1. Large swathes of the old EU were terrible. That includes Palpatine being written as an omnipotent, omniscient force of nature with plans within plans, playing 9 dimensional chess with the galaxy while everyone else plays checkers.
2. Palpatine's return in RoS is utterly unnecessary. The trilogy already had a villain. His name was Kylo Ren.
Maybe there’s a little blame to be laid at Johnson’s feet for unceremoniously killing off the big bad in pt2 of the trilogy before we ever learned anything about him
There’s a good chance I’m going to remove Snoke entirely from my project. Dunno yet.
I think in the end it's the right choice, even if some more explanation of anything about Snoke would help. I think Johnson correctly judged that Snoke is a non-entity and Kylo Ren is interesting and compelling, so he ditched the shitty villain and replaced him with a better one.
That would hold a lot more weight if Johnson wrote the third movie. Instead we got the middle part to a totally different, mostly unaired trilogy in TLJ.
Sadly Johnson cannot predict the future. Yes, the trilogy would have worked better if JJ had just followed the first rule of improv and said "Yes, and". That doesn't change the fact that switching out Snoke for Kylo Ren is a clear upgrade in terms of interest and dramatic potential.
Besides JJs personal issues (and Terrio), the fact that Johnson needed to predict the future is probably the biggest issue with the story we got- they made it up as they went vs having someone at the top tell them the overall story arc
But Johnson didn't need to predict the future. You don't have to plan a whole trilogy out for it to work. The OT certainly wasn't. All you have to do is say "Yes and". To build on what's come before and find a way to tie it all together.
Yeah sure, I agree
And it would have been good for someone to get the directors and writers on the same page about the main story:)
I mean, sure, that could help. But I don't think it's actually as important as it's made out to be. You don't need to get everyone on the same page as long as each individual is willing to build on what came before and move forward. To collectively tell the story a piece at a time rather then trying to wrench it back towards the narrative you want to tell and fuck what anyone else did. It's literally very slow improv and the same rules apply. And it can work. Abrams and Disney just didn't try for the 3rd film.
1. Large swathes of the old EU were terrible. That includes Palpatine being written as an omnipotent, omniscient force of nature with plans within plans, playing 9 dimensional chess with the galaxy while everyone else plays checkers.
2. Palpatine's return in RoS is utterly unnecessary. The trilogy already had a villain. His name was Kylo Ren.
Maybe there’s a little blame to be laid at Johnson’s feet for unceremoniously killing off the big bad in pt2 of the trilogy before we ever learned anything about him
There’s a good chance I’m going to remove Snoke entirely from my project. Dunno yet.
I actually think we learn a lot about him. Just not in the traditional, “who what where” sense. Which, if he was going to matter, we should have learned when he was introduced.
As it stands Snokes origins dont really matter, only the effect he has on Ben. This is made super clear in TFA. As an entity he is like internet toxicity. Where did internet toxicity come from? Does that have a concrete answer you can put into a movie? Does that answer matter? Sure Steve Banon magnified it and made it manifest in people like Steven Miller.... but does Banons origins really matter?
Overall i think its OK to cut him out. The worst scenes in TFA are those that deal with Snoke(its largely people talking about Snoke and what he has done to Ben). But i struggle to come up with defining arc for Kylo without him; at least in the second movie.
1. Large swathes of the old EU were terrible. That includes Palpatine being written as an omnipotent, omniscient force of nature with plans within plans, playing 9 dimensional chess with the galaxy while everyone else plays checkers.
2. Palpatine's return in RoS is utterly unnecessary. The trilogy already had a villain. His name was Kylo Ren.
Maybe there’s a little blame to be laid at Johnson’s feet for unceremoniously killing off the big bad in pt2 of the trilogy before we ever learned anything about him
There’s a good chance I’m going to remove Snoke entirely from my project. Dunno yet.
I think in the end it's the right choice, even if some more explanation of anything about Snoke would help. I think Johnson correctly judged that Snoke is a non-entity and Kylo Ren is interesting and compelling, so he ditched the shitty villain and replaced him with a better one.
That would hold a lot more weight if Johnson wrote the third movie. Instead we got the middle part to a totally different, mostly unaired trilogy in TLJ.
Sadly Johnson cannot predict the future. Yes, the trilogy would have worked better if JJ had just followed the first rule of improv and said "Yes, and". That doesn't change the fact that switching out Snoke for Kylo Ren is a clear upgrade in terms of interest and dramatic potential.
Besides JJs personal issues (and Terrio), the fact that Johnson needed to predict the future is probably the biggest issue with the story we got- they made it up as they went vs having someone at the top tell them the overall story arc
But Johnson didn't need to predict the future. You don't have to plan a whole trilogy out for it to work. The OT certainly wasn't. All you have to do is say "Yes and". To build on what's come before and find a way to tie it all together.
But that is exactly what Johnson did?
TFA directly sets up more or less the vast majority of TLJ.
1. Large swathes of the old EU were terrible. That includes Palpatine being written as an omnipotent, omniscient force of nature with plans within plans, playing 9 dimensional chess with the galaxy while everyone else plays checkers.
2. Palpatine's return in RoS is utterly unnecessary. The trilogy already had a villain. His name was Kylo Ren.
Maybe there’s a little blame to be laid at Johnson’s feet for unceremoniously killing off the big bad in pt2 of the trilogy before we ever learned anything about him
There’s a good chance I’m going to remove Snoke entirely from my project. Dunno yet.
I think in the end it's the right choice, even if some more explanation of anything about Snoke would help. I think Johnson correctly judged that Snoke is a non-entity and Kylo Ren is interesting and compelling, so he ditched the shitty villain and replaced him with a better one.
That would hold a lot more weight if Johnson wrote the third movie. Instead we got the middle part to a totally different, mostly unaired trilogy in TLJ.
Sadly Johnson cannot predict the future. Yes, the trilogy would have worked better if JJ had just followed the first rule of improv and said "Yes, and". That doesn't change the fact that switching out Snoke for Kylo Ren is a clear upgrade in terms of interest and dramatic potential.
Besides JJs personal issues (and Terrio), the fact that Johnson needed to predict the future is probably the biggest issue with the story we got- they made it up as they went vs having someone at the top tell them the overall story arc
But Johnson didn't need to predict the future. You don't have to plan a whole trilogy out for it to work. The OT certainly wasn't. All you have to do is say "Yes and". To build on what's come before and find a way to tie it all together.
But that is exactly what Johnson did?
TFA directly sets up more or less the vast majority of TLJ.
Yes that's my point. TLJ is a great example of how "Yes and" doesn't necessarily tie you down. Johnson took the structure TFA built and moved it forward in interesting ways. TROS is the opposite approach.
I think you also see in the ST overall the problem you can get with trying to plan everything out ahead of time. Sure, it can be good when it's a good plan. But imagine Abrams gets to be the one to decide the shape of the overall ST. I don't think that's better then Johnson having more free reign to move the trilogy forward.
+4
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Inquisitor772 x Penny Arcade Fight Club ChampionA fixed point in space and timeRegistered Userregular
What's the exact mechanism? Who gives a shit. It's not important to the story.
No, the mechanism matters enormously because the last time we saw the Emperor, he was a fucking cloud of vapor rapidly expanding to fill his breakfast command nook. How the fuck he overcomes that to be physically embodied at the very end of a 9-part story when there has been zero mention or indication of anybody actually being able to do that is a plot hole big enough to swallow the entire saga. And as been said a ridiculous number of times at this point, movie elements that require external materials to fill the gaps in their writing are shitty movie elements. Not to mention that it was a plot point straight-up stolen from the EU and it wasn't even a good plot point in the first place. So not only is it a massive, massive writing flaw, it's also a ripoff.
I must have imagined seeing 3 other people (and a mention of a fourth) overcoming death in some fashion prior to RoS, then.
Edit: I'm talking about force ghosts, if that wasn't clear.
If Plapatine had been a force ghost Abrams might have had a leg to stand on regarding his return.
Turns out Palpatine is unkillable. Did Rey actually kill him? We don't know!
You're right. That's why ESB is complete trash. Where did the whole force ghost thing come from? If only Ben had stayed a disembodied voice possibly heard or possibly imagined as in ANH, then ESB would have a leg to stand on.
If the force ghosts in ESB showed up at the start of the movie absolutely unchanged from their mortal form to replace Luke as the main protagonists yeah it'd be pretty awful.
Your complaint was that new, unexplained powers showed up in a new movie with no explanation. By that criterion, both RoS and ESB is total garbage. Don't move the goalposts.
Furthermore, Palpatine is not "completely unchanged". He's clearly stuck to his giant life support machine, and his body is half-rotted away. He only has indirect power over anything but his immediate surroundings, and he can barely move.
And by your complaint about a new antagonist, RotJ is garbage, since there the Emperor is the main antagonist rather than Vader (ESB) or Tarkin (ANH).
My issue isn't a new development. My issue is a new development that doesn't track with the plot in any way. He's been cloning himself for however many decades with no rush to change it until something something dark side.
