DominicCobb

yotsuya said:

DominicCobb said:

I hope someday Lucas’s treatments do come out, I’d be curious. But knowing his past writing processes (on the OT and PT), it’s more likely than not that his treatments were pretty short and vague. More importantly, even if Lucas himself had made the films he would have certainly changed the story of his treatments significantly over the course of time. So the idea that they should have chained themselves to those treatments just because they had Lucas’s name on them is monumentally silly.

More importantly, the idea that evil will always return is “nihilistic” is ridiculous. It’s just factually true. The idea that evil can be defeated once and for all is pretty naive. It works for a fairy tale yes, but Star Wars has been becoming less and less a fairy tale with each new entry. The idea that evil will always return is sophisticated and nuanced (perhaps too much so for some viewers, which is why they ditched it in TROS), and the message that there will always be good to face that evil is anything but nihilistic. It’s the very heart of what Star Wars is - never ending hope in the face of potential despair.

Exactly. We do know that they kept some of what Lucas had come up with. They also revisited a lot of his abandoned ideas for earlier films. I would love to see his treatments, but if you read some of his other treatments, the final films came out much different. And in history and myth, evil is something always lurking and endangering the good we create. The idea that Star Wars should somehow deviate from that and must keep what the heroes of the OT worked so hard to win is indeed silly. Each generation has their own fight and some generations lose that fight (the PT).

I don’t agree with everything your saying but it is important to remember Flash Gordon. Star Wars, like old space opera serials, is supposed to be a never ending saga, where we know no matter what the heroes will always be there to save the dar. If the evil can be defeated for forever, that’s it’s not really never ending is it?

This gets back to the fact that I fully believe that many people just fundamentally did not want to see movies made set after ROTJ, whether they say so or not. Simply put, to make a story set after ROTJ, you needed to undo that ‘happily ever after’ victory. What made TFA and TLJ so great is that they didn’t just wantonly undo it, they gave a thematic reason for doing so that justified their addition to the story. TROS… not so much.

MalàStrana said:

the Original Hexalogy.

Lol that’s incredible. I now have read everything on this forum 😄

I hope someday Lucas’s treatments do come out, I’d be curious. But knowing his past writing processes (on the OT and PT), it’s more likely than not that his treatments were pretty short and vague. More importantly, even if Lucas himself had made the films he would have certainly changed the story of his treatments significantly over the course of time. So the idea that they should have chained themselves to those treatments just because they had Lucas’s name on them is monumentally silly.

More importantly, the idea that evil will always return is “nihilistic” is ridiculous. It’s just factually true. The idea that evil can be defeated once and for all is pretty naive. It works for a fairy tale yes, but Star Wars has been becoming less and less a fairy tale with each new entry. The idea that evil will always return is sophisticated and nuanced (perhaps too much so for some viewers, which is why they ditched it in TROS), and the message that there will always be good to face that evil is anything but nihilistic. It’s the very heart of what Star Wars is - never ending hope in the face of potential despair.

(Discussing piracy is against the rules)

If you’re clever about it, the gaps shouldn’t be too drastic. We’ll see when the film comes out but I’m pretty confident my plan should work (and the changes would feel rather minimal).

But regardless, we’re sort of off topic.

I don’t believe fandom is an absolute bad but there is some inherent toxicity to it, in regards to the possessive nature it engenders in fans. That’s not healthy and the way the internet works really just serves to heighten the hyperbolic and extreme emotions and unhealthy tendencies. I don’t really know if there’s a solution or anything but it’s a complicated issue.

RogueLeader said:

Honestly I think the editor is bullshitting around the answer. The way she answered it just seemed rather weird. Sure, that could’ve been intended to be the last shot when they filmed it, but was who was in the shot always the same?

Who knows, but either way I don’t like the implication that a smart editing technique makes something “slapped together.”

