I have a hard time believing this won’t win best Music.
But a script isn’t the same thing as this overarching “plan” that people keep referencing, which is more accurately a conceptual security blanket for fandom to let them feel like everything is alright, some faceless person at Disney has Kennedy/Abrams/insert-director-here “under control” and they won’t mess up Star Wars.
You can make a good movie out of a subpar script. It’s happened many times. For example: Star Wars. But I’m not even arguing that you don’t need a great script. I’m arguing that constantly suggesting an overarching plan would have made things right is wishful thinking, because this director doesn’t follow plans even when they ARE good, or further, when they’re HIS OWN PLANS.
I don’t want to confuse the idea that “script” = “plan” here, not in the way we’re all constantly talking about “The Plan” as in “Disney should have had a Plan” or “See what happens when Kennedy doesn’t hammer out a Plan.” Do I wish the script had been better? I wish everything had been better. But sometimes collaborative art projects just don’t come together despite everyone’s best intentions. For example: The Phantom Menace.
“The Plan” has become this weird mythological safety net for fandom, and the truth is most everything that fandom loves didn’t really have a plan, and even if there was, it wasn’t really adhered to.
“The Plan” wouldn’t have saved The Rise of Skywalker. It needed good ideas, and all it got were bad ones.
It’s Disney’s fault for having such a tight deadline. When Carrie passed, they should have pushed it back a year. No one external forced the release date.
Abrams was given a daunting task. I still don’t like what he pulled off, but fault depends on how you frame it.
None of the bad decisions he made were time-based though. He would have had an extra 6-10 months to try finessing his mountain of bad ideas, but they still would have been fundamentally bad. If anything, looking at how that movie was made, it just would have been packed full of even more - and newer - bad ideas than what we got on his deadline.
They also said that Sasha Banks would play Sabine, but she seems to be an original character here.
Does she? She just seems like someone in a hood. That could be Sabine. But it could also be someone we’ve never met before.
But whether some “insider” or not got something right or wrong - Ahsoka is gonna be in this show. No way all that smoke around Rosario Dawson is going to be JUST smoke. Plus Temuera Morrison is definitely in the show. Everyone immediately assumed he was Boba Fett, but it seems a lot more likely to me he’s Rex - especially if Ahsoka is around.
There’s going to be Clone Wars/Rebels characters in this show. Which is fine. It’s all in how it’s executed. Filoni’s shows have consistently figured out how to take ideas that sound pretty bad on their face and make them work. Maul coming back shouldn’t have worked. Ahsoka living past order 66 shouldn’t have worked. The Bendu, etc.
I think if there’s a good way to have Rex, Ahsoka, and Sabine make the leap into live-action on this show, they’ll figure it out, and it’ll probably work just fine.
If/when an official restoration of the theatrical versions is ever put on Disney+, we’ll probably just call them just that: The theatrical versions. I think at that point, if it ever happens, they’ll be so ubiquitous and easily accessible that there won’t be the need for a nickname. If I had to guess, they’d become “the originals” for short.
GOUT?
GOUT is the unfortunate acronym the community sort of accepted and kept propagating in the mid 2000s in reference to the 2006 DVDs that had the laserdisc masters included on a bonus disc. It stands for “George’s Original Unaltered Trilogy.”
Apparently it was originally kind of a dumb joke but then people started using it unironically and then it became an accepted sync-standard for restorationists and preservationists. It’s on its way out now though since there are new restorations that don’t base their length and sync on those old laserdisc masters anymore.
GOUT = the 2006 bonus discs.
I can’t believe I haven’t contributed to this list yet. I thought for sure I had, but… nope!
My first copies were technically pirated: The 1984 CBS premiere of Star Wars taped onto VHS, and then copies of Empire and Jedi taped off cable from a friend who had it (our family didn’t get cable until much later)
My second copies were… ALSO pirated: I rented the videos from a rental store, and used an old VCR to dub them.
My third copies were finally legally purchased: The Faces VHS set.
Fourth copies: The Widescreen VHS box set with the hologram cover (one of my first eBay purchases, too).
