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Episode VIII : The Last Jedi - Discussion * SPOILER THREAD * — Page 130

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 (Edited)

The funny thing is, that despite all my misgivings about TLJ, I still enjoy it on some level, and it has several really great moments, that rank with some of Star Wars best for me.

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NFBisms said:

In a movie where Luke Skywalker of all people is presented as a jaded cynic - I don’t think Holdo is supposed to be perceived as in the right over Poe, fwiw.

Poe is a brash hotshot, sure, but don’t overthink it - Holdo as a leader definitely made huge mistakes. Everyone is at fault for what happens, but that’s partly why TLJ is so good to me. It’s been said to death, but the movie proposes this question specifically about what defines a hero, and Holdo isn’t exempt from that scrutiny imo.

Exactly. This is a film about failure. At no point are we supposed to believe that Holdo is a perfect, immaculate leader - in fact we purposefully spend most of the movie being lead to believe the opposite. What’s important when they flip the script is that Holdo’s heart was in the right place in regards to “saving” not “fighting.”

Also yotsuya makes a good point in bringing up Twelve O’Clock High. I watched that film shortly before TLJ, and it’s clear they’re definitely in a similar headspace in regards to friction within the chain of command.

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DrDre said:

yotsuya said:

Collipso said:

i’m only one minute in and he’s already bashing everyone that doesn’t like the movie and saying that we don’t like it simply because our theories were wrong. that’s simply not true, i liked rey being a nobody, but i wish we had more information on Snoke to help bridge the 30 year gap and how we went from ‘RIP the empire’ to ‘RIP the rebels’ with a new extremely powerful emperor. we’re two movies in already and we have no idea why the galaxy is in the state it’s in, and Snoke’s “backstory” could help with that.

What what exactly was Palpatine’s backstory before the prequels? What exactly is his backstory in the prequels? That we don’t get information on Snoke is not exactly something new.

Palpatine wasn’t someone of influence until the prequels, and we got to witness him dismantle the Republic throughout the PT in great detail. With Snoke it’s sort of an afterthought. The guy undid everything our heroes fought for somehow, but that’s not considered to be of importance, apparently. It appears to me, that what mattered most is giving us a redux of the OT conflict, and the OT aesthetic with different characters.

That isn’t an accurate assessment of the galactic situation. It is clear from the setup in TFA that the Republic is not very strong and that the great Republic of old has not been recreated. So what our heroes were fighting for in the OT has never been finished. If you look at history this is what often happens. The first government formed after a revolution doesn’t last. Usually it falls and is replaced with something else until that falls and something stronger rises in its place. All we have on the First Order is they rose from the ashes of the Empire. Clearly the production is an indication that Snoke ended up in control of an old Imperial shipyard. Who Snoke is makes little difference to the overall story. That he was there at the right time and place to create the First Order is all that matters. The rest is just filler.

And Palpatine was someone of influence. He dissolved the Senate in ANH. Just because the novelization of ANH had the picture of a weak emperor does not mean that is what the movies portray. Though when you really analize it with the Prequels, you get a dual personality Emperor. Publically he is Palpatine, a pushover. In the shadows he is Dark Sidious and is the one pulling all the strings. So that public pushover you find in the ANH novelization turns out to be as correct as the powerful sith lord we see in the movies.

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 (Edited)

yotsuya said:

DrDre said:

yotsuya said:

Collipso said:

i’m only one minute in and he’s already bashing everyone that doesn’t like the movie and saying that we don’t like it simply because our theories were wrong. that’s simply not true, i liked rey being a nobody, but i wish we had more information on Snoke to help bridge the 30 year gap and how we went from ‘RIP the empire’ to ‘RIP the rebels’ with a new extremely powerful emperor. we’re two movies in already and we have no idea why the galaxy is in the state it’s in, and Snoke’s “backstory” could help with that.

What what exactly was Palpatine’s backstory before the prequels? What exactly is his backstory in the prequels? That we don’t get information on Snoke is not exactly something new.

Palpatine wasn’t someone of influence until the prequels, and we got to witness him dismantle the Republic throughout the PT in great detail. With Snoke it’s sort of an afterthought. The guy undid everything our heroes fought for somehow, but that’s not considered to be of importance, apparently. It appears to me, that what mattered most is giving us a redux of the OT conflict, and the OT aesthetic with different characters.

That isn’t an accurate assessment of the galactic situation. It is clear from the setup in TFA that the Republic is not very strong and that the great Republic of old has not been recreated. So what our heroes were fighting for in the OT has never been finished. If you look at history this is what often happens. The first government formed after a revolution doesn’t last. Usually it falls and is replaced with something else until that falls and something stronger rises in its place. All we have on the First Order is they rose from the ashes of the Empire. Clearly the production is an indication that Snoke ended up in control of an old Imperial shipyard. Who Snoke is makes little difference to the overall story. That he was there at the right time and place to create the First Order is all that matters. The rest is just filler.

That he was there “at the right time” is contrived, and diminishes the entire story arc of the OT imo. The writers just pushed the reset button and pulled another “Sith Lord” out of thin air to get us right back at the start of ANH. The New Republic is a token effort, just like stating that Kylo Ren and Snoke are not Sith Lords. The New Republic is just there to be blown away, and never seen again, such that the Resistance can become the rebels, and the FO the Empire, whilst Kylo Ren and Snoke are completely indistuinguishable from their Sith counterparts. Lucas spent an entire trilogy exploring how a democracy got turned into an Empire, whilst setting up the rivalry between the Jedi and the Sith, and showing how a young Jedi turns into a Sith Lord. The ST gives us very little context, and makes very little effort to show us how and why we’re right back at square one after two trilogies of seeing an Empire rise and fall. Meanwhile Kylo Ren is just evil, because he’s a bad egg, I guess. He’s given zero motivation for turning to the dark side. Snoke had won his heart is all we get, and Luke apparently pushed him over the edge, because that’s what Jedi do, when you need another Darth Vader.

While the story works fairly well seen on its own terms, in my view it simply doesn’t flow very well from the first six films, and clearly isn’t very original, in that it recycles an awful lot from the OT both visually and narratively. The fact that so many things are left unexplained, and unexplored only reinforces this. Snoke is thus just another Emperor redux like so many other things the ST “borrowed” from the OT. This is the real issue here. By giving Snoke an original backstory, and by making him distuinguishable from the Sith Lords that proceeded him the entire events of the ST are elevated, because it adds history and context, thus allowing the Star Wars universe and mythology to grow beyond simply rehashing what Lucas and his contemporaries did better some four decades earlier.

After six films of stories and events just plunging us into another OT inspired conflict with little context to connect the dots is not going to work for many people, because they are already too invested in the universe, and the characters. Saying Snoke is used not very differently from the Emperor in the OT, is not a defense, but an admission of guilt, because it ignores the fact, that we have had fourty years of story developments, and world building since that time. If the OT’s resolution is important, then how that happy ending got unraveled is as well. To say, that it doesn’t really matter how Snoke and the FO got to undermine the New Republic, and why the New Republic allowed itself to be overrun, is to say that the OT’s resolutions aren’t very important, because another Sith Lord can be pulled from behind the curtain to undo it anyway to extend the conflict ad nauseam. By extension this also undermines the resolution of the ST, because of the precedent it creates. The next writer can just create another Sith Lord from whole cloth, create the Second Order from the ashes of its predecessors, and have Rey moping on another island, such that the next false prophet can repeat the cycle, no explanation required. The Star Wars saga has thus become the movie equivalent of the boy who cried wolf.

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DominicCobb said:

NFBisms said:

In a movie where Luke Skywalker of all people is presented as a jaded cynic - I don’t think Holdo is supposed to be perceived as in the right over Poe, fwiw.

Poe is a brash hotshot, sure, but don’t overthink it - Holdo as a leader definitely made huge mistakes. Everyone is at fault for what happens, but that’s partly why TLJ is so good to me. It’s been said to death, but the movie proposes this question specifically about what defines a hero, and Holdo isn’t exempt from that scrutiny imo.

Exactly. This is a film about failure. At no point are we supposed to believe that Holdo is a perfect, immaculate leader - in fact we purposefully spend most of the movie being lead to believe the opposite. What’s important when they flip the script is that Holdo’s heart was in the right place in regards to “saving” not “fighting.”

Seems pretty much spot on to me.

