Game of Star Wars: The Final Hope

[HexMachina]

1 hour ago, karaddin said:

I didn't mind Solo but I definitely didn't love it. I only watched it on streaming and think the fundamental problem with it was that it was telling a story I just wasn't that interested in.

Yeah i liked it too in an “inoffensive summer blockbuster” way. 

58 minutes ago, karaddin said:

I think I would have happily watched a story centered on literally everyone else in the movie except Han & Chewie. I'm normally quite open to prequels, so its really something specific to Han that makes me uninterested in his back story - I guess its knowing that any character growth is going to stagnate up until ANH. This kinda went with trying to explain why he was cold and cynical, but I don't really need that explained for anyone growing up in a galaxy ruled by the Empire and with the Hutts as well - a lot of people are going to become that way.

I think this in part comes down to Jedi not being meant to use the Force as a weapon. Enhancing themselves is one thing, and the shrapnel cloud could maybe be OK, but directly using it against others is meant to be something of a no no. Of course then they go and use Force push and it goes out the window anyway so *shrug*

There were so many characters in he film itself that were more interesting than Han and Chewie that i wish had more time. Criminal underuse of Thandie Newton for example..,,

But i did think all of the cast did a great job 

[dbunting]

5 hours ago, Nictarion said:

You know a lot of 8 year olds that are interested in interplanetary trade disputes? 

I know a lot of 8 year olds who love cutesy characters who speak with funny dialect and also love seeing kids their own age star in the movie, so yeah.

What 8 year old didn't participate in that? I mean what is a marble if not a tiny planet that you traded or gambled with your friends? I know I had some that looked like planets and galaxies so who knows

[karaddin]

2 hours ago, JEORDHl said:

Right. I keep forgetting that the Jedi are all about peace. The Sith though... [spreads hands]

The writers and producers have more or less dropped the leap and speed enhancements though. Guess Ben and Yoda didn't have enough time to pass it on, and Luke [a leaper] only gave Rey three lessons. Hopefully the Tomes will have some shit she can pass on. 

I think Rey force jumps over a chasm too large to jump over unassisted in the trailer? Or I'm just really unfit (I am) and people can actually make that jump without a force assist lol.

2 hours ago, HelenaExMachina said:

Yeah i liked it too in an “inoffensive summer blockbuster” way. 

There were so many characters in he film itself that were more interesting than Han and Chewie that i wish had more time. Criminal underuse of Thandie Newton for example..,,

But i did think all of the cast did a great job 

Yeah exactly. I think that's why it just comes down to being the wrong story for me, I'm not going to point at anything and say it was bad....it just wasn't what I wanted.

[mormont]

11 hours ago, Toth said:

Great for you if you liked it, but I'm interested in stories and worldbuilding. Sure, Star Wars was always pretty simple in terms of story, but worldbuilding was the one thing it always managed to achieve,

I'm not always a subscriber to the 'rose tinted glasses' thing when it comes to the original trilogy, but one place where it very much does apply is in the 'worldbuilding'. The worldbuilding in the OT does not stand up at all. It's no better than either the sequel or prequel trilogies in that respect. Very little is fleshed out or explained, and much of what is makes scant logical sense. How does the Empire operate? How does the Rebellion operate, for that matter? Who are all these random alien races in the background and where do they fit into the world? Who were the Jedi, and why have they been all but forgotten in the span of a single lifetime?

Most the the worldbuilding in the OT took place in spinoff material - books, comics, etc. There's very little on screen, and Lucas doesn't appear to care much about it.

 

[Heartofice]

Agree that the OT didn’t do a lot of world building, in the direct way you’d expect. But what it did do was quite often leave hints of a much bigger story and universe that other people felt inspired to fill in on their own.

There are lots of bits of dialogue here and there that reference other planets and other events and characters that aren’t in those movies. It certainly got me very excited to learn about Vader’s origin story after hearing Obi Wan in A new hope ( I was totally wrong to want to see that story it turns out )

[Caligula_K3]

12 hours ago, Darth Richard II said:

I loved both and R1 and Solo. It's honestly not THAT controversial, it's just the haters yell the loudest.

I think I'm weird in that I like R1 the least of all the modern Star Wars movies. I didn't think it was bad or anything, but I had no attachment to any of the characters. The main characters of the trilogy are pretty excellent, imo, and make up for some of the flaws- though admittedly Finn was wasted in The Last Jedi, and I would be very happy to remove most of the Canto Blight plotline. I also really enjoyed what the new trilogy did with Luke Skywalker, and I know I'm in the minority there. Though again, maybe it is the haters who just yell the loudest.

