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The Mandalorian: This Is The Way to Season 2


Corvinus85

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2 hours ago, Werthead said:

The prequel trilogy was about making money as well. People just kidded themselves it was going to be more important than it turned out to be because Lucas had it - very vaguely - planned when making the original movies. When getting to the end of the prequels, you realise it hasn't really added any significant further understanding of the universe that is actually useful (apart maybe from midichlorians, ironically, and that further understanding is that Lucas is a bit of an idiot). It took The Clone Wars to actually redeem the prequel era and make it make any of kind of thematic or ideological sense.

I wonder if Filoni and Favreau are warming up to do the same thing for the sequel trilogy: as it stands, it's a mess (the last film in particular), but this week's Mandalorian at least nodded to a way of making it more connected in a grander sense.

TFA is one of my go-to "stupid dumb fun" movies of the last decade, alongside Pacific Rim and its sequel. It's very dumb, but it is watchably entertaining.

Using the follow ups to clean up the messes of the movies. Was that the grand plan all along?  Hopefully any connective tissue from Mandalorian to the sequel trilogy is tangential at best and it moves in a way to not redeem the sequels, but to move past them...Clone Wars at least had the bones of a story thru line and structure to work towards fixing.  There's nothing ultimately redeeming about the sequels that merits fixing. Move along, I say.  (And I get that isn't going to happen, Disney pumped to much into this already...branding their Star Wars Lands with too much First Order was a mistake...)

 

There is nothing redeeming about the TFA for rewatching. What you describe with it being dumb fun is how I'd describe rewatching the prequels.

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2 hours ago, Jaxom 1974 said:

Using the follow ups to clean up the messes of the movies. Was that the grand plan all along?  Hopefully any connective tissue from Mandalorian to the sequel trilogy is tangential at best and it moves in a way to not redeem the sequels, but to move past them...Clone Wars at least had the bones of a story thru line and structure to work towards fixing.  There's nothing ultimately redeeming about the sequels that merits fixing. Move along, I say.  (And I get that isn't going to happen, Disney pumped to much into this already...branding their Star Wars Lands with too much First Order was a mistake...)

There is nothing redeeming about the TFA for rewatching. What you describe with it being dumb fun is how I'd describe rewatching the prequels.

I think Disney already wants to move on. The focus is on the Mandalorian era and The High Republic for now. Pre-Rise they were talking about doing maybe more focused one-off films about the sequel trilogy cast, but Boyega and Isaac very clearly don't want to do that (Boyega might be talked back with a good script, Isaac is clearly so over it) and Ridley seems seems pretty blase about it. If they do go post-sequel trilogy, I think they'll go way past the sequel trilogy, like that comic series that was set 100+ years after RotJ that was decent.

The prequels being "dumb fun" works really well for The Phantom Menace (but a lot better for TFA), doesn't work at all for Attack of the Clones and can't really work for Sith (a film about murdering children doesn't really work in that fashion).

It's unfortunate that Star Wars is impervious to remakes, because remaking the prequel trilogy with much better scripts and directors but the same underlying premise isn't a bad idea (whilst the sequel trilogy can be mostly ignored moving forwards).

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I disliked TFA from the get go. It's nothing but derivative, which makes it bad. Worse still, it is bad in a boring way. I'm not about to watch the prequels anytime soon, but at least they were bad in an amusing way. I can't help but laugh at Hayden Christensen's attempt of selling lines like "I don't like sand..." if I catch AoTC on tv for instance. The prequels fit in the same league as Trolls 2 and The Room in that way.

The only shitquel that has some saving graces is TLJ, but even those have become harder to spot thanks to the rampant incompetence of The Rise of Shit. 

2 hours ago, Werthead said:

It's unfortunate that Star Wars is impervious to remakes, because remaking the prequel trilogy with much better scripts and directors but the same underlying premise isn't a bad idea (whilst the sequel trilogy can be mostly ignored moving forwards).

The prequels were a mistake to begin with. I can't fathom why people want to see events that are already heavily hinted on in the core story. They'll never be able to live up to one's own imagination of those events. Same thing with a prequel centered on Robert's Rebellion for instance. It's been a while since I went north of this place, but I remember that every time someone made a thread about potential ASOIAG/GOT prequels they always came back with that bland and boring idea.

Sequels, at least to me, feel much more natural. Which is again a subject to just how fucked up the shitquels are, if I rate the unnecessary, creative failures of the prequels above the even more creatively bankrupt shitquel trilogy.

