MikeWW

ChainsawAsh said:

I’ve long held the belief that Lucas’ real passion for filmmaking was in editing. Just look at how excited he is in the TPM doc about how digital tools let him blend together a performance by actor A from one take and a performance by actor B from another take in the same shot.

Lucas is a great big-picture idea guy, an average writer and director, and a fantastic editor. I also think he would have personally edited every Star Wars movie if his duties as producer and director didn’t make that pretty much impossible.

Him hiring Burtt for the position of editor on the PT certainly lends credence to that idea, since Burtt to my knowledge was not exactly known for his (non-sound) editing skill at that time.
It seems to me that Lucas picked an in-house buddy for the position precisely so he’d be able to backseat drive like crazy.

.

Anchorhead said:

RogueLeader said:

And speaking of of Lucas’ original vision for Lucasfilm and Skywalker Ranch, I don’t know if it will ever truly live up to his original vision…

His talk of what he was going to do as an independent film maker wAs just that - talk. He belched out that crap for thirty years.

Independent crap.

Creox said:

SilverWook said:

I thought it was documented that a British editor did the first rough cut?

In any case, the Oscars Marcia Lucas, Richard Chew, and Paul Hirsch received for editing Star Wars speaks for itself.

This.

All I have to do is watch the prequels to see what a GL film looks like when he has no one around to reign him in or say “no” when needed.

Read the posts above you.

Also there a lot of good editing moments in the PT.
For example, the 123 editing of-

“Who could have done this” -cut to- Anakin slaughtering the separatists -cut to- Palpatine monologuing about the first Galactic Empire.

DominicCobb said:

MikeWW said:

SilverWook said:

I thought it was documented that a British editor did the first rough cut?

In any case, the Oscars Marcia Lucas, Richard Chew, and Paul Hirsch received for editing Star Wars speaks for itself.

The way I know the story is that a British editor (not sure how he became involved) did a cut without Lucas really watching (I think he was busy), Lucas sees it and hates it, scraps it and starts over with new picks, who each take a chunk of the movie under his supervision and in collaboration with him.

Yes, that’s correct.

If Star Wars was “saved in editing,” which I don’t think it’s fair to say it was, then it was saved in editing by, primarily, Lucas himself.

Lucas is obviously a man of many talents and from the start of his career always seemed more interested in visuals, sounds, and editing, rather than actors. And it’s not surprising to me that he stopped directing after the health problems he faced on Star Wars, though I don’t know why he never did get back around to making that experimental stuff. Who knows, probably the becoming a business man and parent just took priority.

Part of me thinks he HAS made them. He made a comment once about only showing them to his friends.
I wouldn’t be surprised if he has a “fuck the haters” attitude after all the prequel reactions.

SilverWook said:

I thought it was documented that a British editor did the first rough cut?

In any case, the Oscars Marcia Lucas, Richard Chew, and Paul Hirsch received for editing Star Wars speaks for itself.

The way I know the story is that a British editor (not sure how he became involved) did a cut without Lucas really watching (I think he was busy), Lucas sees it and hates it, scraps it and starts over with new picks, who each take a chunk of the movie under his supervision and in collaboration with him.
And as I noted above, De Palma vouches for Lucas’ editing skills.

Mocata said:

Yeah and when I mean managed I mean y’know one all time classic saved in editing etc. rather than a whole career sparkling with gems like Scorsese, Coppola and De Palma. People with passion who thrive on rather than shrink away from the job. But sure maybe those alleged personal projects he’s been speaking about for the last decade will appear and surprise us all…

“Saved in editing” carries so many false implications.
Lucas himself was a skilled editor to the point where George was asked by De Palma to edit all his student films.

Mocata said:

Taking the director’s chair is a high pressure role. His contemporaries all managed it.

I mean, he “managed” to be the sole director of an all time classic, so hey.

Mocata said:
As for George’s dream… I’d believe if it I saw any proof he liked to actually direct movies.

I’m pretty sure he just dislikes pressure, because he talks wistfully about his student films.

