JohnGreenArt said:

Regardless of how wonderful the film is, it's impossible to put the "Vader's your father, Leia's your sister, and Yoda's the little green man" cats back in their respective bags. Unless you haven't seen the prequels or have been living in a cave for the past 25 years. I saw the movies when they were originally in theaters, so those things were surprises to me. Things didn't get leaked on the World Wide Web back then.

I know today's audiences can be obssessed with trailers that reveal too much or hearing spoilers, like not wanting to know what happens in the new Dark Knight movie because they don't want any surprises ruined (can anyone imagine what the ESB trailer would've been like if it had the "No... I am your father" bit in it?).

I'm not saying knowing spoilers in advance makes ESB a bad movie, not at all, just that it's a different viewing experience for any audience when before the movie even starts they already know something about the characters when they're not *supposed* to know about it until it's revealed within the film itself, as the filmmakers originally intended.

I know what you mean. Spoilers/internet access aside, I think part of the problem is the marketing of the film...a lot of studios seem to have this "coddle" mentality - they think that the public won't be "get" the story in 2 hours if it's not explained to them in bite-sized chunks ahead of time. James Cameron talked about it in the commentary on T2. The film is structured so that the audience isn't told until the last possible second that this time Arnie is the hero, but it's almost a waste of effort because the trailers, in order to advertise the film, will reveal that fact months before the film hits the theaters anyway. In the end though, you have to make the film from the story perspective, not the marketing perspective, because once the film leaves the theater and becomes part of everyday life years later, it becomes new again to people who hadn't seen it in the theater originally.