In general I fully agree with @Jaxom 1974

Quote

 Hopefully any connective tissue from Mandalorian to the sequel trilogy is tangential at best and it moves in a way to not redeem the sequels, but to move past them...Clone Wars at least had the bones of a story thru line and structure to work towards fixing.  There's nothing ultimately redeeming about the sequels that merits fixing.

It would also be incredibly grating to connect them, because Mando and company weren't even hinted at during the shitquels. You could shoehorn them in of course, by inventing an unnecessary side quest that they were on and that was somehow essential to defeating Palpargarine (cause he's a pale imitation of the real thing)  but that would be such a cliche.

 

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I just started watching the Mandalorian a couple weeks ago and have now caught up to the most recent episode. I'm coming into this thread as the discussion seems to be veering how it compares to the sequel trilogy. In my opinion, the Mandalorian is nowhere near as good as The Force Awakens or The Last Jedi. It's definitely better than The Rise of Skywalker, but that's not a high bar to clear.

Maybe I was just overhyped on this show, since I'd heard nothing but good things... But I really don't get the hype. The action is fun. The set and costume design is excellent. Baby Yoda is adorable. Some episodes offer pulpy fun - though some episodes, like the one where Mando defends a village against orcs, or the one where he gets stuck in a cave with ice spiders - are really bad. The show is just a series of side quests in an RPG, but it's rare that there's any fun or good dialogue, or that there are any interesting conflicts. And the rotating cast of side characters is incredibly flat, which is very sad for a show that's managed to obtain such great actors.

The recent episode with Katee Sackhoff summed it all up for me. This was probably the best episode of the season, but it still felt deeply unsatisfying. The set up is amazing: Mando meets these other Mandalorians and it's revealed that "the way of the Mandalore" is the way of a tiny and extreme sect. That's fantastic! Let's explore that! Instead, Mando jetpacks off from the scene so that we can shove another action scene in the middle of the episode, and then we enter sidequest mode so we can ignore anything potentially interesting about the story. At least Titus Welliver got to be the antagonist in this one, instead of ice spiders or a Kreyt dragon.

I'm not saying The Force Awakens was a masterpiece or anything. But the Mandalorian is just as derivative, but without any real attempt at developing characters or having meaningful conflict. And the Last Jedi, despite its flaws (hello Canto Blight), at least had ambition, and some of its plotlines and character arcs worked very well.

I'll still keep watching till the end of the season, because I've got Disney + till then, Baby Yoda is really adorable, and some episodes are mindless fun. But it's a pity, because there's so much talent behind this show, and I think that even if pulpy fun is their goal, it could be a lot better than this.

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1 hour ago, Veltigar said:

I disliked TFA from the get go. It's nothing but derivative, which makes it bad. Worse still, it is bad in a boring way. I'm not about to watch the prequels anytime soon, but at least they were bad in an amusing way. I can't help but laugh at Hayden Christensen's attempt of selling lines like "I don't like sand..." if I catch AoTC on tv for instance. The prequels fit in the same league as Trolls 2 and The Room in that way.

The only shitquel that has some saving graces is TLJ, but even those have become harder to spot thanks to the rampant incompetence of The Rise of Shit. 

The prequels were a mistake to begin with. I can't fathom why people want to see events that are already heavily hinted on in the core story. They'll never be able to live up to one's own imagination of those events. Same thing with a prequel centered on Robert's Rebellion for instance. It's been a while since I went north of this place, but I remember that every time someone made a thread about potential ASOIAG/GOT prequels they always came back with that bland and boring idea.

Sequels, at least to me, feel much more natural. Which is again a subject to just how fucked up the shitquels are, if I rate the unnecessary, creative failures of the prequels above the even more creatively bankrupt shitquel trilogy.

In general I fully agree with @Jaxom 1974

It would also be incredibly grating to connect them, because Mando and company weren't even hinted at during the shitquels. You could shoehorn them in of course, by inventing an unnecessary side quest that they were on and that was somehow essential to defeating Palpargarine (cause he's a pale imitation of the real thing)  but that would be such a cliche.

 

Just edit the Razorcrest into the fleet that appears at the end of Rise, the same way Lucas added Christensen as the force ghost at the end of Jedi.

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1 hour ago, Maltaran said:

Just edit the Razorcrest into the fleet that appears at the end of Rise, the same way Lucas added Christensen as the force ghost at the end of Jedi.

