A Closer Look at Star Wars on Film and Off

mclove writes "Revenge of the Sith comes out on DVD today, and there's an interesting article on Slate dissecting the now-complete trilogy as the avant-garde, intellectual sort of film that Lucas keeps saying it is."` Relatedly inkslinger77 writes "ILM model maker, Brian Gernand, speaks about what it is like to work with George Lucas and why he thinks Star Wars attracts such a huge following, particularly among the IT community. He also gives some information about the technology that is used behind the scenes. "

Fan Films

[ianmalcm]

Star Wars is probably the best example of IT nerds meeting film geeks, and that pairing continues with all the fan films. Projects like http://www.impstherelentless.com/ [impstherelentless.com] bring the best of garage coders, animators, and home movie people together. And everyone wants to document their Star Wars fandom, from http://www.starwoids.com/ [starwoids.com] to http://www.starwait.com/ [starwait.com] to the most recent project, http://www.lininguptv.com/ [lininguptv.com].

Re:Fan Films

[grimJester]

Although it's not a Star Wars fan film, Star Wreck [starwreck.com] is a good example of IT nerds meeting film geeks.

About the droids...

[interactive_civilian]

khasim said:

But not as stupid as having those 'droids drop in on Ben ... with the son of the guy who built them ... and Ben not recognize them or say anything to the kid.

Perhaps he was just being cautious. I think we can assume that Ben was on Tattooine looking over Luke, and probably not paying close attention to the rebellion (from the glimpses of his shack, he doesn't seem to have anything that indicated that he was well in touch with the rest of the galaxy). He has no reason to expect droids to show up nor know their purpose when they do.

He did not lie when he said "I don't recall ever owning a droid" as far as we know. Also, he may not have much reason to recognize R2D2 as he never really did anything with R2...That was all Anakin, if you recall. Obi-Wan was using other droids in his ships. As for C3P0, well, as we saw in Cloud City (among other places), there are other droids with identical designs, so there is no reason to recognize 3P0 either...

However, it seems (to me) quite clear that the droids were sent to Tattooine with Leia by her "father" (Senator Organa, right?). It was only after Leia's ship was attacked that their mission (well, R2's anyway) became to find Obi-Wan.

To me, it seems to fit the plot rather well, with the only thing that seemed to happen by chance (or the will of the Force if you buy the article author's premise) was the droids coming to Luke first.

IMHO. :-)

Episode I is ...oh my...

[Anonymous Coward]

i like the movie. But the episode I was a full fiasko.
How is supposed so advanced army when they blow up their command ship to just
stop working the whole army.. this is ridiculous.
Anyone will have some fallback to autonomous..

And the army is disabled in the most stupid way, just shut-down !?!
Even in today standards the droids can be made to act on their own...

And before the invasion there was 20-30 federation ships, how they
become just 1 ?!?!?!?

This ruined for me the great 4,5,6 episodes...

Re:About the droids...

[sg3000]

> He did not lie when he said "I don't recall ever owning a droid" as far as we know.

Agreed. As we can tell, Obi-Wan often speaks in a way that his words can be interpreted to mean two different things. He said he didn't recall owning any droids, not, "I have no idea who these droids are." His statement was true, but it also mislead Luke to think that Obi Wan didn't know the droids at all. Obi-Wan also does this when he describes what happened to Luke's father.

Obi Wan's response is natural. He's been a hermit for 20 years after Darth Vader hunted down all the Jedi, and he's used to being coy about his identity. Advertising who he was was not in his best interest.

Personally, I thought this Slate article was a little silly. It seems almost to be a parody of film criticism. I believe that Episodes I-VI are good movies (with the exception of about half of VI), but not because they're "post modern". David Begor's article [brightlightsfilm.com] does a much better job of describing Lucas' three major themes: the circular nature of violence, duality of good/evil, and the nature of redemption.