Channel72

So I read the full ESB draft script by Leigh Brackett. Here’s some random musings that occurred to me when reading this:

• This draft is not very good, especially compared to the final product. The overall plot is basically the same (Rebels are hiding in a secret ice planet base, the Empire finds them, Luke goes off to train on a swamp planet, Han and Leia survive a space chase and end up at Lando’s floating city, get betrayed by Lando, and Luke shows up and confronts Vader). Despite having the same plot broadly speaking, there really is not a single scene in this draft that would be recognizable if actually filmed.
• The whole thing feels way more campy or whimsical than ESB. For example, in ESB, Echo Base looks like a practical, functional military base. But in the draft, the base is inside some kind of whimsical ice castle, with secret invisible doors in the ice.
• The script spends more time on a sub-plot about ice monsters (the Wampas) attacking the base than on the actual Empire attacking the base. Ice monsters attack the base, killing many people, and forcing the rebels to evacuate. While the rebels are evacuating due to the ice monster attack, the Empire also coincidentally shows up at the same time. The ice monsters are almost supernaturally powerful. It’s really stupid.
• Luke still acts like he does in Episode IV. He is portrayed as immature and inexperienced, compared to the suave, confident and experienced Han. The script implies that part of Luke’s motivation for becoming a Jedi is basically so Leia will take him seriously as a potential romantic partner.
• There’s a lot more exposition about the state of the Galaxy. There’s a scene where a Rebel commander explains that after the Death Star was destroyed, many systems joined the Rebellion, but the Imperial navy is still very powerful, and is currently spread thin around the Galaxy pursuing rebel cells. This kind of exposition is missing in the final version, requiring us to infer these background details ourselves. (Also the final version seems to imply Echo Base is the only rebel base.)
• The Force is way more vague. At one point, Darth Vader can force choke Luke from thousands of miles away merely by sensing his presence. Luke only barely escapes by jumping into hyperspace. (In the final draft, Vader force chokes Ozzel from a distance, which is also a bit iffy - but at least it’s implied that Vader has to at least visually see his target in that case.)
• In this draft, it’s possible to summon a Force Ghost by calling out “By the Force, I call you!”. This is how Luke summons Ben Kenobi’s ghost. This is utterly horrible.
• There is way more emphasis on the threat of Luke turning to the Dark Side. Since Vader is not Luke’s father in this version, Vader taunts Luke about how he murdered Luke’s father when they fight in Cloud City. This makes Luke very angry, and he begins using the Dark Side. It’s implied that Luke is on the verge of becoming evil from repeated Dark Side usage, but then at the last second Luke stops fighting Vader and throws himself down a shaft (similar to what happens in the final version). I like the final version much better, but it occurred to me that one consequence of merging Vader with Luke’s father was that the threat of Luke turning evil never seemed plausible. In the final version of ESB, Vader is Luke’s father and has nothing to taunt Luke with to inflame his anger and turn him towards the Dark Side. But in this earlier draft, since Vader murdered Luke’s father, Vader is easily able to make Luke angry, causing Luke to embrace the Dark Side.

Interestingly, there’s also some elements in this script that seem to have been recycled as concepts that appeared in the Prequels, decades later. Some examples:

• Darth Vader (who is not Luke’s father in this version) more explicitly tempts Luke with the power of the Dark Side. In fact, Vader specifically tells Luke that the Dark Side will enable him to “keep those he loves safe from harm”. Earlier it is established that Luke worries a lot about Princess Leia’s safety, and Vader exploits this when tempting Luke. This dynamic is pretty much identical to the way Palpatine tempts Anakin in the Prequels.
• Cloud City has elements that were almost certainly recycled into Kamino in Attack of the Clones. In the draft, Cloud City (called Orbital City) has tall, pale-white-skinned, native aliens that ride “giant manta-rays”. They also use “pneumatic darts” as weapons. This was obviously recycled as the Kamino aliens. (But the recycling feels a bit clumsy - the Kamino aliens don’t really fit the water-themed environment they inhabit, whereas these native cloud aliens were supposed to feel like airy warriors that dwell in the clouds - hence they use primitive darts. But why would the advanced Kamino aliens use darts?).
• Yoda (in this draft named “Minch”) uses a lightsaber, and at one point has a mock lightsaber duel with Ben Kenobi’s force ghost. This is the corniest thing ever. I don’t understand how Brackett wrote this thinking it would be filmable. (I don’t know if this scene specifically inspired Lucas to have Yoda fight with a lightsaber in the Prequels; it’s probably more likely that Lucas just thought it would be cool.)

StarkillerAG said:

Channel72 said:

Surprisingly, I think Darth Vader never sits down in Return of the Jedi. Objectively.

WRONG! If you watch the deleted scenes, he CLEARLY sits down right after arriving on the Death Star in order to contact Luke and persuade him to join the dark side. You utter imbecile. You should be ashamed of yourself. 😉

I should have known Anakin likes sitting down. He does so much sitting in Episode 3. I think that’s the real reason he wanted to be on the council, so he didn’t have to stand up during all those boring meetings.

Surprisingly, I think Darth Vader never sits down in Return of the Jedi. Objectively.

