Channel72

To be honest, even in the original theatrical release, where Han does the obviously correct thing by shooting first, the scene is still a little wonky.

It’s not entirely clear if Greedo approached Han initially with the intention of killing him. Presumably, Greedo didn’t necessarily plan to kill Han at first, but just wanted to turn him over to Jabba and collect the reward money. The dialogue confirms this explicitly. After Han says “Even I get boarded sometimes. Do you think I had a choice?”, Greedo responds by saying “You can tell that to Jabba. He may only take your ship.”

Okay, so it’s pretty clear that Greedo isn’t interested in killing Han at first, but rather seems to want to force him at gunpoint to walk over to see Jabba, I guess. But then Han says “Over my dead body”. Apparently this makes Greedo change his mind for some reason and decide to kill Han instead. So now even in the original, non-special edition version, Han essentially kills Greedo in self-defense, because Greedo directly told Han that “I’ve been looking forward to killing you for a long time.”

This isn’t necessarily the clearest of death threats (maybe Greedo meant something more like “I can hardly wait to kill you after Jabba is done with you”.) But it would certainly be reasonable for Han to interpret this line as an imminent death threat.

Assuming Greedo did intend to kill Han imminently, it’s kind of weird that Greedo suddenly switched from “You can tell that to Jabba” to “I’ve been looking forward to killing you” simply because Han objected to the idea of Jabba taking his ship (which has nothing to do with Greedo). I guess Greedo maybe just lost patience and was like “fuck it this guy isn’t cooperating I’ll just kill him”.

My preference for this scene would be to write it so that Han clearly and unambiguously murders Greedo in cold blood just to get away from him. After Han says “Over my dead body”, Greedo should just say “that’s the idea” (meaning Jabba will probably kill Han), and then Han should just shoot Greedo under the table. But having Greedo say the additional line “I’ve been looking forward to killing you for a long time” opens up the possibility that Han acted in self defense, even without the Special Edition weirdness.

WitchDR said:

rocknroll41 said:

So having all the main characters be men instead of women is “stepping out of gender politics”?

To be fair, Disney can’t write a single good female character to save their life. The only characters that have had any staying power are all male characters: Cassian, Din, and Grogu.

Mon Mothma and Dedra Meero are both incredibly written female characters. They’re more interesting than any of the male characters in Andor, except probably for Luthen. But I agree these are exceptions or outliers among mostly crappy Disney Star Wars productions.

We’ll never see another Mulholland Drive. And now there’s nobody alive who knows what it’s actually really about

henzINNIT said:

It will never cross the uncanny valley

If by never you mean by 2027 or something, then yeah, probably.

On a forum like this where everyone else is also a Star Wars nerd, I say A New Hope, because that is the clearest possible way to refer to this movie. When talking to normal people, I just say “the original Star Wars” or “Star Wars 1977” or something like that.

JadedSkywalker said:

Every director has their style and eccentricities. I just don’t get how people don’t notice the same issues in his earlier films maybe because they are better movies?

Or maybe he had help with the screenplays.

The whole digital cinema and we’ll fake it in cgi and fix it in post, is almost every major comic book or fantasy or science fiction film now.

Lucas had some help writing the Prequels also - people exaggerate when they claim that Lucas wrote the Prequels entirely by himself. However, it is true that Lucas had way more help writing the Original Trilogy, obviously, where for ESB and ROTJ he mostly wrote plot outlines or very early drafts and then had other people flesh out the actual script.

Also, the Original Trilogy truly had ground-breaking special effects for the time. Nobody had seen anything remotely like the Death Star trench run, for example, with moving star fields and dog fights in space. And while the Prequels certainly had a similar effect in terms of revolutionizing the VFX industry (Jar Jar was the first completely CGI character I think) and pushing digital film-making into the mainstream, the overall impact and “wow factor” was much less pronounced from the perspective of the average audience member.

