NeverarGreat

Yes.

A wonderful essay!

I totally agree with almost everything you say here, despite coming to the movies in the early 90’s. I have often wondered what a spiritual continuation of the original film would look like, and I think it would have to be unconnected from the original in time and space. Imagine a show or movie set in this vast galaxy but we are unaware of if Luke and his friends exist in the far future, the far past, or presently on the opposite side of the galaxy. That level of separation would be incredible.

Perhaps a group of colonists, stranded on a barren world for centuries, desperate to find some technology to let them escape while battling aliens from within the mysterious world.

Maybe a lone mystical warrior from time unknown who battles for peace and justice between two warring star systems.

Imagine an alien race mapping the stars in their dark nebula, encountering a monstrously large ship full of identical human soldiers in cryogenic stasis and their misadventures when these soldiers awaken.

Take it away from anything we can place and the imagination runs wild. Thank you for reminding me why I love this universe.

My comment wasn’t directly speaking to Luke’s relationship to Anakin, and I agree that it’s dumb that Luke didn’t contact Anakin if he did know about the wayfinders.

But eh, finding plot holes in TROS is like examining a sieve.

I really like the idea that Force Ghosts don’t physically manifest except to those who have seen them in life. It serves as an in-universe explanation and also clarifies the storytelling; it’s much better to expand on existing character relationships than to introduce new ones for the sake of the fans.

I always felt like it was the opposite in that Force users could have longer lifespans, and felt that Yoda’s long life was a reference to Godly Biblical figures who lived hundreds of years.

RicOlie_2 said:

There’s about three memes in this entire thread. The rest are just pictures with text. I think y’all are too old for the Internet. 😉

A combination of Force and force makes sense.

ThisIsCreation said:

Hal 9000 said:

Tatooine causes people to age in dog years.

I agree somewhat with this, but i also look at force users as people who age faster the closer they are to the force and how they harness it.
Obi-wan aged the way he did because of a mixture of stress, the planets conditions & the force within him causing him to age that way.

So you’re saying that without the Force, Yoda would have lived 2,000 years?

I’d bet the reason Vader physically chokes Antilles is because the Force hasn’t been established at this point in the film. It’s notable that he only uses the Force after Obi-wan reveals it to Luke.

Anakin Starkiller said:

Hal 9000 said:

Well, unless I want to introduce a generational loss across the entire trilogy by ripping the finished edits themselves, at this point it’d probably be easiest to manually trace and rebuild the entire trilogy by overlaying them by a guideline proxy video track ripped from the existing finished edits.

It’s just not worth it, not without the truckloads of free time I once had. Those FCP7 project files are houses burning down caught in suspended animation.

Why would that introduce loss? It’s digital.

Just to bump an older comment, the loss would happen if the finished edits are only available in lossy formats like MP4 and not in lossless AVI. While it is good to have a final render in AVI, it would take up hundreds of gigabytes of space and be impractical for multiple feature length edits without a dedicated hard drive or three. The edits were also made quite a few years ago when storage wasn’t as cheap as it is now.

That said, if he had the space and free time to render out an AVI for each one then any further edits could be done with that AVI as a source and introduce no further loss.

Interesting. I didn’t originally have a preference one way or another for this aspect of Rogue One, but put in this light I can see the issue.

I agree that the Death Star having an intentionally designed weakness does imply that without that weakness the Death Star would be impervious, and this does weaken the message of Star Wars a bit. I think the intent of the Rebels finding a weakness in the Death Star is to show that no matter how impressive a Technological Terror may be, it will always have unforeseen weaknesses.

It feels a bit like the rules of argumentation - you always want to address your opponent’s argument in its strongest form. If the argument has been intentionally undermined, say, by someone on your team giving the opponent faulty data which you can then call out - then it doesn’t feel like winning the argument on its own merits.

Good relations with Ms. Dodonna, Hal has.

Or rather, TLJ had good but poorly-implemented answers to TFA’s questions.

TROS took that as TLJ having bad answers and came up with its own, far worse and incompetently-implemented answers.

sade1212 said:

The idea that Luke, Leia, Han, Lando and the Rebel Alliance generation achieved nothing because of the ST is ludicrous. They achieved nearly thirty years of peace and freedom. The First Order then only takes control of the galaxy for about a year before they and the Sith Eternal are defeated. For all of real human history there have been periods of war followed by periods of peace, ultimately followed by periods of war, and so on. Just because the OT generation don’t succeed in ending all war in the Star Wars universe for all time doesn’t mean what they did was pointless. TLJ is quite explicit in its theme of “we are what they grow beyond” - one generation can’t fix everything, but so long as each subsequent generation can learn from some of the mistakes of their ancestors and move forwards, we ultimately achieve progress. Just like real human civilisation.

