I mean, that's also dumb? He literally cost the First Order a dreadnought. I'm not sure that falls into the category of "sharp tool". Though I suppose if dreadnoughts can grow and pop out of the ground like RoS star destroyers, it's not a big deal.
The merit thing is me projecting our modern military's structure on them I guess.
We see in the person of the Dreadnought commander at the least that the First Order has the same strengths and weaknesses the Empire did - massive resources managed by a reasonably-competent backbone of career officers, who have their hands tied by a top tier of leadership that is either crippled by well-telegraphed personality flaws which can be exploited by opfor (Hux, Ren) or is willing to commit forces in risky or counterproductive ways because Reasons™ (Palpatine, Vader, Snoke).
Munkus BeaverYou don't have to attend every argument you are invited to.Philosophy: Stoicism. Politics: Democratic SocialistRegistered User, ClubPAregular
I am legit impressed at how the sequel trilogy managed to alienate Star Wars fans in a way the prequel trilogy did not.
It certainly helped that I was in the seventh grade when episode one came out.
Also that “the internet as we know it” didnt really exist. SA was launched in 1999. Reddit 2005. Youtube 2004. Facebook 2004. PA 1998 (and someone more knowledgeable can tell me when the forums became a “thing”). Early 2000’s?
You would have had to been in on the ground floor of ground floor in order to be having the kind of conversations we have regularly. There simply wasnt enough of a usenet population to penetrate the general consciousness.
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
edited February 2020
The PT trilogy also generated a considerable amount of connected material that was far superior, and the EU (now "Legends") material was still going strong. So there was actually a lot of additional things to play, read, and watch.
In comparison, Disney torpedoed the EU when it acquired the setting, which was a chunk of alienation. Then there was really nothing to replace the EU while the ST was going on (I never even considered picking up the EU again after it was decanonized, what would even be the point of reading it now?), and there's also been essentially nothing like either of the Clone Wars series or a pile of fun SW games to give people an alternative to the ST.
So with nothing else around, the ST got all the focus and just burned people out really badly, even if it arguably wasn't as bad as the PT.
So with nothing else around, the ST got all the focus and just burned people out really badly, even if it arguably wasn't as bad as the PT.
Now that is indeed arguable. While each movie in the PT and ST is bad in its own right, the PT has at least the benefit of being a coherent trilogy of films that build on each other towards an ultimate end. You can take a plot point in Episode 1 and follow it through Epside 2 to its culmination in Episode 3. It will be uninteresting or even unpleasant, depending on the plot point, but it can be done. The ST as a trilogy is at best incoherent and disconnected, and at worst Episode 9 goes out of its way to outright contradict Episode 8. There is no arc, no plot element you can follow and see develop over all three movies. There are early plot points that are dropped, plot points that evolve and then are scrapped and taken in a completely contradicting direction, and sudden new plot points that appear out of nowhere later on.
The idea that Disney destroyed the EU is still really weird to me, considering it feels like more of the EU's material has made its way onto the big and small screen since Disney than before. And despite maybe some lip service from Lucas/Lucasfilm, I don't think any of the EU was ever really treated as canon to begin with.
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Inquisitor772 x Penny Arcade Fight Club ChampionA fixed point in space and timeRegistered Userregular
The prequels are bad, yes, but the themes make sense and you kind of know where they are going. There are also the tiniest slivers of good-to-great ideas that you feel could've worked if they were just shepherded properly.
The ST as a whole is very inconsistent, which can make it look poor in comparison to something that it just unuformly mediocre. It's the same reason we lament the rookie with potential who didn't pan out more than the second-stringer who was always going to be a bench player.
The ST also suffers because lit has, by far, the worst film in the entire franchise. There is no amount of editing or adjusting that could have been done to save TROS. Everything from the writing to the pacing was just off. That film is a clear case study of everyone else doing their jobs fantastically but having it not matter in the end because the writers and director did not have a coherent vision or an actual story to tell. Which is unfortunate because it is the finale, which means that it casts a long shadow over people's perceptions of the entire trilogy, and perhaps the entire franchise. It doesn't matter how good the main course was if the dessert made you vomit.
The ST is miles better then the PT. Better actors turning in better performances with better scripts and better direction.
The ST is more disappointing in some ways because TPM set the bar so low and time has not been kind to the movies to the point that everyone just kinda moved on.
The PT is like watching some ordinary folks dancing at a club, just having the time of their lives.
The OT is like watching some dance school kids turning in a good performance on the street while a sick beat plays on a boom-box.
The ST is like watching professional dancers, and one of them slips and it’s just this slow-motion crash of beautiful people hitting a pristine waxed wooden floor.
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FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
The ST is not nearly that compelling, but yeah, kinda
I need to write a script that adds “In my opinion,” to the beginning of posts in movie related threads. For my blood pressure’s sake if nothing else.
IMO, the PT was such a disappointment after the build up that came from OT. The ST, while not some brilliant cinema, came in well above my expectations for films that were clearly all rushed through development.