So in what language does Maltaran stand for Satan? :P

49 minutes ago, Mr Meeseeks said:

Is this where I say I love TLJ and the fighting starts? 
 

Seriously. Some of us actually enjoy Star Wars. Well like three or four of us.

Since Kathleen Kennedy and George Lucas are two of those three, I would look for better company if I were you :P

I think you're also a few years to late to start a fight with that particular statement. When it came out, TLJ was really divisive (apart from Canto Blight, everyone hated that part) as it took the story in a bold direction and not everyone liked that. 

After TROS, I feel like there is now almost consensus that TLJ was the best of the bunch. A lot of people might still hate what TLJ tried to do, but pretty much everyone I know prefers the ambition of TLJ (poorly handled or not) to the pandering mess that was TROS. 

I liked most of TLJ when it came out and still think it was the best of the three, but my opinion has changed somewhat for the negative. The fact that none of the interesting bits in TLJ are taken up in TROS hurts the movie in my opinion and some of the scenes that I thought were amazing on first watch (mainly the throne room fight) aren't as well choreographed as I thought they were, which really shows in a rewatch.

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Count me in among the TLJ fans. I really love 3/4srds of that movie. I even enjoy some of the Finn/Rose plotline once they get off Canto Blight and are just with the codebreaker. It is really too bad that the starting point for the Rise of Skywalker seems to have been to ignore The Last Jedi as much as possible.

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8 hours ago, Veltigar said:

I liked most of TLJ when it came out and still think it was the best of the three, but my opinion has changed somewhat for the negative. The fact that none of the interesting bits in TLJ are taken up in TROS hurts the movie in my opinion and some of the scenes that I thought were amazing on first watch (mainly the throne room fight) aren't as well choreographed as I thought they were, which really shows in a rewatch.

Yeah, this definitely hurt it for me as well. Having the next movie actively try to undo everything that was interesting will just drag both movies down.

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5 hours ago, karaddin said:

Yeah, this definitely hurt it for me as well. Having the next movie actively try to undo everything that was interesting will just drag both movies down.

That conversation has moved to the general SW complaints thread.  :D

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Anyone comparing this show to a D n D campaign is spot on. It's 100% a DM w/ single player campaign. Which isn't great for a tv show, to be quite honest. It DOES work occasionally, tho.  It's a pretty good show for kids, unless you want your kids to grow up with, like, high expectations out of entertainment. 

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1 hour ago, Relic said:

Anyone comparing this show to a D n D campaign is spot on. It's 100% a DM w/ single player campaign. Which isn't great for a tv show, to be quite honest. It DOES work occasionally, tho.  It's a pretty good show for kids, unless you want your kids to grow up with, like, high expectations out of entertainment. 

The thing the writers seem not have realized is that if you're going to use the RPG structure for a show (which is probably not a good idea to begin with), you really need to have a strong cast of main characters. Especially when your main actor is hampered by being stuck in a helmet and full armour all the time. Give me a version of this show where Mando has a consistent crew of baby Yoda, Starbuck Mandalorian, Timothy Olyphant. and Carl Weathers, and where these side characters are given some development, and I'd be much happier even with the annoying sidequest structure. Also, please let Pedro Pascal take off the damn helmet soon so he can use his face.

(Sorry to Cara Dune; maybe there's a good idea in that character, but the actress is really bad.)

 

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The constant side-quests are the main problem for me at the moment. The world-building / lore bits of the show are great, but the mindless Storm Trooper shoot-em-ups and attempted comic relief from minor characters are becoming a drag. 

There is definitely a cool story to tell if they would just hurry up and tell it! They need to look at something like Avatar for a better balance.

ETA: They killed all the best minor characters off in S1. I really liked The Client. 

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Really, this is Filoni's plan and how he works. This is how Clone Wars worked, how Rebels worked, and hell, it's how (mostly) Avatar worked (Filoni cut his teeth on that). There are some nice 'bring everything together at the end' bits, but largely it's a serialized sidequest adventure with some fun adventures and very little building on a fairly shallow plot. As cool as Clone Wars and Rebels are, both have a lot of chaff to wade through before you get to anything awesome. 

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Interesting. I've never seen other Filoni shows so maybe my expectations were too high, especially because most of the buzz I'd heard about the show was positive (it was a bit of a relief to come into this thread and see that I'm not the only one who thinks it's underwhelming). I wasn't expecting The Wire or Game of Thrones in space or anything at that level, but I did maybe expect something along the lines of the quality and approach of Firefly.

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