spoilers [SPOILERS] Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker

[sologdin]

if he carries all the sith memory back to darth bane et al., then he likely takes a long view.

dunno why it is a criticism if the film addresses modern concerns and lacks a far future imaginary--that would take quite a bit of creativity and would likely appear sufficiently alien to be unrecognizable to us.  i still think it comical that they have WWII dogfights and napoleonic capital ship battery exchanges at point blank range--we can right now shoot things from the other side of the planet--i'd expect starkiller base to be the ordinary manner of interstellar war.

canonicity fights are the most comical occurrence of all--as though one set of fake facts are more important than another just because the owner of the intellectual property says so.  silly bourgeois can't control consumers' interpretations or appreciations. the narrative is by contrast enriched for being heterglot and irreconcilable--it elevates its status into the classically mythological--greek and egyptian and norse and arthurian myths exist in parallel inconsistent variants, say, and that is a strength.

[Lord Varys]

1 hour ago, Derfel Cadarn said:

Re Luke’s training between ANH and ESB, maybe Ezra or Ahsoka train Luke? A follw-up Rebels show with Luke etc and the Ghosts would be good

The point of that discussion was what kind of development in abilities and such we get for Rey/Luke in the movies - it is irrelevant what they did between movies if the movies as such don't show or at least hint at development.

And here the new movies definitely did something better - after all, Rey has been training with Leia for some time in TROS whereas Luke explicitly did not go back to Dagobah to continue his training with Yoda between TESB and ROTJ - that's explicitly stated in the movies.

[sologdin]

i don't get the geek critique about quality and quantity of instruction. (dodgeball wrote the end to that, when torn tells vaughan to remember your training, which consists of dodge duck dip dive and dodge.) it's space magic, and the wunderkind intuits the correct method at the moment of crisis--you turned off your targeting computer for most people by contrast means that everyone gets killed by peter cushing.

[RumHam]

3 hours ago, Derfel Cadarn said:

Re Luke’s training between ANH and ESB, maybe Ezra or Ahsoka train Luke? A follw-up Rebels show with Luke etc and the Ghosts would be good

 

I don't think so. spoilers for Rebels: 

 

Ahsoka and Sabine don't go looking for Ezra until after RotJ. So presumably he's still Thrawn's prisoner off in some unknown region between ANH and ESB.

We don't know what Ahsoka was doing between surviving her battle with Vader and reapering to look for Ezra, but she didn't consider herself a Jedi. One article I read argued she must have re-jedied at some point cause she's one of the voices of past Jedi in the new movie. But so is Anakin, and while he turned good at the end I don't think anyone would argue that he died a Jedi.

[Lord Varys]

1 hour ago, Darryk said:

I got the impression it was a loss of faith in weak bureaucrats that allowed a tyrant to rise. Kind of like what's happening today.

I'd say we have very strong and deliberate right-wing movements who try to take power with any means possible - Palpatine was never a Hitler-like character he was burying democracy as a democrat (at least in the public). The Sith essentially rose to power like the right-wingers in their demented minds think the Jews are controlling everything - by destroying the Aryan spirit and blood in fake wars and deciding everybody's fates in shadowy circles, etc. There is nothing of a real fascist movement in the PT movies. And that's actually pretty good, because with the Jedi there it couldn't really have worked if some sort of Palpatine-led SA had taken over the Republic.

1 hour ago, Jace, Basilissa said:

Yeah, there's not a lot of ambiguity to the "to thunderous applause" line. People love a Daddy.

Yeah, there is that, but there is no substance in this context. What does that line even mean? Do people no longer care about democracy? Do they think it doesn't work anymore (and if so: why?)? Do they think Palpatine can be a more effective 'supreme leader' as the Galactic Emperor? Do they believe in dictatorship or are they afraid for their lives?

We just don't know. We see that the Galactic Republic is abolished and replaced by the Galactic Empire, but we don't know why that happens.