Also is he clearly stuck to it? He was clearly dead in ESB but turns out he never was. Maybe it's just yet another fake out he can hop right off at any point. Maybe there's a thousand more of him hanging out on other planets faffing about with a pile of even deadlier pseudo death stars for no apparent reason.
All for his 60 year plan to have a grandchild grow up alone, be a force prodigy, track down a Jedi no one else could find, keep some books in a last-minute decision, use those books to go to a planet where a friend of someone who happened to be on her crew sought them out and showed them where to go, fall in to some quicksand, fight and kill a giant worm with a knife with unreadable text on it, get the text translated by a droid simultaneously programmed to understand Sith but also forbidden from doing so, use the information to land in the exact spot outside of a destroyed ship that perfectly matches the shape of a knife, get a space Garmin, lose the space Garmin, steal another space Garmin, and show up with only a single lightsaber. Which for some reason is superior to just letting Kylo strike him down in anger at the start of the movie.
It's bad writing, through and through.
The idea of some ancient Sith tripping balls and crafting a dagger based on a vision of the far off future is great and entirely on brand for Star Wars.
Maybe for the EU and video games it is, but for the actual films it's not on-brand at all. Someone who has only seen the films (which should be the baseline expectation) would think that this came out of nowhere and made no sense. Like, even someone who is familiar with all the (non-canonical) information would find it to be a form of exceptionally poor execution. And even if it were on-brand, people would be right in saying that that particular brand of storytelling is just not good because it comes out of nowhere.
It would be like if in The Lord of the Rings trilogy:
Smeagol only shows up in the opening scene of The Fellowship of the Ring where he finds the Ring and kills his cousin, and then never shows up again except for a few sentences of an opening crawl for The Return of the King where it says "SMEAGOL RETURNS! After killing his cousin, Smeagol lives in the Misty Mountains for hundreds of years with the Ring, only to lose it to Bilbo Baggins. He has been searching for it ever since..." Then halfway through the last movie he is shown to have been behind Saruman and Sauron and literally everything bad that happens in all the preceding films via a voice-over in Frodo's head ("I am EVERY...VOICE...YOU...HAVE...EVER...HEARD!") and then he shows up at the end to attack Frodo and knock the Ring into the volcano.
Would anyone watching those movies think, "Well, it was explained in the books! And it's totally on-brand because Tom Bombadil comes out of fucking nowhere in the books, too!" would be a good justification for the films?
+3
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FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
As the Disney era goes, I’ve enjoyed more than I haven’t, honestly. TFA was fine, but boring. It felt obligatory, I guess. TLJ was the most interesting movie in the franchise, if not the best. I’m increasingly worried that Solo is going to become the Star Wars movie I’ve seen most. Rogue One was a failed experiment in my mind, but at least it was an experiment. Mandalorian is a surprisingly successful little space western.
It’s really just RoS that grates on every last nerve for me. I had my complaints with all of the above, but RoS is the only time in my life I’ve wanted to leave a theater (when the crew arrives on the Babu Frik planet, I checked my watch and was shocked by how little time had passed).
I mentioned Terrio earlier because the only movie I’ve seen that caused a similar level of “What in the fuck is supposed to be motivating any of this?” was Batman v. Superman (Specifically, when Lois throws the kryptonite spear into the water, walks ten feet away, and then reacts to the knowledge that Superman needs the spear despite being nowhere near him by immediately turning around). Just sheer fucking sloppiness.
I mean, I’ve seen Battlefield Earth in theaters. No director should be able to surprise me with their big budget awfulness.
Yeah, I don't know where this "the ST sucks" thing comes from. TROS sucks. The other two are either pretty good with some glaring JJ issues or great.
Also a movie should not need you to read the tie-in <insert not movie media here> to know what the fuck is going on.
TROS faceplanting the end of the ST doesn’t make the whole trilogy suck, but it does make TFA and TLJ weaker by association. And it’s making me look at TFA with a more critical eye, since it has some similar flaws that are now a little harder to ignore.
Yeah, I don't know where this "the ST sucks" thing comes from. TROS sucks. The other two are either pretty good with some glaring JJ issues or great.
Also a movie should not need you to read the tie-in <insert not movie media here> to know what the fuck is going on.
TROS faceplanting the end of the ST doesn’t make the whole trilogy suck, but it does make TFA and TLJ weaker by association. And it’s making me look at TFA with a more critical eye, since it has some similar flaws that are now a little harder to ignore.
The other ST movies had their own many problems. The biggest of all, IMO, is how the ST blatantly cribs from the OT. Each one of the ST is nearly completely identical thematically to the OT. At the end of the ST, the universe is in exactly the same spot as it was at the end of the OT. That alone, elevates the PT above the ST in my opinion despite the PT's many many flaws, at least it had its own story separate from the OT. When TFA came out, In a general sense, I liked it, or at a minimum, I thought they did a good job with Rey, except for the whole power creep thing. But looking back, I think it was just another case of I was just hungry for new Star Wars so I was willing to overlook so much nonsense. Same thing happened with Phantom Menace. I was a total Ep1 fanboy for a few months following its release. Wasn't till a while later I started to realize just how bad it was.
The biggest downer for me was how it just ripped off A New Hope so completely. It was because of that, that I had such high hopes for TLJ, I thought there was no way in hell they would crib ESB too and I thought TLJ would where they would step up and make the ST shine....boy, was I wrong once again. That's where the ST died for me, long before TROS came out.
Yeah, I don't know where this "the ST sucks" thing comes from. TROS sucks. The other two are either pretty good with some glaring JJ issues or great.
Also a movie should not need you to read the tie-in <insert not movie media here> to know what the fuck is going on.
TROS faceplanting the end of the ST doesn’t make the whole trilogy suck, but it does make TFA and TLJ weaker by association. And it’s making me look at TFA with a more critical eye, since it has some similar flaws that are now a little harder to ignore.
The other ST movies had their own many problems. The biggest of all, IMO, is how the ST blatantly cribs from the OT. Each one of the ST is nearly completely identical thematically to the OT. At the end of the ST, the universe is in exactly the same spot as it was at the end of the OT. That alone, elevates the PT above the ST in my opinion despite the PT's many many flaws, at least it had its own story separate from the OT. When TFA came out, In a general sense, I liked it, or at a minimum, I thought they did a good job with Rey, except for the whole power creep thing. But looking back, I think it was just another case of I was just hungry for new Star Wars so I was willing to overlook so much nonsense. Same thing happened with Phantom Menace. I was a total Ep1 fanboy for a few months following its release. Wasn't till a while later I started to realize just how bad it was.
The biggest downer for me was how it just ripped off A New Hope so completely. It was because of that, that I had such high hopes for TLJ, I thought there was no way in hell they would crib ESB too and I thought TLJ would where they would step up and make the ST shine....boy, was I wrong once again. That's where the ST died for me, long before TROS came out.
In what way are ESB and TLJ thematically identical? They aren't even structurally identical, since TLJ runs through parts of the ROTJ structure (ie - the throne-room showdown) and then flips the script on that.
+10
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Giggles_FunsworthBlight on DiscourseBay Area SprawlRegistered Userregular
Like if Stark comes back I will be very loudly and ignorantly shitting up the MCU threads too just like I ruin this thread
Short of getting a Stark cameo via time travel shenanigans or a pre death message to Parker or his daughter it will basically cut the nuts off of any narrative going forward.
They left a much bigger for Evans to come back through obviously (a cameo that has him kicking the shit out of some Hydra lackeys as an old man would be good times).
There's no way Stark doesn't come back as an AI.
+1
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Giggles_FunsworthBlight on DiscourseBay Area SprawlRegistered Userregular
What's the exact mechanism? Who gives a shit. It's not important to the story.
No, the mechanism matters enormously because the last time we saw the Emperor, he was a fucking cloud of vapor rapidly expanding to fill his breakfast command nook. How the fuck he overcomes that to be physically embodied at the very end of a 9-part story when there has been zero mention or indication of anybody actually being able to do that is a plot hole big enough to swallow the entire saga. And as been said a ridiculous number of times at this point, movie elements that require external materials to fill the gaps in their writing are shitty movie elements. Not to mention that it was a plot point straight-up stolen from the EU and it wasn't even a good plot point in the first place. So not only is it a massive, massive writing flaw, it's also a ripoff.
I must have imagined seeing 3 other people (and a mention of a fourth) overcoming death in some fashion prior to RoS, then.
Edit: I'm talking about force ghosts, if that wasn't clear.
If Plapatine had been a force ghost Abrams might have had a leg to stand on regarding his return.
Turns out Palpatine is unkillable. Did Rey actually kill him? We don't know!
You're right. That's why ESB is complete trash. Where did the whole force ghost thing come from? If only Ben had stayed a disembodied voice possibly heard or possibly imagined as in ANH, then ESB would have a leg to stand on.
If the force ghosts in ESB showed up at the start of the movie absolutely unchanged from their mortal form to replace Luke as the main protagonists yeah it'd be pretty awful.