Some of those officially licensed Star Wars technical books say there’s a bathroom on the Millennium Falcon. I’m sure Leia was thrilled to share that bathroom with Chewie, who doubtlessly was always clogging up the sink with hairballs.

KumoNin said:

Thrawn. The other reason we like these characters, and the entire reason anybody is excited to see the blue guy is Zahn’s writing. The way he was written, and, in fact, how perfectly Zahn’s mystery-detective-plans-within-plans writing style lends itself to this type of character, is the reason I and others gasped at the name drop in that Mando S2 episode, it’s the reason live action Pellaeon made some people (ok maybe also me…) giddy.

That’s also why I’m excited to see Thrawn.

But it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that more people exist who only know Thrawn from the Rebels incarnation. And it’s very likely this is how Filoni will depict him. I haven’t seen much of Rebels, but the little I’ve seen or absorbed via osmosis feels like a very different vibe than Zahn’s military sci-fi-ish stories with their tech-centric plots involving cloning cylinders and cloaking devices and remote-controlled starships. Zahn’s Thrawn is always applying technology in innovative ways to further military objectives, very often to make up for what he lacks in conventional resources and manpower.

The Rebels version of Thrawn’s story involves giant wolves and magical space whales. I mean I guess that’s theoretically no more outlandish than ysalamiri, but Zahn’s ideas generally have well-defined parameters and serve very practical story purposes. I forgot the particular story-driven purpose of the space whales in Rebels, but I think it was just mostly created as a cool visual fantasy element to liven up a space battle.

Superweapon VII said:

Channel72 said:

Episode 5 seems to want to convey that Luke was on Dagobah for a while, and mastery of the Force is a slow, incremental process requiring training, even though it’s hard to understand how Luke could have been on Dagobah for long given the overall plot logistics.

Well, if you’re willing to inject some hard sci-fi into your space fantasy, without a hyperdrive, the Falcon would’ve had to travel from Hoth to Bespin in real space at near-light velocity, which would’ve subjected the crew to relativistic time dilation. So everyone aboard the Falcon may’ve only experienced an hours’-long trip while six months elapsed for the rest of the galaxy.

After having watched the Empire Strikes Back probably over 100 times, I just now noticed that the movie does in fact provide at least a minimum required training time duration of 1.5 days for Luke’s training with Yoda.

The first actual training session with Yoda is the scene where Luke is running around with Yoda on his back. Midway through this scene, before Luke enters the vision cave, Yoda says the following: “Nothing more will I teach you today. Clear your mind of questions.”

So Yoda says he won’t teach Luke anything further today. The next time we see Luke training with Yoda is the scene where he’s doing a headstand and lifting a rock. So the earliest this must be happening is the following day, but it could also be any number of days later.

So this sets a minimum time requirement of 1.5 days. Since it is night time on Dagobah when Luke leaves for Cloud City, the absolute shortest time the training could be is 1.5 days, if we assume every single training scene after the first happened on the same day that Luke leaves for Cloud City.

But the fact that, during the first training scene (Luke running around with Yoda on his back), Yoda ends the training by saying essentially “we’ll resume tomorrow”, suggests to me that we’re supposed to see the different training scenes as happening over a longer time period, with Luke living and sleeping on Dagobah each night.

But the longer we try and stretch out the total training time, the more creative we need to be to explain how Han and Leia were either waiting around inside that giant worm doing nothing for like a year, or else invoke General Relativity for the Hoth to Bespin trip.

We all know Irvin Kershner did not have Einstein in mind when working on this movie. But if we explore this just for fun, we still run into difficulty. We also have to account for the perspectives of Boba Fett and Darth Vader. Boba Fett seems to just follow Solo from the asteroid field to Bespin, meaning Boba Fett is also traveling at relativistic speeds in the same reference frame as Han Solo. Or maybe Fett calculated Solo’s most likely destination and jumped ahead via hyperspace. Either way, assuming Bespin is one star system away from Hoth (a weird coincidence that Han’s friend Lando lives next door to the remote Rebel base), the distance would be around 4 light years. This means that for anyone not traveling in the same reference frame as Han Solo, at least 4 years would have passed from the time Han left the asteroid field to the time he arrived at Cloud City. So… did Boba Fett call up Darth Vader and say “Okay I found the Millennium Falcon, and I know where it’s headed based on its current trajectory. Meet me in Cloud City in 4 years.” I guess Vader spent those 4 years thinking about the perfect way to surprise them, settling on an elaborate dinner party and a cool one-liner.

Mocata said:

I think it’s more calculated than that. Why write new characters when you can use old ones? Less risk and more brand recognition. A mixture of TCW cameos and old characters from books is potent stuff. Is the Thrawn trilogy really the place to start now, or is it just a logical next step in their methodical mining of the old EU? As for deepfakes… yeah I have a bad feeling about this.