1 hour ago, Jace, Basilissa said:

And if I'm being real. I would so be a staff officer in the Emperor's Admiralty. I know, I'd be betraying a lot of fundamental beliefs. But I just respect a man who takes so much enjoyment in his work. I wanna love what I do, and he knows something about loving what he does.

I mean he used to. Now he's a tired old zombie who spends forty years waiting for a fucking whelp to do something or something. The guy who single handedly overthrew a thousand generations' worth of Republic and impregnated the universe. He's just chillin'.

Palpatine is pretty much a completely empty character. There is no substance there. We don't know why he wanted to have power, his motivation is never explained, nor what it personally gives to him to rule over an entire galaxy.

A mannequin would be a more charismatic leader than this guy ;-).

1 hour ago, sologdin said:

canonicity fights are the most comical occurrence of all--as though one set of fake facts are more important than another just because the owner of the intellectual property says so.  silly bourgeois can't control consumers' interpretations or appreciations. the narrative is by contrast enriched for being heterglot and irreconcilable--it elevates its status into the classically mythological--greek and egyptian and norse and arthurian myths exist in parallel inconsistent variants, say, and that is a strength.

That is missing the point. You are talking about variants and retellings and reinterpretations of the same story - but that's not what those new movies did. They are presented as sequels, not remakes - although in effect they are remakes rather than sequels. They tell the same story, nothing new.

[Jace, Extat]

You don't like Palpatine? I mean, not in this latest horror piece, but in the prequels? He's the only thing in those turd piles worth watching! He's evil and he loves it! Like Karl Rove, but with a personality and better looking.

[Lord Varys]

13 minutes ago, Jace, Basilissa said:

You don't like Palpatine? I mean, not in this latest horror piece, but in the prequels? He's the only thing in those turd piles worth watching! He's evil and he loves it! Like Karl Rove, but with a personality and better looking.

Oh, I like him, alright, I just mean that we really don't know him as a person. The Palpatine persona is a complete fake. There is only Darth Sidious, and he has little more to offer than overconfidence and maniacal laughter - there is no depth there. But there could have been some.

If I ever met the guy my first question would be: 'Why do you bother with all that shit?'

By the way - how to we interpret the weird eyes? Is the TROS version blind? Or are his eyes just white because he doesn't have enough Sith fuel?

[polishgenius]

Palpatine is basically a poor man's Davros knockoff but he's fun as hell - I don't really need all my villains to have depth of motivation.

[Lord Varys]

9 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

Palpatine is basically a poor man's Davros knockoff but he's fun as hell - I don't really need all my villains to have depth of motivation.

Well, most Star Wars characters are fun as hell because of the dialogue Lucas liked to write - and also because the strange characters he created. I mean, who else would have ever come up with a coughing alien cyborg?

[Ice Queen]

The thing that bothered me was Kylo dying. Now hear me out. He and Rey had a very strong bond that always seemed to me meant that light and dark aren't opposites and that there is a middle ground that should be embraced, not defeated. Like ice and fire, they're complementary and mirror images of each other.

Light and dark belong together. Yin and yang. The Ouroborous. Two sides of the same coin. Recognition that light does not always win. It would have been more faithful to the struggles of the human spirit to show that light and dark can co-exist without being self-destructive. One does not need to be pure evil to embrace the dark side of his nature.

That, in my opinion, would truly be bringing balance to the Force. There is rarely pure good and pure evil in this world. We are all light and dark. So instead of learning to live with both aspects, in 20 or 30 years there will be a new baddie because the dark side has been repressed and feared. All this has happened before and it will happen again.

[sologdin]

You are talking about variants and retellings and reinterpretations of the same story - but that's not what those new movies did. They are presented as sequels, not remakes - although in effect they are remakes rather than sequels. They tell the same story, nothing new.

am not following the distinction drawn here.  do i misunderstand the word 'canon' that gets used frequently in these threads, or have i misunderstood that the new owners have decertified the old expanded universe narratives? i don't think my comment applies to the new films vis-a-vis their relation to the old films; that would be definitionally impossible--though some interpretations insist that the new films are wrong, which is the same error in the opposite direction.  i don't think the new films remake anything; they certainly develop prior understandings.

