Broom Kid

If he doesn’t know how anything at Disney (or WB, or Lucasfilm) really works, his belief in this person’s “veracity” doesn’t count for much though. That doesn’t mean he’s a troll, but posting things to Saltier than Crait doesn’t do a lot for credibility in any account. I don’t know this man, but I can disbelieve the story he’s been fed without casting aspersions on his personality or his being (I wasn’t trying to do that, anyway.) I don’t think you need to defend his character, because I’m not really assaulting it.

But this story is very detailed and very outlandish and is based on a premise that is pretty ridiculous, because it ultimately suggests Bob Iger is willing to use Star Wars and JJ Abrams as human shields to protect Marvel Studios from an ascendant Warner Bros.

All you have to do is look at 2019’s box-office totals to see how little sense that makes.

Oh dang, I initially had quoted ATM’s “Honestly I don’t think RJ works well with characters he didn’t create himself,” but I don’t know why you’d try to rebut my response to that statement if you didn’t on some level agree with it? I must have confused you following up on my own response with the person I was quoting.

Apologies for any misunderstanding, but I tried to be as clear as possible what I was arguing and why I was arguing it, but I did confuse you with another poster later in the conversation.

the hashtag is definitely speeding up this morning, but the response to the hashtag is pretty skeptical it seems, so that’s somewhat reassuring, I guess. Kind of.

There’s not going to be any “proof” there. It’s a pretty ridiculous claim for a single source to be making considering how huge it is, and how many secret/behind-the-scenes rooms this story takes place in. That one source would need to be in almost all those rooms firsthand for any of this to make sense, and making sense isn’t a huge concern considering the story opens with the notion this whole thing was an Iger-led game of 4D chess whose ultimate goal was preventing WB from competing with Marvel Studios.

act on instinct said:

I think maybe you’re misinterpreting or responding to someone other than me because my point was not to slander Rian as hard to work with, or to minimize the role of a director. But it is clear he did write TLJ and did not write Breaking Bad which was deep into its own arcs which were followed completely under his direction. The difference between those two examples is the amount of control and authorship.

No, I directly quoted you. He had control and authorship of those episodes. Those episodes were directed by Rian Johnson, and for any of this conversation to make any sense, it assumes that the director is a major part of a film’s “authorship.” Whether you meant to minimize the role of director you were inadvertently doing so and that’s what I was responding to. He was given control and authorship of The Last Jedi to a larger degree than he was on Breaking Bad, but the idea that he doesn’t work well with other people’s creations doesn’t hold a lot of water to me. If that were true I don’t think any of the three episodes he was put in charge of would have worked out as well as they did, or that he’d keep being asked back to direct them. If you’re solely looking at Star Wars and Star Wars alone, maybe I could see that argument being put forward, but I still don’t think it stands up very well considering the movie essentially played out exactly the way he wanted it to, and it only gets wobblier once you apply a larger perspective and take in the rest of his career outside of Star Wars, and see the collaborations he had were smooth and productive, and the end result was, as with every other movie he’s made, a critical and financial success.

But the director isn’t just a director on any set. He’s also partially a cinematographer, partially an editor, partially an acting coach, and yes - partially a writer. Even if they never get those credits. The idea that he doesn’t work well with characters he didn’t create doesn’t make sense considering one of the best shows on television, one he had zero hand in creating or developing, kept having him come back to direct increasingly more and more important episodes.

The idea that he doesn’t work well with people or their creations doesn’t hold a lot of water when looking at his career, a career which has never actually had a failure in it, looking at both audience, critical, and financial receptions.

Rian got what he wanted because he works well with people and those people all helped him realize his vision.

ATMachine said:

Honestly I don’t think RJ works well with characters he didn’t create himself. He’s probably a far better director without having to deal with a collaborative series of films.

The three episodes of Breaking Bad he directed are widely considered three of the best episodes that show ever produced.

Rian Johnson works well with basically everybody.

It’s 100% far-fetched. It’s fan-fiction from a very controversial subreddit. The idea that Iger, who sought out Abrams personally, only did so to hamstring WB’s attempts to make successful DC movies (which they’re already doing - Joker is going to make more than Rise of Skywalker worldwide) doesn’t make any sense unless you’re the sort of person who is already inclined to believe all the conspiracy theory stuff that goes along with being a DC “Release the Snyder Cut” fan.

