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Tag Archives: Carrie Fisher
Dishonored (2012)
We All Start With Innocence, but the World Leads Us to Guilt.
The true inspiration for today’s review was that terrible holiday known as Black Friday. Technically, it started a while before that with a number of people telling me how awesome this game was. But that didn’t actually inspire me to buy the game because it still didn’t look that interesting to me, and them talking it up was only going to make it worse. But there was something that could make it better. It could go on sale for $25 on Black Friday. And it did! Now, I hate Black Friday, and if it was my choice I wouldn’t have been there at all, or this game would have to wait for me until about 1 pm because there’s no way in Hell I’d get up early for it. Since I was forced to be there, and I was in the vicinity buying a game I wanted much more than this, I decided to relent and pick up a copy of Dishonored, developed by Arkane Studios, published by Bethesda Softworks, and including the voices of Chloë Moretz, John Slattery, Billy Lush, Susan Sarandon, Lena Headey, Brad Dourif, and Carrie Fisher.
We are the bodyguard of the Empress of Steampunk world. Our name is Corvo Attano and our voice box was apparently damaged at a young age, rendering us completely speechless. This becomes problematic when the Empress is murdered in front of us (because we’re also very bad at our job) and her daughter Emily (Chloë Moretz) is kidnapped (because we’re EXTRA bad at our job), and we are unable to tell people that we didn’t do it. We get all nice and framed for this, but we get freed by a group of Loyalists, led by Admiral Havelock (John Slattery). Then we are set on a mission to shake up the corrupt government and free Emily, the rightful heir to the throne.
You people need to knock it off with the whole overenthusiasm thing. You talk up a game that is “Okay” at best until it is made out to be the game of the year and the game can only suffer for it. I think the problems I had with the story made for the bulk of my problems with it. Actually, it was more how the gameplay changed the story, but we’ll get to that after a few other points. The first thing that struck me is that the story is kind of bland and mostly about political conspiracies, and anyone that knows me knows that there’s not a whole lot I find more boring than politics. The idea of the silent protagonist feels a little antiquated now as well, and it seems like it would have at least helped with some of the problems my character got into because of it. They say that the purpose of the silent protagonist is to get the player more involved with their character, but that hasn’t really proven to be the case, has it? I didn’t give two flying fucks about Corvo. I didn’t feel like I was him, nor did I get particularly involved in his story. If you really want to get me involved in a game, you need to make one about a guy playing video games, masturbating, and occasionally writing reviews that one or two people read. Then again, I wouldn’t buy that game either, and anyone else that did might get too depressed by it. And the other side of that argument is that there are plenty of games that have protagonists that speak that I got involved with. Ezio Auditore talks, Marcus Fenix talks, Nathan Drake talks. When my roommate asked me what my 5 favorite games would be, 4 out of 5 of them had protagonists that speak. The only one with a silent protagonist in that list was Final Fantasy 7. How about you have a great story to get me involved instead? There were also tons of things in the game that annoyed me because they didn’t make sense. When I was walking the streets on my way to a masquerade ball, why would guards attack me when I was wearing a mask? If that mask is good enough for the guards at the party, the other ones would surely have known about it or I’m sure half of the guest list was killed on their way to the soirée. And why did the guards keep trying to kill me after I exposed the Lord Regent and they took him to jail? Shouldn’t they all have figured at that point that I was framed?
I need to talk about the gameplay before I can combine it with the story to tell you what really annoyed me about the game. The gameplay itself was fine, but it’s really nothing I haven’t seen before. It feels like it wants to be, but it isn’t. And it ends up being a little boring to me, as most stealth games are. You have to do a really good job on your game to make stealth games feel like more than just waiting in shadows for someone to turn their back. They added in some powers, like the Blink ability, that makes it interesting when you can teleport behind someone to stab them up good. But if sneaking didn’t work out for you, there didn’t seem to be much by way of consequences for it. Fighting was fairly easy at first, being not much more than block and stab. Later it gets a little more complicated because the enemies dodge more and have guns, but fuck them ‘cause I can stop time now. The upgrades to your equipment never seemed to help that much, but the upgrades to your powers maybe helped too much, making the game a little too easy when you could see your enemies through walls, teleport right behind them, freeze time if you were in a pinch, and call in an army of rats if that wasn’t working. Also, the AI wasn’t that bright, which adds to the easiness. There was one part where I was flat out spotted by a number of guards and I backed up, falling down about 10 feet off a ledge where I could hear the guards say, “I guess it was nothing.” Out of sight, out of mind, I guess. The biggest problem with the gameplay I had was that I couldn’t play it for more than an hour at a time without getting so bored I had to turn it off. I’m sure the game wouldn’t take that as a compliment, and it wasn’t intended as one.
