NFBisms

Here’s a pretty detailed rambling about the Force from George himself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68dvgRT3Kx8

Lucas talks about the dark side as selfishness versus the light side as selflessness.

From video: “And you want to keep it in balance.” ^(following left/right arm movements reminiscent of a metronome)

Selfishness is dark side. The dark side itself is not the anger, greed, hatred, fear, jealousy, etc. - those are all just extensions of self-preservation and greed - manifestations of the extent you are passionate about what you desire. How angry or scared you are, defining how far you’re willing to go in your actions. What you want, how much you want, as correlative to what you’ll do to keep it. Serving only yourself and those desires - following a path paved by those intentions - is imbalance.

And it’s easy because at their basest level those feelings are natural, “biological pleasures” as Lucas puts it. You can want innocuous things, you can even want good things. That’s what makes it dangerous, that’s its power. Where the Light Side requires discipline to maintain, passion and desire is human.

Lucas talks about it as motivated from those tangible, quantifiable things - not occult magic. No side of the Force actually corrupts or controls you. Not any more than a child learning and pushing the limits of what they’re capable of, men earning money and status, or a politician with “power” in an authority sense. If anything, you corrupt it. The Force within yourself.

Lucas says that Force remains in balance when you follow its will. But he makes it a point in the video’s opening lines to say that you still have free will. A choice to reject it if you want to.

TLJ adheres to that point and tries to reiterate that almost to a fault (since a lot of ppl don’t like Luke’s arc in it. Or Poe’s. Or Finn’s. Even Rey’s for that matter). Luke talking about the “balance in nature between light and dark” is in a conversation all about the Force within oneself. The natural balanced energy that Rey could feel throughout the island as well as within herself. Luke specifically says this doesn’t belong to anybody, nor is it a power you wield. This entire point you brought up as a fundamental misunderstanding, is slavishly adherent to Lucas’s ideas.

it really hurts* to see people interpret the movie this way but i will refrain from repeating a previous held debate

*not really, obviously

ShamanWhill said:
The ways in which the Force are discussed in the Disney sequels are contradictory to the ways in which the Force is discussed in George’s Star Wars Saga. So please refrain the future from referencing those movies. This thread is a place for us to invent what the proper cannon should have been. Thank you!

I mean, unless we’re discussing what about them that it isn’t. Like, I think, TROS is way way off, but TFA is at least vague, and TLJ is slavish in its adherence to George Lucas’s Force and Jedi. So when I bring up the Disney films I’m not actually discussing from a perspective of them as canon, but just parsing out what about them fit and what would have been done about those ideas, if at all, in the hypothetical universe where Lucas got to make his sequels.

I think context for how they’re referenced in this thread matters, if you want to police it that badly. I don’t think I’ve used them as proof of a point, just a jumping off point for the discussion on what Lucas would mean with the concept of “balance.”

We’re not in a vacuum, much less in that alternate reality where the movies didn’t happen.

Well, TROS and TLJ are fundamentally incompatible, so you shouldn’t take Luke’s later “I was wrong” to heart if we’re talking about how TLJ discusses a middle path.

To me, the films maintain that the dark side is rooted in selfishness. Not anger, hatred, fear, jealousy, etc. alone… Those are all just extensions of self-preservation and greed - manifestations of the extent you are passionate about what you desire. Being selfish is a natural human instinct, and I think ROTJ especially shows that it actually doesn’t corrupt you. Not any more than a child learning and pushing the limits of what they’re capable of, men earning money and status, or a politician with “power” in an authority sense.

Two examples of the Dark Side we see in the OT: Luke Skywalker wanted to save his friends so badly, he became angry, let his hate for the Empire drive his actions. Darth Vader once wanted to be more powerful than other Jedi, he let that jealousy dictate his path. But they were both able to pull back. They could make that choice, and Vader after thinking it was “too late for him.” Dark side corruption isn’t magic, you still have responsibility for yourself. It’s never too late.

Perhaps the idea that we should be thinking about, isn’t what would make a gray Jedi different, but that the examples we follow that have triumphed were essentially gray Jedi. TLJ advocates for a middle path by straight up contextualizing the Jedi teachings as having failed, twice, and that the future should grow beyond those teachings.

