Teasing Us From a Long, Long, Time Ago, In a Galaxy Far, Far Away…
Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 17, 2015
Well. I wanna be skeptical. I want to be unbiased. I’ve been burned. We all have. Many times.
But… but….
Okay, there’s a very slim chance that maybe, MAYBE you may be here and not know what I’m talking about. This was just released:
I think anything I’m about to say is just joining a chorus of voices. A whole bunch of us old fans had exactly the same experience – which this teaser is exactly trying to evoke. We all became 10 years old again, for two minutes. Argue all you want, but if the final movie in December manages to recapture that for two full hours, it’ll be a win.
Although, in reality, I was eight when I saw the original Star Wars… which was, I believe, just “Star Wars” then – not “A New Hope.” But for me, The Empire Strikes Back was the film. I guess I was eleven when that one landed, and I was able to understand what was going on much better. It was everything I’d hoped it would be. Another Star Wars, only better. The characters gained more depth. Excellent lightsaber battles. The big reveal about Darth Vader. The awesome Imperial March music. “I love you!” “I know!” The cliffhanger ending. Man. THAT, to me, was what a sequel should be. I watch this, and this hope springs that maybe, at long last, I get another Empire Strikes Back.
But the tiny voice of caution in my head is saying, “Hey! You felt that way when you saw the teasers for The Phantom Menace, too!” And it’s not wrong. In fact, I just re-watched that old trailer, and … it hurts. I haven’t seen it in years, and now it reminds me of how drastically the final film differed from my imagination. The movie in my imagination was way, way cooler than the final result. I feel the disappointment anew.
But dang it. That impossible-looking droid in the teasers is actually a real robot operated by remote-control, not a CGI effect. And that’s possibly the one thing that I’m latching onto as evidence that this movie is going in the right direction.
UPDATE: Yeah, this:
Filed Under: Movies - Comments: 3 Comments to Read
OttoMoBiehl said,
I know how you feel. I’ve been totally geeking out for the last 24 hours or so. I wanna believe! But, I do have faith.
* Shot on 35mm film and not digital.
* Real, practical sets.
* Real props.
* Original cast.
Oh, please let this be good.
Cuthalion said,
I’m hopeful. It helps that I didn’t hate the prequels either. (I actually generally liked everything but Anakin. Who was kind of the point of the prequels I guess, but I enjoyed them all the same.) So for me, I haven’t been burned. I even watched them for the first time in the order they were made, starting when I was little. Episode I came out when I was 9, I think? I had probably seen Jedi very recently before.
Anyway, that means that there hasn’t been a bad one yet for me, and I’m expecting to like this one, too! Hopefully the more particular fans will as well.
Maklak said,
I liked Star Wars when I was young, but I was never crazy about it and I preferred Star Trek and Battlestar Gallactica in any case. When I got older, the newer movies and video games made me dislike Star Wars. I even re-watched the old movies a year or two ago and they were boring and unmemorable. So meh.
In any case, I dislike a space setting with swords and ship to ship combat. Guns beat swords and if you want to attack a spaceship, you send drones to do it remotely. They can be relatively stealthy, can be disguised as asteroids, can accelerate at 20g or more with strong enough engines and a few tonnes of metal accelerated to several kilometers per second is more powerful than any explosive. Send enough of them and any evasive manoeuvres and point defence weapons on enemy ship can be overwhelmed. One downside of this approach is that those drones / ACVs / MIOUs are effectively one-shot (because they either hit and get destroyed or pass their target and can’t decelerate, change orbit and try again in a reasonable amount of time), but hey, missiles are cheaper than spaceships. Bonus points for using ACVs against planets to perform Exterminatus by targeting population centres with artificial meteors. Or fitting those drones with nukes or other one-shot powerful weapons, like particle beams and rairguns, then programming them to kill any spaceships in a hostile system, swarming then and bugging out.
But I digress. My view is: give me a hard SF with space travel and I’ll most likely enjoy it. Star Wars is just brain bleach. Babylon 5 and Albedo Space get a pass.