The biggest problem I had with the game was how the gameplay affected the story. They let you know about halfway through the game that killing people turns the story dark at the end. Fuck that shit! Killing these enemies just makes sense. A: it’s mostly self-defense because if any of them see you, they will try to kill you. B: it makes the game easier because you don’t have to keep watching out for them after they’re dead. C: it’s more fun! All I heard about this game before I bought it was that it was basically about cutting throats. That is literally all I knew about it before I played it. Then you’re going to punish me by making me corrupt an innocent little girl and make everyone hate me and be shitty to me because I played the game the way that makes sense? Fuck you! The Spiderman game I’m playing now doesn’t punish me for webbing people and punching them in the face. Assassin’s Creed doesn’t wag its finger at you for stabbing the people that deserve it with your wrist blades. I understand punishing me for killing innocents, but I wasn’t doing that. At the end of the game, the formerly nice boat driver that took me to my missions was so shitty to me he pretty much said he hopes I get killed, and just to help that along he’s going to fire his gun to get the attention of everyone on the island before he departed. And Emily is drawing pictures of me standing atop a mountain of corpses with a sword dripping with blood as she talks about how she’ll kill anyone that opposes her when she becomes Empress.
I don’t have very much to say about the look of the game. It looks good. I had no complaints. It’s just a Bioshock-esque steampunk world, but it’s so bland and dark to set the mood that it ends up being visually disinteresting and adding to the boredom I already had for the game.
This is also not a great game for achievements. I’m leaving the game with just over 300. Most of the achievements are for completing missions without killing anyone and without getting spotted. I find that course of action too frustrating and boring to actually make an attempt at it. I probably would if I found the game more interesting, but I just don’t care. I was vaguely interested in finding out what would happen to the ending if I had played this game the shitty way, but that question could be answered by a quick trip to YouTube. It wasn’t worth it.
Dishonored suffered from the high expectations set by the people I know. Seems to be a running theme in some of my reviews, doesn’t it? This game was okay, but certainly not as spectacular as some people acted like it was. The story was pretty good if you’re into that kind of thing, and the gameplay is fine but in no way innovative. But I’ll tell you what no one told me: this game is, in fact, not at all about stabbing people and slicing throats. Go into the game with that idea and the game will hate-fuck your skull. Instead, play this game if you like falling asleep while waiting in the shadows to hug someone that’s trying to kill you until they fall asleep and you can move on. That’s how the game wants you to play it. Also, I guess the other option is to just not play it. I’d recommend that one. Especially with it still at $60. I paid $25 for it and I didn’t think it was worth it. But I am going to trade it in for $15 dollars, so I recommend buying it when you can find it for $10. Dishonored gets “It can take one to sublime heights or harrowing depths” out of “Are you chasing something, or running away?”
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Heartbreakers (2001)
If I Were a Guy, I’d Do You.
Back from my October Horrorthon, I decided that I needed to try to focus on some outstanding requests that I’ve had building up. The first one I decided to take a look at was from my friend Grabooski. A while ago, the ‘Booski requested two movies of me that I kept putting off. I think I was thrown off by how random the two movies seemed to be, and also put off by the fact that they seemed more like chick flicks. But I’ve never reviewed a movie for her, so I decided to do one of her movies first. I knew about the movie that I picked because I saw the poster for it and specifically decided not to ever watch it ever. But that was before I took requests. Now that I do, I wouldn’t even bother acting like there is something that I wouldn’t watch. And so, to expand my horizons, I decided to review Heartbreakers, written by Robert Dunn, Paul Guay, and Stephen Mazur, directed by David Mirkin, and starring Sigourney Weaver, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Ray Liotta, Jason Lee, Gene Hackman, Nora Dunn, Anne Bancroft, Sarah Silverman, Zach Galifianakis, Carrie Fisher, and Kevin Nealon.
