Honestly, I would have preferred it more with them in it because they were replaced with a bunch of flat cardboard cutouts with no personality. Yeah, Will might have been annoying, but hey, at least I remember who he was. The only new character from On Stranger Tides that I can remember is Blackbeard and only because I knew who he was before I watched the movie.
I also felt that in that movie in addition to having all these new characters pop up, they then had nothing to do. They didn't further the plot at all. If they hadn't been present in the story or had been replaced by different characters, the plot would have rode merrily along because the only character who really had any influence over what was happening was Jack Sparrow.
What kills me, though, is that the way the script seemed to be written, the main character should have been Barbossa. He had the most interesting character arc even though that mostly happened off screen. They didn't even show it, he just mentioned losing the Black Pearl to Blackbeard in that one brief little scene. In the theater I just sat there wishing that we had that as a movie instead. I mean, his character underwent a huge shift from the end of AWE and they totally just brushed over it and went back to Jack Sparrow doing stuff.
What kills me, though, is that the way the script seemed to be written, the main character should have been Barbossa. He had the most interesting character arc even though that mostly happened off screen. They didn't even show it, he just mentioned losing the Black Pearl to Blackbeard in that one brief little scene. In the theater I just sat there wishing that we had that as a movie instead. I mean, his character underwent a huge shift from the end of AWE and they totally just brushed over it and went back to Jack Sparrow doing stuff.
This I agree with, I would've loved to see the stuff with Barbossa. Would've been neat.
At least DMC and AWE had bits of "Will doing stuff", "Elizabeth doing stuff", and "Pintel and Ragetti doing stuff" to sew it together. Maybe I have a high Sparrow tolerance, but it only really started getting to me in Stranger Tides.
Too much Sparrow? No such thing!
On stranger tides was the second best movie in the series right after the original. The other two movies suffered from too much Will and Elizabeth and too little Sparrow (although I liked these movies too).
Will and Elizabeth were replaced by Angelica who did a fantastic job at pulling Sparrow by the nose, getting him into trouble and contrasting him.
This was really a dream come true since by the third movie I really wished Will and Elizabeth would disappear from the franchise, it was getting too serious with them.
At least DMC and AWE had bits of "Will doing stuff", "Elizabeth doing stuff", and "Pintel and Ragetti doing stuff" to sew it together. Maybe I have a high Sparrow tolerance, but it only really started getting to me in Stranger Tides.
Sparrow is not a main character, that's the problem. He's a character, but there's no reason to invest in him as a protagonist, which makes the movies have no gravity, which makes them less enjoyable. At least the characters of Will and Elizabeth add weight and consequence to the film.
The Pirates series went off the rails once it started taking itself too seriously. Now you might say...but Fawful....the movies went off the rails because it didn't take Captain Jack seriously and made him a buffoon. No, it's not the same thing. The first Pirates movie was tongue in cheek continuously with every character. Jack was just the most mysterious and interesting character, but he wasn't ten million times moreso than Will or Elizabeth. That's why the friendship between Jack and Will was so strong there...because they were almost on equal footing as interesting characters. Part of the likeablity of William Turner was that he could be a bit of a buffoon at times too. Jack and Will were both buffoons at times, and just as clever at others. Elizabeth was also clever in the first movie, and her comedy came not from gags or buffoonery but from the contrast between herself and the pirates she was stuck around. The villains were completely tongue in cheek. Suddenly DMC was super-serious because sequels need to be DARK and GRIM, and that just wasn't a good fit. The ending of DMC worked so well in spite of the movie because it was one of the first times the movie allowed itself to be tongue in cheek again. Any time the movie allowed that it was better. Jack going into the mouth of the Kraken and Barbossa coming back were both insanely cheesy, tongue in cheek moments of badassery. AWE barely EVER allowed for that, and it was also poorly written. It did a good job of removing every badass element in its characters ever.
I do remember that one of the biggest laughs I had in the first movie was Will with that damn wall sconce right at the beginning. Seriously, I started choking, I was laughing so hard. It's because I wasn't expecting it. They advertised the movie as hardcore action with a bit of drama and then pulled that shit out. The surprise made it glorious.
