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Star Wars Prequels Media Movies

Studios Prepare for Star Wars 68

Posted by CmdrTaco from the this-is-scary dept.
Stephen Legge writes "Here's an article from the Toronto Globe&Mail about studios shuffling their spring line-up in anticipation of a chaotic Phantom Menance opening." Also worth noting, they've moved the release date from the 21st to the 19th. It still overlaps Linux Expo. Are we gonna rent a theater out or what?
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Studios Prepare for Star Wars More

Studios Prepare for Star Wars

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  • Is it just me or does most of the CG in the trailer look a little weak? Take the first scene, where the tanks roll over the top of the hill. While I have seen worse in other movies, its poor for something coming from Lucas. Where is the famous its-the-future-but-it-looks-old look? I can only hope that the trailers feature partially rendered FX...

    Also, yoda. He doesn't look like yoda. I could believe that he was yoda's brother, or another of yoda's race, but the look isnt quite right, even for a younger yoda..

    sigh... rant mode off...

  • Go to Linux Expo during day.

    See Star Wars at night.

    Problem solved.

    --

  • I want to go to the Expo, but I MUST see episode one... We have to find someone in the area of the Expo to call around find out how/when they are selling the tickets...

    Anyone willing?

    This needs to be an organized effort or it probably won't work out for everyone.
  • Or you could simply view the HTML source, find the filename, and download it directly

    Or you could just scroll down and click on on of the "Download this movie" links.
  • I was about to say the same thing.


    I love Star Wars (and I will see it in it's first week), but it's formula. If I could only see one of "The Phantom Menace" or "The Red Violin" I'd see the latter.

  • Or you could simply view the HTML source,
    find the filename, and download it directly.

    HTML, the Original Open Source!

    ...Or something.
  • there is no emporer at that time. just Senator Palpatine (same actor as Episode 6.) He is also a GOOD guy in the first episode (I guess he to must walk down to the dark side.)
  • I explicitly turned off the ten Star Wars trailers a day, Rob. What's going on?
  • http://slashdot.org/ is a static HTML page and will NOT be tailored to your tastes. If you've adjusted your page settings, you will need to make your new Slashdot start page http://slashdot.org/index.pl.

  • http://www.apple.com/quickti me/trailers/fox/episode-i/ [apple.com]

    Some damn nice screen shots too.

  • ...they need to surrender to the Republic for the time being...
    That'd be "accept Federation control for the time being"... And yes, Palpatine is still just a Senator, especially since there's no Empire yet. Yet.

    -cfw
    --
  • I am prepared to stand in line a *loooong* time, believe me. In 1977, I queued for 3 hours to get in to see Star Wars. It's the only film I've ever encountered that had a queue going round 3 sides of the block at our local Gaumont cinema. Times have changed since then (including the cinema being knocked down), but I'd still wait just as long.

    In fact, a few of us have been considering flying to New York for the weekend to see it there, rather than wait the extra 2 months for a UK release...

  • By the way, you can get the trailer at Apple's web site [apple.com]. It loads into a window, but you can find the cached 25 MB file on your disk later.

    Oh, there are lower-resolution versions available, but no-one's gonna download them, right? :-)

  • The Globe and Mail says that [globeandmail.ca] the makers of The Red Violin [imdb.com] are hoping that a lot of people who see Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace [imdb.com] will also go see their movie because Samuel L. Jackson [imdb.com] will be in both movies, and he's been going on and on about The Red violin in his Star Wars interviews.


    I have no idea if it's a good movie or not, though. :-)

  • I can't imagine they would charge much more than
    the cost of a full price ticket for every seat
    in the theater to rent it. I'm sure we could find
    enough takers at the Expo to fill every seat. Is
    there anyone in Raleigh who could make the
    arrangements?
  • I'm *not* going to stand in line for a long time. I'll just wait till most people have already seen it.. I don't mind seeing it a week or two later.
  • Three years later, when Empire came out, the cover story on Time magazine was Empire -- the cover illo was George Lucas surrounded by movie characters; I forget the caption.

    I was six when the original came out but I remember it well-- Even before I saw the movie I'd already ironed one of those decals from a Cheerios box of C3PO & R2D2 onto my shirt. You know, One of those cheap ones with sparkly stuff in it that smelled funny when you ironed 'em on would peel off REAL quick.

    I don't know about the Time cover from '80 but had a Time cover from '83 (Jedi) similar to the one you describe hanging on my wall for a few years-- Lucas, surrounded by Star Wars guys and the caption was something like "Lucas Wraps It Up"

    Ok, now that I've reminisced, I guess I need to say something relevent about computers. Uhhh... Boy, Lemonade Stand was fun on the Commadore PET, wasn't it?

