Channel72

Superweapon VII said:

Here’s a hot take that might upset a subset of the forum: Fans haven’t “started to come around and start showing the prequels the appreciation that they should have gotten in the first place”. It’s almost exclusively the fans who always loved the prequels unironically continuing to love the prequels unironically, be they the gushers from the days of yore or the kiddies who’ve grown up on them now adding their voice to the echo chamber.

The only thing I can say in terms of appreciating or reevaluating the Prequels, is that the Disney Sequels at least made me appreciate how George Lucas really tried to make his Prequels different from the OT in terms of story, aesthetics, locations, plot, themes, etc. The Sequels came off to me as mostly soulless regurgitations of the OT synthesized by a particularly boring AI (with the partial exception of TLJ, which presented an entirely different form of sucking). This made me at least appreciate Lucas’ desire to actually tell a story, rather than just shamelessly capitalize off of the OT.

And yet, sadly, the Prequels still seemed to suck the few times I rewatched them over the years; they just suck in very different ways than the Disney films.

The core issue is Lucas has some really inspired ideas, but sucks badly at writing (a fact he admits on multiple occasions) and seems to have a very different philosophy about the fundamental nature of Star Wars than a significant percentage of the original OT fanbase, as well as a significant percentage of the people whose creative input shaped the OT.

Palpatine’s death at Vader’s hands was probably the most incredibly poignant, perfect ending possible to the saga. Despite ROTJ’s many flaws, they really nailed that ending. It’s so rare that a saga like this wraps up with such a perfect resolution.

Of course, Lucas decided to decrease the poignancy factor by ~30% by dubbing in Vader saying “No! No!!!” before killing Palpatine. Sometimes I just don’t understand that man.

And I think Palpatine’s death was probably the least ambiguous death possible. Nobody ever had any doubt that he was dead. Future installments that unwisely decided to resurrect him (Dark Empire, Rise of Skywalker) did so through cloning - which doesn’t negate the fact that he did in fact die in ROTJ. Just because someone dies doesn’t mean a clone of that person cannot later be created.

Bomma72 said:

This is the truth, he wins about 99% of the whole trilogy, rules the galaxy for decades and dies with his offspring the most powerful person in the galaxy. Objectively he won. He has a few bad moments, in decades of dominance.

And yet his office is so tacky. Can’t he find a better interior designer on Coruscant?

NFBisms said:

Andor’s political statement continues with an economically friendly, free To access archive

Andor’s political statement is significantly diluted given that this statement is promulgated by a corporate behemoth traded on NYSE. But also, “Revolutionary message co-opted by hyper-bourgeois entertainment oligopoly - news at 11”

Oh man, I forgot about words like “flaming” and “flame wars”. These words sound so stupid in 2023. Let’s all agree to pretend we never said them.

Anyway, to throw in some more useless anecdotal evidence, yes - the Prequels were very controversial in the early 2000s to maybe around 2013 or so, at least on Star Wars Internet forums. Just go to any old school Star Wars Internet forum (including this one) and read posts from around 2001-2010 (if they go back that far) and you’ll find that almost every other thread is some heated argument about the Prequels. As Kellythatsit mentioned, there was even an entire stupid terminology used back then to describe both sides of the argument (“bashers” and “gushers”, oh god it’s embarrassing to even type those words now) because the phenomenon of arguing about the Prequels was so common.

Anyone who tells you otherwise, or tells you that the Internet loved the Prequels until Red Letter Media came along or anything similar is blatantly wrong.

Off the Internet, it’s much more difficult to gauge popular sentiment. But I recall that in the early 2000s the prevailing sentiment of popular culture towards the Prequels (or at least Phantom Menace) seemed to me at least to be mostly negative and prone to mockery.

For an example of early Prequel criticism (so early it was actually written before the Phantom Menace was released to the general public), see this 1999 review by Eli Roth (complete with dated 90s lingo), and also look at the comments section: http://web.archive.org/web/20000305191203/http://www.leisuresuit.net/Webzine/articles/starwars_rev.shtml

You’ll notice that even in 1999 - before the movie was even released to the general public - and a decade before RedLetterMedia, all the usual anti-Prequel talking points of today are fully present (over use of CGI, juvenile tone, Jar Jar, under-developed plot, breaking continuity with the OT, dull acting, etc.)

