Sat down and watched the 3D blu-ray of TFA again tonight and then again with the 2d version with JJ’s commentary. It’s been a year almost since the film came out and i still think it’s as good as ever. It has its flaws , yeh, but so do all the original 3, and we still love them. But this IS Star Wars, unlike those terrible prequels.
It’s amazing just how good the 3d looks on the blu-ray. At the cinema , the few times i saw it in 3d, the picture was a little blurry and lots of crosstalk. But i noticed that the projector booth glass was smudged to hell in all the cinemas i saw the 3d version. Gone are the days cinemas cared about giving you best possible viewing. no crosstalk and the picture is nice and clear. Colours are great.
The commentary is pretty good. It’s nice to hear JJ confirm all the things i said about rey and her abilities ( which are actually explained in the movie so it is hard for me to understand why so many seem to be confused and complaining about this). I won’t go into details about the commentary so people can hear it all fresh fro themselves.
The new extras on the disc are a bit too short, which is a complaint i had about the original release. I think it would have been better if these behind the scenes concentrated more on how they did things than so many talking heads. It was nice that the foley artists finally got some recognition as they are an integral part of a films production, yet they usually seem to get overlooked.
Only 2 new deleted scenes ( 3 f you count the one that was with the target release). Its a shame they included a version of the unkar plutt scene with the temp cg effects on the face. It would have been nice to see it with the original mask, no matter how rough that looked. Its probably a more violent scene than any other ever seen in a star wars film. But you can see why most of these scenes were cut. But the “Leia and the Resistance scene” is such a shame it was so short ( only about 17 seconds) and that it was cut from the film. This scene is classic Leia. Carrie was perfect. Slightly comedic and classic Leia attitude. Its also gives the destruction scene more emotion when the camera zooms in on the woman as we know she was sent there by Leia. ( in fact Leia is sends 2 people to their deaths in TFA if you include this scene. Maybe she is snoke after all 😉 ).
Al in all i am still loving every minute of this film. It’s still #3 for me, just below anh & ESB. It does make me laugh when i see people defending the prequels for being so original and saying that ANH is just a rip off of ANH. Yet AOTC has far more plot points ripped from ESB than TFA has from ANH. And TPM is basically just ANH & ROTJ. But i guess when George does it, it “rhymes” and when someone else borrows plot points it’s a “rehash”. ROTJ isn’t exactly original either. But TFA has some of the best acting in the whole saga. It did what the prequels failed miserably at - giving us characters we could actually care about and giving us actors that actually has chemistry together. I couldn’t have given a damn about any of the characters in the prequels. Including the ones from the OT. they were terrible. Even though Ewan was the best out of the lot, they portrayed Obi-Wan as a dick. Same goes for the Jedi. TFA also went back to the more old school way of telling the story, by not thinking they have to explain every single little bit of whats happening. another thing wrong with the prequels. Let’s have that air of mystery. Let’s figure things out for ourselves and have our own theories, no matter how right or wrong they turn out to be.
It was also a fun ride. Knowing that this is the first trilogy that the story has actually been planned out between the writers and directors, it’s nice to know that things were deliberately left unanswered . They didn’t need to be …yet. That will come.
So, for me, there are more good Star Wars films than there are bad. 3 great (ANH, ESB & TFA),one good (ROTJ) and three bad, one being very bad.
Ratings after a year (For Star Wars films NOT all time films)?
ESB - 10
ANH - 9.5
TFA - 9
ROTJ - 7
AOTC -3
TPM & ROTS - 1
I eagerly await Rogue One know to see if Lucasfilm without George can make it 2 for 2 with giving us great films.