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i have no problem with the holdo plot at all, in fact it might be the one i like the most. i really liked her character, and how she interacted with poe. i do wish she was given more reason to say “i like him” when he’s unconscious, but it’s fine. the canto bight plot is not as interesting or as well executed to me, and while the jedi plot is by far the best, rey is just so annoying to me, to a point where i lost interest in that particular part of the story halfway through.

and when we got to that fourth act i really started to feel the 2 and a half hours.

but it’s a good movie. i think i’m going to get my blu ray this week, and finally rewatch it on the weekend.

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 (Edited)

Collipso said:

i have no problem with the holdo plot at all, in fact it might be the one i like the most. i really liked her character, and how she interacted with poe. i do wish she was given more reason to say “i like him” when he’s unconscious, but it’s fine. the canto bight plot is not as interesting or as well executed to me, and while the jedi plot is by far the best, rey is just so annoying to me, to a point where i lost interest in that particular part of the story halfway through.

and when we got to that fourth act i really started to feel the 2 and a half hours.

but it’s a good movie. i think i’m going to get my blu ray this week, and finally rewatch it on the weekend.

Haha, I got the bluray and the 4K bluray myself. I enjoy it for the most part on its own terms. It’s beautiful to look at, and I especially enjoy Mark Hamill’s performance. I personally feel the most clever part of the film is the skype sessions between Rey and Ben, which allowed Rey to stay on Ach-To, whilst she and Ben had some interesting character development. I personally would have had a lot of respect for RJ, if he had let Rey, and Ben join forces, whilst leaving it in the middle, whether Ben joined Rey’s side, or Rey joined Ben’s side. That would have been some unique plot twist, that would have kept people guessing for the next two years.

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oojason said:

‘The Last Jedi is amazing and you are all insane.’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXCLJp541Pw

^ Someone’s opinion on the film (Maj0r Lee) - has some decent insights and viewpoints that haven’t really been delved into much before (which is somewhat surprising - given the endless repetitive nature of debate on TLJ).

It also addresses some of the criticisms of the film - which is a strange surreal watch (and humourous), given the claims and emotions by some of those criticising it (mainly vloggers & youtubers etc - whom seem to be the people being referred to in the title of his video).

so i finished watching it, and it was indeed humorous! i had not seen any of the videos he ended up taking some parts of and ‘countering’, and wow are those people angry and mad for some reason.

it seemed as if he was trying to paint all critics of the movie with the same brush, as if we’re all like those couple of guys from the videos he put in his video, and we’re definitely not all like that. i think it would’ve been better if he took parts from one of David Stewart’s videos, for example, and countered his points using actual arguments, instead of just strawmaning all of those really emotional responses from those guys he actually ended up putting in. granted, given what several of them were saying, strawmaning was almost necessary.

the first 15 minutes or so of the video are basically him presenting his opinion on several aspects of the movie, and i think i disagree with him in about 90% of the things he said. i also don’t think i “didn’t get” some things that those that don’t like the movie theoretically didn’t get. for example, i picked up the reference to “you changed your hair” from TFA, and i did get that one of the things the movie did was to, in a way, destroy (or change) several of the things we valued in Star Wars prior to it. i’m just not sure i like it.

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I’ll see how I feel now that it’s had time to steep. Starting my second viewing in 3…2…

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Anchorhead said:

I’ll see how I feel now that it’s had time to steep. Starting my second viewing in 3…2…

1…

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DrDre said:

yotsuya said:

DrDre said:

yotsuya said:

Collipso said:

i’m only one minute in and he’s already bashing everyone that doesn’t like the movie and saying that we don’t like it simply because our theories were wrong. that’s simply not true, i liked rey being a nobody, but i wish we had more information on Snoke to help bridge the 30 year gap and how we went from ‘RIP the empire’ to ‘RIP the rebels’ with a new extremely powerful emperor. we’re two movies in already and we have no idea why the galaxy is in the state it’s in, and Snoke’s “backstory” could help with that.

What what exactly was Palpatine’s backstory before the prequels? What exactly is his backstory in the prequels? That we don’t get information on Snoke is not exactly something new.

Palpatine wasn’t someone of influence until the prequels, and we got to witness him dismantle the Republic throughout the PT in great detail. With Snoke it’s sort of an afterthought. The guy undid everything our heroes fought for somehow, but that’s not considered to be of importance, apparently. It appears to me, that what mattered most is giving us a redux of the OT conflict, and the OT aesthetic with different characters.

That isn’t an accurate assessment of the galactic situation. It is clear from the setup in TFA that the Republic is not very strong and that the great Republic of old has not been recreated. So what our heroes were fighting for in the OT has never been finished. If you look at history this is what often happens. The first government formed after a revolution doesn’t last. Usually it falls and is replaced with something else until that falls and something stronger rises in its place. All we have on the First Order is they rose from the ashes of the Empire. Clearly the production is an indication that Snoke ended up in control of an old Imperial shipyard. Who Snoke is makes little difference to the overall story. That he was there at the right time and place to create the First Order is all that matters. The rest is just filler.

That he was there “at the right time” is contrived, and diminishes the entire story arc of the OT imo. The writers just pushed the reset button and pulled another “Sith Lord” out of thin air to get us right back at the start of ANH. The New Republic is a token effort, just like stating that Kylo Ren and Snoke are not Sith Lords. The New Republic is just there to be blown away, and never seen again, such that the Resistance can become the rebels, and the FO the Empire, whilst Kylo Ren and Snoke are completely indistuinguishable from their Sith counterparts. Lucas spent an entire trilogy exploring how a democracy got turned into an Empire, whilst setting up the rivalry between the Jedi and the Sith, and showing how a young Jedi turns into a Sith Lord. The ST gives us very little context, and makes very little effort to show us how and why we’re right back at square one after two trilogies of seeing an Empire rise and fall. Meanwhile Kylo Ren is just evil, because he’s a bad egg, I guess. He’s given zero motivation for turning to the dark side. Snoke had won his heart is all we get, and Luke apparently pushed him over the edge, because that’s what Jedi do, when you need another Darth Vader.

While the story works fairly well seen on its own terms, in my view it simply doesn’t flow very well from the first six films, and clearly isn’t very original, in that it recycles an awful lot from the OT both visually and narratively. The fact that so many things are left unexplained, and unexplored only reinforces this. Snoke is thus just another Emperor redux like so many other things the ST “borrowed” from the OT. This is the real issue here. By giving Snoke an original backstory, and by making him distuinguishable from the Sith Lords that proceeded him the entire events of the ST are elevated, because it adds history and context, thus allowing the Star Wars universe and mythology to grow beyond simply rehashing what Lucas and his contemporaries did better some four decades earlier.

After six films of stories and events just plunging us into another OT inspired conflict with little context to connect the dots is not going to work for many people, because they are already too invested in the universe, and the characters. Saying Snoke is used not very differently from the Emperor in the OT, is not a defense, but an admission of guilt, because it ignores the fact, that we have had fourty years of story developments, and world building since that time. If the OT’s resolution is important, then how that happy ending got unraveled is as well. To say, that it doesn’t really matter how Snoke and the FO got to undermine the New Republic, and why the New Republic allowed itself to be overrun, is to say that the OT’s resolutions aren’t very important, because another Sith Lord can be pulled from behind the curtain to undo it anyway to extend the conflict ad nauseam. By extension this also undermines the resolution of the ST, because of the precedent it creates. The next writer can just create another Sith Lord from whole cloth, create the Second Order from the ashes of its predecessors, and have Rey moping on another island, such that the next false prophet can repeat the cycle, no explanation required. The Star Wars saga has thus become the movie equivalent of the boy who cried wolf.

I was pointing out that in the pre-PT world we had virtually nothing on Palpatine. The two characters are not very similar other than a lack of background the first time they are seen. And a lot of the ST is based on what they did in the old EU/Legends. Building a new Republic was not easy and they had to content with remnants of the Empire, like Thrawn. The Disney era Star Wars movies have been getting a lot of inspiration from the Legends books, though they are not really repeating anything. Knowing what happened in Legends, though I didn’t read most of them, really puts the sequels in perspective. Where you are seeing as parallels to the original, I see more parallels to Legends. Snoke has more in common with Trawn in many respects. And Snoke and his New Order have advanced things and created new technology where Trawn was fighting with left overs. But then that is a difference between 10 and 30 years after ROTJ. But the ST was always going to be about the next generation of the Skywalker family and I suspect that Ben/Kylo is going to end up with a very unique journey. If JJ and Rian have both been working off the same arc for the characters, which seems likely, then the third act is going to make this a very different trilogy from the last two. The OT was about taking down the bad guys, the PT was about the rise of the bad guys. The ST seems to be about finding the balance again. And that feels like a GL plot line. His prophesy of the chosen one bringing balance to the force seems like the core idea of what we are aiming for now. GL always denied that the force should be like ying/yang, but what Rian did in TLJ was very much ying/yang in nature, down to the image on the floor of the cave. It seems to be the answer to Luke’s unanswered quest of how to keep students from falling to the dark side.