The OT covers look particularly bad. Yikes.

DrDre said:

MikeWW said:

DrDre said:

MikeWW said:

Mocata said:

George didn’t seem to care about how bumpy things looked, just look at the Phantom Menace features. Now it’s all fluff.

Funny thing about that is that everyone pretends that he was watching something close to final when he made the “too far in a few places” comment.

We know he did, because Ben Burt gives us a sequence of events, that closely follows the final movie, pointing out the tonal issues to Lucas, and Lucas himself admits there’s little he can do about it at that stage, because of the way the movie has been constructed.

You assume way too much though. You have no idea what Lucas did or didn’t do to “diminish the effects of it”, because they don’t show the footage.

But speaking of Ben Burtt and the TPM finale, in the commentary track when Obi Wan kills Darth Maul, Burtt talks about how they were fine tuning the editing of the climax up until basically the minute they shipped the movie out, which would have been much later than the time of the “too far in a few places” screening.

You don’t know that that cut wasn’t notably worse than what Lucas ended up with.

You don’t know the final cut was notably better, so I’m not the only one making assumptions, however, given Lucas’ own admission that he couldn’t do much to improve it, other than diminish the effects of it, it seems logical to conclude the final version isn’t too far off the one they were viewing, and the fact that they were fine tuning the editing of the climax until the movie shipped out, indicates they weren’t satisfied with the climax up till the end. The issues discussed are related to Lucas’ choice to go for a four act structure, which results in the audience being jerked around from scene to scene. The tonal differences between the scenes with Jar Jar comedic antics in one scene, and Qui-Gon Jinn’s emotional death scene in another, and other scenes surrounding them, are very much intact in the final film, and consistent with the criticisms Ben Burt leveled at cut they screened internally.

Look it’s obvious you really like the prequels, and that’s fine. I enjoy them, but also feel they are flawed on many levels. It seems you reject the “gone too far in some places” comment, because you don’t want it to be applicable to the final cut, not because there is much circumstantial evidence the final cut is markedly different, while I think if you look at it objectively (not a point of view biased by love or hate for the film), it’s logical to conclude Lucas was and is aware of some of the flaws in the film, and tried to improve it where he could, but was also aware, that at that stage in the production, they could only dull the symptoms somewhat, but not remove the cause, the four act structure, and the tonal issues that come with it.

In any case this thread is supposed to be about the 4K restorations of the OT, not about the prequels, so this will be the last I will say on the subject.

And the only other thing I’ll say is that, for example, Peter Jackson says the exact same thing about tinkering with LotR until the second it has to be shipped out.
You’re taking aneutral thing and wrenching it into evidence.

Also, see my post directly above this one.
I’d say that he really only went too far in 1 place in the final cut, not a few places.

pleasehello said:

MikeWW said:

You don’t know that that cut wasn’t notably worse than what Lucas ended up with.

I don’t see how it could’ve been much worse.

Use your imagination and it’s very easy.
For instance, the only awkward transition IMO is Qui Gon’s death into “My Give Up” with Jar Jar.
But imagine if the transition didn’t have Williams’ music and that sweeping shot of the battlefield before we see Jar Jar.

DrDre said:

MikeWW said:

Mocata said:

George didn’t seem to care about how bumpy things looked, just look at the Phantom Menace features. Now it’s all fluff.

Funny thing about that is that everyone pretends that he was watching something close to final when he made the “too far in a few places” comment.

We know he did, because Ben Burt gives us a sequence of events, that closely follows the final movie, pointing out the tonal issues to Lucas, and Lucas himself admits there’s little he can do about it at that stage, because of the way the movie has been constructed.

You assume way too much though. You have no idea what Lucas did or didn’t do to “diminish the effects of it”, because they don’t show the footage.

But speaking of Ben Burtt and the TPM finale, in the commentary track when Obi Wan kills Darth Maul, Burtt talks about how they were fine tuning the editing of the climax up until basically the minute they shipped the movie out, which would have been much later than the time of the “too far in a few places” screening.