A hashtag on twitter isn’t evidence of anything but people on twitter enjoying the open trade of hot takes and loud opinions. Besides which, there’ve been warnings that malcontents would be pushing a “Release the JJ Cut” campaign last week, because being loudly anti-Disney is good money for a lot of people whose online incomes depend on patreon donations, YouTube monetization, etc.

Well, all of JJ’s movies share a lot of similarities because he’s got an identifiable, strong personal style. But Into Darkness, save for the very poor decision to sample the ending from Wrath of Khan and invert it despite it not having any set up (or real point, considering we’d already seen at this point Khan isn’t even the real bad guy in the film, more like an antihero), had some similar problems, but it also wasn’t as incoherent from a storytelling perspective. Almost all the beats it was trying to pay off were set up and investigated at least a little. It’s not a successful film overall, but there are more effective moments in it, and those moments are more competently strung together. It’s a much more consistently constructed and executed movie than The Rise of Skywalker.

I was going to click the reddit link but it appears to come from “Saltier than Crait” which isn’t a subreddit that’s ever had much worth or value as anything but a gall-bladder for Star Wars. There are much more reliable places to source information from than a place that is essentially a self-described salt mine.

Fan fiction isn’t just for people who enjoy shipping. There are lots of places online where fan-fiction is how you play the game of “this is how I would have done it if I were in charge” and so people write very involved stories using real-life figures as the characters in a Lifetime movie.

Anyway, the “Darth Vader’s Death” music is 100% from Return of the Jedi, it sounded to me like they took it from the CD, and it’s very oddly edited on top of that.

I know the odds of there being an extended version are about as good as there being original versions on the upcoming box set - but I have to believe this thing got at least a half hour cut out of it at the last minute, if not maybe even 40-45 minutes. I don’t know if that extra time would have helped, or if it just would have been a half hour of more “what the hell - why are these people doing all these things?” but knowing that they edited Lando and Jannah’s final scene to make it look like he was hitting on her when we know they SHOT that scene as the closing of both their character’s arcs and beginning of a father/daughter adventure…

if that storyline existed on film and became THAT ending by the time the movie crossed the finish line, then it makes me wonder if every question I have about the messy, truncated, dead-end plotting in this movie actually DOES have an answer, it’s just on a hard drive somewhere marked “Deleted scenes.”

There are some good things in the movie! I just wish there was a better movie surrounding those moments. There’s a LOT of movie. But not so much a better one. I wonder if the better one got shaved to death.

NeverarGreat said:

Broom Kid, I’ve seen you bring this up several times before, to the point where I legitimately wonder why you are on a site which proudly proclaims its intensely-focused sub-fandom cred if you believe that such a thing is unhealthy.

Couple reasons. Three, actually:

1. I’m not any different than anyone else who struggles with breaking (or at least modulating) unhealthy habits, or who is trying to find a way to maintain a balance that works. Plus I like Star Wars.

2. This place DOES have its share of toxic behaviors and bad posters engaging in mostly unhealthy behavior, but it’s also small and self-contained enough (and willing to self-police in a manner that many communities don’t indulge, or in some cases actively shun) that compared to other communities, it’s relatively “safe,” if you will. Plus it’s one of the few places in which “community” isn’t a pretentious euphemism, but an accurate descriptor.

3. All things in moderation, etc.

I want to leave in 2019 the idea that a fandom is toxic purely because it is a fandom. People are allowed to have strong positive feelings for works of art, and they are allowed to come together to express those feelings. I don’t think that is a bad thing.

It doesn’t HAVE to be, no, and I agree that it’s not always. But I’ve seen about 20 years of experience that it almost always becomes that way, and the last 10 of that 20 has been an ongoing example in how bad it becomes once mainstreamed.