I mean, I’m fairly old, so I remember experiencing various ground-breaking movies as they were released over the past 30 years. I remember being blown-away by new special-effects technology precisely three times in my life, and the Star Wars Prequels were not one of those three times. Those three times were Terminator 2, Jurassic Park, and the portrayal of Gollum in Lord of the Rings. I haven’t seen anything else that truly seemed revolutionary or game-changing to me, except possibly AI Luke Skywalker in the Boba Fett show a few years ago. But the Prequels never stood out to me as particularly revolutionary in terms of visual effects, even though, factually speaking, I realize they had a dramatic impact in terms of pushing Hollywood in general towards digital film-making, paving the way for all the Marvel stuff we have now. Yet even in 1999 when the effects in Phantom Menace truly were state-of-the-art, some people were already complaining about the overuse of CGI, with some early reviews complaining that some scenes looked less like Star Wars and more like “A Bugs Life” or something.

^ yeah but Andor

I’m not the biggest Nolan fan but this does sound interesting. There really hasn’t been a definitive adaptation of The Odyssey in the same way that, say, many people view Peter Jackson’s LOTR Trilogy as a definitive adaptation of Tolkien. I think the last time Hollywood produced a Homeric epic was when they adapted The Iliad into a movie called Troy, starring Brad Pitt, which (I vaguely recall) sucked pretty badly. But I have a bit more faith in Nolan, I guess. I’m interested in seeing how Hollywood will interpret The Odyssey in terms of casting and character design, and how all the mythological elements like the Cyclops, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, etc. will be depicted with modern VFX technology. I at least trust Nolan enough to use some restraint and avoid indulging in a CGI explosion like Peter Jackson often does.

Also, the latter part of The Odyssey (comprising most of the 24-chapter epic poem), where Odysseus returns home to Ithaca in disguise, is probably difficult to adapt faithfully due to the vastly different cultural values we have in the 21st century, compared to the Bronze Age sensibilities of Homer’s original audience. I’m referring to the fact that in the “grand finale”, Odysseus violently murders dozens of Ithacan noblemen (some of whom begged for their lives) for the “crime” of courting his wife Penelope, even though these noblemen really did nothing wrong from their perspective (aside from perhaps being rude) because they all believed Odysseus was dead. Odysseus even brutally murders his own household slave girls because some of them slept with the noblemen. I assume stuff like this will not be included (without sufficient modification) in any modern Hollywood adaptation because Odysseus is the protagonist and his violent murder-spree would come off as incomprehensible to a 21st century audience. Regardless, I’m all for seeing Nolan attempt to adapt this stuff anyway, because it would be hilarious to see a modern Hollywood production written with a Bronze Age conception of morality.

Hopefully we’ll also get a Homeric Cinematic Universe featuring tie-ins with The Iliad and Virgil’s fan-fiction epic The Aeneid, culminating in an Avengers-style crossover event where Odysseus, Achilles and Aeneus join forces to fend off an invasion from the Underworld led by Hades and some guy named Elpenor (deep cut reference alert) who died after getting drunk this one time and falling off a roof.

I haven’t watched this show, and it’s encouraging to read all the positive reactions. But it seems this show barely registered on this forum’s radar, judging by the extremely limited engagement in this thread. In contrast, the thread for The Acolyte (which had a mostly luke-warm or negative reception on this forum) generated like 15 pages of posts, and the Andor and Kenobi threads generated even more than that. It seems this forum is just not particularly interested in Skeleton Crew. I wonder if this is a more universal phenomenon that extends beyond this forum. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is the case, because this show does not use widely-known pre-existing characters and has a very unique or niche premise for a Star Wars show.

This reminds me of a larger conversation about awareness and advertising for streaming shows. I mean, 20 years ago whenever a Hollywood film or network TV show (especially something as culturally impactful as Star Wars) was released, the marketing would be pretty much unavoidable. You would become aware of the show fairly quickly, and then be constantly reminded of its existence via an unrelenting bombardment of television commercials, movie trailers, billboards, etc. But nowadays, fewer and fewer people (particularly younger people with Disney+ subscriptions) watch cable television or go to the movie theatre, choosing instead to watch things on YouTube or other online platforms. Of course, these streaming video platforms do embed video advertisements in their content, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen an ad for Skeleton Crew. Perhaps there are fewer vectors available to advertisers nowadays to cost-effectively spread awareness among target audiences than there was in the past. Or perhaps the target audiences are scattered across too many different online platforms, making it difficult to cost-effectively reach them, unlike 20 years ago when everyone was watching the same television networks and seeing the same movies in theaters. This problem is probably further exacerbated by the niche premise of Skeleton Crew and the fact that its title lacks any connection to the Star Wars IP. Of course, if you already subscribe to Disney+ you’ll see new shows advertised on the home screen, but if you don’t already have Disney+ you might never become aware of new shows.