A lot of the humor in the next two movies tried too hard, the straight characters became straighter and the silly characters became sillier, but there were still always elements that I enjoyed. I liked Elizabeth and Barbossa, I liked Norrington, I liked Beckett, I liked Davy Jones... I liked the weird fish people because nobody ever uses weird fish people in movies.
And in Stranger Tides, they got rid of most of the characters I liked, failed to replace them with characters I could learn to like, refused to tell me anything about those characters, and trivialized the plot. I mean, we go from AWE, where there is a very real threat that every character that we've grown to like will end up swinging from a yardarm, to Stranger Tides, where the biggest threat is that someone else will become immortal first (or, I suppose, that minor characters with little screen time will die, but we barely even know who they are let alone feel any attachment to them). The drama was gone, the humor was gone, the characters were gone... it was a very empty movie and it made the little irritating things that I didn't mind so much in the previous movies really stand out.
I'm a Barbossa fan. I think he had the most interesting story that was never told. Why did he mutiny? We never know. How did he come back from the dead? Magic! How did he manage to go from being the most-feared pirate in the Caribbean to a respectable privateer? It all happens off-screen.
Though, I'll say, I really noticed the loss of Pintel and Ragetti in Stranger Tides. They were great simply in how opportunistic they were.
I'm a Barbossa fan. I think he had the most interesting story that was never told. Why did he mutiny? We never know. How did he come back from the dead? Magic! How did he manage to go from being the most-feared pirate in the Caribbean to a respectable privateer? It all happens off-screen.
Though, I'll say, I really noticed the loss of Pintel and Ragetti in Stranger Tides. They were great simply in how opportunistic they were.
Completely with you. I was always a bigger Barbossa fan than Sparrow fan. He actually comes off as more of a rounded character than Jack. And I COMPLETELY AGREE that his story of facing off with Blackbeard needed to have been the real story.
I had a dream last night about Star Wars episode eight. The stakes were insanely high....higher than they ever have been on any Star Wars movie. It actually resembled Doctor Who in my dream in how well it kept you guessing if characters would live or die.
One instance had Hans Jedi son and an aged wise Chewy held down in a grid by a seasoned sniper, and the guy and Chewy ran out of ammo. Another part had Han searching for Luke's daughter at a giant space junkyard, filled with remnants of past empire ships, including parts of the second death star. He soon came to realize it was occupied by a faction of empire remnants from the old days ala Japanese remnants on islands after world war 2.
There was a big fight that involved Indian-style tactics among the corridors of junk. The space junkyard was in space and not on a planet by the way.
Han finally found Luke's daughter on a swamp world devoid of a sun or natural light.
Also Palpatine was alive.
The dream merged into one where I was telling dad about the movie, and we were eventually massacred by an insane cult.
You know...I'd pay to see it. It'd spit in the face of every author and fan who have crafted the expanded universe, but by god it'd be more entertaining than the prequels. I think the winner there is having HAN as the protagonist rather than perfect Jedi Master Skywalker.
One of my biggest issues with the Pirates movies after Black Pearl is just how ridiculous they all got.
I mean, in the first one, all your suspension of disbelief really had to put up with was cursed pirate treasure. Plus in that movie, pirates were actually pirates, in that they were bad guys.
And then suddenly the pirates are good guys, and Will and Elizabeth are pirates now (???) and there's Davy Jones, and a kraken, and a sea goddess, and returning from the dead, and a council of pirate lords (???) and somehow piracy now is actually just fighting for freedom against the evil British Navy.
Disney, which announced it would buy Lucasfilm last year, plans to make spinoff movies based on characters in addition to the three sequels it had previously announced, CEO Bob Iger told CNBC in an interview after the earnings report.
Eh, they're planning on recouping their BILLIONS of dollars. Of course they're going to immediately start milking the cow they just bought. So? That's what the New Trilogy is, I have no idea why spin-off films are considered any scarier/worse, but then, I don't see why a new trilogy is seen as exciting/cool. The movies are part of a big effort to make back a massive investment, and as such don't just have to be successful themselves, but also be successful in terms of the larger scheme of making back FOUR BILLION DOLLARS. In that way, anything that comes out is going to be safe, boring, and ultimately very unlikely to be worth watching.