Your complaint was that new, unexplained powers showed up in a new movie with no explanation. By that criterion, both RoS and ESB is total garbage. Don't move the goalposts.
Furthermore, Palpatine is not "completely unchanged". He's clearly stuck to his giant life support machine, and his body is half-rotted away. He only has indirect power over anything but his immediate surroundings, and he can barely move.
And by your complaint about a new antagonist, RotJ is garbage, since there the Emperor is the main antagonist rather than Vader (ESB) or Tarkin (ANH).
My issue isn't a new development. My issue is a new development that doesn't track with the plot in any way. He's been cloning himself for however many decades with no rush to change it until something something dark side.
Also is he clearly stuck to it? He was clearly dead in ESB but turns out he never was. Maybe it's just yet another fake out he can hop right off at any point. Maybe there's a thousand more of him hanging out on other planets faffing about with a pile of even deadlier pseudo death stars for no apparent reason.
All for his 60 year plan to have a grandchild grow up alone, be a force prodigy, track down a Jedi no one else could find, keep some books in a last-minute decision, use those books to go to a planet where a friend of someone who happened to be on her crew sought them out and showed them where to go, fall in to some quicksand, fight and kill a giant worm with a knife with unreadable text on it, get the text translated by a droid simultaneously programmed to understand Sith but also forbidden from doing so, use the information to land in the exact spot outside of a destroyed ship that perfectly matches the shape of a knife, get a space Garmin, lose the space Garmin, steal another space Garmin, and show up with only a single lightsaber. Which for some reason is superior to just letting Kylo strike him down in anger at the start of the movie.
It's bad writing, through and through.
The idea of some ancient Sith tripping balls and crafting a dagger based on a vision of the far off future is great and entirely on brand for Star Wars.
Maybe for the EU and video games it is, but for the actual films it's not on-brand at all. Someone who has only seen the films (which should be the baseline expectation) would think that this came out of nowhere and made no sense. Like, even someone who is familiar with all the (non-canonical) information would find it to be a form of exceptionally poor execution. And even if it were on-brand, people would be right in saying that that particular brand of storytelling is just not good because it comes out of nowhere.
It would be like if in The Lord of the Rings trilogy:
Smeagol only shows up in the opening scene of The Fellowship of the Ring where he finds the Ring and kills his cousin, and then never shows up again except for a few sentences of an opening crawl for The Return of the King where it says "SMEAGOL RETURNS! After killing his cousin, Smeagol lives in the Misty Mountains for hundreds of years with the Ring, only to lose it to Bilbo Baggins. He has been searching for it ever since..." Then halfway through the last movie he is shown to have been behind Saruman and Sauron and literally everything bad that happens in all the preceding films via a voice-over in Frodo's head ("I am EVERY...VOICE...YOU...HAVE...EVER...HEARD!") and then he shows up at the end to attack Frodo and knock the Ring into the volcano.
Would anyone watching those movies think, "Well, it was explained in the books! And it's totally on-brand because Tom Bombadil comes out of fucking nowhere in the books, too!" would be a good justification for the films?
These movies are literally filled with people having visions and sensing things and stuff hinging on prophecies. What Star Wars were you watching?
Yeah, I don't know where this "the ST sucks" thing comes from. TROS sucks. The other two are either pretty good with some glaring JJ issues or great.
Also a movie should not need you to read the tie-in <insert not movie media here> to know what the fuck is going on.
TROS faceplanting the end of the ST doesn’t make the whole trilogy suck, but it does make TFA and TLJ weaker by association. And it’s making me look at TFA with a more critical eye, since it has some similar flaws that are now a little harder to ignore.
The other ST movies had their own many problems. The biggest of all, IMO, is how the ST blatantly cribs from the OT. Each one of the ST is nearly completely identical thematically to the OT. At the end of the ST, the universe is in exactly the same spot as it was at the end of the OT. That alone, elevates the PT above the ST in my opinion despite the PT's many many flaws, at least it had its own story separate from the OT. When TFA came out, In a general sense, I liked it, or at a minimum, I thought they did a good job with Rey, except for the whole power creep thing. But looking back, I think it was just another case of I was just hungry for new Star Wars so I was willing to overlook so much nonsense. Same thing happened with Phantom Menace. I was a total Ep1 fanboy for a few months following its release. Wasn't till a while later I started to realize just how bad it was.
The biggest downer for me was how it just ripped off A New Hope so completely. It was because of that, that I had such high hopes for TLJ, I thought there was no way in hell they would crib ESB too and I thought TLJ would where they would step up and make the ST shine....boy, was I wrong once again. That's where the ST died for me, long before TROS came out.
In what way are ESB and TLJ thematically identical? They aren't even structurally identical, since TLJ runs through parts of the ROTJ structure (ie - the throne-room showdown) and then flips the script on that.
•Ship out of gas being chased by star destroyers
•sieges of Hoth/Crait
•new Jedi hope going to remote planet to learn from hermit master who fucked up bad before
•new Jedi hope getting impatient with old hermit master and confronting the dark side in a cave thing (about her parents)
•badguy apprentice tasked with capturing and turning the new Jedi hope
The flip in the throne room is fucking great though
What's the exact mechanism? Who gives a shit. It's not important to the story.
No, the mechanism matters enormously because the last time we saw the Emperor, he was a fucking cloud of vapor rapidly expanding to fill his breakfast command nook. How the fuck he overcomes that to be physically embodied at the very end of a 9-part story when there has been zero mention or indication of anybody actually being able to do that is a plot hole big enough to swallow the entire saga. And as been said a ridiculous number of times at this point, movie elements that require external materials to fill the gaps in their writing are shitty movie elements. Not to mention that it was a plot point straight-up stolen from the EU and it wasn't even a good plot point in the first place. So not only is it a massive, massive writing flaw, it's also a ripoff.
I must have imagined seeing 3 other people (and a mention of a fourth) overcoming death in some fashion prior to RoS, then.
Edit: I'm talking about force ghosts, if that wasn't clear.
If Plapatine had been a force ghost Abrams might have had a leg to stand on regarding his return.
Turns out Palpatine is unkillable. Did Rey actually kill him? We don't know!
You're right. That's why ESB is complete trash. Where did the whole force ghost thing come from? If only Ben had stayed a disembodied voice possibly heard or possibly imagined as in ANH, then ESB would have a leg to stand on.
If the force ghosts in ESB showed up at the start of the movie absolutely unchanged from their mortal form to replace Luke as the main protagonists yeah it'd be pretty awful.
Your complaint was that new, unexplained powers showed up in a new movie with no explanation. By that criterion, both RoS and ESB is total garbage. Don't move the goalposts.
Furthermore, Palpatine is not "completely unchanged". He's clearly stuck to his giant life support machine, and his body is half-rotted away. He only has indirect power over anything but his immediate surroundings, and he can barely move.
And by your complaint about a new antagonist, RotJ is garbage, since there the Emperor is the main antagonist rather than Vader (ESB) or Tarkin (ANH).
My issue isn't a new development. My issue is a new development that doesn't track with the plot in any way. He's been cloning himself for however many decades with no rush to change it until something something dark side.
Also is he clearly stuck to it? He was clearly dead in ESB but turns out he never was. Maybe it's just yet another fake out he can hop right off at any point. Maybe there's a thousand more of him hanging out on other planets faffing about with a pile of even deadlier pseudo death stars for no apparent reason.
All for his 60 year plan to have a grandchild grow up alone, be a force prodigy, track down a Jedi no one else could find, keep some books in a last-minute decision, use those books to go to a planet where a friend of someone who happened to be on her crew sought them out and showed them where to go, fall in to some quicksand, fight and kill a giant worm with a knife with unreadable text on it, get the text translated by a droid simultaneously programmed to understand Sith but also forbidden from doing so, use the information to land in the exact spot outside of a destroyed ship that perfectly matches the shape of a knife, get a space Garmin, lose the space Garmin, steal another space Garmin, and show up with only a single lightsaber. Which for some reason is superior to just letting Kylo strike him down in anger at the start of the movie.
It's bad writing, through and through.
The idea of some ancient Sith tripping balls and crafting a dagger based on a vision of the far off future is great and entirely on brand for Star Wars.
Maybe for the EU and video games it is, but for the actual films it's not on-brand at all. Someone who has only seen the films (which should be the baseline expectation) would think that this came out of nowhere and made no sense. Like, even someone who is familiar with all the (non-canonical) information would find it to be a form of exceptionally poor execution. And even if it were on-brand, people would be right in saying that that particular brand of storytelling is just not good because it comes out of nowhere.
It would be like if in The Lord of the Rings trilogy:
Smeagol only shows up in the opening scene of The Fellowship of the Ring where he finds the Ring and kills his cousin, and then never shows up again except for a few sentences of an opening crawl for The Return of the King where it says "SMEAGOL RETURNS! After killing his cousin, Smeagol lives in the Misty Mountains for hundreds of years with the Ring, only to lose it to Bilbo Baggins. He has been searching for it ever since..." Then halfway through the last movie he is shown to have been behind Saruman and Sauron and literally everything bad that happens in all the preceding films via a voice-over in Frodo's head ("I am EVERY...VOICE...YOU...HAVE...EVER...HEARD!") and then he shows up at the end to attack Frodo and knock the Ring into the volcano.
