Star Wars: a story for every fan? (Andor Spoilers)

[DaveSumm]

1 hour ago, Darryk said:

As much as I despise Johnson's take, the fault lies mainly with JJ Abrams. He is the number one reason the sequel trilogy sucked. He introduced a bunch of in threads in Episode 7 (the mysterious disappearance of Luke, the introduction of Snoke) but had no plan for where those p;lot threads would go, simply leaving it to Johnson who, of course, was too lazy to take those threads anywhere interesting so just clumsily killed them off.

There was no binding vision for the three films and that's on Abrams. Imagine getting the opportunity to make an entire Star Wars trilogy and instead of planning out a cohesive story, just choosing to wing it.

Surely it’s on whoever hired Abrams? Disney said “let’s get a safe pair of hands to land a SW movie for the first time since 1983, tee up some cool shit and then plan later”. Abrams is absolutely the go-to ‘safe hands / tee up cool shit’ guy, that’s what you get when you hire him.

I’ve always maintained that there exists a potential Episode VIII which takes what TFA lays down and makes something cool out of it, and we wouldn’t have got this retroactive downgrading of TFA in everyone’s heads. Instead, Johnson rejected all its ideas, and made a movie which I actually don’t think is bad in itself, but simply doesn’t function as either a sequel to TFA or as Episode VIII of a saga.

And as much as everyone hates Palpatine’s return, I do get what Abrams was going for; it was the only thread left to pull on to make any sort of sense that this actually is a saga and not just 6 films with 3 unrelated sequels.

So for me it makes more sense to blame Johnson, or whoever should’ve ensured Johnson made a more suitable film.

[sifth]

2 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

True, they are never going to go full out and praise Disney, but then it’s worth pointing out how much of an outlier something like Andor is. 

Even Midnight's Edge has made videos saying stuff like "Andor is a good show and it's a failure, because no ones watching it". They always need that negative spin, because their viewers are a bunch of hate mongers and nihilists. They can't just admit Disney did something right and try to get more people to watch it. I would call it madness, but when your brand is to sell people on hate, it does sort of make sense and we all know Disney is a popular thing on Youtube to hate these days.

[Heartofice]

5 minutes ago, sifth said:

Even Midnight's Edge has made videos saying stuff like "Andor is a good show and it's a failure, because no ones watching it". They always need that negative spin, because their viewers are a bunch of hate mongers and nihilists. They can't just admit Disney did something right and try to get more people to watch it. I would call it madness, but when your brand is to sell people on hate, it does sort of make sense and we all know Disney is a popular thing on Youtube to hate these days.

Yeah it’s basically audience capture, where you cannot say something that will lose you viewers. 

[sifth]

6 minutes ago, DaveSumm said:

Surely it’s on whoever hired Abrams? Disney said “let’s get a safe pair of hands to land a SW movie for the first time since 1983, tee up some cool shit and then plan later”. Abrams is absolutely the go-to ‘safe hands / tee up cool shit’ guy, that’s what you get when you hire him.

 

Fun fact, Disney actually went through a rather huge list of director. A lot of people turned them down however, because they were too scared to touch the Star Wars IP at the time.

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/70686/10-directors-who-turned-down-star-wars

Here's a list of some of them for you, along with famous directors, who nearly worked on some of the classic films. Honestly from the people I know of on the list of directors they nearly hired, I think Brad Bird would have been the best choice. He's made some very strong and emotional films over the years and he doesn't believe in mystery box trash writing.

[Lord Varys]

12 minutes ago, DaveSumm said:

And as much as everyone hates Palpatine’s return, I do get what Abrams was going for; it was the only thread left to pull on to make any sort of sense that this actually is a saga and not just 6 films with 3 unrelated sequels.

So for me it makes more sense to blame Johnson, or whoever should’ve ensured Johnson made a more suitable film.

Going with Palpatine's return out of the blue in this silly manner was complete horseshit.

Abrams could have just brought back his Snoke character - the dead guy could have been a clone or surviving his death like Maul. Palpatine's return would have needed build-up and a proper explanation.

But, again, the real problem with the ST is the silly setting of TFA, not so much TLJ. That just makes it worse.

[sifth]

11 minutes ago, Lord Varys said:

Going with Palpatine's return out of the blue in this silly manner was complete horseshit.

Abrams could have just brought back his Snoke character - the dead guy could have been a clone or surviving his death like Maul. Palpatine's return would have needed build-up and a proper explanation.

But, again, the real problem with the ST is the silly setting of TFA, not so much TLJ. That just makes it worse.

Worse yet, Abrams didn't even bother to try and give us an explanation as to how the character survived; he just had Palpy recite some vague line about immortality from episode III and felt that was good enough.

