1,068,735 @ 7:08 am
Star Wars: The Last Jedi - or, just another night at the Medford City Council when the Bob & Joe Show returns!
Trailer review by Joe Viglione 10-10-17
JV is Chief Film Critic of TMR Zoo and Community Media Medford
Trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYRy5bCsWF8
Trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYRy5bCsWF8
In two months and five days from my writing this The Last
Jedi will hit the screens and bring in over a billion dollars. That’s assured unless Kim Jong-un finds some
super powers to go along with his thermonuclear obsession. https://www.facebook.com/OfficialKJU/ You can join Kim’s FB page there, I’m not
interested. But everything a little
despot hopes for is wrapped up in the trailer for The Last Jedi and here’s
where we all have our interest piqued – a trailer is supposed to be stunning,
supposed to grab you, and this one does.
It’s about four and a half minutes and opens with menacing
high tech. This long-time Star Wars fan
(and who isn’t?) sees a glitzy new, fresh and exciting look at what dazzled the
world in Episodes 4, 5 and 6. Which one
has to do to keep the fans from needing a good cleansing after the truly
horrible 1, 2 and 3 desecration of one of the greatest series in the history of
filmmaking. Mechanized modern-day
Metropolis, the strength of George Lucas re-imagined Flash Gordon, Flash Gordon
to the extreme. Why reinvent the wheel when you can re-focus a tried and true
formula? Lucas’ gift and insight became
a gift to the world, and we look at the components of a trailer
Though the new character development is missing, our heart
strings tugged by the images of Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill, seeing Chewy –
as great as it is – feels like Worf sent from Star Trek: The Next Generation
into Deep Space Nine. Essential in that
the new characters of Deep Space Nine had little or no traction in the Star
Trek Universe outside of the hardcore hardcore base and the vision-less powers
that be needed to bring in Colm Meaney (Chief O’Brien – 52 episodes The Next
Generation, 173 of Deep Space Nine – did they make that many???) and Michael
Dorn (Worf, 175 episodes TNG, 102 episodes Deep Space Nine) to give the series
some kind of anchor. Sad thing is, they
could have integrated fuller remnants of Next Generation out at Deep Space
Nine, the obvious somehow escapes science fiction writers of today who have the
road map Harlan Ellison, Robert Bloch, Isaac Asimov created…but can’t seem to
adjust their set to the Outer Limits…or Twilight Zone…or original Star Trek
sagas. “"No one just wants to see a
retread of Obi-Wan Kenobi," Hamill said to USA Today. "We've
seen the benevolent Jedi master training people."
“Untamed power …and beyond that” is the dark theme, a hint
of the exploration of the “dark side” – the devil’s playground, with cinematic
awe and shock, an upcoming roller coaster ride – the futuristic negative zone
inherent in current human nature, taken to the extreme. What Terminator, the Matrix and Star Wars,
all series, and all very popular, do correctly is to not take these stories
down the rabbit hole of a mud bath (think John Travolta in Battlefield Earth, TV
series Babylon 5 which actually did pull in some original Star Trek writers as
I advised above – D.C. Fontana and Harlan Ellison – according to Wikipedia, but
– clearly – not enough of their genius to pull B5 from out of the depths – “Other
writers to have contributed scripts to the show include Peter
David, Neil Gaiman, Kathryn M. Drennan, Lawrence
G. DiTillio, D. C. Fontana, and David
Gerrold. Harlan Ellison, a creative consultant on the show,
received story credits for two episodes.[65]) (Wikipedia)
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The spacecraft appear sleek, modern – upgrades for a new
time, much deserved, and director Rian Johnson will have to follow guidelines
from both Disney and Lucas Film, the franchise much too important to experiment
with. The Kinks said it well, “Give the
people what they want” – and as long as Jar Jar Binks is kept in exile, along
with the Ewoks, the heart of Star Wars will continue to beat on the correct
path.