[Martini Sigil]

1 hour ago, Jace, Basilissa said:

You don't like Palpatine? I mean, not in this latest horror piece, but in the prequels? He's the only thing in those turd piles worth watching! He's evil and he loves it! Like Karl Rove, but with a personality and better looking.

Holy cow this made me laugh. 

[sologdin]

I'm not being negative to keep enjoyers from enjoying

does this actually happen? is there someone who wants to sabotage in this way, or are there those who are vulnerable to such sabotage?  i have an aesthetic appreciation of this stuff that is enhanced by learned colloquy with interested interlocutors, which includes strident vitriol.

[Centrist Simon Steele]

2 hours ago, sologdin said:

i don't get the geek critique about quality and quantity of instruction. (dodgeball wrote the end to that, when torn tells vaughan to remember your training, which consists of dodge duck dip dive and dodge.) it's space magic, and the wunderkind intuits the correct method at the moment of crisis--you turned off your targeting computer for most people by contrast means that everyone gets killed by peter cushing.

Or in Army of Darkness when Ash teaches the peasants to fight...of course, AoD was making fun of that, but it's still how this works in these worlds.

[Kalbear]

3 hours ago, Ran said:

There remain stories in the accepted canon that have Luke doing things like staying for a time in a hidden Jedi temple where he Obi-wan gave him some help in finding training remotes that allowed him to further hone his lightsaber and Force skills, and a few other things of that sort. He also finds Obi-wan's journals at some point and learns more from them. And then simply his efforts to use what abilities he did have strengthend his connection to the Force and led him to new things. There's three years between those films, so a lot of time for experimentation and learning from that,

It's also canon that Rey had a flight simulator in her hut and she practiced it all the time, and that she has psychometry and learned a lot about the force when she touched Anakin's lightsaber. 

(It's also canon that baby yoda has force powers and can force choke things, so...)

[Ran]

Dyad of the Force. All that I needed to explain her abilities with the Force.

 

 

[Lord Varys]

17 minutes ago, sologdin said:

You are talking about variants and retellings and reinterpretations of the same story - but that's not what those new movies did. They are presented as sequels, not remakes - although in effect they are remakes rather than sequels. They tell the same story, nothing new.

am not following the distinction drawn here.  do i misunderstand the word 'canon' that gets used frequently in these threads, or have i misunderstood that the new owners have decertified the old expanded universe narratives? i don't think my comment applies to the new films vis-a-vis their relation to the old films; that would be definitionally impossible--though some interpretations insist that the new films are wrong, which is the same error in the opposite direction.  i don't think the new films remake anything; they certainly develop prior understandings.

Not sure who talked about canon here? I certainly did not. If there is a problem with those movies then that they stayed too close to the OT by ripping off those stories.

The EU stuff was never binding to anything Lucas wanted to do in his movies, and my personal issues with that essentially being shelved has more to do with it no longer being continued than with it not fitting with the new movies.

37 minutes ago, Ice Queen said:

The thing that bothered me was Kylo dying. Now hear me out. He and Rey had a very strong bond that always seemed to me meant that light and dark aren't opposites and that there is a middle ground that should be embraced, not defeated. Like ice and fire, they're complementary and mirror images of each other.

But this kind of thing was never a message any Star Wars movie ever sent. There is light and there is darkness - and light is good and darkness is evil. They are not complimentary in any way. The Sith are a cancer that has to be destroyed. You cannot do good with the dark side.

Darkness might be in any individual, especially every Force user, but you must not give in to that or you turn out like Palpatine.

37 minutes ago, Ice Queen said:

That, in my opinion, would truly be bringing balance to the Force. There is rarely pure good and pure evil in this world. We are all light and dark. So instead of learning to live with both aspects, in 20 or 30 years there will be a new baddie because the dark side has been repressed and feared. All this has happened before and it will happen again.

