Re: Star Wars Episode VII
41I'm holding out for the film focused on Stormtrooper #6 in scene 53 of A New Hope. That's going to be a juicy one!
Just cut them up like regular chickens
Yeah, it's not like they were going to shove a Yoda one-shot out in 2014 or anything.darkness wrote:I've got to think they'd want to see how Ep 7 does before branching off into side character tangents. That said, if there's any franchise that's pretty much a license to print money, it's Star Wars.
I agree with everything you say here aside from "Super 8 was an advance," it was an aping exercise of the first water of the movies you mention but it actually confirmed what I suspected, which is that JJ knows how to get the right people together, work with actors, break a story well from a standard 3 act structure etc but he brought so absolutely nothing to the table aside from "yeah, I liked those movies as a kid too" that I stopped hoping for original entertainment from him and figured he would just do well with things like this. I agree that the new Star Trek is more straight up sci-fi actioner than pseudointellectual sci-fi moralizing with the occasional fistfight. But given the task at hand it was about as good as you could expect, perhaps a bit better. He does a fine job of throwing the ensemble together and giving each one a moment to shine, he probably digs deeper into the Kirk/Spock relationship than has ever been done before, the baddies are bad, the rewriting of the timeline works, plenty of nods to the original series, ultimately solid casting, there's a lot to respect considering how ungodly fucked the whole endeavor could have been.klimov wrote:It's a digestable enough watch-it-once-on-a-Saturday-night-and-then-forget-about-it CGI explosion fest - he did a decent enough job there from a commercial persective - but it isn't Star Trek, imho. Not that Star Trek is something to be put up on a pedestal, don't get me wrong, but it does (did) have a certain tone, a certain ethos - a guilty pleasure... Super 8 was an advance for sure, although not all it was hyped up to be - I find it lacks the soul, the memorable iconography and the timeless fun, of The Goonies, E.T., Gremlins, etc.
And a little dig at Lucas:I’m trying to start fresh," he said. “There are certain pleasures that we think the saga can bring to people that they’ve been missing, and we’re hoping to bring them that, and at the same time, have them feel that it’s all new.
The full LA Times interview here.The ones I worked on were a long time ago, and they had a slightly different feeling than the ones that followed. The first three, Star Wars, Empire and Return of the Jedi are all sort of more about people than the ones that followed.