3D STAR WARS for the masses...has ARRIVED! — Page 30

i dont think cars 2 had as many ads as TPM3D.  Then again, based on merch sales, they probably dind't need it.

as for 1997, noway were they expecting this to come close to that.  probably just enough to make profit , spread good word of mouth and pay for the next conversion.  apologists are probably thrilled it didn't bomb and site these numbers as 'proof' that TPM is not hated.

the thing no one seems to be talking about is this 'one film per year' strategy.  its too long for 5 more movies and momentum can't carry over. plus a ton of things can change in that time. 

lol, but what a way to honor the 40th anniversary of the once proud franchise formerly known as star wars - watching ROTJ and hearing "No....NOOOOOOO!!!" and seeing hayden ghost.  gotta love it.

The video more or less sums up how I feel about The Phantom Menace as a whole.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/escape-to-the-movies/5357-The-Phantom-Menace-13-Years-Later

TV's Frink said:

 

red5-626 said:
Well I saw TPM in 3D, and I will admit that I enjoyed it.

The 3D was well dun, considering that it was a conversion from 2D 35mm. Some may say that this is like converting a B&W movie to color, but some times if dun well that can look rather good. Other times if dun poorly it looks rely bad.

This 3D converting was dun well and looks rather good.

And if you thought that TPM characters did not have any depth, well they still don’t but the 3D glasses give you the elusion that they do. LOL!

PS

I Know I am feeding the GL monster, but hay I did not buy the blu rays!

Ben thar, dun thaht.

 

Well played, phrink!

I have just got back from watching TPM:3D. Here is my review:

It is no great secret that i am not a fan of the prequels. I don't hate them, i just  think they are just not on the same level as the Original trilogy . So why did i go to see TPM in 3D? Well, that was my own fault. Remind me never to wind my wife up , who hates Star Wars by the way, saying how much i wanted to go and see this in 3D at the cinema as a Valentines Day present (plus it's her birthday a couple of days later so i wound her up by saying she will be having a Star Wars birthday). Then before you can tell her it's a joke, you find out that she has booked two tickets for the sunday afternoon performance and paid for them. Ouch.

I'm not going to go into where i feel this film fails because that has been covered so many times and i have nothing more to add on that subject. I went in there with an open mind to see how this movie would hold up in it's 3D conversion. Well things started ok. We got the cinema pretty much to ourselves. It was a weird atmosphere and it seemed very strange that a Star Wars movie would have so few attending on its first weekend. I looked around the cinema and counted 17 people, not including ourselves. So 19 people at a Sunday afternoon showing is very poor. The opening few days haven't faired much better. The most they have had at any one screening was 43, which was Saturday night, with one showing on the friday having only 5 tickets sold.

Sometimes i have gone to watch 3D movies and there have been major problems with focusing and calibration. This happened when watching Transformers 3, which was unwatchable without feeling ill. If the 3D adverst are all worng, then its a good bet the film will be too. So i was happy to see the Titanic trailer. Boy does that look like a great conversion. The 3D on that was excellent. So here i was, with fingers crossed, that TPM would  be as good. Oh, how wrong i was. The new fox and Lucasfilms logos looked great and really stood out. Then came the main crawl. Now that looked amazing, with real depth and 3D really gave this the wow factor. But thats where it ended. As soon as the camera panned down after the crawl disappeared it became almost 2D. But worse than that was just how bad quality many parts of the film was. While some shots looked good, apart from some obvious DVNR, there was a hell of a lot of the film that looked horrendous. The extra shots added for the extended pod race opening was just one example. They looked like bad upscaled images and blurry as hell. This is not how TPM looked at the cinema in 1999.

But back to the 3D. Both my wife, and myself, found ourselves constantly lowering our glasses  because we couldn't believe that what we were supposed to be seeing was a 3D image. Now usually when you do that when watching a 3D movie, there is noticeable blurring of the image, but not in this case. the majority of the time the image looked the same with or without the glasses. Shots that you would think should look awesome in 3D just looked flat. For example, the vista shots of the Naboo scenery. Flat, with no depth at all. Now i know George has stated that they went for the subtle 3D approach, but there is subtle and there is none existent. This was the latter.The picture was also dark, thanks to the tinted glasses. Whereas most films will brighten the image for 3D to compensate for the glasses, this one didn't and it suffered for not doing it.

The only thing the 3D seemed to help was the Cg characters. this did actually help them look like they could have been a part of the scenery, instead of flat cartoon like images. The battle droids seemed to profit from this the most.

Even when there was a noticeable 3D image, the backgrounds looked flat, like the characters were acting against a photograph. It just didn't look right at all.

If i pay extra money to see a 3D movie i want to see a 3D movie (yes i know , i didn't pay for this one). I went in hoping to be wowed by seeing Star Wars in 3D, and came out feeling majorly disappointed.