They're using LucasArts' name for the publisher here too although they're designed by Zen Studios (I have a strange feeling that LucasArts will be closed and serve as merely a brand name for Disney in a few years time).
Mystification means lack of presence.
Add presence (or screen time) to a mysterious character, and the mystery goes poof.
Well no thanks, duh.
In Tolkien's Lord of the Rings books, Saruman has one mystified and one demystified appearance, and tertium non datur! The first one makes him scary, seeing him in person after three almost complete books of build up. In comparison, the movies force Christopher Lee in whenever possible. Result: Just another villain who doesn't scare anyone.
An example of how it's actually DONE could be Rob Reiner's "A Few Good Men". Villain Colonel Jessup has scarcely a presence in the movie up until the final confrontation. And that's how villains are allowed to speak words which continuously get voted into the top 100 of most memorable lines.
TL;DR: Disney, fuck it, do something NEW with the franchise.
In that way, anything that comes out is going to be safe, boring, and ultimately very unlikely to be worth watching.
As opposed to Lucas' prequel films or re-releasing the existing (Special Edition) Star Wars movies in 3D. I feel safer with Disney milking the Star Wars cow than for Lucas to do it.
The Clone Wars TV show doesn't suck, and I would bet real money that the reason why is because George Lucas isn't a writer nor director for the show.
If they were going for a Jedi Master movie, it'd be Mace Windu. He's human and therefore can possibly be seen as a hero.
But such as Kit Fisto is relatively unknown (to those not familiar with the EU), while Mace Windu is very much Samuel L. Jackson. I would speculate that a spin-off might be better starting with an unknown.
Also, while Kit isn't human, he's still humanoid, which is probably good enough.
...I guess the truth is that I don't really care for Mace Windu, nor do I like knowing that the reason why his Lightsaber is purple (and the only purple one at that) is because Jackson wanted his to be purple. It's like Lucas listened to nobody when it came to making the movies, but when a well-known A-list actor wants something, he jumps through their hoops even when it doesn't make much sense for the overall franchise.
According to Ain't It Cool News, there's a rumour going around that the first spin-off could be about Yoda.
Words cannot express how much I am against this.
This was actually my ideal dream spin-off. I want to see over 500 years of Jedi history through the lens of a single character. I want to see the mistakes that Yoda made on his way to Jedi Master that ultimately caused him to give the advice that he did. The version of the film I have in my head probably has nothing to do with what would end up on-screen, but conceptually the idea of a film based on Yoda was actually one of my top "I'd like to see this happen" ideas.
I feel safer with Disney milking the Star Wars cow than for Lucas to do it.
Disney is going to be safe, Disney is going to be boring. The prequels are bad, but they're bad because dammit those were the movies Lucas wanted to make. I hate to say it, but the Disney acquisition has retroactively made me respect the Prequel trilogy more than I ever have, because yes they were terribly awful movies, but they were terribly awful movies that could have only been made by Lucas. They were still in some way personal to him. Now Disney is going to release something, and yes it'll be clean and fancy and polished and most people will probably say it's better, but it'll also be safe. It'll be mired in nostalgia. It will ultimately be not unlike other big-budget films of its time.
It's not that I don't expect Disney to produce a clean, safe, well-polished product. What I don't expect Disney to make is anything imbued with ambition, love, or personal style.
The Clone Wars TV show doesn't suck
....I think we're just on different ground here entirely.
But such as Kit Fisto is relatively unknown (to those not familiar with the EU), while Mace Windu is very much Samuel L. Jackson. I would speculate that a spin-off might be better starting with an unknown.
The reason they're using characters that are actually in the films is to AVOID the unknown.
Also, while Kit isn't human, he's still humanoid, which is probably good enough.
