Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker, a new thread arises

[RumHam]

9 minutes ago, Darth Richard II said:

Ok but how do we know the leaked clones script is legit. Walsall it confirmed by anyone.

My understanding is that it was confirmed by the movie coming out and being a shorter version of that script. 

[felice]

2 minutes ago, RumHam said:

My understanding is that it was confirmed by the movie coming out and being a shorter version of that script. 

Also a number of the deleted scenes were filmed and included on the DVD.

[Darth Richard II]

Ah. I’ve seen stuff like that before where you get a longer version of a film, then it turns out a lot of the non filmed bits are fake.But I’ll take you word on it.

[Ran]

3 hours ago, RumHam said:

It's not really a plot hole in the movies.

No more so than many of the other "plot holes" I was referring to, which is why it was a joke. It's never specifically addressed but is fairly obvious after a moment's thought, so isn't a problem.

[Vaughn]

6 hours ago, Ran said:

No more so than many of the other "plot holes" I was referring to, which is why it was a joke. It's never specifically addressed but is fairly obvious after a moment's thought, so isn't a problem.

What, like a human being deflecting a light speed weapon (blasters) in real time by swinging a light sword? 

 

It's a funny thing how we just accept happily some stuff (hyperspace, light sabers, etc...) and then will absolutely grind our fellow fans to death over plot details which require far smaller leaps of faith. 

[Rippounet]

6 minutes ago, Vaughn said:

It's a funny thing how we just accept happily some stuff (hyperspace, light sabers, etc...) and then will absolutely grind our fellow fans to death over plot details which require far smaller leaps of faith. 

It's almost as if genres had established conventions about suspension of disbelief and fans tended to focus their exchanges on everything outside those established conventions...

[Lord Varys]

2 hours ago, Vaughn said:

What, like a human being deflecting a light speed weapon (blasters) in real time by swinging a light sword? 

Blaster blots obviously aren't as fast as light or else we would see them move on screen or being deflected by lightsabers.

The Jedi/Sith do not move fast enough to intercept them, but they do feel/sense/know where they will when they come, and thus the lightsaber is there first. They don't see the blot coming and then move fast enough to intercept them.

2 hours ago, Vaughn said:

It's a funny thing how we just accept happily some stuff (hyperspace, light sabers, etc...) and then will absolutely grind our fellow fans to death over plot details which require far smaller leaps of faith. 

I don't have issues with people accepting plot holes - I just find it disrespectful of content creators if they introduce shit like 'Palpatine is back' and then count on the fans to make sense of this. Anything that isn't explained or at least properly implied by a movie or a books or whatever itself, but relies on fan theories to make sense is bad on that particular level.

And I noticed that especially in the fantasy/SF department the number of creators who just produce stuff like that and then count on fans in the internet making sense of it.

Of course there were always plot holes in movies and such - but there was a time when such things as blatantly nonsensical as a man coming back from the dead would have gotten a proper explanation within the story.

2 hours ago, Rippounet said:

It's almost as if genres had established conventions about suspension of disbelief and fans tended to focus their exchanges on everything outside those established conventions...

Let's remind the next time when I read Tolkien to laugh incredulously every time 'a Hobbit', 'wizard', or 'elf' shows up, because such things don't exist, do they?

[The Dragon Demands]

@Ran

I largely agree with your ranking, though Rogue One is difficult in that it is sort of uneven; the last hour from when they arrive on Scarif onward holds up to the original trilogy; there were a few rough parts earlier that they DID fix up with editing.

So the only difference is that I'd rank The Force Awakens above all other non-original trilogy films, behind the Return of the Jedi (and close to it), with Rogue one right behind TFA (and Rise of Skywalker close after Rogue One).

So you put 4- Rogue One 5 - Rise of Skywalker 6 - The Force Awakens

I put 4 - The Force Awakens, then 5- Rogue One and 6 Rise of Skywalker

Rise of Skywalker...I walked out of the theater thinking it felt more or less like a worthy ending to what was promised in TFA (with some trilogy-wide issues), much as I think A New Hope is a better "movie" than Return of the Jedi, but I still love Return of the Jedi.

No one likes Canto Bight. Neither do I.  I contend that the entire non-Rey "B-plot" in TLJ was good on paper, but not well executed (much as I feel that Anakin/Padme romance in AOTC was a good idea on paper, that is in broad outline, but was TERRIBLY executed with awful dialogue).

