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Anyone else totally disregard Leia being Luke's sister? — Page 7

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TV’s Frink said:

darth_ender said:

Anyone else this site and fanedit.org make people scrutinize movies too much and suck the fun out of escapist diversion?

P.S. I love it here, but seriously, that aspect of the culture, it just…

  1. I don’t ever this site.
  2. The nice thing is that you can ignore any edit you don’t like.
  3. Up ur.

Welp, I could respond to several things here, but really, all I want to say is that I’m just glad that my attempt at starting a running gag here as a sock more than four years ago has finally caught on…and it only took the change of your to ur to make it happen.

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darth_ender said:

Anyone else think this site and fanedit.org make people scrutinize movies too much and suck the fun out of escapist diversion?

P.S. I love it here, but seriously, that aspect of the culture, it just…

As long as people go beyond simple ‘I don’t like X’ and dig deeper to find the real issues with movies, then I think these sites are important. There are a lot of projects that aren’t too interesting from this standpoint, since they seek merely to remove elements from films deemed ‘childish’, ‘slapstick’, ‘boring’, etc. I find these edits less interesting because I often mentally edit these things out of films anyway, and going to the trouble of actually removing them doesn’t significantly alter the experience.

But edits that seek to craft whole new narratives, like some of the more ambitious Phantom Menace edits, can be viewed as different films entirely. Similarly, something like TFA Restructured can be viewed like an experiment to see how much of a difference one (major) change can have on an entire film. And of course edits which make substantial changes to the effects (Adywan) make the films quite different indeed.

You probably don’t recognize me because of the red arm.
Episode 9 Rewrite, The Starlight Project (Released!) and ANH Technicolor Project (Released!)

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NeverarGreat said:

darth_ender said:

Anyone else think this site and fanedit.org make people scrutinize movies too much and suck the fun out of escapist diversion?

P.S. I love it here, but seriously, that aspect of the culture, it just…

As long as people go beyond simple ‘I don’t like X’ and dig deeper to find the real issues with movies, then I think these sites are important. There are a lot of projects that aren’t too interesting from this standpoint, since they seek merely to remove elements from films deemed ‘childish’, ‘slapstick’, ‘boring’, etc. I find these edits less interesting because I often mentally edit these things out of films anyway, and going to the trouble of actually removing them doesn’t significantly alter the experience.

I made a version of the first Austin Powers movie that removed much of the lowbrow potty humor and it improved the experience quite a bit for me. To each his own.

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 (Edited)

Yeah, to me the biggest problems of TPM are silly humor and annoying Anakin, so just trimming that makes it enjoyable to me. Not ANH or ESB enjoyable, but enjoyable.

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I’ve watched only trimmed up edits about once a year since I was about 14 or 15 (23 now) so by now I barely remember some of the stuff that always gets cut, do that may be why I don’t hate the prequels as much as most here.

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I probably should clarify: I actually love fan edits. I have several of them and appreciate how they can improve a movie.

However

What I feel is that often there are movies that are already very enjoyable. However, fan edit sites tend to focus so much on the negatives that I never would have noticed that it takes away the simple pleasure of enjoying a movie. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate that people edit movies. Heck, NeverarGreat, I was one of those who was disappointed with TFA and am grateful for your work to improve it. Nevertheless, sometimes the simple pleasure of enjoying a movie as is has been destroyed by the excessive scrutiny of members of these sites.

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I try to ignore Leia being Luke’s sister. ROTJ is the one I loved the most as a kid, but has slowly diminished in enjoyment the more I see it, unfortunately.

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Strange coincidence that there’s a discussion about how good or bad ROTJ is, because I just saw it tonight with the music performed live to screen by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, and it really hit me just how poor the film is compared to the previous two installments (which I saw with the Philharmonic as well just in the past couple weeks). Seeing them all so close together is probably a big part of why the iffiness of Jedi was so glaring tonight.

The sister reveal never really bugged me - the history behind Luke and Leia’s births and separation makes it understandable to me and not small-universe-ish at all. However, what DID hit me tonight is just how out of the blue a major plot thread of the film is: Luke believing there’s still good in Vader. There’s absolutely zero reason for the viewer to think that, let alone Luke after the hell Vader causesd in ESB, but then when talking with Obi-Wan on Dagobah, Luke suddenly says he thinks Vader still has good in him and can be saved. Where the heck did that come from?!

