many times before, the fighting between Palpatine and the Jedi could have been a lot better. It veers between fairly slow, simple fight choreography between the actual actors, and a CGI Ian McDiarmid jumping around unnecessarily. This should have been an epic, memorable fight, and it’s not (well, it’s memorable for the wrong reasons). I get the sense from behind-the-scenes videos that they just didn’t spend enough time on this aspect of the scene.

Mace Windu overpowers Palpatine, of course, and then Anakin comes in. Anakin has not seen the fight, nor heard anything that Palpatine said to the Jedi, and now he must choose who to believe about what has happened. The setup to this moment is fantastic – who does Anakin believe? Does he believe Master Windu, who has never trusted him – who was the person who said that he wouldn’t be trained as a Jedi, and then that he would not be given the rank of master – who is part of the Jedi Council, which Anakin has long found frustrating, and which asked him to do something against the Jedi Code, and who is now about to do something against the Jedi Code? Or does he believe the person he has long seen as his true mentor, and who claims can teach him how to save Padmé? It’s glaringly obvious which one he would choose in the end.

I like almost everything in the film from the point where Anakin turns to the Dark Side onwards. The music as Order 66 is executed is fantastic – sorrowful, mournful. We even get some great world-building as that happens – we see several completely new planets, with very different terrains and life-forms, just for a few seconds each as part of the montage. It’s more world-building than we get in all of the Disney films. The sight of the Jedi Temple on fire at night is also delightfully tragic.

The fight between Anakin and Obi-wan on Mustafar is one of the highlights of the trilogy, I think. Mustafar is another environment that we haven’t seen so far in the series, and an excellent choice of backdrop for a fight between father and son, or between brothers, that will decide the fate of the galaxy. The music – Battle of the Heroes – is outstanding – both epic and tragic. I know very little about sword-fighting, so I couldn’t say exactly how good or bad the fight choreography is, but throughout the entire sequence, it looks like both characters are giving it all they’ve got.

I think possibly the best line of the prequel trilogy is Obi-wan saying ‘I have failed you, Anakin. I have failed you.’ – because it is absolutely true, and it’s only now that it’s too late that Obi-wan has realised it.

It is a beautiful tragedy when Obi-wan has to watch Anakin be burned by the lava. He has to watch the destruction of his pupil and brother, who by this point hates him not just because he is on the opposing side of a war, but because he has been the source of his frustration for years, and is now just letting him burn. I think Christensen performs brilliantly in this scene (and so does McGregor, when I think about it).

There are some bad lines in this part of the film. Some of Padmé’s lines when she’s talking to Anakin after she arrives on Mustafar are a bit odd. I think that, as ever, this is down to how the dialogue is written – it’s far too terse – and a lack of reaction shots and close-ups. Also, after the Mustafar sequence, when Padmé is dying, and the robot says ‘She’s dying, and we don’t know why … She’s lost the will to live.’ – this is a bit daft.

At the same time as the sequence on Mustafar, we see the fight between Yoda and Palpatine. Once again, Lucas finds a way of doing something different with the fight – this one taking place in the main senate hall. The destruction of the senate hall as the head of the Sith and the head of the Jedi fight is a simple symbolism, but a satisfying one.

After all of that, there are various short scenes that wind down the film, and the trilogy. Qui-gon being the first Jedi to become a force ghost is a nice touch – you get the sense that if there’s anyone who would be the first, it would be him. Padmé’s funeral, while short, and sort of cliché, is beautifully tragic – and a great scene to have at the end of this trilogy – the tragedy of Padmé Amidala and the tragedy of Anakin Skywalker are essentially one and the same.

This film has an extraordinary number of excellent aspects. It has some bad lines of dialogue, and there are many missing reaction shots. Some of the scenes are too long, others too short, others not impactful enough. The film has many flaws, but I don’t think they at all outweigh the extraordinary number of good things about the film. This is an excellent, but imperfect, film.

This is the same as what I said about the previous two films. There are many, many great things about this trilogy, and the idea that it was a complete disaster, as some people seem to think, is completely flawed. To see this trilogy as a disaster, you would have to ignore about 90% of it, and over-focus on about four or five lines of dialogue throughout the three films. You would have to ignore all of the great world-building, the great actors, the great performances, the great sword fights, the great costume design, the great music, a story structure which is unlike most of what we get from modern Hollywood (one of the things people who like The Last Jedi claim is great about the film was that it didn’t follow the same tired structure that a lot of space fantasy films do – well the prequels also don’t follow that same structure), and you would have to over-focus on ‘I don’t like sand.’ – a line so forgettable and ignorable that I’m amazed anyone at all complains about it.

If nothing else, writing these reviews has shown me just how many things I like about these films, and I will now be able to come back to this review if I want to think over these things again.