I think it’s safe to predict that within 10 or 20 years, it will be possible to create an entire Hollywood-quality live action movie entirely using digital tools on a laptop. Then the floodgates will open and a trillion fan films of every possible permutation of Star Wars lore will engulf the Internet. The only difference between the endless stream of fan films (some of which will be of better quality than the official versions) and the official ones is that creators of fan films will not be able to profit directly from their films, because they do not hold a license to the IP. But fans will do it out of passion anyway, especially as technology improves to the point where a live-action Hollywood production can be digitally created with a simple script and some basic prompting. Then the entertainment industry will panic, and scramble to introduce regulation preventing this, but ultimately fail to meaningfully stop it.

But hey at least somebody can recreate the theatrical OT in 4K.

Spartacus01 said:

I can’t imagine Vader saying “Liar!! You’re with him! You brought him here to kill me!”

No, he just said: “You are part of the Rebel Alliance and a traitor! Take her away!”

Prequel Anakin would have said something like “Traitor!! You’re with the Rebels! You’ve turned against us!! I will not let you get away with this!” or whatever.

He’d also pace back and forth while saying it. Then an Imperial officer would inform him that an escape pod with no lifeforms crashed on the surface of Tatooine. After realizing what planet they were orbiting, Anakin would tell his crew to initiate an orbital bombardment to kill all Sandpeople and also destroy all sand, after suspecting Leia was here as part of some nefarious sand-related plot to overthrow the Empire. He would then yell out to nobody in particular, saying “I now see through their lies! I will make them pay for their coarse, rough and irritating plotting against my Empire!!!1! It’s all Obi Wan’s fault!!”

It sounds like Filoni kind of mourns the EU to a certain extent, but maybe I’m just reading something into his statement that isn’t there. I get the sense he appreciates the EU stories and wants to make a movie that tells some reworked version of one or more EU stories. But I guess he also wants to combine it with his Rebels plot lines.

It’s interesting to reflect on the fact that a live action retelling of most of the early EU stories from the 1990s was not possible for over two decades, since all those stories focus on the original cast who had aged beyond the roles. But now because we’re “living in the future”, those stories can actually be told in live action using deep-fake recreations of the OT cast. It’s certainly uncharted territory. So far, CGI recreations (and later deep-fakes) have been used for minor roles or cameos. But the day will soon come I’m sure when a starring role is entirely a deep-fake. A lot of people find this idea disturbing, but it will inevitably become more and more common as time goes on.

Archivist99 said:

Channel72 said:

Sometimes Vader sounds a bit impatient - it’s kind of funny when some Officer has to bother him when he’s inside that meditation chamber, and Vader is like “What is it, General?” You can hear slight impatience in his voice. But he never rages or loses his temper. He’s the complete opposite of Kylo Ren. And definitely way more subdued than Anakin, who was constantly flipping out in both Episode 2 and 3. We can make excuses for this personality difference by saying that over the years Vader became more mature as a Sith and learned to channel his anger in more constructive ways or whatever, but honestly the reality is that Anakin’s portrayal just kind of sucks.

What makes you say that last line? Why wouldn’t ruling the galaxy for 20 years, having settled into your choice to take wrong path lead to a less “flipping out” personality? The “flipping out” was all due to his internal struggle between his better angels (Obi Wan) and the devil in his ear/his baser desires (Palpatine). The struggle is over after he ends the Jedi and loses Padme. He has nothing left but his delusions about bringing order to the galaxy and overthrowing Palpatine (both of which he tries to sell Luke on, and neither of which involve turning away from the Sith path).

You’re not really disagreeing with me here. You seem to agree that Anakin does flip out more than Vader, but you provide an explanation for why you believe this observed difference in behavior is plausible.

All I can say is that your explanation (essentially saying Vader had no reason to flip out once he settled into his role as a powerful Sith) doesn’t really help make Anakin and Vader seem like the same person to me. I mean ultimately this is subjective, but I just can’t really picture Darth Vader saying a lot of the stuff Anakin says with the cadence or wording that Anakin uses. As one example, I can’t imagine Vader saying “Liar!! You’re with him! You brought him here to kill me!” Instead, Vader would just say “You have betrayed me. You have brought Obi Wan to kill me.”, while pointing his finger in Padme’s face.

I mostly enjoyed this episode, but this whole experience is giving me déjà vu, bringing up memories of Book of Boba Fett. Basically for like 75% of the show’s run time, the show just spins its wheels mostly going nowhere. Seeds are planted that admittedly do pay off later, but these seeds don’t require 75% of the show to feel like fluff. It’s always those last one or two episodes, comprising around 25% of the show, where stuff finally happens. This is exactly what happened with Boba Fett, where the primary villains didn’t do anything until the last scene of the second to last episode. Yet we had like 3 episodes where Boba Fett wanders around town trying to get an appointment with the mayor or whatever. It’s like whoever writes this stuff is incapable of writing with an evenly distributed sense of progression.

Now this Mandalorian episode introduces some legitimately cool things, like the Imperial Council. This is the closest thing I’ve ever seen to a live-action depiction of Post-ROTJ EU stuff, and a rare instance where the political landscape of the post-ROTJ Galaxy is actually explored. We should have seen this council much earlier, dropping in on their nefarious meetings throughout the run of the series.

