Star Wars: Entering an uncivilized era

[Jaxom 1974]

28 minutes ago, KalVsWade said:

 

Not really; at the very least you need exposition on that. You need exposition to understand why he's been hiding, what he's been doing, and what the point of it all is. You can just do that via actual talking or by flashbacks or something like that, but it's not a great narrative fit to just drop the cliffhanger the previous movie left on. 

 

See, this is where you end up, as a matter of course, adding a bridging movie to help with understanding what was supposed to be that time gap.  Call it A Feast For Jedi...or something akin to that...

[Lord Varys]

3 minutes ago, Ran said:

That is the first Star Wars TV project trailer that has left me really excited. And the scene at the 34 second mark gives such THX-1138 vibes.

Maybe it's just my appreciation for Rogue One speaking, but this seems to suggest that it's intending to be a genuinely serious, adult story in the Star Wars universe. 

Have the same issues with that trailer as I have with Rogue One. I don't care about a Star Wars that's basically humans only.  I'm going to watch that because reports tell us that they will really flesh out Mon Mothma ... aside from that there seems to be little of interest in there.

The Andor character seems to be the perfect antithesis to how I'd a Rebellion show to be - either make your main character an idealist believing in democracy who ends up developing a harder side out of bare necessity or go with a disillusioned Imperial who slowly but surely is drawn into the world of the Rebels.

Apparently, Andor is not exactly going to meet either of those profiles.

15 minutes ago, KalVsWade said:

One of the best things TFA did was make the fights actually reflect the story instead of just being cool choreography - something that people love about Rebels at times too (particularly the Obi-Wan/Maul final duel). Finn is completely outmatched. Kylo Ren is playing with him throughout the fight. It's very similar to how the duel looks in Rob Roy at the end too. Only when Kylo actually gets hurt does he finish things off and he stops fucking around. 

I didn't mean his confrontation with Fetish Guy - I meant him wielding the thing in general. He should have no training for that at all.

15 minutes ago, KalVsWade said:

I kind of agree with it personally. I get why others don't, but recognizing that the Jedi were a very shitty organization who caused a whole lot of shit and were unable to stop the one thing that they were supposedly put together to do is not actually crap.

No, that's just silly fannish interpretation there. The Jedi were neither a shitty organization, nor would Luke Skywalker ever believe they were. He believed his dad was still a good guy in ROTJ, after all. And he, Luke Skywalker, was the new head of the Jedi Order. He could make sure they wouldn't suck even if he thought Yoda and Obi-Wan and their colleagues sucked ... which he just never thought.

15 minutes ago, KalVsWade said:

But Luke couldn't be going on a quest; he had to be in one place. Because there's a map to him that's been around for years. He had to be there, be reliably there, and when TFA ends he is there, so he can't be 'going off on a quest'. He's at that spot. 

Luke later was on a quest as per TROS. But I didn't mean that he would have been on a quest which eventually had him stranded on that planet but rather that he had to get to that place for a reason. And he certainly could still have trying to do something on that planet, something he needed help with, something he couldn't leave behind, something he had to access, to defeat, or otherwise interact with.

But, sure, the entire thing of there being 'a map to Luke Skywalker' was total crap. Luke Skywalker is a person, not a place, so no map will ever lead to him. And since people can move, there would be no guarantee that Luke would still be where he may have gone to decades earlier (or whenever).

15 minutes ago, KalVsWade said:

Now, I think that they could have answered that in maybe a more satisfactory way - that Luke is there because this is the actual source of Snoke's power, that he is doing all he can to simply stop that power at all costs to him, that he cannot leave - but that also goes against everything we know about Luke's personality and passions to date.

Yes, sure, and that's why there should have been answer to this which fit with Luke's character and not a generic 'The Jedi in the PT sucked' explanation.

15 minutes ago, KalVsWade said:

They can't just have Luke and Rey go off and have a connection together because it means that Luke is totally fine with the people he loves dying, but some random gal from Jakku coming along and he drops all that? Hoo boy, the fanboi howls on that would have been bad.

Well, if Rey had been Luke's daughter or niece or otherwise important in the Snoke mystery business there could have been an explanation there. I mean, the whole point of Rey-Luke certainly was that he would train her, right?

15 minutes ago, KalVsWade said:

And Luke leaving his daughter and his partner on a sand planet and not letting anyone know about it and just abandoning them? Is both an absolutely HORRIBLE character arc for Luke AND is a retread of TESB, something that was complained about again!