Regardless, I’ve met people in their late 20s that genuinely were surprised to learn that there was ever widespread dislike towards the Prequels on the Internet. There’s obviously a generational aspect to this, and I can understand why younger people might be skeptical about this, since it’s so different than the prevailing attitude today.

Mocata said:

Well that was brief. But satisfying. Oddly enough the dialogue between Fett and Kast has been in my head since the 1990s when it was in the SW magazine. The ‘you’re nobody’ bit should have been the kind of thing that Mando said to Gideon before he died. What could have been eh.

Strange what sticks in your brain for 25 years. Why does the name Jaster Mereel still exist in my mind but I can’t remember where I put my wallet? Anyway I might find a few online copies of Dark Empire or the Thrawn trilogy.

Because the name Jaster Mereel is objectively awesome.

Twin Engines of Destruction is what should have happened in The Mandalorian when that small-town sheriff guy was wearing Boba Fett’s armor in the Season 2 episode with the Krayt Dragon.

There’s so many classic Boba Fett comics that are just incredible. I don’t understand why none of these storylines were adapted for the live action Boba Fett show. [Insert more bitching about Disney, etc. etc. everything sucks now, etc., get off my lawn]

I haven’t read any of these books, but the concept at least seems interesting. This seems to be the first attempt to write Star Wars stories that don’t either (1) rely on known characters from the mainline movies or (2) center around the eternal Jedi/Sith struggle in some way.

But I don’t quite know what to make of the High Republic yet, based off the descriptions/summaries I’ve read. The setting and backstory sounds vaguely “Star Trek” inspired, e.g. focusing more on exploration, space travel being more difficult and slow, weird sentient plant beings (I think?) as villains, etc. And of course, a sentient rock is the most Star Trek thing ever. The descriptions I’ve read and some of the imagery I’ve seen reminded me a bit of the original Star Trek movies (Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Star Trek II, III, etc.) with the Jedi instead of Starfleet. But that was just my impression - I haven’t actually read any of these books yet, so I am probably way off. Regardless, it sounds very interesting.

Val Kilmer as Anakin sounds pretty cool.

But I’m not sure about Lucas’ perception of Anakin around the mid 1980s. I agree he would almost certainly have conceived of Anakin as probably around 19 or 20 rather than a little kid. But I’m not sure if Lucas’ 1980s Anakin would simply be a translation of Hayden Christiansen into a 1980s equivalent (i.e. some 80s teen heartthrob/bad boy type).

The only definitive clue about Lucas’ actual mental image of Anakin around 1983 is the fact that Lucas cast Sebastian Shaw as elder Anakin. Shaw’s brief performance suggests Lucas perceived of Anakin as British, maybe because Kenobi was British and Lucas thought of Anakin as coming from the same world/environment as Kenobi. Gary Oldman (mentioned in the podcast) sounds like a possible candidate. Some of the actors mentioned for 1980s young Kenobi may also have been considered for Anakin by Lucas.

I used to imagine Anakin as something like a young Malcolm McDowell (although he was much too old to actually play Anakin in the mid 1980s.)

Oddly, the phrase “trash compactor” is never used in A New Hope, or anywhere else in the OT. But I suspect a lot of people are absolutely sure it is.

Pakka said:

The limitless universe that existed from 1977-1980 started to shrink as soon as Vader said “I am your father”, and just about everything that has happened since has continued to make it seem smaller. Even mainstream critics have started to notice that, while it’s supposedly set in an entire, sprawling galaxy far, far away, Star Wars feels very “small-town”. Everybody knows everybody, everything is too connected, and there are few real surprises.

I don’t entirely agree with this idea (I grew up in the generation after where the OT was on VHS and the Special Editions were my first theatrical Star Wars experience), HOWEVER I can completely understand this sentiment. There’s something about the 1977 Star Wars that captures this feeling of limitless possibilities - producing an intense, child-like curiosity about what’s beyond the horizon. The fact that the movie is set in “the furthest place from the bright center of the Universe” (to paraphrase), instead of like, some 1977 equivalent of Coruscant, along with the very lived-in aesthetic, the straightforward directing, and the hinted back stories, all probably play a large role in producing these feelings. There’s so much that’s tantalizingly unknown that we only get glimpses of, out on the frontier in a vast cosmos. (I get a similar vibe occasionally from Ridley Scott’s first Alien movie).

