The Mandalorian Season 3 - Season Two Spoilers

[Mark Antony]

The most emotional part of the episode imo (Mando taking his helmet off) didn’t involve any OT nostalgia

[Werthead]

I've seen some interesting casting ideas for picking up with Luke, Leia and Han after the OT in a Mando-era project. Some of these are problematic, most notably the insistence on casting Sebastian Stan as "young" Luke. Stan is 38 now, so by the time any likely project rolled around he'd be almost twenty years older than Luke was in the OT (and correspondingly almost 10 years short of Luke in the ST). He's wearing it well, but I think that makes it unlikely you could use him unless you were going for a very specific time period, say when Luke tried to kill Ben, and frankly you could still use Hamill for that.

The favoured fan casting for Leia seems to be Millie Bobby Brown, who is obviously way too young right now to pick up after the OT (Carrie Fisher was 27 when she filmed RotJ, playing 23; Brown is 16), though some kind of "Young Leia" story on Alderaan could be viable. Give it a decade and you could probably do a solid post-OT-era story with Brown, Ehrenreich returning as Han (who was fine in Solo, but not outstanding; I'd be wary of risking another choice at this juncture), Glover as Lando and a newcomer as Luke.

Incidentally, it just occurred to me that Luke is going to be flying his X-wing back where he came from with Baby Yoda sitting on his lap, which seems a bit dangerous. "Just going to sleep for a bit...leave the proton torpedoes alone!"

[Vaughn]

11 hours ago, Slurktan said:

Except that's the point.  Luke (and Vader in his scene) didn't do that.  They mopped the fucking floor with normals. Ahsoka playing with her food just makes her look bad, Which is a weird thing to do when you are trying to introduce her to people who have no idea who she is.

Vader was an absolute apex force user - that's the whole point of the OT and presumably Luke became one. Haven't watched Clone Wars yet, just Rebels, but I just assumed that Ahsoka was one tier down from that and didn't finish training. It's true that she held her own against Vader but partially that was due to specifics of their relationship I think.

[Heartofice]

Finally managed to get some time to watching the final two episodes. Saw them on a big screen, high quality, and they looked gorgeous. Also the soundtrack doesn't get mentioned enough but it really is perfect, I find myself humming it enthusiastically after every episode.

So yeah, I think the season was pretty successful, it was a lot of fun, as talked about, it's simple fun, it doesn't have a ton of depth and it doesn't need to. I feel satisfied by the end and look forward to each new episode.

Having said that, if there is something I wanted to say, it's that if you are going have a show which main focus is it's action then you need to make that action better and it needs to stand out. Right now I think a lot of the fights and set pieces are pretty lackluster.

Partly I think it is the problem with the red shirt storm troopers who just continuously run into laser fire without offering anything. It means that there is very rarely any tension in fights. Add in that Mando's armour makes him virtually invincible, I mean even to the dark sabre, and there is rarely a point where you are even a little worried about the outcome. 
Which is why there needs to be more genuine threat on the show, the Dark Troopers got a bit of short shrift if you ask me, they were built up all season but Luke chops through them like butter, and there wasn't enough of them in action to be genuinely impactful. Plus they looked a little silly. 

So my one request would be more threat in action scenes, but actually also more invention. Go watch a Jackie Chan movie or even the Russo bros marvel movies to see how to direct action and make it interesting, more variety in the scenes, more contrast in fighting styles, less pew pew shooty shooty easy peasy.

Oh, and I'm sure I don't need to mention it but who is the production company who is able to convince Disney that they can do life like de-aged human CGI characters? Who is falling for that pitch every time? I wonder what happened, did they film all the scenes and they said 'its fine, we'll do Luke in post, it's gonna look great!' and then Peyton Reed has his head in his hands when sees the final result?

If he'd known it was gonna look like that surely you'd shoot it differently, make everything dark, top light it and keep Lukes hood on the whole time. Something, anything would be better than that creepy monstrosity. 

But overall, loved the season.

[Jaxom 1974]

Dark Troopers came out of the old EU, right? One of the videogames, maybe?  If so, there is a bit of symbolism in having Luke, the Disney Luke, cutting them down and essentially brushing them aside. Add in the idea that Din, the New Disney Star Wars Guy, had issues with just one of them, and suddenly you realize that everything is still always going to be about Luke...

 

(OK, maybe that's stretching a little...)

[Corvinus85]

31 minutes ago, Jaxom 1974 said:

Dark Troopers came out of the old EU, right? One of the videogames, maybe?  If so, there is a bit of symbolism in having Luke, the Disney Luke, cutting them down and essentially brushing them aside. Add in the idea that Din, the New Disney Star Wars Guy, had issues with just one of them, and suddenly you realize that everything is still always going to be about Luke...

 

(OK, maybe that's stretching a little...)

I'm pretty sure that what we got was EU Luke, now fully adopted by Disney. Dark Troopers, Thrawn, etc. are other examples of Disney slowly bringing in some of the good EU stuff.

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

1 hour ago, Heartofice said:

Oh, and I'm sure I don't need to mention it but who is the production company who is able to convince Disney that they can do life like de-aged human CGI characters? Who is falling for that pitch every time? I wonder what happened, did they film all the scenes and they said 'its fine, we'll do Luke in post, it's gonna look great!' and then Peyton Reed has his head in his hands when sees the final result?

If he'd known it was gonna look like that surely you'd shoot it differently, make everything dark, top light it and keep Lukes hood on the whole time. Something, anything would be better than that creepy monstrosity. 
 

