Star Wars: Threads of Destiny (2014)

This review will contain some spoilers, but they won't ruin the movie for you (the movie itself does a good job with that). Even though my opinion is very negative, I don't mean to insult or badmouth it in any way, I just write what I think in a pretty straight forward way.Writing this review is a hard thing to do without "profanities or spiteful remarks" as the guidelines say. I mean ... fencing? Really? As in rapiers, not light sabers or lore friendly vibroblades. When it comes to the lore, as my review summary already stated: I was disappointed. I'm not the biggest star wars geek in the world, but the screenplay completely disregards rules that Jedi have. For example "don't fall in love", which the Padawan's Master completely ignored (and seemingly embraced) as the princess flirted with his apprentice.Something really annoying that also broke the immersion for me was the atrocious acting. Okay. I'll cut them some slag, as this is a fan movie, but oh my, I haven't even seen such bad acting in any Sandler movie. The accents aren't that bad either, but come on, they should at least know how to say "Jedi" correctly.The screenplay was simply bad. Cut away the occasional philosophy that's meant to add depth to the conversations and everything the actors say becomes completely uninteresting. Scenes that should take a second were dragged on for 15-20 seconds to make the movie look longer, effectively just making it more boring.What really killed the movie for me though was the way it was recorded. Blurry backgrounds in nearly every scene, terrible CGI with cut scenes being completely blurry, ships behaving differently than they would in the original Saga. Scenes where faces, the background or objects were completely black. Oh and the costumes. The costumes were something unexpected. Obviously not in a good way. I have seen pornographic star wars movies with better costumes. Similar and probably even better acting too. I honestly thought that some scenes were cliché intros to porn. (I did "research").Tl;DrThis movie is bad. From the screenplay, to the immersion, over the acting, the CGI effects. Everything was just bad, to the point where it motivated me to write a review, after seeing how many "This movie is AWESOME" reviews there are. I recommend it if you're drunk with friends and want to have a laugh or have troubles falling asleep.

There's a lot of bad reviews and ratings for Threads of Destiny here, and I believe they're all mistaken and/or out of line. But allow me to explain what Threads of Destiny is;Threads of Destiny, is a Star Wars fan film set 96 years after the Return Of The Jedi. The Skenvi Empire, a smaller group of bad guys set out to secure their resources and parts of the galaxy for their own, in order to ensure a lucrative future. The New Republic can't have that, and sends out two Jedi ambassadors to make a better deal for the planet of Coreign. Sound familiar? That's because it is. Threads of Destiny remembers what was good about Star Wars back in the day, but also knows what the prequels did right, by making a compelling story about good vs evil, but also has smugglers, aliens, women and robots.If you've ever watched the original trilogy, you'd know that the visual effects are quite dated. Such is, regrettably the case with Threads also, but that's to be expected. The film was shot in 2005 on DV-camcorders, and put together by an ensemble of visual effects artists over 8 years.What people tend to forget when watching this film, is just that. They pick on the Swenglish(Which could really just be a foreign space-accent, to be fair), and the sub-par compositing. Again, the film was shot on DV on poorly lit green screens, and we have to give them credit for doing what they did.This is a FAN FILM, it's not Episode VII. The amount of work put into this film over nearly a decade is astonishing. The music is great, the sound mixing is awesome, and the story is good. The fact that the VFX look dated, is because, frankly, they are. They're also made by dozens of people around the planet, all being coordinated by Rasmus Tirzitis - the director. Not some fancy VFX house, or even a visual effects supervisor; the director.So please, when you're rating this film, please take the story into consideration. Not the acting, not the visual effects. After all, if we rated the original Star Wars films based on their visual effects, we wouldn't give them 10/10 today.

If you want to be impressed by special effects on-the-cheap, then this is the movie for you. Provided you watch less than 10-minutes of it. Otherwise, the writing is pedestrian at best and atrocious at worst. The acting isn't much better. However, I could have stomached that if the editing had been tight. Unfortunately, the pacing is set to the speed of poured molasses. The creators needed to cut about 40% of the material they presented.At the end of the day, this is just a hot mess of self-love. I wouldn't be shocked if the creators thought they were making the next great epic Star Wars story. Instead, they've just emphasized that if you were good enough to make a great movie, you wouldn't be making fan-fiction.

For an amateur Fan Film this is top notch. The special effects are well done, though the same problem most fan films have shine through in the story and acting. It hits upon the clichés, and by the numbers, and the actors come across more than a little stunted, sounding a bit more like Live Action Roleplayers (LARPers). For all that I stayed with it through the whole thing, which is actually pretty impressive. The acting, as it was, and story were at least if not better than Episodes 1 and 2. I'd really enjoy seeing something like this done by some passionate people willing to push new boundaries instead of the normal Star Wars tropes.