I imagine Lucas’s ST would have skipped the extra steps and gotten straight to that point. His PT already shows that the Jedi as idealized by Obi-Wan was far from perfect. Perhaps his Luke would have been enlightened on that front already, or the conflict would have been introduced in VII and not VIII.

Well, selfishness isn’t inherently evil. We all have a natural inclination towards self preservation, we all want things: to be happy, to be respected, for those we care about to be, to have the things we like.

Outside of TROS, “darkness” always always had its roots in those intentions. Desire. It doesnt make you want to do bad deeds for no reason, but the extent you want - your passion - convincing you that you have to do whatever it takes to achieve those goals. How many parents would kill for their child? Protecting your children isn’t bad, but the act of killing is questionable, justified or not.

I figure if anyone explores the dark side as a tool for good, it would double down on greed as natural, human desire. TLJ kind of does it by showing how selfless sacrifice can actually hurt the ones you love, and that saving yourself means you can live to fight another day with those you care about.

isnt your icon revan

I would keep Rey Nobody but somehow maintain the integrity of “Sheev fucks.” But that’s just me.

That’s so wizard!

It’s a life lesson we should all hear, really. Ghosts need to eat too.

Ghosts need to eat, too.

Well, I think he only ignored world-building and plot for sure, but the entire movie was just character arcs and the themes that guided them. So I 2/3 agree with you.

But yeah, Rian is a very theme-oriented filmmaker, and I was just trying to explain what makes him that way, and how people like myself enjoy the film. I totally understand why people didn’t like it, and I’ve been the first to say on this page how unwieldy and perhaps misguided TLJ and its approach was. Star Wars is a brand - a lore that people follow - not just a series of films. Rian should have known that audience, not assume they were all film nerds. It’s not like TLJ is particularly super well-written enough anyway.

I guess I do want to dispute the idea that themes shouldn’t be put first. I think they inform pretty much all good storytelling, and you need to prioritize thematic consistency to bring any story together. I think focusing on theme can’t overtake plot, character, and world. It can only enhance them. But not caring about it can ruin them. The themes are the story. That’s where everything about your story comes from. Why it’s being told. People just doing stuff somewhere doesn’t work without a any sort of through-line to tie it together.

I do get Rian’s approach, though.

While worldbuilding is an important part of writing any story, another school of writing would more emphasize themes - the why. What was the point of the story, and why did you need to tell it?

Worldbuilding is of course a great exercise in imagination and fleshes out your story, but it doesn’t necessarily justify your story’s existence on a deeper level. As someone who dabbled in film school, this is an attitude a lot of film academics and artsy professors push on you. Escapism and fun, is all well and good, but the best work is about something. While there’s only so many new ways you can combine tropes and derivative elements from thousands of years of storytelling, the unique experiences of different individuals in an ever-changing world will never run out.

Write not to make the most interesting, fleshed out worlds, or the coolest, most interesting characters - write a story with purpose and meaning to you, because everything has basically been done before. (And that can manifest in a multitude of different ways, not just plot.) That doesn’t exclude cool worlds and characters, but creativity from that perspective will naturally be more unique than just emulating what you like.

It was often explained to us as good practice because film is a two hour medium and you never know if you’ll get a sequel. Or the opportunity for an expanded universe. Moviemaking is a business, and your first pitches won’t spawn franchises without any proof of profit. And the studio wouldn’t need your hero’s journey in a sci-fi/fantasy world if they already have properties/options in that same niche. Without big names or money, it’s about making the Expanse when Star Trek exists.

This is definitely where Rian comes from. And it’s not something you can just unlearn. Especially when that’s how you begin to enjoy things. So when he gets the Star War, the question he feels he must answer with his film is “Why are there sequels?” from a thematic perspective. Not “How can I expand an existing universe?” If anything, the Star Wars world as already built on the back of at least 8 other films, hours of TV, tons of books, and so many comics - was a luxury for him. He just doubled down his film. He never considered it part of his job to curate anything more than those two hours.

and to be fair, it’s not like most of us do either lmao

The nose art scene is gone, but I’d say what we got was better?

I suppose it’s odd that Anakin knows that Obi-Wan knows. Or that Rex knows at all. It felt like a very fanservice-y moment for sure, but I genuinely do not really care about much of anything else in this arc. I don’t particularly like the Bad Batch, and Echo honestly meant more dead (as another one of the fallen dominoes) than he ever did while he was alive. But more Anakin/Obi-Wan/Padme dynamic? I’m here for all that.