But nowadays, all of that enticing Star Wars imagery has turned into “IP”. Like, every single weird alien in the Mos Eisley Cantina was at one point strange and new - each weird creature suggested an entirely different civilization or world existing somewhere out there. But now they keep copy-&-pasting the same Cantina aliens everywhere in Star Wars. Every Star Wars bar, outpost or underground nightclub has the same alien species. (We paid $4 billion for the rights to hammerhead alien! We’re damn well putting hammerhead alien in our new Star Wars cafe!) Meanwhile, there’s an exhaustively detailed Wookiepedia article about the history and culture of each species.

While I understand this aspect, it’s hard for me to really understand how the Vader revelation in particular shrinks the Universe. Of course, I get how the Vader revelation can be seen as narrowing the focus of the story to this one family. But… even without the Vader revelation, Luke, Ben Kenobi and Vader were always intimately connected and likely to be the focus of any potential sequels. (Ben trained Vader, Vader killed Luke’s father, etc. Luke was always about two degrees of separation from the Emperor of the Galaxy.) The original Leigh Brackett script of ESB (which has mostly the same plot as the real ESB, except Vader is not Luke’s father) still focuses heavily on Luke and Luke’s relationship with Vader. Even if the “I am your father” revelation never happened, it’s hard to imagine the subsequent Star Wars sequels unfolding in a manner that didn’t revolve around Luke and Vader at their emotional core. Nothing hooks an audience more than character drama - so it’s difficult to imagine some alternate timeline where Star Wars sequels were made that didn’t continue the story of the main cast.

The real problem is Star Wars has lost the sense of the tantalizing unknown, the limitless possibility just beyond the horizon. Now we all know what’s beyond the horizon. It’s probably Tatooine. Or a planet that looks like Tatooine (and probably has Jawas or Jawa-equivalents). Or Coruscant again.

And it doesn’t help that every planet in the Galaxy is just a quick 1-hour trip away via hyperspace. I actually take the opposite view from the essay about “Star Wars as surrealism instead of sci-fi”. While I don’t want Star Wars to be hard science fiction, I think that if the sci-fi angle was played up more, it would be easier to maintain that sense of the tantalizing unknown. If it took months or years to travel from the Outer Rim to the core worlds, or if most of the Galaxy was remote and unexplored, or if the Empire lasted for centuries or millennia, instead of decades, etc - these are the sort of details that better convey this sense of vastness and possibility, and of the tantalizing unknown in fiction.

Ronster said:

Darth Caliban said:

Bobson Dugnutt said:

Darth Caliban said:

So basically no additional story elements, dialogues or anything with alternative worldbuilding information like Han with the girl (Jenny?) in the cantina during the rough cut for ANH?

There are probably some alternate line deliveries, or different pieces of dialogue that suggest other things. Han saying “That bounty hunter we ran into on Ord Mantell changed my mind” was cut, which implies another adventure they had before ESB, for example.
It is likely however, that we generally know about just about everything that was cut, and that there aren’t any big subplots, sequences or scenes that have been cut out or kept under wraps.
People will debate forever still though that Luke missed the first time during their chasm swing, or Leia spat on Tarkin, or Vader’s TIE exploded, or the Biggs scenes were in there from the start. It’s fun to think about, but it’ll never be proven in anyway.

“I love rumors! Facts can be so misleading, but rumors, true or false, are often revealing.” - Hans Landa

By the way, to come back to the speculated about additional AT-AT scene, is it known if a set for the compartment for the stormtroopers inside the walker was ever built for ESB?

Can’t remember ever reading anything about it, but if they built it, i’d guess they would have used it at least for some test sequences.

After Wedge downs the AT-AT with the tow cable that scene was expanded upon in story boards basically the rebel troops and the Storm Troopers were to have a small gun battle outside the downed AT-AT and the troops running out the trench shouting “Come on!” is still in the film but the rest is it is likely un-filmed or unfinished. They just blew it up it was easier.