@karaddinI pretty much completely agree with what you said. I wish TFA had restrained itself a little on the retreads, but if they'd taken out Starkiller Base it wouldn't bother me at all; the movie did a great job reestablishing the Star Wars feeling, and packed in real emotion through Han's death. TLJ had higher highs and lower lows than TFA, but it's still a really cool and interesting movie that took the franchise in an interesting direction.

 

[Vaughn]

6 hours ago, Heartofice said:

Agree that the OT didn’t do a lot of world building, in the direct way you’d expect. But what it did do was quite often leave hints of a much bigger story and universe that other people felt inspired to fill in on their own.

There are lots of bits of dialogue here and there that reference other planets and other events and characters that aren’t in those movies. It certainly got me very excited to learn about Vader’s origin story after hearing Obi Wan in A new hope ( I was totally wrong to want to see that story it turns out )

This is a great lead into why I find the fan service stuff frustrating but am also excited about the increased content coming out. I like the implied large universe of Star Wars and enjoyed that in KOTOR, etc... So for the same 20 people to keep doing everything is kind of goofy and limiting. I thorough enjoyed TFA but Rey and Finn take off in the Falcon which was in storage for years and suddenly Han and Chewie find them? Outer space is pretty, pretty big guys. Would have been much better for them to end up Maz's somehow and then meeting Han or something. 

 

'Solo' and 'Rogue One' did this well.

[Toth]

18 hours ago, RumHam said:

If they didn't retcon the prequels there's no way they'll ditch this trilogy short of a total reboot which I'd guess is decades off. 

But doesn't the Sequel Trilogy pretends both the Prequel and Original Trilogy doesn't exist? That's exactly what they are doing by having it take place in a void where nothing that came before it matters. It just seems to me quite fair to treat it the same when it is over. And it would give new writers a chance to start fresh a few hundred years later in the timeline or something.

7 hours ago, mormont said:

I'm not always a subscriber to the 'rose tinted glasses' thing when it comes to the original trilogy, but one place where it very much does apply is in the 'worldbuilding'. The worldbuilding in the OT does not stand up at all. It's no better than either the sequel or prequel trilogies in that respect. Very little is fleshed out or explained, and much of what is makes scant logical sense. How does the Empire operate? How does the Rebellion operate, for that matter? Who are all these random alien races in the background and where do they fit into the world? Who were the Jedi, and why have they been all but forgotten in the span of a single lifetime? 

Most the the worldbuilding in the OT took place in spinoff material - books, comics, etc. There's very little on screen, and Lucas doesn't appear to care much about it.

That seems to me to be an odd view to have. Worldbuilding doesn't mean getting the emperors tax returns. It means establishing the setting. And I think especially the first movie did an excellent job dropping just enough bits of history to know exactly what you are dealing with. That there is a galaxy-spanning oppressive empire. That it used to be a republic, that the powergrab of the emperor was a gradual process since the senate was dissolved just now. That there used to be an enigmatic cult of magic-wielding peacekeepers that has been betrayed and slaughtered. That there are now rebels fighting the empire. That the rebels are staffed by discontent former imperials...

Sure enough, the other two movies just built upon that foundation and the prequel trilogy thought itself obligated to expand the republic and the clone wars that had already been established by the first movie. But at least they had the chance to do that. And the old EU had the chance to pick up all the little pieces and enrich the setting in every direction. And they could do that because every detail both felt like it had some kind of history and that this history wasn't treated like some obscure mystery box no-one knows about.

Granted, I haven't read the new Disney EU, but I have read some recaps of the new novels... and they all painted a very grim picture. Instead of writers feeling comfortable just telling stories in an established setting they are confined by the obscurity of the new canon. Either they stick to the old movies (especially the original trilogy) or they don't dare expain anything at all for fear of getting retconned by a later movie that actually explains shit like how strong or weak the First Order actually is.

If I am being very generous, then I could interprete TFA's disregard of even acknowledging the status quo of the end of Return of the Jedi as a conscious decision to distance itself from Episode 1's senate scenes that... I honestly didn't find that bad, but have since become a meme for how bad the prequels are considered. Or of Abrams' rehashing of plot points of Episode 4 forcing him to haphazardly roll everything back to a vaguely defined status quo. But of course the less idealistic side of me is aware that Disney has been suspiciously keen to make their own Star Wars brand completely unrelated to all previous material. One reason seems to be the rumors that Lucas' contract with Disney involved some kind of clause ensuring royalties for old characters, but it's also entirely possible that they wanted to have a setting more compatible with the Disney brand and target group, something they outright stated as a reason when canning The Clone Wars as their very first action. So yes, I cannot disconnect the mess of TFA's worldbuilding to corporate decision-making, that's how messed up it is.

