{"id":1098,"date":"2005-06-04T23:28:35","date_gmt":"2005-06-05T03:28:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/2005\/06\/04\/star-wars-episode-iii\/"},"modified":"2013-01-27T06:51:02","modified_gmt":"2013-01-27T11:51:02","slug":"star-wars-episode-iii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/2005\/06\/04\/star-wars-episode-iii\/","title":{"rendered":"Star Wars Episode III"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px;\" class=\"sharethis-inline-share-buttons\" ><\/div><p>I had nothing to do tonight, after a day of running errands, so I took myself to see the last installment of Star Wars.  Which&#8230;well&#8230;met my expectations.  The dialogue sucked, the imagery was pretty awesome, and <em>The Empire Strikes Back<\/em> is still far and away the best of the six films.  I get that this is really nothing more than a vanity project for Lucas at this point, because if he really cared about these characters, he would have recognized his own limitations as a writer and gotten some help, but I was really hoping that this one would somehow, i don&#8217;t know, rise above it.  And at some points it did. But it&#8217;s really like he took point A (where the last film ended) and point B (where this film needed to end so that it would lead in to Episode IV), and then stuck them, along with some minor plot points, into a cliche-o-meter.<\/p>\n<p>And it&#8217;s not just that we already know how it ends.  We know how the Lord of the Rings ends because the books have been around for 50 years, but somehow I was still on the edge of my seat throughout <em>all<\/em> <em>three <\/em> of those films.  And now my mind is wandering off to the thought of what if Peter Jackson had been allowed to play with these characters&#8230;.how awesome would that have been?<\/p>\n<p>Then I wonder if maybe the original films weren&#8217;t actually that good, and I&#8217;m just remembering them fondly because I was about 3 when my dad took me to see the original (seriously, waiting on line for star wars is one of my earliest concrete memories.  and yes, i&#8217;m a dork).  But then I remember that in college, I somehow ended up with a friend&#8217;s box set for a semester (he didn&#8217;t have a VCR), and when we were bored, my roommate and I would have a marathon (we also didn&#8217;t have cable, and it snowed a lot in Buffalo).  And we could watch those films over and over again and enjoy them thoroughly (except for the Ewoks.  We always hated the Ewoks).  And even if I owned the prequels, I just couldn&#8217;t imagine sitting down and watching them all the way through for the 9 or 10 hours it would take.  Sure, I could see popping in the DVD and fast forwarding to the good parts (such as they are), but these films have actually made me less of a fan of the entire ouvre.<\/p>\n<p>So, as a film, I can&#8217;t really recommend it.  As a conclusion to a film journey that has spanned pretty much my entire life to date?  it was somewhat necessary to see.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I had nothing to do tonight, after a day of running errands, so I took myself to see the last installment of Star Wars. Which&#8230;well&#8230;met my expectations. The dialogue sucked, the imagery was pretty awesome, and The Empire Strikes Back is still far and away the best of the six films. I get that this [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[],"tags":[17],"class_list":["post-1098","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-movies"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6ZBi-hI","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1098","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1098"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1098\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6042,"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1098\/revisions\/6042"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}