I don’t think John Boyega and Mark Hamill have ever realized how their negative comments can be lightning rods for online bullying. They can say tons of complimentary things and people will ignore them, but as soon as they say anything negative it becomes fuel for online attacks.

Yep. And John is free to his opinions, but some of the things he’s said are a little yikes.

NeverarGreat said:

The map to Luke is discovered on Jakku by an old friend of Luke’s, and the first person BB-8 carrying the map runs into is the granddaughter of Palpatine, who is in speeder distance of the Millennium Falcon and happens to use this to escape the planet and they happen to be picked up within five minutes by Han Solo and brought to a place that has Luke’s old lightsaber in the basement. All of these things, save the connection between Han and the Falcon, are complete coincidences.

Another reason why Rey Nobody would’ve made a lot more sense!

Exactly!

ray_afraid said:

Z6PO said:

It primarily has to make sense to the people that watch the movie. If it doesn’t look like the burnt guy we saw earlier on, if we can’t recognize him, the movie makers have failed at story telling.

But, since it’s easy to recognize him as the man we just met, this is no problem.
…right?

Is it? I think especially once you remove the eyebrows he’s just about completely unrecognizable.

FreezingTNT2 said:

DominicCobb said:

FreezingTNT2 said:

Darth Lucas said:

Octorox said:

Darth Lucas said:

Add other force ghosts to the Luke/Leia shot like Anakin and Obi Wan.

With the exception of Ben, I don’t really get this suggestion. Anakin, Yoda and Obi-Wan have no meaning or significance to Rey. They did to Luke, but we already got that scene at the end of Return of the Jedi.

What I think a lot of fans don’t want to accept (and to be honest, I don’t think Abrams and Terrio wanted to accept this either) is that the OT characters are not the main characters of these new movies. The protagonists are the new characters: Rey, Ben, Finn, Poe, and Rose. Any OT or PT characters should be there to support their character development, not to steal the spotlight.

Obi Wan has significance to Rey. Anakin has significance to Ben Solo, who would be there in this version. The thought of ending the “Skywalker Saga” without at least Anakin having some importance seems off to me.

Exactly. Everything, and I mean everything, hinges around this character and how he affected the entire galaxy.

“You must unlearn what you have learned.” It wasn’t the story of Anakin until the prequels reframed the saga. The ST has simply reframed the saga again.

I’m referring to the events within this saga, not the franchise itself.

Well if we’re talking about within the story itself and not the franchise itself, Anakin died what ten years before Rey was even born? Why would him showing up to wave at Rey be relevant to her story?

FreezingTNT2 said:

Darth Lucas said:

Octorox said:

Darth Lucas said:

Add other force ghosts to the Luke/Leia shot like Anakin and Obi Wan.

With the exception of Ben, I don’t really get this suggestion. Anakin, Yoda and Obi-Wan have no meaning or significance to Rey. They did to Luke, but we already got that scene at the end of Return of the Jedi.

What I think a lot of fans don’t want to accept (and to be honest, I don’t think Abrams and Terrio wanted to accept this either) is that the OT characters are not the main characters of these new movies. The protagonists are the new characters: Rey, Ben, Finn, Poe, and Rose. Any OT or PT characters should be there to support their character development, not to steal the spotlight.

Obi Wan has significance to Rey. Anakin has significance to Ben Solo, who would be there in this version. The thought of ending the “Skywalker Saga” without at least Anakin having some importance seems off to me.

Exactly. Everything, and I mean everything, hinges around this character and how he affected the entire galaxy.

“You must unlearn what you have learned.” It wasn’t the story of Anakin until the prequels reframed the saga. The ST has simply reframed the saga again.

Dr. Krogshöj said:

I watched TROS again today and I am confident Rey Palpatine cannot be taken out convincingly. Any thought of some foreshadowing of her origin during hee Takodana force vision?

I’m quite certain it can.