Personally, I was aware of Skeleton Crew and its Goonies-inspired premise months ago, and I subscribe to Disney+. But I still haven’t watched any episodes. I’m not even sure why. The limited promotional material and positive reviews I’ve seen simply haven’t sufficiently motivated me to actually go watch it, even though I (perhaps hypocritically) really do want to encourage the production of original shows like this that take creative risks with the Star Wars IP. That’s how you get really outstanding stuff like Andor.

Sometimes the overwhelmingly positive reevaluation of the Prequels that occurred across the Internet around 2015 makes me start thinking that I was too harsh on these movies and I should probably give them another watch and maybe reevaluate the positive aspects. I mean, I really want to like them. But every time I try this, the flaws stand out so sharply to me and I just end up rediscovering why I never liked these movies in the first place.

People often say that the actual story of the Prequels was excellent, and it’s only the implementation or execution that resulted in such flawed films. I agree with this, but I don’t think it’s a particularly compelling or interesting point. The actual story outline of the Prequels - broadly speaking - was already known back in the 1980s: Kenobi trained Anakin to be a Jedi and the two became good friends. A manipulative Senator named Palpatine orchestrated a coup by leveraging influence with Trade Guilds and large corporations, overthrowing the Republic and killing all the Jedi in the process. Anakin betrayed Kenobi and sided with Palpatine who appointed him chief “Jedi Hunter”. Then Anakin and Kenobi dueled near a volcano and Anakin fell into lava. Kenobi then arranged for Anakin’s children to be raised in secret. (Yes, even that specific detail about Trade Guilds was known in the 1980s).

So the basic story outline was already known before Lucas began production of the Prequels in the 1990s, and many Star Wars fans were familiar with this story and how it ends. So the entire point of actually making these Prequel films after all these years was the implementation details - the casting, the dialogue, the performances, the fleshed-out finer-grained plot points surrounding the Clone Wars and Anakin’s fall, the identity and personality of Anakin’s wife, the Jedi Order as it existed during “a more civilized age”, etc. The implementation was what everyone was waiting for. We already knew the story and how it ends, but we wanted to see an implementation of this story realized on the big screen. We wanted to see Kenobi and Anakin fighting side by side while exchanging cheesy quips. We wanted to see their great friendship tragically torn apart after Anakin embraces the Dark Side. And we wanted to see their dramatic final showdown atop the volcano.

And yet, almost every aspect of the implementation was fucked up in some way, beginning with the entire plot of Phantom Menace wasting a whole movie on an irrelevant side quest that had little bearing on the overall saga and prominently featured overtly juvenile characters and tone. The finer-grained implementation details fleshing out the Clone Wars and Palpatine’s conspiracy were mostly under-developed and hand-wavy, and often defied audience expectations in the least interesting way possible or created weirdly unnecessary continuity problems. This botched execution was so consistently pervasive throughout all aspects of all three films that praising the underlying source material registers to me as pointless. I still can’t comprehend how it was even possible to so colossally fuck up such dramatically compelling story material on almost every level. The only major implementation details that genuinely worked well were some of the casting decisions (Ewan McGregor is great), certain elements of the fight choreography, and John William’s score was also great (because of course it was). Even many of the visual effects (which George Lucas is famously known for as a pioneer and visionary) aged poorly due to the over-reliance on early-2000s 3D rendering to portray characters and environments.

JadedSkywalker said:

Can someone explain why everyone thinks Mace is this badass lightsaber duelist. He went out in a very weak way. Blown out a window due to unlimited power. After Anakin chopped his hand off.

It’s just a classic case of “telling instead of showing”. We all have this idea in our heads that Mace Windu is supposed to be a “badass lightsaber duelist” because of meta-contextual info like Samuel Jackson’s prior career and his role in things like Pulp Fiction where he’s very intense and says awesome shit. The only actual “showing” of his skills in the Prequels is when he decapitates Jango Fett (which I admit is cool) and when he fights Palpatine and (presumably) wins. But even the Palpatine fight never registered to me as particularly compelling, because the fight choreography between an aging Ian McDiarmid and Samuel Jackson was sort of clunky and relied on strategic editing to make it appear less ridiculous.

