I could go into detail here about how seeing Star Wars with my Dad for my 8th birthday literally made me who I am today, determining my tastes, my attitudes and my chosen profession….but I’m not going to bother.
My three word review of Episode III:
By.
The.
Numbers.
Or, to give it slightly more attention: Neither better nor worse than Phantom Menace or Attack of the Clones — the same combination of occasionally nifty with cringe-worthy, laughably bad. In general, the whole thing felt like 2 hours and 30 minutes of watching Lucas knock over the expected plot pins he had set in the previous films, one by one…some with more success than others. A solid C+.
The one thing I took away from the experience is this: Bernard Cornwell said that he wrote the Sharpe series of novels because he was bummed that there were no more Hornblower books for him to enjoy. Lucas has said that he made the original Star Wars as an amalgam of those things from his childhood that he enjoyed (serial space opera cliffhangers, etc.), because they weren’t being made any more. It is obvious to me that the internal mythology that my generation built up around Star Wars is cooler than Lucas’ latter-day attempts, and yet for the most part, we have sat back and let him continue, rather than creating something ourselves. We’ve taken the passenger seat, perhaps longer than we should have. One of us needs to create something to fill the vacuum that we perceive….something that speaks to the things we loved that aren’t being made any more.
…and it might as well be me.
Might as well.
I like your take on current gen as passenger. Veddy nice.
It’s something that has bugged me for some time now….part of the problem is that the fucking Baby Boomers won’t get the hell out of the way, but a bigger problem is that we, collectively, seem more than content to let them continue to dictate cultural terms.
I mean, fer chrissakes, by the time that the Boomers were our age, they had already produced Star Wars, Jaws, Indiana Jones, The Godfather I and II, and that’s just in film. What do we do? Sit around and wait for Lucas, Spielberg, Coppolla, etc. to make more.
That’s fucked up.
Agreed. Of course, we’ve been making video games. And the ever-expanding “Jay & Silent Bob” anthology.
“No-threat-to-anyone-droids”
I just don’t understand why they call them battle droids…they might be more aptly named “bowling pin droids” or “go down like a porn star droids” or “sliced like butter by lightsaber droids”.
These things are the ultimate straw horses.
Re: “No-threat-to-anyone-droids”
I’ve always thought that they were “give-us-something-that-can-be-sliced-in-half-with-a-lightsaber-so-that-the-kiddies-aren’t-traumatized-by-heroic-Jedi-carving-up-living-things” droids.
You know….the big-budget equivalent of G.I. Joe’s lasers, robot tanks and aircraft….or the ubiquitous A-Team shot of the carload of bad guys staggering away from a huge wreck.
Re: “No-threat-to-anyone-droids”
Well, they’re no threat to the Jedi – which is good because they need something to mow down to look good. They’re Mook Droids. They’re not as good as the clone troupers, but that’s because the Clone Troupers are a Better Class of Mook.
The other, higher classes of droid are more difficult to use, yeah.
If you’ve got a lot of battle droids, and they’re fighting people who aren’t as well trained or who aren’t as well equipped, then they’re a problem. Notice that there weren’t a lot of Mook Droids on the battle on the Wookie planet.