I'm still not decided on the ending of TROS: was it a good idea for Ben Solo to die? I thought there was no other way, but I don't know. I have to think on it.  Perhaps a bigger issue is "was Rey being Palpatine's granddaughter a retcon? and is that necessarily a bad thing?" -- we'll be discussing those two big issues for months.

a "trilogy wide problem" is that they didn't coordinate well enough, so they'd introduce new characters or concepts with the strong hint they'd follow up on it, only to then drop them because they didn't really plan it out:  Maz Kanata, Phasma, Rose, and DJ.  And I LIKED Rose, as a character (good to have a lowerdecks character), but Finn didn't do any better in the Canto Bight subplot.

 

[The Dragon Demands]

16 hours ago, Lord Varys said:

There were a couple of scenes with him and Padmé and Mon Mothma depicting an opposition movement against Palpatine which would eventually grow into the Rebellion, but those were all cut.

Oh they filmed those:

 

[Lord Varys]

6 minutes ago, The Dragon Demands said:

Oh they filmed those:

 

Yeah, sure I know that. Just wanted to point that out to Ran who may not have known that considering he didn't seem to have watched the DVDs which included those (and some of the AOTC cut scenes).

By the way - does anybody know whether any of the PT cut scenes which were on the DVDs are to be found somewhere in the collected Blu-Ray set containing all the six movies (the fancy thing back from 2011). I'm watching the movies on that and in the cut scenes section they only have such scenes that hadn't been included on the DVDs earlier.

[The Dragon Demands]

Well I didn't know if Ran was aware of them; it's worth a watch, it feels like it was cut purely for time

[Darth Richard II]

I liked Canto Bight.

[dog-days]

I had problems with the way it took place in the middle of the retreat of the resistance fleet, but found stuff to enjoy in the segment itself - I liked having a look at a different aspect of the Star Wars universe, and appreciated DJ - I was sorry he was completely absent from tRoS. 

[HexMachina]

3 minutes ago, dog-days said:

I had problems with the way it took place in the middle of the retreat of the resistance fleet, but found stuff to enjoy in the segment itself - I liked having a look at a different aspect of the Star Wars universe, and appreciated DJ - I was sorry he was completely absent from tRoS. 

Same here, i enjoyed the sequence in isolation but it suffered from being shoehorned in to the pretty ridiculous time frame of TLJ. 

I really liked the last jedi, but having it take place over so short a time AND including stuff like this brought it down a bit

Of course they then repeated this in RoS wih the 16 hours (or whatever it was exactly) line. Is that the actual timeframe they stuck to? Or did i miss something somewhere where things were altered?

[Darth Richard II]

It could have been edited better into the film. 
 

im still unsure why no one will answer me about that supposed episode 2 draft Varys keeps mentioning. Was that confirmed as legit a long enough time ago or...?

[The Mother of The Others]

14 hours ago, Lord Varys said:

Sith mind control kicks in with Order 66 since the clones all address Palpatine as 'my lord' rather than 'Your Excellency' (as they do address the Supreme Chancellor), and it would have been better to take that route rather than go with the chip preventing them from enacting their fantasies to kill Jedi

This is what they did.   (The movies-only crowd of fans knows not of these brain chips.) 

  (Similarly, the movies didn't confirm the Darth Plagueus timeline or that he was siddy's mentor, which apparently confines sideous to a regular human lifespan in EU lore.  What the movies did do is show him as a semi- fucked- up- faced hoodie wearing emperor-looking guy already in the AotC final reveal BEFORE HIS "DISFIGUREMENT" in RotS.  This means that movie-only viewers were in fact steered to believe the fuggly face was Sid's real face, that he was an ancient being fooling the mere mortals into accepting him as their chancellor as his latest fake ID, like a vampire uses various aliases throughout the generations to disguise his immortal presence among us..       ...... maybe LONG ago he'd "learned everything his master had to teach him" before killing Plaguiss, and among those skills was "the ability to cheat death."   (And then became a gross-assed witch man like Melisandre whose true visage was a saggy bag of wrinkled skin and hollowness.)  The resurrection thing (of Padme) was beyond Sid's ability, because it was too life-based whereas his skill is more like an undead thing.   He had an imperfect / lesser / corrupted understanding of his old master's legit breakthrough force ability.  But he just didn't tell Anikan this part until after Ani went sith and was trapped.  That's what the movies implied.  And I'm gonna stick with it, because better.  All this other stuff that's filled in the blanks differently is inferior in my view, like the stormtrooper brain chips.  

