Mocata said:

Does woke mean anything these days? I use to think it was something do do with common sense being replaced by box ticking and messaging but it’s hard to say any more.

Woke is one of the more fun reappropriations of language to mean absolutely nothing that’s happened in quite awhile.

“Woke” (staying woke, being woke) was basically just slang for Black folks to keep their head on a swivel. “Stay Woke” was mostly just a slang term short for “keep your eyes open” or “pay attention” to danger in social situations. It most frequently got applied when it came to people trying to rob you (metaphorically or literally) but not being up-front about it. Know who you’re around, know what moves they’re likely to make to put you down and keep you there. Eventually it came to represent a larger societal idea (it didn’t take that long to encompass that meaning) where you see behind bad-faith arguments/definitions for societal progressivism, but that’s more or less the etymology of the term.

Once the social media era grabbed hold of it from its origin (which pre-dated social media by DECADES, btw) it got pretty quickly diluted by bad-actors looking to defang the phrase completely, until now it basically means “something a racist person thinks is ‘virtue signaling’ or worse, ‘reverse racism’ being unfairly perpetuated upon THEM”

It’s more or less a dogwhistle for conservative types to cry about things they don’t like personally. Has nothing to do with being “woke” at all anymore, it’s just kind of an all-purpose insult for anything the person calling it out deems beneath them in even a SLIGHTLY progressive manner.

It’s basically to the point now where its ONLY usage is either ironic, or full-blown ceding the redefinition of the term to acknowledge that the only real use of it comes from right-wing folks trying to use it like a scarlet letter.

JadedSkywalker said:
I liked Vader with the red lenses and don’t choke on your aspirations, that was very OT Vader.

Complete side-tangent: I know it’s a bit of a tiny kerfluffle regarding “the red lenses” on Vader (and he did have sort of darker amber/tinted lenses in Star Wars that often had a bit of a red hue when the lights hit them) and how Rogue One supposedly overdid it to some degree; but as someone who has cut a version of that movie and pixel-peeped QUITE a bit, a lot of the “red lenses” stuff is literally just red light IN the shot reflecting off the lenses, which otherwise still look mostly dark/black. The meeting with Krennic on Mustafar seems to be a scene that gets complained about heavily, but you can actually see the set lights casting a red glow on the scene and reflecting off the mask. It’s not that the lenses are red, it’s that there are orange/yellow/red lights bouncing off that plastic.

I believe the entire purpose of Driver pursuing Soderbergh (who then got Burns onboard) was primarily to investigate the idea of the character not being “redeemed” - Driver had initially signed on thinking that was the goal with the guy, and that had been reinforced by how The Last Jedi was done.

I don’t think they were trying to cement Kylo’s importance to the overall story, really. In fact, his being forcefully, clumsily shifted to hold almost the whole focus of the ST by the midway point of Rise of Skywalker is a huge reason it folds in on itself, dramatically - the movies start by pairing Rey and Finn as the co-leads, and then Rey takes center stage for the 2nd chapter, and instead of Finn & Rey coming together for the 3rd chapter, they backseated both of them for the sake of making Ben the hero/main character. Say what you will (I do, all the time, LOL) about Trevorrow’s skills as a creative, but at least his first couple whacks at the story recognized where The Last Jedi was pointing towards, and it was NOT a “redemption” for Kylo, and it was 100% at Finn leading some sort of uprising amongst the First Order (which is probably the only way the Resistance overcomes having almost no numbers).

This seemed to have been a story looking to pursue the original idea in a different framework. Kylo/Ben wouldn’t actually be prominent to that degree, he’d be hunted, and the clumsy, facile idea of “redemption” forced on him would be sidestepped for a more interesting examination of the character who actually IS too far gone.

Make it anime

Rip off Macross

Done.