I think it’d be fun if Disney did a thing that would just be a new set of movies set directly after the OT every few years. Just make it all a high budget new EU extravaganza.
Speaking for this Star Wars fan, the draw has always been the larger universe that acts as a sandbox for other stories and tabletop games. So while the PT is bad, it didn't leave a turd in the sandbox. The movies being bad movies doesn't really matter to me when I sit down with my pals and play a pencil and dice game. The ST isn't like that. It doesn't matter how competently made the movies are, they bury a turd in every corner of the sandbox I might want to explore.
Speaking for this Star Wars fan, the draw has always been the larger universe that acts as a sandbox for other stories and tabletop games. So while the PT is bad, it didn't leave a turd in the sandbox. The movies being bad movies doesn't really matter to me when I sit down with my pals and play a pencil and dice game. The ST isn't like that. It doesn't matter how competently made the movies are, they bury a turd in every corner of the sandbox I might want to explore.
It blows my mind that Disney can do so well with Marvel and so completely miss the mark with Star Wars. When you hit the reset button and remove all the EU stuff, you have to be pretty careful how you lay out the framework for all the stuff that's going to follow, books, games, additional movies and shows, not to mention fan's doing homebrew role playing and the like.
The PT trilogy also generated a considerable amount of connected material that was far superior, and the EU (now "Legends") material was still going strong. So there was actually a lot of additional things to play, read, and watch.
In comparison, Disney torpedoed the EU when it acquired the setting, which was a chunk of alienation. Then there was really nothing to replace the EU while the ST was going on (I never even considered picking up the EU again after it was decanonized, what would even be the point of reading it now?), and there's also been essentially nothing like either of the Clone Wars series or a pile of fun SW games to give people an alternative to the ST.
I think the amount of content that came out may have helped but I think it really comes down to framework or world building. The entire EU had a pretty good OT to work from. The EU wasn't only chock full of amazing works, they had some amazing stinkers in there. My go to example is the Courtship of Princess Leia; I had the struggle to finish that book and I was only in middle school. But the fact that you had good with the bad and that many were self contained stories that future authors could either ignore or revamp helped. In the end even if you have 2-3 stinkers come out, if a good one was released, you wanted to read about Luke, Leia, Han, etc because you were invested in them from the OT. I'm not sure how that'll work with the ST and the future new EU stuff. One of the more interesting characters in the entire thing is now gone at the end of TRoS.
Disney has really struggled with the brand. I really like a lot of the actors in the ST movies, but they were just a mess. Why they thought getting different directors and writers for each one was a good idea is beyond me. Giving EA an exclusive license has also been a disaster. The PT may have been terrible but they did spawn some decent stuff like the Clone Wars and Republic Commando. The ST in contrast, did a terrible job laying out the framework for additional content to come.
For me at the end, I just want good Movies, Shows, and Games that have Star Wars in them. For movies, you can look at Marvel and argue how good some of the movies are, but in general most folks would at least say they are "ok". That's really all I wanted from the ST. I don't need massive reworks of things, just give me a by the number story that is fun and has good characters in it. Lay the framework for all the future content.
I'm fine with not everything under the Star Wars brand being absolutely amazing. Allowing authors to take wild swings with fiction is how you get a lot of mediocre stuff but it's also how you get some of the best and most creative works.
That said, I would have fucking expected them to at least try to be more consistent with the quality of the fukkin', y'know, mainline films.
I'm fine with not everything under the Star Wars brand being absolutely amazing. Allowing authors to take wild swings with fiction is how you get a lot of mediocre stuff but it's also how you get some of the best and most creative works.
That said, I would have fucking expected them to at least try to be more consistent with the quality of the fukkin', y'know, mainline films.
They are being consistent though! The way I see it, we average out to 1/3 of Star Wars films are good/great, 1/3 are fair, 1/3 are poor.
It's just so strange. You'd think if they were going to say "screw it" with TRoS, at very least the business interests would have shined through. Some of them did (lots of new toys), but killing Kylo Ren was just baffling. You had it setup for his redemption and the 2 of them coming out triumphant against the big bad guy. The amount of "extra" content they could have gotten out of his character could have been staggering. Did he and Rey stay together? What adventures did they get up to post TRoS? I could come up with at least a dozen EU storylines they could have used with the 2 of them alive.
There's a good chance corporate interests are why TRoS looks the way it does and they rarely have good instincts when it comes to making art.
The baffling thing with TROS is that whoever they hired to oversee the ST didn't even bother to make sure some sort of vague plan or at least continuity was in place.
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FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
It's just so strange. You'd think if they were going to say "screw it" with TRoS, at very least the business interests would have shined through. Some of them did (lots of new toys), but killing Kylo Ren was just baffling. You had it setup for his redemption and the 2 of them coming out triumphant against the big bad guy. The amount of "extra" content they could have gotten out of his character could have been staggering. Did he and Rey stay together? What adventures did they get up to post TRoS? I could come up with at least a dozen EU storylines they could have used with the 2 of them alive.