Mocata said:

Apparently the final shot is slapped together from an earlier scene

https://twitter.com/im_organa/status/1211461346040172545

First of all, “slapped together” makes it sound like doing so would be lazy and/or that the final effect is unconvincing, which is silly, and second, it wasn’t: https://comicbook.com/starwars/2019/12/31/star-wars-the-rise-of-skywalker-final-shot-rey-desert-tatooine-pasaana/

Octorox said:

I don’t know, I understand your point, but to me that’s the kind of thinking that led to this movie being overstuffed with fanservice and callbacks in the first place. I LOVE Obi-Wan, he might be my favorite Star Wars character, but I recognize that his part in the story is done.

Completely agree. We hear them while Rey’s getting up, I think that’s enough. Seeing them at the end would just be silly.

dgraham414 said:

The force Skype lightsaber fight

Broom Kid said:

Everything Threepio
Everything Babu Frik
The soundtrack, especially the version of the main title that plays when Lando arrives to the final battle
The little shrug Ben gives when he pulls the saber from behind his back

JawsTDS said:

The moment between Ben and Han was absolutely perfect.

Definitely agree with these.

RogueLeader said:

I think the question regarding the effectiveness of the Leia scenes won’t really be answered for another 10-15 years, where a whole new generation who weren’t even around when Carrie was alive can experience these movies without the knowledge of Carrie’s passing during the making of this new trilogy. We’re lifelong fans who consume whatever Star Wars news we come across. How will it be for a first time viewer, or a brand new fan?

Personally I just think the main reason for the critique is it’s an easy thing to latch on to, and you can extrapolate all sorts of bad storytelling philosophies that come from the decision, whether the decision itself has anything to do with the bad storytelling of the film. I think the truth of the matter is more nuanced. Some scenes work, some don’t. I think there’s a world where the film as a whole is better, and people give the Leia moments a pass. It’s a little telling that no one complained about the idea before they saw the film.

At the end of the day, I always come back to this - her role in the film is extremely minimal, and has nearly no effect on the plot or any of the film’s worst decisions.

joefavs said:

Good article about the issues with the creative process that got us here.

“Conspiracy theories abound regarding this film, but the truth is probably dumber and more well-meaning than angry fans love to hate to believe.”

https://birthmoviesdeath.com/2019/12/31/decoding-the-rise-of-skywalkers-difficult-creative-process

It’s a good article that tries to look at what went wrong rationally, and I agree with many of the conclusions. But I think I probably fundamentally disagree with the idea that reverse engineering a story will always end in disaster. Maybe here it did, but when it comes to endings, I think it can be very important to work backwards. Some of the things they did - like mapping out unresolved questions from the previous films - you can easily see scenarios in which these things end up working.

Ultimately I think the basic fact of the matter is that they started from a place where they were trying to accomplish too much within one movie and they didn’t have enough time to whittle it down to a more manageable length. I fully believe most of the post production changes were things that were done to simplify the narrative (that ironically might have complicated it in other ways).

I don’t think it’s a secret that I found TROS to largely be a disappointment, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t things I liked about it. Because far too often this site becomes a hive of negativity, let’s try to be positive?

I’ll start. Something I love are the visuals. I think the film looks just great. I never had a problem with how TFA looked, but I wouldn’t try to argue it was anything but the least visually interesting of the Disney films. After TLJ specifically, I think Abrams and Mindel felt they needed to step their game up. And I feel like they truly did, and made one of the most visually interesting films of the saga in many regards.

What are some things you guys love?

nl0428 said:

DominicCobb said:

nl0428 said:

I have both a suggestion to make and a point about the deleted scenes come the Blu-ray release.

My suggestion is similar to your change of moving the Luke and Yoda scene to a different place in your edit of The Last Jedi. How about moving the scene between Ben and Han to a different place as well? Maybe after Rey leaves Ahch-To in Luke’s X-Wing? Just like how Luke was offscreen for a long period of time, the same could be said about Ben here.

I think it might strain believability that he’d just stay standing on that precarious piece of the Death Star for so long.

