Reflections of a Revengful Sith! (afterthoughts)

The lights go out, an invisible shroud of silence covers the theater, and then, suddenly, out of the black screen jumps the All time favorite logo along with the most familiar score of all time. Then..even if you feel that this wont be as good as it should be, and even if you know whats gonna happen, during that orchestra hit...you get goosbumps. A Feeling of true excitement. Now you know, you are watching star wars.
It took geroge lucas two movies to finally create a star wars film worthy of its previous installments. A Movie, that unlike its previous two, is not only full of visual detail (which is by far the best CGI Work ever put on a big screen) but features a plot that keeps the viewer occupied all the time. Even though the script is sometimes quite "blank", with dialogs that are sounding right out of a cartoon show, the plot is strong enough to support its weak character work and even weaker acting.

THE LOOK:
The Darkest star wars ever made, with a reduced color pallete in certain scenes the director tries to achieve the decent of anakin into the dark side, which he (The director) acomplishes very nicely. Fight scenes and light saber battles to keep you full for the next 3 years! Almost every chapter features an explosion or a lightsaber fight. The graphical detail put in each and every planet of the film is outsanding, and for the first time, i can say with safety that the bluescreen technology since the muddy and blured Episode II has quite advanced.

THE SCORE:
John williams adds some very dark moods into certain scenes in a way that we havent used to in star wars movies, but the overall musical feeling of the movie is star-war-ish, with the returning of "the duel of the fates" in a new compilation, and some very interesting new themes, like the theme of the half-robot half-creature theme during the scene when he first appears.

THE CHARACTERS:
Skywalker is still a brat that makes all the wrong choices based on his feeling of superiority and fear of loss, that we allready knew, what i didnt like is the way that the emperor was presented. The old episodes (4-5-6) had an emperor much more evil, and much more tough. In episode three the emperor shows weaknesses, and he is sometimes...a comedian, its really another image of him, which i think was a mistake. Obi-Wan on the other hand is still the better worked character, he is more mature than the other two movies, and does allways the right thing.

THE OUTCOME:
By far the best star wars preaquel. (Not better than the old sequels, even if some say its better than "return of the jedi")

Sehr gut. Dank.

Ja.

Ah, gotcha. Sort of like the difference between an MP3 file and an analog recording of the same source. Even though a 320kbps MP3 file sounds pretty close to an analog recording, there are those people out there (like Senior Puccio) that can discern between the two. With digital, you're getting that squared off curve of the light waves that digitizing tends to do, thus missing some information, and with a film camera, you're getting the full natural curve of the light waves. Yes?


- Josh 8)

Josh,

"Digital filming" is not an oxymoron. It just doesn't exist. :)

Anyway, the end result doesn't have anything to do with the lens. You can use the same lens with a film and a digital camera, and the digital video recording would still be inferior to the film recording. The end result has to do with both the video format (recording in 0s and 1s) as well as the computer chips that "sense" what a videographer is shooting.

Eddie

Eddie,

Why can't digital filming (oxymoron?) incorporate as many colors as standard film cameras? Doesn't the lense capture the same reflected light?

The slightly hazy, glassy appearance has more to do with all the effects in each scene, rather than "reduced color palette". Blue screening effects are tricky and the edges of characters often suffer as a result. This happens to film stock scanned in and worked on in the digital doman too.

Also, the lack of "grain" in digital images lend itself to criticism of some film purists. I'm telling you, even when digital motion picture cameras exceed film cameras in terms of resolving power, exposure latitude and color information, some people will still swear by film. Eddie is probably one of them.

YCH,

Actually, even though I accept film grain as a fact of using film, I do not mind the lack of grain in video-based technologies. However, the fact of the matter is that even 2K video pales in comparison to film, which is capable of at least 5K (35mm film). The digital stuff still looks like computer animation rather than live action. All Lucas had to do was say that he was doing a computer-animation or a mixed-media movie. Instead, he insists that "Star Wars 1-3" are live-action movies, which is a myopic.

Eddie

[deleted because the comment was leading to a lost cause]

Yeah, I thought it had a slightly hazy, glassy appearance and the same flat backgrounds as before.