Max (Sigourney Weaver) and Page Conners (Jennifer Love Hewitt) are a mother-daughter con artist team. We start our journey with them watching as Max cons small-time Mafioso Dean Cumanno (Ray Liotta) into marrying her, and then getting a divorce on the first day by getting Page to seduce him into cheating on her. After collecting the settlement, they are confronted by an IRS agent (Anne Bancroft) who informs them that they owe a lot of money in back taxes. This forces them to head to Palm Beach to find one last big score. They pick a tobacco baron named William B. Tensy (Gene Hackman), whose addiction to his own product has significantly reduced his time amongst the living. While Max is working on him, Page finds a bartender named Jack (Jason Lee), who stands to gain a large sum of money if he sells his bar, and Page decides to try to take on this con on her own, behind her mother’s back.
I wouldn’t say Heartbreakers was a bad movie, but I also couldn’t bring myself to act like it was good. Probably the first thing I noticed about the movie is that it was entirely predictable. Around the point of the IRS thing in the story, I could’ve guessed how the rest of it was going to turn out. I guess I couldn’t have predicted that they were going to entirely forget to wrap up the Gene Hackman story though. Did they get his money? Did they get nothing? Did the police suspect the strange woman he had been spending all his time with? Or are we just going to forget about that storyline and jump back into the Jason Lee love story? Probably that one. This could easily be tolerable if the movie was entertaining, but it sadly fell short. It just wasn’t funny to me. There were maybe one or two mildly amusing moments in the movie, but one or two will not sustain me for over two hours of movie. If it had ended about a half hour earlier when it should have … well … I probably still wouldn’t have found it very entertaining. And I’m always confused about how that happens when they have the good sense to hire some really funny people to act in the movie. Kevin Nealon, Sarah Silverman, and Zach Galifianakis were all in this movie. You couldn’t have asked their opinion on punching up a few jokes? Instead, you have a joke where a guy dies by falling over and hitting his face on a statue’s penis, a penis that then ends up in his mouth while he’s on the floor. I wrote that same joke once … when I was 10. It got lots of laughs. I ended up spending a good portion of the movie focusing on these two women and their abilities as con women. They did not seem all that great at their job. When they reveal that they are con women early in the movie, they are super blunt about it, revealing everything at a gas station with all the wig removal and conning a guy into buying their gas. Was I not supposed to have figured that out a long time ago? When I saw Jennifer Love Hewitt for the first time, I knew they were con women. Well, first I touched myself, and THEN I knew they were con women. Later in the movie, I started to realize that they weren’t that good at it. Why would they leave their money in a bank, especially if they weren’t going to pay the IRS? Even though you know they have money and would be afraid of government investigation, why would you con someone in organized crime? That just seems dangerous. If you’re going to decide to take on an unnecessary Russian accent to woo your target, shouldn’t you learn more than the word for “Yes” and the lyrics to a Beatles song about the USSR? Or at least try to stay out of situations where someone might find out that you didn’t do your research and learn the language? And how did it take them so long to figure out that they should perhaps ask the mobster who shows up in love with Max how they should dispose of the dead body they had created?
All that being said, I’d say the real reason to watch this movie is the performances. Well, not so much the performances as the performers. And not so much the performers as Sigourney Weaver and Jennifer Love Hewitt being really hot. I found the movie predictable, a little dumb, and extremely rarely funny, but they were able to keep me watching by having those two lovely ladies wearing some skimpy clothing through the greater majority of the movie. I spent most of the movie trying to figure out which one I’d rather have. Physically, JLH is hotter, and almost to a ridiculous extent. When they were talking about how fast they could get a guy to marry them, I was thinking that 3 months seems like a long time and either woman could probably get me to do it way faster than that. But I actually think Sigourney could do it faster. I mean, she’s got way more nerd cred. She was in the Alien movies AND Ghostbusters. And did you see the underwear she wore on her honeymoon with Liotta? Ridiculous.
For as much as I thought Heartbreakers was predictable, too long, and not funny, I didn’t really find the movie painfully bad. And I think it’s entirely based on Sigourney Weaver and Jennifer Love Hewitt’s hotness. There are people that may find this movie funny. I wasn’t one of them, but I could see it happening. But if you’re a guy and you can’t watch a movie with Sigourney Weaver and Jennifer Love Hewitt dressed skimpy and hot, then there’s a very good chance you like penis. You can check this movie out on Netflix streaming if vagina is more to your liking. Heartbreakers gets “I love a woman who eats raw meat” out of “Isn’t that the same shoe you wanted to jam up my ass?”