Oh no, Kylo surviving would have been one of the few things they could do to make the movie worse.
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Inquisitor772 x Penny Arcade Fight Club ChampionA fixed point in space and timeRegistered Userregular
There's a good chance corporate interests are why TRoS looks the way it does and they rarely have good instincts when it comes to making art.
The baffling thing with TROS is that whoever they hired to oversee the ST didn't even bother to make sure some sort of vague plan or at least continuity was in place.
Yeah, it's really easy to blame the corporate overlords, when it doesn't sound like they started meddling until the final film. And given the script, it's hard to blame them - the properly identified that there was an issue but didn't have the expertise to fix it themselves. The main thing you can blame them for is being able to identify the problem but then not being willing to either give the additional time/resources to fix it or bite the bullet, change the people in charge, and start over (the second time, given they already did it with Trevorrow). Nothing we've heard from the "leaked" details of Abrams's original script would have fixed the inherent problems with the film. In a lot of ways, they would have exacerbated the existing ones - necessitating an even faster pace, with more characters and meaningless subplots, and even "bigger" completely unearned moments.
If it's true that Abrams was on the phone arguing with people constantly, the question becomes with whom was he arguing? Was it Kathleen Kennedy? Alan Horn? Bob Iger? The Star Wars "creative council"? Kennedy was the one who was ostensibly the most "in charge" of the entire thing, so I'm curious if she was trying to protect Abrams from further meddling or if she was actively pushing him in directions he didn't want to go.
Once we've seen Abrams' Star Trek and his new X-Files revamp show Fringe, we'll have a much better idea of whether Abrams really is brilliant — or just a clever hack.
- Cloverfield. Once you got past the hype, it really was a great ride, and the nihilistic ending was sort of awesome in a Blake's 7-y way. For once, the fact that everything's a mystery didn't seem to matter, because the mystery was just in the background.
- Lost. It's another thing we won't really be able to evaluate yet, because a lot depends on how well it ends, and how much sense it actually makes in the end.
- Forever Young. I pretty much covered this one yesterday. But the treacly plot, with the nonsensical motivations — why would being in suspended animation make his girlfriend's supposedly impending death easier to handle? — is pretty hard to take. The film pretty much slides into the ick zone the moment two cute kids revive Mel in the present day. And then there's the fact that he starts to age rapidly, as a side effect of cryogenic suspension. Wha huh?
Ultimately I think the biggest mistake they made was putting Abrams in charge of the first film, and then going back to him to finish the last one. They should've avoided him with a 30-foot pole.
It's just so strange. You'd think if they were going to say "screw it" with TRoS, at very least the business interests would have shined through. Some of them did (lots of new toys), but killing Kylo Ren was just baffling. You had it setup for his redemption and the 2 of them coming out triumphant against the big bad guy. The amount of "extra" content they could have gotten out of his character could have been staggering. Did he and Rey stay together? What adventures did they get up to post TRoS? I could come up with at least a dozen EU storylines they could have used with the 2 of them alive.
Oh no, Kylo surviving would have been one of the few things they could do to make the movie worse.
Maybe. Kylo surviving and having to deal with the aftermath of his mistakes could be good?
It's just so strange. You'd think if they were going to say "screw it" with TRoS, at very least the business interests would have shined through. Some of them did (lots of new toys), but killing Kylo Ren was just baffling. You had it setup for his redemption and the 2 of them coming out triumphant against the big bad guy. The amount of "extra" content they could have gotten out of his character could have been staggering. Did he and Rey stay together? What adventures did they get up to post TRoS? I could come up with at least a dozen EU storylines they could have used with the 2 of them alive.
Oh no, Kylo surviving would have been one of the few things they could do to make the movie worse.
Maybe. Kylo surviving and having to deal with the aftermath of his mistakes could be good?
I don't doubt that there's the potential for a good story there.
I doubt that the current people making decisions are capable of telling that story.
It's just so strange. You'd think if they were going to say "screw it" with TRoS, at very least the business interests would have shined through. Some of them did (lots of new toys), but killing Kylo Ren was just baffling. You had it setup for his redemption and the 2 of them coming out triumphant against the big bad guy. The amount of "extra" content they could have gotten out of his character could have been staggering. Did he and Rey stay together? What adventures did they get up to post TRoS? I could come up with at least a dozen EU storylines they could have used with the 2 of them alive.
The problem with that was that he was evil and killed a bunch of people, and most writers are too hackish to be able to deal with former villains actually having to confront the consequences of their actions.
Yeah, one interesting idea is that the dark side is kind of like addiction. They talk about how it's easier and more seductive. It would also fit into the Jedi's monkish ways, steeling them against that addiction. Having Kylo not only have to deal with his mistakes but having to constantly fight the urge to fall back would be interesting.
Of course I agree with See317, I don't have any faith in Disney pulling something complex like that off.