The sequel films have been a very weird experience for me. I remember my friend bring his toy lightsaber, to the screening on Saturday night, for episode VII's opening weekend and turning it on, just as the lights were getting dark and everyone clapping at the screen, excited about what they were about to see. Fast forward a few years and suddenly people in the audience are booing at the screen, when Ben and Rey are suddenly kissing.

[DaveSumm]

21 minutes ago, Lord Varys said:

Abrams could have just brought back his Snoke character - the dead guy could have been a clone or surviving his death like Maul.

Still wouldn’t make it a saga in any way though.

[Lady Anna]

47 minutes ago, DaveSumm said:

I’ve always maintained that there exists a potential Episode VIII which takes what TFA lays down and makes something cool out of it, and we wouldn’t have got this retroactive downgrading of TFA in everyone’s heads. Instead, Johnson rejected all its ideas, and made a movie which I actually don’t think is bad in itself, but simply doesn’t function as either a sequel to TFA or as Episode VIII of a saga.

This is generally my opinion as well.

[Ran]

Lucas was cool with the proposal of the Emperor having cloned his body and transferred his spirit to it through arcane Sith magic, when Tom Veitch was hired to write Dark Empire. Given that, I've never understood why Palpatine's return in what seems clearly to be similar circumstances -- we even seem to see cloning vats! -- needed explanation or seemed out of leftfield. It was exactly in keeping with the only suggestion Lucas ever okayed for the return of the Emperor.

That said, it would all have worked a lot better if JJ had handled the 2nd film, even if on some levels it would almost certaintly not be as competent a film as what Rian Johnson made.

[JGP]

 

Intermission

 

 

 

[Lord Varys]

2 hours ago, Ran said:

Lucas was cool with the proposal of the Emperor having cloned his body and transferred his spirit to it through arcane Sith magic, when Tom Veitch was hired to write Dark Empire. Given that, I've never understood why Palpatine's return in what seems clearly to be similar circumstances -- we even seem to see cloning vats! -- needed explanation or seemed out of leftfield. It was exactly in keeping with the only suggestion Lucas ever okayed for the return of the Emperor.

That said, it would all have worked a lot better if JJ had handled the 2nd film, even if on some levels it would almost certaintly not be as competent a film as what Rian Johnson made.

The difference there is glaring - Tom Veitch did explain it, Abrams did not.

Also, of course, Dark Empire is not the weirdo final part of a disjointed set of movies pretending to be a trilogy, it is a comic series specifically dealing with Palpatine's return, Luke exploring his dark side, and Leia accepting her Jedi legacy.

You have to put yourself into the shoes of normal person watching that movie. They have every reason to believe Palpatine is dead. They don't know or care about an obscure comic book from the early 1990s.

The leftfield way there is obvious - Palpatine's return takes place in the fucking opening crawl. That's utter nonsense. It is like the Prologue of TWoW establishing that Tywin Lannister has just announced he is back from the dead and running the government now in the wake of Kevan's assassination.

The plot could have made sense if there had been no Snoke and Palpatine would have been Evil Hologram dude from the start. Hell, the entire story of Fetish Guy's obsession with being evil would have made more sense if he had wanted to licked Palpatine's boots. Palpatine was a genius ... Vader was a cripple and a failure. No sane person would want to emulate him.

3 hours ago, DaveSumm said:

Still wouldn’t make it a saga in any way though.

No, of course not, but it took the final movie into a completely different direction. It is like Darth Tyranus randomly returned as the the big bad in ROTJ.

[Lord Varys]

5 hours ago, sifth said:

Worse yet, Abrams didn't even bother to try and give us an explanation as to how the character survived; he just had Palpy recite some vague line about immortality from episode III and felt that was good enough.

Honestly, I already felt insulted by Snoke the Evil Hologram Dude back in TFA. That guy was so obviously a vapid ripoff of Palpatine that it was hard to watch it. As was the entire setting, which kind of felt like a bad remake of ANH. The Empire is now the ridiculously named 'First Order' (I don't think anyone understands what that's supposed to mean or convey), the Rebellion 'the Resistance' (if they had pronounced it French it may have had a nice ring to it) and the (New) Republic is a joke.

And if one considers Dark Empire, the funny thing is that this over-the-top comic book series is actually better plotted and written than the ST. Abrams ripped off DE not only with his cloned Palpatine but with his Starkiller Base nonsense - which is a variation of Palpatine's Galaxy Gun from DE II. The Galaxy Gun fires missiles through hyperspace which can destroy entire planets ... which is a much better concept than a silly Death Star planet which apparently can destroy planets in real time with no explanation at all.