All of this is reflective of George Lucas’ overall bad creative choices: a character like Palpatine, who represents a “wicked sorcerer” and “evil mastermind” archetype, should not be doing backflips in a nicely furnished office. He should be sitting behind his desk, adopting a Monty Burns pose, and saying delightfully evil things while dominating everyone with Force powers that don’t require him to get up.

Your survey is using a highly biased population sample (i.e. people who took the time to make an account on OriginalTrilogy.com) and therefore the responses do not represent the “average Star Wars fan”. The people here (including myself) represent a distinct cohort of Star Wars fans with opinions that skew towards rejection of OT revisionism, dislike of the Prequels and Special Editions, and distrust of George Lucas as a creator. The responses you get will reflect the average opinions of this particular cohort of fans, not the average Star Wars fan.

I suspect the average Star Wars fan has very different opinions about Star Wars than the average member of this forum. I also suspect the average or median age of the people that participate in this forum is a bit higher than the average age within the “general population” of Star Wars fans. In fact, an old-school Internet forum like this (as opposed to a modern social media platform) most likely selects for relatively older people.

Spartacus01 said:

Channel72 said:

ESB, you have Luke fighting the man who killed his father (or so he believes), and in ROTJ you have a son fighting his own father.

However, it should also be pointed out that Luke did not interact with Vader at all in The Empire Strikes Back, nor did Vader have any particularly special relationship with Luke up to that point. The only thing Vader knew about Luke was that he was his son, but the two had no meaningful connection, and prior to that duel, Luke had never even spoken to him. Therefore, all the tension in that duel exists solely because you, the viewer, imagine what the two of them might be feeling in that moment. Which is essentially the same as imagining Anakin and Obi-Wan having more positive interactions off-screen compared to the ones that were actually shown in Attack of the Clones.

Revenge-based motivation doesn’t require so much previously established on-screen interactions. See e.g. stuff like Kill Bill vol 2, the Princess Bride, etc. “You killed my father, prepare to die” is all you really need before the part where “they fight”. (Although, some previous on-screen interaction can certainly only improve things.) Whereas, when you have two former friends (or a student/mentor) and one friend betrays the other, you need some mother fucking fleshed out details and some footage of the “good times” before the part where “they fight”.

Regardless, your criticism of Empire Strikes Back is essentially valid. More prior interactions between Luke and Vader (apart from the Battle of Yavin and Luke fighting Vader’s apparition in the cave) would only help to improve the duel, but it’s not as crucial as in the Kenobi/Anakin case.

Channel72 said:

CGI lava effects

The lava was not created using CGI. Footage was taken from Mount Etna — a real volcano located in Sicily, Italy — and then composited into the background. The only CGI related to the lava involved the instances where it rains down just a few inches away from them. Otherwise, the scenes used real footage of Mount Etna. Furthermore, there are not many alternative ways to simulate such a scenario other than CGI and real imagery pasted in the background, as there are not exactly many practical effects capable of convincingly simulating lava, and it is not like you can start throwing real lava at the actors.

Right. CGI lava effects.

Also, “practical lava effects” wouldn’t really improve anything here anyway. The criticism is about over-indulgence of spectacle to compensate for lack of actual drama, not about practical VFX vs. CGI. The Darth Maul fight in Phantom Menace arguably has the same problem, except instead of excessive CGI lava plumes they used the London Symphony Chorus.

The best duels are ones where the duelists have some major personal history and backstory that led to the duel happening in the first place. That’s why the duels in ESB and ROTJ are always the best. In ESB, you have Luke fighting the man who killed his father (or so he believes), and in ROTJ you have a son fighting his own father. Only the duel in Revenge of the Sith, where you had a former student fighting his former mentor and friend, even had the potential to surpass the Luke/Vader duels. But unfortunately, since the Prequel movies failed to establish a compelling relationship between Anakin and Obi-Wan, the duel itself is just empty and over-compensates with CGI lava effects and John Williams.

I mean, John Williams could score anything and it would be awesome. A movie scene showing somebody doing their taxes set to a John Williams score would be amazing. Let’s call it “Tax Season II: The Accounting Begins”, with music by John Williams.