Pretty interesting the Polygon article is clearly writing this thing because of the leaks, but doesn’t cite them (instead citing the now 10yrs old story about Edwards watching Star Wars as prep for Rogue One) - and makes sure to include this sentence

Yes, it’s 50 years old, and that original print probably wouldn’t look spectacular.

Which sucks! Gizmodo cites the Polygon story but manages to actually INFORM their readers as to why people are wondering about it (and doesn’t seem to just casually toss in the idea it’ll look bad by default, LOL)

oojason said:
They could be in indicator towards a physical media release (or large-scale internal archival project) - rather than just a DCP for a theatrical run for the 50th anniversary. I do hope we get to see some more of those kind of videos.

I think the dead giveaway this was always going to have some sort of physical release (whether it’s Disney doing it or they license it to a label like Criterion) - even before the official 50th announcement so early - is that they’re working on an Atmos mix next to the theatrical audio restorations.

I’ve heard the suggestions that it could be an internal archival project BUT an Atmos remix nulls all that out. You’d only be doing one of those if you’re planning on a big release, theatrical AND home, otherwise it wouldn’t make any sense to do at all.

FWIW - in my own bespoke edit of this movie for my Plex server (mostly made out of this edit to begin with, of course) I did keep his ghost out of the proceedings, LOL, while trying to rework the ending with diff. music choices and no dialog once she leaves the Falcon.

I dunno, maybe this would work/could work

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NN13Uvk3D-0

JadedSkywalker said:

I hope they hire Mike Matessino and Neil S Bulk to do the John Williams scores. That would be a dream. But It won’t happen.

You mosey on over to JWFan and the people there who KNOW those folks have been winking and hinting at that exact thing coming for YEARS now, LOL. Long before anything about the restoration was known.

So they’re doing a big ol’ Atmos remix (using different takes/elements) and then including restorations of the original surround mixes AND the mono?

Can we get an isolated score in there, too?

Because I’m pretty certain they’re going to be remastering (CORRECTLY this time) those, too.

timdiggerm said:

I think, given the history of this possibility, skepticism is understandable. Don’t count your eggs until they hatch, don’t celebrate with too much confidence until Disney actually makes it official.

I’m not saying it isn’t understandable - I’ve been pretty up front all throughout the thread about how I understand the actual decades of habit and/or ritual, coming to bear on a lot of this. I’m not trying to shame people for being skeptical and/or pessimistic.

I’m only really pointing it out as relevant context for why the reactions are muted, and why - with these muted reactions (and attendant weirdness to boot) the insistence on standard leaks about something that’s been in the works for about 3+ years now and is GOING to be a thing in 2027, maybe shouldn’t be treated as an existential threat to the degree people seem to be doing in the two places online centered on the original theatrical cuts.

A company accidentally leaking work-in-progress clips of the restoration to a public youtube channel, especially when reaction to it is basically a blip at most, isn’t going to get the whole thing canceled when it’s been budgeted on a 5yr schedule and 3 of that has already gone forward, and at this point the 50th has been officially announced. I don’t think its a lot of worth in refocusing attention off the actual restoration or the 50th, and onto a mostly non-existent possibility that this leak is going to get everything canceled and ruined.

And further - considering the thread is called “hopes and expectations” I don’t know that expressing or focusing ON hopes and now allowing oneself to HAVE expectations should be such a scary proposition, LOL. It’s the 50th Anniversary! If you’re gonna let yourself hope, why not now? It’s just Star Wars.

They’re not going to cancel the 50th anniversary because leaks of what they’re doing for it got out years earlier and the primary reaction to it were shrugs and a bunch of people posting weird messages about how they’re probably going to get people fired.

This is kinda what I was talking about earlier: We’ve got what looks like pretty incontrovertible proof that we’re finally getting what we’ve been asking for since 2004, and nobody seems particularly happy about it now that it’s happening, LOL.

