I wound up going with some friends and saw the 12:01AM screening of Episode 2 (funny since I didn’t really plan on seeing it at all, much less on opening night), digitally screened at the newish Grove theater. We caught the digital projection, which well, was interesting. First, about the projection, during the first few minutes the picture was offset about 5-10% to the right of the screen and crawling. Apparently, just because it’s digital doesn’t mean that the projector monkeys won’t find a way to screw things up (remember when there used to be real projectionists in the booth? no, me neither, but I’ve heard they do exist… in Chicago at least). Also fun were the occasional screen blankings and one or two tearing/vsync errors. It occurred to me that while the next generation of kids might never see scratched up and dirty reels or projectionist dots, they’ll be completely used to the digital artifacting from the digital projection technology.
Oh, about the movie. Well, the grip of people I saw it with seemed to enjoy it, and I don’t want to rain on that parade, but even coming in with incredibly low expectations… but, wow, the dialogue, characterizations, and story were laughably bad. There is a continuation of the byzantine unrest in the Republic involving factions of various trade organizations, blah blah blah, but honestly, my eyes glazed over at the screen crawl. That’s really weird, because I remember when first reading the crawls on the earlier Star Wars movies that they were simultaneously 1) much simpler and 2) much more engaging. It got me thinking… it can’t be that hard to make an entertaining space opera can it?
Of course, that’s oversimplifying, seeing as it’s not just some random movie, but “STAR WARS”, part of a mega-franchise with so many expectations. But really, does that make it impossible to make a movie that can engage on something beyond a visceral level? I mean, it’d be fine that was what was being aimed for, but somehow, sitting through quite a bit of lengthy exposition, even worse dialogue, and more than a few hackneyed plot devices, I get the feeling that Lucas was trying to say… something. On the bright side, there were some ‘dramatic moments’ so silly that I just burst out laughing. Very entertaining in a MST3K way. So, no, Anakin’s journey to the dark side isn’t very compelling at all, and his ‘romance’ with Padme is actually slightly creepy, and isn’t very convincing (Jedi mindtrick explains it I’m sure).
Oh, and while I’m kvetching, It’s funny that on a visual level, I actually much prefer the the older films. Just about everything in the movie is computer generated, green screened, and composited, and unfortunately… you can very much tell for the majority of it. From the bad character interactions, to the ever-present shine, it just made the whole movie look like a giant video game. I don’t necessarily blame the technology, it seems to be more of an aesthetic decision than anything else.
Hmm, that’s a lot of writing, really late at night.
Update: here’s a nice summary thread on /.