Speaking of Hal commentaries, I used to fall asleep to your prequel commentaries in my first year of college actually!
(revealing how old I am, roughly)

Not because you were boring or anything, but because your edits were the only videos I had saved on my phone for whatever reason, and our dorms had bad wi-fi at night. It was alright because I loved hearing you talk about how you went about editing the films, your thoughts on them, who helped you, and how, etc… I really enjoyed your dry sense of humor too.

Without any specifics, I just thought you should know you played some part in inspiring where I ended up in my real life atm. I don’t think I would have thrown nearly as much time into learning how to edit better if I didn’t think I myself could spend a couple hours a day practicing by editing those movies from your example.

Testing out a color grade for the final version…

It’s the conduit through which a lot of Legends stuff is somewhat canonized, basically. Things like Delta Squad or Quinlan Vos were in the show as references to the larger EU at the time. Without The Clone Wars remaining canon, certain things and characters would only be Legends now. It’s the middle of a Venn Diagram.

I kind of find it ironic given how TCW used to get flack for ignoring the EU to do its own thing. Now it’s the only canon media keeping a lot of that EU a part of the main lore.

ZkinandBonez said:

NFBisms said:

I wish they were finishing Crystal Crisis instead, to be honest.

They might make it into a comic or a novel like they did with some of the Maul episodes and the conclusion to Ventress’ arc. I think I read somewhere that Lucasfilm still treats these stories as canon, so it would be strange if they didn’t do anything with them at all in the future. Wasn’t there also a Boba Fett vs Cad Bane episode that’s still unfinished?

Well Crystal Crisis was just as completed as Bad Batch was - in animatics form - all those years ago. Fully voiced, foley’d, and storyboarded. The other incomplete arcs never got that far, which is why they were adapted into other media. If they were going to finish off either CC or BB, I would have preferred CC, that’s all I was saying. Adapting it into a book or comic would be a downgrade from its current form.

Bad Batch is fun, but that’s about it. Meanwhile, there’s good character stuff in Crystal Crisis between Anakin and Obi-Wan that directly works off of season 5 and plays into Revenge of the Sith, and probably the final Ahsoka episodes. More than clone trooper A-Team.

I wish they were finishing Crystal Crisis instead, to be honest.

I was actually thinking about a Save The Reveal edit in relation to my own the other day! If you cut the last half of New Canon Cut pertaining to Anakin, with some tweaks, you could easily create an edit where it doesn’t seem like Anakin turns to the dark side - without having to remove most of those early scenes.

Here’s proof of concept using clips from my edit:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SkKsTcRHBWuSvfqnD4ga9pf8xiIFERub/view?usp=sharing

Right off the bat, Anakin’s established as totally understanding of the Jedi’s POV on Palpatine, and even lobbies their concerns. Rather than being all-in on Palps, he just has faith that he isn’t as bad as the Jedi think he is. By removing his petulance and entitlement, his lashing out at Padme, he’s allowed to be at odds with the council without explicitly telegraphing a turn. It becomes an understandable wariness, not lingering darkness. Palpatine trying to turn Anakin against Padme is a key point, because with the next scene, it doesn’t necessarily work. Anakin will brood about it, but by instead confiding in Padme tenderly about his dreams, he rejects that manipulation. New Canon Cut puts him at a crossroads of two equally possible decisions, but have Anakin apologizing to Obi-Wan after everything, and it looks more like Anakin has come back around to the Jedi’s perspective. Especially if the last time we see him, he’s going to turn Palpatine in. The groundwork for the ESB reveal is still laid, but it’s not obvious.

EDIT: But I agree that this isn’t necessary especially since the best parts of ROTS are in the last act. I also think flashbacks to TPM and AOTC definitely don’t need to happen. 95% of the prequel story is in ROTS imo, not just 80. The context that would be missing is pretty irrelevant and sometimes works against the film.

Thanks to everyone who has given me feedback so far in private topics! I think when the new season of TCW ends, I’ll have a final version done. It’s now less about experimenting and doubling down on and polishing the decisions I’ve made that have worked for people.