I don’t think they’re worried about us anymore, if they ever were. And they’re certainly not going to fire a bunch of folks for accidentally posting quality control clips to YouTube that led to… basically nothing. A couple reddit threads nobody seemed to believe, a YouTube video that not a whole lot of people watched, and pretty much all discussion of it being locked at starwarstrilogy.com and now this thread becoming… whatever’s happening right now in here.

The 50th Anniversary is happening. It’s clearly going to be bigger than one wide release of Star Wars, too. This SHOULD be a pretty good thing, the fact we have a very good sign it’s going to be what we’ve been wanting all this time, but not only is the reaction to all this frankly pretty MUTED, but on top of that it’s still more negative than anything.

I think that’s notable.

I’d imagine anything that went up that anyone knows about got downloaded almost instantly, LOL. The clips we’re talking about today, went up (and back down) months ago, according to the leak.

The work itself apparently has been ongoing since 2022? Which makes the care being taken by the folks who knew for months all the more admirable. It does seem there’s likely zero chance the project was ever going to get full-blown canceled because of a YouTube leak (this would mean LFL/Disney knew five years before release they were going to be doing this in 2027, and had scheduled accordingly) and while I can very much understand not wanting people to get fired for an automation mistake - it really doesn’t seem likely to me that would be in the cards, either?

Especially considering the leak, even now fully leaked, isn’t really making a lot of noise anyway, or at least any that would call down that level of thunder, internally. It’s hard to say, I guess. But the excess of caution is very admirable and thoughtful.

That said, once it’s out, it’s out, and this was always going to happen, LOL. It’s a fundamental part of Star Wars fandom online. To be real, large swaths of how news ITSELF is disseminated online is rooted in how leaks became a pillar of the internet in the late 90s because of Star Wars.

Eckhardt also chimed in on that reddit thread to say this is what he saw. Or rather, what he said was “told ya so.” LOL.

I’m not sure these caps share any of the UHD’s same framing decisions. This shot from ESB is cropped in WAY tighter on the UHD than it is on these caps, for example:

ESB UHD
https://i0.wp.com/imgs.screencaps.us/198/4k-swempire/full/4k-swempire-starwarsscreencaps.com-10522.jpg?ssl=1&quality=95

Leak
https://i.imgur.com/FuA8TIB.jpeg

If I wasn’t at work right now I’d probably see if I could figure out which asteroid that is from Empire Strikes Back, LOL. And then I’d step frame-by-frame through 4K80 for like 3 minutes before I got bored and gave up

Well that’s the thing that makes this so alternately confounding and frustrating: Lucasfilm (or the company being hired out to help restore all this stuff for Lucasfilm for 2027) IS basically teasing us, intentionally or no. And I can’t believe that, by this point, nobody at either the company, or at LFL, doesn’t know about this. But it seems like even in the circles where these leaks and teases would have been massive news just a couple years ago, people are doing one of two things

1. shrugging like “I guess that’s cool”
2. immediately “debunking” it out of force-of-habit.

Both of which combine to make this feel like a big fat “so what.” If these sorts of things don’t spark anything off at the spoiler forums, if the people who hawk those places for cheap/easy “content” at Geek outlets online don’t really care, and if they can’t even gain traction in the place literally NAMED after something like this finally happening, it makes me wonder whether it’s simply too late for this to make the sort of impact many of us have been presuming it’d make when it finally happened.

I mean, the fact the leak exists in the way it does is odd, full stop (an automated process breaking and accidentally revealing some part of the restoration team is using private YouTube uploads to share quick clips for QC with other parts of the team, complete with chats/transcripts), but the fact the pics look clearly different from the Reliance stuff, AND clearly different from any of the 4K projects, makes it seem pretty clear to me this is the goods.

Lust-In-Phaze said:

Does this change anyone’s minds on whether those leaks from the summer were legit? I’m not versed enough in the fine details of any shots to say whether they’re doctored from other restorations, curious what greater minds than my own have to say.

It didn’t really change my mind but that’s mostly because I already believed it was the goods in the first place, lol!