Right out the gate, the first paragraph of the opening crawl is awful. When we get to the movie proper, there's a whole lot of action and, conspicuously a whole lot of camera movement, but the soundtrack is oddly mute during most of it and there's just no drama. Everything is still very sterile and unconvincing, even though you can tell the effects technology has come a long way since the previous movie. Anakin still sucks, and the direction of all the dialogue scenes still sucks, which is particularly terrible because a lot of those problems collide in a really fake, sterile looking, terribly directed dialogue-heavy section on Coruscant immediately after the opening battle.
Edit: Jesus, this Anakin/Padme stuff is awful. I remember Sith as being the good one of the PT, but these scenes are easily as bad as the worst stuff in AotC.
I put most of the blame there on Lucas being... Lucas.
"Okay, Hayden, look at the tennis ball. Not me, the ball. Good. Now, I want you to glare. And pout. Glare. Pout. That's it. Show me your adolescent raaaage.
Okay, now just keep doing that for an hour. I've got to get over to Stage 2 and shoot more footage of Natalie crying."
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Munkus BeaverYou don't have to attend every argument you are invited to.Philosophy: Stoicism. Politics: Democratic SocialistRegistered User, ClubPAregular
It's just so strange. You'd think if they were going to say "screw it" with TRoS, at very least the business interests would have shined through. Some of them did (lots of new toys), but killing Kylo Ren was just baffling. You had it setup for his redemption and the 2 of them coming out triumphant against the big bad guy. The amount of "extra" content they could have gotten out of his character could have been staggering. Did he and Rey stay together? What adventures did they get up to post TRoS? I could come up with at least a dozen EU storylines they could have used with the 2 of them alive.
Oh no, Kylo surviving would have been one of the few things they could do to make the movie worse.
Maybe. Kylo surviving and having to deal with the aftermath of his mistakes could be good?
Here's some of the problems with that, and I'm gonna use two examples to compare him to: Vader and Zuko.
Zuko is a guy who is put into a shitty circumstance but time after time when offered to go down the right path he ignores it and continues to do shitty things.
Kylo Ren is a guy who murders his father in movie 1 and then in movie 2 is offered a carte blanch chance at redemption and ignores it. And then becomes the leader of the organization what does shitty things. He stops being manipulated by anything except his own awfulness the moment Snoke dies and there is no impetus for him to stop being a shitty person after he becomes the head honcho of the chief shitty person organization. There needs to be a reason why people keep giving him another chance and there is nothing contextually that presents this. Zuko eventually decides to turn on the shitty people in his life and still doesn't get a carte blanch chance at redemption because he had been so shitty to people and refused to help the right side.
And Vader....Luke doesn't even learn the significance of his relationship to Vader until the climax of Empire. Luke is never trying to redeem Vader until that point, no one is. But when Vader says "Hey Luke, you're my kid let's overthrow the Emperor" it demonstrates two things: Luke is important to Vader and Vader is willing to turn on the Emperor if the time is right. It's not necessarily "I know there is good in him!" levels but it sure as hell is more than what Kylo Ren displays.
And then the very next time Luke and Vader interact on screen Luke is trying to redeem his papa and Vader is all "Son, you have no ideaaaaaaaaaa how strong the Emperor is he's just so strooooooooooooooooooong."
Then Luke shows Vader mercy during their climatic battle and Vader has his face turn. And still dies for it.
We know who Kylo Ren is and his relationship to the cast since the very beginning. And he is given no end of opportunities to repent, become a good-guy, and forsake the dark side. But he doesn't. Time after time, he just refuses.
Vader is a guy who blew up a fucking planet and he is presented by the context of the story as more redeemable than Kylo Ren.
The problem is that episode 7 and 9 are just so poorly written that there is nothing you can do with the character at all.
Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but dies in the process.
the dark side of the force is a pathway to many abilities some consider... unnatural
dew it
And we're not even halfway through. and I think I missed some.
There is good here. McDiarmid is the fucking hero of this movie. What a treasure. His Palpatine can barely contain his evil frog voice and it occasionally just slips out. He'll be having a normal conversation and then out of nowhere he'll say "Jedi" like he's choking on phlegm and it's great. The visual imagination in the movie is in full Star Wars force and it's a damn shame the visual effects couldn't keep up. Everything on Utapau, conceptually, is magical. Greivous gets shafted as a character, which is also a shame, but his wheely bike machine is totally glorious.
McGregor is also flexing every charm muscle he can, bound though he is by the material. His character is written like an absolute moron, but McGregor makes it so you don't really notice it unless you squint. At least, not compared to the rest of the council.
The main problem is Ep 8 did a great job of closing the door on a Kylo Ren redemption arc but the people making Ep9 have too little originality to do anything with that and so went back to the easy "redemption arc" well instead.
I will always love "So be it... Jedi" from ROTJ because that "Jedi" sells that the gloves are coming off and it was probably overdue in Palpatine's opinion.
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Munkus BeaverYou don't have to attend every argument you are invited to.Philosophy: Stoicism. Politics: Democratic SocialistRegistered User, ClubPAregular
The main problem is Ep 8 did a great job of closing the door on a Kylo Ren redemption arc but the people making Ep9 have too little originality to do anything with that and so went back to the easy "redemption arc" well instead.