Which never really made much sense. Somehow, falling down makes the metal easier to penetrate. They should have just cut away after the AT-AT fell - that’s enough for the audience to understand it was taken out.

Marooned Biker Scout said:

Contrast that to Andor, real sets, real people, reactions, everyday life on various environments, though notably Ferrix and Aldanhi, It draws us in, grounds us as viewers, we’ve been there, we identify and believe those familiar surroundings. Even when we are shown the lower levels of Coruscant, or the ISB HQ, they have the similar grounding, background extras going about their day.

(Along with some beautiful cinematography, direction and editing, of course.)

Yeah, definitely. And that’s because many of those shots on Coruscant are actually just real locations that were digitally touched up to look more Star Warsy. I think one of the locations on Coruscant is the McLaren headquarters in England, and the ISB HQ is a plaza in the Canary Wharf in London.

It’s the reason Coruscant seems so different (and more tangible) in Andor than in the Prequels.

I also liked the depiction of Coruscant in the test footage for the canceled Star Wars Underworld show. It was closer to the Prequels in style, but it also had this more grounded, Blade Runner vibe.

RogueLeader said:

They could’ve emphasized that Han was using his smuggling skills to sneak the ground team onto the Endor moon. They could have even explained that Han himself paid for the clearance codes, using his criminal connections to procure them. And I do think having Han let Lando fly the Falcon also contributes to his character growth as well.

Yeah, and this suggests all sorts of enticing possibilities if only there was more time or more movies. I mean, you could have an entire subplot about Han and Lando going on a mission to get those clearance codes from like Black Sun or whatever, which could easily fill half a movie. And I think this highlights another issue with ROTJ: it was hampered from the start, because it had the monumental task of satisfactorily wrapping up the whole saga, which includes rescuing Han, resolving the conflict with Vader, revealing the “other”, and overthrowing the Empire, all in about 2 hours! And Empire Strikes Back didn’t exactly leave us off with the sense that some final showdown between the Empire and Rebellion was immanent. Considering all this, it’s really a miracle ROTJ turned out as good as it did.

k-slam64 said:

If Jabba has a palace, why does he live in the dungeon? All he does is lay around in bed all day smoking space weed and hanging out with his loser friends.

Because he’s like a cool rich friend that throws parties and hires live bands to party in his basement. One time back in the 80s he got Sy Snootles to show up and she did a live performance of Lapti-Nek, everyone was so high. I think this one chick was eaten by a rancor, and Boba Fett was there maybe. It was wild. Then in the morning after everyone woke up he let us hang out on his party yacht.

It’s really hard to create new, compelling characters, let alone to get people to watch them, especially in a franchise like this with so much historical baggage. Andor created at least two new compelling characters, which is amazing. Timothy Zahn did it as well in the 1990s. But… that’s pretty much it for post-Lucas Star Wars in my opinion (although I haven’t read most of the latter-EU or seen many of the cartoons, so maybe I’m missing out). I liked Seasons 1 and 2 of The Mandalorian, but I have to admit it wasn’t really because of the character work. But maybe IG-11 should get an Emmy.

God, Andor is so freaking awesome. I wish more people watched it so it would have more influence steering the future direction of Star Wars. But then, maybe if too many people watched it, the executives would start meddling with it, and start demanding they insert Baby Yoda into at least 2/3 of all scenes. Then we’d end up with Season 2 of Andor starting out, and Baby Yoda is just there with no explanation. Then after Cassian Andor is captured by the ISB and interrogated/tortured, we regularly cut back to Baby Yoda eating cookies, then back to the Imperial torture droid.

StarkillerAG said:

And the first moment I mentioned, Lando arriving with the cavalry, has been documented to have been in the movie from the very beginning: it was in Colin Trevorrow’s “Duel of the Fates” draft, written before Endgame even started filming. So that obviously couldn’t have been Endgame inspired.

It’s also in Lord of the Rings, when the Rohan army arrives at the last minute to turn the tide of the ongoing battle at Helms Deep. That goes back to the 1960s.

I don’t think Han should have died in ROTJ.