Would anyone watching those movies think, "Well, it was explained in the books! And it's totally on-brand because Tom Bombadil comes out of fucking nowhere in the books, too!" would be a good justification for the films?
These movies are literally filled with people having visions and sensing things and stuff hinging on prophecies. What Star Wars were you watching?
Yeah, I don't know where this "the ST sucks" thing comes from. TROS sucks. The other two are either pretty good with some glaring JJ issues or great.
Also a movie should not need you to read the tie-in <insert not movie media here> to know what the fuck is going on.
TROS faceplanting the end of the ST doesn’t make the whole trilogy suck, but it does make TFA and TLJ weaker by association. And it’s making me look at TFA with a more critical eye, since it has some similar flaws that are now a little harder to ignore.
The other ST movies had their own many problems. The biggest of all, IMO, is how the ST blatantly cribs from the OT. Each one of the ST is nearly completely identical thematically to the OT. At the end of the ST, the universe is in exactly the same spot as it was at the end of the OT. That alone, elevates the PT above the ST in my opinion despite the PT's many many flaws, at least it had its own story separate from the OT. When TFA came out, In a general sense, I liked it, or at a minimum, I thought they did a good job with Rey, except for the whole power creep thing. But looking back, I think it was just another case of I was just hungry for new Star Wars so I was willing to overlook so much nonsense. Same thing happened with Phantom Menace. I was a total Ep1 fanboy for a few months following its release. Wasn't till a while later I started to realize just how bad it was.
The biggest downer for me was how it just ripped off A New Hope so completely. It was because of that, that I had such high hopes for TLJ, I thought there was no way in hell they would crib ESB too and I thought TLJ would where they would step up and make the ST shine....boy, was I wrong once again. That's where the ST died for me, long before TROS came out.
In what way are ESB and TLJ thematically identical? They aren't even structurally identical, since TLJ runs through parts of the ROTJ structure (ie - the throne-room showdown) and then flips the script on that.
The good guys lose a battle and/or are at their lowest point. teacher trains student. major revelation about family
What's the exact mechanism? Who gives a shit. It's not important to the story.
No, the mechanism matters enormously because the last time we saw the Emperor, he was a fucking cloud of vapor rapidly expanding to fill his breakfast command nook. How the fuck he overcomes that to be physically embodied at the very end of a 9-part story when there has been zero mention or indication of anybody actually being able to do that is a plot hole big enough to swallow the entire saga. And as been said a ridiculous number of times at this point, movie elements that require external materials to fill the gaps in their writing are shitty movie elements. Not to mention that it was a plot point straight-up stolen from the EU and it wasn't even a good plot point in the first place. So not only is it a massive, massive writing flaw, it's also a ripoff.
I must have imagined seeing 3 other people (and a mention of a fourth) overcoming death in some fashion prior to RoS, then.
Edit: I'm talking about force ghosts, if that wasn't clear.
If Plapatine had been a force ghost Abrams might have had a leg to stand on regarding his return.
Turns out Palpatine is unkillable. Did Rey actually kill him? We don't know!
You're right. That's why ESB is complete trash. Where did the whole force ghost thing come from? If only Ben had stayed a disembodied voice possibly heard or possibly imagined as in ANH, then ESB would have a leg to stand on.
If the force ghosts in ESB showed up at the start of the movie absolutely unchanged from their mortal form to replace Luke as the main protagonists yeah it'd be pretty awful.
Your complaint was that new, unexplained powers showed up in a new movie with no explanation. By that criterion, both RoS and ESB is total garbage. Don't move the goalposts.
Furthermore, Palpatine is not "completely unchanged". He's clearly stuck to his giant life support machine, and his body is half-rotted away. He only has indirect power over anything but his immediate surroundings, and he can barely move.
And by your complaint about a new antagonist, RotJ is garbage, since there the Emperor is the main antagonist rather than Vader (ESB) or Tarkin (ANH).
My issue isn't a new development. My issue is a new development that doesn't track with the plot in any way. He's been cloning himself for however many decades with no rush to change it until something something dark side.
Also is he clearly stuck to it? He was clearly dead in ESB but turns out he never was. Maybe it's just yet another fake out he can hop right off at any point. Maybe there's a thousand more of him hanging out on other planets faffing about with a pile of even deadlier pseudo death stars for no apparent reason.
All for his 60 year plan to have a grandchild grow up alone, be a force prodigy, track down a Jedi no one else could find, keep some books in a last-minute decision, use those books to go to a planet where a friend of someone who happened to be on her crew sought them out and showed them where to go, fall in to some quicksand, fight and kill a giant worm with a knife with unreadable text on it, get the text translated by a droid simultaneously programmed to understand Sith but also forbidden from doing so, use the information to land in the exact spot outside of a destroyed ship that perfectly matches the shape of a knife, get a space Garmin, lose the space Garmin, steal another space Garmin, and show up with only a single lightsaber. Which for some reason is superior to just letting Kylo strike him down in anger at the start of the movie.
It's bad writing, through and through.
The idea of some ancient Sith tripping balls and crafting a dagger based on a vision of the far off future is great and entirely on brand for Star Wars.
Maybe for the EU and video games it is, but for the actual films it's not on-brand at all. Someone who has only seen the films (which should be the baseline expectation) would think that this came out of nowhere and made no sense. Like, even someone who is familiar with all the (non-canonical) information would find it to be a form of exceptionally poor execution. And even if it were on-brand, people would be right in saying that that particular brand of storytelling is just not good because it comes out of nowhere.
It would be like if in The Lord of the Rings trilogy:
Smeagol only shows up in the opening scene of The Fellowship of the Ring where he finds the Ring and kills his cousin, and then never shows up again except for a few sentences of an opening crawl for The Return of the King where it says "SMEAGOL RETURNS! After killing his cousin, Smeagol lives in the Misty Mountains for hundreds of years with the Ring, only to lose it to Bilbo Baggins. He has been searching for it ever since..." Then halfway through the last movie he is shown to have been behind Saruman and Sauron and literally everything bad that happens in all the preceding films via a voice-over in Frodo's head ("I am EVERY...VOICE...YOU...HAVE...EVER...HEARD!") and then he shows up at the end to attack Frodo and knock the Ring into the volcano.
Would anyone watching those movies think, "Well, it was explained in the books! And it's totally on-brand because Tom Bombadil comes out of fucking nowhere in the books, too!" would be a good justification for the films?
These movies are literally filled with people having visions and sensing things and stuff hinging on prophecies. What Star Wars were you watching?
Yeah that’s all the bad parts of the SW movies
Bad is pretty subjective. Luke going into the cave is goddamn iconic. Whether you like it or not it sure as hell isn't just EU and vidya tho.
I'm not really defending RoS here. It was a horribly executed mess with all of Abrams' pettiness and flaws as a director on full display. I think there was still a bunch of fun stuff there, and I enjoyed it more than anything in the PT though which is godawful. Episode 1 is the most enjoyable in hindsight and it was not a great movie!
But the endless nitpicking about things that were established in other movies as "not Star Wars" or out of nowhere is incredibly tiresome. It's like some of the folks in this thread just want to have a character narrate a Wookiepedia article otherwise it isn't clear enough to them.
The idea of some ancient Sith tripping balls and crafting a dagger based on a vision of the far off future is legitimately great but I didn’t even realize that’s what we got
That would have been a sweet thing to spend more time on than a lot of the other bullshit
Yeah, I don't know where this "the ST sucks" thing comes from. TROS sucks. The other two are either pretty good with some glaring JJ issues or great.
Also a movie should not need you to read the tie-in <insert not movie media here> to know what the fuck is going on.
TROS faceplanting the end of the ST doesn’t make the whole trilogy suck, but it does make TFA and TLJ weaker by association. And it’s making me look at TFA with a more critical eye, since it has some similar flaws that are now a little harder to ignore.
The other ST movies had their own many problems. The biggest of all, IMO, is how the ST blatantly cribs from the OT. Each one of the ST is nearly completely identical thematically to the OT. At the end of the ST, the universe is in exactly the same spot as it was at the end of the OT. That alone, elevates the PT above the ST in my opinion despite the PT's many many flaws, at least it had its own story separate from the OT. When TFA came out, In a general sense, I liked it, or at a minimum, I thought they did a good job with Rey, except for the whole power creep thing. But looking back, I think it was just another case of I was just hungry for new Star Wars so I was willing to overlook so much nonsense. Same thing happened with Phantom Menace. I was a total Ep1 fanboy for a few months following its release. Wasn't till a while later I started to realize just how bad it was.
The biggest downer for me was how it just ripped off A New Hope so completely. It was because of that, that I had such high hopes for TLJ, I thought there was no way in hell they would crib ESB too and I thought TLJ would where they would step up and make the ST shine....boy, was I wrong once again. That's where the ST died for me, long before TROS came out.
