[OT] Something To Keep In Mind When Reading Reviews Of Episode II

[El_Gringo]

http://www.nytimes.com/library/film/061580empire.html


Check out the scathing review written in 1980 about The Empire Strikes Back.

 

[Numion]

This quote right here tells us something about the skills of this reviewer:

"Hamill may one day become a real movie star"

Yeah, right

 

[Moe Ronalds]

Does anyone here go to Nightly.Net? I saw a thread on this there... Something else to keep in mind, Roger Ebert gave it a worse review than TPM, so don't give too much weight (pun intended) to the critics.

 

[Wolfspider]

Here's something else to keep in mind: Critics are merely people who have strong opinions about things and have the good fortune to be in a position to have those opinions broadcast to a large audience. In that way, they're not unlike you and me.

I'm sure we could find a handful of people on this very board who didn't like Empire. In fact, there might even be--heaven forfend!--people on the board who don't like Star Wars at all! Does the fact that they didn't like it mean that their opinions are worthless? Of course not! And, like a poster in another thread mentioned, one critic gave the recent Britney Spears movie a B+ when other critics generally panned it. Does that mean the Britney-loving critic is a numbskull? No, not necessarily. It just means that she had a different opinion of the film than most.

Reviews are a guide. You read a lot of them and you make a judgement based on what's said, weighing everything and taking as many factors into consideration as possible.

So don't pull up one abberent review from the past and make the illogical conclusion that all reviews are worthless.

In any case, as I said in the other thread, what really matters is the test of time. Empire has stood the test; so has Star Wars. Will Episode I? Will Episode II? I'll see you in 20 years with an answer.

 

[Some guy from Ohio]

I will be retiring from this universe now because this is the first time I agree with everything Wolfspider said about a Star Wars topic.

 

[MaxKaladin]

(Here I go merrily angering people My experience with critics is that 90% of them are either artsy types or poseurs of the same who won't really like a movie unless it's filmed in black and white in a smokey parisian coffee house where nobody does anything for two hours but puff on their cigarettes and whine in subtitled french about how angsty and miserable they are.

So it is that when the 'critics' start panning a SF or action movie*, I start to get excited about it since it seems that the better a movie like that is, the more they hate it.

*Sadly, there hasn't been enough good fantasy to test the theory there.

 

[King_Stannis]

i used to really appreciate roger ebert's reviews. i still find him a pretty good critic, but i'm finding that in a lot of his recent reviews he likes to really dump on cgi to prove his knowledge of the film industry. notice how he spent a bunch of time talking about the transfer of the digital images to film. he also called the special effects in "gladiator" terrible, again to prove his knowledge of what "good cgi" effects are.

 

[KnowTheToe]

I will be retiring from this universe now because this is the first time I agree with everything Wolfspider said about a Star Wars topic.

Amen brother. Way to go Wolf

 

[Psion]

I'm sure we could find a handful of people on this very board who didn't like Empire.

Until TPM came along, Empire was easily the worst movie. And that opinion is far from an anomoly. In fact, I seem to remember many discussions in which those who thought emprie was the best was something of an anomoly.

 

[Viking Bastard]

Until TPM came along, Empire was easily the worst movie. And that opinion is far from an anomoly. In fact, I seem to remember many discussions in which those who thought emprie was the best was something of an anomoly.

Really? That's rather interesting I must say.

I didn't get the chance to see my first Star Wars movie until I was twelve, some six years ago. It was A New Hope and I must say I felt immensily disappointed by it. All I could think of was: "That's it?!?" Cheezy plot, cheezier dialouge, I found Vader to be the worst movie villain ever and all the other characters except for Kenobi and Han Solo were major pain in the butt. It looked great, sure, but that was pretty much it.

A year or so later I saw Return of the Jedi. A friend of mine wanted to see it (he'd seen it before, his older brother being a total SW freak). I found the movie much better than ANH. Espacially loved the big final battle and I thought, "Hey, there might be some hope for this franchise yet."

Then, just a couple of weeks later I saw The Empire Strikes Back and I fell in love and mysteriously changed into a geek who stood in line for four hours to get a ticket on a early screening of Episode II.

So yeah, Empire rocks!