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Sorority Row (2009)
I Don’t Have Time to Play “Catch Me, Rape Me”
Today’s movie is one I had seen a trailer for on some DVD that I watched recently and I says to myself, “I wanna see thems.” But I wasn’t talking about the movie. I was talking about Jamie Chung’s tits. The movie looked like a typical slasher film that I would normally be reviewing in October, but I would have forgotten this movie existed by then, so it had to happen now. Let’s see how it went, in my review of Sorority Row, written by Josh Stolberg and Peter Goldfinger, directed by Stewart Hendler, and starring Briana Evigan, Leah Pipes, Audrina Patridge, Matt O’Leary, Jamie Chung, Margo Harshman, Rumer Willis, Carrie Fisher, Julian Morris, Caroline D’Amore, Matt Lanter, and Deja Kreutzberg.
In the sorority house of Theta Pi, Megan (Audrina Patridge) – with the help of her sorority sisters Cassidy (Briana Evigan), Jessica (Leah Pipes), Claire (Jamie Chung), Chugs (Margo Harshman), and Ellie (Rumer Willis) – decides to play a prank on her ex-boyfriend, Garrett (Matt O’Leary), after finding out he cheated on her. The prank they decide to pull is to have Jessica give Garrett roofies to give to Megan. He gives them to her and she starts convulsing and appears to die. But they weren’t really roofies and she’s not really dead. To keep the joke going, the girls take Garrett and the “body” of Megan out to a deserted steel mill to dump the body. Not yet willing to give up on the joke, they put her “body” on the ground and act like they’re deciding to dump the body after cutting it up into pieces, further driving Garrett into despair. They split up to look for things to cut the body up. Unfortunately for them, Garrett finds a tire iron first and plunges it into Megan’s chest. So now she’s ACTUALLY dead. Now the idea of hiding her actual body and going about their lives sounds a little sweeter. The entire group of them agrees to dump the body except for Cassidy, but the bitch Jessica decides to wrap the body in Cassidy’s coat and dump her in it, so if Cassidy tells the police, she’ll be a suspect still. The group continue on to graduation (with Cassidy stepping away from the group for the most part). But, at graduation, they think they see Megan walking around, causing Ellie to scream and faint on stage as Cassidy’s boyfriend, valedictorian Andy (Julian Morris), makes a speech. Megan’s sister, Maggie (Caroline D’Amore), introduces herself to the group later. The group is relieved … until they get a text of a picture of the bloody tire iron in a gloved hand. Insert the remaining story of “I Know What You Did Last Summer” and call that a movie.
This is not a great movie. It’s basically the same story we’ve seen many times before with the tiniest bit of a twist at the end. The worst part of the movie, to me, was the subject matter: sorority girls. The greater majority of what I’ve seen about sorority girls comes from movies and they are always portrayed as either drunk, slutty, stupid, bitchy, or all of the above. This movie is all about those girls. I’m already annoyed from the start. Then you’d think that I’d be happy to see them all get killed, but I wasn’t. I’ve already seen I Know What You Did Last Summer. You just took that movie and slapped it into a sorority with a bunch of people I would never want to spend any time with while fully clothed. Almost everything said by these people seems as if it was written by really old people with a checklist of “The things those goddamned youngsters that won’t stay off my lawn would talk about.” They talk about updating their Facebook status constantly, and their second biggest concern (behind the person trying to kill them) was the location of their cell phones, and their cell phones were the same ones that 90 year old people who are afraid of staying up with technology buy! Sorority girls don’t use flip phones! Every single one of them is on an iPhone, and that’s a fact! While I was watching this movie, I picked up my iPhone and posted on Facebook that I … Oh shit … Either way, these bitches were annoying. I was happy that the sluttiest, alcoholic one was the first of the girls to die, but I still had to sit through a movie with the rest of the bitches. It was also 40 minutes into the movie before you saw a pair of boobs! How are you going to set a horror movie in a sorority house overflowing with super hot chicks and not show boobs? They showed about 3 pairs back to back, but none from the stars of the movie. I’m not particularly interested in seeing the boobs of the only vaguely attractive extras, especially if one of them quips about her “perfect tits” when they were par at best. The entire story of this movie was