joefavs

If this is to be believed, the casting has been narrowed down substantially: http://makingstarwars.net/2016/03/final-shortlist-of-actors-for-han-solos-story/

Ehrenreich and Egerton have both been mentioned in this thread already, if memory serves. I don’t think I’ve seen a single movie with any of these guys so I can’t pretend to have much of an opinion, but I don’t think Reynor looks nearly as much like Harrison as the other two.

EDIT: that’s a bad photo of Reynor, he’s much closer to Ford in his IMDB photo.

I didn’t see Temple of Doom until much later than the other two because my parents hated it and I took them at their word for a long time, so I may have nostalgia goggles with a different prescription to some extent. I tend to watch it when it happens to be on TV, but that disc in my box set gets very little action apart from when I decide to run the whole series, which is very rare. It just doesn’t seem to have the same heart as Raiders or Crusade. I do think Willie is truly awful, but I could probably forgive that if the tone was different.

DominicCobb said:

1. Raiders of the Lost Ark

2. Last Crusade

3. Temple of Doom

4. Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Anyone who ranks any other way is just wrong, wrong, wrong.

I appear to be right, at least by DominicCobb’s standards.

Now I’m happy I didn’t buy the blu-ray box set a couple months back. I’ve been working my way through a TOS rewatch at a lazy pace and I considered picking up a used copy when they took the films off Netflix to ensure that I’d be able to watch them at the proper time, but I ultimately decided to wait and see if they would return to streaming by the time I got to them. They did, and I’ll probably watch those when I get there rather than waiting on a new release that for now looks to be a rumor beyond Wrath of Khan, but I’m pleased not to have sunk any money into it prematurely. If this comes to pass, I’ll definitely shell out for the remasters.

I think the decision to include the original cast in the ST indicates that the OT is probably safe from reboots in any case. Beyond that though, they made such a big fuss about the official status of the new canon when they threw out the EU that I’d be astounded if anything that survived the purge ends up being discarded. I guess it’s possible decades down the line, but not before another enormous overhaul like the Legends thing.

The only justification I consider reasonable for Machete (or Rister) order is when you’re with someone who hasn’t seen them before and insists on including the prequels in their first viewing (which is what the situation was with a couple of the people in the group I did my pre-TFA marathon with). I would never, ever want to start a new viewer on any of the prequels, and doing them all at the end after we’ve already seen all of the movies I actually like is such a demoralizing prospect. If the other party can be persuaded not to do it all in one go, I recommend marathoning the OT (and now I guess TFA) and then coming back to the PT at a later date just to get an idea of what I now think of as the bad old days.

For my own viewings, if I’m expanding things beyond the OT (which I sometimes do, since I find watching the PT with like-minded friends and creating our own commentary once in a long while to be an enjoyable experience in its own right) and I don’t need to take newbies into consideration, I tend to prefer to spread it out over a couple days: be baffled by the PT on day one, be delighted by the OT on day two, and for now, either tack TFA onto the end of the second day or watch it on its own soon after. If I’m in charge of programming on whatever my gang’s pre-VIII marathon ends up being, I’m thinking PT two weekends before VIII, OT the following weekend, and then TFA earlier in the day before we head to the theater.

I’m warming to the idea of this being Han’s funeral. Does this mean we’re going to Corellia?! I’d really love that. I think the only time I’ve seen Corellia depicted visually was in Star Wars Galaxies, and in that it was just sort of vaguely Earth-like, so Dubrovnik wouldn’t be a huge stretch (assuming they’re sticking with the same general idea and not doing a complete redesign like Kessel in Rebels). I’m not itching to see Tatooine or Bespin again any time soon, but it would be cool if the ST takes us to some OT planets that were name dropped but never seen rather than sticking to completely new places like TFA did.

Here’s a teaser for the feature length making-of doc that will be included with the blu-ray: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cICvrNL9sg0

I’m really happy they’re doing this. I’ve got fond memories of this kind of long documentary from ten or twelve years ago, but it feels like I haven’t seen a new one in a really long time.

Faithwyn said:

For what it is worth, I don’t think the ANH crawl has ANY place in a Theatrical Reconstruction of Star Wars.
I saw the film opening week in 77’ and it was called “Star Wars” LOL!!! If I want to see ANY of Georges evil changes I would watch my S.E. copy (cursed that it is). There… I said my piece.

You do you, but I’m sure at least some of the VHS children like myself feel differently. After all, I don’t think the 77 crawl ever made it to home video before the GOUT in 2006. Us folks who weren’t around for the four years before the crawl was changed ought to have our Star Wars too.

Anyway, if someone can get the 81 working properly, that definitely gets my vote over the 97 or 04/11, but it’s not desperately important.

A "Mos Eisley" miniseries a la Fargo would be neat.

For the record, I never meant to suggest that most people like the prequels. I only meant that most people don’t obsessively despise them the way everyone does here, and they happen to tie directly into TCW, which is a very important part of Star Wars for a lot of actual children, so it doesn’t seem appropriate to blow the whole thing up just to appease the most bitter segment of the fan base.

Oh, I very much want the ANH version. The 77 is well and good when you’re only watching Star Wars, but I like to have the ANH for marathons, for consistency’s sake.

Towne, for the ANH crawl version of 2.6.1 (or whatever it is we’re calling this), are you going to be using Harmy’s 1997 version again or Darth Lucas’s 1981? I don’t have any real preference, just wondering.