And as for parallels, the PT very much paralleled the OT so I don’t see the ST following suit as much of an issue.

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 (Edited)

yotsuya said:

DrDre said:

yotsuya said:

DrDre said:

yotsuya said:

Collipso said:

i’m only one minute in and he’s already bashing everyone that doesn’t like the movie and saying that we don’t like it simply because our theories were wrong. that’s simply not true, i liked rey being a nobody, but i wish we had more information on Snoke to help bridge the 30 year gap and how we went from ‘RIP the empire’ to ‘RIP the rebels’ with a new extremely powerful emperor. we’re two movies in already and we have no idea why the galaxy is in the state it’s in, and Snoke’s “backstory” could help with that.

What what exactly was Palpatine’s backstory before the prequels? What exactly is his backstory in the prequels? That we don’t get information on Snoke is not exactly something new.

Palpatine wasn’t someone of influence until the prequels, and we got to witness him dismantle the Republic throughout the PT in great detail. With Snoke it’s sort of an afterthought. The guy undid everything our heroes fought for somehow, but that’s not considered to be of importance, apparently. It appears to me, that what mattered most is giving us a redux of the OT conflict, and the OT aesthetic with different characters.

That isn’t an accurate assessment of the galactic situation. It is clear from the setup in TFA that the Republic is not very strong and that the great Republic of old has not been recreated. So what our heroes were fighting for in the OT has never been finished. If you look at history this is what often happens. The first government formed after a revolution doesn’t last. Usually it falls and is replaced with something else until that falls and something stronger rises in its place. All we have on the First Order is they rose from the ashes of the Empire. Clearly the production is an indication that Snoke ended up in control of an old Imperial shipyard. Who Snoke is makes little difference to the overall story. That he was there at the right time and place to create the First Order is all that matters. The rest is just filler.

That he was there “at the right time” is contrived, and diminishes the entire story arc of the OT imo. The writers just pushed the reset button and pulled another “Sith Lord” out of thin air to get us right back at the start of ANH. The New Republic is a token effort, just like stating that Kylo Ren and Snoke are not Sith Lords. The New Republic is just there to be blown away, and never seen again, such that the Resistance can become the rebels, and the FO the Empire, whilst Kylo Ren and Snoke are completely indistuinguishable from their Sith counterparts. Lucas spent an entire trilogy exploring how a democracy got turned into an Empire, whilst setting up the rivalry between the Jedi and the Sith, and showing how a young Jedi turns into a Sith Lord. The ST gives us very little context, and makes very little effort to show us how and why we’re right back at square one after two trilogies of seeing an Empire rise and fall. Meanwhile Kylo Ren is just evil, because he’s a bad egg, I guess. He’s given zero motivation for turning to the dark side. Snoke had won his heart is all we get, and Luke apparently pushed him over the edge, because that’s what Jedi do, when you need another Darth Vader.

While the story works fairly well seen on its own terms, in my view it simply doesn’t flow very well from the first six films, and clearly isn’t very original, in that it recycles an awful lot from the OT both visually and narratively. The fact that so many things are left unexplained, and unexplored only reinforces this. Snoke is thus just another Emperor redux like so many other things the ST “borrowed” from the OT. This is the real issue here. By giving Snoke an original backstory, and by making him distuinguishable from the Sith Lords that proceeded him the entire events of the ST are elevated, because it adds history and context, thus allowing the Star Wars universe and mythology to grow beyond simply rehashing what Lucas and his contemporaries did better some four decades earlier.

After six films of stories and events just plunging us into another OT inspired conflict with little context to connect the dots is not going to work for many people, because they are already too invested in the universe, and the characters. Saying Snoke is used not very differently from the Emperor in the OT, is not a defense, but an admission of guilt, because it ignores the fact, that we have had fourty years of story developments, and world building since that time. If the OT’s resolution is important, then how that happy ending got unraveled is as well. To say, that it doesn’t really matter how Snoke and the FO got to undermine the New Republic, and why the New Republic allowed itself to be overrun, is to say that the OT’s resolutions aren’t very important, because another Sith Lord can be pulled from behind the curtain to undo it anyway to extend the conflict ad nauseam. By extension this also undermines the resolution of the ST, because of the precedent it creates. The next writer can just create another Sith Lord from whole cloth, create the Second Order from the ashes of its predecessors, and have Rey moping on another island, such that the next false prophet can repeat the cycle, no explanation required. The Star Wars saga has thus become the movie equivalent of the boy who cried wolf.

I was pointing out that in the pre-PT world we had virtually nothing on Palpatine. The two characters are not very similar other than a lack of background the first time they are seen. And a lot of the ST is based on what they did in the old EU/Legends. Building a new Republic was not easy and they had to content with remnants of the Empire, like Thrawn. The Disney era Star Wars movies have been getting a lot of inspiration from the Legends books, though they are not really repeating anything. Knowing what happened in Legends, though I didn’t read most of them, really puts the sequels in perspective. Where you are seeing as parallels to the original, I see more parallels to Legends. Snoke has more in common with Trawn in many respects. And Snoke and his New Order have advanced things and created new technology where Trawn was fighting with left overs. But then that is a difference between 10 and 30 years after ROTJ. But the ST was always going to be about the next generation of the Skywalker family and I suspect that Ben/Kylo is going to end up with a very unique journey. If JJ and Rian have both been working off the same arc for the characters, which seems likely, then the third act is going to make this a very different trilogy from the last two. The OT was about taking down the bad guys, the PT was about the rise of the bad guys. The ST seems to be about finding the balance again. And that feels like a GL plot line. His prophesy of the chosen one bringing balance to the force seems like the core idea of what we are aiming for now. GL always denied that the force should be like ying/yang, but what Rian did in TLJ was very much ying/yang in nature, down to the image on the floor of the cave. It seems to be the answer to Luke’s unanswered quest of how to keep students from falling to the dark side.

And as for parallels, the PT very much paralleled the OT so I don’t see the ST following suit as much of an issue.

How does Snoke have more in common with Thrawn? The only commonality is, that Snoke took control of Imperial remnants. Other than that Snoke is a dark side user like Palpatine, with a former Jedi apprentice, that he seduced to the darkside, like Palpatine. He physically resembles Palpatine with a deformed body, and even gets to repeat many of Palpatine’s lines from ROTJ, after which he gets killed by his apprentice like Palpatine, because of his arrogance, and his belief that he cannot be betrayed like Palpatine.

The PT had a number of parallels with the OT, but that’s nothing compared to the ST. The PT was aesthetically and narratively totally different from the OT. The ST tells the same basic story as the OT with the same aesthetics (albeit a bit modernized), where a small band of rebels have to defeat an overwhelming Force oppressing the galaxy, and a Jedi prodigy has to seek out the help of a Jedi master to defeat a former Jedi student, who has fallen to the dark side, and is now under the influence of a dark lord.

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Collipso said:

Jay said:

Agreed that some female points of view would be refreshing.

A bit all over the place, but a passionate take:
https://youtu.be/FQTornBY4Ig

More organized:
https://youtu.be/2LXZJy0NEck

Serious rants:
https://youtu.be/0jY010oKl7c
https://youtu.be/FQTornBY4Ig

jay, you linked the same video twice. the second one under ‘serious rants’ is the same one as the ‘all over the place’ one.

Oops, thanks. Fixed. First video should be this: https://youtu.be/Kc3H9hYh6KQ

Forum Administrator

MTFBWY…A

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DrDre said:

yotsuya said:

DrDre said:

yotsuya said:

DrDre said:

yotsuya said:

Collipso said:

i’m only one minute in and he’s already bashing everyone that doesn’t like the movie and saying that we don’t like it simply because our theories were wrong. that’s simply not true, i liked rey being a nobody, but i wish we had more information on Snoke to help bridge the 30 year gap and how we went from ‘RIP the empire’ to ‘RIP the rebels’ with a new extremely powerful emperor. we’re two movies in already and we have no idea why the galaxy is in the state it’s in, and Snoke’s “backstory” could help with that.