You don’t know that that cut wasn’t notably worse than what Lucas ended up with.

I would get a hoot out of seeing film grain on a digital image.

Mocata said:

George didn’t seem to care about how bumpy things looked, just look at the Phantom Menace features. Now it’s all fluff.

Funny thing about that is that everyone pretends that he was watching something close to final when he made the “too far in a few places” comment.

Very interesting.

schorman13 said:

nightstalkerpoet said:

I’d go:
1080p x264 adding --vbv-maxrate 18000 --vbv-bufsize 15000 --keyint 48 to your command line

Include the 5.1 track and the commentary track, with your hard subs burnt in.

This should give you a fairly high quality general purpose release.

I’m using Cinema Craft HDE this time for the main version. I’m sure I could use x264 for a lower bitrate version.

MikeWW said:

That scene is fine IMO?
Side note, it’s like the only scene that looks better on the BD version due to the close up moving shots of them sitting having lots of artifacting on the grass in Schorman’s version.

I wonder if some kind of fusion of the two could be done. Keep the higher bitrate of the BD, but somehow give it the color grading of the HDTV version.

And this is just fantasizing really, but could, through some kind of partial transparency effect, the extra digital noise and detail of the HDTV be overlaid on the hypothetical color corrected BD footage?

Unfortunately, you can’t really combine the Blu Ray and HDTV versions of Attack of the Clones perfectly. The Blu Ray has just been tweaked too much. You can get a sort of mediocre result using this code in avisynth:

BluRay.Merge(BluRay.MergeChroma(HDTV.Merge(BluRay.Invert()))).Tweak(sat=2.5,coring=false)

Rant time…
The biggest sin of the blu ray is the DNR IMO.
AotC unfiltered actually looks fairly cinematic, but the BD looks like a bad cartoon.
The opening shot of Mace in the Chancellors office is night and day.

Here’s to hoping the 4K version is fixed…

That scene is fine IMO?
Side note, it’s like the only scene that looks better on the BD version due to the close up moving shots of them sitting having lots of artifacting on the grass in Schorman’s version.

I wonder if some kind of fusion of the two could be done. Keep the higher bitrate of the BD, but somehow give it the color grading of the HDTV version.

And this is just fantasizing really, but could, through some kind of partial transparency effect, the extra digital noise and detail of the HDTV be overlaid on the hypothetical color corrected BD footage?

RogueLeader said:

MikeWW said:

It’s a hair away from plain old factual though.

Do you not feel like it is a little arrogant to think your opinion is objectively fact?

Maybe, but I’ve never heard a compelling counterargument for this issue.

yotsuya said:

MikeWW said:

yotsuya said:

Shopping Maul said:

NeverarGreat said:

DrDre said:

yotsuya said:

DrDre said:

SilverWook said:

MikeWW said:

SilverWook said:

A puppet being operated by the real villain?

But why have a dime store Palpatine if the plan all along was to use the real thing?

Because that’s how Palpatine operates. Masks, deceptions and lies. Snoke was just a more sophisticated version of wearing a hood and keeping his face in a strategically placed shadow.

That’s a nice in-universe explanation, but in reality it’s almost certain, that JJ intended for Snoke to be the big bad, and when RJ dispatched him, they had to bring back Palpatine in some form to up the ante. Had it been their intention to bring back Palpatine, they would logically have introduced him as the puppet master in a cameo at the end of TLJ. Additionally RJ clearly made TLJ with the intention to break free from what came before, whilst TROS seems to do the opposite promising a whole host of connections to the past.

I have to disagree with your interpretation of TLJ. That is the message that hermit Luke and Kylo Ren share. Both are proved wrong by the rest of the movie’s plot. The end of the movie is about embracing exactly what Luke said they didn’t need before Rey and Yoda brought him back to himself. And Kylo is trying desperately to be bad and be consumed by the dark side and yet he can’t seem to manage it. He’s trying to convince himself that he needs to destroy the past so he can be bad enough. But that is not RJ’s message in TLJ. Luke executes the very single handed battle with his lasersword against incredible odds and creates a legend, reminding Kylo and us that he will not be the last Jedi - meaning he is embracing the past and letting it carry forward. Quite the opposite of breaking free from what came before. And there is no hint that JJ is going to undo anything.

