Star Wars: For All Your PT, OT, ST, & AT-AT/ST Needs

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

14 hours ago, felice said:

#2, put Jabba's lair on a different planet; there's no reason he needs to be based on Tatooine, and Lando and Chewie spend months trying to track it down.

I'm sorry but how is this better and not just different? An extended prologue of Lando and Chewie planet hopping to find Jabba's lair might be interesting visually but I don't see how it improves the story.

2 hours ago, Vaughn said:

The Ewoks are better than the Gungans because they seem to be a largely alien culture with limited ability to communicate with the human/human equivalent species (surely there's a term for this class of being in SW?).  The Gungans are essentially human level equivalent aliens who all appear to be incompetent, stupid and outmatched, which is why their characterization has a gross racist/colonialist vibe. Not to mention that the humans apparently DID colonize their planet?

The Ewoks are better because they are cuddly, snuggly, cute, little teddy bears who fucking roast and eat their enemies.

For the kids.

[RumHam]

2 hours ago, Lord Varys said:

People seem to have to rewatch TPM

Now that's just bad advice. 

17 minutes ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

The Ewoks are better because they are cuddly, snuggly, cute, little teddy bears who fucking roast and eat their enemies.

For the kids.

It was pretty fucked up of Leia to tell them not to eat the stormtroopers in that animated short. Respect their culture, Leia! You can't judge them by our values!

[Heartofice]

39 minutes ago, teej6 said:

Whether people hate or like the prequels (I’m in the latter camp), one has to admit that Lucas was original. One need not like the Anakin backstory and the politics of the prequels to see that Lucas was ambitious in his themes and character arcs. JJ Abrams OTOH is a hack. All he did was recycle the OT in TFA. As for the third movie, I don’t know what the hell he’s doing... it’s all over the place, no continuity in character storylines or any storyline, no logic, and everyone and their grandmother has immense power. 

I don’t know about Lucas being all that original. You could point to all the obvious tropes and bits and pieces he’s nabbed from other movies to craft his films. New Hope is pretty much Hidden Forteess at times. What he did really well back in the day was taking all the things he loved as a kid and gave them a modern twist and added some craft.

Im trying hard to think about what in the Prequels feels ‘original’ and I’m coming up blank. 
 

There does seem to be huge bit of revisionism around the prequels now, mainly because you can put them beside the sequels which are souless rehashes, and say ‘oh well the prequels at least tried to tell a story and were original’

But you could also go the other way round and say ‘oh well at least sequels were mostly competently made and featured (marginally) less treading in poo’

 

[Kalbear]

1 minute ago, Heartofice said:

Im trying hard to think about what in the Prequels feels ‘original’ and I’m coming up blank. 

All stories have been done before, but - 

- Palpatine literally manufacturing a war in order to turn things from Republic to Empire is a pretty big lift as far as space opera on movies go

- Palpatine doing all of this entirely to get Anakin onto his side is an even bigger lift

- The Jedi as not particularly awesome paragons of virtue - showing how the good guys are reactionary mind controlling isolationists, constantly being outthought by others and being used for their own ends - is not something typical

- at the end it's a tragedy, which is pretty common for Shakespeare and pretty rare for serialized movies

1 minute ago, Heartofice said:

There does seem to be huge bit of revisionism around the prequels now, mainly because you can put them beside the sequels which are souless rehashes, and say ‘oh well the prequels at least tried to tell a story and were original’

They did! The actual core plot of the prequels could be really, really good. It wasn't because the acting was crap, it was too beholden to special effects and pacing was hideous. But the actual storyline could have been really great.

1 minute ago, Heartofice said:

But you could also go the other way round and say ‘oh well at least sequels were mostly competently made and featured (marginally) less treading in poo’

You can! The ST (at least TFA and TLJ) were very competently directed, fun, fast-paced and had good dialogue and character bits. (TROS is pretty much trash in every way)

The issue is that the OT is, for the most part, both a decent plot (albeit a fairly generic one) AND well-executed. 

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

5 minutes ago, RumHam said:

Now that's just bad advice. 

It was pretty fucked of of Leia to tell them not to eat the stormtroopers in that animated short. Respect their culture, Leia! You can't judge them by our values!

Holy shit that's awesome. I didn't even know about that. I was thinking of the scene from ROTJ.

Stuffing. The ration sticks are like stuffing.

Open him up, scoop out the giblets, pack him with maybe one-two hundred ration sticks, low-and-slow on the rotisserie for 6 hours; gourmet! Julia Childs couldn't do it better.

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

4 minutes ago, Kalbear Total Landscaping said:

All stories have been done before, but - 

- Palpatine literally manufacturing a war in order to turn things from Republic to Empire is a pretty big lift as far as space opera on movies go

- Palpatine doing all of this entirely to get Anakin onto his side is an even bigger lift

- The Jedi as not particularly awesome paragons of virtue - showing how the good guys are reactionary mind controlling isolationists, constantly being outthought by others and being used for their own ends - is not something typical

- at the end it's a tragedy, which is pretty common for Shakespeare and pretty rare for serialized movies

They did! The actual core plot of the prequels could be really, really good. It wasn't because the acting was crap, it was too beholden to special effects and pacing was hideous. But the actual storyline could have been really great.