True, but then again, why was Luke standing at the edge of a cliff in The Force Awakens for a while before Rey found him?

The difference is with Luke it’s ambiguous what he was up to. With Kylo we saw the preceding scene that put him there.

Hal 9000 said:

I can’t remember, but does it cut from him tossing his saber to Rey tossing kindling onto the TIE?

I believe there are a couple of other scenes between them.

I won’t be sure until sometime later, but I think that scene is pretty well tethered to the loss of Leia.

I agree.

nl0428 said:

I have both a suggestion to make and a point about the deleted scenes come the Blu-ray release.

My suggestion is similar to your change of moving the Luke and Yoda scene to a different place in your edit of The Last Jedi. How about moving the scene between Ben and Han to a different place as well? Maybe after Rey leaves Ahch-To in Luke’s X-Wing? Just like how Luke was offscreen for a long period of time, the same could be said about Ben here.

I think it might strain believability that he’d just stay standing on that precarious piece of the Death Star for so long.

Yes, I tend to think that “Rey shouldn’t love abusive man” is a sort of one dimensional way of viewing their relationship.

Well after letting TROS settle, I think this is ultimately how I feel -

Near Perfect
Star Wars
The Empire Strikes Back

Excellent
The Last Jedi

Great
The Force Awakens

Good
Return of the Jedi
Solo

Okay
The Rise of Skywalker
Revenge of the Sith
Rogue One

Not Great
The Phantom Menace

Not Good
Attack of the Clones
The Clone Wars

Bad
Caravan of Courage
The Battle for Endor

Worst Thing I Have Ever Attempted to Watch
Holiday Special

RogueLeader said:

FreezingTNT2 said:

Do you think Rey’s yellow lightsaber should be removed altogether from the final scene in this franchise? She has truly brought balance to the Force, Darth Sidious and his followers have been destroyed once and for all, the Skywalker bloodline is now extinct (no, Rey doesn’t count as a biological Skywalker), and tyranny has come to an end, so the Jedi have already served their purpose and now no longer have a reason to exist.

I think this is a fair question. If this is suppose to be an ultimate victory, then maybe. If you’re stressing that fascism and tyranny can rise when you least expect it and do-gooders have to remain vigilant, then maybe not.

For me, I hate the idea of an ‘ultimate victory.’ I’d like to hope there’s a deleted scene or something that stresses it isn’t that, otherwise I’m still not sure what to do to convey that idea. I saw a clip with JJ before the movie came out where he said something like the fight against the dark side is a constant struggle, so I was really disappointed with how the film concluded. But the fact that he feels that way does give me some semblance of hope that there’ll be something along those lines in deleted material.

Regarding Ben and Rey’s kiss, I think some people didn’t like it because they felt it wasn’t set up. While I think it was (“I offered you my hand once”), I don’t think it was set up as explicitly as Han/Leia or Anakin/Padmé. Both pairs talk about their feelings explicitly, whereas the Ben/Rey romance could be written off as a special connection. According to leaks, in the deleted scene of Kylo Ren’s confrontation with the Oracle, the Oracle would’ve mentioned his feelings for Rey. Maybe Kylo could be given new dialogue that makes those feelings clearer. I’ll have to go through Driver’s filmography and see what kind of dialogue we have to work with.

I’m of the opinion that the romance was obvious, but they definitely wanted it to be a lingering question until the big kiss. I’d definitely prefer an establishment of the fact earlier, if there is a deleted scene that does that like you say.

I’d definitely love to see Ben as a ghost at the end. I’ve thought about it but I can’t really think of any satisfying reason he shouldn’t be there.

As for the ticking clock, I’ve seen the film three times and I guess I’ve missed the “16 hour” mention each time. I trust you guys it’s there, but I’d say trust me it can be removed without losing anything.

I had my third viewing a few days ago, and I’ve definitely made peace with it too. It’s not a bad film, but it’s got some really disappointing missed opportunities, even within the framework they chose.