Being a fan of something is fine. Sharing why you like things with others who might share your interests is also fine. But millions of people manage to do this all the time without being part of a fandom. Liking popular culture isn’t special, and that self-awareness goes a long way towards avoiding the mentally unhealthy pitfalls fandom is constantly introducing while its members act like those pitfalls are actually swimming pools. Letting entertainment supplement your life experiences is good! That’s what it’s supposed to do! Letting your enjoyment of an entertainment REPLACE large parts of your personality? That’s fandom. One of those results often discards moderation and perspective, and promotes obsession, entitlement, possessiveness, and fixation, and that’s where it can get unhealthy if you’re not paying attention to yourself and what you’re doing with your time.

Good things can come out of fandoms, have done before, will do again, and are truly remarkable at times. But the presence of a good thing in a bad situation doesn’t transform the situation’s inherent badness. Good students graduate from terrible schools every year. Fandom is like a school that is nothing but electives. That might be fun for a semester or two, but if you’re not careful you wake up a decade later like Wooderson cruising high school parking lots trying to get high with some 5th year seniors because they won’t realize you’ve been making the same jokes and telling the same war stories for the last 10 years.

Again - way off topic. But you asked me directly, so I thought I should at least answer. For what it’s worth, I appreciate that you addressed me directly, and did so with patience and kindness (which we could all do with a lot more of) so for my part, I’m going to try and help fulfill your request to leave conversations about fandom toxicity behind in 2019, so when I do visit here and see fit to pitch in my two cents, I’ll keep that particular penny in my pocket. Or leave it in the tray at the 7-11 before I even come through the door.

Happy New Year!

Fandom in general is pretty mentally unhealthy. It only makes sense that smaller, more intensely-focused sub-fandoms would be seen as being even more “yikes.” The mainstreaming of fandom is maybe one of the worst things to have been facilitated by the internet in the 21st century, not just in how it helped normalize toxicity in discourse, but in how entertainment discussions have become both distraction from, and proxy for, ACTUALLY important and and meaningful things happening in the real world.

The more we get distracted, the more we convince ourselves the distractions are more meaningful than they actually are - the more meaning we undeservedly project onto entertainments, the more warped and shrunk our perspectives become, the more toxic and reactionary we are - until the baseline we occupy every time we log on is frequently scared, angry, helpless, and disillusioned, at all times, of most things; things which we can’t control and never could because we don’t actually make movies or tv shows, we just watch them - which only causes us to further pursue pop culture distractions as a form of “escapism.”

It’s a pretty dumb, ugly, vicious circle that’s been mainstreamed and normalized to a fairly disturbing degree. Its partially why our cultural memory is maybe two-weeks long at best.

Anyway - way off topic, I know, so back to the ending shot: I don’t think the editor has any reason to lie about that final shot, so I’ll take their word for it, and it’s honestly a lot more likely that crowdsourced internet detective work wasn’t correct than the editor is lying to cover something up. There’s a lot more evidence of the former being frequently true than there is the latter.

And yes, Rey being Palpatine’s hidden granddaughter is some JJ Abrams “Spock just happens to be in the exact cave that young Kirk escaped from a monster into” level coincidence, LOL

John Boyega openly clowned them on twitter and instagram earlier today and everyone else who’s been annoyed with them took the invitation to open fire as well.

His name has been a trending topic on Twitter all day.

https://twitter.com/search?q="John Boyega"&src=tren

So - first, they didn’t get the ending they wanted, and then their detective work about that last shot gets debunked by an editor, and finally John Boyega shines a spotlight on them and they… don’t react well.

The last day of 2019 has NOT been a good day for Reylos, has it.

Everything Threepio
What little we got of the Bollywood movie that seemed like it was just about to break out on Pasaana (but didn’t).
Everything Babu Frik
The soundtrack, especially the version of the main title that plays when Lando arrives to the final battle
The little shrug Ben gives when he pulls the saber from behind his back

I disagree that it was a fitting end for her character. I don’t think it was that at all. I don’t think it could have been with what was left over, and the decision to go forward with this idea was a bad one, made for well-intentioned-but-ultimately-bad reasons. It was absolutely forced because Abrams had already decided he was going to put her in there before he had ANY story in place.

