The Oregonian’s Shawn Levy ponders which highly anticipated set of -quels let viewers down the most. His conclusion is… Not really all that surprising, actually.
Well, with both trilogies complete and behind us, I’m not sure that those people would have been correct in the least. Lucas improved on quite a bit of “SWEP1” in the subsequent prequels, while the Wachowskis absolutely crash-landed “The Matrix” in their sequels to it. (Let’s leave off “Speed Racer,” shall we, so as not to be overly cruel….) Especially given a decade of reassessment, I’d call Lucas’ three-film enterprise by far the more successful.
(Via io9, where they are polling, and Star Wars is ‘winning.’ Frustrated childhood dreams rear their ugly heads again!)
And can I just say randomly that The Fifth Element beats them all in capturing the madcap cheesy fun aspect of Star Wars? Or will you stone me?
The Fifth Element is a brilliant film. It doesn’t get the respect it deserves.
And Matrix is not holding up well from what I see. People don’t talk much about it anymore.
The Fifth Element was a marvelous film, full of action, comedy, and an impressively fleshed out world.
I think people would still talk about the Matrix if they left it with one film. The first film opened the door to interesting discussion, while the latter two just filled up our minds with philosophical babble paired with eye candy effects sequences.
The Fifth Element is a stylistically a brilliant film, but I wouldn’t call it brilliant as a whole. Strip away the fancy costumes & sets and it is just another average sci-fi film.
The Matrix died because the sequels were so bad.
It is easy to say that the Star Wars prequels got better, but that is because Ep1 was so bad.