He has massive eyes and an inability to give a discernably human range of expression. Please find for me a live action film made in the past 10 years with a budget over $150 million dollars(because Disney is not putting less money behind this than they put into any of the Marvel Phase One films) that has a discernably inhuman lead protagonist. Your best bet is probably going to be Bilbo Baggins, and his claim to inhumanity is particularly hairy feet.
the Disney acquisition has retroactively made me respect the Prequel trilogy more than I ever have, because yes they were terribly awful movies, but they were terribly awful movies that could have only been made by Lucas. They were still in some way personal to him.
[...]
It's not that I don't expect Disney to produce a clean, safe, well-polished product. What I don't expect Disney to make is anything imbued with ambition, love, or personal style.
To me, bad is bad. One can have all the good intentions in the world when making their movie, but if it sucks, it sucks. Lucas' problem is that he listened to no one but himself when making the prequels. At least Disney (and, in Ep 7's case, JJ Abrams) is willing to consider outside opinion.
Regarding Abrams, Star Trek (2009) is a good movie. People make fun of the lens flares and bitch about the Apple-Store bridge, but I've seen all the movies and shows of the Trek universe, and JJ Abrams' movie has all the heart and soul that make the franchise great.
This, along with his refusal to remaster the OOT, shows me that Lucas was what was ruining the Star Wars franchise. Sure, Disney might play it safe for now, but once they've assured the fans that they're not going to take the massive dump on Star Wars that Lucas had been doing, then they might feel more comfortable with taking it in a new and bold direction.
I might respect Lucas for wanting to follow his vision, but I detest his arrogance and unwillingness to take any potential advice that might have made the pequels great.
Meh, I actually don't care about the Star Wars movies anymore.
And this is the same thing the Star Trek franchise faced. Few but the hardcore fans really cared about it anymore.
If they are going to make a good Star Wars movie, they need to make one that has enough nostalgia to capture the excitement of fans of the OOT, while making it new and fresh in a way that will capture new fans.
JJ Abrams for one, in my opinion, did both of these magnificently with Star Trek, so I'm willing to be open minded for what's in store for Star Wars.
I don't think that position is defensible without ultimately resigning the realm of film to that of commercial products not unlike toasters or vacuum cleaners. If you don't leave room in your lexicon for the concept of a noble failure, you're one step closer to the position that film as a whole is just another assembly-line procedure in which professionals put together the pieces to create a consumable product that can be objectively evaluated, and thereby rob the greatest medium for communication that we've ever developed of its humanity.
Well, yes, film making is an art. And in its art there is value to the artist's original vision.
But I don't see the how it benefits a franchise such as Star Wars, which is (or once was) beloved by so many, for George Lucas to become a modern day CGI-obsessed Ed Wood.
EDIT: And also, I don't see how it benefits anyone for the artist to arbitrarily decide that his original, beautiful, much-loved artwork is unsatisfactory and must be permanently covered over with new fingerpaintings. That, sir, is arrogance at its worst. So artist's vision be damned when Lucas has no respect whatsoever for fans of the original masterpiece he so greatly despises.
Hmm... I'm not sure what to make of a Yoda spin-off.
If it's of a Yoda reminiscent of his portrayal in Empire Strikes Back, then yes. It can be amazing. If it's of a Yoda who hippity-hops around with his lightsaber as in Attack of the Clones, then no. It will suck.
Also, there's something to be said for keeping an air of mystery about him. Filling in all the blanks regarding his past may only serve to lessen the appeal of the character.
Comments
I also felt that in that movie in addition to having all these new characters pop up, they then had nothing to do. They didn't further the plot at all. If they hadn't been present in the story or had been replaced by different characters, the plot would have rode merrily along because the only character who really had any influence over what was happening was Jack Sparrow.
What kills me, though, is that the way the script seemed to be written, the main character should have been Barbossa. He had the most interesting character arc even though that mostly happened off screen. They didn't even show it, he just mentioned losing the Black Pearl to Blackbeard in that one brief little scene. In the theater I just sat there wishing that we had that as a movie instead. I mean, his character underwent a huge shift from the end of AWE and they totally just brushed over it and went back to Jack Sparrow doing stuff.
This I agree with, I would've loved to see the stuff with Barbossa. Would've been neat.