    W
    -------------------
  • Do not be so fast judging. Actually with proper negotiating you could even get promotional as a part of the conference.

    If LucasArts did not have that cursed deal with Micorosft it would be there and would be free... Least likely they render with NTs ;-)

    Anyway, it does worth for someone of the deities to speak with LA...
  • Auction them on ebay. There are even more ridiculous stuff auctioned there...
  • You can't rent out a theater, LucasFilm won't let anyone do that. It was on theforce.net a bit ago.
  • You could just fly down to the US for a nice friendly summer visit, see a few movies, grab a few souvenirs, and make all your friends jealous...

    Then again, it is just a movie.

    But it is Star Wars.

    Could you just take a trip to Britain or something to catch it? When does it appear there?

    AS
  • i'll be there at the expo cmdrtaco, set a time we'll hit the theater!
  • >For the youngsters here that don't remember life before Star Wars, some
    >who wonder what the big deal is, let me take you back a bit.

    Very well put -- that takes me back to when I was 9 and it first came out. I'd already absorbed a heavy diet of ST:tOS, but Star Wars hit me like a bomb, just as it did the rest of the culture.

    I still remember fondly how I first heard of it: my parents showed me an issue of Time magazine, with a little strip up in the corner that said "Inside: The Year's Best Movie?" (Yes, with the question mark. Little did they know.) And Mom and Dad said "Do you think you'd like to see this?"

    Inside was a magnificent spread telling of a farm boy and a pair of robots and a grand adventure, with glorious pictures of space battles and 'droids. I was hooked. I told my parents "You bet!"

    Three years later, when Empire came out, the cover story on Time magazine was Empire -- the cover illo was George Lucas surrounded by movie characters; I forget the caption. And up in the corner, showing the change from three years before, was a little band that said something about a major news story -- maybe something to do with the election, or the hostage crisis in the Middle East.

    They'd learned. :)

  • had decent space combat and starship scenes

    Well, that would certainly make it scifi and not SF - nobody AFAIK has ever done that realistically in film, and it's been damn rare in books.

    That aside - does 2010 make the cut for "within the past ten years? That was pretty good (just no space combat). Lost In Space turned out not nearly as bad as it might have - the launch sequence was silly but the rest was far better than the original TV show.

    Armageddon and Deep Impact were entertaining, in their way, but really bad on the technical accuracy scale.

    Apollo 13 doesn't count - that was a historical drama. :-)
  • Rereading that, a couple more historical perspectives come to mind.

    For those of us that grew up in the 60s, when the space program was new and we (we nerds, anyway) all dreamed of becoming astronauts when we grew up, the mid-seventies was a disaster. They cancelled the Apollo program, scrapping the hardware already built for Apollos 18 and 19. Skylab had come crashing down. Space was over, from what we could tell. The Shuttle was being delayed and delayed.

    For the non-nerds, the seventies were just as bleak. Watergate and Vietnam were only recently over. We'd had one "oil crisis" where in todays dollars, gas had gone from todays' prices to two or three dollars a gallon. Jimmy Carter was President.

    And then along comes this roller-coaster, revolution in filmmaking, feel-good (the good guys win) movie with the awsome John Williams music. It was just what we needed.
  • Realistic not in the sense of conformance to known physics (about which we're willing to suspend some disbelief for the sake of a good story - so long as the physics of the story is internally consistent).

    Realistic in the sense of real characters, characters who are affected by their experiences in the story. The basic characters in Star Trek, for example, never change. Compare that to Luke's transition from the beginning of ANH to the end of ROTJ. Or Solo's. (The bit with Greedo shooting first in the updated edition of ANH really weakened that, though. That was a mistake.)

    Yeah, there have been some other scifi films that have had that character development -- Contact comes to mind. But that's not the same sort of spacefaring, lots of action, flick that we're looking for here. The classic Forbidden Planet (the inspiration for Star Trek, btw) comes close.

    Part of Lucas' genius here is combining sheer technical cinematographic brilliance (the SFX, etc) and the classic fast pace of the old serial thrillers with some classic story lines. (Some have complained that he 'stole' his plot lines from other classic films or stories. Hey, they're just ideas. Steal from the best, I say.)
  • Time cover

    Heh. Somewhere around I think I still have an old Newsweek cover, with a picture of the British battle fleet heading out to the Falklands, with the caption "The Empire Strikes Back".
  • For the youngsters here that don't remember life before Star Wars, some who wonder what the big deal is, let me take you back a bit. It was long long ago, in a galaxy far far away -- at least compared to today.