Fifth copies: The Widescreen SE box set
The Phantom Menace on Widescreen VHS
The Phantom Menace on DVD
Attack of the Clones on DVD
The 2004 DVD set
Revenge of the Sith on DVD
The "Complete Saga’ blu-ray set
The Force Awakens on blu-ray
Rogue One on blu-ray
The Last Jedi on blu-ray (Target exclusive)
Solo on blu-ray
The Rise of Skywalker on blu-ray (Target exclusive)
Not only that, but DAMN: You just up and bought a scanner for this. That’s dedication. And awesome as all hell.
I believe the fault lies with Disney and the make-believe “Lucasfilm Story Group” that they created
I just want to say I really appreciate you giving such a measured take on the situation.
Is sarcasm?
It’s Abrams’ fault. It’s his name on the movie, his name as producer, his name as writer. He made the movie. Acting like a larger plan would have stopped him from making a bad trilogy-ender doesn’t make any sort of logical sense (almost as little logical sense as saying the story group was “make believe,” or further, thinking the story group was anything but canon checkers for the creatives). He abandoned “the plan” TWICE when making TFA (both Lucas’ notes and then Arndt’s treatments) and it became a much-loved, well-reviewed success - the highest grossing (domestic) film in history (and likely will be for the foreseeable future). There being “a plan” for The Rise of Skywalker wouldn’t have mattered one whit, because when he did get the chance to come back, he ignored HIS OWN PLANS (Rey Kenobi, Finn the Jedi, Stormtrooper rebellion) to pursue something completely different. And it didn’t work.
Had Abrams made a good movie out of his new on the fly plans (like he did with TFA), none of us would be talking about plans, or “executive meddling” (he’s the executive doing the meddling at the behest of other executives, btw). But he made a bad movie, and now we’re all trying to figure out how it could have happened. But the truth is it happened because nobody bats a thousand. He’s made bad movies before, and he made a bad movie again, this time to end the sequel trilogy. The idea that Disney could have stopped that with a “well conceived plan” doesn’t make any sense. It’s wishful thinking. The dude doesn’t follow plans no matter where they come from, even if “Following the plan” were some surefire key to success, and it isn’t.
Every movie is a risk, and there isn’t some cheat code or safety net to prevent bad movies from coming out of the creative process. It takes work, talent, collaboration, skill, and luck. Every time. No matter what the plan is.
Here’s why the “a little planning” argument fails out:
The problem with The Rise of Skywalker is that the guy who was hired to come in and “fix” it to Lucasfilm’s satisfaction was completely uninterested in following any plan. Including his. Plans only have any worth if someone chooses to follow them. And Abrams wasn’t going to follow it. He didn’t even follow his own.
So you have a creative who doesn’t care about any plan (even his own) and executives unconcerned with making anyone adhere to that plan. Lucas was very much the same way. Guiding visions sound noble but if the person doing the guiding isn’t GOOD AT IT then you still wind up with more bad movies than good.
Plans aren’t laws. Especially not in a creative area. There’s a reason screenwriters are lowest figures on the filmmaking totem pole, and it’s not because they don’t know how to stick up for themselves.
Sometimes movies are just bad because the creatives making them don’t make the right decisions. It’s not a conspiracy or anything. Guiding visions and plans in place are security blankets for fandom. They’re not foolproof ways forward to making good movies, and there aren’t even really that many examples to prove the strength of that assertion anyway. Not that it matters. Security blankets can’t really protect you from monsters, either. But it feels like they can, and that’s THEIR worth.
So, if you left TFA thinking “it really seems like they want to hint that Rey’s parents were Kenobis of some sort” you weren’t wrong. That was initially on the table.
https://twitter.com/starwarstuff/status/1303652748223754240
Then Rian Johnson made the case for Rey Nobody really strongly and everyone liked that, and they did that for The Last Jedi. And then Trevorrow’s script got junked, they asked Abrams back, and he decided Rey was REALLY a Palpatine, only to waffle on that throughout production, and then ultimately decide fairly late in the game that she was.