What what exactly was Palpatine’s backstory before the prequels? What exactly is his backstory in the prequels? That we don’t get information on Snoke is not exactly something new.

Palpatine wasn’t someone of influence until the prequels, and we got to witness him dismantle the Republic throughout the PT in great detail. With Snoke it’s sort of an afterthought. The guy undid everything our heroes fought for somehow, but that’s not considered to be of importance, apparently. It appears to me, that what mattered most is giving us a redux of the OT conflict, and the OT aesthetic with different characters.

That isn’t an accurate assessment of the galactic situation. It is clear from the setup in TFA that the Republic is not very strong and that the great Republic of old has not been recreated. So what our heroes were fighting for in the OT has never been finished. If you look at history this is what often happens. The first government formed after a revolution doesn’t last. Usually it falls and is replaced with something else until that falls and something stronger rises in its place. All we have on the First Order is they rose from the ashes of the Empire. Clearly the production is an indication that Snoke ended up in control of an old Imperial shipyard. Who Snoke is makes little difference to the overall story. That he was there at the right time and place to create the First Order is all that matters. The rest is just filler.

That he was there “at the right time” is contrived, and diminishes the entire story arc of the OT imo. The writers just pushed the reset button and pulled another “Sith Lord” out of thin air to get us right back at the start of ANH. The New Republic is a token effort, just like stating that Kylo Ren and Snoke are not Sith Lords. The New Republic is just there to be blown away, and never seen again, such that the Resistance can become the rebels, and the FO the Empire, whilst Kylo Ren and Snoke are completely indistuinguishable from their Sith counterparts. Lucas spent an entire trilogy exploring how a democracy got turned into an Empire, whilst setting up the rivalry between the Jedi and the Sith, and showing how a young Jedi turns into a Sith Lord. The ST gives us very little context, and makes very little effort to show us how and why we’re right back at square one after two trilogies of seeing an Empire rise and fall. Meanwhile Kylo Ren is just evil, because he’s a bad egg, I guess. He’s given zero motivation for turning to the dark side. Snoke had won his heart is all we get, and Luke apparently pushed him over the edge, because that’s what Jedi do, when you need another Darth Vader.

While the story works fairly well seen on its own terms, in my view it simply doesn’t flow very well from the first six films, and clearly isn’t very original, in that it recycles an awful lot from the OT both visually and narratively. The fact that so many things are left unexplained, and unexplored only reinforces this. Snoke is thus just another Emperor redux like so many other things the ST “borrowed” from the OT. This is the real issue here. By giving Snoke an original backstory, and by making him distuinguishable from the Sith Lords that proceeded him the entire events of the ST are elevated, because it adds history and context, thus allowing the Star Wars universe and mythology to grow beyond simply rehashing what Lucas and his contemporaries did better some four decades earlier.

After six films of stories and events just plunging us into another OT inspired conflict with little context to connect the dots is not going to work for many people, because they are already too invested in the universe, and the characters. Saying Snoke is used not very differently from the Emperor in the OT, is not a defense, but an admission of guilt, because it ignores the fact, that we have had fourty years of story developments, and world building since that time. If the OT’s resolution is important, then how that happy ending got unraveled is as well. To say, that it doesn’t really matter how Snoke and the FO got to undermine the New Republic, and why the New Republic allowed itself to be overrun, is to say that the OT’s resolutions aren’t very important, because another Sith Lord can be pulled from behind the curtain to undo it anyway to extend the conflict ad nauseam. By extension this also undermines the resolution of the ST, because of the precedent it creates. The next writer can just create another Sith Lord from whole cloth, create the Second Order from the ashes of its predecessors, and have Rey moping on another island, such that the next false prophet can repeat the cycle, no explanation required. The Star Wars saga has thus become the movie equivalent of the boy who cried wolf.

I was pointing out that in the pre-PT world we had virtually nothing on Palpatine. The two characters are not very similar other than a lack of background the first time they are seen. And a lot of the ST is based on what they did in the old EU/Legends. Building a new Republic was not easy and they had to content with remnants of the Empire, like Thrawn. The Disney era Star Wars movies have been getting a lot of inspiration from the Legends books, though they are not really repeating anything. Knowing what happened in Legends, though I didn’t read most of them, really puts the sequels in perspective. Where you are seeing as parallels to the original, I see more parallels to Legends. Snoke has more in common with Trawn in many respects. And Snoke and his New Order have advanced things and created new technology where Trawn was fighting with left overs. But then that is a difference between 10 and 30 years after ROTJ. But the ST was always going to be about the next generation of the Skywalker family and I suspect that Ben/Kylo is going to end up with a very unique journey. If JJ and Rian have both been working off the same arc for the characters, which seems likely, then the third act is going to make this a very different trilogy from the last two. The OT was about taking down the bad guys, the PT was about the rise of the bad guys. The ST seems to be about finding the balance again. And that feels like a GL plot line. His prophesy of the chosen one bringing balance to the force seems like the core idea of what we are aiming for now. GL always denied that the force should be like ying/yang, but what Rian did in TLJ was very much ying/yang in nature, down to the image on the floor of the cave. It seems to be the answer to Luke’s unanswered quest of how to keep students from falling to the dark side.

And as for parallels, the PT very much paralleled the OT so I don’t see the ST following suit as much of an issue.

How does Snoke have more in common with Thrawn? The only commonality is, that Snoke took control of Imperial remnants. Other than that Snoke is a dark side user like Palpatine, with a former Jedi apprentice, that he seduced to the darkside, like Palpatine. He physically resembles Palpatine with a deformed body, and even gets to repeat many of Palpatine’s lines from ROTJ, after which he gets killed by his apprentice like Palpatine, because of his arrogance, and his belief that he cannot be betrayed like Palpatine.

The PT had a number of parallels with the OT, but that’s nothing compared to the ST. The PT was aesthetically and narratively totally different from the OT. The ST tells the same basic story as the OT with the same aesthetics (albeit a bit modernized), where a small band of rebels have to defeat an overwhelming Force oppressing the galaxy, and a Jedi prodigy has to seek out the help of a Jedi master to defeat a former Jedi student, who has fallen to the dark side, and is now under the influence of a dark lord.

Palpatine seized power through cunning. Snoke and Thrawn through luck and being in the right place at the right time. Palpatine took over the core of the Republic and turned it into an empire. Snoke and Trawn take over a tiny slice and build it into something to threaten the New Republic with. I see none of Palpatine’s cunning in Snoke and all of Trawn’s arrogance. If you want to focus on the force side, Snoke can’t even properly turn Ben to the dark side. He’s not even evil enough to kill his mother. Kylo Ren is not Darth Vader. And Snoke isn’t thrown into a chasm, he is cut in half by a light saber. And Kylo isn’t trying to save Rey from Snoke, Snoke thinks he knows Kylo and fails to read his deception where there was no attempt at deception from Vader. Only in the very broadest of strokes does the PT resemble the OT, but when you get down to the details it is a very different story with very different motives and agendas. In ROTJ, Vader killing Palpatine was the end of the story. Kylo killing Snoke is only the middle of the story. The similarities of TLJ to both TESB and ROTJ were not lost on me, but I found the blending to be intriguing because it leaves me wondering where they are going to go next. In the OT at this point Vader was dead and the Empire destroyed. We are at a very different place. Snoke is dead and Kylo Ren is very much alive. But which side is he on? How will his story play out now? We are way beyond any parallel with the OT at this point. The parallels have been minor at best. More structural than story. What confrontation will Rey and Kylo have in the next film? It is uncharted ground and that is what makes the ST different and unique.

Author
Time

yotsuya said:

DrDre said:

yotsuya said:

DrDre said:

yotsuya said:

DrDre said:

yotsuya said:

Collipso said:

i’m only one minute in and he’s already bashing everyone that doesn’t like the movie and saying that we don’t like it simply because our theories were wrong. that’s simply not true, i liked rey being a nobody, but i wish we had more information on Snoke to help bridge the 30 year gap and how we went from ‘RIP the empire’ to ‘RIP the rebels’ with a new extremely powerful emperor. we’re two movies in already and we have no idea why the galaxy is in the state it’s in, and Snoke’s “backstory” could help with that.