In other news, I’m making a new Star Wars trilogy.

Wait, nevermind. I just cancelled it.

I didn’t realize the potential Rogue One had until I saw what Tony Gilroy was capable of doing with Andor. It really puts Rogue One in a different light. I always thought Rogue One was mediocre. The main problem is the pacing and the characterization. The movie jumps around too fast (especially in the beginning) to really let any of the events resonate, which is a common problem with modern movies. Also, Jyn Erso and Cassian Andor just came off to me as way too under-characterized. We needed to spend more time with them before the main events of the film, in order to get a sense of who they are. I could see some bare outlines of personality and chemistry in Erso and Andor, but not anything close to Original Trilogy levels. But now that I’ve seen Andor, which has amazing characterization, Rogue One comes off more as an imperfect, missed opportunity, rather than something hopelessly mediocre which I can just write off.

It’s just George Lucas’ fast-paced writing, and the inherent under-characterization of everyone in a pulp-sci-fi action flick like Star Wars. Leia barely seems to care that her entire planet exploded. That doesn’t mean the audience is supposed to understand she’s cold or unemotional. Rather, the audience is supposed to just fill in the blanks and assume Leia was traumatized but there’s just no time to dwell on that during the emotional roller-coaster that is the events of A New Hope.

I know that Vader’s evil Mordor castle is a product of the 1970s, but since it never actually appeared in the OT, I guess I never really liked it. I don’t like things that make Vader closer to being Dracula or something. Vader to me is more of an efficient, dystopian villain, who spends his time in sterile, technological conference rooms and control centers. He has no interest in or time for melodramatic things like evil fortresses surrounded by lava. That sort of chthonic or infernal imagery is way too on the nose and thematically inconsistent with Vader’s story. Vader lives in an efficient, sterile world of starship technology and life support systems.

^ I mean, even after a horse dies from excessive blunt-force trauma, then decomposes into the soil, then fossilizes underneath layers of sedimentary rocks after millions of years, you can still dig it up, bring it to the lab, use rabio-carbon dating to see when it died, and then beat it some more.

NFBisms said:

“Politics” do not [necessarily, or often] work via the same mechanics as a fable’s moral or lesson. These aren’t ‘messages’ at the end of an after school special or Saturday Morning Cartoon episode.

They are manifest in all work, as a reflection of the author’s perspectives, the context in which work is created. It can be as simple as the Empire dissolving the Senate being portrayed as bad, or as thematic as Leia being portrayed counter to conservative femininity. There are things you wouldn’t write, and things you likely would, if you were to write your own story. That is politics.

Lucas can go back outside of his initial intentions and verbalize what precisely might have inspired him. It’s no different than Spielberg realizing how his parents inadvertently inspired how the aliens communicate in Close Encounters. But instead of making The Fabelmans, Lucas makes the prequels.

Having political inspiration inherent to oneself doesn’t even have to interplay with intention. I absolutely believe Lucas intended to just make a fun, swashbuckling space opera. I absolutely believe Lucas was more influenced by Flash Gordon than he was Vietnam. But the context from which the story arose from him is worth talking about, especially for himself to analyze. There are aesthetics and what a story is (its genre form, its intention), and then there are the values a story inherently has.

Right, I’m mostly reacting to the (implied) idea that Lucas began writing Star Wars (either the OT or the Prequels) with some clear, historical/political allegory in mind, in the way that, say, George Orwell did while writing Animal Farm. I think it was more like, Lucas was thinking “I want to write this cool story with space ships and lasers and wizards and fairy-tale endings, and I sure love those old WW2 movies and serial adventures where they fight Nazis. But I also think my cool film-school friends are on to something with this anti-war and revolutionary stuff that’s going on now. I feel like I have something to say about all this, so I’ll sprinkle in some thematic fragments here and there.”

I mean, these perceived allegorical dimensions of Star Wars always seemed way more “tacked on” to me, and much less organically emergent from the story itself, than other comparable sci-fi like Dune or Star Trek.

It’s similar to how Lucas is now strongly associated with Joseph Campbell, even though the “hero’s journey” stuff sort of just naturally seeped into Star Wars via cultural osmosis, rather than Lucas actually reading Campbell and methodically setting out to write a story constrained by specific Campbellian parameters.