stupid. I predicted who the killer was going to be the very first time I saw him. Throughout the entire movie, the girls keep speculating that the killer is most likely Garrett, but we all know it’s not going to be, especially after he dies. Then we kind of think that it might be Megan, not actually dead, but very actually pissed. It’s not her either. They tried to pick someone you wouldn’t expect it to be, but I did. The only person in this movie that I would NEVER have thought would be the killer would’ve been Garrett. It would’ve been really shocking if the girls tried so hard to lead the audience into thinking it was him but (knowing that we would expect the unexpected) it would shock me if it actually was. It also really confused me that one of the girls tried to defend Garrett, saying that he was “harmless”. Apparently you forgot that the reason someone is hunting you is because he plunged a tire iron into someone’s chest. Then, being that the killer was not Megan, the entire motivation of the killer goes out the window. The actual motivation of the killer is retarded and does not make sense. It actually being Megan would have made total sense, and even Garrett would’ve made sense, but been too predictable. But we kind of figure out it’s not Megan because she kills outside of the group too often. If it was Megan, and it was a revenge film, then she would have no reason to kill anyone else unless they got in her way of killing one of them, not some random girl in the shower that has nothing to do with it. Killing the girl in the shower made sense with the motivations of who the killer actually was, but his motivations were stupid from the start, so it cancels that out. All of these stupid story elements could be forgiven if the action and the kills were cool and/or scary. They weren’t. The killer killed with a tire iron with some sharp things on it, which is an obvious choice. But the kills were basically just stabbings and throwings of the tire iron. And the movie was filmed with an intent for style, which turned out to just make things too dark and blurry to actually be able to figure out what was happening at times. When the killer is revealed, one of the girls looks down to see something in his pocket that gives him away. It gives him away to the people in the scene, but not to me because I have no idea what it was they saw! It looked like a couple of tent poles or something.
The performances of the actors in this movie pretty much required only one thing: hotness. The main cast mostly pulls that off, but everyone else is just okay. Briana Evigan was hot. Leah Pipes was hot and a ultra-irritating bitch. Jamie Chung was the hottest. Margo Harshman was hot, but she threw me off by being a way over the top slut and drunk. Rumer Willis was okay, but her chin is too big for my tastes. She was probably the best actress as it pertains to this movie. Audrina Patridge was hot, but barely in the movie. Caroline D’Amore was hot enough. I’m not mentioning their performances because none of them really impressive. Carrie Fisher was in this too, which makes me sad that she doesn’t pick better projects. But I love Carrie Fisher forever and always. Also, fuck you for killing her, movie. Matt O’Leary spazzed out as Garrett pretty well too.
Sorority Row is dumb. It’s filmed poorly, it’s story is poorly written and predictable, the killings aren’t interesting, and the couple of hot girls in the movie don’t get their tits out. There’s really no reason to see this. If you want to get the whole experience of the film, watch the first 20 minutes. You’ll see (and be annoyed by) the girls in the film, see the reason the killer is after them, and (if you’re like me) figure out the rest of the story when you see one character. Sure, you’ll miss the boobs, but you’re not missing much. Skip this film unless you want to make fun of something. Sorority Row gets “It’s not my fault that you’re gay” out of “Ewww, she looks horrible!”
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Star Wars: Episodes IV, V, and VI (1977, 1980, and 1983)
Twi’leks? Still hot. But then there’s Metal Bikini Leia…
Here we go again. Another super long review because you guys would prefer it to 3 separate reviews. Because of my hatred for reading, this will be the conclusion to my Star Wars review saga. The canon does continue on from here into seemingly interesting places (which I figure from what I can gleam from Star Wars Wikipedia websites), but only in novel form. And fuck that! I don’t read for nobody. Not even Star Wars! I’ve gotten off track … Oh yes! The original trilogy! Here comes Episodes IV, V, and VI. Again, I intend to include spoilers, but if you haven’t seen these movies, I don’t like you. Not at all.