In what way are ESB and TLJ thematically identical? They aren't even structurally identical, since TLJ runs through parts of the ROTJ structure (ie - the throne-room showdown) and then flips the script on that.
•Ship out of gas being chased by star destroyers
•sieges of Hoth/Crait
•new Jedi hope going to remote planet to learn from hermit master who fucked up bad before
•new Jedi hope getting impatient with old hermit master and confronting the dark side in a cave thing (about her parents)
•badguy apprentice tasked with capturing and turning the new Jedi hope
The flip in the throne room is fucking great though
* Side trip to nice neutral planet... oops, not so nice.
* Introduction to new friend... oops, he just gave you up to the bad guys. (The twist is that Lando switched back; Del Toro's character doesn't.)
Yeah, I don't know where this "the ST sucks" thing comes from. TROS sucks. The other two are either pretty good with some glaring JJ issues or great.
Also a movie should not need you to read the tie-in <insert not movie media here> to know what the fuck is going on.
TROS faceplanting the end of the ST doesn’t make the whole trilogy suck, but it does make TFA and TLJ weaker by association. And it’s making me look at TFA with a more critical eye, since it has some similar flaws that are now a little harder to ignore.
The other ST movies had their own many problems. The biggest of all, IMO, is how the ST blatantly cribs from the OT. Each one of the ST is nearly completely identical thematically to the OT. At the end of the ST, the universe is in exactly the same spot as it was at the end of the OT. That alone, elevates the PT above the ST in my opinion despite the PT's many many flaws, at least it had its own story separate from the OT. When TFA came out, In a general sense, I liked it, or at a minimum, I thought they did a good job with Rey, except for the whole power creep thing. But looking back, I think it was just another case of I was just hungry for new Star Wars so I was willing to overlook so much nonsense. Same thing happened with Phantom Menace. I was a total Ep1 fanboy for a few months following its release. Wasn't till a while later I started to realize just how bad it was.
The biggest downer for me was how it just ripped off A New Hope so completely. It was because of that, that I had such high hopes for TLJ, I thought there was no way in hell they would crib ESB too and I thought TLJ would where they would step up and make the ST shine....boy, was I wrong once again. That's where the ST died for me, long before TROS came out.
In what way are ESB and TLJ thematically identical? They aren't even structurally identical, since TLJ runs through parts of the ROTJ structure (ie - the throne-room showdown) and then flips the script on that.
•Ship out of gas being chased by star destroyers
•sieges of Hoth/Crait
•new Jedi hope going to remote planet to learn from hermit master who fucked up bad before
•new Jedi hope getting impatient with old hermit master and confronting the dark side in a cave thing (about her parents)
•badguy apprentice tasked with capturing and turning the new Jedi hope
The flip in the throne room is fucking great though
But they all come in different orders and 3/5 are pre-ordained by TFA...
Yeah, I don't know where this "the ST sucks" thing comes from. TROS sucks. The other two are either pretty good with some glaring JJ issues or great.
Also a movie should not need you to read the tie-in <insert not movie media here> to know what the fuck is going on.
TROS faceplanting the end of the ST doesn’t make the whole trilogy suck, but it does make TFA and TLJ weaker by association. And it’s making me look at TFA with a more critical eye, since it has some similar flaws that are now a little harder to ignore.
The other ST movies had their own many problems. The biggest of all, IMO, is how the ST blatantly cribs from the OT. Each one of the ST is nearly completely identical thematically to the OT. At the end of the ST, the universe is in exactly the same spot as it was at the end of the OT. That alone, elevates the PT above the ST in my opinion despite the PT's many many flaws, at least it had its own story separate from the OT. When TFA came out, In a general sense, I liked it, or at a minimum, I thought they did a good job with Rey, except for the whole power creep thing. But looking back, I think it was just another case of I was just hungry for new Star Wars so I was willing to overlook so much nonsense. Same thing happened with Phantom Menace. I was a total Ep1 fanboy for a few months following its release. Wasn't till a while later I started to realize just how bad it was.
The biggest downer for me was how it just ripped off A New Hope so completely. It was because of that, that I had such high hopes for TLJ, I thought there was no way in hell they would crib ESB too and I thought TLJ would where they would step up and make the ST shine....boy, was I wrong once again. That's where the ST died for me, long before TROS came out.
In what way are ESB and TLJ thematically identical? They aren't even structurally identical, since TLJ runs through parts of the ROTJ structure (ie - the throne-room showdown) and then flips the script on that.
•Ship out of gas being chased by star destroyers
•sieges of Hoth/Crait
•new Jedi hope going to remote planet to learn from hermit master who fucked up bad before
•new Jedi hope getting impatient with old hermit master and confronting the dark side in a cave thing (about her parents)
•badguy apprentice tasked with capturing and turning the new Jedi hope
The flip in the throne room is fucking great though
But they all come in different orders and 3/5 are pre-ordained by TFA...
TLJ is like Brahms deconstructing and reconstructing a melody over the course of a symphony vs TFA being a Beatles cover band
Yeah, I don't know where this "the ST sucks" thing comes from. TROS sucks. The other two are either pretty good with some glaring JJ issues or great.
Also a movie should not need you to read the tie-in <insert not movie media here> to know what the fuck is going on.
TROS faceplanting the end of the ST doesn’t make the whole trilogy suck, but it does make TFA and TLJ weaker by association. And it’s making me look at TFA with a more critical eye, since it has some similar flaws that are now a little harder to ignore.
The other ST movies had their own many problems. The biggest of all, IMO, is how the ST blatantly cribs from the OT. Each one of the ST is nearly completely identical thematically to the OT. At the end of the ST, the universe is in exactly the same spot as it was at the end of the OT. That alone, elevates the PT above the ST in my opinion despite the PT's many many flaws, at least it had its own story separate from the OT. When TFA came out, In a general sense, I liked it, or at a minimum, I thought they did a good job with Rey, except for the whole power creep thing. But looking back, I think it was just another case of I was just hungry for new Star Wars so I was willing to overlook so much nonsense. Same thing happened with Phantom Menace. I was a total Ep1 fanboy for a few months following its release. Wasn't till a while later I started to realize just how bad it was.
The biggest downer for me was how it just ripped off A New Hope so completely. It was because of that, that I had such high hopes for TLJ, I thought there was no way in hell they would crib ESB too and I thought TLJ would where they would step up and make the ST shine....boy, was I wrong once again. That's where the ST died for me, long before TROS came out.
In what way are ESB and TLJ thematically identical? They aren't even structurally identical, since TLJ runs through parts of the ROTJ structure (ie - the throne-room showdown) and then flips the script on that.
•Ship out of gas being chased by star destroyers
•sieges of Hoth/Crait
•new Jedi hope going to remote planet to learn from hermit master who fucked up bad before
•new Jedi hope getting impatient with old hermit master and confronting the dark side in a cave thing (about her parents)
•badguy apprentice tasked with capturing and turning the new Jedi hope
The flip in the throne room is fucking great though
But parts of that just don't happen and others are stretched to the point of it being "they are the same because both had actors".
The long slow chase or the final battle that doesn't actually happen on Crait are nothing like the things you are comparing them to in ESB. Luke and Yoda's attitudes are completely different and that shapes how those interactions play out. Yoda is unsure if Luke should be trained because he's impatient and angry. Luke doesn't want to train Rey because he believes the Jedi need to end. Luke doesn't send Rey to the cave the way Yoda does and actually yells at her for even thinking about going there when she's first trying to touch the Force. She goes there on her own after talking to Kylo Ren. And what she sees there is completely different. Snoke doesn't tell Kylo Ren to get Rey. If he gives him any orders it's to kill Luke.
The parallels in TLJ are like the "snow" on Crait. It's meant to tickle your memory of these things from ESB or ROTJ but it's actually it's own thing.
I’m still of the opinion that we knew everything we needed to know about Snoke at the moment of his death in TLJ. The Galaxy at large reacted to the Battle of Endor and subsequent fracturing of the Empire by trying really hard to pretend that evil had been permanently defeated and there was no need to follow up on the Imperial dissolution with anything other than some parades and fireworks, followed by a return to peaceful life. Of course, there were still evil, ambitious fuckers in the galactic woodwork looking to seize the chance to have a little Empire of their own. Snoke is the one who got to the top of the hill first; he even used Force trickery to get into the head of one (or more?) of the students at Luke’s fancy new “Jedi Academy” and took that threat off the board before making his move on the settled parts of the Galaxy.
As far as I can tell from the texts of TFA and TLJ, that’s who Snoke is, and that was enough to satisfy me. How he got that wicked divot taken out of his head? Unimportant. Where he learned to use the Force? Dunno; maybe he found a holocron somewhere, maybe he’s a talented amateur who gets his ideas about the Dark and Light sides of the Force from folklore and legend.