And yeah, it sucks that all of this is mostly just setting up the Sequels. There is literally nothing in Star Wars more boring than the First Order. But at least the Thrawn-related stuff has some potential to be interesting, since Thrawn’s story seems mostly orthogonal to any potential proto-First Order story-line. I’m just not remotely convinced that anyone involved with this show has the requisite Zahn-like writing talent to depict Thrawn correctly. Dave Filoni is not physically capable of writing lines like “But it was so artistically done”.

sade1212 said:

Re: Rey’s ‘power level’: I think a lot of the disagreement comes from a difference in understanding of how the Force is supposed to work. A lot of Yoda’s teaching in ESB - ‘size matters not’/‘only different in your mind’, ‘do or do not, there is no try’, telling Luke ‘that is why you fail’ in response to his disbelief over the X-wing being lifted out of the water - suggests to me at least it’s more of a binary thing than a linear power scale. Yoda wasn’t entirely just screwing with Luke, right, he really did think it could’ve been possible for him to lift the X-wing himself after what is, in the most generous interpretation of ESB, absolutely no more than a month of training, so long as he truly believed he could do it. After all, that’s how Luke wins in the first movie: he’s had less than an hour or so of training by Yavin, but the whole idea of the climax is that just by truly letting go and putting absolute faith in the Force, he lands the shot. Not because he’s spent six years training in the specific technique of Force-Enhanced Torpedo Accuracy.

It’s certainly possible to construct a reasonable argument demonstrating that Rey’s use of the Force isn’t necessarily so different from what we see in the OT. Both the OT and the ST play fast and loose with elapsed time. We don’t know if Luke was training on Dagobah for a few hours, days, or months.

But the problem with Rey is both one of degrees and writing intent: The OT clearly indicates Luke needs a mentor in order to learn new Force abilities, and he seems to acquire new powers incrementally with training. But Rey appears to acquire new Force abilities spontaneously and rapidly, without any mentor or training. Luke needed Kenobi to prod him along to deflect blaster bolts and later blow up the Deathstar. In the cave on Hoth, Luke struggled to perform telekinesis - we don’t know how he knew this Force power was even possible, but the sense of elapsed time that passed between Episode 4 and 5 leaves open many possibilities. Then in Episode 6 Luke seems much more powerful. A few years have elapsed since Episode 5, but it’s unclear how Luke grew in power, since he apparently didn’t return to Yoda.

But these fuzzy ambiguities about Luke’s training likely result from logistical problems with the writing rather than what the films were actually trying to convey about the Force. Episode 5 seems to want to convey that Luke was on Dagobah for a while, and mastery of the Force is a slow, incremental process requiring training, even though it’s hard to understand how Luke could have been on Dagobah for long given the overall plot logistics.

But with Rey, there’s not even an attempt to convey that it takes time and training to learn the Force. There’s a scene in the Force Awakens where Rey is being held prisoner, and she somehow spontaneously discovers the “Jedi mind trick” in order to free herself. Then after she escapes, Kylo Ren says that the longer it takes to find her, the stronger she will become, implying that she’s gaining power by the second! The next day, Rey is able to lift tons of heavy boulders with the Force. Rey’s learning to use the Force is depicted more like “unlocking” a latent superpower, and she requires little or no guidance from a mentor figure to acquire new powers. Luke’s Force abilities required guidance from a mentor, and were of a significantly smaller scale than some of what Rey does (Luke struggles to lift a single medium-sized rock in Episode 5). Some of the discrepancy between Rey and Luke is attributable merely to the normal Hollywood tendency to make everything “bigger and better” as special effects improve over time. But the writing itself also indicates Rey is rapidly “unlocking” new powers in real time, growing in power rapidly with no guidance from a mentor. It’s really at odds with how the Force is portrayed in the OT (and certainly in the PT), despite the way the OT often plays fast and loose with elapsed time leaving open questions about Luke’s training.

And despite Yoda’s “size matters not” statement, the OT certainly portrays learning the Force as an incremental process requiring training, where smaller scale things are easier to do than larger scale things. (And if Yoda’s “size matters not” statement is really to be taken at face value, why didn’t Yoda just fling the Death Star into the nearest Sun and call it a day?)

StarkillerAG said:

I know what you mean, Channel72. Despite me white-knighting hard for the sequels earlier today, I do recognize that they were pretty much completely unnecessary in the grand scheme of things. The exact same things that happened in the OT happened again, just with different people. And as a consequence, the sacrifices of the OT characters seem pointless.

After thinking about it for a while, I’ve come to the realization that the sequel trilogy would be monumentally improved if you made just one change: have Luke be part of the Resistance in TFA. Rather than his entire new Jedi Order being obliterated and him being in exile, have most of Luke’s apprentices survive Kylo’s downfall, with Luke himself still dedicated to defeating the First Order and restoring the Jedi.

In this hypothetical scenario, TFA would be centered around Luke’s efforts to find the first Jedi temple, with pretty much the entire first half of the theatrical movie intact otherwise. Luke would be mentioned throughout, but would only appear in person once the Falcon lands on the Resistance base, with a big fanservicey introduction scene of him training the six-or-seven remaining Jedi. He would stay on the base for the final battle, but the very end of the movie would feature him, Rey, and the other students landing at the first Jedi temple, aiming to establish it as their new home.