What what exactly was Palpatine’s backstory before the prequels? What exactly is his backstory in the prequels? That we don’t get information on Snoke is not exactly something new.

Palpatine wasn’t someone of influence until the prequels, and we got to witness him dismantle the Republic throughout the PT in great detail. With Snoke it’s sort of an afterthought. The guy undid everything our heroes fought for somehow, but that’s not considered to be of importance, apparently. It appears to me, that what mattered most is giving us a redux of the OT conflict, and the OT aesthetic with different characters.

That isn’t an accurate assessment of the galactic situation. It is clear from the setup in TFA that the Republic is not very strong and that the great Republic of old has not been recreated. So what our heroes were fighting for in the OT has never been finished. If you look at history this is what often happens. The first government formed after a revolution doesn’t last. Usually it falls and is replaced with something else until that falls and something stronger rises in its place. All we have on the First Order is they rose from the ashes of the Empire. Clearly the production is an indication that Snoke ended up in control of an old Imperial shipyard. Who Snoke is makes little difference to the overall story. That he was there at the right time and place to create the First Order is all that matters. The rest is just filler.

That he was there “at the right time” is contrived, and diminishes the entire story arc of the OT imo. The writers just pushed the reset button and pulled another “Sith Lord” out of thin air to get us right back at the start of ANH. The New Republic is a token effort, just like stating that Kylo Ren and Snoke are not Sith Lords. The New Republic is just there to be blown away, and never seen again, such that the Resistance can become the rebels, and the FO the Empire, whilst Kylo Ren and Snoke are completely indistuinguishable from their Sith counterparts. Lucas spent an entire trilogy exploring how a democracy got turned into an Empire, whilst setting up the rivalry between the Jedi and the Sith, and showing how a young Jedi turns into a Sith Lord. The ST gives us very little context, and makes very little effort to show us how and why we’re right back at square one after two trilogies of seeing an Empire rise and fall. Meanwhile Kylo Ren is just evil, because he’s a bad egg, I guess. He’s given zero motivation for turning to the dark side. Snoke had won his heart is all we get, and Luke apparently pushed him over the edge, because that’s what Jedi do, when you need another Darth Vader.

While the story works fairly well seen on its own terms, in my view it simply doesn’t flow very well from the first six films, and clearly isn’t very original, in that it recycles an awful lot from the OT both visually and narratively. The fact that so many things are left unexplained, and unexplored only reinforces this. Snoke is thus just another Emperor redux like so many other things the ST “borrowed” from the OT. This is the real issue here. By giving Snoke an original backstory, and by making him distuinguishable from the Sith Lords that proceeded him the entire events of the ST are elevated, because it adds history and context, thus allowing the Star Wars universe and mythology to grow beyond simply rehashing what Lucas and his contemporaries did better some four decades earlier.

After six films of stories and events just plunging us into another OT inspired conflict with little context to connect the dots is not going to work for many people, because they are already too invested in the universe, and the characters. Saying Snoke is used not very differently from the Emperor in the OT, is not a defense, but an admission of guilt, because it ignores the fact, that we have had fourty years of story developments, and world building since that time. If the OT’s resolution is important, then how that happy ending got unraveled is as well. To say, that it doesn’t really matter how Snoke and the FO got to undermine the New Republic, and why the New Republic allowed itself to be overrun, is to say that the OT’s resolutions aren’t very important, because another Sith Lord can be pulled from behind the curtain to undo it anyway to extend the conflict ad nauseam. By extension this also undermines the resolution of the ST, because of the precedent it creates. The next writer can just create another Sith Lord from whole cloth, create the Second Order from the ashes of its predecessors, and have Rey moping on another island, such that the next false prophet can repeat the cycle, no explanation required. The Star Wars saga has thus become the movie equivalent of the boy who cried wolf.

I was pointing out that in the pre-PT world we had virtually nothing on Palpatine. The two characters are not very similar other than a lack of background the first time they are seen. And a lot of the ST is based on what they did in the old EU/Legends. Building a new Republic was not easy and they had to content with remnants of the Empire, like Thrawn. The Disney era Star Wars movies have been getting a lot of inspiration from the Legends books, though they are not really repeating anything. Knowing what happened in Legends, though I didn’t read most of them, really puts the sequels in perspective. Where you are seeing as parallels to the original, I see more parallels to Legends. Snoke has more in common with Trawn in many respects. And Snoke and his New Order have advanced things and created new technology where Trawn was fighting with left overs. But then that is a difference between 10 and 30 years after ROTJ. But the ST was always going to be about the next generation of the Skywalker family and I suspect that Ben/Kylo is going to end up with a very unique journey. If JJ and Rian have both been working off the same arc for the characters, which seems likely, then the third act is going to make this a very different trilogy from the last two. The OT was about taking down the bad guys, the PT was about the rise of the bad guys. The ST seems to be about finding the balance again. And that feels like a GL plot line. His prophesy of the chosen one bringing balance to the force seems like the core idea of what we are aiming for now. GL always denied that the force should be like ying/yang, but what Rian did in TLJ was very much ying/yang in nature, down to the image on the floor of the cave. It seems to be the answer to Luke’s unanswered quest of how to keep students from falling to the dark side.

And as for parallels, the PT very much paralleled the OT so I don’t see the ST following suit as much of an issue.

How does Snoke have more in common with Thrawn? The only commonality is, that Snoke took control of Imperial remnants. Other than that Snoke is a dark side user like Palpatine, with a former Jedi apprentice, that he seduced to the darkside, like Palpatine. He physically resembles Palpatine with a deformed body, and even gets to repeat many of Palpatine’s lines from ROTJ, after which he gets killed by his apprentice like Palpatine, because of his arrogance, and his belief that he cannot be betrayed like Palpatine.

The PT had a number of parallels with the OT, but that’s nothing compared to the ST. The PT was aesthetically and narratively totally different from the OT. The ST tells the same basic story as the OT with the same aesthetics (albeit a bit modernized), where a small band of rebels have to defeat an overwhelming Force oppressing the galaxy, and a Jedi prodigy has to seek out the help of a Jedi master to defeat a former Jedi student, who has fallen to the dark side, and is now under the influence of a dark lord.

Palpatine seized power through cunning. Snoke and Thrawn through luck and being in the right place at the right time. Palpatine took over the core of the Republic and turned it into an empire. Snoke and Trawn take over a tiny slice and build it into something to threaten the New Republic with. I see none of Palpatine’s cunning in Snoke and all of Trawn’s arrogance. If you want to focus on the force side, Snoke can’t even properly turn Ben to the dark side. He’s not even evil enough to kill his mother. Kylo Ren is not Darth Vader. And Snoke isn’t thrown into a chasm, he is cut in half by a light saber. And Kylo isn’t trying to save Rey from Snoke, Snoke thinks he knows Kylo and fails to read his deception where there was no attempt at deception from Vader. Only in the very broadest of strokes does the PT resemble the OT, but when you get down to the details it is a very different story with very different motives and agendas. In ROTJ, Vader killing Palpatine was the end of the story. Kylo killing Snoke is only the middle of the story. The similarities of TLJ to both TESB and ROTJ were not lost on me, but I found the blending to be intriguing because it leaves me wondering where they are going to go next. In the OT at this point Vader was dead and the Empire destroyed. We are at a very different place. Snoke is dead and Kylo Ren is very much alive. But which side is he on? How will his story play out now? We are way beyond any parallel with the OT at this point. The parallels have been minor at best. More structural than story. What confrontation will Rey and Kylo have in the next film? It is uncharted ground and that is what makes the ST different and unique.

Spot on. I’ll say that how Snoke got his power simply isn’t relevant to the story that’s being told. It is, of course, very relevant to the story of “what happened after ROTJ,” but that’s not 100% what the ST is about - it’s just as much it’s own story as it is a continuation. I sympathize with those who expected TFA to be a direct sequel to ROTJ, but ultimately I personally don’t have any issues with their approach. The ST starts in media res with a lot of unknown happenings in the intervening years - in this way it much more accurately simulates the experience of watching the OT first, rather than the PT then the OT. Which I appreciate. I like that the trilogies are separated by more than just time - they tell different stories and some of the in-between needn’t be spelled out.