There’s no way this is faked, so far as I can see. Aside from having to get real in the weeds with speculation as to how they did it (which would ignore all the details about how we found out about it and how long it’s been ongoing) you can pretty easily pull up a copy of either the 06 Bonus DVD or DeSpecialized or 4k77 and match them to the caps and see the sources are different and the level of detail and color (even via compressed caps of youtube) is simply too good to be ai-faked upscales. Or carefully “degraded” clips from the UHD.

At this point I think folks just want to be skeptical more out of force of habit than anything else.

Edit is now available! OP’s been edited.

Any questions you got, as per usual, fire away, I’m all ears and happy to hear whatever you got!

Acbagel said:

New Imperial forces arrive at Mandalore!

Hey-Heyyyy, I recognize that planet approach 😃

This whole project is frankly astounding in its scope and execution. Just remarkable, remarkable work. And that trailer is the hotness, too. Everything about this looks top-notch. More folks should know about this.

(original art elements by Mayank Kumarr)

Hello There!

I’m going to tell you a story. A story of a faneditor who was folding laundry one weekend afternoon, with James Bond in the background. A classic story, one many are familiar with; it’s how most of my first viewings of Roger Moore’s entire era were done, in fact. But it wasn’t a James Bond movie, it was a YouTube essay ABOUT a James Bond movie. No Time to Die, specifically: the explosive sendoff to the Daniel Craig era, and direct sequel to Spectre, of which this editor had created an Alternate Cut months before.

And while this editor was tidily packing the drawer with neatly rolled up socks, ideas were sparking; editorial answers to the questions the essayist was posing. Scenes being reconstituted into shapes that might make the bow-tied young man in the video nod and go “Well played, clerk.”  And the next thing he knew, he had flopped onto the couch with No Time to Die blaring, and the notes app was getting filled, the movie getting paused and rewound, like he still didn’t have vacuuming to do, and there was all the time in the world…

The above IS a true story. I wasn’t planning on doing No Time to Die, I was honestly just…fine with its grandiosity/largesse, considering its being EON’s final creative statement on the character. Sure, I agreed with folks saying it probably didn’t need to be 2hrs 43min, (!!) but: it wasn’t as tonally confused, or as somnambulisticc, or as yellow as Spectre, so hey!

And then Calvin Dyson, the bow-tied young YouTuber getting blackout schnockered on contriva-tinis in the background, broke through my shirt-folding zen with things that made that runtime seem… real unnecessary, actually! And after a focused rewatch for the first time in a long time, I found myself agreeing with a ton of his solid takes, (but do not look up my guy’s all-time Bond rankings tho, whew!), and now I was very much watching No Time from a POV firmly embedded in my Alternate Cut of Spectre. Which now, clearly, needs a partner.

So here we are! No Time To Die (Alternate Cut) - a leaner, meaner (almost 20min shorter!) telling of the story, with a little less narrative tail-chasing and a LOT more pep in its step on the way to a (still) explosive(ly) grand(iose) finale for Craig’s tenure as 007.

WHAT HASN’T CHANGED:

Bond still dies. This was a big-ol-hairy deal on release; I believe a lot of prior edits to this film were centered on undoing it. But like I said in the essay-thingy for the Spectre Alt Cut (Hey, what do we call these things we write to go along with our edits, btw? Do they have a name besides “self-indulgent sales-pitch readers are skimming to find the cutlist?”) -  with EON relinquishing the character to MGM/Amazon, there’s a very clear demarcation point between eras, and it just makes sense to let their big swings stand as-is

Bond is still a (smartass) dad. A notable amount of the theatrical version is dedicated to this plotline being (artificially) turned into a mystery element. But it also just gives up on that mystery arbitrarily, so this Alternate Cut makes a few trims to simply… not raise the spectre (pun intended!) of Mathilde’s parentage in the first place. And the way looser vibe Bond’s got here? That ALL stays. I don’t know if the breezy smartassed back ‘n’ forths between Bond/his team/Blofeld are Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s doing, or if it’s just Craig coming in hot off Knives Out, both at the same time, or what… but I think it works like gangbusters so I didn’t try messing with any of that, tonally (although, again - a lot of this movie’s dialog scenes got touched in one way or another).