Carrie Fisher’s death was a tragedy. It was too soon, it was unfair, and I, like millions of others, wish it hadn’t happened. But whatever this was in Rise of Skywalker, it wasn’t a tribute. It was childish. It was refusal to accept that she was gone, and they used her image and her presence as maybe the ultimate act of “fan-service” in a movie packed full of it. “There’s no way we could make this movie without Carrie” is a noble sentiment. It’s also an untrue statement. They could have, and looking at the results, they should have.

They did her and her memory no real favors with this, and they certainly didn’t help their story out any, either.

ray_afraid said:
Just because there’s little hope doesn’t take away the point AT ALL.

I believe he’s saying there’s little point in “aggressively confronting the subject,” not that there’s no point in wanting the original versions.

Like, let’s just take it as read that anyone who contributes posts to the ongoing conversation at a place called “originaltrilogy.com” is someone who wants the original versions made commercially available and purchasable by Disney/Lucasfilm.

If we do that, if we start from the assumption that everyone here wants the original versions to be made available, then you’d think the instances of people getting aggressively confrontational when talking about it should decrease, right? Because it’s recognized at that point there’s common ground we’re all standing on.

Hopefully I didn’t misunderstand the request there, but that’s how I read it. Not that people should give up on wanting things that are perfectly reasonable to want. But I’m reading Ronster’s post as saying people will and should question why we don’t have what we want yet, but they should also maybe not be so angry/aggressive when trying to discuss it with other likeminded people.

Not sure how to make you understand, I guess. None of those other things are happening in a vaccuum with regards to the story. Starting with Carrie’s footage needing to be repurposed, and further deciding to make her self-sacrifice the reason he turns as the justification for keeping Carrie’s footage is just that: The start. That’s the foundation the rest of the story (and most of the decisions afterward) follow from. Those are the first two cards pinned to the board, and they never came off.

“They’d just have found a different way to redeem him” is part of my point - they should have, especially if choosing a different way would have meant doing the right thing and not repurposing deleted scenes “to honor” Carrie, especially since the result achieved nothing close to legitimately honoring her. I’m not arguing they shouldn’t have redeemed him. But by tying his redemption to reusing Carrie’s deleted scenes, they removed a ton of options, many of which would have likely been better than what they wound up with as a result.

I also don’t understand why you’re giving them the benefit of the doubt when it comes to “not doing a CG Leia” when they actually did it, and word is the sequence was even longer initially. I guess if you want to simplify my biggest disappointment, it’s that I’m disappointed they even tried to sidestep her actual death by making her final performance in Star Wars a bunch of strung-together deleted scenes that never worked in the finished film. The movie (and the filmmakers themselves) would have been better served by not looking backwards so hard and by looking forward instead.

Leia being around was a key part of Kylo’s redemption, and they specifically tied her dying to his redemption. It seems pretty apparent to me they only wrote Kylo’s arc (which essentially superseded Rey’s arc in terms of importance) the way they did because they worked backwards from what would redeem him, and they decided his mother’s choice to kill herself by reaching out to him during that fight would be the catalyst.

So they kept her active in the plot by recycling footage and writing dialog to mad-lib their way to the end of the 2nd act, specifically because they needed that presence to register just enough for Kylo’s redemption to pay off as intended.

If anything, Terrio’s answer when he was trying to explain why Rose Tico got so minimized seemed to hint that their initial “We’re not going to CG her” was an out and out lie, (it kind of was already, considering that training scene) and I wouldn’t be surprised if Han’s appearance was similar to how Superman’s mother is who showed up in Superman II once Marlon Brando was cut out. “Well, we can’t CG Carrie for this scene, let’s see if Harrison will do it instead.”

So even setting aside the fact her scenes aren’t particularly good (and it’s fairly obvious she’s not really acting with anyone in the scene, and nobody in the scene is really acting with her) the initial decision to make her self-sacrifice key to Kylo’s redemption, to justify repurposing a bunch of deleted scenes, is what hemmed them in.

It’s why the movie is so plot-focused at the expense of any real feeling or thematic coherence. They approached it like a puzzle first and foremost instead of really exploring what they had to work with at the end of The Last Jedi and building from there. If your primary story question (and they kept saying keeping Carrie is where they actually started) isn’t “Where do I want my characters to go from here” but “How do I repurpose deleted scenes so they’re so vital to our endgame that you can’t remove them,” you’re starting from a pretty mercenary spot, even if you’re doing so with the best, most honorable intentions.