Episode IV – A New Hope (1977)
A slightly less long time ago in an equidistant galaxy, we hop into the middle of a battle between a giant Star Destroyer and a tiny starship. Princess Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher) puts the plans for a terrible weapon the Galactic Empire is working on into one of her droids, R2-D2 (Kenny Baker), and sends him and her other droid, C-3PO (Anthony Daniels), to the desert planet of Tatooine. She is then captured by the Lord of the Imperial forces, Darth Vader (David Prowse, voiced by James Earl Jones). The two droids are captured by Jawas and traded to Owen and Beru Lars and cleaned by their nephew, Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill). R2-D2 reveals to Luke that he’s owned by Obi-Wan Kenobi (Alec Guinness) and Luke figures out that they must mean the old hermit Ben Kenobi. R2-D2 goes off to find Obi-Wan and Luke follows. Obi-Wan saves Luke from Sand People and tells Luke that he knew his father when he was a Jedi Knight, and that his father was killed by Vader. He tells Luke that he can teach him the ways of the force and presents him with his father’s lightsaber. He tries to get Luke to go with him to save the princess but Luke feels obligated to his aunt and uncle … until he finds out they’ve been killed by Storm Troopers. He then accompanies Obi-Wan to Mos Eisley to find a ship. They find two smugglers, Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and his giant fuzzy Wookie co-pilot Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew), who agree to transport them in their ship, the Millennium Falcon. Back on the Death Star, Grand Moff Tarkin (Peter Cushing) tries to intimidate Leia into giving up the location of the Rebel Base by blowing up her home planet of Alderaan. Luke and his buddies show up to find Alderaan destroyed and get captured by the Death Star’s tractor beam. The group splits up. Obi-Wan goes to disable the tractor beam, the droids stay in the Falcon, and the rest go to rescue Leia. They do and eventually return to the Falcon, just in time for Luke to witness Obi-Wan get struck down by Vader, his body disappearing and his robe falling empty to the ground. The group escapes, minus one old man, and regroup with the Rebels to plan an attack on the Death Star. They find that the only weakness of the massive space station is a tiny exhaust port. They mount an assault but everyone fails at taking a shot at this exhaust port because their targeting computers aren’t up to the task. Luke goes in and Obi-Wan’s voice in his head tells him to turn off the targeting computer and use the Force. With the help of the Force and his schizophrenic voice, Luke destroys the Death Star. Everyone gets medals. HOORAY!
Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
A while after the last movie, the Rebel Alliance is still in trouble, even though they blew up the Death Star. Leia is now in charge of a contingent of troops on an icy planet of Hoth. Han Solo and Luke Skywalker are still in the group with her. Luke is riding around on an ugly, horse-like creature called a tauntaun and sees a probe droid land. He goes to investigate it but is attacked by a Yeti-looking mother fucker called a wampa and is dragged back to it’s lair for the purpose of becoming his dinner. Han goes out to look for Luke and finds him laying in the snow, having freed himself from the wampa with liberal use of the Force and his lightsaber. Luke has a vision of Obi-Wan telling him to go to Dagobah and train with Jedi Master Yoda (Frank Oz). Han keeps Luke alive by stuffing him inside the belly of his dead tauntaun. And I thought they smelled bad ……………………………………….. on the outside! The Empire lays seige on Hoth and everyone just barely manages to escape, Luke splitting off from the rest to go train with Yoda. Han and Leia, along with R2-D2, C-3PO, and Chewbacca barely manage to escape, but their hyperspace engine is malfunctioning. Han comes up with the brilliant plan of going to the nearby Cloud City, on the planet Bespin, to get his ship fixed with his old friend Lando Calrissian (Billy Dee Williams). Lando has betrayed Han and they fall into Darth Vader’s trap. Vader freezes Han in carbonite and gives him to the bounty hunter Boba Fett (Jeremy Bulloch). On Dagobah, Luke has been having difficulty training with Yoda and, to make matters worse, starts having visions of his friends in pain. Against Yoda and ghost Obi-Wan’s wishes, Luke jets off for Bespin to save them, falling into Vader’s trap. With Han on his way back to Jabba the Hutt with Bob Fett, Lando manages to free the rest of the group and take them to the Millennium Falcon to escape. Luke battles with Vader and gets his hand cut off. To apologize, Vader tells Luke that he didn’t kill Luke’s father, but instead he IS Luke’s father. Luke responds by jumping down the trash chute and hanging upside-down from the antenna beneath Cloud City. Hundreds of people’s TV’s shut off in the middle of Game of Thrones. Luke reaches out with the Force and tells Leia where he is, so they swing around and get him. With a little help from R2, they get the hyperdrive working and bounce. Luke gets a brand spankin’ new robot hand, Lando and Chewy go off looking for Han, and Luke and Leia look out a window.