I would say episode 7 closed off the redemption arc and episode 8 was just following the breadcrumbs that were setup.
Nine is just fucking bad.
Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but dies in the process.
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Munkus BeaverYou don't have to attend every argument you are invited to.Philosophy: Stoicism. Politics: Democratic SocialistRegistered User, ClubPAregular
Here's the thing
JJ wrote fucking episode 7
If he wanted Kylo Ren to do a redemption arc maybe don't, you know, have Ren fucking murder his father in cold blood while his father is all "Come home, Ben"
but no, JJ had to have his blatant homage which includes killing the mentor figure with your big bad without understanding what that means for the character
If you wanna set up the redemption story just have it so Kylo Ren wants to kill his father, but is denied the opportunity. He wants to kill Luke, but is denied the opportunity. Then finally he has the opportunity to kill his mother....and decides he can't go through with it. Boom she sacrifices herself and in doing so allows Kylo to come back to the light side.
Very easy to do!
Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but dies in the process.
If you wanna set up the redemption story just have it so Kylo Ren wants to kill his father, but is denied the opportunity. He wants to kill Luke, but is denied the opportunity. Then finally he has the opportunity to kill his mother....and decides he can't go through with it. Boom she sacrifices herself and in doing so allows Kylo to come back to the light side.
The reality is you have both him killing his father and not being able to kill his mother. So it's messy either way
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
It definitely gets a little fanservicey and it's never really good, but like a lot of the prequels you can tell there are good concepts and this one is probably the closest of the three to executing those ideas. It also helps that it's easily the most watchable and feels much shorter than the other two (some of that is of course that it is shorter, but not by all that much).
Something that I will give all the prequels credit for is feeling like journeys. Each one covers a lot of ground while
a) not actually being all that long
b) not feeling like they're totally and breathlessly jam-packed with stuff
So, yay? I mean they mostly have the opposite problem of being boring, but something here is being done closer to right than movies like TFA or Avengers: Age of Ultron, as far as pacing is concerned.
There's also a bunch of stupid shit in Sith and things I wish had gone differently (do the Jedi make one good decision in the whole of this trilogy?), but it's the best and most fun of the prequels, while I think pretty well wrapping the whole plot up, all things considered.
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Inquisitor772 x Penny Arcade Fight Club ChampionA fixed point in space and timeRegistered Userregular
If he wanted Kylo Ren to do a redemption arc maybe don't, you know, have Ren fucking murder his father in cold blood while his father is all "Come home, Ben"
but no, JJ had to have his blatant homage which includes killing the mentor figure with your big bad without understanding what that means for the character
If you wanna set up the redemption story just have it so Kylo Ren wants to kill his father, but is denied the opportunity. He wants to kill Luke, but is denied the opportunity. Then finally he has the opportunity to kill his mother....and decides he can't go through with it. Boom she sacrifices herself and in doing so allows Kylo to come back to the light side.
Very easy to do!
This is why I think people give TFA too much of a pass. I thought it was a decently-entertaining film, but had some serious flaws in terms of narrative and, more importantly, as the starting point for a longer story. But you kind of let it go because there are more movies to come, so maybe they'll figure something out? Turns out those initial issues were actually pretty hard to move past. Rian Johnson tried his best to wipe the slate clean, but for some reason they decided to run it back as hard as possible instead of taking the story to a more natural conclusion.
If he wanted Kylo Ren to do a redemption arc maybe don't, you know, have Ren fucking murder his father in cold blood while his father is all "Come home, Ben"
but no, JJ had to have his blatant homage which includes killing the mentor figure with your big bad without understanding what that means for the character
If you wanna set up the redemption story just have it so Kylo Ren wants to kill his father, but is denied the opportunity. He wants to kill Luke, but is denied the opportunity. Then finally he has the opportunity to kill his mother....and decides he can't go through with it. Boom she sacrifices herself and in doing so allows Kylo to come back to the light side.
Very easy to do!
I don't think Kylo killing Han negates any sort of redemption arc. You can see the way it's still plausible in how TLJ plays the Kylo/Rey relationship. Kylo killing Han is what establishes Kylo as someone genuinely bad. As someone who would need an arc to be redeemed, like real effort, rather then just a chat with dad.
TLJ takes this thread and waves it in front of us before finally shutting it down for good.
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Munkus BeaverYou don't have to attend every argument you are invited to.Philosophy: Stoicism. Politics: Democratic SocialistRegistered User, ClubPAregular
If he wanted Kylo Ren to do a redemption arc maybe don't, you know, have Ren fucking murder his father in cold blood while his father is all "Come home, Ben"
but no, JJ had to have his blatant homage which includes killing the mentor figure with your big bad without understanding what that means for the character
If you wanna set up the redemption story just have it so Kylo Ren wants to kill his father, but is denied the opportunity. He wants to kill Luke, but is denied the opportunity. Then finally he has the opportunity to kill his mother....and decides he can't go through with it. Boom she sacrifices herself and in doing so allows Kylo to come back to the light side.