None of that matters in the context of his arc in the films. What’s important to the rest of the story about Snoke is that he was allowed to get where he was at all. The Republic’s lethargy and willful blindness. Luke’s allowing himself to be pressed into the role of Master, his failure with Ben and subsequent retreat into exile. These were the conditions that created room for someone like Snoke to come into power; if it hadn’t been him, it would’ve been someone else. The fact that he’s so high on his own flatulence that Kylo is able to murder him right when he believes himself to be watching the execution of the only valid threat to his power is a great story beat for Kylo and entirely on-brand for Star Wars Evil (“Evacuate? Now, in our moment of triumph?”).
Changing him from “a natural consequence of the post-Endor state of the Galaxy” to “a cloned puppet made specially (and made pre-deformed because ...???) to troll Ben Solo” is not the worst thing TRoS does, but it’s on the list of Sins for sure.
Yeah, I don't know where this "the ST sucks" thing comes from. TROS sucks. The other two are either pretty good with some glaring JJ issues or great.
Also a movie should not need you to read the tie-in <insert not movie media here> to know what the fuck is going on.
TROS faceplanting the end of the ST doesn’t make the whole trilogy suck, but it does make TFA and TLJ weaker by association. And it’s making me look at TFA with a more critical eye, since it has some similar flaws that are now a little harder to ignore.
The other ST movies had their own many problems. The biggest of all, IMO, is how the ST blatantly cribs from the OT. Each one of the ST is nearly completely identical thematically to the OT. At the end of the ST, the universe is in exactly the same spot as it was at the end of the OT. That alone, elevates the PT above the ST in my opinion despite the PT's many many flaws, at least it had its own story separate from the OT. When TFA came out, In a general sense, I liked it, or at a minimum, I thought they did a good job with Rey, except for the whole power creep thing. But looking back, I think it was just another case of I was just hungry for new Star Wars so I was willing to overlook so much nonsense. Same thing happened with Phantom Menace. I was a total Ep1 fanboy for a few months following its release. Wasn't till a while later I started to realize just how bad it was.
The biggest downer for me was how it just ripped off A New Hope so completely. It was because of that, that I had such high hopes for TLJ, I thought there was no way in hell they would crib ESB too and I thought TLJ would where they would step up and make the ST shine....boy, was I wrong once again. That's where the ST died for me, long before TROS came out.
In what way are ESB and TLJ thematically identical? They aren't even structurally identical, since TLJ runs through parts of the ROTJ structure (ie - the throne-room showdown) and then flips the script on that.
•Ship out of gas being chased by star destroyers
•sieges of Hoth/Crait
•new Jedi hope going to remote planet to learn from hermit master who fucked up bad before
•new Jedi hope getting impatient with old hermit master and confronting the dark side in a cave thing (about her parents)
•badguy apprentice tasked with capturing and turning the new Jedi hope
The flip in the throne room is fucking great though
But they all come in different orders and 3/5 are pre-ordained by TFA...
TLJ is like Brahms deconstructing and reconstructing a melody over the course of a symphony vs TFA being a Beatles cover band
I respect that, but at the same time, it's taking the eighth chapter of a series I've been following for forty years to say "oh hey, your fave is problematic and I'm going to show why by stepping on all of these characters you like, old and new, and finishing the reset-to-zero that the seventh movie started". And I can't help but resent that a little. There were a finite number of Numbered Movies; there will never be another Episode VIII. I still think that TLJ had some issues with pacing and execution, but I'd be dishonest if I claimed this wasn't as much, for me, about having something that was fun, that I enjoyed, that was "mine", hijacked (by a brilliant creator!) to deliver a Moral Lesson.
Again, this mattered more to me back when there was some faint hope that IX might end both trilogy and saga well; instead, it pushed the ST as a whole far over the line into "toss it in the bin and salvage what good bits you can from it." Which is what TLJ was saying, I guess.
Maybe one of TLJ's lessons was that I need to let go of Numbered Movies as the core and/or the best of Star Wars, and embrace that the so-called "side" material can be just as essential, and even better.
This thread and the general movie thread have taught me something over the last year or two that I still struggle to understand.
Writing is almost irrelevant to Movie People (big movie fans and directors alike).
But since writing's like 80% of what I'm showing up for on any piece of media, something like TLJ that I guess is considered quite good if you care about the Movie Stuff, I just...don't get why it's put up high.
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FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
Yeah, TLJ may be the best of the ST, but that's an oncredibly low bar, and it absolutely had its problems.
This thread and the general movie thread have taught me something over the last year or two that I still struggle to understand.
Writing is almost irrelevant to Movie People (big movie fans and directors alike).
But since writing's like 80% of what I'm showing up for on any piece of media, something like TLJ that I guess is considered quite good if you care about the Movie Stuff, I just...don't get why it's put up high.
The people who don't are about writing are the fans saying "It was big and fun and Star Wars and that's enough for me". And even movie buffs who, for example, don't like JJ Abrams will talk about his skill with pacing or pretty shots or whatever. And then say "too bad about the bad writing though, which kinda brings it down". A lot of the praise with TLJ, for example, is for the writing.
I respect that, but at the same time, it's taking the eighth chapter of a series I've been following for forty years to say "oh hey, your fave is problematic and I'm going to show why by stepping on all of these characters you like, old and new, and finishing the reset-to-zero that the seventh movie started". And I can't help but resent that a little.
TLJ isnt about how the things you love are problematic. Its a big ol love letter to the OT! If its about anything meta like that its not about how “star wars is bad actually” but how we cannot enshrine the previous movies (OT) nor can we destroy them(PT) but must learn from them as we move forward.
And it doesnt reset to zero...
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
The fact that anybody has to work to convince me that TLJ is a "love letter" to the OT precludes any ability I have to believe it really is a love letter. Johnson at least paid some attention to details of the setting, but TLJ is very much a film where Johnson had some big ideas for scenes and just kinda went "meh" if those scenes didn't match up to the setting in some glaring way or another.
There's nothing about squabbling in the ranks, mistrust among the the Resistance members, tedious side trips, failing at your lifelong goals, or pointless messages about war profiteering that in any way resemble things I associate with Star Wars.
The fact that anybody has to work to convince me that TLJ is a "love letter" to the OT precludes any ability I have to believe it really is a love letter. Johnson at least paid some attention to details of the setting, but TLJ is very much a film where Johnson had some big ideas for scenes and just kinda went "meh" if those scenes didn't match up to the setting in some glaring way or another.
There's nothing about squabbling in the ranks, mistrust among the the Resistance members, tedious side trips, failing at your lifelong goals, or pointless messages about war profiteering that in any way resemble things I associate with Star Wars.
It literally ends with a kid staring up the sky imagining he's a Jedi fighting for good against the evil empire. The movie is not subtle about it's views on Star Wars as a part of culture.
The fact that anybody has to work to convince me that TLJ is a "love letter" to the OT precludes any ability I have to believe it really is a love letter. Johnson at least paid some attention to details of the setting, but TLJ is very much a film where Johnson had some big ideas for scenes and just kinda went "meh" if those scenes didn't match up to the setting in some glaring way or another.
There's nothing about squabbling in the ranks, mistrust among the the Resistance members, tedious side trips, failing at your lifelong goals, or pointless messages about war profiteering that in any way resemble things I associate with Star Wars.
Did you watch Star Wars? Leia(and the gang) is constantly at odds with the rebellion. (And Luke). They make side trips all the time. Two in the first three movies! The entire second movie is about failing your lifelong goals!
Also there is not a pointless message about war profiteering. Its about taking sides. The fact that this has to be explained to you makes me wonder because the movie was not subtle about it
Edit: like. Half of the thread of ESB is Yoda failing to train Luke and then Luke failing to save his friends and defeat Vader! It ends with the Hero getting his hand cut off and losing his icon of the Jedi!
Goumindong on
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Giggles_FunsworthBlight on DiscourseBay Area SprawlRegistered Userregular
I’m still of the opinion that we knew everything we needed to know about Snoke at the moment of his death in TLJ. The Galaxy at large reacted to the Battle of Endor and subsequent fracturing of the Empire by trying really hard to pretend that evil had been permanently defeated and there was no need to follow up on the Imperial dissolution with anything other than some parades and fireworks, followed by a return to peaceful life. Of course, there were still evil, ambitious fuckers in the galactic woodwork looking to seize the chance to have a little Empire of their own. Snoke is the one who got to the top of the hill first; he even used Force trickery to get into the head of one (or more?) of the students at Luke’s fancy new “Jedi Academy” and took that threat off the board before making his move on the settled parts of the Galaxy.
As far as I can tell from the texts of TFA and TLJ, that’s who Snoke is, and that was enough to satisfy me. How he got that wicked divot taken out of his head? Unimportant. Where he learned to use the Force? Dunno; maybe he found a holocron somewhere, maybe he’s a talented amateur who gets his ideas about the Dark and Light sides of the Force from folklore and legend.
None of that matters in the context of his arc in the films. What’s important to the rest of the story about Snoke is that he was allowed to get where he was at all. The Republic’s lethargy and willful blindness. Luke’s allowing himself to be pressed into the role of Master, his failure with Ben and subsequent retreat into exile. These were the conditions that created room for someone like Snoke to come into power; if it hadn’t been him, it would’ve been someone else. The fact that he’s so high on his own flatulence that Kylo is able to murder him right when he believes himself to be watching the execution of the only valid threat to his power is a great story beat for Kylo and entirely on-brand for Star Wars Evil (“Evacuate? Now, in our moment of triumph?”).