So far the biggest things to fix:

• “Roger roger” elevator bit. Make the quality drop less noticeable or just remove altogether. There’s enough banter and wit in the rest of the first act now that I don’t need it anymore?
• Mixing audio better overall, but particularly in re-scored/radically edited scenes. Raising levels on Anakin/Padme conversation about lightsaber and timing the audio clips with the shots better.
• Intro Kashyyk scene needs wipe and maybe some extending.
• Reinstate some of Anakin’s attitude. Either in front of the council or only with Obi-Wan, but not in both.
• Use some different shots of Anakin in Anakin confronting Palpatine scene.
• Reinstate some of Palpatine’s orders to Vader, keep shot of him putting on hood.
• Clean up vfx in final Mustafar sequence (Obi-Wan listening to Anakin, Anakin igniting first)
• Re-add Qui Gonn voice.

I’m still open to feedback for the current version!

On the topic of Finn/Poe is there a way we could edit Poe’s moment with Zorii and give it to him and Finn instead?

EDIT: actually that would play as too funny to be any kind of earnest payoff for that possible romance lmao

Alright, I now have a cut with my most recent ideas available, PM for link. I’d want the final version to be along these lines but obviously I’ll need feedback. So it would be greatly appreciated!

A couple notes/thoughts about my own edit:

• I started from scratch this year. Plenty of my old decisions from old versions are present pretty much exactly as they were, but quite a bit is different. And because I’m no longer editing with Labyrinth of Evil (I’m still pulling from it, just doing it myself), some of the minor decisions made there are not here. You’ll still hear battle droids and clones. The original crawl is intact.

• Returning to fan editing was inspired in part by showing my little cousin the prequels over the holidays. There are things I retained simply because he liked/remembered them. He’s 10.

• I wanted to do a color grade like in previous versions but I figure I should wait until I have something locked down. Also everything I was coming up with was browner than I would have liked.

• I don’t think I fixed the storytelling as much as I changed the story, if that makes sense. What this has over the theatrical isn’t that it’s less “cringe” or is paced more mercifully/flows better. It’s become a somewhat radical edit - the characters are not really the same as the ones in the theatrical. They feel more like real, emotional people with character arcs. I’m particularly happy with how Padme comes across now.

• As far as fitting in with The Clone Wars - I don’t know what the new season will bring. But this works far better with what we have of the series so far than the theatrical. I will say, Christensen’s Anakin might actually come off as a nicer guy than Lanter’s here. This is because if I let Christensen be as badly tempered as Lanter, his relationship with Obi-Wan and the council became much less like the one in TCW. (Not to mention Hayden doesn’t pull it off with the same flavor of intensity.) If I committed to fully pacifying Christensen, it made him bland and more easily pushed around. It was a balancing act, and you have to account for how other characters treat him, not just the man himself. NCC!Anakin in that way feels slightly more influenced by OT!Anakin than TCW!Anakin. But it still fits.

• I’m thinking about renaming this, since I don’t know if I care about “New Canon” anymore after Rise of Skywalker. It’s still TCW-based obviously - with the consistency of character this sought to achieve - but TCW being a part of Disney’s canon doesn’t seem to mean much anymore. Maybe something more ROTJ-inspired, since it more directly ties into that,

• i forgot qui gonn

• i wish the kashyyk thing was better implemented

Shopping Maul said:

Wanderer_ said:

Shopping Maul said:

Well why the hell did Vader deserve redemption?
He didn’t, we tolerated it because Vader was well written and it was easier for us to feel that his love for his son was enough to make him turn back.

At least Kylo had layers, some obvious conflict.

Mm, this is an odd one. Vader had many more layers than Kylo. Vader was always in conflict, he was a slave to the dark side. Kylo chose to be the monster he became and I honestly don’t think the movies gave us reasons for him to have let darkness grown inside of him.

But that’s not true according to the OT. Vader was a straight up bad guy in ANH - choking dudes to death, torturing princesses, killing Obi Wan (quite happily I add - “this will be a day long remembered…”), and shooting down X-Wings. In TESB he relentlessly pursues the rebels, kills his subordinates for human error, tortures Han and Leia to get Luke’s attention, and finally gives Luke a ‘join me or die’ ultimatum (“don’t make me destroy you”).