TLJ would have the same character arc for Rey, with her being tempted by darkness via her connection with Kylo, but it would be completely reframed in the context of a non-grumpy Luke attempting to train her as the latest addition to his Jedi school. Several scenes on the island would be mostly intact, but others would be almost completely new. Since Luke is on the island for most of the movie, the Resistance plot would play out like it did originally. At the end, Luke still pulls his teleportation trick, but doesn’t die: Luke now does it with the hope that his bravery will inspire Force-sensitives across the galaxy to join his temple.

At the start of TROS, it would be revealed that Luke’s wish came true: dozens of new Jedi are now being trained at Luke’s temple. However, Luke’s health is failing, and he knows that his time is near. Around the end of the first act, he gathers all of his students around his deathbed to hear his final lesson. He tells them that Rey will be the new master of the Jedi academy, and that he’ll always be watching them in the next life. And so, with his mission to restore the Jedi finally complete, Luke dies with a smile on his face.

I know that was a bit wordy, but I was just feeling a little inspired today. If the sequels actually played out like that, I’m sure a lot of their most vocal haters would like them a lot more. Too bad that will never happen.

Yes, your synopsis would have been orders of magnitude better. The main problem with the Sequels is they make the OT redundant, which is sad.

Even new Star Wars stories set in the OT time period, like Andor, (my new favorite show), fall victim to the dramatic consequences of the Sequel Trilogy “reboot” plot. You sort of need to mentally ignore the Sequels when watching Andor, otherwise you’re watching a small band of desperate revolutionaries endure nightmarish prisons, make impossible moral sacrifices for a better future, etc., only to have the Empire rise again around two decades later, and then be destroyed again in a similar but discontinuous way by different people.

The old EU in all honesty wasn’t that great (it went off the rails pretty quickly), but at least it told an overall story that was a progression of the OT events, as the former Rebels of the OT became the political and military leaders of the New Republic. The New Republic was depicted as a flawed institution, but it placed the OT heroes in different roles and exposed them to different challenges, progressing the OT story instead of just resetting back to Rebels vs. Empire.

screams in the void said:

to the people that are butthurt because " Rey took away from Luke’s story " …the sequel trilogy was never intended to be Luke’s story , even when George talked about as far back as interviews from the 1980s , he said if it got made it would be about passing the baton to the next generation and Luke would be in his 60s . Rey is that next generation .

Well, nobody expects the Sequel trilogy to have Luke as a main character. I mean, obviously Mark Hamill is getting old, and the Sequel trilogy should be about the next generation of Jedi with a new cast of main characters. I’m pretty sure everyone understands and expects this.

The specific complaint here (which I agree with) is not that the Sequels focus on new younger characters, but rather that the Sequels retroactively nullify the previous accomplishments of the older OT characters, when the Sequels should instead build upon those accomplishments with a new generation of characters.

So:

Good Story: Luke as an old man takes on the wise mentor role (like Kenobi in Episode 4), trains a new generation of Jedi, including Rey, who is the main character and focus of the story. Rey learns from Luke and goes on to have her own adventures and carry on the torch for the Jedi Order.

Bad Story: Luke as an old man trains a new generation of Jedi, but his entire Jedi school is destroyed in a fiery explosion, resetting the Galaxy back to an earlier state when all the Jedi were dead. (This is basically Order 66 2.0) Then Rey meets Luke but doesn’t really learn much from him, then Luke dies. Then Rey goes on to create a Jedi school that is not destroyed in a fiery explosion this time. This turns Luke’s story (from the OT) into a footnote, since there was no progression from Luke’s story to Rey’s story. Rather, Luke’s story is a dead end that leads nowhere, and Rey’s story becomes a replacement (not a progression or continuation) of Luke’s story.

Superweapon VII said:

You can see this contrast more clearly when you compare Leigh Brackett’s TESB draft with the final film.

Yeah - isn’t Vader still separate from Luke’s father in Brackett’s version?

StarkillerAG said:
Why does it have to be a gender thing? Why are so many people on here acting like Disney Star Wars is some evil woke plot to emasculate white men and replace them with women and minorities?

I think we ended up with Luke as a disillusioned suicidal exile not because Disney or Rian Johnson had some malicious desire to emasculate anyone, but rather as a fluke result following from a certain sequence of events. Michael Arndt wrote a script for Episode 7 that apparently included (based on concept art) some elements that ended up in TLJ, including a female protagonist (maybe named Kira) and Luke living alone on some island (but not necessarily disillusioned with the Jedi or suicidal). (Arndt’s script may have been based on Lucas’ original story treatments - Lucas originally hired Arndt after all - but it’s difficult to harmonize that with Lucas’ later claim that his Sequel was about Leia and Darth Maul, but whatever.)