Everyone on the twitters and the forums and all the usual fandom places seem to think this is proof positive that YOU NEED A PLAN (you don’t) but I don’t know. The takeaway here seems to be that if you want to double back on an idea, you better have good answers and a clear vision for how you want to do it. Because if you don’t, it’s not going to work well. Johnson had a pretty strong, clear idea for not pursuing Abrams’ initial “Rey Kenobi” idea (if he even knew that was the idea), but Abrams didn’t have any sort of clear idea for why he was doing anything he was doing, as evidenced by the fact he couldn’t even decide on WHAT it was he wanted to do until deep into production.
that’s certainly… a take.
Watch your mouth or you’re gonna be reading all about it in GQ Magazine.
$5.99. Per month
$5.99! I can make my own memes for that, we don’t have to sit here and watch Baby Yoda sip soup all–
We’ll pay you 5.99 now… and another 6.99 for Hulu w/ ads and ESPN+
ESPN+ huh? Okay, you guys got yourself a ship.
(ESPN+ those guys must REALLY be desperate this could REALLY save our necks)
they were all remastered by Reliance in 2012 as the first step in 3D conversion for theatrical re-release. And then The Phantom Menace 3D didn’t do what they wanted it to do at the box-office, and then George Lucas gave up and sold the company.
The suns change position in almost the same way in the theatrical, so if this is jarring it isn’t because of what we did here. I am fairly certain it’s the same footage of the suns even.
It’s a bad cut in the theatrical, too - the only thing that makes it slightly better is that there are figures in the foreground also blipping into existence so theres’ something else drawing attention to the fact the suns are just blinking around the screen. But it’s a bad cut either way. Again, it’s not “suggesting” anything, it’s just jump-cutting celestial bodies across the screen. if there’s a way to cut to something else before cutting back it’ll play better than just BLIP.
I don’t think cutting to the inside of the ship you just heard starting up for a fun moment as Rey and BB-8 leave frame, suggesting new adventures on the way, and then cutting back outside to that ship flying through frame is “random.” I think it honestly makes spatial and storytelling sense to do that. “Rey Skywalker” - They leave frame on the suns. Cut to the inside of the ship you just heard start up. Cut back to the suns, now in different position, a short time later - ship flies through that frame. Time has passed, the feeling of “they’re off on new adventures” is underlined, and iris out.
But I do think the current (and original) cut is just flat-out not good, in either original or fan-edited form right now.
Anakin Starkiller said:
Yes, there is a through-line, but Carrie Fisher’s death is irrelevant. Leia’s role in the trilogy has always been fairly minor, and her role in DotF could have easily been rewritten around the footage they had. Lucasfilm clearly had a problem with the script itself. I’m inclined to believe it’s the way it handled Kylo.
I don’t think Fisher’s death is irrelevant, There was a strong insistence on figuring out some way to keep her character in the story despite the fact the actor had died. I do agree the handling of Kylo was also a very big problem, but even bigger was the apparently not-up-for-debate guideline that you couldn’t write Leia out of the movie. It simply wasn’t an option. And it should have been. The movie was apparently begun (and re-begun) with Leia being responsible for whatever redemption Kylo was going to have. At no point did anyone even try to concieve of a story where Leia wasn’t in it, or that Kylo wasn’t redeemed. Removing huge, story-changing options like that from the storytelling process really hurt the movie’s potential.
On-topic: Has there been any discussion about moving the Chewie & the Boys chess scene to after Rey says “Rey Skywalker” but before she gets back on the ship? Because I still think that jump cut where the suns literally shift across the screen is not good. Unless that jump cut isn’t in the movie anymore (I haven’t seen the most recent workprint). I think you need a scene placed in there so it doesn’t look like a mistake in editing just occurred. Because that’s what it looks like now. I remember someone earlier saying “it suggests the passage of time” but it doesn’t really do that. It just looks like teleporting suns. That’s not suggesting anything clearly other than “we cut something out of here and didn’t put anything back.”
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/1368118/action/topic#1368118
The UK blu-ray only Skywalker Saga box that was talked about frequently in this thread before the release might be different, but I don’t know that anyone who bought that one (the Wal-Mart link that kept getting posted was essentially a link to import the UK set) has written about it since they got it.
Thanks for the confirmation! It’s good to know.
Mace Windu’s lightsaber was blue until it was purple, too.
