From a distance: Looking back at the prequel trailers - Revenge of the Sith

1/26/10



Coming soon... the trailers of "Revenge of the Sith".



7 months later... [Sorry, I got a little busy]
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I've always liked sports metaphors, so let's just say that at this point Lucas was at the plate with no balls [His wife got those in the divorce. Zing!] and two strikes. With "The Phantom Menace" Lucas had not only swung and missed, but the bat had slipped out of his hands and killed a little old lady in the front row. With "Attack of the Clones", Lucas had fouled off a pitch, but the ball had beaned a Girl Scout. In short, it wasn't looking good for the Flannel Flogger.
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Enter "Revenge of the Sith". All signs pointed to this being the darkest chapter of the prequel saga. Somewhere in the last twenty years we've come to equate "darker" with "better", so against history and our better judgement, many of us still had high hopes for the third and final chapter of the prequel saga.
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Ultimately "Revenge of the Sith" was an improvement over it's predecessors, but like the guy in a family of complete morons who gets his GED on the third try, "ROTS" looks better than it actually is. It's somewhat lofty reputation is based more on it's relative value than it's actual value. Yes it has it's moments, but there are scenes in "ROTS" so shockingly bad that I'm embarrassed to watch them... and I didn't have anything to do with the movie.
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With the film in perspective, let's take a look at the trailers and see what they say five years later.
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[To see my reviews of the "TPM" and "AOTC" trailers click here and here]
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NOSTALGIA TRAILER
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Trailer 1
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- A very clever tactic; using the original trilogy to remind us that "Star Wars" used to be good.
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- :43 seconds in. Thundercats, hooooo!
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- 1:00 in. Inexcusable. Showing Vader in the suit in the teaser. It smacks of desperation on the part of Lucasfilm.
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- The next few shots are of the main characters looking horrified. These shots were actually taken from a hidden video filming the actor's reactions to reading the script for the first time.
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- Action! Explosions! Computer graphics!
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This trailer is really nothing more than a cheap and desperate ploy to bleed goodwill from the original trilogy. "Hey, it's Darth Vader! Oooh, look. Wookies!".

EPIC TRAILER
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Trailer 2
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- :00 - 1:00. Bad acting - EXPLOSION! - Bad acting - EXPLOSION! - Bad acting - EXPLOSION!

- 1:00 - 1:10. Even though the only people who didn't know that Palpatine was Darth Sidious were either living in a cave in Afghanistan or getting laid on a regular basis, Lucas still went to great lengths to never betray the fact in the first two prequels nor in public. But here, in the trailer, he just can't hold it in any longer.
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- 1:18 in. A slow motion Jimmy Smits. Always a sign of epicness.
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- The rest of the trailer pretty much betrays the entire plot.

Well that brings us to the end of this little experiment. They say that trailers are the films the director wish they had made. As we've seen here, they still would've sucked.