I disagree. TLJ spends most of its time deconstructing the mythology of Star Wars. It then reconstructs it in some form, but not by embracing the past. Luke’s last stand is not a reaffirmation of the reality of his legend in-universe, it is a ruse, which tells the audience, that legends and myths aren’t real, but they can serve a purpose when others choose to believe in them. This is in stark contrast to the OT, where the legend of Luke Skywalker is real in-universe. The Luke of the OT is the guy who really faces down the bad guys with his laser sword, whereas the Luke at the end of TLJ is an illusionist of sorts, intent on perpetuating a legend in-universe, while the viewer has been made aware it is all just smoke and mirrors.

This brings up the question of what Luke’s legend actually was, in universe, after the events of ROTJ.

Is Luke a Jedi and hero who can singlehandedly dispatch an AT-AT with a lightsaber and who blew up the Death Star, who defeated not only Vader but the Emperor in a single stroke? If so, I can see Luke wanting to distance himself from this story since it is rather deceptive.

Or is Luke in the minds of the people more of an aspirational figure whom they know is all-too human, and who only managed to topple an empire due to his compassion and loyalty helped by his powerful friends and family? This is a legend he would probably embrace but it isn’t as alluring to the everyday person so I would bet that most of the galaxy thinks of him as the Jedi superman.

So I think it’s very apt that Luke would act as an illusionist in embracing this admittedly false legend in TLJ. Luke doesn’t ultimately use the lightsaber to defeat his enemies, he throws it away in favor of a more compassionate, human approach. This is now lost to the galaxy in favor of his newly-affirmed legend of Jedi superman, and could be a sinister turn for his legacy and history.

Luke’s ‘in-universe’ legend post-ROTJ would have to be simply that he (supposedly) killed the bad guys. If he had let slip at the Ewok party that he had stood by and shown mercy while the Emperor and his bestie were slaughtering thousands of innocent beings, he would have been lynched. Imagine how thrilled the many victims of Palpatine/Vader’s tyranny would have been to hear that Vader was a nice guy after all and that it had been worth letting a few more Rebels die in order to facilitate Vader’s bedside conversion.

I keep harping on about it but it never ceases to bug me - Luke did not save the galaxy. At best he inadvertently (accidentally if you will) prevented Palpatine’s possible escape from the exploding Death Star. All he cared about was saving Vader’s soul and keeping his cool so he could become a guru.

Chewbacca saved the galaxy. TFA should have opened with “Chewbacca has vanished…”

The story we have on our end is not what Luke would be known for in universe. I can’t say if Vader’s part would have come out, but if it had it would have been that he came back to himself and sacrificed his life to kill the Emperor. The story we see is very compelling because we were not the Empire’s victims. The story told in universe would have to be adjusted and changed in order for it to be compelling and picked up as a legend. And they would only have Luke’s word as to what happened. The larger picture is that Luke, Han, Leia, Chewie, Lando, and Wedge, worked together to bring down the shields and destroy the Death Star, Darth Vader, and the Emperor. Learning that Luke is the new Jedi would have caused the public story to emphasize him because of the stories from the past of all the Jedi exploits. People would imagine that Luke had led the troops as Obi-wan, Anakin, Mace, and Yoda once had. They would want him to do it again. While Luke did it with illusion, he really played out exactly what people in universe would imagine a Jedi doing, so he very much was embracing the past and the legends of the Old Republic Jedi and giving his sister and Rey exactly what they needed, which he earlier said was not what they needed. He did a 180 on his views thanks to Rey and then Yoda.