Whatever their core reasoning was, it still stands that from a story-telling point of view you can't just go tabula rasa in an established setting without ridding what was there of meaning. And it's doubly bad because it is horribly obvious that Disney treats Star Wars as a brand they just have to market, not as a world that you can make additions to and have it grow.

[Ran]

1 hour ago, Toth said:

But doesn't the Sequel Trilogy pretends both the Prequel and Original Trilogy doesn't exist?

They sequel features a cast of characters from the original trilogy, four of which appeared in the prequel trilogy as well.

I'll grant that it has substantially weakened the feeling that there's a strong causal relationship between the events of the OT and the start of the sequels, with it basically rebooting the state of things by turning the New Republic into a Resistance and reconstituting the Empire as the First Order. But it's hyperbolic to say that's the same thing as claiming the previous films don't exist.

I'm not sure if anyone has remarked on Bob Iger's memoir which touches on Lucas's feelings on the new films. The most salient point to this discussion is probably this part:

 

Quote

Things didn't improve when Lucas saw the finished movie. Following a private screening, Iger recalls, Lucas "didn't hide his disappointment. 'There's nothing new,' he said. In each of the films in the original trilogy, it was important to him to present new worlds, new stories, new characters, and new technologies. In this one, he said, 'There weren't enough visual or technical leaps forward.' He wasn't wrong, but he also wasn't appreciating the pressure we were under to give ardent fans a film that felt quintessentially Star Wars."

The problem, Iger suggests, is that Lucas didn't fully appreciate what Lucasfilm and Disney were trying to do with the new trilogy, and specifically The Force Awakens. "We'd intentionally created a world that was visually and tonally connected to the earlier films, to not stray too far from what people loved and expected," Iger explains, "and George was criticizing us for the very thing we were trying to do."

I think what a lot of Star Wars fans had come to expect, after decades of EU material, was that the new story would show us the New Republic fighting against something that felt entirely like a new threat in a mode that felt less like gutsy rebels vs. fascists as seen in the original trilogy. More importantly, they wanted to see that what Luke, Leia, Han, etc. did really mattered and had a genuine impact. By not really showing us the New Republic at all except for the fifteen seconds it took to blow it up, by immediately throwing us into the Resistance, the events of the OT can seem illusory, dismissed with a wave of J.J. Abrams' magic wand.

What Zahn's first trilogy did, kicking off the EU, was make the remnant of the Empire an insurgent threat against a fragile government still working to find its footing after decades of former imperial oppression, and it felt like the stakes were high, understandable, and (most importantly) like a plausible development of the situation so many years on. Disney took a less original route, a route that Iger sees as safer, but they missed what I think a lot of OT fans expected to see in terms of the impact of the OT, and it seems that George Lucas was among them.

[Jen'ari]

14 hours ago, JEORDHl said:

Right. I keep forgetting that the Jedi are all about peace. The Sith though... [spreads hands]

The writers and producers have more or less dropped the leap and speed enhancements though. Guess Ben and Yoda didn't have enough time to pass it on, and Luke [a leaper] only gave Rey three lessons. Hopefully the Tomes will have some shit she can pass on. 

---

Tangential, but my money is on Rey being a female clone of Anakin. If so, I wonder how they're going to deal with the power gap between dark clone and light clone. Palpatine's ghost would've been training dark clone forever and a day, right.  

I can’t see either Rey or Kylo being anywhere near a match in combat for a restored Palpatine, the only characters who convincingly would be are Luke and Yoda imo, and even with Yoda it was a draw.

The Sith are generally far better fighters- Maul being able to hold his own against Qui Gon and Obi Wan pretty easily (until a quick thinking and intuitive Obi Wan got the better of him).

Dooku fighting Obi Wan and Anakin.

 

Palpatine fighting Maul and Opress and defeating them easily, killing 3 Jedi masters in seconds and holding his own against Mace Windu(there is some debate as to wether he threw that fight to turn Anakin to the Dark Side, none of us know definitively though)

Plus of course holding Yoda to a complete stalemate, something no other Sith,Dark Jedi or  clone trooper  has managed to come close to.