The problem is that it was difficult to figure out what to do with his character after the rescue. They decided to throw him with the Endor ground team, but it often feels like he’s just along for the ride. But then, I guess the same could be said about Leia. The problem is, unlike the first two movies, post-Jabba ROTJ is the first time in Star Wars where the main characters’ involvement in the unfolding plot doesn’t exactly seem necessary. Like, why are Han and Leia specifically leading the Endor ground team? It could really be any senior Rebel doing this, and neither Han nor Leia have been established as “Seal Team Six” types. Luke, on the other hand, ends up doing something that only he specifically can do: confronting Vader.

This is unlike ANH and ESB, where each character is doing things specific to that character’s ongoing arc. In ANH, Han is a smuggler/criminal caught up in larger events, and Leia is a Senator secretly leading a Rebellion. In ESB Leia continues leading the Rebellion and Han is split between his old life and his new responsibilities. But in ROTJ, we’re just suddenly presented with some mission parameters by the Rebellion’s top brass, and for arbitrary reasons our beloved main characters are assigned arbitrary roles. (Why is Lando - who we’ve only found out even joined the Rebellion a few seconds ago - given a leading role in this critical mission? Something about the Battle of Taneb?)

A more natural use of the characters, given their previous history, would be for Leia to replace the role of Mon Mothma or Ackbar, for Han to lead the attack in the Falcon, and for Luke to lead the Endor ground team. Alternatively, it would also make sense for Luke to lead Rogue Squadron in the Endor space battle. But the problem is that it’s simply not feasible to write the story this way, because this would effectively remove Leia from most of the onscreen action, and it would separate the main cast even further. Plus, whatever role Luke is assigned, he needs to abandon at some point in order to go confront Vader. So it’s pretty difficult to find a way to satisfactorily position all the main cast given the parameters of the Battle of Endor, in a way that feels completely natural in-Universe but is also dramatically effective.

I think to really make it all work, the parameters of the Battle of Endor themselves would need to be reworked in some way. I feel like Han really should be in the Falcon, but then we need something for Lando to do. Maybe an entirely new subplot is required, like having Lando recruit a secondary fleet of smugglers or whatever. (Oh god that sounds like Rise of Skywalker, nevermind.)

My guess is that in modern times, with big-budget movies in particular, the film-making process is way more streamlined and compartmentalized across different teams than it used to be. I mean, the big spectacle CGI action scenes are often developed by completely different teams working at different companies with little direct involvement from the director, apart from occasional feedback. Whereas, back in the day, you’d have Lucas or Kershner hanging out overseeing the ILM crew constructing the models and setting up VFX shots. There was still a lot of compartmentalization and outsourcing involved in the production process of course, just much less of it than today.

Marooned Biker Scout said:

The Prequels: I can’t remember any scenes either like those from the OT. Likely due to the green screen or blue screen CGI backgrounds, and the focus of direction. Unless it had a thousand ships or vehicles whizzing around in the background (“so dense, so very dense”), there wasn’t much going on like in the OT.

Yeah. The world of the Prequels is either mostly empty or a chaotic mess. The corridors of the Kamino cloning laboratory, or the halls of the Jedi Temple… where is everyone? There’s usually just the characters required for the scene and some digital backgrounds. The world feels surreal and abstract, not a real physical place you could actually visit. Then you have the opposite phenomenon where the background is a million ships or robots shooting at each other.

RogueLeader said:

If it Lucas Luke and Leia were going to be siblings from the very beginning, I do feel like he would’ve handled it differently. Yes, the trilogy is more so Luke’s story than anyone else’s, but the revelation and what it means for Luke isn’t given the same weight for Leia, even if the implication is pretty much the same.

Of course, Luke idealized his father, wanting to be like him, so discovering what his father became has this consequence of Luke wondering if he could become that too. Whereas when Leia was adopted by the Organas, they raised her as her parents. So I don’t think Leia ever spent much time wondering who her biological parents were, or wanting to be like them. The Organas were enough for her to look up to.

I know the EU and Canon both explore Leia’s feeling on Vader being her father a little, but it could’ve been interesting for the movies to explore that more.

