John Doom said:
danny_boy said:
Lucas could have shot the Phantom Menace with lens flares,shaky cams and rapid fire editing(ala Michal Bay) in 1998 but chose to preserve the static compositions and conservative editing(by 1990's standards)of the OT.
:D If Abrams turns TFA into another "michael bay", it may require careful fan-editing to slow down the scenes, but how to fix shaky cameras and lens flares?
danny_boy said:
But one factor that affected the prequels which hardly anyone notices is that the audience already new where the plot and the characters were headed(they just did not know how) across all 3 episodes(I,II and III).
What was the main attraction of the OT whilst it was unfolding?......the idea that you had no idea where it was heading and who would survive and who would not.
Big difference.
If you think about it, the only character we knew would survive were Anakin, the Emperor, Obi-wan, the droids and Yoda. Vader's motives were at the core of the prequels and kept the audience's interest high, but in the end they didn't carefully handled them :\
Knowing the fate of the characters that you mentioned was enough to supress any potential excitement that can be derived from not knowing what is going to happen.
In 1981,when I watched SW back to back with ESB for the first time , I thought Han was dead in the carbonite(despite Vader's, Fetts's and C3P0's assertion that he would be/was ok---hey I was 6 years old!) and I thought Luke would bleed to death on the gantry when his hand was sliced off.
When that did not happen I thought Luke would die when he jumped off said gantry (only for him to get sucked into the airshaft).
And when that did not happen I thought he would die on the weather vane--lol!
All of that excitement/adrenaline was accentuated by the fact that I(we) did not know what was going to happen in those tense few minutes.
Now maybe an older person in 1980/81 would have anticipated that the hero/main protagonist would not die in ESB.
But compared to any of the prequels, there was never a threat of death or impending doom to any of the principle characters (for someone who was familiar with the Star Wars mythology).
The real test though would be to show the saga in episodic order(I- VI) to someone who is not familiar with it and see if it works(on them).