Author
Time

yotsuya said:

DrDre said:

yotsuya said:

DrDre said:

yotsuya said:

DrDre said:

yotsuya said:

Collipso said:

i’m only one minute in and he’s already bashing everyone that doesn’t like the movie and saying that we don’t like it simply because our theories were wrong. that’s simply not true, i liked rey being a nobody, but i wish we had more information on Snoke to help bridge the 30 year gap and how we went from ‘RIP the empire’ to ‘RIP the rebels’ with a new extremely powerful emperor. we’re two movies in already and we have no idea why the galaxy is in the state it’s in, and Snoke’s “backstory” could help with that.

What what exactly was Palpatine’s backstory before the prequels? What exactly is his backstory in the prequels? That we don’t get information on Snoke is not exactly something new.

Palpatine wasn’t someone of influence until the prequels, and we got to witness him dismantle the Republic throughout the PT in great detail. With Snoke it’s sort of an afterthought. The guy undid everything our heroes fought for somehow, but that’s not considered to be of importance, apparently. It appears to me, that what mattered most is giving us a redux of the OT conflict, and the OT aesthetic with different characters.

That isn’t an accurate assessment of the galactic situation. It is clear from the setup in TFA that the Republic is not very strong and that the great Republic of old has not been recreated. So what our heroes were fighting for in the OT has never been finished. If you look at history this is what often happens. The first government formed after a revolution doesn’t last. Usually it falls and is replaced with something else until that falls and something stronger rises in its place. All we have on the First Order is they rose from the ashes of the Empire. Clearly the production is an indication that Snoke ended up in control of an old Imperial shipyard. Who Snoke is makes little difference to the overall story. That he was there at the right time and place to create the First Order is all that matters. The rest is just filler.

That he was there “at the right time” is contrived, and diminishes the entire story arc of the OT imo. The writers just pushed the reset button and pulled another “Sith Lord” out of thin air to get us right back at the start of ANH. The New Republic is a token effort, just like stating that Kylo Ren and Snoke are not Sith Lords. The New Republic is just there to be blown away, and never seen again, such that the Resistance can become the rebels, and the FO the Empire, whilst Kylo Ren and Snoke are completely indistuinguishable from their Sith counterparts. Lucas spent an entire trilogy exploring how a democracy got turned into an Empire, whilst setting up the rivalry between the Jedi and the Sith, and showing how a young Jedi turns into a Sith Lord. The ST gives us very little context, and makes very little effort to show us how and why we’re right back at square one after two trilogies of seeing an Empire rise and fall. Meanwhile Kylo Ren is just evil, because he’s a bad egg, I guess. He’s given zero motivation for turning to the dark side. Snoke had won his heart is all we get, and Luke apparently pushed him over the edge, because that’s what Jedi do, when you need another Darth Vader.

While the story works fairly well seen on its own terms, in my view it simply doesn’t flow very well from the first six films, and clearly isn’t very original, in that it recycles an awful lot from the OT both visually and narratively. The fact that so many things are left unexplained, and unexplored only reinforces this. Snoke is thus just another Emperor redux like so many other things the ST “borrowed” from the OT. This is the real issue here. By giving Snoke an original backstory, and by making him distuinguishable from the Sith Lords that proceeded him the entire events of the ST are elevated, because it adds history and context, thus allowing the Star Wars universe and mythology to grow beyond simply rehashing what Lucas and his contemporaries did better some four decades earlier.

After six films of stories and events just plunging us into another OT inspired conflict with little context to connect the dots is not going to work for many people, because they are already too invested in the universe, and the characters. Saying Snoke is used not very differently from the Emperor in the OT, is not a defense, but an admission of guilt, because it ignores the fact, that we have had fourty years of story developments, and world building since that time. If the OT’s resolution is important, then how that happy ending got unraveled is as well. To say, that it doesn’t really matter how Snoke and the FO got to undermine the New Republic, and why the New Republic allowed itself to be overrun, is to say that the OT’s resolutions aren’t very important, because another Sith Lord can be pulled from behind the curtain to undo it anyway to extend the conflict ad nauseam. By extension this also undermines the resolution of the ST, because of the precedent it creates. The next writer can just create another Sith Lord from whole cloth, create the Second Order from the ashes of its predecessors, and have Rey moping on another island, such that the next false prophet can repeat the cycle, no explanation required. The Star Wars saga has thus become the movie equivalent of the boy who cried wolf.

I was pointing out that in the pre-PT world we had virtually nothing on Palpatine. The two characters are not very similar other than a lack of background the first time they are seen. And a lot of the ST is based on what they did in the old EU/Legends. Building a new Republic was not easy and they had to content with remnants of the Empire, like Thrawn. The Disney era Star Wars movies have been getting a lot of inspiration from the Legends books, though they are not really repeating anything. Knowing what happened in Legends, though I didn’t read most of them, really puts the sequels in perspective. Where you are seeing as parallels to the original, I see more parallels to Legends. Snoke has more in common with Trawn in many respects. And Snoke and his New Order have advanced things and created new technology where Trawn was fighting with left overs. But then that is a difference between 10 and 30 years after ROTJ. But the ST was always going to be about the next generation of the Skywalker family and I suspect that Ben/Kylo is going to end up with a very unique journey. If JJ and Rian have both been working off the same arc for the characters, which seems likely, then the third act is going to make this a very different trilogy from the last two. The OT was about taking down the bad guys, the PT was about the rise of the bad guys. The ST seems to be about finding the balance again. And that feels like a GL plot line. His prophesy of the chosen one bringing balance to the force seems like the core idea of what we are aiming for now. GL always denied that the force should be like ying/yang, but what Rian did in TLJ was very much ying/yang in nature, down to the image on the floor of the cave. It seems to be the answer to Luke’s unanswered quest of how to keep students from falling to the dark side.

And as for parallels, the PT very much paralleled the OT so I don’t see the ST following suit as much of an issue.

How does Snoke have more in common with Thrawn? The only commonality is, that Snoke took control of Imperial remnants. Other than that Snoke is a dark side user like Palpatine, with a former Jedi apprentice, that he seduced to the darkside, like Palpatine. He physically resembles Palpatine with a deformed body, and even gets to repeat many of Palpatine’s lines from ROTJ, after which he gets killed by his apprentice like Palpatine, because of his arrogance, and his belief that he cannot be betrayed like Palpatine.

The PT had a number of parallels with the OT, but that’s nothing compared to the ST. The PT was aesthetically and narratively totally different from the OT. The ST tells the same basic story as the OT with the same aesthetics (albeit a bit modernized), where a small band of rebels have to defeat an overwhelming Force oppressing the galaxy, and a Jedi prodigy has to seek out the help of a Jedi master to defeat a former Jedi student, who has fallen to the dark side, and is now under the influence of a dark lord.

Palpatine seized power through cunning. Snoke and Thrawn through luck and being in the right place at the right time. Palpatine took over the core of the Republic and turned it into an empire. Snoke and Trawn take over a tiny slice and build it into something to threaten the New Republic with. I see none of Palpatine’s cunning in Snoke and all of Trawn’s arrogance.

Since we know nothing about Snoke, he essentially has no character, or history beyond his relationship with Kylo Ren. As such, the idea that Snoke does not have Palpatine’s cunning is literally based on nothing, as Snoke’s character is nothing more than a plot device in the service of Kylo Ren’s character arc. So, Snoke is essentially little more than the OT’s Emperor with a condensed character arc. The difference between Snoke’s arc, and Palpatine’s is solely in Kylo Ren’s motivations for killing his master.

If you want to focus on the force side, Snoke can’t even properly turn Ben to the dark side. He’s not even evil enough to kill his mother. Kylo Ren is not Darth Vader. And Snoke isn’t thrown into a chasm, he is cut in half by a light saber. And Kylo isn’t trying to save Rey from Snoke, Snoke thinks he knows Kylo and fails to read his deception where there was no attempt at deception from Vader.

One might argue Vader isn’t evil enough to kill his son, and like Kylo he is conflicted in ROTJ, and both Palpatine and Snoke take notice. Whilst Palpatine doesn’t berate Vader, and only wonders if the Dark Lord’s feelings are clear, the sentiment is the same. Also lets not forget, that Kylo did kill his father. Both masters are aware of a weakness in their apprentices, and both are arrogant enough to believe, that they cannot be betrayed. Then there’s the fact that Vader also plotted against his master in TESB. So, in my view most of the essential elements that TLJ uses to tell its story are borrowed from the OT. The plot is more condensed, because TLJ provides a remix of both TESB, and ROTJ, whilst adding a few twists, but the story remains the OT with a few twists, and not its own story in my view.