Episode VI – Return of the Jedi (1983)
Luke sets up a plan to rescue Han from Jabba the Hutt (not Jabba the English Bulldog). He first sends in R2 and 3PO as a goodwill gift, with a warning that he does not want to mess with newly promoted Jedi Knight Luke. Lando infiltrates the palace as one of Jabba’s guards and Chewy gets brought in by a bounty hunter named Boushh. At night, Boushh frees Han from his carbonite prison and reveals herself to be Leia in disguise. Luke arrives to try to negotiate (I say “try” ’cause it must be hard to concentrate with Leia in that metal bikini) for Han’s release, only to get dropped into a pit with a giant, awesomely badass creature called a Rancor. Luke drops a door on him and kills him, then is taken into captivity. Jabba decides to sacrifice the lot of them to the Sarlacc, a creature in a pit that eats people. R2 shoots a lightsaber at Luke and Luke proceeds to whoop ass. Han also inadvertently hits Boba Fett in the jetpack, shooting him into the Sarlacc pit and to his death. Leia also strangles Jabba to death with a chain (this time it actually WAS my dog. … I was not pleased). The group goes back to the Rebels and Luke returns to Dagobah to finish his training, but finds Yoda dying. In his last words, Yoda admits that Darth is Luke’s father and that there is another Skywalker. In conversation with ghostbi-Wan, Luke puts together that the other Skywalker is his twin sister, Leia. The Rebels have learned that the Empire is creating another, bigger Death Star and plans to destroy it. A ground party comprised of Luke, Leia, Han, Chewy, and the droids will go to the forest planet of Endor to destroy the Death Star’s shield generator while Lando takes the Falcon and attempts to destroy the Death Star. After a tiny skirmish on Endor when they land, Leia and the others join up with a ridiculously cute tribe of indigenous creatures called Ewoks. At night, Luke tells Leia that Vader is their father, and then leaves to surrender himself to Vader and some Imperial troops, taking him to the Death Star to meet Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid), master of Vader and leader of the Empire. Palpatine tries to convert Luke to the dark side by informing him that he is, contrary to what the Rebels believe, on “a fully armed and operational Death Star”. Both Lando and Leia’s teams run into a large group of Imperials and find out “It’s a trap!” It was all a ruse to get Luke mad enough to join the dark side. Han and Leia’s team, with the help of the Ewoks, overcome their trap and manage to take out the shield. Luke tries to strike down the Emperor but is blocked by Vader and engages him in a lightsaber battle. Vader’s boasting of potentially turning Leia to the dark side since Luke won’t makes Luke snap. He disarms Vader (literally), but stops himself from killing him, believing there is still good in his father. Palpatine gets sick of Luke’s goodness and starts to fry him with some Force lightning. Hearing the pained screams of his son, Vader lifts the Emperor over his head and, despite being fried by Palpatine’s lightning, throws the Emperor down into the reactor and to his death. Luke helps the mortally wounded Vader back to his ship as the Imperials scatter because Lando is making his way into the core of the Death Star. Vader (Sebastian Shaw here, but not the villain from Marvel comics) asks his son to take off his mask so he can see him with his own eyes for once and confesses to him that Luke was right; there was good in him after all. Then he dies. Lando manages to get into the MCP-from-Tron-lookin’ core of the Death Star and destroys it, the Rebel forces and Luke all escaping. Celebration breaks out all over the galaxy, Luke burns his father on a funeral pyre, and Luke sees the spirits of Obi-Wan, Yoda, and Anakin (either Shaw or Hayden Christensen, depending on the version) proudly watching over them.
A New Hope is probably the worst of this trilogy, but only because V and VI were so gundamn good. The visuals were amazing for it’s time, and, even for these times, they stand up quite nicely. The dumb little things that Lucas went back in and added do nothing to help the movie, but they don’t hurt it in my mind either. Fanboys just don’t like any changes being made to their beloved movies, forgetting that they’re actually Lucas’ movies that we’re just getting to watch. The best thing to me about this movie and the next two is R2-D2. Whoever is to be blamed for this little droid should be applauded for giving a featureless little robot such a personality. I love that little mother fucker. The performances are all good as well. Han is the best of the humans to me. He’s a smug asshole, but he’s charming as shit. If Leia didn’t get him, I’d have tried. Leia’s good as well. Luke was a little grating in this movie. He seemed pretty whiny through the bulk of the movie. Aunt Beru and Uncle Own are fuckers though. They almost ruined the entire movies by telling Luke that Obi-Wan is dead and wanting to keep him at the farm. If he’d done that, he’d be dead like you two and we’d have no Star Wars! Jerks. Vader’s design was great. He looks like the badass that he should. And James Earl Jones’ voice sells the shit out of him. Obi-Wan must’ve been getting forgetful in his old age, acting like he stopped going by Obi-Wan before Luke was born and not recognizing the two droids. Nuh-uh! I saw them movies! The scale of this movie is as epic as it should be. This is first illustrated in the very beginning when the tiny Rebel ship is running from the mammoth Star Destroyer, and it continues throughout. For an off topic note, why does the fat pilot gotta be called Porkins, huh? Also, let’s face it, George. Han shot first.
