I know I’m a bit behind on the whole bandwagon of checking out Star Wars: Revelations, but oh well. I have now downloaded it, burned it to a DVD, and watched it — so I feel confident that I can comment on it.
First off, though, a little about getting the movie — the nerdy part of me thought the challenge of getting it on DVD was almost better than the film itself.
On the movie download page, the two main file formats are QuickTime and Windows Media Player WMV. For the more geeky fans, there is also DivX and a bunch of formats for various hand-held devices. What really got me excited, though, was the DVD version of Revelations. My new notebook has the ability to burn DVDs, but I haven’t used it yet. I figured this would be a perfect learning opportunity.
Since the file is over 3GB, the creators of the film prefer that people get the film using BitTorrent. I had used BitTorrent in the past to download episodes of season 4 of The Surreal Life, so I figured it would be pretty straightforward and fast. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case.
The BitTorrent files were taking forever to download. I was getting download speeds of only 33KB/sec, which meant that downloading would take well over 10 hours. I know my connection is faster, so that seemed insane. So despite the fact that the FTP wasn’t the preferred method, I went and downloaded my favorite FTP client, NcFTP (which supports resuming of failed/stopped/disconnected downloads), and started downloading. It took most of Saturday to download (but at least I was getting between 80KB/sec and 120KB/sec), but at least it was faster than BitTorrent.
Once I had the ISO image, I needed a way to burn it on to the blank DVD (a Memorex DVD-RW, for what it’s worth). Originally I figured that I could use burnatonce, a great little program I’ve used in the past to burn normal CD images. Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out how to get burnatonce to work with DVDs, so I searched for another solution. I quickly found DVD Decrypter (which is apparently out of “print” but can still be found on download sites), which worked great. I thought it would take forever to burn a 3.5GB ISO image, but amazingly it only took 25 minutes or so.
With the burning completed this morning, I now had Star Wars: Revelations and was ready to watch it. (There is still the option of downloading the “specials” disc #2 with behind-the-scenes features and whatnot, but for now I’m content with just the film.)
As for the film itself, I have mixed feelings.
The special effects are amazing. The amount of CGI work done for this film (including light saber battles, space scenes, explosions, holograms, etc.) is spectacular. If someone were to splice a few of the shots into a “real” Star Wars film, I probably couldn’t tell the difference. The only complaint I have about the CGI work is that it is often “too realistic.” I’m not exactly sure how to describe it, but I think it has to do with the fact that the film was entirely digital, which left it without that somewhat grainy and theatrical feel that normal movies have. Everything was too crisp and clean to be in a movie.
As for the acting, however, I was pretty disappointed. I’m not sure how the film was cast, but as far as I can tell most of the characters are played by a group of friends — the director, for example, plays one of the main characters. For the amount of awesome CGI work that went into the project, I would’ve hoped that as much effort would have gone into casting. Not to say that the film was horrible or that the quality of acting reminded me of ninja and karate movies people made in high school (though at times it did have that feel…), but it definitely could have been better.
If I had to venture a guess, I would assume that the people behind the film had more of a technical/computer background rather than a theatre arts one — but I could be wrong (and I should probably research a bit before being so critical). If anything, I think that seeing the people in the film made me realize how difficult acting truly is and that we often take that for granted with most movies and television shows.
The story, on the other hand, was rather interesting. It takes place between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope. The main character, Taryn Anwar, is a seer Jedi. In the past, the seers had been kicked out of the Jedi order, so Taryn is a bit of a rouge — perhaps? Prior to the film, she had been working for Zhanna, the Emperor’s Hand, to help exterminate the Jedi (which began in Revenge of the Sith). Eventually, Taryn teams up with some other Jedi’s to figure out the meaning of a mysterious artifact.
Spoiler ahead:
At the end, the “revelation” is that the seer Jedi’s foresaw the rise of Anakin Skywalker (or, more vaguely, a Jedi who would turn to the Dark Side). In order to prevent this from happening, they would on occasion kill Jedi who they feared might turn (which is probably part of the reason they were kicked out of the Jedi order). The seers setup a system to track all the Jedi’s in the universe — that was the secret of the artifact.
The final battle at the end is between Zhanna and Taryn over who gets to keep the list of all Jedis. Ultimately Zhanna escapes with the list, but Taryn’s friends make a copy so they have a list too. At the end, Darth Vader kills Zhanna (who he was jealous of), and will presumably take credit for having the list and hunting down the remaining Jedis. Taryn and her friends vow to protect as many Jedi as possible and plan to enlist the help of Senator Organa (from Revenge of the Sith and Leia’s adopted father).
Like I said, the story is interesting, and has a few twists that I didn’t mention. And there are a few “cameos” like Boba Fett and that strange eye machine that guards Jabba’s palace in Return of the Jedi that only true fans would think of including. (Though I don’t remember a character muttering, “I have a bad feeling about this…”)
I love the idea of having various “alternate universes” that are created with literature and film. The more complete these universes the better. I’ve posted about this before (on my old blog, though, I think), and I’ve concluded this enjoyment of “mythologies” is part of the reason I find soap operas and television shows so enjoyable.
I think it’s awesome that a bunch of fans got together to add to an alternate universe that they so obviously love. I truly hope that more people will add to the universe in such rich ways. Over at TheForce.Net there are a bunch of fan films that I will have to check out, but I have a feeling that none will compare to Revelations when it comes to visual effects, storyline complexity, and length.
I commend the makers and look forward to more fan-created work.
