It’s definitely true that TLC is the weakest of the three, and the clone stuff just isn’t as good as it isn’t to be.
Finally got around to watching the 4K release of The Undiscovered Country (Extended Cut) last night. The picture quality was, to my eye at least, beautiful. Only a few of the space shots looked model-y, and that’s because they are (and it wasn’t that bad), and I was struck by how some of them, especially towards the end of the movie, felt very TOS in their composition (in contrast with the more dynamic, fancy cinematic shots), but not in a bad way. The acting is, of course, great, though some of the dialogue is ridiculous (“If my surmise is correct those boots will cling to the killers’ necks like a pair of Tiberian bats”).
The movie was really interesting and strange, however, given it’s place in history and current events. It never tries to hide the fact that it’s about the end of the Cold War, but I was a very little kid when the movie debuted and have little sense, myself, of how strange detante with the Soviets must have felt. And yet, given recent events in Ukraine, I felt more understanding of Kirk & McCoy’s attitude towards the Klingons than ever before. Glasnost & Perestroika were wonderful ideas, but it’s so, so hard to not be cynical about where it’s all lead. But I can’t deny that Spock & Gorkon are right, it’s just so difficult.
Oh also the storyline on the Enterprise, with Detective Spock-lock (Sher-spock?), is the better part of the middle act. Rura Penthe sounds cool, but honestly it wasn’t that great.
I’m really interested to see your takes on these films as I really enjoyed your work on Kenobi. I’ve found the prequels the hardest to find edits of that I’d be happy to put into into my definitive collection, but your AotC sounds like it could be just what I’m looking for.
Out of interest, what’s your stance on multimedia, or inserting Clone Wars/Tales of the Jedi scenes? I know many find it jarring, but I feel some of Dooku’s scenes from TotJ could really add to the tone of TPM.
I’m a big fan of the animated series. But I don’t intend to integrate them into the movies. They’re always separate things to me.
That’s fair enough. I’ve seen a few edits that integrate, and a few that don’t, and to be honest, both can work really well. I’m undecided as to how I’d like my definitive collection to look, particularly surrounding Dooku’s TotJ arc as it works well stand alone or integrated. I look forward to viewing your edits; it might give me some much needed clarity on this topic.
It’s tempting to use some Dooku footage from Totj in conjunction with that deleted scene from AOTC, but I think the merging of the two mediums will just feel too fanedit-y.
Correct.
It’s got to be the “Small Details” thread; this ought to be merged there if that’s possible.
So maybe this is how it looked and then again maybe not.
This is a great summary of a lot of threads around here lol
Yeah, “sterile” sums up Villeneuve’s style quite well. “Dreary” works also.
I never understood all the praise Arrival got. I’m guessing 99% of the people who got their rocks off to the film were floored by the plot twist. Well, I went into the movie knowing the twist beforehand and got nothing out of the experience expect cold colour grading and a protagonist with all the charm and personality of a dead salmon sitting in a cooler (and I normally love Amy Adams).
His style was a perfect fit for Blade Runner 2049, though.
Oh, no, I found it beautiful and moving before the plot twist. The plot twist, honestly, felt way too implausible to me. But I loved the movie, especially before that
There are times when it’s wisest, I think, to just not reply. Don’t cast your pearls and all that
Regardless, I’ve met people in their late 20s that genuinely were surprised to learn that there was ever widespread dislike towards the Prequels on the Internet. There’s obviously a generational aspect to this, and I can understand why younger people might be skeptical about this, since it’s so different than the prevailing attitude today.
I’m 36 and I thought the positivity towards the prequels was mostly sarcastic/ironic. How could it be anything else?
I found it very interesting that Cantwell’s concept model for the Millennium Falcon eventually got turned into the Corellian Corvette. Uncle George must have liked that one a lot.
That design was the Millennium Falcon for most of the time making the movie; the switch only happened late when it was decided that it resembled the ships in Space 1999 too much. That’s why the Tantive IV model is so big and detailed despite barely being in the film: Until they swapped out the cockpit (which radically changed the intended scale of the model), it was intended to be the Millennium Falcon and would have been in a lot of closeup shots.
