I do not know about you guys, but how do you compare the extreme fan reactions to (and extreme fan outcry over) Star Wars Episode I The Phantom Menace (1999) with the fan outcry over the changes that Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson had made when filming J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1937 children’s book The Hobbit (such as splitting the story into three films)? Well, I think the parallels between these two prequel movies (Star Wars The Phantom Menace and The Hobbit An Unexpected Journey (2012), separated by thirteen years, may be striking to you all. Both Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (along with its follow-ups, Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith) and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (along with its follow-ups, The Desolation of Smaug and The Battle of The Five Armies (formerly known as There and Back Again)) are preludes to two more substantial (and better) epic trilogies (The 1977-1983 Star Wars Original Trilogy and The 2001-2003 three-part adaptation of Lord of the Rings), and it is not merely that it is good or bad, for George Lucas’ Star Wars prequels and Peter Jackson’s Hobbit movies are not only polarizing to their respective fan-bases, but because the respective releases of Lucas’ Star Wars Prequels (in 1999, 2002, and 2005, respectively) and of Jackson’s three films based on the 1937 children’s classic The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien (in 2012, 2013, and 2014, the last film of which will be called The Battle of the Five Armies) brought fans both old and new into presumably bloody conflict with one another as well as bloody debate over the respective merits of the two respective prequel trilogies and their respective directors. The respective hypes for both the Star Wars prequels as well as the Hobbit films attempt to reconcile the breach between their respective old and new fan-bases by appealing to what they were respectively expecting, and they disappoint a lot of their older, lifelong respective fan-bases especially by relying too much heavily on computer generated images (or CGI for short). Finally, both prequel trilogies (and respectively, Star Wars The Phantom Menace as well as The Hobbit An Unexpected Journey) have both provoked—and will no doubt continue to provoke—highly ambivalent fan and critical responses because, even if George Lucas’ Star Wars prequels and Peter Jackson’s three films based on Tolkien’s 1937 The Hobbit used CGI too much, the release of and response to these two respective prequel trilogies may openly reflect matters about which our American society is itself extremely ambivalent. You know what I’m saying about the reactions to the Star Wars prequel and Hobbit trilogies of George Lucas and Peter Jackson, respectively?
Posted on: Tue, 21 Oct 2014 20:29:29 +0000
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