There is a very strange, almost serendipitous scene in Empire Strikes Back that has always fascinated me. It happens after the scene where Chewie flips out and starts attacking Storm Troopers just before Han is about to be lowered into the carbon-freezing pit. Han intervenes and tries to calm Chewie down before things get out of control. While this is happening, Boba Fett aims his blaster at Chewie, but then Vader stops him from firing by pushing down the barrel of his blaster. Then - there’s this weird shot of Leia just staring at Vader for a few seconds. This is followed by a shot of Vader, seemingly staring back at her (although we can’t tell for sure because of his mask). Leia then walks over to Chewie and starts trying to calm him down. It’s the strangest thing, as if Leia and Vader instinctually exchanged some non-verbal agreement to prevent the situation from escalating further.

I know it can’t possibly mean much. The idea of Leia being Vader’s daughter didn’t exist when that scene was written and filmed. But it’s another one of those uncanny, serendipitous coincidences that takes on an interesting new dimension retroactively in light of later revelations.

Mocata said:

Palpatine and 10,000 Star Destroyer Death Stars was used in place of all kinds of real story ideas. I guess they think since it’s done they’re better to double down on that? What’s next, 10,000 Executor Class planet killers? The lack of writing ability is stunning.

J.J. Abrams’ next stroke of brilliance will clearly involve 100 quadrillion Eclipse class dreadnoughts, each one commanded by a Palpatine clone and a Thanos clone, and each equipped with a giant cannon that blows up the entire Star Wars Universe - both the canon Universe and the Legends one, and also blows up any movie theatre where the film is shown.

I mean, pretty much any complicated engineering project should be quicker the second time around, because the technical challenges have already been solved and the infrastructure to build more is already in place.

A “not quite analogous but analogous enough” example is the Atomic Bomb. The first atomic bomb took about 5 years to go from concept to first successful test (and arguably 20 years before that to lay the theoretical groundwork). But the hydrogen bomb, a much more powerful weapon, only took about 2 years to develop (started in 1950, first detonation test in 1952). This is because most of the engineering and theoretical problems were already solved, and most of the infrastructure was already in place to build more bombs, etc.

This doesn’t necessarily apply if you’re building a much more advanced/improved version of something with fundamentally new capabilities, instead of just duplicating or scaling up something. Like the F-22 fighter jet took around 6 years to develop, but the much more advanced F-35 took over 20 years. That’s because the latter was such a leap forward and so ambitious that it introduced many new engineering problems, and ended up getting bogged down in defects and budgeting issues.

The DS2 should be quicker to build than the DS1 unless it’s doing something way more advanced than the DS1. We know the DS2 is bigger, it can fire the superlaser at an angle, and I think it recharges faster. So there might be some new engineering challenges. There’s no way to say for sure since it’s all fictional. But the MAIN challenge (scaling up a laser to such ridiculously insane energy levels that it can blow up an entire Earth-sized planet) is already solved.

Plus, with the DS2 you also have other factors that should make it quicker to build than the DS1, such as less political obstacles due to the Senate not existing, and more urgency to get it done. (ROTJ begins with Vader showing up and threatening an Admiral to speed up construction.) I bet the DS2 would have had tons of defects if it was actually completed, due to being so rushed by Palpatine.

Z6PO said:

Speaking of similar scenes in the same movie: the sister reveal is explained 3 times! First Luke get the news, then he breaks the news to Leia, and then Leia has to explain it to Han. It makes sense for the characters to get this information, but for the audience it’s the exact same reveal repeated 3 times. And it’s boring.

Also, Leia seemingly has no reaction to the fact that this implies Vader is also her father. (Luke tells her Vader is his father in the same scene.) Maybe her reaction is delayed or she doesn’t immediately make the connection. She’s upset a few minutes later after Luke leaves, when Han comes by. But it’s implied she’s upset mostly because Luke had to leave.

You’d think she’d have a much stronger reaction, like “Holy shit, you mean the evil cyborg that tortured me, and tortured Han, and stood by and watched as my whole planet exploded, etc. is my father??”

Of course, the real reason she doesn’t react is because Leia and Vader never interact again in the story, so the story doesn’t bring up Leia’s feelings about this since it’s not significant to the story and there would never be any real payoff.

Finn was like one of the best things about the Sequels. He was an entirely original character concept. Normally, I’d be upset about how badly mishandled his character was, but since the entire Trilogy was mostly an incoherent mess, it’s kind of a moot point.