Saying that though I think the Jedi certainly seem wiser in some aspects, the Sith like to gloat too much and come undone, but then they kind of have to, I’m sure Disney is not going to let the Emperor win.....sadly.

[The Mother of The Others]

1 hour ago, Bittersweet Distractor said:

(there is some debate as to wether he threw that fight to turn Anakin to the Dark Side, none of us know definitively though)

Plus of course holding Yoda to a complete stalemate, something no other Sith,Dark Jedi or  clone trooper  has managed to come close to.

The terrain decides all these sith fights.    If yoda vs. emperor had been fought in the octagon it may have gone the other way, but because of those senate hover podiums, which were the equivalent of a rainy football field, we got yoda suffering a compound fracture of his ass bone.   Gotta wear grip gloves and the long cleats in sith fights to hold on to yur damn lightsabre better and not slip off the hover podium of destiny.

Wasn't it shown that sideous vs. Windu ended that way because it was what the emperor needed.  He couldn't kill the jedi and then turn annakin later, it had to be then.   So i think they did show him kinda going from large and in charge with the lightning to suddenly oh whoa is me helpless against the window sill.  It was a setup.   Emperor vs. Mace in an octagon without anything to throw telekinetically or window death drops to worry about, that'd be worth a pay per view.

 

2 hours ago, Ran said:

Iger explains, "and George was criticizing us for the very thing we were trying to do."

Well spoken, diplomat Ran.   I'll try to follow that example and fail but hopefully keep the failure to a minimum:  this Iger quote is him covering for how the movie they served up wasn't really a movie at all.  It was a cut and paste of previous star wars scenes presented in a.... new order.   The New Order itself, the supposed content, was also but a reshuffling of things back to the starting point in the 1970's.  That wasn't new, as Lucas noticed.  They thought nobody would notice that FA was an homage like the clip shows used at the academy awards instead of a movie?   That's some bad Igerring, Iger. 

What Disney was 'trying to do' was profit from the franchise by turning it into a museum piece like a collector leaves a toy in its original wrapper to preserve the value.  Zero risk that way, they thought.  Like how the 'prevent defense' always works so well in sports.... if your goal is to lose the game.  By playing it safe, they've undermined the franchise much more than if they'd taken risks, destroyed people's enjoyment of that universe much more than if they'd just taken their toy out of the packaging and USED it, getting it a little dirty in the process but also having all the FUN of playing and creating and changing and developing the star wars universe in a way that'd bring it to LIFE.   Instead they guaranteed a dead on arrival product, because it's not able to breathe if you leave it in the original trilogy frozen in carbon han solo style, using the old characters only for dystopian disappointment, which made the writers happy because they feel like they've applied their craft when they manage to depress people with a Star Wars movie!   That's not modernization, that's being out of touch with the whole concept of modern mythology and its uplifting effect on a culture.   ( And yes, Richard, it is telling that you're about to not know what that even is, in 3...2....1....)

[Darth Richard II]

Modern Mythology’s uplifting affect on culture? WTF?

[Corvinus85]

1 hour ago, Bittersweet Distractor said:

I can’t see either Rey or Kylo being anywhere near a match in combat for a restored Palpatine, the only characters who convincingly would be are Luke and Yoda imo, and even with Yoda it was a draw.

The Sith are generally far better fighters- Maul being able to hold his own against Qui Gon and Obi Wan pretty easily (until a quick thinking and intuitive Obi Wan got the better of him).

Dooku fighting Obi Wan and Anakin.

 

Palpatine fighting Maul and Opress and defeating them easily, killing 3 Jedi masters in seconds and holding his own against Mace Windu(there is some debate as to wether he threw that fight to turn Anakin to the Dark Side, none of us know definitively though)

Plus of course holding Yoda to a complete stalemate, something no other Sith,Dark Jedi or  clone trooper  has managed to come close to.

Saying that though I think the Jedi certainly seem wiser in some aspects, the Sith like to gloat too much and come undone, but then they kind of have to, I’m sure Disney is not going to let the Emperor win.....sadly.

Obi Wan beat Maul more than once. Maul also got beat by a blind Kanan. In retrospect, Maul wasn't that tough, or maybe he just got worse with age.

Ahsoka went toe-to-toe with Vader.

[Darth Richard II]

Maul did have robot legs after that, though so does Vader, so I dunno, just speculating.