    The first trailer appeared in late 76 or early 77. I don't remember the exact time, or even what the feature movie was, but I do remember seeing the trailer, and thinking "damn, I can't wait".
    You have to remember that for us SF fans, things had been bleak for years. Star Trek had been off the air for years (except syndicated reruns some places), the Apollo program was long over with the first shuttle flight still years in the future, and cinematic SF had been a wasteland, with the high points, the high points, being the Nth sequels to Planet Of The Apes. There was no such thing as personal computers - there were a few, and expensive, "hobbyist computers" like the Altair, the SOL, possibly the Apple I. Most computer geeks (who were damned rare by comparison) programmed mainframes, as often as not using punched cards.

    And into this cultural (ok, nerd culture) vacuum came Star Wars. The title "A New Hope" didn't show on the original film, but it was that to all of us nerdy SF, space, robotics, etc. fans who'd about given up on ever seeing again anything that lived up to "2001" or even - and this tells how desparate we were - the original Star Trek.

    Sure, Star Wars was "scifi" (a somewhat derogatory term to true hardcore SF fans) what with the sounds in vacuum and aerodynamic manoeuvering of space vehicles, but that was OK, we also understood the need for popular dramatic appeal, and at least you didn't see the goddamn wires holding the spaceship models, and the robots didn't look like humans in cardboard boxes and heating duct. Heck, C3PO's design even paid homage to one of the classic SF films.

    The release of subsequent episodes was nearly as exciting, but not quite the, revelation?, that the first was -- we had some idea what to expect, and we knew the characters. You youngsters that grew up with the Star Wars series on videotape don't, can't have the same appreciation.
    Well, some of you perhaps do. The brief theatrical re-release of the (updated) originals a year ago may have damped some of the anticipation, but that aside it's been over two decades since theatrical release of a new Star Wars episode. And this one (with a couple of obvious exceptions) has all new characters, new worlds, and some new filmmaking technology. Still, it won't quite be the revolution the original was -- we haven't had the same dearth of scifi flicks in the last few years - the studios know now that you can make money on them if you're halfway serious about doing a good job. (Which still excludes some of the bombs we've seen).
    But for us old geezers :-) who remember the first (I was barely out of college then), the prospect of a new Star Wars will always be something special.

    Even if it is only a movie.

    -- Al
  • Raleigh *does* have movie theaters. And I bet it'll be playing on almost every stadium-style screen in the Triangle. All you have to do is pick a listing, and flood the theater all at once - about an hour or so before showtime.

  • It would be crazy for other studios to put out anything else when Star Wars comes out.

    The trailer looks good.

    I have one question, who is the Emporer?
    I don't think it can be Palpatine, but it looks
    like him??????

    Any ideas
  • I've read a few times, but don't have the URL,
    that says George Lucas doesn't want anybody
    renting out entire theaters for TPM, and he's
    threatened to limit distribution to those theaters
    that do allow entire theaters to be rented out.
    Here in Austin, TX, many theaters are not allowing
    reservations for the theaters for TPM, no matter
    who you are... the sames ones we've rented multiple theaters from many times in the past few montsh...
  • Yes! It is a great film. I'd go see it again (and probably will).
  • I have just checked out the European release dates: it won't get here (France) until then :-(((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((

    Why so late? Why is France going to be the latest place? Why am I in France?
  • The nose and chin of Darth Sidious (in the hologram and with Darth Maul) are pretty visible... and very identifiable IMHO as Palpatine's. *shrug* Personally, I think it's obvious. We know Palpatine becomes the Emperor. We know what the Emperor's fashion sense is like. We know he can do nasty tricks with Force lightning (though it has always been somewhat satisfying to watch Mark Hamill suffer!). So he's pretty obviously a Sith Lord, and as such gets the title of "Darth" tacked onto the front of his name.

    The title scheme actually makes a lot of sense if you compare it to, say, European monarchies. (Please excuse me while I butcher this horribly -- it's quite late in my world.) JQ Royal can be Earl of Whichevershire and reffered to as just "Whichevershire." Likewise, we can have Anakin Skywalker, Darth Vader, and refer to him as Vader.

    Oh, and Sidious' voice in the trailer matches the Emperor's. :-)

    Yes, I have the trilogy burned onto my retinas for quick reference. No, I guess that means I don't have a life. ;-)

  • May I suggest that you go see the movie "The Red Violin".... it is very, very good movie. one of the best I have seen this year!

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