Apparently Arndt’s script featured Luke prominently, unlike the Force Awakens. At some point, J.J. Abrams and Kasdan were added as writers. Around 2013, Arndt quit or was fired for unknown reasons, probably related to disagreements with Abrams. Note that George Lucas himself was involved peripherally in the creative process, collaborating with Disney on Episode 7, up until Lucas realized Disney was no longer using his ideas, after which he backed off. It seems reasonable to conjecture that this may have coincided with Arndt leaving and Abrams asserting more control, but who knows. Regardless, Abrams eventually got his way and turned Episode 7 into what we have now, but Arndt had said that as early as 2012, he worried that Luke featured too prominently in the story to the detriment of the new characters. At some point, either Abrams or Arndt or both of them were trying to come up with a “MacGuffin” for the film, and they settled on the search for Luke Skywalker. This required Luke to be missing for some reason, and also only appear at the end of the movie. It doesn’t seem like this aspect was part of Lucas’ original ideas (although Lucas may have had Luke on an island with a Jedi Temple), and it doesn’t seem to be the case that either Abrams or Arndt envisioned Luke as disillusioned with the Jedi or suicidal, just alone on an island for unknown reasons.

It appears that neither Abrams nor Arndt originally had a clear idea about why Luke was on this island - they simply wanted “the search for Luke Skywalker” to be the MacGuffin, and they didn’t want Luke to take the spotlight away from the new characters. But perhaps reasons for Luke being on the island were fleshed out later as the whole Ben Solo story-line was developed, and so ultimately Episode 7 was written with the implication that Luke’s disappearance was directly connected to Ben Solo’s murderous rampage. This still doesn’t exactly explain why Luke is on the island, but it points in some general directions I guess.

Rian Johnson was given this starting premise, and so he ran with the idea and decided that Luke was on that island because he had become disillusioned with the Jedi and was there on a self-imposed exile. Perhaps the Ben Solo tragedy led Rian Johnson to this idea. Of course, the idea of a suicidal Luke who is disillusioned with the Jedi doesn’t really line up with Abrams’ concept of a “map to Luke Skywalker”, or the fact that the island itself has an ancient Jedi Temple on it. But Rian Johnson obviously believed he could make it work, and thought the idea of a disillusioned Luke was very compelling.

So that’s how we got sad Luke alone on an island.

I personally really hate how Luke is portrayed in TLJ, but it’s obvious that nobody set out to “emasculate Luke”. Luke ended up like that as a result of a series of creative decisions made in isolation as part of a poor overall planning process.

That said, Rian Johnson obviously had more options than just making Luke a sad, suicidal exile. The fact that the island had an ancient Jedi Temple on it (an idea apparently going back to at least Michael Arndt’s early scripts, if not Lucas’ original ideas) suggests to me that Luke was probably meant to be there because he was searching for some kind of ancient Jedi wisdom or texts that would give some insight into how to handle the situation with Ben Solo. But that’s just my conjecture.

If you’re trying to portray sequel hate as entirely apolitical and not right-wing at all, using literal right-wing rhetoric does not help your case.

It isn’t obvious to me that there’s some strong correlation between hating the Sequels and holding right wing political beliefs. (Anecdotally, my political beliefs are heavily left-wing, but I don’t like the Sequels). The issue is that there are a lot of common Sequel criticisms floating around that overlap with similar criticisms motivated by right-wing political beliefs.

For example, I realize there is a perception that the whole “Mary Sue” criticism is strongly associated with ultra-conservative political beliefs, suggesting that this criticism is primarily motivated by sexism or misogyny. But I believe the “Mary Sue” criticism is at least partially valid (if often exaggerated), yet I also believe the Sequels should have a female Jedi protagonist. The non-sexist version of this criticism seems very straightforward, and it’s easy to imagine an alternate version of Rey’s story that would not fall under this criticism. Of course, this criticism is also a matter of degrees. A similar criticism could be made about Luke (I always thought it was ridiculous that Luke knew how to expertly pilot an X-wing in Episode 4; an earlier scene showing him piloting his T-16 Skyhopper would have helped alleviate this somewhat). But Rey suffers from these sort of problems to a much greater degree in my opinion. Of course, I can’t say what percentage of fans that voice this “Mary Sue” criticism are motivated by sexism, but it’s not at all obvious to me that it’s some large majority. It’s unfortunate that we use this female-gender term “Mary Sue” (another historical accident), instead of some more descriptive, neutral term like “Hero’s Journey Cheat Code” or something.

I imagine that most of the population processes Star Wars movies the same way I process a Harry Potter movie. I barely know what’s going on, I think some things look cool occasionally, I have only a vague conception of what happened before in earlier movies, and I completely forget most of what I saw a few hours later.

So here’s the thing: yes, this sucks and seems like an absolutely terrible decision. However, I really wonder how much of an information bubble Star Wars fans exist in. There are common “truisms” that seem to be generally accepted as facts within the “fan community” (whatever that means). Facts like (1) the Sequels suck, or (2) Rise of Skywalker is particularly ridiculous, or (3) Andor is amazing, etc. But are these opinions reflected in the general public? I mean I think the average movie-going consumer probably doesn’t give any of this much thought, and therefore for them the Sequel Trilogy was a fun little adventure. And I imagine most of the box office revenue comes from average consumers. So from Disney’s perspective this might not seem like such a bad idea. Granted, up until now, it really seemed like Disney was intentionally steering clear of anything related to the Sequels.