Only in the very broadest of strokes does the PT resemble the OT, but when you get down to the details it is a very different story with very different motives and agendas. In ROTJ, Vader killing Palpatine was the end of the story. Kylo killing Snoke is only the middle of the story. The similarities of TLJ to both TESB and ROTJ were not lost on me, but I found the blending to be intriguing because it leaves me wondering where they are going to go next. In the OT at this point Vader was dead and the Empire destroyed. We are at a very different place. Snoke is dead and Kylo Ren is very much alive. But which side is he on? How will his story play out now? We are way beyond any parallel with the OT at this point. The parallels have been minor at best. More structural than story. What confrontation will Rey and Kylo have in the next film? It is uncharted ground and that is what makes the ST different and unique.

Yeah, but to me it’s very faint praise to suggest that finally after two installments of mostly rehashing, and remixing the OT’s story threads in a condensed form, we might finally get a mostly original story in episode IX, which for me is too little, too late.

Author
Time
 (Edited)

DominicCobb said:

yotsuya said:

DrDre said:

yotsuya said:

DrDre said:

yotsuya said:

DrDre said:

yotsuya said:

Collipso said:

i’m only one minute in and he’s already bashing everyone that doesn’t like the movie and saying that we don’t like it simply because our theories were wrong. that’s simply not true, i liked rey being a nobody, but i wish we had more information on Snoke to help bridge the 30 year gap and how we went from ‘RIP the empire’ to ‘RIP the rebels’ with a new extremely powerful emperor. we’re two movies in already and we have no idea why the galaxy is in the state it’s in, and Snoke’s “backstory” could help with that.

What what exactly was Palpatine’s backstory before the prequels? What exactly is his backstory in the prequels? That we don’t get information on Snoke is not exactly something new.

Palpatine wasn’t someone of influence until the prequels, and we got to witness him dismantle the Republic throughout the PT in great detail. With Snoke it’s sort of an afterthought. The guy undid everything our heroes fought for somehow, but that’s not considered to be of importance, apparently. It appears to me, that what mattered most is giving us a redux of the OT conflict, and the OT aesthetic with different characters.

That isn’t an accurate assessment of the galactic situation. It is clear from the setup in TFA that the Republic is not very strong and that the great Republic of old has not been recreated. So what our heroes were fighting for in the OT has never been finished. If you look at history this is what often happens. The first government formed after a revolution doesn’t last. Usually it falls and is replaced with something else until that falls and something stronger rises in its place. All we have on the First Order is they rose from the ashes of the Empire. Clearly the production is an indication that Snoke ended up in control of an old Imperial shipyard. Who Snoke is makes little difference to the overall story. That he was there at the right time and place to create the First Order is all that matters. The rest is just filler.

That he was there “at the right time” is contrived, and diminishes the entire story arc of the OT imo. The writers just pushed the reset button and pulled another “Sith Lord” out of thin air to get us right back at the start of ANH. The New Republic is a token effort, just like stating that Kylo Ren and Snoke are not Sith Lords. The New Republic is just there to be blown away, and never seen again, such that the Resistance can become the rebels, and the FO the Empire, whilst Kylo Ren and Snoke are completely indistuinguishable from their Sith counterparts. Lucas spent an entire trilogy exploring how a democracy got turned into an Empire, whilst setting up the rivalry between the Jedi and the Sith, and showing how a young Jedi turns into a Sith Lord. The ST gives us very little context, and makes very little effort to show us how and why we’re right back at square one after two trilogies of seeing an Empire rise and fall. Meanwhile Kylo Ren is just evil, because he’s a bad egg, I guess. He’s given zero motivation for turning to the dark side. Snoke had won his heart is all we get, and Luke apparently pushed him over the edge, because that’s what Jedi do, when you need another Darth Vader.

While the story works fairly well seen on its own terms, in my view it simply doesn’t flow very well from the first six films, and clearly isn’t very original, in that it recycles an awful lot from the OT both visually and narratively. The fact that so many things are left unexplained, and unexplored only reinforces this. Snoke is thus just another Emperor redux like so many other things the ST “borrowed” from the OT. This is the real issue here. By giving Snoke an original backstory, and by making him distuinguishable from the Sith Lords that proceeded him the entire events of the ST are elevated, because it adds history and context, thus allowing the Star Wars universe and mythology to grow beyond simply rehashing what Lucas and his contemporaries did better some four decades earlier.

After six films of stories and events just plunging us into another OT inspired conflict with little context to connect the dots is not going to work for many people, because they are already too invested in the universe, and the characters. Saying Snoke is used not very differently from the Emperor in the OT, is not a defense, but an admission of guilt, because it ignores the fact, that we have had fourty years of story developments, and world building since that time. If the OT’s resolution is important, then how that happy ending got unraveled is as well. To say, that it doesn’t really matter how Snoke and the FO got to undermine the New Republic, and why the New Republic allowed itself to be overrun, is to say that the OT’s resolutions aren’t very important, because another Sith Lord can be pulled from behind the curtain to undo it anyway to extend the conflict ad nauseam. By extension this also undermines the resolution of the ST, because of the precedent it creates. The next writer can just create another Sith Lord from whole cloth, create the Second Order from the ashes of its predecessors, and have Rey moping on another island, such that the next false prophet can repeat the cycle, no explanation required. The Star Wars saga has thus become the movie equivalent of the boy who cried wolf.

I was pointing out that in the pre-PT world we had virtually nothing on Palpatine. The two characters are not very similar other than a lack of background the first time they are seen. And a lot of the ST is based on what they did in the old EU/Legends. Building a new Republic was not easy and they had to content with remnants of the Empire, like Thrawn. The Disney era Star Wars movies have been getting a lot of inspiration from the Legends books, though they are not really repeating anything. Knowing what happened in Legends, though I didn’t read most of them, really puts the sequels in perspective. Where you are seeing as parallels to the original, I see more parallels to Legends. Snoke has more in common with Trawn in many respects. And Snoke and his New Order have advanced things and created new technology where Trawn was fighting with left overs. But then that is a difference between 10 and 30 years after ROTJ. But the ST was always going to be about the next generation of the Skywalker family and I suspect that Ben/Kylo is going to end up with a very unique journey. If JJ and Rian have both been working off the same arc for the characters, which seems likely, then the third act is going to make this a very different trilogy from the last two. The OT was about taking down the bad guys, the PT was about the rise of the bad guys. The ST seems to be about finding the balance again. And that feels like a GL plot line. His prophesy of the chosen one bringing balance to the force seems like the core idea of what we are aiming for now. GL always denied that the force should be like ying/yang, but what Rian did in TLJ was very much ying/yang in nature, down to the image on the floor of the cave. It seems to be the answer to Luke’s unanswered quest of how to keep students from falling to the dark side.

And as for parallels, the PT very much paralleled the OT so I don’t see the ST following suit as much of an issue.

How does Snoke have more in common with Thrawn? The only commonality is, that Snoke took control of Imperial remnants. Other than that Snoke is a dark side user like Palpatine, with a former Jedi apprentice, that he seduced to the darkside, like Palpatine. He physically resembles Palpatine with a deformed body, and even gets to repeat many of Palpatine’s lines from ROTJ, after which he gets killed by his apprentice like Palpatine, because of his arrogance, and his belief that he cannot be betrayed like Palpatine.

The PT had a number of parallels with the OT, but that’s nothing compared to the ST. The PT was aesthetically and narratively totally different from the OT. The ST tells the same basic story as the OT with the same aesthetics (albeit a bit modernized), where a small band of rebels have to defeat an overwhelming Force oppressing the galaxy, and a Jedi prodigy has to seek out the help of a Jedi master to defeat a former Jedi student, who has fallen to the dark side, and is now under the influence of a dark lord.

Palpatine seized power through cunning. Snoke and Thrawn through luck and being in the right place at the right time. Palpatine took over the core of the Republic and turned it into an empire. Snoke and Trawn take over a tiny slice and build it into something to threaten the New Republic with. I see none of Palpatine’s cunning in Snoke and all of Trawn’s arrogance. If you want to focus on the force side, Snoke can’t even properly turn Ben to the dark side. He’s not even evil enough to kill his mother. Kylo Ren is not Darth Vader. And Snoke isn’t thrown into a chasm, he is cut in half by a light saber. And Kylo isn’t trying to save Rey from Snoke, Snoke thinks he knows Kylo and fails to read his deception where there was no attempt at deception from Vader. Only in the very broadest of strokes does the PT resemble the OT, but when you get down to the details it is a very different story with very different motives and agendas. In ROTJ, Vader killing Palpatine was the end of the story. Kylo killing Snoke is only the middle of the story. The similarities of TLJ to both TESB and ROTJ were not lost on me, but I found the blending to be intriguing because it leaves me wondering where they are going to go next. In the OT at this point Vader was dead and the Empire destroyed. We are at a very different place. Snoke is dead and Kylo Ren is very much alive. But which side is he on? How will his story play out now? We are way beyond any parallel with the OT at this point. The parallels have been minor at best. More structural than story. What confrontation will Rey and Kylo have in the next film? It is uncharted ground and that is what makes the ST different and unique.