WHAT HAS CHANGED:

Safin is no longer Young Madeleine’s savior. In fact, the whole pre-titles sequence omits the mini-horror movie, which is instead heavily truncated & transformed into an actual flashback in her office, framed via the story she tells on the train in Spectre. (The Gunbarrel now irises open on the car leaving the tunnel at Matera, Italy; almost as if Bond & Swann drove straight here from Spectre’s ending - and makes for a nice bookend to the film’s final shot) Safin’s fixation on her is now vaguely creepy/familial, but most importantly - the contrivance where adult Swann doesn’t remember his California Raisin-ass face the SECOND she saw it is now gone! He’s just a vengeful, pop-eyed, slow-talking weirdo, who knows he can leverage her for exactly what he wants; which is more than enough for a Bond villain, really.

It’s a LOT more straightforward as a story. Bond stories typically aren’t so complicated that you need the basic concepts of the plot repeated four or five times! Certainly not this one, but this one does it constantly. There’s 4-5 different, labored speeches about what Heracles is, how it works, and what it was intended to do - including one from Safin in the last 20 minutes. There’s the weird “is Mathilde Bond’s kid” thing that not only doesn’t go anywhere, but also makes MI6 look foolish: Moneypenny reports they’ve been monitoring Dr. Swann’s spot, but they somehow didn’t notice a slinky-smacking, crepe-crushing 5 year-old girl living with her?

The theatrical climax has the weird “potential buyers on boats” ticking clock on top of the missile ticking clock and the poison “ticking clock.” There’s even a weird bit in the pre-titles where Spectre has a sheep-barn on speed-dial? All that stuff is gone now, plus some more pacing/performance punch-ups via trimming off a LOT of conversational dead-weight throughout the film! Bonus: The loss of the last Heracles explanation leads to Bond vs Safin in the Poison Garden playing out a little differently, and hopefully more dramatically. Speaking of added drama…

The title song got a remix, and the end titles got replaced.  I always thought it was a waste EON asked Billie Eilish and Finneas to do a song, and then suffocated the drums and the bass with a pillow, as if to make it pair better with Sam Smith’s flatlined, drum-free drone of a Spectre title song (Spectre Alt Cut, of course, puts Radiohead in its riiiiight plaaaaace). And then I learned that every time they perform it live, there’s not only a healthy bassline there, but they have a dude literally beating hell out of the drums! So I took audio from their Oscars performance, pieces of the Japanese import single’s instrumental track, and the film version, and blended them. For the end titles, I removed Louis Armstrong’s vocal version from On Her Majesty’s, and replaced it with a 1988 instrumental re-recording of the track for a John Barry retrospective album, which then fades into a specially-edited for these credits version of the No Time to Die suite found on Hans Zimmer’s “The World of Hans Zimmer” album.

This isn’t a massive overhaul of the film’s core storyline, nor am I trying to significantly rewrite it in the edit: No Time to Die (Alternate Cut) is an attempt to find the more streamlined version of that movie inside this theatrical release. It’s still going way operatic and grandiose for its final 15min; but with so many scenes trimmed and tightened up for pace and performance (This alt cut is 3min shorter than Spectre’s theatrical cut, and 18min shorter than what was in theaters!), and so many circular/go-nowhere subplots being deleted and/or trimmed down severely; the hope is that those big moments are no longer seen as self-indulgent & slow, but instead a li’l more finely calibrated to land the punches they’re throwing. Especially in juxtaposition to the (mostly!) untouched action and comedy beats - with a couple extra comedy moments newly introduced through a judicious cut or two.