It would be nice to have actual polling data about this stuff. There are arguments to be made using proxies like toy sales and all that, but all of that is really speculative because it doesn’t control for other variables. (Like we could say poor toy sales for Sequel Trilogy products indicates general dislike of these films, but it could also just mean that the latest generation of children is less inclined to play with toys in general because they have iPads or whatever.)

But it’s definitely sad to me that we’ll never get a live action portrayal of Luke’s continuing adventures post-ROTJ and his new Jedi Order. Rey would be a great character if she was written to be trained by Luke and perhaps his star pupil. But they wrote her such that she doesn’t really learn anything from Luke, and she sort of just cannibalizes his story. But really, this is kind of to be expected because it’s obvious that The Force Awakens was never actually a Sequel. It was written as a “reboot”. Nothing in that film was written as a progression of previous events. Previous events were treated mostly as an inconvenience. The New Republic and Luke’s Jedi Order were grudgingly mentioned and then promptly blown up so we could move on to rebooted Rebels vs. Empire action. It’s kind of crazy that after waiting 30 years for a follow up to ROTJ, they decided to go with “A New Hope but with updated special effects” instead of a story that followed naturally as a progression of previous events, like an actual Sequel is supposed to do and like the EU actually did. So the fact that Rey simply repeats Luke’s story while sort of just deleting his prior accomplishments implied from the Original Trilogy follows naturally from the fact that Episode 7 was a reboot instead of a proper Sequel.

But yeah, I also find this whole thing very tragic.

What’s funny is this “pseudo-Sequel that’s really a reboot” thing seems very modern due to J.J. Abrams, since he did the same thing with Star Trek in 2009. However, this is actually a much older phenomenon and was very often the “default” way to write a Sequel. Consider that, for example, Ghostbusters 2 basically just deletes all the accomplishments of the first movie, and then just retells the same story. (And with the same characters no less.) This used to happen all the time with sequels. It was just obviously not the right way to continue with Star Wars, which was already a 6 episode story where each episode progressed from the events of the previous one.

Then again, who knows? Maybe this movie will just get canceled like half of Disney’s other announced projects.

I don’t know, I was just watching Empire Strikes Back the other day, and actually it’s pretty surprising how calm and reserved Vader is most of the time. In A New Hope Vader loses his temper once, in the very first scene, when he’s like “Tear the ship apart and bring me the plans!” or whatever. But in Empire he’s very subdued. He never loses his temper - he just calmly kills you when he feels you’re under-performing. The closest he comes to sounding angry is when he says to Ozzel “You have failed me for the last time, Admiral”, but in fact he barely even raises his voice when saying this. He just wants Ozzel to shut up so he can tell Piett the plan going forward. He comes off as ruthlessly efficient, which goes along with his “half-machine” persona.

Sometimes Vader sounds a bit impatient - it’s kind of funny when some Officer has to bother him when he’s inside that meditation chamber, and Vader is like “What is it, General?” You can hear slight impatience in his voice. But he never rages or loses his temper. He’s the complete opposite of Kylo Ren. And definitely way more subdued than Anakin, who was constantly flipping out in both Episode 2 and 3. We can make excuses for this personality difference by saying that over the years Vader became more mature as a Sith and learned to channel his anger in more constructive ways or whatever, but honestly the reality is that Anakin’s portrayal just kind of sucks.

Also of interest to continuity is that Vader is slightly different in A New Hope because he essentially was a different character at that time. He was written as more of a generic villain who killed Luke’s dad. It was only with Empire that Vader became a more complex character, and his personality changed slightly to reflect that. But the difference between Episode 4 Vader and Episode 5 Vader is barely even noticeable compared to Prequel Anakin versus OT Vader.

Thrawn is cool, so that’s a plus. But you know, it’s kind of sad to me that, due to the passage of time and the way things worked out with Star Wars, we’ll never get to see the post-ROTJ adventures of the original OT cast in live-action. We’re following Mando and Ahsoka around the Galaxy during a time period where, theoretically, Han, Luke and Leia are off somewhere doing awesome things.

Also, the coolest thing about Thrawn was his military tactics and use of technology in innovative and unexpected ways. This brings to mind a development in modern Star Wars which is rarely discussed, but which I think has fundamentally altered the nature of the franchise: the main “cool factor” (meaning what fans generally find to be the coolest aspect of the franchise) changed at some point. In post-Prequels Star Wars, the main “cool factor” of the franchise shifted primarily to Jedi powers and lightsaber fights. But originally the main “cool factor” among fans was the space battles and the elements of military sci-fi. There hasn’t been a proper, multi-stage goal-oriented space battle since Rogue One (at least not in live-action).

Even in The Force Awakens, which was the most OT-inspired, retro incarnation of modern Star Wars ever, the protagonist achieves her first major victory via a lightsaber fight, instead of a space battle like in A New Hope and (arguably) Phantom Menace.

I think you mean Don Plagueis the Wiseguy.

But the best is definitely when Michael Corleone and Hyman Roth fight to the death in a lava-filled casino. Fortunately, Roth loses the high ground and then doesn’t live to see the New Year.

