StardustCamellia

SilverWook said:

George worked much the same way. He didn’t have the sister thing worked out yet when Yoda spoke of another in Empire. Did Irvin Kershner have to know if Vader really was Luke’s father or not to make that scene work?

I think someone at Lucasfilm will be guiding things. People are not just going to make up whatever they want.

With Kathleen Kennedy at the helm of Lucasfilm, you know it won’t just be all willy nilly. And remember that while VIII and IX will not be written by JJ, he is still the EP on the movies. There will be a steady hand at the tiller. Just because someone won’t recieve a writing credit in the titles doesn’t mean they won’t be present or consulted in order to maintain continuity.

TavorX said:

StardustCamellia said:

Harmy said:

Maybe they just renamed Coruscant, just like they renamed everything else that is otherwise exactly the same 😃 Hopefully, we’ll learn more about these things in The First Order Strikes Back 😉

No, the Hosnian system (and Hosnian Prime) are not Coruscant.

Further proof here as well:

Hm. I hadn’t seen this yet. Most everything is about where it was on the NJO-series EU insert maps, as well as the Chronology full color books. But, since when are they putting the whole Anoat-Bespin-Hoth fustercluck into one system? Binary? Trinary? Hm.

The fact that you could see SKB’s shot from Takodana bugs me. It shouldn’t, Because Science Fantasy, but it does. It bugs me in a fundamentally wrong way, and is among my chief complaints about the movie. Sound in space I can dismiss, it’s an ‘audible sharpness’ thing. But the Starkiller beam left my brain hurting, to the point where I thought, initially, that Takodana and Hosnian Prime were in the same star system.

File under “how do magnets work?”. Thanks for sharing this image. Very interesting…

Harmy said:

Maybe they just renamed Coruscant, just like they renamed everything else that is otherwise exactly the same 😃 Hopefully, we’ll learn more about these things in The First Order Strikes Back 😉

No, the Hosnian system (and Hosnian Prime) are not Coruscant. I believe both some of the “Journey to Episode VII” stuff as well as the TFA novelization reveal that the seat of the Senate is on rotation, elected every so often, and that at the time, the Senate is at Hosnian Prime. But it is one of the Core Worlds, apparently. Odd, I know.

I’m generally not big on noevelizations, but I think I might have to give the TFA one a read.

Well, here’s some food for thought. It occurred to BuzzFeed to send someone with no prior SW experience to see TFA.

Indeed.

My need of Finn-Poe shenanigans is kingly. Not only is their on screen dynamic really fun and engaging, but Oscar Isaac has openly said he’s totally playing a bit of a shiptease with how he did his scenes with Finn, which is pretty amazing.

I think one of the more interesting things about all this is how TFA is the first film in the franchise since the OT to not revisit an iconic planet. So far we’ve had Jakku, Takodana, D’Qar, and SKB. No Tattooine, Coruscant, etc. I like how they’re opening up the galaxy a little more.

TavorX said:

SilverWook said:

It could always be a hologram recording. Especially if he thought he might not come back from confronting Kylo.

This is actually the most interesting suggestion. Some heart felt holo recording could really offer a balance of sadness and nostalgia that doesn’t take away from his death AND it negates the need for any flashbacks. Brilliant!

“If you’re watching this, then chances are, I’m probably dead. Chewie, don’t let that crazy kid crash the Falcon too bad.”

In all seriousness, I’m not sure how I’d feel about that. It’s tidy, but Han doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy to leave a sappy note behind. He was always one to put all his cards on the table. It would work as a narrative device if done right, but at the same time would (at least to me) feel genuinely OOC.

SilverWook said:

imperialscum said:

SilverWook said:

It would be an interesting experiment for someone who has never seen the OT to watch TFA.

It would most likely ruin his Star Wars experience. I would feel guilty simply if I did not try to convince a friend to watch OT first, let alone purposely do some “interesting experiments”.

Someone is bound to drag their non fan boyfriend/girlfriend or relative to see it. You’d have to be living in a cave not to be slightly familiar with the basics of Star Wars. There’s hardly anyone who doesn’t know of Darth Vader or what a stormtrooper is.

And lest we forget, the original film dropped us into the middle of a conflict we knew little about.

Believe it or not, my partner hadn’t seen the original trilogy when I first met her. Even her parents, who are of that generation (teenagers when ANH dropped) haven’t watched it. I uh, corrected this situation ASAP. Now she’s deeply steeped in both the OT and EU (ugh, “Legends”) stuff.

And, as odd as this may seem, as much as SW (specifically the OT) is part of the ‘public consciousness’, there are a lot of people who have gone out of their way to avoid seeing it, as if being contrarian and dissenting for the sake of it makes them cool.

I would be mortified if they brought Han back. He got (earned) an incredibly poignant death scene. But, I’m convinced we’re going to see more of him either in flashback or one of the anthology movies.

I’m still not sure how I feel about flashbacks in SW. It’s really ‘un-SW’; these are simple movies and they’ve largely eschewed narrative devices like that. And we know he’s not coming back as a Force Ghost, so that only leaves so many avenues…

DominicCobb said:

I bet she had more screen time that was cut but honestly I think she was put there to establish a character who’ll get more screen time in later installments.