For those that are unaware, the scene where Han is talking to the bounty hunter Greedo (the scene where I’ve memorized a line that Greedo speaks in a made up language, in case anyone doubts my nerdiness), originally Han shot Greedo under the table before Greedo could shoot. George thought this made Han too much of a dick and added in a blast from Greedo so that Greedo shot first. Fans erupted with anger. As I watched this version on BluRay, I could barely tell who shot first. So calm the fuck down, fanboys. You make me embarrassed to count myself amongst your number.
The Empire Strikes Back is probably what most people would call the best movie in the series, and I’d be inclined to agree. The reason? Vader is Luke’s fuckin’ father! HOLY SHIT! Of course, at this point (whether you’ve seen the movie or not) you probably know that. But I remember seeing that when I was a kid and later having to collect my mind from the wall behind me, on account of how much it was blown! The visuals got better as (I assume) the budget increased, not having a movie studio doubting your quality anymore after the success of the original. Now it’s all “Give us money and back the fuck off.” The performances remain in the same quality for the most part. Hamill gets less annoying as he becomes a badass. Watching Han and Leia’s relationship begin to bloom from bickering to love is great, but damaging to me. Why? Because I intend to ruin a great many relationships by only responding to “I love you” with “I know”. Think about it, it will kill many relationships but the one that gets it is meant for me. The puppeteering on Yoda here is amazing. It had so much more personality as a puppet than they were able to pull off with the CGI Yoda in the prequels. But why come Luke travels all that distance to train with a Jedi master just to ignore almost everything he tells him? Vader’s still a badass here, but it’s funny to me when he tries to hide from Luke in their fight because of his breathing problems.
Return of the Jedi wraps it all up for us. Not the best of the 3 but far from a bad movie. Luke has finally graduated to total awesomeness as his training nears completion. The practical, puppet version of Jabba the Hutt was SO much creepier than the CGI one from the prequels and the added scene from A New Hope. In this movie, Leia makes every nerd in the world fall in love with her by wearing a metal bikini as Jabba’s slave, which is much better than her Boushh outfit with the Sega Genesis on her head. And that Rancor is fucking terrifying. They made Ewoks blink in this one, which is a nice touch and makes them more realistic. And watching those adorable mother fuckers die in the battle is the saddest thing ever. PERIOD. Where’s the Sarah McLaughlin video for them?! The benefit of the BluRay remaster was made clearest to me in this movie, when the explosion of the Death Star 2 literally shook my living room. They changed the most things in this movie; all the things you may have seen the fanboy outrage over. The biggest one was that the originally silent scene where Darth Vader picks up the Emperor and throws him to his death now has a Revenge of the Sith-esque “NOOOOOOOOOOOooooooo!” added on top of it. Fanboys cried out in a much similar fashion. But why? I still think it works. I’ve got no problem with this change. It fits and I wouldn’t even have noticed had I not seen it on the internet because I don’t analyze every frame of the film, I just watch it. The change I had a problem with happened a few years ago. And what is that? I miss Yub Nub. Look it up.
Also, a little cool fact I found out while watching these movies: A character says “I have a bad feeling about this” in each of the 6 movies. Obi-Wan in Episode I, Anakin in Episode II, Obi-Wan again in Episode III, Luke and Han in Episode IV, Leia in Episode V, and C-3PO in Episode VI. I wouldn’t have thought of it had I not been reading the trivia about all the movies on IMDB while watching them.
My prognosis here is: AWESOME. I’ve always loved these movies and I can’t imagine there’s anything that could happen in my life, or anything George Lucas could do to them, that would change that. I probably watch these movies at least once a year as the whim strikes me ever since they came out on DVD. And, now in BluRay, they’re at their best. You don’t notice the difference as much in the prequels because they were filmed in higher quality. But when you get to the original series, all of which came out before I was even born, you can really see a big jump in quality of video and sound. My review? “Buy these movies” out of 3000. I think you should buy the whole saga, personally, but if you hate the prequels so much, at least do yourself the favor of picking up the original saga. Don’t make me come to you and wave my hand in front of your face to make you do it.
And, as always, please rate, comment, and/or like this post and others. It may help me get better.
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