Anyway, don’t know If this was posted here ever:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2017/12/21/no-rey-from-star-wars-the-last-jedi-is-still-not-a-mary-sue/#5934b7564500

[Jen'ari]

1 hour ago, The Mother of The Others said:

The terrain decides all these sith fights.    If yoda vs. emperor had been fought in the octagon it may have gone the other way, but because of those senate hover podiums, which were the equivalent of a rainy football field, we got yoda suffering a compound fracture of his ass bone.   Gotta wear grip gloves and the long cleats in sith fights to hold on to yur damn lightsabre better and not slip off the hover podium of destiny.

Wasn't it shown that sideous vs. Windu ended that way because it was what the emperor needed.  He couldn't kill the jedi and then turn annakin later, it had to be then.   So i think they did show him kinda going from large and in charge with the lightning to suddenly oh whoa is me helpless against the window sill.  It was a setup.   Emperor vs. Mace in an octagon without anything to throw telekinetically or window death drops to worry about, that'd be worth a pay per view.

 

 

My take on it is that Yoda and The Emperor are pretty evenly matched overall as the respective masters of light and dark, as much as I'm a fan of The Emperor I never saw it as Yoda losing that fight, he saw it was one he may not be able to win and sensibly thought it best to live to fight (or train Luke) another day.

With Mace, I did get the feel The Emperor threw that one considering how quickly he killed the other Jedi, the novelization of the film is meant to be much clearer regarding both events but I have to admit I've still never read it, in fact it's going on my reading list .

1 hour ago, Corvinus said:

Obi Wan beat Maul more than once. Maul also got beat by a blind Kanan. In retrospect, Maul wasn't that tough, or maybe he just got worse with age.

Ahsoka went toe-to-toe with Vader.

I don't think Obi Wan was the most powerful force user out there but he was clever,fast thinking and a great fighter, him and Qui Gon are my favourite Jedi.

[dbunting]

5 hours ago, Caligula_K3 said:

I think I'm weird in that I like R1 the least of all the modern Star Wars movies. I didn't think it was bad or anything, but I had no attachment to any of the characters.

 

I think this is precisely why I did like it. No preconceived notions about how this character should act, or who this person should be. They were all new, and still in the story we were invested in. And to me, it was the most adult centered movie of the bunch. It didn't feel like it was made to target kids. No JarJar, no little porgs, minimal cutesy stuff like that.

[DMC]

12 hours ago, mormont said:

The worldbuilding in the OT does not stand up at all. It's no better than either the sequel or prequel trilogies in that respect. Very little is fleshed out or explained, and much of what is makes scant logical sense. How does the Empire operate? How does the Rebellion operate, for that matter? Who are all these random alien races in the background and where do they fit into the world? Who were the Jedi, and why have they been all but forgotten in the span of a single lifetime?

Most the the worldbuilding in the OT took place in spinoff material - books, comics, etc. There's very little on screen, and Lucas doesn't appear to care much about it.

This.  If you're looking for worldbuilding with Star Wars, then you've never been looking for the main trilogies.  Comparatively between the three, at least thus far, the prequels have been far and away the best at worldbuilding.  The OT is not about that, and the current trilogy - as has been mentioned - is lacking in that respect.

[red snow]

41 minutes ago, dbunting said:

I think this is precisely why I did like it. No preconceived notions about how this character should act, or who this person should be. They were all new, and still in the story we were invested in. And to me, it was the most adult centered movie of the bunch. It didn't feel like it was made to target kids. No JarJar, no little porgs, minimal cutesy stuff like that.

The problem was that by the end of the film i didn't have much idea of how the characters should act or should be. So while there were plenty of reasons to be invested in the story i was never that engaged with the characters. Except for the droid - i was upset about his fate so they got him right at least.

It's a great done in one wartime suicide mission that is a nice lead in to episode IV. Just a bit cold or should have had less characters.

[karaddin]

Another case of the ST not ignoring prior movies but making them central - Luke's outlook in TLJ is heavily influenced by the failures of the Jedi in the PT. His conclusions about what to do are wrong, but he's not wrong in judging what happened then as a condemnation of what the Jedi had become.

Yoda's appearance aligns with this as well - teach your successors your mistakes so they don't make them. Luke didn't make the same mistakes as the PT Jedi, they need to impart those lessons so Rey doesn't repeat either of them.

[Darth Richard II]

There are actually also a LOT of visual callbacks to the prequel trilogy in TLJ. Mostly from Sith I think.