You can! The ST (at least TFA and TLJ) were very competently directed, fun, fast-paced and had good dialogue and character bits. (TROS is pretty much trash in every way)

The issue is that the OT is, for the most part, both a decent plot (albeit a fairly generic one) AND well-executed. 

Bombers in space.

Low speed chase.

Ships don't know which way is up.

[Kalbear]

1 minute ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

Bombers in space. 

Which is not any less stupid or more stupid than small fighters flying at around 300mph and shooting blasters at each other and missing.

1 minute ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

Low speed chase.

Everything in space is low speed in star wars. 

1 minute ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

Ships don't know which way is up.

this has been an issue since ANH.

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

6 minutes ago, Kalbear Total Landscaping said:

Which is not any less stupid or more stupid than small fighters flying at around 300mph and shooting blasters at each other and missing.

Sending big, lumbering, un-maneuverable, incredibly easy-to-kill ships against small fighters flying around at 300 mph shooting blasters is fantastically stupid. I thought the film demonstrated that perfectly, despite the fact that an officer and the best pilot in the resistance thought it was a good idea.

And since when does the Resistance have bombers? What civilian population were they planning on annihilating exactly?

11 minutes ago, Kalbear Total Landscaping said:

Everything in space is low speed in star wars. 

this has been an issue since ANH.

 Please explain.

[Kalbear]

17 minutes ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

Sending big, lumbering, un-maneuverable, incredibly easy-to-kill ships against small fighters flying around at 300 mph shooting blasters is fantastically stupid. I thought the film demonstrated that perfectly, despite the fact that an officer and the best pilot in the resistance thought it was a good idea.

And since when does the Resistance have bombers? What civilian population were they planning on annihilating exactly?

They probably got them from other systems. They don't have a ton of options, so they use what they've got. The bombers are old, shitty, and weak - that's sort of the point. 

17 minutes ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

 Please explain.

Everything in Star Wars moves absurdly slowly. It's all patterned on WW2 flight cameras, and that's the aesthetic. It makes for cool dogfights and scenes and is incredibly utterly stupid for a space system. In addition, everything uses inertia and gravity as if you need to be under constant acceleration to turn and move. So many other stories do their space combat far better than Star Wars does as far as being realistic in space. And that's been an issue since the very first movie.

[Rippounet]

I vaguely remember the bombers being found in one of the Rebels multi-episodes arc.

[Caligula_K3]

Everytime someone complains about the bombers or Admiral Holdo's manuever being unrealistic a little part of me dies inside. Star Wars space combat (or combat in general) has always been motivated by the rule of cool above all else. There are of course many reasons you can criticize a combat scene in any of these movies, but realism is completely missing the point.

[Rippounet]

8 minutes ago, Caligula_K3 said:

Everytime someone complains about the bombers or Admiral Holdo's manuever being unrealistic a little part of me dies inside. Star Wars space combat (or combat in general) has always been motivated by the rule of cool above all else. There are of course many reasons you can criticize a combat scene in any of these movies, but realism is completely missing the point.

Yeah, no. Neither lasguns nor ligtsabers are realistic, but once movies have established they exist, they shouldn't change. The issue isn't realism, it's consistency.

[TrueMetis]

The Y-wing is technically a bomber, though of a different type then the ones in the TLJ which were basically the star wars equivalent to the Flying Fortress in keeping with the "fighting in space is the same as WW2 dogfighting" aesthetic. (Seriously, the name of those bombers is the MG-100 StarFortress B/SF-17) It is kind of ridiculous because that's not how space works? Yeah, but that was every bit as true in ANH.

[DaveSumm]

1 hour ago, teej6 said:

Whether people hate or like the prequels (I’m in the latter camp), one has to admit that Lucas was original. One need not like the Anakin backstory and the politics of the prequels to see that Lucas was ambitious in his themes and character arcs.

I mean, reeeaaaally though? Ambitious how? The only people who actually have arcs at all needed arcs because the OT dictated that they did. The only part of the prequels that I personally didn’t expect was that Palpatine actually bothered to get democratically elected. I guess I figured he was just a dickhead tyrant who tyrantted his way to the top.

So I’ll grant that that might have been interesting, except Lucas is staggeringly bad at supplying information to an audience. He seemed to have this idea, but then completely forget to gradually educate the viewer as to its details. His entire relationship with Dooku and Dooku’s actions don’t make a lick of sense toward this plan.

My new favourite take down of the prequels:

He points out at the beginning that the Mr Plinkett review is the most in-depth, but I remain utterly baffled how anyone can sit through hours of that fucking voice.

[Ran]

The Holdo maneuver was dumb just because it completely breaks Star Wars fleet battles going forward unless they just decide to ignore it (which of course they will, if they ever do post-sequel films). Gorgeous image, though.

As to the bombers, it was stupid for two reasons:

1) For some reason the bombs reacted as if they were moving in atmosphere.  