I’d imagine probably around late January/early February? Just a guess, though.

I don’t think JJ’s statement was anything other than JJ trying to be interesting but unsubstantial during a press tour. Which JJ is very good at being.

He’s not a Lucasfilm spokesman or anything. He’s not even an employee, really. Keep in mind that he had a chance to sign his production company up under Disney while he was making Rise of Skywalker and chose instead to sign with WB. Looking at that one interview as confirmation of what’s coming on this set seems, to be all Treebeard about it, a little hasty.

It’s really, really LIKELY that the original versions won’t be on the set. But it’s just as possible Abrams doesn’t know what’s on this set (or at the time of the interview, that there even WAS a set coming) one way or the other. So we’re basically back to just waiting to see what these 27 (or 18) discs contain.

ray_afraid said:

^ Didn’t JJ just confirm that there’s no OUT coming out?

JJ’s not really in a position to confirm what the home video department is or isn’t doing. He said he asked about it once (he never said when, could have been when he first got hired back in 2013/2014, and he doesn’t seem to have ever asked again) and he didn’t understand why the answer was “no.”

That doesn’t confirm anything other than he doesn’t get why Disney hasn’t released the OT, which is essentially no different than anyone else who wants these versions made available. Just because he worked there doesn’t mean he speaks for what’s happening currently.

Again: It’s pretty likely the original versions aren’t going to be on this set, but Abrams didn’t confirm anything other than that he asked about it at some point between 2013 and now and didn’t understand why the answer was no.

I think a lot of the film’s primary problems are due to making space for her deleted scenes as opposed to using that time to create new scenes. And Terrio’s “excuse” being valid or not, it still points to the idea that there are things this film couldn’t do because they were pre-occupied with keeping those deleted scenes. They boxed themselves in unnecessarily, and that box was extra small because they only had a few minutes of deleted scenes from which to build an entire plot around. Leia not being alive for this movie was never an option for Abrams and Terrio, and that rigidity was damaging to the film overall.

It was their first really big choice when it came to the storytelling, and they chose not to accept the truth of what had happened in 2016 and instead decided to look backwards as hard as they could and build everything else from that decision. It made for a dramatically unsatisfying character, and movie.

Fang Zei said:

What I find kind of funny is that this Skywalker Saga set is going to contain an additional disc per movie and yet that additional disc will not contain the unaltered versions.

We don’t actually know what the breakdown on the extra discs are, or what’s going to be on them. Granted, you’re PROBABLY correct, but we don’t know what those extra discs even are yet. It’s all hypothetical at this point.

there’s some good stuff in there, though!

My most disappointing aspect of the Sequel Trilogy:

The decision to start the construction of the final chapter’s story around mad-libbing deleted scenes of Carrie Fisher into the film proper. That single decision was one of the biggest handcuffs on the story’s total potential, led to the almost complete erasure of Rose Tico from the story, and worst of all - never worked as intended. It was intended to be an honoring of Fisher’s work, and an homage to her and her character, and it came off as one of the biggest acts of storytelling childishness in The Rise of Skywalker: an almost petulant refusal to accept things had changed, and to move on in a healthy, meaningful way. A better tribute would have likely involved finding a way for the characters to acknowledge and figure out their own ways to fill that Leia-sized hole in their hearts, preferably in a way that actually pays tribute to the character in spirit and in meaning, as opposed to literally turning the character’s dead body into a prop for about a half hour of screentime.

My most satisfying aspect of the Sequel Trilogy:

Honestly, it really has to be Rey plucking the saber out of the snow. I rarely get full-on goosebump moments during movies. I acknowledge how special they are, but I usually don’t physically react unless the movie has really nailed a moment, above and beyond. Not only did that saber flying into Rey’s hand as “Burning Homestead” played induce chills and goosebumps on first view, it happened on the second and third view, too. It’s just such a perfect reveal, and the potential of the sequel trilogy is made blindingly apparent when she switches it on. Even knowing how her story ends, that moment is still satisfying.