This is more than likely the biggest reason she’s even still in the film (even though most of her part in it could easily have been done by PlasticSoldier93730). We’ll see Phasma again, probably pissed off and with an ax to grind.

And there WERE so many great characters! I can’t sing enough praises for Finn. I admire his courage; he looks at some pretty tough situations and jumps in head first. Grabbing a lightsaber and going after Kylo, no questions asked? Just another day in the life of Finn. He’s got real potential. Plus I love how he plays off of both Rey and Poe. The three of them have real on screen chemistry, almost more so than Ford, Fisher, and Hamill did in ANH (blasphemy, right?!).

Thankfully, you do not need to see the prequels to understand or enjoy TFA. In fact, it almost seems there was a concerted effort to avoid them altogether.

Ever since I heard about the DE, I’ve been really, really curious/wanting to watch it. It definitely seems like an enormous labor of love, and as a lifelong SW fan, it’s one I can appreciate and relate to. So thanks for that. My go-to for my viewings of the OT have been the 2006 Theatrical bonus DVDs, which don’t really scale properly on an HDTV.

I’m pretty familiar with watching NKVs on my PC, so that’s not really an issue.

The bigger issue for me is that either I broke Jdownloader, or I have broken links. Stuck at 500MB on the links Harmy posted up over at tehparadox. I may have missed something.

[I have no idea why my browser made this post.]

Yeah. I’m not sure you get one from the other with Gwendolyn Chrstie’s comments vs. her on screen performance. Did we see the wrong movie? It would have been amazing for “Traitor!!” trooper to have been subbed for Phasma instead. And then when Han shoots, it just glances off her chromium armor like it’s no big deal. That would have been a fun moment. We see her for a couple scenes, she doesn’t do a whole lot, and then gets dumped, in every sense of the word. Was the ‘strong woman’ budget spent all on Rey?

Who knows. I keep hearing there was stuff cut from this film due to runtime and to keep it tight. I hear we lost a couple of Maz Kanata bits because Nyong’o “wasn’t delivering” and we may have lost a scene with Luke (though, I’m a big, big fan of how they actually left us wanting more rather than breaking the tension with anything additional).

It’s going to be a long wait.

What am I currently reading? Well, given I misplaced my copy of “The Martian,” I recently picked up a copy of Ann Leckie’s “Ancillary Justice”. I’m roughly 50 pages in, and so far all I can say is that it’s weird. Comparisons people have made to this series and Banks’ “Culture” series are very easily justified. Unlike any of the Culture books I’ve read though, so far I don’t really give a crap about anyone in the story.

TavorX said:

MJR80 said:

Off subject a bit, but does anyone think the following?

Finn is a Solo (read the new comics-Han was married before the '77 movie to a woman of color), thus making Finn and Ren half-brothers.

Rey is a Kenobi, not a Skywalker (maybe Obiwan’s granddaughter). I only say this because of the voices she hears during her flashback (but she also heard Yoda’s as well).

Snoke is Darth Plageus.

Discuss.

Finn seems rather young, so it’s rather doubtful that Finn would look that aged if Han married before the events ANH. It really would be far reaching to shoehorn in that Han was screwing around and had a random kid he didn’t know about throughout the whole trilogy. I say nay.

A Kenobi? Highly… improbable. Those flashbacks are voices that were heard/seen mostly from Luke’s perspective. One line from Kenobi. One line from Yoda. One line from Luke. What’s the common denominator? It’s tied to Luke, especially the imagery of Cloud City corridors. Also, Maz kept saying the saber was calling to Rey. That saber is a Skywalker heirloom.

That Snoke theory is being tossed around a lot. Many believe it. I’m on the fence. It sounds a little silly that they’ll go, “NOPE, you thought Palpy was pulling the strings?? Hahahaha! Snoke IS THE Master Puppeteer!!” It’s just too much. There’s absolutely no hints that there was something beyond Palpatine and as far as I’m assuming, Palpatine would be the type to make sure his old Master was dead-dead and wouldn’t serve him. The only thing that does make it a sound theory is that Plagues probably cheated death due to his… knowledge of… Midichlorians.
It all depends. This can really be compelling or really go downhill.

Joining in on the thread kind of late…

I really hope Snoke -isn’t- Plagueis. That would just be kind of hokey, and like has been said, stretch believability to the breaking point, maybe past incredulity. There’s just no way DP would have sat idly by while his apprentice ran the galaxy for twenty-five years, and Palpy was clearly in charge. I also personally hate it when narratives choose to go the route of “Well, it easn’t explicitly disproven, so it’s possible, and we’ll go there”. Nope, don’t want that.

Anyhow, my biggest disappointment thus far was Phasma. I know KK and Abrams have said she’s ‘important,’ but it’ll be hard now for her to pick her self-respect up off the ground given she was seen in TFA. Chalk it up to another part of TFA where it feels something was lost in the editing room.