Usually this comes down to time and/or money. The problem is that people have been looking at him for over 40 years. If its off by an inch or off by a mile, it's still going to look off. The Luke deepfake was actually pretty good, but not close enough.

[Heartofice]

2 minutes ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

Usually this comes down to time and/or money. The problem is that people have been looking at him for over 40 years. If its off by an inch or off by a mile, it's still going to look off. The Luke deepfake was actually pretty good, but not close enough.

I don't think it matters who it was supposed to be, it looked totally off. The face didn't sit well on the body, it didn't sit well on the frame of the head, it didn't move well, it was deep into the uncanny valley.

The point is, it almost never works. It's an incredibly hard thing to pull off and the sensible thing is not even attempt it. They've tried it with Peter Cushing and Carrie Fisher now and it's been really offputting, and that was with more money and time than they had to do Luke. So anyone with any smarts would say 'nah, we'll try something else'. 

All they really had to do was make sure Luke never takes his hood off, make the lighting of the scene different, so that for instance it's darker, there is emergency lighting flashing everywhere, and then all you need to do is model the bottom of his face. Might need to rewrite the scene a bit but it makes it a lot less cringeworthy. 

[DaveSumm]

I don’t understand why this, presumably done by some person with a PC, looks better when it’s over a year old:

Maybe Jim Carrey was purposefully selected as he works better on Jack Nicholson? Or is there more available footage of Carrey to work from than Hamill?

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

 

[Corvinus85]

1 hour ago, Heartofice said:

Oh, and I'm sure I don't need to mention it but who is the production company who is able to convince Disney that they can do life like de-aged human CGI characters? Who is falling for that pitch every time? I wonder what happened, did they film all the scenes and they said 'its fine, we'll do Luke in post, it's gonna look great!' and then Peyton Reed has his head in his hands when sees the final result?

In a recent interview, Favreau said they did that "with whatever we had". Sounds like they rushed it, or had limited resources. Maybe to reduce the chance of leaks, they took less time and had fewer people involved. I think it was a good choice to bring Luke back like that, as a re-introduction moment, but they need to re-cast for future plotlines.

[Jaxom 1974]

59 minutes ago, Corvinus85 said:

I'm pretty sure that what we got was EU Luke, now fully adopted by Disney. Dark Troopers, Thrawn, etc. are other examples of Disney slowly bringing in some of the good EU stuff.

I agree that many EU things have bled into Disney Wars. Thrawn, depending on where it goes, being one of the better things.

That doesn't mean there isn't a little symbism in Luke, the OG of Star Wars, just absolutely wrecking something people think was good about the EU...

[DaveSumm]

Yep, still confused ... this looks way WAY better.

I know SW has a rocky history of editing itself, but I’d be totally down for them to improve this later ... I mean they edited out jeans guy.

[Maltaran]

5 hours ago, Vaughn said:

Vader was an absolute apex force user - that's the whole point of the OT and presumably Luke became one. Haven't watched Clone Wars yet, just Rebels, but I just assumed that Ahsoka was one tier down from that and didn't finish training. It's true that she held her own against Vader but partially that was due to specifics of their relationship I think.

Having literally just finished watching Clone Wars but not yet watched Rebels, I'm tempted to agree - she's definitely one of the strongest Jedi we've seen, not on Anakin's level but certainly close to Obi-Wan by the end.

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

1 hour ago, DaveSumm said:

Yep, still confused ... this looks way WAY better.

I know SW has a rocky history of editing itself, but I’d be totally down for them to improve this later ... I mean they edited out jeans guy.

So its a deepfake of a deep fake? That's like Deep²fake²? 

You're right though. That's miles better.

I'll never forgive them for Jeans guy.

[Kalbear]

Okay, I got it. When they said they used what they had around - well, they're basically using NVidia graphics libraries and probably BF2 assets. 

That's hilarious and sad. They could have easily done so much better.

[TrueMetis]

Is Luke a deepfake in the show? Based on how it looked I assumed it was CGI.

[DaveSumm]

17 minutes ago, TrueMetis said:

Is Luke a deepfake in the show? Based on how it looked I assumed it was CGI.

Yea CGI. My (limited) understanding is that that deepfake wouldn’t look nearly as good without using the CGI as a starting point, so it’s not like a YouTuber could do that from scratch. But I don’t really get why a Disney budget doesn’t allow you to do what they did on top of that. I was kinda waiting for this but I didn’t realise it’d be so quick, there’s superior Rogue One scenes on YouTube and The Irishman has already been improved on.

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

Deepfake is the speculation, though it hasn't been confirmed I don't think. Some of that comes from the lack dynamic camera or character movement in those scenes.

Deepfakes can look amazing but they tend to look a bit janky if there's a lot of relative movement between the camera and the face it's shooting. That's why the Jim Carrey Shining scene is so remarkable.

Tarkin in Rogue One was motion Capture with a 3D sculpt. 

[Lord of Rhinos]

On 12/21/2020 at 12:44 PM, Kalbear Total Landscaping said:

That's the 'female-centric' one that they're doing? The one that they couldn't even bother to give a synopsis for?

Nice job. 

I mean it has as much a description as the other projects:

 

"Leslye Headland, Emmy Award-nominated creator of the mind-bending series Russian Doll, brings a new Star Wars series to Disney+ with The Acolyte. The Acolyte is a mystery-thriller that will take the audience into a galaxy of shadowy secrets and emerging dark side powers in the final days of the High Republic era.^[3]"