Changing him from “a natural consequence of the post-Endor state of the Galaxy” to “a cloned puppet made specially (and made pre-deformed because ...???) to troll Ben Solo” is not the worst thing TRoS does, but it’s on the list of Sins for sure.
For those that don't hate EU, Bloodlines tells a story about Leia's political career and plays with these themes, and how resurgent fascism came to be in the New Republic. It was a fun little read.
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
The fact that anybody has to work to convince me that TLJ is a "love letter" to the OT precludes any ability I have to believe it really is a love letter. Johnson at least paid some attention to details of the setting, but TLJ is very much a film where Johnson had some big ideas for scenes and just kinda went "meh" if those scenes didn't match up to the setting in some glaring way or another.
There's nothing about squabbling in the ranks, mistrust among the the Resistance members, tedious side trips, failing at your lifelong goals, or pointless messages about war profiteering that in any way resemble things I associate with Star Wars.
It literally ends with a kid staring up the sky imagining he's a Jedi fighting for good against the evil empire. The movie is not subtle about it's views on Star Wars as a part of culture.
This isn't a "love letter" to Star Wars, it's a staple Star Wars shot. And it isn't a very good reflection of the original shot, seeing as the original scene features a Luke that is anxious to go off and join the Empire, not fight against it. There's nothing more impressive or meaningful in the shot from TLJ than something you could slap into, say, a 30-second commercial for Galaxy's Edge, particularly since it's a completely random kid unrelated to the story in any way, other than having some Force ability and being on the same dull-ass planet at the same time as some actual characters.
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Zavianuniversal peace sounds better than forever warRegistered Userregular
I feel like Jar Jar should get a solo movie to finish his character arc
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
I love Star Wars, but boy do I hate this thread sometimes.
There's nothing about squabbling in the ranks, mistrust among the the Resistance members, tedious side trips, failing at your lifelong goals, or pointless messages about war profiteering that in any way resemble things I associate with Star Wars.
...This is literally most of the B plots in the OT. And the PT! And a decent amount of the TV shows that I've watched connected to the franchise! What is even going on here?
Anyway I'm hoping to finally watch ep 9 either today or tomorrow. I would have already but damn is that runtime intimidating, considering opinions at large about it.
The fact that anybody has to work to convince me that TLJ is a "love letter" to the OT precludes any ability I have to believe it really is a love letter. Johnson at least paid some attention to details of the setting, but TLJ is very much a film where Johnson had some big ideas for scenes and just kinda went "meh" if those scenes didn't match up to the setting in some glaring way or another.
There's nothing about squabbling in the ranks, mistrust among the the Resistance members, tedious side trips, failing at your lifelong goals, or pointless messages about war profiteering that in any way resemble things I associate with Star Wars.
It literally ends with a kid staring up the sky imagining he's a Jedi fighting for good against the evil empire. The movie is not subtle about it's views on Star Wars as a part of culture.
This isn't a "love letter" to Star Wars, it's a staple Star Wars shot. And it isn't a very good reflection of the original shot, seeing as the original scene features a Luke that is anxious to go off and join the Empire, not fight against it. There's nothing more impressive or meaningful in the shot from TLJ than something you could slap into, say, a 30-second commercial for Galaxy's Edge, particularly since it's a completely random kid unrelated to the story in any way, other than having some Force ability and being on the same dull-ass planet at the same time as some actual characters.
No? Again with the “have you seen star wars?!”. He wants to go to the academy so he can join the rebellion. Like Biggs did. After which Owen chides him and explains how he wont be going off on some “damn fool crusade” like his father. Not until the harvest is done at least.
Luke is not anxious about anything in that scene he is longing for adventure in the stars...
Edit as an aside. Did you realize that ach-to only has one sun?
The fact that anybody has to work to convince me that TLJ is a "love letter" to the OT precludes any ability I have to believe it really is a love letter. Johnson at least paid some attention to details of the setting, but TLJ is very much a film where Johnson had some big ideas for scenes and just kinda went "meh" if those scenes didn't match up to the setting in some glaring way or another.
There's nothing about squabbling in the ranks, mistrust among the the Resistance members, tedious side trips, failing at your lifelong goals, or pointless messages about war profiteering that in any way resemble things I associate with Star Wars.
It literally ends with a kid staring up the sky imagining he's a Jedi fighting for good against the evil empire. The movie is not subtle about it's views on Star Wars as a part of culture.
This isn't a "love letter" to Star Wars, it's a staple Star Wars shot. And it isn't a very good reflection of the original shot, seeing as the original scene features a Luke that is anxious to go off and join the Empire, not fight against it. There's nothing more impressive or meaningful in the shot from TLJ than something you could slap into, say, a 30-second commercial for Galaxy's Edge, particularly since it's a completely random kid unrelated to the story in any way, other than having some Force ability and being on the same dull-ass planet at the same time as some actual characters.
No? Again with the “have you seen star wars?!”. He wants to go to the academy so he can join the rebellion. Like Biggs did. After which Owen chides him and explains how he wont be going off on some “damn fool crusade” like his father. Not until the harvest is done at least.
Luke is not anxious about anything in that scene he is longing for adventure in the stars...
Edit as an aside. Did you realize that ach-to only has one sun?
Luke wants to join The Imperial Academy to join the Rebellion?
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Yeah, I don't know where this "the ST sucks" thing comes from. TROS sucks. The other two are either pretty good with some glaring JJ issues or great.
Also a movie should not need you to read the tie-in <insert not movie media here> to know what the fuck is going on.
I mean, sure, that could help. But I don't think it's actually as important as it's made out to be. You don't need to get everyone on the same page as long as each individual is willing to build on what came before and move forward. To collectively tell the story a piece at a time rather then trying to wrench it back towards the narrative you want to tell and fuck what anyone else did. It's literally very slow improv and the same rules apply. And it can work. Abrams and Disney just didn't try for the 3rd film.
I actually think we learn a lot about him. Just not in the traditional, “who what where” sense. Which, if he was going to matter, we should have learned when he was introduced.
As it stands Snokes origins dont really matter, only the effect he has on Ben. This is made super clear in TFA. As an entity he is like internet toxicity. Where did internet toxicity come from? Does that have a concrete answer you can put into a movie? Does that answer matter? Sure Steve Banon magnified it and made it manifest in people like Steven Miller.... but does Banons origins really matter?
Overall i think its OK to cut him out. The worst scenes in TFA are those that deal with Snoke(its largely people talking about Snoke and what he has done to Ben). But i struggle to come up with defining arc for Kylo without him; at least in the second movie.
But that is exactly what Johnson did?
TFA directly sets up more or less the vast majority of TLJ.
Yes that's my point. TLJ is a great example of how "Yes and" doesn't necessarily tie you down. Johnson took the structure TFA built and moved it forward in interesting ways. TROS is the opposite approach.
I think you also see in the ST overall the problem you can get with trying to plan everything out ahead of time. Sure, it can be good when it's a good plan. But imagine Abrams gets to be the one to decide the shape of the overall ST. I don't think that's better then Johnson having more free reign to move the trilogy forward.
Maybe for the EU and video games it is, but for the actual films it's not on-brand at all. Someone who has only seen the films (which should be the baseline expectation) would think that this came out of nowhere and made no sense. Like, even someone who is familiar with all the (non-canonical) information would find it to be a form of exceptionally poor execution. And even if it were on-brand, people would be right in saying that that particular brand of storytelling is just not good because it comes out of nowhere.
It would be like if in The Lord of the Rings trilogy:
Would anyone watching those movies think, "Well, it was explained in the books! And it's totally on-brand because Tom Bombadil comes out of fucking nowhere in the books, too!" would be a good justification for the films?
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It’s really just RoS that grates on every last nerve for me. I had my complaints with all of the above, but RoS is the only time in my life I’ve wanted to leave a theater (when the crew arrives on the Babu Frik planet, I checked my watch and was shocked by how little time had passed).
I mentioned Terrio earlier because the only movie I’ve seen that caused a similar level of “What in the fuck is supposed to be motivating any of this?” was Batman v. Superman (Specifically, when Lois throws the kryptonite spear into the water, walks ten feet away, and then reacts to the knowledge that Superman needs the spear despite being nowhere near him by immediately turning around). Just sheer fucking sloppiness.
I mean, I’ve seen Battlefield Earth in theaters. No director should be able to surprise me with their big budget awfulness.
TROS faceplanting the end of the ST doesn’t make the whole trilogy suck, but it does make TFA and TLJ weaker by association. And it’s making me look at TFA with a more critical eye, since it has some similar flaws that are now a little harder to ignore.