It is a very sad thing when you realize that movie writers actually badly rip off comic books which are kind of over the top, anyway. Funnily enough, DE also did a much better job to introduce and create secondary characters and locations than any of the ST movies.

[karaddin]

9 hours ago, DaveSumm said:

I’ve always maintained that there exists a potential Episode VIII which takes what TFA lays down and makes something cool out of it, and we wouldn’t have got this retroactive downgrading of TFA in everyone’s heads. Instead, Johnson rejected all its ideas, and made a movie which I actually don’t think is bad in itself, but simply doesn’t function as either a sequel to TFA or as Episode VIII of a saga.

Yeah I agree with this. I think you could take the skeleton of tRoS and make a workable trilogy with a completely different middle movie, or you can actually continue the story from TLJ and make a compelling trilogy with a very different conclusion and thematic beats. The big one for me is that I'm convinced TLJ was setting up Kylo as the irredeemable big bad and needed a 3rd movie that followed through on that. 

If Disney were never going to allow that, and I think it's extremely likely to be the case, they should never have allowed TLJ to be made as it was. The failure of the trilogy is 90% a failure of the management lacking an actual story it wanted to tell.

[Lord Varys]

17 hours ago, karaddin said:

Yeah I agree with this. I think you could take the skeleton of tRoS and make a workable trilogy with a completely different middle movie, or you can actually continue the story from TLJ and make a compelling trilogy with a very different conclusion and thematic beats. The big one for me is that I'm convinced TLJ was setting up Kylo as the irredeemable big bad and needed a 3rd movie that followed through on that.

Not really. Fetish Guy is neither a compelling villain nor a compelling character (we never get any explanation why he wanted to be evil aside from 'he heard voices'). Rey and Finn also got fucked over as characters by TLJ and TROS, so nothing is salvagable there.

If you look at TLJ the movie doesn't even want to be the middle part of a trilogy. It fucks over pretty much every character and plot thread and original character from TFA and the OT while having a kind of symbolic ending of its own. Sure enough, Fetish Guy is still there, but he got his beating from Luke, and with Luke gone, the Jedi gone, and there being this weirdo symbolic last scene where you have kids discovering their force abilities this could have been the end.

Johnson made a movie that doesn't really need a sequel. In fact, it is quite impossible to make one that would feel as it would fit or was intended unlike, you know, with TFA which - for all its obvious flaws - definitely introduced characters and plot lines that needed to be resolved in sequel(s).

[sifth]

1 hour ago, Lord Varys said:

Not really. Fetish Guy is neither a compelling villain nor a compelling character (we never get any explanation why he wanted to be evil aside from 'he heard voices'). Rey and Finn also got fucked over as characters by TLJ and TROS, so nothing is salvagable there.

If you look at TLJ the movie doesn't even want to be the middle part of a trilogy. It fucks over pretty much every character and plot thread and original character from TFA and the OT while having a kind of symbolic ending of its own. Sure enough, Fetish Guy is still there, but he got his beating from Luke, and with Luke gone, the Jedi gone, and there being this weirdo symbolic last scene where you have kids discovering their force abilities this could have been the end.

Johnson made a movie that doesn't really need a sequel. In fact, it is quite impossible to make one that would feel as it would fit or was intended unlike, you know, with TFA which - for all its obvious flaws - definitely introduced characters and plot lines that needed to be resolved in sequel(s).

On the subject of Snoke, have you ever noticed that he acts like a completely different character, once Rian Johnson starts writing him. In the first film, he's a very calm and calculating character. Even as the Star Killer Base is blowing up, at the end of TFA, he's not showing any anger, his only concern is Kylo Ren and completing his training................because naturally it's going to be important down the line. Also he doesn't use his force powers to hurt his underlings when they fail him.

Fast forward a few years and we see Snoke again, only now he's constantly yelling at people. When Husk and Kylo Ren fail him he goes out of his way to use his force powers to hurt them. Also his so called "training" of Kylo Ren, was just him saying "he should be a ashamed that he lost to Rey".

I rather like Rian Johnson as a writer/director and can't wait to see the Glass Onion in a few weeks, but why did he want to make a sequel, that basically ignores most of what was set up before? It's madness, just pure madness. They should have just given him his own Star Wars film to make from the ground up.

[Lord Varys]

50 minutes ago, sifth said:

On the subject of Snoke, have you ever noticed that he acts like a completely different character, once Rian Johnson starts writing him. In the first film, he's a very calm and calculating character. Even as the Star Killer Base is blowing up, at the end of TFA, he's not showing any anger, his only concern is Kylo Ren and completing his training................because naturally it's going to be important down the line. Also he doesn't use his force powers to hurt his underlings when they fail him.

