I walked out of the theater at the end of TPM feeling blown away by the lightsaber battle. Lucas wasn't bullshitting on that "The Beginning" documentary when we was telling the vfx people about the lightsaber battle needing to be even more exciting than the podrace. Speaking of the podrace, I don't remember that being terribly exciting at all. It has been 7 and a half years, but I don't remember anything on tatooine really doing anything for me. Probably the redundancy of going back there when we'd already been there in not one but two movies of the original three, that's what was getting to me. I liked how the whole movie was basically centered around naboo, this new planet we've never seen before.
But it was the only new planet we saw.
Yes, it's neat to see Coruscant expanded from just that one shot at the end of ROTJ's SE, and to find out how it's name is actually pronounced, but let's not forget that we didn't even get hung up on mentioning the names of planets in ANH and Empire. It was part of the lived in feel of those movies. Notice I don't mention Jedi. Well, that's because the battle at the end of TPM felt like a retread of Jedi's battle, there was no way I could get that comparison out of my head. This time it was a big land battle and a small space battle instead of the other way around.
I'd already finished about a third of the novelization before I saw the movie itself on opening day and somehow the writing didn't seem as hokey when I reminded myself that I was reading the novelization. Seeing it up on screen was a bit different I'm afraid. I did at least get the feeling of really stepping back to a time 30 years earlier in that galaxy far, far away. Maybe that's just because of how....different everything was. Yes, I know in retrospect it really wasn't different in the right ways, but I digress.
Another thing that's always been in the back of my head about the entire PT is the problem of making these movies so long after the originals. Heck, ROTJ was a little past its time, but TPM was 22 years past its time. Even forgetting that, I'd been hearing about these prequels in one way or another since '94, and the fact is that they just didn't deliver. All the many things I've pondered on recently just didn't come to mind back in '99, so to remove myself and remember how I felt back then is a little complicated now. Like I've said before, I've understood the notion of Lucas seeing only SE and PT since the day the TPM trailer was released. But those SE's didn't have an effect in every single shot, so even the SE's are still quite different from the PT. I still looked at TPM as the first new star wars movie in 16 years, SE or no SE. I mean, I was 13, almost 14 at the time, and I'd grown up on the original versions, not the SE's. To some up how I felt leaving the theater, I wouldn't say I was dissapointed, just underwhelmed.
It's funny, I've been going through my Star Trek movie dvds and thinking about the stretch of time from Star Wars in '77 to TPM in '99. I grew up on both Star Wars and Star Trek, but Star Trek was pretty much it for me at least until the trailer for TPM was released in fall of '98. Star Trek had started to show signs of suckage by that point anyway, and I'm sort of happy to say that the last of the movies I saw on the big screen was First Contact on opening night. It was probably one of the most memorable moviegoing experiences of my middle school years. I mean, the whole audience applauded at the end! Anyway, another reason I bring up Trek is ILM. They worked on all the movies 1-8 except for 5 and 1 (but even 1 had John Dykstra so it earns some points). 6 was one of the first movies I ever saw in a theater, and I saw 7 and 8 on the big screen as well. Let us not also forget Wrath of Khan and Search for Spock, movies ILM contributed to in the years before and after ROTJ, respectively.
So ILM fed our appetite for space adventure movies in the years between the Star Wars trilogies. Lucas and Spielberg must've really needed ILM for Last Crusade. Either that or Paramount didn't want them for Star Trek V. In any event, and this is the point that I'm really getting at, how many times did we hear about how much money Lucas was saving on TPM's effects budget just because he owns ILM? Yea, they found the time to work on other big movie projects during the PT, but there is the feeling that a lot of their work went to waste on what were not the best Star Wars stories that could've been told. Lucas simply relied on them too much instead of finding an interesting way to tell his story the way the makers of the OT did. I mean, break down for me the percentage of shots in the OT involving effects and then do the same for the PT. Not much more needs to be said on this.
The other thing to be addressed is the matter of "kidifying" Star Wars, something that ROTJ was first accused of. On the audio commentary for ROTJ, around one of the last scenes at Jabba's Palace, Lucas says that people tend to take Star Wars too seriously when it's really just Space Opera. No one's really arguing that point, they were arguing that ROTJ is all kidified but Lucas dodges the question by throwing something irrelevant in as an answer. Well, I went into TPM without any blinders on, and it seemed fairly kidified to me. The meal conversation scene was just awful and still is. The podrace had some impressive "ooo, wow, look how real that looks" moments, but besides that it did nothing for me. The lightsaber battle was the only real drama of the film's end.
Jumping ahead to AOTC, well, I already knew just about everything that was going to happen when I saw it with my friends on opening day, but that should never stop you from enjoying a movie.
I laughed through some of the more "important" parts.
That didn't stop me from seeing it several times that summer. Hey, what can I say, it's Star Wars.
By the time ROTS rolled around, I think I had somewhat of an idea of what the Harry Potter fans must feel like when they see the movies having already read the books (I haven't read any of the HP books). By that point, the EU had become a whole lot better than the movies and it just felt like Lucas was adapting from it and not the other way around. If not that, it definitely didn't feel any better than the EU which in turn was no where near as good as the OOT.
And notice how there's this huge public interest in TPM and ROTS and much less in AOTC. TPM because it was the first in 16 years and ROTS because it might've been the last and, more importantly, it was the prequel to the original movie from '77. That's why I'm happy to say that my last big screen viewing of ROTS was at the Uptown, the only theater in D.C. to show Star Wars on May 25, 1977.