The Attack of the Clones
As I have more work to do on my dissertation, I end up doing more irrelevant stuff like twittering, e-mailing, IMing, and watching all the movies and their commentaries… Well today, I end up sending whatever I wrote for my first chapter to my dissertation group and decided to take the night off. So I opened up a bottle of champaign and finished the Web updates on the Tri-State SAR Web site, and finished the commentaries for The Attack of the Clones. It is funny that all the deleted scenes began with either producer or the editor saying "Well it was an exceptionally good scene, but in the end we realized that we didn’t have a use for it." And most of these scenes for the sappy love story between Padma and Annakin. Big surprise! What was more surprising for me was that when I watched the movie for the first time, I already thought it was too long as is. When I watched the commentary, I realized that that story was going to be even longer! Urgh…
And then I watched the actual movie, yet again. Man what sloppy script writing. If it weren’t for the brilliant CGI and visual effects, the movie would be worthless. Lucas at one point admits at one point in the commentary that he doesn’t think that the script has too much importance and that it is the visual aspect of the movie that is more important. Well, I have to respectfully say, bull shit!
And I wondered, why did he have to insist on writing the script then? Let people who are better at it do it. They are, after all, sinking in inordinate amounts on money. I mean some of the dialogs in the love scene are so exaggerated, so sappy, that you would think that Lucas never fell in love, ever. Annakin’s evil side is so grossly exaggerated in the dialogs that it is surreal. Audience does not like to have its hand held every step of the way, otherwise it is a big turn off. Story-telling is an art form. Lucas is great in visual story-telling, but the verbal one, he needs to leave it to better people.
He reminded me of some of our clients at work, who are determined to do everything about the course, including the script writing, not realizing that they are butchering the entire course.
06/21/07: Funny as I was reading Wired online, I came across the commentary of The Luddite: The Last Guy to See Star Wars. He is saying similar things, accept for the original trilogy. Bad script, bad acting… Not sure if I can whole-heartedly agree that the original serious sucked as back as the prequels.