Sure, TFA was a silly retread of the OT, but that can be changed if we accept that TFA is a reality. Sure, they would have to come up with a very good reason why Rey was stranded on Jakku. But being Palpatine's granddaughter also didn't explain this, so who cares? I mean, let's say Rey was another magical Anakin-like child and Luke had a vision that Snoke would destroy everything if he ever found her. That could kind of justify erasing her memory and stranding her at a place where nobody would ever look for her.

It wouldn't be a great plot, of course, but desert girl was no great setup, either, just a female copycat of both Anakin and Luke.

[Jaxom 1974]

32 minutes ago, Ran said:

That is the first Star Wars TV project trailer that has left me really excited. And the scene at the 34 second mark gives such THX-1138 vibes.

Maybe it's just my appreciation for Rogue One speaking, but this seems to suggest that it's intending to be a genuinely serious, adult story in the Star Wars universe. 

Yeah.  This seems to be much more than just Andor's story, and possibly what I was mentioning before: How do the various, disparate cells of Rebellion find their way to joining forces.  That could be a very good story.  That there appears to be some sort of POV coming from the side of the Empire also?  That's good too.

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

I'm liking that Andor trailer. One can hope. 

[Myrddin]

Star Wars Celebration = Lots of Lucasfilm stuff today:

https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/star-wars-disney-plus-series-skeleton-crew-jude-law-1235278548/

 

(New Willow trailer is posted in Trailer thread)

[Lord Varys]

9 minutes ago, Jaxom 1974 said:

Yeah.  This seems to be much more than just Andor's story, and possibly what I was mentioning before: How do the various, disparate cells of Rebellion find their way to joining forces.  That could be a very good story.  That there appears to be some sort of POV coming from the side of the Empire also?  That's good too.

From what I heard

Spoiler

The first three episodes will focus on Andor's home planet and how the Empire is dismantling it in a colonialist fashion. Not that bad an idea in principle, but we have already seen that in Rebels and Rogue One - it could be more interesting to see how the Empire also sucks for the average Imperial citizen. But more importantly - having the all-human Empire exploit and all-human planet is a bad choice in my opinion.

From the fourth episode onwards the focus will shift/also include Mon Mothma who seems to be the female lead of the show, and they have been teasing that this is really going to be very interesting. I think we got a glimpse of Mon Mothma addressing the Imperial Senate in the trailer. That could be really powerful, just as it could be if they actually tried to depict Imperial politics on the mid-tier level.

 

[Kalbear]

51 minutes ago, Lord Varys said:

I didn't mean his confrontation with Fetish Guy - I meant him wielding the thing in general. He should have no training for that at all.

Every trooper gets training with hitting things with a stick. Even if he's a janitor as his MOS, he still went through basic. 

The idea that you can't press a button and wave a stick around and that's a nitpick is pretty ridiculous.

51 minutes ago, Lord Varys said:

No, that's just silly fannish interpretation there. The Jedi were neither a shitty organization, nor would Luke Skywalker ever believe they were. He believed his dad was still a good guy in ROTJ, after all. And he, Luke Skywalker, was the new head of the Jedi Order. He could make sure they wouldn't suck even if he thought Yoda and Obi-Wan and their colleagues sucked ... which he just never thought. 

The Jedi were absolutely a shitty organization. Hidebound, tradition-driven, reactionary, conservative, willing to sacrifice people at a moment's notice to get even the smallest personal advantage and deeply unconnected with caring. Luke won and saved the galaxy because he did precisely what Yoda and Obi-Wan told him not to do. He refused to kill Vader, he refused to give up hope, he refused to give up his friends and family.

That's not a silly fannish interpretation. That's literally what happened in the movies. We see both Luke succeeding because he ignores the precepts of his Jedi teaching and we see the entire Republic fall because they adhere entirely to the Jedi teachings.

51 minutes ago, Lord Varys said:

Luke later was on a quest as per TROS. But I didn't mean that he would have been on a quest which eventually had him stranded on that planet but rather that he had to get to that place for a reason. And he certainly could still have trying to do something on that planet, something he needed help with, something he couldn't leave behind, something he had to access, to defeat, or otherwise interact with.

So why wouldn't he reach out? Why the map? Why the isolation? None of that makes sense.

51 minutes ago, Lord Varys said:

Yes, sure, and that's why there should have been answer to this which fit with Luke's character and not a generic 'The Jedi in the PT sucked' explanation.

To me, Luke trying to go the Jedi way and it failing him in almost the same kind of way it failed Anakin did, actually, fit his character. 

51 minutes ago, Lord Varys said:

Well, if Rey had been Luke's daughter or niece or otherwise important in the Snoke mystery business there could have been an explanation there. I mean, the whole point of Rey-Luke certainly was that he would train her, right?