If you would like to check it out yourself, feel free to SEND ME A DM here, or SEND AN EMAIL to straightcutsnochaser at gmail. PLEASE DO NOT JUST REQUEST A LINK BELOW. It’s not just a bigger chance I won’t see the request in the comments, but it’s also just straight up against the rules here! Any suggestions, comments, critiques, questions - whatever you got, I’m all ears!

NO TIME TO DIE (ALTERNATE CUT)
2hrs, 25min. 2.40:1 AR (1920x800), 23.976fps, Dolby Digital 5.1, Burnt-in French subtitles, soft English subtitles.

CHAPTERS

1. Gunbarrel - The Past is Not Dead
2. Letting Go is Hard
3. Main Titles
4. Stealing Obruchev
5. Hello, Felix
6. Disarming Young Woman
7. Three Weeks Training
8. Happy Birthday
9. Goodbye, Felix
10. I’ve Come Back to Play
11. Memory Box
12. License Reinstated
13. Losing Control
14. A Thousand Reasons
15. A Little Adventure
16. It’s Just a Number
17. My Father’s Garden
18. The Farm and the Factory
19. Do You Know What Time it Is?
20. All the Time in the World
21. To James - End Credits

Theme still goes, though.

Most Anakin problems are rooted in Lucas’ late decision to age him down to single digits instead of letting him be a middle-school kid/pre-teen.

And honestly, his whole weird conception of the Jedi as super-repressed monks - which is only just now in the last 10 years getting seriously investigated as a terrible thing to have been in the first place. And frankly a massive disconnect from what he was alluding to in the first three movies. They were clearly samurai-ish, so there was obviously a code, but he turned them into deranged monks and then mandated we’re supposed to think of them all as good guys ANYWAY.

The truth is simply that he didn’t really have a handle on basics like characterization and plot when he came back from a self-imposed creative retirement, and he never got that handle he USED to have back. He wrote all his heroes like robots and undercut any real dramatic forward motion whenever he could, and instead of making it better he fell back on “I meant to do it like that, of course” and because he’s the CEO there’s nothing you can really say to that.

But yeah, if Anakin starts at age 13 you have so much more opportunity to infuse him with a roguish personality from jump, and it’s easier to build that forward in the next two movies. But instead you start him at 9 and now nothing about him makes a lot of sense, or reads as recognizable human behavior.

But then again choosing to make him more or less the main character of not just the prequel trilogy, but BOTH trilogies (by default) by retconning the story to be about Anakin Skywalker’s fall and redemption (even though he never actually GOT redeemed at the end of Jedi, he just did one good thing for his kid before dying) he also completely goofed. Anakin should have been a SUPPORTING CHARACTER at best, and the POV should have been either Padme or Obi-Wan. But it obviously would have never occurred to him to make the Prequel Trilogy be ACTUALLY about Luke & Leia’s mom, in the same way the Original Trilogy was about Vader’s kid. Not Vader.

Vladius said:
Hypothetically if it wasn’t a Star Wars movie I don’t know how good it would be considered,

It probably would have got noms. The brand cuts both ways on this.

I haven’t watched The Acolyte but based on everything I’ve heard about it

Bro. You’re speaking on it to this extent and you haven’t even watched it? You’re just cherrypicking comments on it from people and calling that good so far as analysis of theme goes?

I think the issue people have with more than half of Star Wars not being good is that it could have been left alone and stayed good.

This was never going to happen. Was already not happening. The very first thing that gets produced after Star Wars is The Star Wars Holiday Special, LOL.

if you weren’t interested in EU books or video games or comics, you just didn’t bother, and it was out of sight, out of mind. Now we get major movies and TV shows with budgets in the high millions pushed in our faces

It’s not “pushed in your faces” anymore than the nonstop onslaught of books, games, comics, cartoons, and TV shows from 1984-2015. If you can “just not bother” with that, you can “just not bother” with this too, you know? Just skip a cartoon. Just pass on a TV show. Just don’t watch a prequel movie. It’s not hard to do this, as you’ve shown.