Very easy to do!
I don't think Kylo killing Han negates any sort of redemption arc. You can see the way it's still plausible in how TLJ plays the Kylo/Rey relationship. Kylo killing Han is what establishes Kylo as someone genuinely bad. As someone who would need an arc to be redeemed, like real effort, rather then just a chat with dad.
TLJ takes this thread and waves it in front of us before finally shutting it down for good.
From a narrative standpoint, the two most irredeemable things you can do are killing a well-liked character that loves the person in question and killing a dog without remorse.
Like, Anakin slaughters a village of people like animals and then later kills a bunch of children. But the big scene with the big impact is him choking his pregnant wife while yelling at her.
You can show that Kylo is a bad person by the fact that he does terrible things to people he isn't related to and that he wants to get a kill that will show 'no really, i'm the bad guy' by killing one of his family members.
Denying him that catharsis allows for a possible redemption later on and also is really good storytelling! Kylo wants just one thing to be evil and he just can't do it, either by circumstance or his own 'weakness.'
Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but dies in the process.
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The merit thing is me projecting our modern military's structure on them I guess.
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It certainly helped that I was in the seventh grade when episode one came out.
Also that “the internet as we know it” didnt really exist. SA was launched in 1999. Reddit 2005. Youtube 2004. Facebook 2004. PA 1998 (and someone more knowledgeable can tell me when the forums became a “thing”). Early 2000’s?
You would have had to been in on the ground floor of ground floor in order to be having the kind of conversations we have regularly. There simply wasnt enough of a usenet population to penetrate the general consciousness.
In comparison, Disney torpedoed the EU when it acquired the setting, which was a chunk of alienation. Then there was really nothing to replace the EU while the ST was going on (I never even considered picking up the EU again after it was decanonized, what would even be the point of reading it now?), and there's also been essentially nothing like either of the Clone Wars series or a pile of fun SW games to give people an alternative to the ST.
So with nothing else around, the ST got all the focus and just burned people out really badly, even if it arguably wasn't as bad as the PT.
Now that is indeed arguable. While each movie in the PT and ST is bad in its own right, the PT has at least the benefit of being a coherent trilogy of films that build on each other towards an ultimate end. You can take a plot point in Episode 1 and follow it through Epside 2 to its culmination in Episode 3. It will be uninteresting or even unpleasant, depending on the plot point, but it can be done. The ST as a trilogy is at best incoherent and disconnected, and at worst Episode 9 goes out of its way to outright contradict Episode 8. There is no arc, no plot element you can follow and see develop over all three movies. There are early plot points that are dropped, plot points that evolve and then are scrapped and taken in a completely contradicting direction, and sudden new plot points that appear out of nowhere later on.
The ST as a whole is very inconsistent, which can make it look poor in comparison to something that it just unuformly mediocre. It's the same reason we lament the rookie with potential who didn't pan out more than the second-stringer who was always going to be a bench player.
The ST also suffers because lit has, by far, the worst film in the entire franchise. There is no amount of editing or adjusting that could have been done to save TROS. Everything from the writing to the pacing was just off. That film is a clear case study of everyone else doing their jobs fantastically but having it not matter in the end because the writers and director did not have a coherent vision or an actual story to tell. Which is unfortunate because it is the finale, which means that it casts a long shadow over people's perceptions of the entire trilogy, and perhaps the entire franchise. It doesn't matter how good the main course was if the dessert made you vomit.
The ST is more disappointing in some ways because TPM set the bar so low and time has not been kind to the movies to the point that everyone just kinda moved on.
The OT is like watching some dance school kids turning in a good performance on the street while a sick beat plays on a boom-box.
The ST is like watching professional dancers, and one of them slips and it’s just this slow-motion crash of beautiful people hitting a pristine waxed wooden floor.
IMO, the PT was such a disappointment after the build up that came from OT. The ST, while not some brilliant cinema, came in well above my expectations for films that were clearly all rushed through development.
I think it’d be fun if Disney did a thing that would just be a new set of movies set directly after the OT every few years. Just make it all a high budget new EU extravaganza.
It blows my mind that Disney can do so well with Marvel and so completely miss the mark with Star Wars. When you hit the reset button and remove all the EU stuff, you have to be pretty careful how you lay out the framework for all the stuff that's going to follow, books, games, additional movies and shows, not to mention fan's doing homebrew role playing and the like.
I think the amount of content that came out may have helped but I think it really comes down to framework or world building. The entire EU had a pretty good OT to work from. The EU wasn't only chock full of amazing works, they had some amazing stinkers in there. My go to example is the Courtship of Princess Leia; I had the struggle to finish that book and I was only in middle school. But the fact that you had good with the bad and that many were self contained stories that future authors could either ignore or revamp helped. In the end even if you have 2-3 stinkers come out, if a good one was released, you wanted to read about Luke, Leia, Han, etc because you were invested in them from the OT. I'm not sure how that'll work with the ST and the future new EU stuff. One of the more interesting characters in the entire thing is now gone at the end of TRoS.