Read https://kitbashed.com/blog/a-complete-history-of-the-millennium-falcon for more details
If anyone wants to take a look inside the Sourcebook, you can borrow it for an hour from the Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/starwarssourcebo0000smit/mode/2up
I hope someday we’ll see some talented editors or fans put together a short video based on those scenes lost or cut for Black Friday, and other scenes for Jedi: either animated or model based. It’d be cool to see.
This is, unsurprisingly, my dream. I mean, we have the storyboards for the effects shots, so recreating them in CG is more or less possible. It would not be easy, in as much as it’s work, and then there’s the problems of missing/low-quality cockpit pilot shots, but a rough mockup ought to be doable. We’ll see what happens.
Well, it took me a little more than two months, but this thread directly lead to my storyboard-based reconstruction: https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Reconstructing-the-end-of-ROTJ-with-Storyboards/id/92274
Both this thread and yours are truly fascinating to me. Thank you. I’m going to go read my old Storyboards book for the Original Trilogy right now.
Do you think we’ll find more about on “Black Friday” and the missing Storyboards? I hope we’ll see some interviews, articles and documentaries on this for the 40th anniversary of Return Of The Jedi, as has been done on the official website for Star Wars and Empire for their 40th anniversaries.
I have found more storyboards that aren’t on the site yet, just haven’t had the time to update it. It really does seem like it was a combination of
and hey, maybe it really was too long too
You can imagine how cool it must’ve been for audiences to have each character slowly be revealed to them after not seeing them for 3 years.
Lol, literally slowly
ROTJ has many problems, but that has to be a contender for worst shot in the film.
You can imagine how cool it must’ve been for audiences to have each character slowly be revealed to them after not seeing them for 3 years.
Twelfth Night - 1996
The wife and I attempted this one, because she remembered it being good. The source material is good, as is the cast…but we gave up after a half an hour. It was neither funny nor engaging, and suffered from so many bad-Shakespeare-adaptation tropes.
Surprisingly, I think Darth Vader never sits down in Return of the Jedi. Objectively.
WRONG! If you watch the deleted scenes, he CLEARLY sits down right after arriving on the Death Star in order to contact Luke and persuade him to join the dark side. You utter imbecile. You should be ashamed of yourself. 😉
You’re right.
I guess the only time he sits in ANH is in the TIE Fighter? I’m pretty sure he always stands in the conference room
Was the shoe erased in cleanup? Or were the Battle scenes recomposited at some point and the shoe omitted?
Most, if not all, of the effects shots were recomposited for the Special Edition. This allowed them to fix problems like TIE fighters appearing out of nowhere or transparent spaceship parts (and many more) but also lead to problems like omitting flying shoes
Not for ROTJ. Not a lot of the shots were recomposited. The TIEs still appear out of nowhere. The shot with the shoe was the famous one where the TIEs go through the Falcon, so this was recomposited. But most of the shots in ROTJ were left alone
Oh! My mistake!
As an adaptation/modernization of the old books… a series would be wonderful
Was the shoe erased in cleanup? Or were the Battle scenes recomposited at some point and the shoe omitted?
Most, if not all, of the effects shots were recomposited for the Special Edition. This allowed them to fix problems like TIE fighters appearing out of nowhere or transparent spaceship parts (and many more) but also lead to problems like omitting flying shoes
To bring it back to this film, I wonder if the “New Jedi Order” label on this film’s timeframe is indicative in any way of the larger story they’ll be looking to tell post TROS (much like all the pseudo-Zahnian stuff going on w/ Ahsoka & co). They’ve already taken the general idea of a mysterious figure corrupting a student (Kyp Durron/Ben Solo), so… I dunno, I guess we’ll see.
I have to say, having someone say the words “Heir to the Empire” is a little on the nose
If they’re smart, they’ll do it essentially like a soft reboot, in that all the questions fans have about Palpy, the Force Dyad, Rey’s power-level, etc will be secondary to basic facts and there will be no expectation that you need to have seen the Numbered Episodes recently to follow the story. Basic facts would be:
And then, if they’re smart, they’ll never make another Numbered Episode again
I’ve yet to see a reason why they were made other than to serve as New Star Wars product.
To be fair, that’s why they made every Star Wars movie after STAR WARS
Did the spider episode and the Krayt Dragon episode get a lot of views or something?
Have not watched Mando S3 and maybe never will, but the spider episode was very scary and I loved it.