The last time i went to see a 3D movie and i was shocked at how bad the 3D conversion felt was Clash of the Titans. Oh, wait. Wasn't that 3D conversion done by the same company that has handled the conversions for the Star Wars films?

Its obvious that George just doesn't understand 3D. If he could have just got his buddy James Cameron to oversee this conversion, its a good bet fans would have been in for a treat.

Now onto the sound. Well, when you get the trailers before the film sounding BETTER than the movie itself, you know something is wrong. The whole mix sounded as flat as the 3D image.  I remember seeing TPM in 1999 and Sebulba's pod engines almost shook the room. Not so today. it sounded more like a fart in a baked bean tin. There was just no dynamic range to this mix at all. It's not the cinema that is a fault here as i have seen many films on this screen and they have sounded great. So what the hell happened with this one?

So all in all, this was a major letdown. Hopefully, if they continue with the 3D saga, things will be learned from this and they will learn how to use the 3D to its best.

My conclusion? If you love the prequels and just want to experience them on the big screen, then i say go for it. If you want to go just to experience the 3D, then i say save your money as you're likely to leave the theater felling the same way we did.

looks like $23 million and 4th place for this weekend.  always wondered how they accurately predict sundays grosses so early.

so, after everything said and done, its about what was expected by the prognosticators.

question now is what next week will be like?  its hard to predict multipliers and drop-offs for re-releases. Especially for ones that are already on blu ray. and thats not counting the fact that this is a star wars movie -regardless of how horrible it is.

Again, this weekend was surprisingly active - 4 movies over $20 million in february.  having 2 would be impressive, but four!?

CO said:

TPM 3D made 23 million this weekend???   Thats pretty damn good for a movie thats been released before.  I swear I shake my head at this fanbase, and I think I just need to walk away for good as my only hope of a BluRay OOT look less and less possible.

I am telling you that Lucas could make a 2 hour movie of Darth Vader taking a shit in trash compactor of the Death Star, and fans would flock to it.  They would say, "Well, its still Star Wars!"  To read about these jerkoff adults dressing up for the midnight show for this slop makes me embarrassed to be a human being.

Fixed.

UOT on BD will never happen. The UOT is, for all intents and purposes, dead. It lives on through the 2006 DVDs, old VHS tapes, and fan edits/remasters.

CO said:

I am telling you that Lucas could make a 2 hour movie of Darth Vader taking a shit in trash compactor of the Death Star, and fans would flock to it.  They would say, "Well, its still Star Wars!" 

 well yeah, thats why he dedicated 20 years to cultivating a sycophantic fan base and constructing scores of brainwashing mechanisms (including free publicity and talking points masquerading as 'interviews', a sycophantic producer that lies, aggressive marketing of the mythical aspects of star wars and how lucas is a 'modern-day mythmaker', nonsense about the PT being a 'digital cinema trail-blazer',etc, etc).

most of these are from the OT generation however.  kids who grew up with PT make honestly like it, but I doubt they are apologists.  And if they are anything like my cousin, they prefer to download star wars to their iPhone!! BWAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAAHAHAAHAHAAHAHAHAHAAA

thats why he has to cater to toddlers that were born after 2005.

im starting to repeat myself with these posts, so i'll just say we still need to see the second week.  Its still not 100% if they will continue with the 3d conversions and at a 1 per year rate (I believe the former, not sure on the latter).  and our focus should be to continue advocating the OOT and highlighting lucas' lies. 

Well, like I already said in the BD impressions thread, I lost most desire to see this in 3D, because today I watched TPM on BD  (with the plinkett commentary mind you) and wow, is the transfer fucking ugly! I went and compared it side by side with the old HDTV capture and they are simply both awful, each in it's own unique way - the old transfer is heavily cropped, very soft and worst of all it has tons of really ugly ever present edge enhancement. The Blu-Ray on the other hand fixes all that but adds really really bad DVNR. The Phantom Menace is full of bad CG characters but in this transfer, even the real actors look like they're CG, seriously, with this transfer, the movie looks as if it was a Pixar film from late 90s! Both transfers are so bad that if I was to pick which one to watch, I'd probably choose to not watch this piece of shit movie at all. I think I'll pass on the 3D after all...

I'm sure GL fully expected it to debut in 1st place, just like SW, ESB and ROTJ did in 1997. So, $23 million or not, it has to be somewhat of a disappointment to him.

The numbers will drop off pretty rapidly by next weekend, and AOTC will fare even worse when it debuts, I predict.

Forgive me for enjoying just a bit of schadenfreude this Sunday. :-)

SilverWook said:

I'm sure there will be some morning after spin doctoring this week.

There's a "morning" after everything.

I'm "mourning" your use of the wrong word.

;)