Sure, TFA was a silly retread of the OT, but that can be changed if we accept that TFA is a reality. Sure, they would have to come up with a very good reason why Rey was stranded on Jakku. But being Palpatine's granddaughter also didn't explain this, so who cares? I mean, let's say Rey was another magical Anakin-like child and Luke had a vision that Snoke would destroy everything if he ever found her. That could kind of justify erasing her memory and stranding her at a place where nobody would ever look for her.

It wouldn't be a great plot, of course, but desert girl was no great setup, either, just a female copycat of both Anakin and Luke.

If Rey had been Luke's daughter then he completely abandoned his daughter and no one knows why. If he's her uncle that's only slightly better, except then you have either Han being a douchebag, Leia being a deadbeat mom, or there being a third Skywalker child? Come on. This is bullshit telenovela garbage. 

And yes, it wouldn't have been a great plot to mindwipe her for odd reasons, and it still wouldn't explain the map, or what happened with Kylo Ren, or why he's on Acht-To, or any of that. You can come up with a bunch of possible things but the issue is that ALL of them aren't very good. TLJ did something that arguably wasn't great (I personally like it, Ran doesn't) but it was at least a different arc for the characters and did offer explanations. 

[Kalbear]

1 hour ago, Jaxom 1974 said:

See, this is where you end up, as a matter of course, adding a bridging movie to help with understanding what was supposed to be that time gap.  Call it A Feast For Jedi...or something akin to that...

I'm gonna end you if you bring up Luke's fat pink mast

[Ran]

1 hour ago, Myrddin said:

Star Wars Celebration = Lots of Lucasfilm stuff today:

https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/star-wars-disney-plus-series-skeleton-crew-jude-law-1235278548/

 

Skeleton Crew sounds like it might be a little bit similar to Star Trek: Prodigy -- pretty obvious the four kids end up controlling a spaceship and go zooming about the galaxy, though Jude Law's role is a question mark. Maybe a bit of Explorers, too...

Maybe Jude Law is Ulyssess? Not Joyce's, not Homer's, but..

ETA: Re: Andor, for those who forgot the sizzle reel, there'll be plenty of aliens:

 

[polishgenius]

2 hours ago, Ran said:

He screwed the pooch, is all I can say, despite on an individual scene-to-scene basis his obviously being an excellent director with a great visual style. He created something that did not fit well with what came before and then left it in a place where the people calling the shots didn't want it to be and so the third film was spent trying to correct for it.

 

 

I get some of the criticisms of TLJ, or just why people dislike it, even though I don't - but blaming Rhian Johnson for TRoS's failures is just a bit odd imo.

Two reasons: first, he didn't make it as some kind of guerrilla film project where he dropped a finished Star Wars films they had to put out. They'll have known what he meant to do before he started filming, and it's not as if they haven't booted directors during filming or made big changes to a movie after primary filming finished because they didn't like where it ended. So they were obviously fine with what he was doing until it came out and the backlash hit.
Second: regardless of what you think about how Johnson moved on the plots TFA set up, or where it left everything in its own right, there clearly were ways to take it that didn't involve just trying to recant everything so hard that it ended up not only undoing all the progress of TLJ, but a lot of its own plot points as well. They just gave it to a director who it turns out clearly didn't have the imagination for that. Like killing Snoke in particular was an odd choice that left them some difficulty, but Palpatine returning as the solution? There were far better solutions in play for Abrams to use, some of them which the film even hints towards (a broken and wild Kylo battling with Hux for control of the new order had potential for example, but was squandered in the stupidest possible way). None of that mess is Rhian Johnson's fault, even if you hate TLJ on its own merits.   

[Darryk]

Wow, I wasn't interested in Andor at all when it was announced but after that trailer I'm very interested.

Now THAT looks like a new and interesting take on Star wars that actually looks to build on the universe rather than trashing it. See Rian Johnson? That's how it's done.

[Ran]

See my earlier post about the lack of planning as being the biggest problem. And that's certainly on Lucasfilm. That said... it directly led to a laissez-faire "This'll work, go for it" approach to Johnson, and the final product was clearly something Lucasfilm regretted, or why else turn to JJ to try and fix it and get it back on course?tentpole sequels and the picture's different -- they tend to grow if they're doing things right.

The whole story of Lucasfilm right now is that they are constantly picking the wrong people to direct things, announcing projects and then cancelling them (hecl, it sounds like Rogue Squadron may never actually happen, with Jenkins stuck in script development and Waititi's film being pushed ahead of it in the schedule), and so on. The new trilogy fiasco is just another part of it. 