The balance of the Force is restored when the Sith are destroyed - something that was accomplished now, one imagines, by Emperor Palpatine's granddaughter.

People have done a lot of pointless theorizing about the Jedi also doing something wrong that put the Force out of balance - but that's just in people's heads. The movies never establish anything of that sort, nor do any official supplementary material (i.e. stuff that is very closely connected to the movies, like novelizations, etc.). Lucas has explained some of that stuff in the audio commentaries and such. He said Anakin restored balance to the Force when he 'killed' Palpatine. That's that.

Granted, it shows how he sucks as a storyteller that he has prophecies which are never actually properly cited or explained (and he is not the only George doing that kind of thing) but that's how it is.

The idea that one can work with 'the dark side in oneself' if one is a powerful Force user doesn't seem to be accurate. If you have that kind of power you get overtaken by evil if you give in to that shit. Else people would have long ago figured out how to do it without having any problems.

I'd have also liked if the guy hadn't died as I mentioned somewhere above - because that would have been a more powerful sign of forgiveness and less of a nother ripoff from ROTJ.

And whether the Sith will ever come back now that they are all destroyed with Palpatine is completely unclear. You do have to be especially evil to do what he did - the average guy cannot do that. But without a new Jedi Order even another Kylo Ren should easily enough take over the galaxy in a couple of minutes.

Just now, Ran said:

Dyad of the Force. All that I needed to explain her abilities with the Force.

You mean his mediocre abilities in the Force account for her mastery of it ;-)? That would be weird, sort of like passing a test while copying from a person who isn't going to pass...

[Ran]

Huh. Maybe it wasn't a window that reviewer thought he saw the Holdo maneuver being used in RotS, but in fact in the galactic rebellion sequence, specifically the Endor bit as shown here

Neatly split in half star destroyer with a bunch of shrapnel stuff behind it...

So much for one-in-a-million?

[Kalbear]

14 minutes ago, Lord Varys said:

But this kind of thing was never a message any Star Wars movie ever sent. There is light and there is darkness - and light is good and darkness is evil. They are not complimentary in any way. The Sith are a cancer that has to be destroyed. You cannot do good with the dark side. 

 Darkness might be in any individual, especially every Force user, but you must not give in to that or you turn out like Palpatine.

The balance of the Force is restored when the Sith are destroyed - something that was accomplished now, one imagines, by Emperor Palpatine's granddaughter.

Yeah, that ain't accurate at all, and that's the point of the prequel movies. Anakin DID bring balance to the force - by being part of the thing that wiped out all the jedi save, ya know, two. At the end of RotS (and seriously, fuck JJ for making TROS so now it's even more confusing) there are exactly two Jedi and two Sith of any consequence still alive. Previously there were thousands of Jedi and two sith - clearly out of balance. The prophecy was entirely true - from a certain point of view. Anakin brings balance to the force again - or at least more balance - when he wipes out Palpatine, but Luke's existence is the reason that the Dark rose as well. 

And the prequel makes it clear that the Jedi are kind of assholes, too. In the hands of a better director we would have had more sympathy for Anakin's plight. Rebels makes that same point as well. So does Clone Wars with Ahsoka. So does, explicitly, TLJ, where Luke asks why the Jedi should have a monopoly on the Force. I don't know where you get that the movies don't say anything about this - we are told explicitly that the Force is balance in life and death, good and evil, and Snoke 'knew' that someone like Rey would become powerful and had simply assumed it'd be Luke. With Luke shutting himself off, the side of light had to grow. 