Brain chips are in our near future, so I'd fully expect them to be in stormtroopers.....because they'd be in Everyone in the far future.  They'd be normal.  What changed the troopers minds after order 66 would be more special, like a sith-brewed abuse of the clone brains' incomplete reasoning center, pouring evil commands Through those brains in a way that wouldn't need chips.   The brains can't disobey.  Just have regular chips send evil orders to redefine the troops in that moment, not to release some built-in malice they'd been holding back before then.   That would have been messier, left more of a trace, more likely to backfire, like it did in the cartoon apparently.  No, they were reformatted in that moment of 66.   like a finely crafted work of art that used the clones' pinched off brains as a sith canvas to paint their masterpiece of human manipulation in spilled blood.

[Lord Varys]

1 hour ago, The Mother of The Others said:

This is what they did.   (The movies-only crowd of fans knows not of these brain chips.) 

  (Similarly, the movies didn't confirm the Darth Plagueus timeline or that he was siddy's mentor, which apparently confines sideous to a regular human lifespan in EU lore.

The movies don't tell us anything about when Darth Plagueis lived, but the way Palpatine smiles when talking about him strongly implies, I'd say, that he was his apprentice and the guy who murdered him.

I'd have preferred it if Sidious' had been Plagueis' apprentice a couple of centuries ago or so, with the entire Palpatine guy being a persona the man took to eventually rise to power, but that's not the road they took when they covered Sidious and Plagueis in the novel.

1 hour ago, The Mother of The Others said:

What the movies did do is show him as a semi- fucked- up- faced hoodie wearing emperor-looking guy already in the AotC final reveal BEFORE HIS "DISFIGUREMENT" in RotS.  This means that movie-only viewers were in fact steered to believe the fuggly face was Sid's real face, that he was an ancient being fooling the mere mortals into accepting him as their chancellor as his latest fake ID, like a vampire uses various aliases throughout the generations to disguise his immortal presence among us..       ...... maybe LONG ago he'd "learned everything his master had to teach him" before killing Plaguiss, and among those skills was "the ability to cheat death."   (And then became a gross-assed witch man like Melisandre whose true visage was a saggy bag of wrinkled skin and hollowness.)  The resurrection thing (of Padme) was beyond Sid's ability, because it was too life-based whereas his skill is more like an undead thing.   He had an imperfect / lesser / corrupted understanding of his old master's legit breakthrough force ability.  But he just didn't tell Anikan this part until after Ani went sith and was trapped.  That's what the movies implied.  And I'm gonna stick with it, because better.  All this other stuff that's filled in the blanks differently is inferior in my view, like the stormtrooper brain chips.

Sidious doesn't look different from Palpatine in the final scene of AOTC. In fact, the problem is, as I pointed out already, that Lucas changed his mind after AOTC how to deal with the Emperor's weird looks. AOTC had a Palpatine that looked considerable older and somewhat more rotten than the Palpatine from TPM, indicating that there was supposed to be a gradual decay in his physical appearance with him not even reaching 'Emperor-state' decay not even in ROTS.

But the Palpatine in ROTS looks just like Ian McDiarmid did at the time, making him appear younger and healthier than Palpatine did look in AOTC.

In that sense I don't think the idea that Palpatine's 'true looks' were those of the Emperor can be supported by the facts of the movies. Although I freely admit the idea of him being an evil monster living for centuries was tossed around in the fandom even before the PT started - in fact, the DE talk about Palpatine having not died the first time in ROTJ introduced that into the EU lore, and the idea that the dark side was somehow consuming his body was also given by Steve Perry via Xizor in Shadows of the Empire.

I'd have liked it if they had gone with that.

But the final nail in the coffin of such a theory is, in my opinion, the effect of the reflected Sith lightning in ROTS. There is no indication that this reveals Palpatine's 'true face'. Instead, it indicates that his own power reflected back at him does something horrible to his body for some completely unknown reason. And if one looks in detail then Palpatine only has the true Emperor looks at the very end of the movie, after his duel with Yoda, during which he was hit by his own energies again.