When TROS picks up a year later, I imagine we are going to find out that Rey has been training with Luke’s force ghost and has turned her raw talent into great skill. I’m not sure if she will be recruiting and training even more just yet, but that will be her goal.

And even with Palpatine in the PT, we still don’t have much to his backstory. We had to wait until ROTS to hear of Darth Plagueis the Wise and we didn’t learn his first name in the films. There is so much about him that was left to the tie-in media to explain. We did get a full account of how he became Emeperor, but even that many viewers missed because it wasn’t handed to them on a plate but layered in obliquely. Many of the questions about Snoke that are outstanding are still outstanding with Palpatine even after the PT. Other than he started TPM as a Senator from Naboo, we know nothing about him. Even the name drop in ROTS doesn’t reveal if that was his master or his master’s master. Those things were all left to reveal in books. What we know of him from the books is almost everything. I see Snoke the same way. We get what we need in the films (he is the head of the First Order, a group that has risen from a fragment of the Empire) and he is a master of the Dark Side of the force and has lured Ben Solo to the dark side turning him into Kylo Ren, leader of the Knights of Ren. What more do we really need to know? Star Wars doesn’t have a history of giving us the full backstory, only what we need to know who these people are. There is so much that came from books and comics that is considered fact, but it isn’t in the films. We didn’t know anything about how Han won the Falcon until Solo came out. Han was a mystery except he made a run for Jabba the Hutt that ended in him dropping the shipment. We know the most about the Skywalkers, but not much about anyone else. How did Lando become head of Cloud City? We didn’t know how Owen and Beru were related to Luke until ATOC. Some answers came in films years later, some came in books right away, some have never been answered. But most have not been answered in the trilogy we meet these people in.

Me and Dr. Dre explained why Snoke is incomparable with OT Emperor already.

And I don’t agree.

It’s a hair away from plain old factual though.

I’m very curious to see how they handle AotC and RotS.
Will AotC still have the terrible blu ray colors?
Will both of them benefit from HDR since that usually seems to tone down cartoony colors?

yotsuya said:

Shopping Maul said:

NeverarGreat said:

DrDre said:

yotsuya said:

DrDre said:

SilverWook said:

MikeWW said:

SilverWook said:

A puppet being operated by the real villain?

But why have a dime store Palpatine if the plan all along was to use the real thing?

Because that’s how Palpatine operates. Masks, deceptions and lies. Snoke was just a more sophisticated version of wearing a hood and keeping his face in a strategically placed shadow.

That’s a nice in-universe explanation, but in reality it’s almost certain, that JJ intended for Snoke to be the big bad, and when RJ dispatched him, they had to bring back Palpatine in some form to up the ante. Had it been their intention to bring back Palpatine, they would logically have introduced him as the puppet master in a cameo at the end of TLJ. Additionally RJ clearly made TLJ with the intention to break free from what came before, whilst TROS seems to do the opposite promising a whole host of connections to the past.

I have to disagree with your interpretation of TLJ. That is the message that hermit Luke and Kylo Ren share. Both are proved wrong by the rest of the movie’s plot. The end of the movie is about embracing exactly what Luke said they didn’t need before Rey and Yoda brought him back to himself. And Kylo is trying desperately to be bad and be consumed by the dark side and yet he can’t seem to manage it. He’s trying to convince himself that he needs to destroy the past so he can be bad enough. But that is not RJ’s message in TLJ. Luke executes the very single handed battle with his lasersword against incredible odds and creates a legend, reminding Kylo and us that he will not be the last Jedi - meaning he is embracing the past and letting it carry forward. Quite the opposite of breaking free from what came before. And there is no hint that JJ is going to undo anything.

I disagree. TLJ spends most of its time deconstructing the mythology of Star Wars. It then reconstructs it in some form, but not by embracing the past. Luke’s last stand is not a reaffirmation of the reality of his legend in-universe, it is a ruse, which tells the audience, that legends and myths aren’t real, but they can serve a purpose when others choose to believe in them. This is in stark contrast to the OT, where the legend of Luke Skywalker is real in-universe. The Luke of the OT is the guy who really faces down the bad guys with his laser sword, whereas the Luke at the end of TLJ is an illusionist of sorts, intent on perpetuating a legend in-universe, while the viewer has been made aware it is all just smoke and mirrors.