Disney has really struggled with the brand. I really like a lot of the actors in the ST movies, but they were just a mess. Why they thought getting different directors and writers for each one was a good idea is beyond me. Giving EA an exclusive license has also been a disaster. The PT may have been terrible but they did spawn some decent stuff like the Clone Wars and Republic Commando. The ST in contrast, did a terrible job laying out the framework for additional content to come.
For me at the end, I just want good Movies, Shows, and Games that have Star Wars in them. For movies, you can look at Marvel and argue how good some of the movies are, but in general most folks would at least say they are "ok". That's really all I wanted from the ST. I don't need massive reworks of things, just give me a by the number story that is fun and has good characters in it. Lay the framework for all the future content.
That said, I would have fucking expected them to at least try to be more consistent with the quality of the fukkin', y'know, mainline films.
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They are being consistent though! The way I see it, we average out to 1/3 of Star Wars films are good/great, 1/3 are fair, 1/3 are poor.
The baffling thing with TROS is that whoever they hired to oversee the ST didn't even bother to make sure some sort of vague plan or at least continuity was in place.
Oh no, Kylo surviving would have been one of the few things they could do to make the movie worse.
Yeah, it's really easy to blame the corporate overlords, when it doesn't sound like they started meddling until the final film. And given the script, it's hard to blame them - the properly identified that there was an issue but didn't have the expertise to fix it themselves. The main thing you can blame them for is being able to identify the problem but then not being willing to either give the additional time/resources to fix it or bite the bullet, change the people in charge, and start over (the second time, given they already did it with Trevorrow). Nothing we've heard from the "leaked" details of Abrams's original script would have fixed the inherent problems with the film. In a lot of ways, they would have exacerbated the existing ones - necessitating an even faster pace, with more characters and meaningless subplots, and even "bigger" completely unearned moments.
If it's true that Abrams was on the phone arguing with people constantly, the question becomes with whom was he arguing? Was it Kathleen Kennedy? Alan Horn? Bob Iger? The Star Wars "creative council"? Kennedy was the one who was ostensibly the most "in charge" of the entire thing, so I'm curious if she was trying to protect Abrams from further meddling or if she was actively pushing him in directions he didn't want to go.
I recently ran across an article that I think is particularly prescient, from 2008 (https://io9.gizmodo.com/j-j-abrams-genius-or-hack-362815) that has some choice quotes:
Ultimately I think the biggest mistake they made was putting Abrams in charge of the first film, and then going back to him to finish the last one. They should've avoided him with a 30-foot pole.
Maybe. Kylo surviving and having to deal with the aftermath of his mistakes could be good?
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I don't doubt that there's the potential for a good story there.
I doubt that the current people making decisions are capable of telling that story.
The problem with that was that he was evil and killed a bunch of people, and most writers are too hackish to be able to deal with former villains actually having to confront the consequences of their actions.
Of course I agree with See317, I don't have any faith in Disney pulling something complex like that off.
Right out the gate, the first paragraph of the opening crawl is awful. When we get to the movie proper, there's a whole lot of action and, conspicuously a whole lot of camera movement, but the soundtrack is oddly mute during most of it and there's just no drama. Everything is still very sterile and unconvincing, even though you can tell the effects technology has come a long way since the previous movie. Anakin still sucks, and the direction of all the dialogue scenes still sucks, which is particularly terrible because a lot of those problems collide in a really fake, sterile looking, terribly directed dialogue-heavy section on Coruscant immediately after the opening battle.
Edit: Jesus, this Anakin/Padme stuff is awful. I remember Sith as being the good one of the PT, but these scenes are easily as bad as the worst stuff in AotC.
"Okay, Hayden, look at the tennis ball. Not me, the ball. Good. Now, I want you to glare. And pout. Glare. Pout. That's it. Show me your adolescent raaaage.
Okay, now just keep doing that for an hour. I've got to get over to Stage 2 and shoot more footage of Natalie crying."
Here's some of the problems with that, and I'm gonna use two examples to compare him to: Vader and Zuko.
Zuko is a guy who is put into a shitty circumstance but time after time when offered to go down the right path he ignores it and continues to do shitty things.
Kylo Ren is a guy who murders his father in movie 1 and then in movie 2 is offered a carte blanch chance at redemption and ignores it. And then becomes the leader of the organization what does shitty things. He stops being manipulated by anything except his own awfulness the moment Snoke dies and there is no impetus for him to stop being a shitty person after he becomes the head honcho of the chief shitty person organization. There needs to be a reason why people keep giving him another chance and there is nothing contextually that presents this. Zuko eventually decides to turn on the shitty people in his life and still doesn't get a carte blanch chance at redemption because he had been so shitty to people and refused to help the right side.