Only in ROTJ is it suggested that Vader had ‘good in him’, and that was purely because Luke (see Lucas) suddenly decided it was so.

I agree Kylo had no backstory whatsoever, but the conflict within him is/was evident from the get-go. Vader had given himself over to darkness and was pretty comfortable with it in the OT. Kylo was not so adept at evil. In fact the way way Adam Driver played Kylo was how I wish Anakin had been played in the prequels, a truly conflicted soul. That “I want to be free of this pain” moment in TFA had more raw emotion in it than all three prequels put together.

By the way I’m not against Vader’s redemption at all, in fact I thought it was a great idea. I just hate Luke’s POV. I do not understand why Luke was suddenly all gushy about Dad in ROTJ, nor do I understand why this took precedence over everything else that was going on. I’d have preferred a darker movie - one where Luke would be disillusioned with the whole Jedi thing (having been lied to by everyone concerned) and Vader’s turnaround would be a nice surprise while Luke was busy doing everything in his power to defeat Palpatine. But that’s just me. I cannot fathom why saving a war-criminal’s soul would make anyone a legend.

I mean, Luke’s primary influence from the moment he joins Ben in ANH - is his father’s legacy. He wants to learn the ways of the Force and become a Jedi like his father. From that, he essentially follows the path his dad took, right down to when he brushes with the dark side in ESB. He ignores Yoda and Ben’s warnings by rushing in to confront Vader, and save his friends.

That’s when he sees an outcome of following that quick and easy path - Darth Vader - and is faced with making different choices than his father. By ROTJ, Luke has empathy for Vader because he finds that by following his father, he is Vader. He’s more or less been where he’s been. Everything he believed about his father had to be true at one point, but then he took a wrong turn somewhere, which Luke after ESB understands now more than anyone.

It definitely has potential to be naivete, but Luke ends up being right. The idealism that it is, is what makes him a legend. The fact that you, and probably many others in the galaxy, would become disillusioned where Luke didn’t is the point. That doesn’t really say anything about how you personally would have preferred the movie to go, but that’s the theme. It makes sense and isn’t “sudden.” ROTJ just contextualizes the previous set-up. Not that it couldn’t have gone in a different direction - that who knows, I might have preferred myself - but pretty much all the heavy lifting for it is done in the prior two films.

some of you all really missed out on your emo high school romances and it shows

On the contrary, I’d argue TLJ would land for more people if it was decidedly less Star Wars in genre/tone. Not that it would be better, but I think I think it would be more broadly appreciated if it owned the fact that it’s not a typical Star Wars story.

TLJ still tries to externally maintain itself as this classic Star Wars adventure, with quippy one liners from our spunky heroes, weird and wacky aliens, and of course the recycled imagery. The tone is there, the genre pastiche is there - and it works for the people it works for because beneath that surface, there’s much more going on. But if you don’t engage with the film in that way, I imagine it must feel quite pointless.

TLJ uses the Star Wars tone to inform its metanarrative, but a lot of it is about transposing classical ideals invoked by that tone onto a harsher reality. What does it mean to be Luke Skywalker after happily ever after? What does it really mean to fight for what you believe when the odds are stacked against you? Again I’m not saying it would be better, but the heart of the film would become more apparent to more people if it was heavy handed about “not being like Star Wars.” To some of my friends, TLJ was just a disappointing plot. And the plot wasn’t really the point, was it?

The deconstruction from the base of “Star Wars film” is what makes it smart and postmodern, but perhaps it would be more broadly received if it, like, tried to be The Dark Knight of Star Wars. Then I bet some 14 year olds* would have been blown away by Luke’s portrayal as opposed to thinking he was just shafted for bad reasons. Just a more obviously Not Star Wars affair to get people in a different mindset. More people would get into it for being different because it would feel different. I bet the people who like TLJ as it is now wouldn’t like it as much. Me included. But I would never know, would I?

This isn’t to say TLJ as it is, is at its core a bad Star Wars movie - I’d say it’s the only one in the ST with anything that builds on the OT’s themes. I just think it’s a shame Star Wars is such a brand, and not a series of stories now. TLJ leaned into the brand so that it could tell a new story. The Mando leaned into the old stories to be branded a little differently. I understand the mindset and it gave us TLJ, but I don’t feel as excited about the possibilities of the universe any more.

*not necessarily in age