Spot on. I’ll say that how Snoke got his power simply isn’t relevant to the story that’s being told. It is, of course, very relevant to the story of “what happened after ROTJ,” but that’s not 100% what the ST is about - it’s just as much it’s own story as it is a continuation.

The story being told has nine chapters, not three. For all the PT’s failings, Lucas told one overarching story with overarching themes. The ST feels tacked on, because it does not respect several of the overarching themes Lucas introduced in his six part saga, whilst also providing very little narrative glue to connect the last trilogy to the previous two. If the ST tells its own story, which is only very weakly connected to the previous trilogies in a continuity sense, then don’t call it episode IX of a larger story, I would say. Just tell your own story, and let the classic characters keep their happy ending.

I sympathize with those who expected TFA to be a direct sequel to ROTJ, but ultimately I personally don’t have any issues with their approach. The ST starts in media res with a lot of unknown happenings in the intervening years - in this way it much more accurately simulates the experience of watching the OT first, rather than the PT then the OT. Which I appreciate. I like that the trilogies are separated by more than just time - they tell different stories and some of the in-between needn’t be spelled out.

Well I do, if you’re going to continue Lucas’ story, then continue Lucas’ story. Don’t do a soft reboot and give us a remix of the OT. It’s a lot more difficult to tell an original new story, that respects the themes set out by Lucas, but that’s what a lot of critics were expecting. As it is now, a lot of people feel the classic characters’ arcs, and their victories were sacrificed, such that the new characters can relive many of the previous generation’s successes. The most original story element to come out of this thusfar, is Kylo Ren becoming the Emperor, and we’ll just have to see where they take his story. However, considering RJ’s decision to have both Luke, Leia, and Rey give up on the idea, that Ben Solo can be redeemed, the conclusion of the nine episode saga seems to be heading towards rebels defeat the Empire (again), but without the emotional backbone of a close family relation redeeming another in the process. In other words the nine episode saga will be emotionally a lot less satisfying to many than the original six episode saga. That would be a pretty hefty price to pay for a narratively unnecessary saga extension with diminished returns. So, I don’t envy Abrams. It’s up to him to bring balance to the Star Wars saga, and to get the fans that TLJ alienated back into the fold, since I don’t see the rift in the fanbase as a good thing personally, no matter what anyone might think of TLJ. I certainly hope, that episode IX will be liked by both fans and critics of TLJ, and that perhaps some of the critics like me will have more appreciation for TLJ when seen through the prism of the closing chapter of the saga.

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As usual I’ll have to strongly disagree. IV, V, VI, VII, VIII is already far more emotionally satisfying than I, II, III, IV, V, VI ever was. Going from III to IV is much more jarring a shift than going from VI to VII (and I’m not talking about quality). Just because nothing important plot-wise happens in between the PT and the OT doesn’t make them a cohesive and continuous unit, far from it. Lucas’s conception of the six episode saga was incredibly faulty and unsatisfactory. Hard to say how the nine episode saga will look without having seen the last chapter, but it can’t be anymore slapdash than the six episode one (if anything it’s working to rectify the problems).

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DominicCobb said:

As usual I’ll have to strongly disagree. IV, V, VI, VII, VIII is already far more emotionally satisfying than I, II, III, IV, V, VI ever was. Going from III to IV is much more jarring a shift than going from VI to VII (and I’m not talking about quality). Just because nothing important plot-wise happens in between the PT and the OT doesn’t make them a cohesive and continuous unit, far from it. Lucas’s conception of the six episode saga was incredibly faulty and unsatisfactory. Hard to say how the nine episode saga will look without having seen the last chapter, but it can’t be anymore slapdash than the six episode one (if anything it’s working to rectify the problems).

I’ll have to strongly disagree too. 😉 The PT is conceptually, and visually far more interesting to me than the ST, and that’s coming from someone who feels the PT is deeply flawed. I also don’t feel, it’s the current owners’ job to rectify percieved problems with Lucas’ story. Write your own story with your own characters, if you feel, you can do better. I prefer the OT as a three act story over Lucas’ six part saga, but I appreciate the creative vision he was going for while developing the PT. The ST feels like a postmodern take on the OT to me. It’s interesting as a sort of meta commentary on the story that preceeded it, but also in many ways the antithesis of what Star Wars used to be, and for many is supposed to be.

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DominicCobb said:

As usual I’ll have to strongly disagree. IV, V, VI, VII, VIII is already far more emotionally satisfying than I, II, III, IV, V, VI ever was. Going from III to IV is much more jarring a shift than going from VI to VII (and I’m not talking about quality). Just because nothing important plot-wise happens in between the PT and the OT doesn’t make them a cohesive and continuous unit, far from it. Lucas’s conception of the six episode saga was incredibly faulty and unsatisfactory. Hard to say how the nine episode saga will look without having seen the last chapter, but it can’t be anymore slapdash than the six episode one (if anything it’s working to rectify the problems).

Um what?
Between 3 and 4 the Empire grows in power as does the Rebellion, Luke and Leia grow up, and the Death Star is finally completed after 20 years. All of these things were set up in 3, and in fact one of the issues people have with that movie is how much hand-holding it does to make the universe continue relatively unchanged for two decades.

Between 6 and 7 the civil war officially ends with the Imperial remnant being exiled to the unknown regions, a new First Order arises from this remnant, Han and Leia officially get married then have a kid and Luke starts to form a new Jedi order then the Solo kid goes bad and destroys the order and Han and Leia break up and Luke goes into exile. Oh and the First Order is being run by a totally new warlord who is strong in the Force but unrelated to the Sith, they’ve somehow found a way to build a weapon much larger than any built by the Empire at the height of their power, and they’ve infiltrated the Republic Senate so far as to cast Leia out and force her to start her own miniature Rebellion.

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:

DominicCobb said:

As usual I’ll have to strongly disagree. IV, V, VI, VII, VIII is already far more emotionally satisfying than I, II, III, IV, V, VI ever was. Going from III to IV is much more jarring a shift than going from VI to VII (and I’m not talking about quality). Just because nothing important plot-wise happens in between the PT and the OT doesn’t make them a cohesive and continuous unit, far from it. Lucas’s conception of the six episode saga was incredibly faulty and unsatisfactory. Hard to say how the nine episode saga will look without having seen the last chapter, but it can’t be anymore slapdash than the six episode one (if anything it’s working to rectify the problems).

Um what?
Between 3 and 4 the Empire grows in power as does the Rebellion, Luke and Leia grow up, and the Death Star is finally completed after 20 years. All of these things were set up in 3, and in fact one of the issues people have with that movie is how much hand-holding it does to make the universe continue relatively unchanged for two decades.

Between 6 and 7 the civil war officially ends with the Imperial remnant being exiled to the unknown regions, a new First Order arises from this remnant, Han and Leia officially get married then have a kid and Luke starts to form a new Jedi order then the Solo kid goes bad and destroys the order and Han and Leia break up and Luke goes into exile. Oh and the First Order is being run by a totally new warlord who is strong in the Force but unrelated to the Sith, they’ve somehow found a way to build a weapon much larger than any built by the Empire at the height of their power, and they’ve infiltrated the Republic Senate so far as to cast Leia out and force her to start her own miniature Rebellion.

I agree. The PT ends where the OT begins, right down to the twin sunset on Tatooine. Going from ROTJ to TFA is far more jarring to me, where an obvious total victory is suddenly and without explanation completely reversed, while all the victors have become shadows of their former selves. General Solo has again become a smuggler in debt with everyone, who hides from his problems. Luke’s hiding from his problems on a rock, and has closed himself off from the Force. Even Leia has been demoted from princess, and senator to the general of an even smaller band of rebels, whilst Han and Leia have apparently won the worst parents of the year award.