Some set photos from Dubrovnik showing costumes and what looks to be a speeder:
http://www.starwarsnewsnet.com/2016/03/first-look-at-troopers-from-the-starwars-episodeviii-set-in-dubrovnik.html

The aurebesh on the guards’ helmets says “CBPD”. I’m seeing some people suggesting that it could be Han’s funeral procession, but that sounds like nothing more than wild speculation to me. In any case, someone on reddit pointed out that the guards seem to be pretty clearly based on this McQuarrie design:

Just watched In the Heart of the Sea and am very glad I didn’t drag myself to the theater for it a few months ago. Howard tweaked details and shifted emphasis all over the place, transforming the bleakness and irony of the book into this phony inspirational survival narrative. In real life Owen Chase was a borderline sociopathic son of a bitch, George Pollard was a criminally inept captain, the survivors were profoundly screwed up for the rest of their lives, and the whole reason they needed to resort to cannibalism was that they went way out of their way to avoid islands they believed to be populated by cannibals. That’s the movie I wanted to see. Instead, it was a by-the-numbers resolve-in-the-face-of-impossible-odds flick with some admittedly cool whaling scenes and a superficial resemblance to a book I really liked.

The idea of a map in itself doesn’t bother me, but I’d prefer it wasn’t a literal puzzle piece. If R2-D2 has the entire map save that one little chunk that Poe picked up in the beginning, why couldn’t he reveal it earlier so that the Resistance could do their own survey of that one discreet region of the galaxy? If R2’s map had been smaller and BB-8’s had been larger, it would have been much more believable.

I don’t see why films about the Sith Empire or the Mandolorian Wars would need to take the place of the PT though. Those could easily exist without splitting the continuity. I just feel like the last thing Disney wants to do is complicate the timeline. They’re all about bringing in new fans right now, and introducing alternate continuities would be a bad move for that. Better to just build around the prequels and reference them as little as possible.

I can’t remember if it was here or the AV Club, but at some point I heard someone say that their personal canon was that the prequels are factually accurate, but that the films themselves as we know them are essentially in-universe B-movies of the actual events that took place. That’s pretty much the attitude I’ve adopted since reading that, and I’m fine with sticking with it.

Prequel reboot is never in a million years going to happen, and it probably shouldn’t either. Strange as it may sound to jerks like us here on this forum, the PT has a sizable following, and there’s a whole generation of kids who grew up on the Clone Wars cartoon. The idealistic side of my brain says live and let live, those kids have as much a right to their preferred Star Wars as I do to mine, however misguided that preference may be. The cynical side says Disney’s not going to go out of their way to piss off that prime tween merch-buying demographic, especially when it’s so much easier to please everyone by ignoring the prequels and playing in their shiny new sequel-era sandbox. Honestly, now that we’re getting more movies, I don’t even care that the prequels are bad anymore. There are so many potential subjects out there that are so much more interesting to me than Anakin Skywalker again.

Can we table the Snoke/Plagueis speculation until we get more actual information from either leaks from the set or nuEU material? There hasn’t been anything real for or against this theory in months, and the discussion is getting profoundly tiresome as a result. I’m sure there’ll be something to pick apart in Claudia Grey’s Bloodline, but until then, I think everything there is to say has already been said.

I’d give the superweapon to the good guys. Ethical quandaries all around.

There’s actually a theme within “I Can Fly Anything” that I’ve been wondering about. I remember an interview before the film came out where John Boyega mentioned hearing “Finn’s theme” at a tracking session he sat in on, and ever since I got the soundtrack and discovered that no such track exists I’ve been thinking about what he might have meant. My best guess is the motif that kicks in around 1:14 of ICFA, when it switches from the rapid staccato stuff to that slower, sweeping melody. As far as I can tell, that theme occurs three times in the film (this is definitely something I’ll be listening closely for when my blu-ray arrives in a few weeks): the TIE escape, the attack on Maz’s castle (“that’s one hell of a pilot!”), and when what remains of the Resistance fleet leaves the exploding Starkiller Base. Since Finn is unconscious for that last scene, though, it seems like it might be more appropriate to assign the theme to Poe, but I’m not sure if he’s a central enough character to get his own music, especially if it means Finn doesn’t get a theme. Of course, Williams has used character themes in places that don’t make a ton of sense in the past, notably “Princess Leia’s Theme” immediately following Obi-Wan Kenobi’s death, so it could just be a case of that. I’m hoping the soundtrack featurette on the blu-ray sheds some light. God, I’d love it if John Williams did commentary over an isolated score track for each of these movies, but that’s some serious wishful thinking.

Do you really need any of that to enjoy TFA though? I agree that the way they handled that exposition could have been done more clearly, but I don’t think they left out anything necessary for understanding that movie. You get that the Resistance is a sort of proxy for the Republic from the crawl and a few lines of dialog. If you want a history lesson about the state of the Republic over the past 25 years, I’d say that’s exactly the sort of thing that does belong in a book.

SilverWook said:

There may have been a movement by the New Republic to completely dismantle the Rebellion in the years after ROTJ.

I’m still doing a decent job keeping up with the new EU, so I’ve actually got a decent idea of this situation. Aftermath has Mon Mothma talking pretty seriously about demilitarizing. Lost Stars has the Battle of Jakku a couple years after that, so we know it doesn’t take right away, but I’m pretty certain that ends up being the case. I think we’re going to learn a whole lot more about the political landscape in May when we get Bloodline, which is a Leia-centric novel set six years or so before TFA.

Anyone here think we may be going back to Naboo in VIII? The more photos I see of the Dubrovnik set, the more I find myself entertaining the possibility. Did I read somewhere that Carrie Fisher was going to Dubrovnik? Leia’s been to Naboo twice already in the new comics, so it’s definitely a place she knows in the new canon.

I actually find myself feeling more charitable about the prequels ever since TFA came out. I still rank them far below the other films, but now that the franchise is growing again and moving in a direction that I like, much of the anger and resentment I felt toward the PT has dissipated.