 

[Lord Varys]

5 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Yeah, that ain't accurate at all, and that's the point of the prequel movies. Anakin DID bring balance to the force - by being part of the thing that wiped out all the jedi save, ya know, two. At the end of RotS (and seriously, fuck JJ for making TROS so now it's even more confusing) there are exactly two Jedi and two Sith of any consequence still alive. Previously there were thousands of Jedi and two sith - clearly out of balance. The prophecy was entirely true - from a certain point of view. Anakin brings balance to the force again - or at least more balance - when he wipes out Palpatine, but Luke's existence is the reason that the Dark rose as well. 

Darth Sidious and his clones wiped out the Jedi - Anakin Skywalker didn't do much. He killed some children, and helped hunt down some survivors (although not in the movies).

The interpretation that the balance of the Force needed the eradication of the Jedi is nowhere in the movies. In fact, nowhere in the movies is indicated if/when/whether Anakin Skywalker ever fulfilled the prophecy. And Obi-Wan makes it rather clear that the Chosen One was supposed to destroy the Sith, not join them. You can try to say that he may be mistaken ... but an informed character in the fictional world trumps your interpretation which is based on no in-universe content.

5 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

And the prequel makes it clear that the Jedi are kind of assholes, too. In the hands of a better director we would have had more sympathy for Anakin's plight. Rebels makes that same point as well. So does Clone Wars with Ahsoka. So does, explicitly, TLJ, where Luke asks why the Jedi should have a monopoly on the Force. I don't know where you get that the movies don't say anything about this - we are told explicitly that the Force is balance in life and death, good and evil, and Snoke 'knew' that someone like Rey would become powerful and had simply assumed it'd be Luke. With Luke shutting himself off, the side of light had to grow.

Ahsoka decided the Jedi weren't for her ... not that the Jedi are bad. Don't recall anything about Rebels having issues with the Jedi.

Anakin's plight is selfish nonsense. The guy is a mass murderer and a control freak, and without any moral sense whatsoever. When Darth Sidious reveals himself he must realize that the entire Clone War - a war during which hundreds or thousands of his friends died, and billions of innocent people, most likely - was a sham, that this man countlessly tried to murder him, his friends, and his beloved wife ... and yet he still stands by his side. This is the moment where the Anakin story completely breaks down. It just makes no sense.

If Lucas had wanted to do it right he should have saved the Dooku confrontation for later ... after the creation of Darth Vader. With Anakin not knowing that Tyranus and Sidious were working together by the time Anakin pledged himself to Palpatine. Then we could have a scenario where Anakin went too far and only realized who had joined with when it was too late to turn back.

The new movies reinterpret stuff. They are not written by Lucas, so it is difficult to make them fit - they are official sequels, sure, but they still do not necessarily fit all that well (can you make sense of the continuity of Bond movies? I certainly can't, but they go on and on and on...). What I recall about Luke's speech is that the Jedi were fools who did not see Sidious' move coming - which certainly is a shortcoming on their part, but hardly something that would make them assholes. And one wonders how it could have worked better? Should the Jedi have ruled the Republic? Should they have arrested and punished corrupt politicians to prevent the Republic to descend to a level of corruption where the Sith could make use of that? How could they have stopped Darth Sidious?

A measured/stable individual would have been able to be a Jedi and a husband - but Anakin clearly wasn't. It wasn't the secrecy of the marriage that warped things for him, it was his creep control freak nature. What kind of healthy individual obsesses over a woman he hasn't seen for ten years - especially when he was only a ten-year-old boy at the time?

Lucas' interpretion of the imbalance is that the Sith are the ones who do not care about the natural ways of the Force. They want to rule and control nature/the Force to profit themselves, they do not accept the natural course of things.

And while one can say that certain rules of the Jedi are weird, they are in no means corrupt or evil. In fact, the supreme lunatic in those new movies is Luke actually believing that hiding on some planet and ensuring the Jedi die with him is going to help anyone. Outside people are building super weapons and rebuilding the Empire he tried to destroy. The Jedi Order gave the Republic 1,000 years of peace - and many more millennia if you go with the 1,000 generations statement from ANH which is reflected in the EU. What did Luke Skywalker ever give his galaxy?