This brings up the question of what Luke’s legend actually was, in universe, after the events of ROTJ.

Is Luke a Jedi and hero who can singlehandedly dispatch an AT-AT with a lightsaber and who blew up the Death Star, who defeated not only Vader but the Emperor in a single stroke? If so, I can see Luke wanting to distance himself from this story since it is rather deceptive.

Or is Luke in the minds of the people more of an aspirational figure whom they know is all-too human, and who only managed to topple an empire due to his compassion and loyalty helped by his powerful friends and family? This is a legend he would probably embrace but it isn’t as alluring to the everyday person so I would bet that most of the galaxy thinks of him as the Jedi superman.

So I think it’s very apt that Luke would act as an illusionist in embracing this admittedly false legend in TLJ. Luke doesn’t ultimately use the lightsaber to defeat his enemies, he throws it away in favor of a more compassionate, human approach. This is now lost to the galaxy in favor of his newly-affirmed legend of Jedi superman, and could be a sinister turn for his legacy and history.

Luke’s ‘in-universe’ legend post-ROTJ would have to be simply that he (supposedly) killed the bad guys. If he had let slip at the Ewok party that he had stood by and shown mercy while the Emperor and his bestie were slaughtering thousands of innocent beings, he would have been lynched. Imagine how thrilled the many victims of Palpatine/Vader’s tyranny would have been to hear that Vader was a nice guy after all and that it had been worth letting a few more Rebels die in order to facilitate Vader’s bedside conversion.

I keep harping on about it but it never ceases to bug me - Luke did not save the galaxy. At best he inadvertently (accidentally if you will) prevented Palpatine’s possible escape from the exploding Death Star. All he cared about was saving Vader’s soul and keeping his cool so he could become a guru.

Chewbacca saved the galaxy. TFA should have opened with “Chewbacca has vanished…”

The story we have on our end is not what Luke would be known for in universe. I can’t say if Vader’s part would have come out, but if it had it would have been that he came back to himself and sacrificed his life to kill the Emperor. The story we see is very compelling because we were not the Empire’s victims. The story told in universe would have to be adjusted and changed in order for it to be compelling and picked up as a legend. And they would only have Luke’s word as to what happened. The larger picture is that Luke, Han, Leia, Chewie, Lando, and Wedge, worked together to bring down the shields and destroy the Death Star, Darth Vader, and the Emperor. Learning that Luke is the new Jedi would have caused the public story to emphasize him because of the stories from the past of all the Jedi exploits. People would imagine that Luke had led the troops as Obi-wan, Anakin, Mace, and Yoda once had. They would want him to do it again. While Luke did it with illusion, he really played out exactly what people in universe would imagine a Jedi doing, so he very much was embracing the past and the legends of the Old Republic Jedi and giving his sister and Rey exactly what they needed, which he earlier said was not what they needed. He did a 180 on his views thanks to Rey and then Yoda.

When TROS picks up a year later, I imagine we are going to find out that Rey has been training with Luke’s force ghost and has turned her raw talent into great skill. I’m not sure if she will be recruiting and training even more just yet, but that will be her goal.