TFA set up Finn as a second main character - arguably equally as central to the story as Rey. But he was then firmly relegated to “side character” in the next movie. Finn was also obviously being setup as a love interest for Rey in TFA - (a fact that, anecdotally, I’ve found many fans strangely deny to be the case). Or at least, it was implied Finn was one side of an emerging love triangle along with Rey and Kylo Ren.

The fate of all three characters should have been closely intertwined throughout the trilogy, in the same way that the climax of TFA involved all three. Finn originally had a personal connection with Kylo Ren based on mutual animosity, which was dropped after TFA. Sadly, Finn was soon relegated to a side character and written off into oblivion. But again, why do I even care about this? These movies also have Palpatine show up out of nowhere with a secret fleet of 10,000 Star Destroyer Death Stars. At that point, it’s just Spaceballs 3: The Search for a Profitable Plot, so who even cares?

RogueLeader said:

Sometimes I do wonder if the audience being left in the dark so much in the first act works well for audiences first time watching it, going in blind per se, but doesn’t really work as well for multiple viewings. You can imagine how cool it must’ve been for audiences to have each character slowly be revealed to them after not seeing them for 3 years. But the slow reveal of the mystery feels a little dull to me upon rewatch. That might come down to pacing issues moreso than the narrative POV, or me having seen the movie so many times, but I still find ANH and ESB engaging throughout despite that.

Personally, I much prefer movies where we see the planning stages of the heist/rescue/operation/whatever before we watch it play out. There are many great bank robbery or prison escape movies that do this. I find it way more interesting to watch the operation play out when I know the logistics and possible contingencies in advance. Watching the operation play out when I have no clue what the plan is or what possible dangers or contingencies exist usually makes me feel like I’m just watching an arbitrary series of events. I don’t know what things were improvised and what things were part of the plan.

And it’s not like this is a foreign concept to Star Wars. In fact, in ROTJ - the very same movie - Mon Mothma explains in detail all the parameters of the Battle of Endor, and tells us who is doing what and what obstacles need to be overcome. That makes it way more interesting to watch as the events unfold, so we know what goes wrong and what goes right, what things had to be improvised, etc.

But I think with the Jabba scenes, as you said, Lucas wanted the excitement factor of slowly revealing each main character to the audience. Lucas probably thought that a scene with Luke, Leia, Lando and Chewie on the Millennium Falcon, looking at a holographic map of Jabba’s palace and discussing the plan, would probably not work as well dramatically for an opening sequence. But it’s still what I would have preferred.

Mocata said:

If you see news about it on a general outlet that lets the readers give ‘reactions’ there are a lot of thumbs down over SW in general lately. It’s impossible to say what the far reaching vibes are because what we usually see is ultra hyped Celebration types or ultra jaded social media types. Personally I don’t care but I would wait until it’s been released to see how it goes.

It’s impossible to say for sure, but the large number of negative reactions is probably meaningless. The people that go to those websites and click the “thumbs down” button do not represent a random uniform sample of all potential movie-watchers. Rather, they are naturally selected from the set of people who are inclined to express their opinion about Star Wars in the first place, i.e. people with strong pre-existing feelings about Star Wars. The average movie-watching public is not motivated to go click the “thumbs down” button on a Star Wars article.

This type of selection bias is rampant all over the Internet, and it skews everyone’s perceptions about “what everybody really believes”.

The only other thing I’ll add is that historically, main-line Star Wars trilogies have been released following a long period of zero Star Wars movies coming out. The first movie in every Trilogy always dramatically out-performs the 2nd and 3rd at the box office - often making around double what the 2nd and 3rd make. So it seems that the long period in between trilogies is one factor that contributes to the major success and hype of the first film in a new Trilogy. But Rise of Skywalker was released only like 4 years ago. And Disney+ continuously vomits out new Star Wars content. So who knows what will happen.

It’s crazy to reflect on how differently Star Wars was perceived from 1983 to May of 1999. A Star Wars movie was like… an absolutely monumental event, and Lucas was beloved as a master story-teller of almost mythic stature (… or maybe at least until 1997). And from 2006 to 2015, Star Wars was perceived by many as damaged, but still very special. But now a new Star Wars movie is just a new movie.