In Star Wars, Luke thinks he’s got a shot at Leia. Leia basically thinks both of them are bozos. Han doesn’t like her at all until he finds out Luke likes her. If there’s a “triangle” there it’s so simplistic as to be “hey there’s a girl here which of these two guys gets to get her.” That’s good enough to call it a “triangle” I guess, and historically it’s been seen as such but it’s pretty thin, dramatically.
But in Empire: The movie starts with Leia and Han liking each other. Luke is barely there, and when he IS there, she’s using him as a means to get at Han. And from that point forward it’s alllll Han & Leia. There’s no Luke. And there’s never Luke again. His leg of the (really weak) “Love Triangle” is dead the second Leia plants one on him and storms out of the room. At no point is he a romantic consideration for Leia afterwards. That’s borne out by the movie itself, and the behavior of the characters in it, and that’s before you even get to Jedi.
I never once in my life saw that kiss as even remotely romantic!
There’s not really a love triangle even in Empire. Lucas might have thought there was one, but again - the first thing Leia says when she wakes up Han in ROTJ is that she loves him. So even if anyone wanted to read that bedside peck as her taking the opportunity to express her romantic feelings for Luke, the question is effectively dead once Leia rescues Han.
Also there’s the fact Leia never once says anything even close to that to Luke in the Trilogy. She says “I love you” to Han twice, but the one time she admits she does love Luke, Han is the one who says it, to HER, and she laughs like “Yes, but as a brother, dumbass.” There is one scene of open attraction from Leia, towards Luke, in all of Star Wars, and it got cut out in Empire Strikes Back.
Kasdan I think knew the idea of the love triangle was dumb, and knew he’d solved that problem in the prior movie anyway, so he did what he could to present the facade of one to please George but never at any point wrote the characters to behave as if there actually WAS one in play.
It’s so easy to remove the subplot, too. Just cut from “Hey, what’s going on to” “Hold me.” and that’s one part of it completely gone. The other part, on Endor, simply necessitates a shot of Han looking confused and questioning after she says “He’s not. I can feel it.” If you can cut to Han looking goofy (pick a reaction face, he goes through like 3 of them in that scene) after she says that for a second or two, you can just cut back to Leia laughing and saying “He’s my brother.”
Scene plays out as intended. Both scenes are now dramatically consistent with each other and make Han less of an idiot while still making him humorous.
Even in ESB it’s not really a love triangle, as the only reason she’s kissing Luke like that is to piss off Han. It’s not because she WANTS to kiss Luke (although yes, there’s that deleted scene where she DOES, and then they’re interrupted - but since that’s gone, and Return of the Jedi exists…)
I think it’s possible to go straight from Han saying “Hey, what’s going on?” to Leia saying “Hold me” and the scene works just as well. No argument, Han still looks bewildered by Leia’s reactions without there being a dumb fight in between that highlights a silly plotline that shouldn’t exist, AND you lose some of Carrie Fisher’s absolute worst acting, ever.
You could probably take the “Hey, what’s going on” dialog out of its shot, dub it over the approach Han makes (it’s virtually the same) of him saying “I’m sorry” and just let the scene end like it always did (“Hold me”) The edit would be mostly audio, not video.
I personally would find the repeat of TLJ music from the climax to be more distracting.
More distracting than the repeat of ANH music that was already repeated in TFA? 😃
Thanks for indulging the train of thought, though, especially since you didn’t have to.
Also, I’m going to see about brining Burning Homestead in a little bit earlier since I can’t move it later, so those first two notes before the Force theme can pack more of a punch.
Did the prior two mockups I posted using variations on the Force Theme not get seen, or did you just not like them?
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/1369914/action/topic#1369914
No hard feelings if you didn’t, of course, but the point I was making is that I don’t think Burning Homestead is the only possible option for music there. It doesn’t even have to be the only possible version of the Force Theme, for what that’s worth. With some subtle slowdown and stretch, the Force Theme use from The Last Jedi fits pretty well there, with the build to the lightning strike.
If the voice was a severe, disturbing distortion/warping of a regular gonk droid sound effect, with static and clipping introduced into the mix, it’d probably get the desired effect of being somewhat off-putting as opposed to being a quick gag at Threepio’s expense, which was the intent in 1983.