Star Wars : Rebels

[Duncan Edwards]

Keep in mind it's being produced for Disney XD. That's the DTV channel for little kids so don't expect too much.

[kham]

It wont - cant - be touchy feely without resulting an utter epic fail

Plus, with lucasfilm doing the clone wars series, we had some fairly brutal stuff, including a teen jedi getting spammed by Savage Opress's giant mallet , and Ventress casually killing a former-spy through the back and out the chest with a lightsabre. If you using blasters and lightsabres, they aren't water pistols, and very rarely are not fatal

[quagmire_uk]

As far as I'm concerned, Star Wars has already been ruined. I've never been a fan of J.J. Abrams. Why?

1. Alias did nothing for me and I gave up on it after just a few episodes. From what people tell me of what happened later on, it was a good decision.

Shows that start well but go downhill seem to be a common problem for Abrams. The first three seasons of Fringe were fantastic. The later seasons are certainly watchable but it's not in the same league. That seems to happen with every show that he does.

I thought Alias was pretty damn good... for the first two seasons. While the first few episodes were merely "OK", I was gripped by the middle/end of the first season. And then in the second season they had a HOLY SHIT episode where the CIA raided SD-6 and wiped them out. Unfortunately it ended the "double-agent" premise of the series. Apparently they did it because the network executives felt that it made the show too confusing for casual viewers, and so it ended up being a more typical spy action show with the main characters all being part of the CIA. The early seasons where Jennifer Garner was a double-agent, doing dangerous missions that she intentionally had to fail or compromise sometimes (but not too much to avoid suspicion!) were what made it exciting.

I loved the fact that it was a sort of Mission Impossible type spy series and yet it was actually science fiction involving zero point energy machines and deathrays designed by some Nostradamus type guy called Rambaldi in the 16th century. The TV guide and the advertisments for the show gave no clue that it was going to be sci-fi.

However as time went on they kept coming up with more and more bullshit and running out of ideas. I stuck with it till the end, and it was clear that they were making it up as they went along. In one episode the bad guy Sloane mocked some other bad guys for believing the legends that Rambaldi's final great device would grant immortality, a very small-minded idea. So clearly it must be something that will change the whole world...? But in the short final season (I guess it got cancelled and they had to wrap it up fast) it turned out it was just immortality after all. WTF.

Personally, I had suspected that it was going to be a time machine and Sloane would inadvertently get time warped back to the 16th Century and become Rambaldi, thus explaining how a guy in the 16th century could design futuristic tech. It would have been wonderfully poetic if the man who spent his life obsessed with unlocking Rambaldi's secrets would turn out to actually be Rambaldi all along.

2. Lost was a huge disappointment not only because they had 6 seasons on a topical island and no QS, but the entire show was a PhD dissertation on how to waste time. When it was over, my first thought was you had 6 seasons and this was all you could come up with? They could have done it in 2 seasons, 3 tops.

I didn't watch Lost when it started because I wasn't particularly interested in seeing a bunch of people surviving on a tropical island. Later on I learned that he'd pulled the same trick as Alias and it was actually secretly a sci-fi show, the whole thing was a trick to get the mainstream public watching sci-fi. But since lots of people were talking about all the weird mysteries of the show and whether they would ever be solved, I decided to steer clear as I feared it would be another "making it up as they go along" thing like Alias. And indeed that's what happened. I gather lots of people were very disappointed by the ending of the series. (That said, some of the stuff does sound quite interesting, I'm tempting to marathon the whole series - since I know how it ends I won't have any high expectations or be disappointed.)

3. I'm a huge fan of TOS Star Trek. He took a big part of my childhood and some of the most groundbreaking concepts in sci fi and made them into an extremely typical, prefabricated Hollywood exercise on how to be unoriginal.

I have mixed feelings about the Star Trek film. I didn't actually enjoy it much, but I did appreciate him managing to bring back Star Trek and make it mainstream. Now people can admit to liking Star Trek without seeming like complete nerds, even if it is actually the old Star Trek that they prefer. And it means that companies are willing to spend money on the Star Trek license again, they've released blu rays of TOS and The Next Generation and they show it in HD on the SyFy channel.

Same goes for Doctor Who - in the 90s saying that you liked Doctor Who meant you were a truly spectacular nerd, even here in the UK. But since the modern series revived it, it is now mainstream pop culture, and every episode of the old series that still exists has gotten high quality DVD releases with loads of special features.

[nachtjaeger]

There's a delicate balance to CGI. The trick is not to let the effects star in the movie. Babylon 5 pioneered a lot of CGI, but it never took away from the story. I also had no problem with the "enhanced edition" or whatever it was called of SW:Episode 3 having been upgraded with CGI, such as adding lots more CGI Stormtroopers to the Death Star. (I read the novelization before I saw the movie, and always thought the effects in my imagination were better than the movie.)
But look at what Rod Serling did with The Twilight Zone with brilliant acting, world-class writing, B&W TV quality and tiny budgets.

Okay, that's my two cents.

[Qsvgitguy]

Thanks QUK,

I had totally forgotten about Fringe, and for me, with good reason. Again, I watched a few episodes but lost interest very quickly. For me, it just seemed like a very bad rip off of the X-Files, and after a while, X-Files was not even that good anyway.