On stranger tides was the second best movie in the series right after the original. The other two movies suffered from too much Will and Elizabeth and too little Sparrow (although I liked these movies too).
Will and Elizabeth were replaced by Angelica who did a fantastic job at pulling Sparrow by the nose, getting him into trouble and contrasting him.
This was really a dream come true since by the third movie I really wished Will and Elizabeth would disappear from the franchise, it was getting too serious with them.
Sparrow is not a main character, that's the problem. He's a character, but there's no reason to invest in him as a protagonist, which makes the movies have no gravity, which makes them less enjoyable. At least the characters of Will and Elizabeth add weight and consequence to the film.
A lot of the humor in the next two movies tried too hard, the straight characters became straighter and the silly characters became sillier, but there were still always elements that I enjoyed. I liked Elizabeth and Barbossa, I liked Norrington, I liked Beckett, I liked Davy Jones... I liked the weird fish people because nobody ever uses weird fish people in movies.
And in Stranger Tides, they got rid of most of the characters I liked, failed to replace them with characters I could learn to like, refused to tell me anything about those characters, and trivialized the plot. I mean, we go from AWE, where there is a very real threat that every character that we've grown to like will end up swinging from a yardarm, to Stranger Tides, where the biggest threat is that someone else will become immortal first (or, I suppose, that minor characters with little screen time will die, but we barely even know who they are let alone feel any attachment to them). The drama was gone, the humor was gone, the characters were gone... it was a very empty movie and it made the little irritating things that I didn't mind so much in the previous movies really stand out.
Though, I'll say, I really noticed the loss of Pintel and Ragetti in Stranger Tides. They were great simply in how opportunistic they were.
Completely with you. I was always a bigger Barbossa fan than Sparrow fan. He actually comes off as more of a rounded character than Jack. And I COMPLETELY AGREE that his story of facing off with Blackbeard needed to have been the real story.
With vending machine and rubber chicken pulley.
One instance had Hans Jedi son and an aged wise Chewy held down in a grid by a seasoned sniper, and the guy and Chewy ran out of ammo. Another part had Han searching for Luke's daughter at a giant space junkyard, filled with remnants of past empire ships, including parts of the second death star. He soon came to realize it was occupied by a faction of empire remnants from the old days ala Japanese remnants on islands after world war 2.
There was a big fight that involved Indian-style tactics among the corridors of junk. The space junkyard was in space and not on a planet by the way.
Han finally found Luke's daughter on a swamp world devoid of a sun or natural light.
Also Palpatine was alive.
The dream merged into one where I was telling dad about the movie, and we were eventually massacred by an insane cult.
I mean, in the first one, all your suspension of disbelief really had to put up with was cursed pirate treasure. Plus in that movie, pirates were actually pirates, in that they were bad guys.
And then suddenly the pirates are good guys, and Will and Elizabeth are pirates now (???) and there's Davy Jones, and a kraken, and a sea goddess, and returning from the dead, and a council of pirate lords (???) and somehow piracy now is actually just fighting for freedom against the evil British Navy.
Yeah. Ok.
To answer your question..
That post.
They're using LucasArts' name for the publisher here too although they're designed by Zen Studios (I have a strange feeling that LucasArts will be closed and serve as merely a brand name for Disney in a few years time).
Words cannot express how much I am against this.
Add presence (or screen time) to a mysterious character, and the mystery goes poof.
Well no thanks, duh.
In Tolkien's Lord of the Rings books, Saruman has one mystified and one demystified appearance, and tertium non datur! The first one makes him scary, seeing him in person after three almost complete books of build up. In comparison, the movies force Christopher Lee in whenever possible. Result: Just another villain who doesn't scare anyone.
An example of how it's actually DONE could be Rob Reiner's "A Few Good Men". Villain Colonel Jessup has scarcely a presence in the movie up until the final confrontation. And that's how villains are allowed to speak words which continuously get voted into the top 100 of most memorable lines.
TL;DR: Disney, fuck it, do something NEW with the franchise.
