Star wars or lord of the rings

[stof]

quigontcb said:

 Or it could be that we're talking about frikkin Jedi in their prime. Did you expected these primo Jedi to take the Luke Skywalker approach to fighting-spreading your feet as far apart as possible and swinging a lightsaber like a baseball bat?

The special effects are quite good, to say otherwise is lunacy. If you want to take a hyper-critical approach to special effects in a movie, you can say that any movie with special effects is "dated". I've never saw a movie requiring lots of special effects that had me totally convinced.

"Everything but the kitchen sink" kind of goes with the territory of making movies about taking over the galaxy.

I somewhat agree with you on the "younger, more A.D.D." comment. Although it was obvious that the action would pick up as the movies progressed, I think Lucas felt too much pressure to appeal to the lowlifes who have made Vin Diesel a movie star. So many complained about Episode 1 not having enough action, yet I totally enjoyed how it built up the the climactic battles at the end. Even though the final battle of Episode 1 was classic, I'll gladly sit back and watch Liam Neeson acting until the cows come home.

Stof, at least you and I agree that Episode 1 was the best of the prequels. If you notice, their is more and more action in each prequel, yet less and less Jar Jar. Therein lies the problem. Also, I was really hoping when Anakin fully became Vader and was told Padme was dead, instead of the "Nooooooo" line, we'd be treated to a spirit-lifting "YIPPEEE".

The over actiony action wasn't a because they were Jedi. It was because of a current trend in film that thinks stuff has to be exploding or falling to get someones interest. You see the same trend in non pixar CGI movies. It's hard to think of a 2 minute stretch in Madagascar where someone didn't suddenly trip and knock something down that then fell in to someone else who then runs towards someone trying to keep something balanced which might topple and so on and so on adnausium. A lot of crappy movies take this approach. A lot of fantastic movies don't.

 

Take the factory for instance. Here they are in a movie with tons of action scenes, so why did they feel the need to turn discovering a factory in to a whole giant worthless action sequence? Suddenly Padme is stuck in a vat and Anakin is clamped on to the conveyor belt and R2 D2 is flying around and all this crap that doesn't actually have any story purpose. I think that's what I'm trying to get at with the over action element. Action scenes can't stand entirely as an Island to the rest of the film. They have to at least serve some purpose. The Prequels forgot that.

 

Now as for the effects argument. There are plenty of films with spectacular effects that still last to this day. Jurassic Park, Starship Troopers, even Terminator 2 hold up better. And why do they still hold up? Because they acknowledged the limitations of CGI and worked within them. As Joss Whedon said in the audio Commentary of Serenity (another movie where the effects really worked, even if they weren't as high quality tech wise) "Limitations are a good thing. Because they make you be creative"

Lucas seemed to ignore the fact that even with current technology being what it is, there are still limitations to what you can get away with.  And because of it, There are entire sequences that may look very flashy, but they also look very much like a bunch of CGI shooting at a bunch of other CGI. 

 Take the Matrix 1 and the Matrix 2. The first Matrix accomplished fantastic and oft talked about action scenes by filming real life actors on strings and filming it from tons of different cameras. It was original and it really worked. For the second film. They're much anticipated "agent smiths" was just a bunch of CGI. And that's what it looked like. CGI can look amazing at certain times. But we're still not at a level where it looks amazing always no matter what.