Anyway, for a clear example of Star Wars with (mostly obvious and intentional) political messaging done correctly, see Andor.

Superweapon VII said:

I’ve set out to try again at a comprehensive reading of the Bible. I tried once before, reading straight through cover-to-cover, but tapped out before finishing Exodus. This time I’m using a different approach. I’ve started with the New Testament; instead of going by canonical order, I’m following Marcus Borg’s chronological order. Once I’ve finished the NT, I’ll go back to the Hebrew Bible and read it according to the Jewish canon (Torah, Nev’im, and Ketuvim). Then I’ll finish with the deuterocanonical books, including those canon to the Slavonic and Ethopian Orthodox churches. I’ll mostly be reading from my New Oxford Annotated Bible based on the NRSV, but for books like Jubilees and Enoch, I’ll have to look elsewhere.

Eventually, I plan on tackling the Nag Hammadi library (the so-called Gnostic Gospels) and other Judeo-Christian pseudepigrapha.

I read the New Oxford Annotated Bible - it’s definitely the best study Bible out there in my opinion. Also, you probably already know about this, but I’ve found Peter Kirby’s earlychristianwritings.com to be a very convenient resource for all the fun apocryphal and pseudepigraphical stuff.

Yeah, I mean, whenever someone talks about Star Wars being “WW2 in space”, it’s generally accompanied by clips of X-Wings banking like a WW2 fighter plane, or gunners manning a huge laser canon and firing out the window into space like on a WW2 battleship, etc. The “WW2 in space” thing mostly refers to aesthetic/stylistic choices manifested in the groundbreaking visual effects. The story itself is more closely analogous to an asymmetric conflict between insurgents and an oppressive technocratic dictatorship. But perhaps it has more in common with a fantasy where an evil Kingdom is defeated by an unlikely hero than anything rooted in real world politics.

I remember, at least anecdotally, people used to draw parallels with the American revolution, drawing on superficial things like the Imperials all having British accents. (It’s likely the Imperials all have British accents because it was convenient to find British extras at Elstree Studios in the UK where a lot of Star Wars 1977 was filmed.) But I find it very unlikely George Lucas had that in mind. He obviously felt some affinity with the 1960s/1970s counter-culture and the anti-war movement at the time. This probably influenced some things in Star Wars in some minor way, but I think most of it was influenced simply by pulp-sci-fi tropes and Flash Gordon, which often featured evil tyrannical Empires as the bad guys.

Honestly, most of the “political messaging” in Star Wars, (if it even exists), always feels tacked on as an afterthought by Lucas as an attempt to elevate the material. Tying in the Bush Administration and the War on Terror with Palpatine’s story in the Prequels always seemed like a really desperate stretch, not because it wasn’t at least partially a valid analogy necessarily, but because I just don’t really believe George Lucas when he claims to have thought much about these things while writing the script.

I do feel something like a nostalgic reaction when I hear Yub Nub, but I have to admit that Victory Celebration is better. It’s celebratory, but somewhat bittersweet, befitting the victory over the Empire while contemplating the tragedy of Vader (which was probably more poignant when his backstory was less defined). But I still hate the Special Edition CGI montage of planets celebrating.

People often assume that critics of the AoTC love story performances want Anakin to be all suave like Han Solo, and deliver polished, teen-heartthrob romance dialogue. But nobody really wants that. We’re fine with Anakin being slightly awkward. Luke was awkward and whiny and acted stupid as well. That’s fine. What we really want is for Anakin to not come off so much like a creepy asshole. At one point Anakin actually channels Malcolm McDowell from Clockwork Orange as he Kubrick-stares at Padme while grinning, prompting her to say she feels uncomfortable. Anakin can be really clunky and awkward, but he shouldn’t be creepy and grating to the point that I am physically compelled to want to skip all those romance scenes.

The worst thing is that nothing happens in AOTC that really explains why Padme even likes this guy. I guess she feels bad about his mom or something, but you’d think any sympathy she had would dissipate after finding out he committed mass murder.

NFBisms said:

You don’t have to presume I have a viewpoint about the Force that’s any different from yours, it makes it really hard to take any discussion in a new direction. I agree with you. Now take it from there! I appreciate how fair you’ve been to ‘both’ sides of the divide on this while having your own POV, but it often feels like I’m being lumped in with some other nebulous TLJ defender archetype.

