Star Wars, Nothing But Star Wars
With the third and final Star Wars movie mere months away from premiering, we're about to find out the answer to that old zen koan: if Lucas releases a Star Wars movie after two crappy ones, will anyone still care? While the hype for this one is just a mere echo of the the fin-de-siecle Menace madness that swept the world in 1999, the hype machine is definitely beginning to kick in. So far, the big event occurred last Thursday when the brand new trailer for Star Wars III: The Revenge of the Sith premiered at the end of the "O.C.", thus allowing network programmers to finally figure out whether science fiction or girl-on-girl action draws more teenage boys. And yes, the trailer does look totally bitching- dark and ominous with cool shots of people looking distressed, lava spuring everywhere, and Wookies, but we've said that before about previous Star Wars trailers.
You would think, however, that the trailers will be all over the internets by now, but they’re not. Usually, how these things work is that somebody releases a trailer online and then it spreads throughout the Web like, well, like a virus. Instead, Lucas and his henchman spent the weekend trying to shut down as many sites that had it as they could. Over the weekend, the only places where you could see it were on AOL (insert Evil Empire comment here) and on the Star Wars site itself, but in order to see it, you had to pay around $40 to become an official member of the site (what being a member entails, we have no clue). The trailer is now available for free, including on the Star Wars site. Leave it to Lucas to try and figure out just one more way of squeezing money out of his faithful. Despite the lock down over the weekend, Lucas officials have admitted that it's been harder to keep a lid on things this time around, something we can agree with as we accidently got majorly spoiled when we checked out what we thought was going to be nothing more than cool shots of ships. For those of you itching to know what the hell is going on in the clip, TheForce.Net has a shot by shot breakdown of it.
Lucas himself caused a disturbance in the force over the weekend as he told Leslie Stahl on "60 Minutes" that the new movie was going to be darker and more violent than the previous movies. He even suggested that the movie will be probably get a PG-13. Considering the criticisms over the previous prequels being too geared for the kiddies, this raised the expectations up a bit. We're not sure, however, if all the supposed darkness and violence means a dark and violent end to Jar-Jar. In the interview, Lucas also showed off his soon-to-be-opened new digs in the Presidio and said that after this, he was going to be back to making smaller, artier movies. Because of his brilliance in writing dialogue and directing actors, we can hardly wait.
And yes, we agree with Rain- send those cards and letters to Lucas so the Coronet can still be up and running when this movie finally sees the light of day.
Image from Oh No They Didn't