This is partially what I was talking about in the post! People take all of this so seriously, so deathly seriously, as if the stakes are really that high and they’re not, as evidenced by the fact you just said you can not bother and leave things out of sight and out of mind. Just keep doing that! The idea that you have to get mad because more than half of Star Wars isn’t good doesn’t make any sense to me. So what? Nothing that goes for this long, across this many different media, maintains a batting average better than .500 at the absolute best. Other Fandoms don’t do this to themselves when it comes to the fact their long running series has a bunch of stinkers in it.

it’s a lot easier (and more fun) to discuss this stuff when folks aren’t artificially placing life-or-death weight-of-the-world stakes on the media in questions. Star Wars isn’t so precious and breakable that Attack of the Clones or Rise of Skywalker or Book of Boba Fett is going to kill it.

I think the Last Jedi communicated its main ideas pretty effectively, I also think at this point the whole conversation about the film and what it did/didn’t do, and the metatextual aspect of discussion the discussions, has so thoroughly overwhelmed it, to where anything about the film is destined to get sucked into a timelocked field of battle that starts around January 2018 and encompasses the rest of that year.

It’s literally like when The Doctor trapped Gallifrey in a 3D painting - that’s The Last Jedi at this point. It’s a very well made movie, easily the closest thing IN the sequel trilogy to a Lucasian story, (and people keep sidestepping/avoiding this aspect - Last Jedi the only story Lucas actually liked and spoke well of - not just in the prequel trilogy, but really across the whole of the output post-sale) and you basically cannot engage with it past a certain point or you get hauled into a timeloop where it never stopped being 2018 and everyone’s basically waiting to indulge the ritual exercise and call-and-response prompts they all know by heart now.

The Acolyte, however - I kinda tried to address/rectify this to some degree in my own edit: My belief is that show ended up getting compromised on the way from pitch to realized show mostly BECAUSE the idea that there was going to be a dark-side focused show that unambiguously shone a light on the Jedi as “not all that good, honestly” got kiboshed. So the show got watered down, and watered down, and the idea of a revenge story against Jedi who overstepped and deserved what they got in return… turned into a weird wishy-washy, mealy-mouth “mystery” whose POV got so muddied it basically became a mild sort of paean to “fence-straddling” as a valid lens to look through.

They HAD a show about intolerant cops covering up their own crime and the victims of that crime getting their payback. And instead they tried to make it weird apologia for the intolerant cops and their system of policing as a whole. Which was weird, because it’s not like this was a real-world institution. The Jedi don’t exist, and huge parts of the fictional universe literally DEPEND on that fake institution collapsing on itself due to corruption/hubris/disconnection from humanity. It made the show severely compromised as dramatic storytelling. Like the people making it were TOLD at some point that what’s important wasn’t even really the story, it was the sanctity of the not-real institution at its center. It wound up being a show without a country, for lack of a better term.

But then again - I think a lot of conversations about these shows/movies would be a lot less fraught in general if the underlying implication WASN’T that Star Wars is more good than bad (it isn’t) and that the stakes for each new entry WEREN’T sky high box-office/ratings/critical triumphs in the top 5% of anything else that’s ever been made, because I honestly think that’s beyond silly at this point. It’s just making it hard to actually enjoy and appreciate these stories for what they are when we’re constantly holding an artificial (and honestly incorrect) standard for minimm quality up as baseline.

It’s okay that about half of all Star Wars is frankly, not good. It’s fine. It’s not a massive insult, and it’s also not a new thing, either. It’s always been like this, and so many of the arguments that break out tend to break out because the people having them refuse to engage with it on anything other than All Or Nothing stakes.

Well hot damn, look at this. Pretty amazing.

Well hot damn! That’s a hell of a thing to hear, and thank you so much for the kind words!

WHEW.