1 hour ago, The Mother of The Others said:

Brain chips are in our near future, so I'd fully expect them to be in stormtroopers.....because they'd be in Everyone in the far future.  They'd be normal.  What changed the troopers minds after order 66 would be more special, like a sith-brewed abuse of the clone brains' incomplete reasoning center, pouring evil commands Through those brains in a way that wouldn't need chips.   The brains can't disobey.  Just have regular chips send evil orders to redefine the troops in that moment, not to release some built-in malice they'd been holding back before then.   That would have been messier, left more of a trace, more likely to backfire, like it did in the cartoon apparently.  No, they were reformatted in that moment of 66.   like a finely crafted work of art that used the clones' pinched off brains as a sith canvas to paint their masterpiece of human manipulation in spilled blood.

If we go with established Star Wars canon then TCW and Rebels and Resistance and the other shows actually are canon. We can take them into account when discussing Star Wars canon - although I definitely admit that they should have included the Sifo-Dyas and Order 66 stuff in ROTS.

[Werthead]

5 minutes ago, Lord Varys said:

If we go with established Star Wars canon then TCW and Rebels and Resistance and the other shows actually are canon. We can take them into account when discussing Star Wars canon - although I definitely admit that they should have included the Sifo-Dyas and Order 66 stuff in ROTS.

Yup, the chips are canon, although they are also a bit cowardly. The writers had fallen a bit too much in love with their noble-and-honourable clone trooper characters from The Clone Wars, so they wanted to find an excuse not to have their troopers turn on and kill the Jedi. Psychologically, it would have been far more interesting to have had Rex actually kill his Jedi (or at least try to) and then feel guilt about it afterwards and find a way of removing the chip, rather than having had it removed for medical reasons prior so he could keep his hands clean.

That reminds me that they never established Cody's fate in either the EU nor the Disney Canon. If he shows up again having tried to murder Obi-Wan, that'd be interesting.

[The Dragon Demands]

3 hours ago, Darth Richard II said:

I liked Canto Bight.

It wasn't even a bad idea on paper: pointing out "we didn't fix any of the problems that led to the fall of the Old Republic in the first place; a handful of wealthy planets and corporations, particularly those in war profiteering, continue to dominate the rest".

the problem was that it just dragged on, and on, and on well beyond that.  It's a scene that should have been as long as they were in Kijimi or something in TROS....not...what the hell was it, 20 minutes?!

[Lord Varys]

1 minute ago, Werthead said:

Yup, the chips are canon, although they are also a bit cowardly. The writers had fallen a bit too much in love with their noble-and-honourable clone trooper characters from The Clone Wars, so they wanted to find an excuse not to have their troopers turn on and kill the Jedi. Psychologically, it would have been far more interesting to have had Rex actually kill his Jedi (or at least try to) and then feel guilt about it afterwards and find a way of removing the chip, rather than having had it removed for medical reasons prior so he could keep his hands clean.

That reminds me that they never established Cody's fate in either the EU nor the Disney Canon. If he shows up again having tried to murder Obi-Wan, that'd be interesting.

On the one hand I agree with you, on the other hand it became more and more, let's say, difficult to imagine how the clones could turn on the Jedi in this manner in light of the way that they never behaved like mindless robots throughout TCW and, to a degree, even in AOTC and ROTS themselves. We get plots about clone traitors spying for the Separatists, clones deserting, clones turning against a corrupt Jedi general, clones showing they have a mind of their own and double-check orders and the overall situation and whether commands passed down are genuine, etc. How plausible was it that they would just enact those commands without double-checking whether the hologram guy was the real man in charge or at least ask why this specific command was to be executed?

The chips idea was not bad (prior to that, the EU had established the idea that Order 66 was one of many emergency protocols of the Grand Army of the Republic, having essentially nothing to do with a Sith/Kaminoan plan - which I found much worse, actually) but not exactly well-executed for the reasons we touched on above.

I'm also not sure whether the chips actually came in to find an excuse for Rex who came back in Rebels or whether this was actually an arc which was supposed to simply explore the whole clone army thing. That Rex apparently didn't kill any Jedi only came out in Rebels and may not have been the case had they continued TCW doing as many episodes as they wanted to before ending the show at the very end of the war (i.e. in the middle of ROTS).