The other ST movies had their own many problems. The biggest of all, IMO, is how the ST blatantly cribs from the OT. Each one of the ST is nearly completely identical thematically to the OT. At the end of the ST, the universe is in exactly the same spot as it was at the end of the OT. That alone, elevates the PT above the ST in my opinion despite the PT's many many flaws, at least it had its own story separate from the OT. When TFA came out, In a general sense, I liked it, or at a minimum, I thought they did a good job with Rey, except for the whole power creep thing. But looking back, I think it was just another case of I was just hungry for new Star Wars so I was willing to overlook so much nonsense. Same thing happened with Phantom Menace. I was a total Ep1 fanboy for a few months following its release. Wasn't till a while later I started to realize just how bad it was.
The biggest downer for me was how it just ripped off A New Hope so completely. It was because of that, that I had such high hopes for TLJ, I thought there was no way in hell they would crib ESB too and I thought TLJ would where they would step up and make the ST shine....boy, was I wrong once again. That's where the ST died for me, long before TROS came out.
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In what way are ESB and TLJ thematically identical? They aren't even structurally identical, since TLJ runs through parts of the ROTJ structure (ie - the throne-room showdown) and then flips the script on that.
There's no way Stark doesn't come back as an AI.
These movies are literally filled with people having visions and sensing things and stuff hinging on prophecies. What Star Wars were you watching?
•Ship out of gas being chased by star destroyers
•sieges of Hoth/Crait
•new Jedi hope going to remote planet to learn from hermit master who fucked up bad before
•new Jedi hope getting impatient with old hermit master and confronting the dark side in a cave thing (about her parents)
•badguy apprentice tasked with capturing and turning the new Jedi hope
The flip in the throne room is fucking great though
Yeah that’s all the bad parts of the SW movies
The good guys lose a battle and/or are at their lowest point. teacher trains student. major revelation about family
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Bad is pretty subjective. Luke going into the cave is goddamn iconic. Whether you like it or not it sure as hell isn't just EU and vidya tho.
I'm not really defending RoS here. It was a horribly executed mess with all of Abrams' pettiness and flaws as a director on full display. I think there was still a bunch of fun stuff there, and I enjoyed it more than anything in the PT though which is godawful. Episode 1 is the most enjoyable in hindsight and it was not a great movie!
But the endless nitpicking about things that were established in other movies as "not Star Wars" or out of nowhere is incredibly tiresome. It's like some of the folks in this thread just want to have a character narrate a Wookiepedia article otherwise it isn't clear enough to them.
That would have been a sweet thing to spend more time on than a lot of the other bullshit
Enslaving a race of shroom aliens and becoming obsessed to the point that they are cast out of the Sith Order
They were the ones that started the Burning Man festival eons ago but nobody knows anymore why they gather in the desert to dance
* Side trip to nice neutral planet... oops, not so nice.
* Introduction to new friend... oops, he just gave you up to the bad guys. (The twist is that Lando switched back; Del Toro's character doesn't.)
But they all come in different orders and 3/5 are pre-ordained by TFA...
Ah, yes, "The Rule of 420".
TLJ is like Brahms deconstructing and reconstructing a melody over the course of a symphony vs TFA being a Beatles cover band
But parts of that just don't happen and others are stretched to the point of it being "they are the same because both had actors".
The long slow chase or the final battle that doesn't actually happen on Crait are nothing like the things you are comparing them to in ESB. Luke and Yoda's attitudes are completely different and that shapes how those interactions play out. Yoda is unsure if Luke should be trained because he's impatient and angry. Luke doesn't want to train Rey because he believes the Jedi need to end. Luke doesn't send Rey to the cave the way Yoda does and actually yells at her for even thinking about going there when she's first trying to touch the Force. She goes there on her own after talking to Kylo Ren. And what she sees there is completely different. Snoke doesn't tell Kylo Ren to get Rey. If he gives him any orders it's to kill Luke.
The parallels in TLJ are like the "snow" on Crait. It's meant to tickle your memory of these things from ESB or ROTJ but it's actually it's own thing.
As far as I can tell from the texts of TFA and TLJ, that’s who Snoke is, and that was enough to satisfy me. How he got that wicked divot taken out of his head? Unimportant. Where he learned to use the Force? Dunno; maybe he found a holocron somewhere, maybe he’s a talented amateur who gets his ideas about the Dark and Light sides of the Force from folklore and legend.
None of that matters in the context of his arc in the films. What’s important to the rest of the story about Snoke is that he was allowed to get where he was at all. The Republic’s lethargy and willful blindness. Luke’s allowing himself to be pressed into the role of Master, his failure with Ben and subsequent retreat into exile. These were the conditions that created room for someone like Snoke to come into power; if it hadn’t been him, it would’ve been someone else. The fact that he’s so high on his own flatulence that Kylo is able to murder him right when he believes himself to be watching the execution of the only valid threat to his power is a great story beat for Kylo and entirely on-brand for Star Wars Evil (“Evacuate? Now, in our moment of triumph?”).
Changing him from “a natural consequence of the post-Endor state of the Galaxy” to “a cloned puppet made specially (and made pre-deformed because ...???) to troll Ben Solo” is not the worst thing TRoS does, but it’s on the list of Sins for sure.
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I respect that, but at the same time, it's taking the eighth chapter of a series I've been following for forty years to say "oh hey, your fave is problematic and I'm going to show why by stepping on all of these characters you like, old and new, and finishing the reset-to-zero that the seventh movie started". And I can't help but resent that a little. There were a finite number of Numbered Movies; there will never be another Episode VIII. I still think that TLJ had some issues with pacing and execution, but I'd be dishonest if I claimed this wasn't as much, for me, about having something that was fun, that I enjoyed, that was "mine", hijacked (by a brilliant creator!) to deliver a Moral Lesson.
Again, this mattered more to me back when there was some faint hope that IX might end both trilogy and saga well; instead, it pushed the ST as a whole far over the line into "toss it in the bin and salvage what good bits you can from it." Which is what TLJ was saying, I guess.
Maybe one of TLJ's lessons was that I need to let go of Numbered Movies as the core and/or the best of Star Wars, and embrace that the so-called "side" material can be just as essential, and even better.
Writing is almost irrelevant to Movie People (big movie fans and directors alike).
But since writing's like 80% of what I'm showing up for on any piece of media, something like TLJ that I guess is considered quite good if you care about the Movie Stuff, I just...don't get why it's put up high.
The people who don't are about writing are the fans saying "It was big and fun and Star Wars and that's enough for me". And even movie buffs who, for example, don't like JJ Abrams will talk about his skill with pacing or pretty shots or whatever. And then say "too bad about the bad writing though, which kinda brings it down". A lot of the praise with TLJ, for example, is for the writing.
TLJ isnt about how the things you love are problematic. Its a big ol love letter to the OT! If its about anything meta like that its not about how “star wars is bad actually” but how we cannot enshrine the previous movies (OT) nor can we destroy them(PT) but must learn from them as we move forward.
And it doesnt reset to zero...
There's nothing about squabbling in the ranks, mistrust among the the Resistance members, tedious side trips, failing at your lifelong goals, or pointless messages about war profiteering that in any way resemble things I associate with Star Wars.
It literally ends with a kid staring up the sky imagining he's a Jedi fighting for good against the evil empire. The movie is not subtle about it's views on Star Wars as a part of culture.
Did you watch Star Wars? Leia(and the gang) is constantly at odds with the rebellion. (And Luke). They make side trips all the time. Two in the first three movies! The entire second movie is about failing your lifelong goals!
Also there is not a pointless message about war profiteering. Its about taking sides. The fact that this has to be explained to you makes me wonder because the movie was not subtle about it
Edit: like. Half of the thread of ESB is Yoda failing to train Luke and then Luke failing to save his friends and defeat Vader! It ends with the Hero getting his hand cut off and losing his icon of the Jedi!
For those that don't hate EU, Bloodlines tells a story about Leia's political career and plays with these themes, and how resurgent fascism came to be in the New Republic. It was a fun little read.
This isn't a "love letter" to Star Wars, it's a staple Star Wars shot. And it isn't a very good reflection of the original shot, seeing as the original scene features a Luke that is anxious to go off and join the Empire, not fight against it. There's nothing more impressive or meaningful in the shot from TLJ than something you could slap into, say, a 30-second commercial for Galaxy's Edge, particularly since it's a completely random kid unrelated to the story in any way, other than having some Force ability and being on the same dull-ass planet at the same time as some actual characters.
Is said arc ballistic in any way? Preferably in all ways?
...This is literally most of the B plots in the OT. And the PT! And a decent amount of the TV shows that I've watched connected to the franchise! What is even going on here?
Anyway I'm hoping to finally watch ep 9 either today or tomorrow. I would have already but damn is that runtime intimidating, considering opinions at large about it.
No? Again with the “have you seen star wars?!”. He wants to go to the academy so he can join the rebellion. Like Biggs did. After which Owen chides him and explains how he wont be going off on some “damn fool crusade” like his father. Not until the harvest is done at least.
Luke is not anxious about anything in that scene he is longing for adventure in the stars...
Edit as an aside. Did you realize that ach-to only has one sun?
Luke wants to join The Imperial Academy to join the Rebellion?