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rpvee said:

However, what DID hit me tonight is just how out of the blue a major plot thread of the film is: Luke believing there’s still good in Vader. There’s absolutely zero reason for the viewer to think that, let alone Luke after the hell Vader causesd in ESB, but then when talking with Obi-Wan on Dagobah, Luke suddenly says he thinks Vader still has good in him and can be saved. Where the heck did that come from?!

This is why I can no longer buy into the Vader redemption arc. Two whole movies we’ve spent with the man beforehand, and the only time he ever exhibited anything resembling a redeeming trait was when he kept Fett from shooting Chewie, and that was probably done for ulterior reasons.

Show, don’t tell. A technique ROTJ failed badly to utilize.

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I’m still trying to figure out where young Skywalker got his fancy new Jedi outfit from? And why black?

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Slavicuss said:

I’m still trying to figure out where young Skywalker got his fancy new Jedi outfit from?

He buys them in bulk.

And why black?

Luke has a keen fashion sense.

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Luke beings Leia’s sister always made a lot of sense to me.

Do they not see the birds controlled in the atmosphere of the sky? none holds them up except Allah. Indeed in that are signs for a people who believe. – Quran (16:79)

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NeverarGreat said:

Are we turning Beru’s haircut into a full-blown conspiracy theory?

I don’t know about you, but I can turn it into a hat, or a brooch, or a pterodactyl…

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 (Edited)

To those that posit that that Star Wars (mostly the original film, but for some, ESB as well) had a ‘big-universe’ until ROJT shrunk it with that Leia sister nonsense: Obi-Wan being the only* Jedi alive (not counting Vader) by the time of the first Star Wars film (and best of friends with Luke’s father at that - how convenient)…would like a word with you.

*and ESB’s ‘fix’ for that? “Okay, Obi-Wan wasn’t the only survivor…there was Yoda too!” And is Yoda just some random Jedi? Nope! He was Obi-Wan’s teacher…once again: convenient

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 (Edited)

My larger point is that the ‘shrunken-universe’ criticism is sometimes erroneously applied to the later films (especially Jedi), when in fact in can be consistently applied to the first two Star Wars films.

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If Yoda and Obi-Wan didn’t know each other, how would Obi-Wan be able to tell Luke where to find him?

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I also wish all the characters in star wars didn’t know each other. Just give me random people shooting at each other… in space!

TV’s Frink said:

I would put this in my sig if I weren’t so lazy.

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CHEWBAKAspelledwrong said:

I also wish all the characters in star wars didn’t know each other.

At least George Lucas didn’t know his characters anymore when he wrote the Prelogy…

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Frank your Majesty said:

If Yoda and Obi-Wan didn’t know each other, how would Obi-Wan be able to tell Luke where to find him?

I said that them knowing each other was ‘convenient’ for the story/plot, not that none of the characters should know each other. Though, I wonder if it makes any difference whether Yoda was envisioned back then (when the OT was made) as having taught many Jedi, or just Ben/Obi-Wan and maybe also Annikin/Anakin (before he was ret-conned into having been Kenobi’s student)?

If we’re talking about story/plot ‘conundrums’ (the like of which you allude to above), this is in the same vein of making Leia the ‘other’ because, “otherwise, Lucas would have to bring in a totally new character that we’ve never met into the story”. Or the one about Lucas making Leia the sister only because “he couldn’t figure out how to resolve the romance of Luke/Leia or Han/Leia.” In the case of ESB, it was the conundrum of “who would take the place of Obi-Wan as Luke’s teacher”? He probably should have thought about that before he killed him off in the first one though, if you think about it. Conundrum aside, killing off Ben certainly made the first film work as a stand-alone.

The reductio-ad-absurdum of the Jedi as portrayed in SW and ESB is to illustrate why the ‘shrunken-universe’ criticism is misused when applied to Return of the Jedi (as a critique mostly used against Leia as the sister, but sometimes also against Vader being Luke’s father).

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I think the term universe shrinking can’t really be applied to Star Wars and Empire. What you criticize, is that they don’t establish a very vast universe, but universe shrinking means that the established world is retroactively made smaller. Leia being Luke’s sister has consequences for the other movies before Jedi, while not offering anything interesting to the plot. The Yoda subplot is interesting enough on its own, so most people don’t care about the setup being too convenient or not.

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