Film, Gadgets, and Geekdom

So I’ve been thinking about my childhood recently.  Really because the first dog I had is being put to sleep tomorrow.  Super sad.

Then I started thinking about all the new movies that are just remaking or continuing my childhood.  First, let us talk about Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.  This is probably the best of the recent childhood rehashings.  It wasn’t the best of the Indy movies by any stretch of the imagination, but it was a fun movie.  As a continuation of my childhood memories, it did a fairly good job, but it definitely didn’t match up to Raiders of the Lost Ark or Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.  So at this point, my memories of childhood are doing ok, still alive.

Then we come to the hardest hit portions of my childhood: Star Wars.  The original trilogy was one of the greatest movie memories I’ve had.  Since then, they have been among my favorite films and I really geeked out on them.  Then the prequels were released.  When I saw Episode 1, for a while, I tricked myself into believing it was a good movie.  Eventually, I had to face the facts and admit, it sucked hard.  Episodes 2 and 3 raised the bar a little with each movie, but never to the levels of vision and ingenuity shown in the original three.  Once Revenge of the Sith ended, I was hoping that the Clone War saga was put to a close and the Star Wars franchise could just die in peace, with what little dignity it had left.  That is what George Lucas did to his own series, he murdered it in cold blood.

Now, to exhume the body and presumably rape the corpse, is Star Wars: The Clone Wars.  The story to link together the stories of Episodes 2 and 3.  Just the last bit of shit to make sure that the Star Wars fans are completely pissed off and the series is wholly and completely trashed.  Don’t get me wrong, I will go see it, but I will NOT be waiting in line on release day.  I have seen what George Lucas has done to his much loved series and I am not excited about what’s coming.  Maybe I will be shown wrong and it will be a good production, but my expectations are so low, they can’t really be called expectations.

The last thing that I will talk about is Back to the Future.  This was another trilogy that was so well made and just enraptured me as a child.  The movies wove together so well and were excellently delivered by Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd (among others), they also stand in my favorite movies below Star Wars and Indiana Jones (respectively from great to slightly less great).  Thankfully, the rumors of a fourth BttF movie were squashed and it will not be in production.  You can’t grasp how happy this makes me.  The series finished itself at the end of the third movie and everything was wrapped up all nice and tight.

Why do there need to be remakes and re-imaginings of movies that were just fine the way they were?  If you want to bring the movie to a newer audience, let them watch the original.  Let them figure out that if weren’t for these original classics, the stories we know and love today wouldn’t be around.  Please, let the old stories lay in peace.  They don’t need to be rehashed, reimagined, redone, recovered, rewhatevered.  There are so many creative people out there with so many great ideas and skills, give them a chance.  Throw some money to the independent film makers instead of $200 million dollars to remake and fuck up a movie that was just fine the first time.  Creative and original stories are the way to go.