And Vader....Luke doesn't even learn the significance of his relationship to Vader until the climax of Empire. Luke is never trying to redeem Vader until that point, no one is. But when Vader says "Hey Luke, you're my kid let's overthrow the Emperor" it demonstrates two things: Luke is important to Vader and Vader is willing to turn on the Emperor if the time is right. It's not necessarily "I know there is good in him!" levels but it sure as hell is more than what Kylo Ren displays.
And then the very next time Luke and Vader interact on screen Luke is trying to redeem his papa and Vader is all "Son, you have no ideaaaaaaaaaa how strong the Emperor is he's just so strooooooooooooooooooong."
Then Luke shows Vader mercy during their climatic battle and Vader has his face turn. And still dies for it.
We know who Kylo Ren is and his relationship to the cast since the very beginning. And he is given no end of opportunities to repent, become a good-guy, and forsake the dark side. But he doesn't. Time after time, he just refuses.
Vader is a guy who blew up a fucking planet and he is presented by the context of the story as more redeemable than Kylo Ren.
The problem is that episode 7 and 9 are just so poorly written that there is nothing you can do with the character at all.
GENERAL KENOBI
I sense a plot to destroy the Jedi
the dark side of the force is a pathway to many abilities some consider... unnatural
dew it
And we're not even halfway through. and I think I missed some.
There is good here. McDiarmid is the fucking hero of this movie. What a treasure. His Palpatine can barely contain his evil frog voice and it occasionally just slips out. He'll be having a normal conversation and then out of nowhere he'll say "Jedi" like he's choking on phlegm and it's great. The visual imagination in the movie is in full Star Wars force and it's a damn shame the visual effects couldn't keep up. Everything on Utapau, conceptually, is magical. Greivous gets shafted as a character, which is also a shame, but his wheely bike machine is totally glorious.
McGregor is also flexing every charm muscle he can, bound though he is by the material. His character is written like an absolute moron, but McGregor makes it so you don't really notice it unless you squint. At least, not compared to the rest of the council.
I would say episode 7 closed off the redemption arc and episode 8 was just following the breadcrumbs that were setup.
Nine is just fucking bad.
JJ wrote fucking episode 7
If he wanted Kylo Ren to do a redemption arc maybe don't, you know, have Ren fucking murder his father in cold blood while his father is all "Come home, Ben"
but no, JJ had to have his blatant homage which includes killing the mentor figure with your big bad without understanding what that means for the character
If you wanna set up the redemption story just have it so Kylo Ren wants to kill his father, but is denied the opportunity. He wants to kill Luke, but is denied the opportunity. Then finally he has the opportunity to kill his mother....and decides he can't go through with it. Boom she sacrifices herself and in doing so allows Kylo to come back to the light side.
Very easy to do!
The reality is you have both him killing his father and not being able to kill his mother. So it's messy either way
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It definitely gets a little fanservicey and it's never really good, but like a lot of the prequels you can tell there are good concepts and this one is probably the closest of the three to executing those ideas. It also helps that it's easily the most watchable and feels much shorter than the other two (some of that is of course that it is shorter, but not by all that much).
Something that I will give all the prequels credit for is feeling like journeys. Each one covers a lot of ground while
a) not actually being all that long
b) not feeling like they're totally and breathlessly jam-packed with stuff
So, yay? I mean they mostly have the opposite problem of being boring, but something here is being done closer to right than movies like TFA or Avengers: Age of Ultron, as far as pacing is concerned.
There's also a bunch of stupid shit in Sith and things I wish had gone differently (do the Jedi make one good decision in the whole of this trilogy?), but it's the best and most fun of the prequels, while I think pretty well wrapping the whole plot up, all things considered.
This is why I think people give TFA too much of a pass. I thought it was a decently-entertaining film, but had some serious flaws in terms of narrative and, more importantly, as the starting point for a longer story. But you kind of let it go because there are more movies to come, so maybe they'll figure something out? Turns out those initial issues were actually pretty hard to move past. Rian Johnson tried his best to wipe the slate clean, but for some reason they decided to run it back as hard as possible instead of taking the story to a more natural conclusion.
I don't think Kylo killing Han negates any sort of redemption arc. You can see the way it's still plausible in how TLJ plays the Kylo/Rey relationship. Kylo killing Han is what establishes Kylo as someone genuinely bad. As someone who would need an arc to be redeemed, like real effort, rather then just a chat with dad.
TLJ takes this thread and waves it in front of us before finally shutting it down for good.
From a narrative standpoint, the two most irredeemable things you can do are killing a well-liked character that loves the person in question and killing a dog without remorse.
Like, Anakin slaughters a village of people like animals and then later kills a bunch of children. But the big scene with the big impact is him choking his pregnant wife while yelling at her.
You can show that Kylo is a bad person by the fact that he does terrible things to people he isn't related to and that he wants to get a kill that will show 'no really, i'm the bad guy' by killing one of his family members.
Denying him that catharsis allows for a possible redemption later on and also is really good storytelling! Kylo wants just one thing to be evil and he just can't do it, either by circumstance or his own 'weakness.'