But the Sequels show us that Rey kind of just “downloads the Force” after her “mind-meld” with Kylo Ren.

There is absolutely no evidence in the movie itself that this is what happens.

Well, I thought the “Force download” was the official explanation. But regardless, something happened during Kylo’s mind probe that triggered something in Rey, regardless of whether we call it a “Force download” or just a new awareness of latent powers. After Rey escapes using a mind-trick, Kylo says “She’s just beginning to test her powers. The longer it takes to find her, the more dangerous she becomes.” Since Kylo wasn’t afraid of Rey earlier, it’s clear the mind probe somehow prompted Rey to “[begin to] test her powers”, making Kylo fear that Rey will rapidly acquire new Force abilities in a matter of mere minutes or hours, based on the urgency of this dialogue. Whether we call this a “Force download” or just a prompting that made Rey aware of latent abilities, it’s still functionally a spontaneous learning of new skills that causes Kylo to suddenly believe that Rey will soon become very powerful/dangerous.

NFBisms said:
It’s way more of a stretch than what I laid out as the mechanics of TFA, where Rey has “seen” Star Wars™. There is absolutely a physical aspect and real training involved in mastering the Force - I would never ever dispute this - but Rey has basically gotten the workout class via her idolization of the story. Through what’s already the fable-istic nature of the Force’s mechanics, and learning about Luke, she’s basically gotten the number of reps and sets of exercises she should do, alongside the philosophy quotes that would help her keep routine. Not to mention she’s an athletic scavenger jumping massive gaps and climbing ropes among dangerous wreckage, fending for herself to begin with. Farmboy Luke is raised by a loving family (attachments), doing chores, dusting crops, flying for leisure. He’s apolitical - ambitious to leave but not for meaning or purpose - not like Rey who already looks up to heroes.

Well, the Sequels definitely have a “meta”-dimension baked into them, with the main characters having border-line fourth-wall breaking knowledge about our beloved OT heroes. This border-line fourth wall breaking is one of the only consistent motifs across all 3 Sequel films. In TFA, Rey idolizes the OT heroes. In TLJ, Luke asks (the audience) if he’s really expected to whip out his laser sword and be a hero, and Rey for some reason expects her parents to be famous people. And of course, in Rise of Skywalker, Chewie finally gets a medal, and Yogurt teaches Lone Starr to use the Schwartz. OMG I love Star Warz so hard!!! 🙄

Anyway, I never interpreted the meta-story angle as having explanatory power with regard to Rey’s spontaneous Force abilities. I always assumed the meta-stuff was just J.J. Abrams failing to control himself while writing the script as a Star Wars fan. Regardless, I’m not sure why merely idolizing these legendary characters through cultural osmosis would be sufficient to actually learn how to be a Jedi, any more than idolizing Bruce Lee and watching all his movies would be sufficient to become even a mediocre martial artist. But maybe J.J. Abrams thinks it should be sufficient.

My take is that the writers of Force Awakens basically wrote themselves into a corner. Rey meets Han Solo (not Luke), who takes on the role of the “wise mentor”. Han is a natural match for Rey’s technical savvy and junkyard knowledge, but of course the decision to go with Han leaves Rey with nobody to teach her about the Force. But this is a Star Wars movie and the main character has to learn to use the Force before the movie ends. Due to other story-telling decisions, Luke is unavailable until the very last scene. So how will Rey learn to use the Force? I imagine that J.J. Abrams and friends brainstormed quite a bit over this issue - maybe that’s what Maz Kanata was originally created for. But at some point Abrams gave up and decided to just smother his script in more “vague mystery sauce” like he always does. Perhaps Rey’s spontaneous “awakening” was originally supposed to suggest a deeper mystery about Rey’s origins - a mystery that was immediately abandoned once Rian Johnson took over. Who knows? Regardless, Kylo’s mind probe somehow causes Rey to spontaneously become capable of Jedi mind tricks and other Force powers - things she was apparently not capable of doing before the mind probe.