Fast forward a few years and we see Snoke again, only now he's constantly yelling at people. When Husk and Kylo Ren fail him he goes out of his way to use his force powers to hurt them. Also his so called "training" of Kylo Ren, was just him saying "he should be a ashamed that he lost to Rey".

Didn't watch the movies often enough to notice something like that ... however it strikes one as obvious that Abrams didn't intend for the second movie to be all training exercises, meaning we would have picked up the story on Snoke's world after at the end of the training and Rey/Luke back with Leia at whatever planet the story would continue.

Whilst one could make a case to start TLJ with the silly cliffhanger, this wasn't the only option. And there was no need at all to have Snoke's people find and attack the Resistance with a superior force at the beginning of the movie. That was all original TLJ plot.

But the worst part of TLJ definitely is their treatment of Luke. There is just no way that any of this makes sense.

The big problem with Snoke in general just is that he is another cackling evil hologram dude guy - we already have that guy, Star Wars didn't need another version of the character with a different (silly) name. If they wanted to make (one of) Leia and Han's kid(s) evil then they should have actually bothered with an accurate portrayal of the Skywalker-Solo clan - which should have been galactic royalty by that time - with the fall to the dark side having to do with hubris and decadence than an obsession with Darth Vader fetish roleplaying games (I mean, that might be fun with the dominatrix of your choice, but not as a plot device on the big screen).

Whilst the fall of Jacen Solo in the EU also has the guy identify too much with silly Anakin Skywalker (who was led around by the nose by a master manipulator) they at least had the grace to not have Jacen become the apprentice of Evil Hologram dude. He does have a mentor with Lumiya, but his journey to the Sith is more one of (mostly) independent research.

The ST could have gone with that, having the person become evil on their own, viewing political power as their right and prerogative in light of their very famous parents and their privileged upbringing. It could have been great if Leia's greatest enemy as head of state of the New Republic would have been her own child plotting to topple her because they finally wanted to rule themselves.

50 minutes ago, sifth said:

I rather like Rian Johnson as a writer/director and can't wait to see the Glass Onion in a few weeks, but why did he want to make a sequel, that basically ignores most of what was set up before? It's madness, just pure madness. They should have just given him his own Star Wars film to make from the ground up.

I mean, even if you want to go with an OT remake - which is what they all wanted to do - then it was madness to burn through both TESB and ROTJ in a single movie.

Even greater madness was it to actually go with Luke's pointless movie death in the wake of Carrie Fisher's actual death. They should have redone the ending at that point, going with Leia's death whilst keep Mark Hamill around as a main character for the third movie.

[RumHam]

32 minutes ago, Lord Varys said:

Luke's pointless movie death

To be fair it wasn't pointless. He died saving the rebellion from being snuffed out. It's basically the same stakes as Star Wars and TFA.

He had to die for the whole thing to work. If he's around kicking ass then who needs Rey?
 

[Slurktan]

1 hour ago, RumHam said:

To be fair it wasn't pointless. He died saving the rebellion from being snuffed out. It's basically the same stakes as Star Wars and TFA.

He had to die for the whole thing to work. If he's around kicking ass then who needs Rey?
 

Watch the movie again, Luke as a ghost catches and uses the lightsaber.  Him, Anakin, Mace Windu, Qui Gon all could have shown up as ghosts and killed the Emperor with absolutely zero help from Rey so the movie shows it as not needed.  On that note Auralnauts review of ROTS is particularly amusing when it points out where Rey teleportss the lightsaber to Kylo Ren and the implications therein.

[RumHam]

8 minutes ago, Slurktan said:

Watch the movie again

No deal.

12 minutes ago, Slurktan said:

Luke as a ghost catches and uses the lightsaber.  Him, Anakin, Mace Windu, Qui Gon all could have shown up as ghosts and killed the Emperor with absolutely zero help from Rey so the movie shows it as not needed. 

What? Obviously they couldn't do that. The rules to all this force ghost shit are vague and secondary to the story they're trying to tell at that moment. The make it up as they go, maybe she had to be there to focus their spirits.

There are a lot of complaints to have about the sequel trilogy but this is an odd one.

[Slurktan]

1 hour ago, RumHam said:

No deal.

What? Obviously they couldn't do that. The rules to all this force ghost shit are vague and secondary to the story they're trying to tell at that moment. The make it up as they go, maybe she had to be there to focus their spirits.

There are a lot of complaints to have about the sequel trilogy but this is an odd one.

the point is the ghosts can show up and pick up a rock and beat palpatine to death and he cant do anythign to them because they are ghosts