Well you know, Disney paid like $4 billion so they can generate endless excitement/engagement by simply shooting out more things we recognize from old VHS tapes. When will I get a god damn Lobot cameo??? Lobot cameo = +200.00 USD Walt Disney Co. NYSE:DIS

Back in the 70s, George Lucas had to actually make up new things to sell to 20th Century Fox. At first he tried to just purchase some nice Flash Gordon cameos, but that didn’t pan out so he inadvertently created the most awesome thing ever conceived of by H. Sapiens.

So I was rewatching Empire Strikes Back the other day. Every time I rewatch the OT I’m always amazed at how strongly these films manage to convey this illusion that the camera is simply a window into a real, three-dimensional world, and that just off-screen all sorts of things are happening in parallel with what we see in the frame. I posted a thread about this subject a while back.

But what really struck me specifically when rewatching Empire was a certain really extraordinary detail that contributes to conveying this illusion. Everyone remembers the scene in Echo Base where Han has decided to leave the Rebellion to go pay off Jabba, and Han and Leia get into a heated argument in a corridor. What is remarkable about this scene is that multiple times throughout the scene, Han and Leia are interrupted by random extras who walk between them or around them - just random anonymous Rebels going about their jobs. Some are carrying equipment, others are just hurrying down the hall. Han will often get out of the way, making room for the extra to squeeze by, while he’s in the middle of this heated, emotional argument with Leia.

There’s no plot or narrative reason for these constant interruptions. They happen entirely for realism (or “world-building” I guess). You rarely see this kind of realistic mundane detail portrayed in movies anymore. I can’t recall off hand a movie made after the early 1980s that does anything like this. Usually directors subscribe to a philosophy of economical film-making, where Chekhov’s Gun applies across the board, i.e. nothing happens onscreen unless it has significance to the plot or theme. Sure, pretty much every movie will have background extras, but they almost never interrupt the main action. The constant interruptions in the Echo Base corridor really convey this sense that Han and Leia are not merely “main characters”: they are real people that have to deal with the physical realities of a busy military base. This level of detail is incredibly rare to see in movies. Generally, a movie will instead make the Universe bend to the convenience of the main characters. Certainly, the later Prequel movies never did anything like this, where background environments are often artificially generated via CGI and never interact physically with main characters.

Interestingly, these constant hallway interruptions in Empire are not mentioned in the shooting script. So apparently Kershner or someone else simply improvised this, believing it contributed to the movie. It goes to show how much more immersive a movie can be when you have physical/practical sets, because it opens up all sorts of options for realistic interactions between the environment and characters.

Also, this is more of a nitpick, but when Din and Bo Katan first arrive at Disney World planet, the planet’s local computer remotely takes over control of Bo’s ship and begins piloting it. So apparently it’s possible to do that. Bo acts like there’s nothing she can do about it. And this exploit is never used in battles to force enemy ships to crash because… … ??

It’s obvious they really didn’t have much of a story here. We can speculate that this was the result of some studio mandate forcing Grogu back into the narrative. I give that a ~90% likelihood of being true, since Grogu has little effect on the story-line. But even if true, it doesn’t seem like there was any well-defined story involving Din by himself either. Rather, it seems the writers just lost interest after Season 2 and didn’t really have much further story to tell.

Plus, they keep talking about “retaking Mandalore” as if it was an enemy-occupied territory. But it’s just a desolate nuclear wasteland. What does it even mean to “retake” it? Anyone is free to head over to Mandalore and start building some houses if they want. The only thing they need to “retake” it from is a high probability of thyroid cancer from radioactive iodine over the next 20,000 years.

I kind of suspect the writers haven’t really even thought this through, which is why a lot of the episodes this season sort of just string you along with filler, evading the main through-line. The same thing happened with Book of Boba Fett, where there was barely any story (or just dead-end story lines, like that Hutt brother & sister) up until the second-to-last episode, leaving the finale to resolve the paper-thin story.

On the other hand, The Mandalorian was always partially an episodic “side quest of the week” show. But this was easier to enjoy back in Season 1 when the show was just this small-scale adventure across backwater worlds. The simple through-line of “protect the child” was enough to carry the show. But in Season 3 we have multiple larger-scale plot-lines that barely even involve Din Djarin, and it all congeals into a sense of aimlessness. After the through-line of bathing in the subterranean waters was resolved early, the only remaining through-lines are (1) retake Mandalore (whatever that means) or (2) some ominous vagueness about Gideon or some undefined Imperial threat. And neither of these through-lines really even involve Din Djarin personally, apart from the fact that he happens to have the Dark Saber (an object that he doesn’t seem to care about that much.) But worst of all, I think, is that this Season nullified all the emotional consequences of the previous season. This casts a pretty dark shadow of apathy over the whole show, exacerbating the aimlessness and making it a lot harder to care about anything going forward.

Personally, I think it would have been more interesting if they used Bo Katan as an antagonist to Din (which is where I thought they were going), but it seems that is not the case. In retrospect, making her an antagonist would be difficult since Din doesn’t really give a shit about the Dark Saber or leading Mandalore or anything like that.