To that end, what’s mostly been nagging me since my last viewing are some extremely easy minor things they could have changed that would have made the film better What mostly bothered me initially was Rey, but I’m real frustrated with the other characters as well…

• Want to focus on the trio for the main adventure? Fine. Want Rose to anchor the Leia scenes? Fine. But you can still do this and have some semblance of respect for the character. Put her on the Falcon in the opening mission, and have her fixing it instead of random silly alien. Give her more to do in the final battle. Put her on one of the damn horses! Have her be the one that says Finn had a good teacher. Keep some continuity, dammit.
• Along those lines, don’t forget ‘save what you love’! Finn learned an important lesson from Rose in TLJ. Have him convince Jannah and co. to join the fight rather than stay alone on the moon. At the end, instead of just blowing up the Star Destroyer bridge, have Finn and Jannah’s crew storm the bridge and initiate self destruct on the Destroyer. But instead of letting everyone die, they convince as many stormtroopers as they can to put down their weapons and escape.
• The film sets up an interesting conflict, where the trio doesn’t really listen to each other and tell each other things, and ultimately this causes problems. Emphasize that Poe isn’t just cocky like usual, he’s bossy. He’s having a hard time with the ‘leader’ position, and realizes that the solution is to do it together (a payoff in the film without the proper set up). Have Finn explain to Poe what he was going to tell Rey - because he realizes the Force affects everyone, not just people like him, Rey, and Leia. At the end, when Finn needs to be saved, have Poe willingly delegate that job to Lando, rather than being told the Falcon is faster. He’s a leader now, he should be over trying to be the hero! We should actually see him lead!
• To that end, the space battle is forgettable. An easy solution is to add just one show-stopping set piece like the superstructure scene from Jedi - my suggestion, have the Falcon coming to save Finn be a daring task where they have to dodge the falling destroyers.
• Okay, one thing about Rey. The power to heal with the force should be something that Rey wasn’t taught, she just intuitively knows it. We find out this is the power of the force dyad, the power to heal, to save, to cheat death. This is why Palpatine is restored by them. At the end, Ben doesn’t die, and instead he departs to go around the galaxy ‘healing’ the wounds he helped to create, so to speak.

It’s stuff like this that make me really wish they had more time to make the film and iron out all the wrinkles.

I don’t know if it’s necessarily safe to assume it was originally better, but it’s certainly possible. I think the Reylos are naturally clinging on to this as evidence Ben wasn’t supposed to die, but I’m not sure it proves that. Like RL what I read was originally the ending featured the whole gang.

While I love the gag of R2 putting 3PO’s memory back despite his protests, I’d love to use that^ idea if someone can figure it out.

FreezingTNT2 said:

DominicCobb said:

Hal 9000 said:

DominicCobb said:

FreezingTNT2 said:

@Hal 9000 Can you remove the voice-overs of Mace Windu and Aayla Secura speaking when Rey fights Darth Sidious? It contradicts previously established lore in the pre-sequel trilogy canon, in which only Obi-Wan, Yoda, Qui-Gon, and Anakin knew how to become Force ghosts.

Here’s a question, how did Anakin know how to become a Force ghost anyway?

Well, this is obviously only a question once the prequels are factored in, as in 1983 one assumed that’s just what Jedi all do. I think the best answer would be that Obi-Wan and Yoda helped him.

Right. If we only consider the OT, then there’s no problem hearing voices of Jedi like Mace Windu. But if we do consider the PT, we are forced to assume that Anakin learned after death how to become a force ghost. Which means someone like Windu could too.

When you die in Star Wars without learning how to become a Force ghost, you irreversably cease to exist. As Hal pointed out, Obi-Wan and Yoda might’ve helped Anakin, except (from what I view) maybe before his death.

Well if you’re gonna do headcanon why not do a headcanon that explains TROS as well. It’s all made up reasoning anyway.