And even with Palpatine in the PT, we still don’t have much to his backstory. We had to wait until ROTS to hear of Darth Plagueis the Wise and we didn’t learn his first name in the films. There is so much about him that was left to the tie-in media to explain. We did get a full account of how he became Emeperor, but even that many viewers missed because it wasn’t handed to them on a plate but layered in obliquely. Many of the questions about Snoke that are outstanding are still outstanding with Palpatine even after the PT. Other than he started TPM as a Senator from Naboo, we know nothing about him. Even the name drop in ROTS doesn’t reveal if that was his master or his master’s master. Those things were all left to reveal in books. What we know of him from the books is almost everything. I see Snoke the same way. We get what we need in the films (he is the head of the First Order, a group that has risen from a fragment of the Empire) and he is a master of the Dark Side of the force and has lured Ben Solo to the dark side turning him into Kylo Ren, leader of the Knights of Ren. What more do we really need to know? Star Wars doesn’t have a history of giving us the full backstory, only what we need to know who these people are. There is so much that came from books and comics that is considered fact, but it isn’t in the films. We didn’t know anything about how Han won the Falcon until Solo came out. Han was a mystery except he made a run for Jabba the Hutt that ended in him dropping the shipment. We know the most about the Skywalkers, but not much about anyone else. How did Lando become head of Cloud City? We didn’t know how Owen and Beru were related to Luke until ATOC. Some answers came in films years later, some came in books right away, some have never been answered. But most have not been answered in the trilogy we meet these people in.

Me and Dr. Dre explained why Snoke is incomparable with OT Emperor already.

yotsuya said:

DrDre said:

SilverWook said:

MikeWW said:

SilverWook said:

A puppet being operated by the real villain?

But why have a dime store Palpatine if the plan all along was to use the real thing?

Because that’s how Palpatine operates. Masks, deceptions and lies. Snoke was just a more sophisticated version of wearing a hood and keeping his face in a strategically placed shadow.

That’s a nice in-universe explanation, but in reality it’s almost certain, that JJ intended for Snoke to be the big bad, and when RJ dispatched him, they had to bring back Palpatine in some form to up the ante. Had it been their intention to bring back Palpatine, they would logically have introduced him as the puppet master in a cameo at the end of TLJ. Additionally RJ clearly made TLJ with the intention to break free from what came before, whilst TROS seems to do the opposite promising a whole host of connections to the past.

I have to disagree with your interpretation of TLJ. That is the message that hermit Luke and Kylo Ren share. Both are proved wrong by the rest of the movie’s plot. The end of the movie is about embracing exactly what Luke said they didn’t need before Rey and Yoda brought him back to himself. And Kylo is trying desperately to be bad and be consumed by the dark side and yet he can’t seem to manage it. He’s trying to convince himself that he needs to destroy the past so he can be bad enough. But that is not RJ’s message in TLJ. Luke executes the very single handed battle with his lasersword against incredible odds and creates a legend, reminding Kylo and us that he will not be the last Jedi - meaning he is embracing the past and letting it carry forward. Quite the opposite of breaking free from what came before. And there is no hint that JJ is going to undo anything.

Snoke was the bad guy, but when you think about it, we know as little about him as we knew about the Emperor in the OT. He was just a figure mentioned in conversation in ANH. He appeared briefly in a hologram in TESB, and only with his arrival on the Death Star in ROTJ do we really get a feeling of his personality. But we had no back story until the PT. Abrams has been going for that feeling with Snoke - the unfleshed out bad guy at the top. What we get in TROS is going to be something to end the saga (which they have been saying all along that IX was going to do) so who knows what secrets it might reveal. The spoilers have a lot of guesses on Palpatine’s role and there are ways to tie it all in AND tell us more about Snoke if there is a reason to. But he died as backstoryless as Palpatine did back in 1983 (when we had no idea how he came to power or any of his history).

The difference being that the OT were the only movies at that time. Snoke on the other hand is a character that is coming in with six movies behind him. That begs for context in a way that The Emperor did not.
JJ was trying to recreate the OT’s approach, yes, but that’s a farcical idea when the backstory actually exists now.

snooker said:

Michael Arndt never saw Star Wars? That’s a complete lie lol. He did a video essay on Star Wars!!

I was under the impression that Arndt was fired for taking too long and that JJ and Kasdan banged out a quickie.

StarkillerAG said:

MikeWW said:

JJ’s co-writer on 7 hadn’t even seen the films he was making a sequel to

You mean Lawrence Kasdan, the guy who co-wrote Empire and Jedi? I’m pretty sure he’s seen Star Wars.

Darth Vegas?