Also, while this is neither here nor there, I find it interesting that Rey’s climactic action scene in The Force Awakens involves a lightsaber battle rather than a space battle. Generally in the first film of a Star Wars trilogy the main character isn’t yet experienced enough for lightsaber combat, but has enough natural piloting talent to help blow up an enemy space station. Rey’s piloting skills are well established, but she never gets to use them in a climactic space battle. This is a strange writing decision, necessitating the fast-tracking of Rey’s Force abilities so she can plausibly stand a chance against Kylo in a climactic lightsaber duel. This wouldn’t be necessary if Abrams allowed Rey to follow in the footsteps of Luke and Anakin, making her mark as a fighter-pilot during the ending battle. I mean, TFA is already an overly-derivative ANH clone, yet when the story actually calls for some poetic symmetry, Abrams suddenly goes off in another direction. Perhaps he thought that Rey blowing up Starkiller Base would just cross the line, becoming way too much of an obvious ANH clone. I mean even J.J. Abrams has limits. Thus, he ended up further writing himself into more corners.

NFBisms said:
This take on the Force is rejected by the movie. It’s a [popular] expectation (gray Jedi, anyone?), in the same vein as EU Luke, that is disposed of to reinforce the Original Trilogy. This where it gets so messy in reception, because Rian’s engagement with Star Wars, like everyone’s, is personal and varied and doesn’t fit into a box.

I agree there’s a lot of messiness, but I’m not sure the “light/dark balance” idea is necessarily disposed of entirely. After Kylo kills Snoke, Rey rejects Kylo’s offer and then she resets back to factory default “good Jedi” settings at the end. But this doesn’t necessarily dispose of the general idea that, on a cosmic level, the Force automatically generates equally matched light-side/dark-side Force users, as Snoke claims, to maintain some kind of cosmic balance. The “light/dark balance” thing is also suggested when Luke says “Balance… powerful light, powerful darkness” when referring to the vision cave under the island. Of course, this never amounts to anything more than a half-baked throw-away idea that is of course dropped in the next movie.

NFBisms said:
He doesn’t do an idealized, super Luke because like me he saw that Luke literally didn’t beat the Emperor with his powers, he bet on his dad and his friends. The type of guy who literally did take himself out of a picture so that he wouldn’t endanger the mission on Endor. That’s the interpretation. You don’t have to agree with it or how it was done, but it emphasizes Luke for who he was, not as a trained Jedi, but a son. A farmboy in over his head, just a guy, like you or me. That’s why he resonated [to Rian, to me].

The idea that Luke has to contend with the somewhat fourth-wall breaking pressure of being “THE legendary Luke Skywalker™”, feeling some degree of impostor syndrome, is admittedly interesting to some extent. But the level of crippling insecurity and nihilism Luke exhibits is probably something he should have struggled with as a younger, less experienced person. After 35 years, I was kind of hoping to see Luke take on more of a classic “wise mentor” role, giving Mark Hamill free reign to riff on the classic “mystical martial arts master” archetype, loosely modeled after Ben Kenobi in Episode 4. But Luke should also be rattled by the recent disaster with Kylo, struggling to regain confidence in his ability as a mentor/teacher. (Some people would argue that’s exactly what we got with TLJ. But I was hoping to have all that stuff without Luke also being a depressed asshole who doesn’t give a shit that a horde of fascist maniacs is rapidly conquering the Galaxy while Luke fucks around with a fishing pole.)

NFBisms said:
That doesn’t mean he was a “lie”, and it all has so so very little to do with the prequels, or the Jedi as an institution or even an idea. This is a trilogy bereft of any of that kind of worldbuilding or connection - we all know it - but all of a sudden that has valence in this particular critique?

Well, that’s the crazy thing. The Sequels have so little world-building and an almost complete lack of any references to the Prequels. So in TLJ when Luke all of a sudden blurts out the words “Darth Sidious”, you almost get whiplash while thinking: “wait… Rian Johnson actually knows about that??” I mean, yeah the world-building in the Sequels is garbage, but in TLJ Luke pretty much explicitly links his newfound rejection of the Jedi Order directly to historical institutional failures, specifically mentioning Palpatine’s coup in Revenge of the Sith.

NFBisms said:
No, it’s a personal character arc: Luke embracing his flaws and the triumph he is capable of even with them. It’s more analogous to impostor syndrome than it is about history.

I agree that’s probably the intention. I think we both can agree the implementation is just all over the place thematically.