Rogue One's existence is a bloody miracle, and even that had a difficult birth.

[RumHam]

Just now, Ran said:

See my earlier post about the lack of planning as being the biggest problem. And that's certainly on Lucasfilm. That said... it directly led to a laissez-faire "This'll work, go for it" approach to Johnson, and the final product was clearly something Lucasfilm regretted, or why else turn to JJ to try and fix it and get it back on course?

I always assumed they turned back to JJ because they lost faith in Trevarrow after he released a really bad movie. Also all the Rogue One and Solo director stuff probably didn't help.

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

3 minutes ago, RumHam said:

I always assumed they turned back to JJ because they lost faith in Trevarrow after he released a really bad movie. Also all the Rogue One and Solo director stuff probably didn't help.

Are you thinking of Josh Trank? And no, that's not the reason why. 

[Ran]

10 minutes ago, RumHam said:

I always assumed they turned back to JJ because they lost faith in Trevarrow after he released a really bad movie. Also all the Rogue One and Solo director stuff probably didn't help.

Johnson was initially going to write the story for the third film and hand it off to another director to film, as well as doing his own trilogy. That plan changed sometime in 2015 when filming began on TLJ. Trevarrow was indeed brought on... and then dropped, and I'm sure his much-buzzed-about The Book of Henry bombing had an effect (just as most assume the outcry at the final episode of Game of Thrones seems to have killed D&D's Star Wars trilogy).

So they went back to the drawing board. Johnson was free, he wasn't doing anything in particular until he was announced to direct Knives Out in late 2018, but he's stated that Lucasfilm and Disney did not approach him. And so it's J.J. who came back on board. And probably at a much higher quote than Johnson, too. 

And of course his trilogy vanished into the ether as well.

 

[DaveSumm]

I thought Trevorrow left because … well, why would you stay? Who wants to fix that mess? 

Fundamentally, the idea that you could play telephone with the franchise you just bought for $4b was just an awful, bizarre decision. 

[RumHam]

17 minutes ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

Are you thinking of Josh Trank? And no, that's not the reason why. 

I might have been conflating them a bit. He was going to do Bobba Fett right?

I read Trevorrow's script when it leaked and thought it was a lot better than what we got.

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

44 minutes ago, Ran said:

The whole story of Lucasfilm right now is that they are constantly picking the wrong people to direct things, announcing projects and then cancelling them (hecl, it sounds like Rogue Squadron may never actually happen, with Jenkins stuck in script development and Waititi's film being pushed ahead of it in the schedule), and so on. The new trilogy fiasco is just another part of it. 

Keep in mind, when Rogue Squadron was announced no one knew what 2021 was going to look like vis a' vis Covid. I remember having an exchange with someone one the Covid thread who wildly overestimated what vaccine uptake in the United States would be. They probably also made assumptions about D+ subscriber growth and how quickly the parks business would recover. 

 Would not be surprised if the reason Rogue squadron got pushed back was because Disney decided not to commit 300-400 million dollars on a feature film when they could put that money toward more solid bets on D+ and the MCU. 2020 and 2021 were so bad for them financially that they need those bets. I don't think it was a coincidence that the RS delay was made public two days before Disneys Q3 2021 earnings report.

26 minutes ago, DaveSumm said:

I thought Trevorrow left because … well, why would you stay? Who wants to fix that mess? 

Fundamentally, the idea that you could play telephone with the franchise you just bought for $4b was just an awful, bizarre decision. 

 

18 minutes ago, RumHam said:

I might have been conflating them a bit. He was going to do Bobba Fett right?

I read Trevorrow's script when it leaked and thought it was a lot better than what we got.

Treverrow left because Steven Spielberg looked at him with puppy dog eyes while Universal parked a dump truck full of money in his driveway to make some movie about dinosaurs. True story. I heard something similar happened with Taika Watiti and the Akira adaptation he was working on for Warner Brothers. 

Sluts. 

ETA:

 

[Kalbear]

5 minutes ago, DaveSumm said:

I thought Trevorrow left because … well, why would you stay? Who wants to fix that mess? 

Fundamentally, the idea that you could play telephone with the franchise you just bought for $4b was just an awful, bizarre decision. 

Trevorrow left because they didn't like his take. And the reason they didn't like his take was because he made Kylo Ren a bad guy - the bad guy - without any real redemption for him. They brought JJ back in because they wanted to hit a date, basically, and they knew he could do that. 

[DMC]

On 5/23/2022 at 11:20 AM, Myrddin said:

Is this the point in this Star Wars thread we return to discussing Batman? Because y'all are all out of topics as we wait for Friday.

8 more hours.  Nice work everybody!