John

I think this all comes down to one thing. Whether you're a "fan" or not. It seems to me that some people like myself, and a few other members here, fell in love with this series as a kid, and continue to love, and think of the Star Wars universe like a best friend you've known all your life. The "believers" are willing to forgive the shortcomings of the film(s), and are able to see the things that Lucas did intentionally, and understand it as part of the story, as well as see all of the positive things about the film. The "non-believers" have fun tearing the film apart, and can't find any redeeming qualities. Though, isn't it funny that they also paid for a ticket to see something they (supposedly) hate? What's also interesting is that these same "non-believers" have their own film(s) they believe in, and think as highly of as Star Wars fans do, and would as adamantly defend any negative comments made towards their favorite films. It's all subjective... everything. I just find the human ego funny.




- Josh ;)

John,

Even assuming intentionality, the colors that ARE there are muddy, fuzzy, and lacking in definition.

Eddie

Eddie,

I agree that a digital camera probably can't reproduce the range of colors that a conventional camera can, but I think the reduced color palette in "Sith" was intentional. I didn't particularly like it, but I think it's how Lucas wanted it to look.

As far as colors go, Robert Rodriquez got an excellent and vivid array of colors from his digital photography in the first two "Spy Kids" (discounting "Spy Kids 3-D").

John

The reduced color palette is courtesy of the HD video cameras, which are incapable of reproducing colors the way that film can.

Revenge of the Sith finally is here and i have mixed feelings about the movie after seeing it. There sure were some questions still unanswered. The end of the movie felt abit rushed when me and my brother saw it we were like ok that gay the end should have been somthing like Kenobi riding off to the sunset or to make it truley dark show the fleet of Star Destroyers with Vader, emperor and Tarkin flying away similar to Empire. The Saga does feel conncected now especially seeing Vader rise at the end the only problem i had was that the awkward NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO by James Earl Jones. But there are sure to be lots of deleted scenes and cool features on the dvd cant wait.
OVERALL this movie in my opinion it was just what i was expecting even better than i thought it would be and it is second best behind EMPIRE STRIKES BACK.
GOOD JOB GEORGE U DID IT RIGHT THIS TIME.:p

For what it's worth, "Attack of the Clones" was photographed with a Sony HDW-F900 camera, capturing an image at 1080p/24. "Sith" was photographed using an upgraded HCE-F950, with virtually the same resolution. The film print was enlarged slightly to 1280x1024.

John

About the color palette issue. Lucas used it in various scenes, but not extensively..just for key scenes. The Live action blue screen method, as i said on my previeous post, is now more close to "presentable" than Episode 2. As for the colors of film v.s. Video, if i am not mistaken, the video cameras use a device called CCD (Charged couple device) which "translates" light into Digital streams (10100100111010101110000), it was first used on the hubble space telescope. Cameras with more ccd's have better light&color reproduction. The problem with dv for G.Lucas during the pre-production in episode 2 was the framerate. Video until then was shot at 29fps, and george needed it to be at 24. So they went with SONY hd cams. My question is in how many lines was the shooting actually recorded? 1080 or more? If they shot it at 1080 is no wonder it looks a bit blured, its like a 16mm blow-up to a 70mm film. Who else things that the emperor was a dissapointment?

mra,

Actually, Lucas answered that exact question to a reporter for a famous magazine, which one I don't remember off hand. According to Lucas however, you should watch them 1-6. Kids of the next generation will watch the movies (said Lucas), and when they get to "A New Hope", they'll wonder if Vader knows about "Luke" and "Leia" yet. That's about all I remember from the interview.

- Josh

Thinking ahead a few years, it 's the year 2010.
Kids who were too young to watch any of the Star Wars movies are now old enough.
Do you watch them:
4-5-6-1-2-3
or
1-2-3-4-5-6?

"the end should have been somthing like Kenobi riding off to the sunset"
How about obi-wan wearing a fedora hat while riding off the sunset, and after that a black screen appears with the following:

Obi-wan wanted a new change in his life after the defeat of the jedi order, so he chose humility and went to the fergo galaxy, visiting the primitive planet of earth to become an archeologist.