One of the benefits of having a wife who feels guilty when she takes time for herself is that when she plans to go out of town for a few days for recreational purposes, she lets me go to Dads' Night Out with my stay-at-home dads' group, then sleep in the next morning, then have another night off to go see a movie. I chose Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace in 3D, and it brought up a few questions:
1) Why is this movie so full of tedious political intrigue when it's so heavily marketed toward children, who have zero patience for tedious political intrigue?
2) Why are the Tatooine/Pod Race characters so ridiculously cartoonish, especially the two-headed Pod Race Announcer, and several of the pilots?
3) Who decided that Jar Jar Binks would survive this movie while Darth Maul would not?
4) Isn't it Obi-Wan's rage and grief at the death of Qui-Gon Jinn, which are distinctly Dark Side traits, that give him the strength to defeat Darth Maul?
5) When it first came out, was the average viewer supposed to know or to be shocked by the reveal that Padme was Amidala and Palpatine was the Sith Lord?
6) Did I just miss the Immaculate Conception of Annakin Skywalker the first time around, or was that another new innovation from George Lucas, who has previously demonstrated his willingness to revise his movies with every new re-release? Spontaneously knocked up by the midichlorians? Really?
7) Do the accents of the Viceroy and the other members of the Trade Federation seem vaguely racist in a way that I can't quite put my finger on, or is that just me?
8) Shouldn't Palpatine have learned from the destruction of the Droid Control Ship and the resulting shutdown of the entire invading army, that placing all of one's eggs into a single basket, such as a massively expensive Death Star with a glaringly exploitable weakness, is poor strategy?
9) Isn't "Real 3D" essentially a gimmick, layering 2D images, much like a pop-up book, allowing theaters to make the ridiculously expensive theater experience even more expensive? And why exactly are the glasses modeled after the Ray-Ban Wayfarers of Risky Business fame?
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2 comments:
From a rabid Star Wars fan since childhood, all I have to say is.... BOOBS! Because they are more interesting than dissecting Lucas's clearly degenerating prefrontal cortex. I've gone through all of it. The questions. The doubt. The angst. The heartache. The hatred. The sadness. The only thing I have found to placate myself is to pretend the prequels do not exist. That Hayden Christiansen was simply a ridiculous nightmare after a night of funneling Gray Goose in the ballpit at McDonalds. I am obsessively hanging on to my non-edited VHS tapes of the original trilogy and silently staging a one-woman strike against anything to do with prequels altogether. I am old. I am allowed to fear change. But Lucas is older. Someone really needs to lure him away from anything to do with Star Wars, perhaps with a plate of Oreos or a trail of M&Ms, and involuntarily commit him to working for Nickelodeon or the Disney Channel. Hey. It's possible.
And there's the answer I've been looking for: http://youtu.be/VgICnbC2-_Y
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