2) The same tension could have been resolved by using something more in keeping with the _naval_ aspect of fleet battles by having the bombers be _torpedo_ bombers, that needed a long stretch of unimpeded time to target and fire off some sort of super torpedo thingamiajigs that could crack its super shields or whatever excuse they needed for the idea. Ala the old Wing Commander games, actually, where using a torpedo on a capital ship took upwards of half a minute or more from beginning targeting to locking on and firing.

New stuff is fine. Cool stuff is fine. But some effort at consistency, as @Rippounet says, shows some thoughtfulness.

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

36 minutes ago, Kalbear Total Landscaping said:

They probably got them from other systems. They don't have a ton of options, so they use what they've got. The bombers are old, shitty, and weak - that's sort of the point. 

Everything in Star Wars moves absurdly slowly. It's all patterned on WW2 flight cameras, and that's the aesthetic. It makes for cool dogfights and scenes and is incredibly utterly stupid for a space system. In addition, everything uses inertia and gravity as if you need to be under constant acceleration to turn and move. So many other stories do their space combat far better than Star Wars does as far as being realistic in space. And that's been an issue since the very first movie.

According to Wookiepedia, they're kind of new and they're kind of awesome.

Trust me, suspension of disbelief is not a problem for me, so long as the rules aren't bent to the point of breaking once they are established. But even within the established conceits of the Star Wars universe, the low speed chase depicted in TLJ is incredibly stupid. The First Order has this massive fleet and they're just sitting there? It never occurred to these assholes to light speed some of those ships around the crawling Resistance ships and start pounding them from more than one direction?

I'm still trying to understand how "up" was problematic in ANH.

18 minutes ago, Caligula_K3 said:

Everytime someone complains about the bombers or Admiral Holdo's manuever being unrealistic a little part of me dies inside. Star Wars space combat (or combat in general) has always been motivated by the rule of cool above all else. There are of course many reasons you can criticize a combat scene in any of these movies, but realism is completely missing the point.

I never complained about the Holdo Maneuver. That was pretty cool actually. Though I thought it was hilarious when it was suggested in the mission briefing in TROS and Poe delivered the immortal reply, "that was a million to one shot". Implying of course that Holdo was actually trying to escape. 

I didn't even mention the insanity of that sith knife.

9 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

Yeah, no. Neither lasguns nor ligtsabers are realistic, but once movies have established they exist, they shouldn't change. The issue isn't realism, it's consistency.

This.

[Kalbear]

2 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

Yeah, no. Neither lasguns nor ligtsabers are realistic, but once movies have established they exist, they shouldn't change. The issue isn't realism, it's consistency.

I don't get this, at least about the bombers. Bombers have been shown to exist in the movies in several places. The bombers that are shown in TLJ are absurdly antiquated bullshit things, but they aren't much different than TIE bombers as far as plan or function. They are different than Y-Wings in that those are explicitly the kind of torpedo bomber used against capital ships (again, like in WW2) and not the kind of bombing areas like these are.

But to say that they're not consistent? Come on. 

3 minutes ago, DaveSumm said:

I mean, reeeaaaally though? Ambitious how? The only people who actually have arcs at all needed arcs because the OT dictated that they did. The only part of the prequels that I personally didn’t expect was that Palpatine actually bothered to get democratically elected. I guess I figured he was just a dickhead tyrant who tyrantted his way to the top.

Anakin's descent to the Dark side could have been amazing. The Jedi losing not because of Palpatine but because of their incredible institutional weaknesses is an even bigger ambition.

As an example: Anakin is shown through his entire life, starting with his freedom, how incredibly bullshit the Jedi path is. From Qui-Gon rigging a dice game to free him to being told he can't be taught because he's too old, to then being told you can't care about anyone and can't do anything except defend, only to be lauded time and time again when he does the right thing? His mom dies largely because the Jedi won't get off their ass and free slaves, as an example, and wouldn't let him care for her for over 10 years. The Jedi at every single instance they can tell him the wrong thing to do, and he goes ahead and does things in spite of them, and succeeds.

And they're cool with it! Because it lets them succeed at some of their goals, and they're too feckless to do anything else. 

That inversion - of being told that the Jedi are the awesome super knights of sweetness and coolness, that Luke not killing his dad is the supreme act of bravery and love and that's what a true Jedi is, only to find out that that was what Luke wanted the Jedi to be and none of it was true? That's awesome. And it's another reason I love TLJ and the way they took things - because they took one of the best themes of the PT and expanded on it with Luke's descent. 

[Kalbear]

1 minute ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

I'm still trying to understand how "up" was problematic in ANH.

Darth Vader being thrown into craziness as he gets shot by the Falcon. Luke being told to 'pull up' and getting confused about where he was on the Death Star run. The Falcon throwing everyone all over the place when they maneuver. 

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

 

5 minutes ago, Ran said:

1) For some reason the bombs reacted as if they were moving in atmosphere.  

Apparently the bombers project a gravity beam to help the bombs fall because that's much more better.

[Heartofice]

I don’t care about bombers being unrealistic, I just wonder why you’d need them when you have Y wings with torpedos