The Clone Wars TV show doesn't suck, and I would bet real money that the reason why is because George Lucas isn't a writer nor director for the show.
But such as Kit Fisto is relatively unknown (to those not familiar with the EU), while Mace Windu is very much Samuel L. Jackson. I would speculate that a spin-off might be better starting with an unknown.
Also, while Kit isn't human, he's still humanoid, which is probably good enough.
...I guess the truth is that I don't really care for Mace Windu, nor do I like knowing that the reason why his Lightsaber is purple (and the only purple one at that) is because Jackson wanted his to be purple. It's like Lucas listened to nobody when it came to making the movies, but when a well-known A-list actor wants something, he jumps through their hoops even when it doesn't make much sense for the overall franchise.
Disney is going to be safe, Disney is going to be boring. The prequels are bad, but they're bad because dammit those were the movies Lucas wanted to make. I hate to say it, but the Disney acquisition has retroactively made me respect the Prequel trilogy more than I ever have, because yes they were terribly awful movies, but they were terribly awful movies that could have only been made by Lucas. They were still in some way personal to him. Now Disney is going to release something, and yes it'll be clean and fancy and polished and most people will probably say it's better, but it'll also be safe. It'll be mired in nostalgia. It will ultimately be not unlike other big-budget films of its time.
It's not that I don't expect Disney to produce a clean, safe, well-polished product. What I don't expect Disney to make is anything imbued with ambition, love, or personal style.
....I think we're just on different ground here entirely.
The reason they're using characters that are actually in the films is to AVOID the unknown.
He has massive eyes and an inability to give a discernably human range of expression. Please find for me a live action film made in the past 10 years with a budget over $150 million dollars(because Disney is not putting less money behind this than they put into any of the Marvel Phase One films) that has a discernably inhuman lead protagonist. Your best bet is probably going to be Bilbo Baggins, and his claim to inhumanity is particularly hairy feet.
To me, bad is bad. One can have all the good intentions in the world when making their movie, but if it sucks, it sucks. Lucas' problem is that he listened to no one but himself when making the prequels. At least Disney (and, in Ep 7's case, JJ Abrams) is willing to consider outside opinion.
Regarding Abrams, Star Trek (2009) is a good movie. People make fun of the lens flares and bitch about the Apple-Store bridge, but I've seen all the movies and shows of the Trek universe, and JJ Abrams' movie has all the heart and soul that make the franchise great.
This, along with his refusal to remaster the OOT, shows me that Lucas was what was ruining the Star Wars franchise. Sure, Disney might play it safe for now, but once they've assured the fans that they're not going to take the massive dump on Star Wars that Lucas had been doing, then they might feel more comfortable with taking it in a new and bold direction.
I might respect Lucas for wanting to follow his vision, but I detest his arrogance and unwillingness to take any potential advice that might have made the pequels great.
If they are going to make a good Star Wars movie, they need to make one that has enough nostalgia to capture the excitement of fans of the OOT, while making it new and fresh in a way that will capture new fans.
JJ Abrams for one, in my opinion, did both of these magnificently with Star Trek, so I'm willing to be open minded for what's in store for Star Wars.
But I don't see the how it benefits a franchise such as Star Wars, which is (or once was) beloved by so many, for George Lucas to become a modern day CGI-obsessed Ed Wood.
EDIT: And also, I don't see how it benefits anyone for the artist to arbitrarily decide that his original, beautiful, much-loved artwork is unsatisfactory and must be permanently covered over with new fingerpaintings. That, sir, is arrogance at its worst. So artist's vision be damned when Lucas has no respect whatsoever for fans of the original masterpiece he so greatly despises.
I will assume the second one to be The Adventures of Lando, until proven otherwise.
Ahh Fisto the force is with him.
I find your lack of faith disturbing.
If it's of a Yoda reminiscent of his portrayal in Empire Strikes Back, then yes. It can be amazing. If it's of a Yoda who hippity-hops around with his lightsaber as in Attack of the Clones, then no. It will suck.
Also, there's something to be said for keeping an air of mystery about him. Filling in all the blanks regarding his past may only serve to lessen the appeal of the character.