Well, more like ten years if you take into account that most of the First Order soldiers were kidnapped as children.

And according to the Mandalorian, those first five years still had the Empire in control in the outer rim with the New Republic struggling to keep control of just the core worlds.

So yeah, the Core worlds had it good and the rest of the galaxy did fine for about five years as well.

Rodney-2187 said:

Might as well say they shouldn’t talk either and just go around communicating through the Force.

I agree.

Of course, that’s because Yoda should have already been off the Jedi Council and in exile since before the prequels, and Palpatine shouldn’t have been revealed as a Sith Lord at all, instead being merely a politician working in the background and using his proxies to turn Anakin and destroy the Jedi.

Nah. And this is coming from someone who didn’t really have much of an issue with Luke’s portrayal in TLJ.

TLJ had already set up the concept that dark side and light side rise and fall in unison. Luke comes to believe that by rebooting the Jedi, he is giving rise to Snoke and Kylo Ren. Thus he exiles himself in an attempt to return balance to the galaxy without the need for another civil war.

When Rey arrives, he realizes that all he has done is push the responsibility onto someone else, and has to come to terms with his lack of vision.

There. No flashbacks, no attempted murder, no sophomoric whinging about how the Jedi suck. Just Luke making a single well-intentioned mistake and getting his friends killed because of it.

Glad to know 😃

I’m getting an intermittent 502 error today when trying to access the site. Is anyone else getting this error, or is it just a me problem?

JEDIT: This was almost the 502nd topic. Oh well.

SparkySywer said:

NeverarGreat said:

Luke immediately throws away the lightsaber and shuts himself in his hut, refusing to help Rey or the Resistance.
Rose, despite her initial fangirl attitude, actively thwarts Finn’s escape attempt in the process and then accuses him of being a traitor.
Holdo immediately gives Poe a dressing-down and refuses to let him in on her plans, to the point that he believes that she is an enemy.

I don’t really agree. Luke’s character arc is sort of the entire point of the movie, I don’t think changing it would be a good idea.

My suggestion wouldn’t have changed Luke’s character since his training of Rey would still be designed to show her the error of the Jedi and not for the goal of helping her become a Jedi at all.

And with Holdo, she’s not an antagonistic ally, she’s functionally a straight antagonist until the end of the movie.

That would be fine if Holdo was some sort of potential ally that Poe needed to convince to join the Resistance, but she’s acting as the head of the ‘good guys’. Casting her as an antagonist until the abrupt turn at the end doesn’t endear her or more importantly the Resistance to the audience, which is the whole point I was trying to get across. Establishing clear sides in a conflict is basic storytelling.

Rose is the only character here where this really applies well to, but even then I wouldn’t consider her an antagonistic ally. More of an ally who gets off to a rough start with Finn. Especially because Finn is clearly in the wrong trying to abandon ship.

I mean, though many have argued that Finn is a de-facto member of the Resistance after TFA, TLJ makes it clear that he didn’t actually sign up for it and is only interested in Rey. I wouldn’t say he’s clearly in the wrong for not yet being ready to fully sign on to the Resistance, and even if he was, he’s one of the protagonists so an audience is primed to give him the benefit of the doubt.

The short of it is that Rian was so enamored with subverting expectations that he forgot to make the allies of the film likeable from the outset.

It really sucks that “subverting expectations” has been so associated with the Last Jedi. It wasn’t Rian’s governing mindset making the movie, it’s just something he said once behind the scenes and the marketing department plastered that soundbyte everywhere.

Perhaps I should have used ‘creating a postmodern deconstruction of Star Wars’, which would be more accurate. And this could have been just great, except that it often comes at the expense of basic storytelling techniques. Obviously this works for some people who are on board with these antagonistic characters, and that’s good. But a large amount of the audience did not get on board, and personally I think that was an entirely avoidable problem. Rian has been on record saying that the mark of success for him is a divisive film which is either loved or hated, and I disagree.

It’s possible to make a great, interesting piece of art that is also well-regarded by most of its audience. The Matrix. Blade Runner 2049. Jurassic Park. The Sixth Sense. It just requires the desire to place appeal on equal footing with message.

I just didn’t want to bring up instances specific to the prequels/sequels in that thread for fear of derailing it, but if you’re okay with it go right ahead 😃

https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/star-wars-is-surrealism-not-science-fiction-essay/id/82402/page/1#1403457

This wonderful write-up got me thinking about an aspect of Star Wars that has recently been bugging me - technological advancement. In short, the technology of Star Wars sometimes seems to advance, but sometimes seems to retreat. In general, the appearances change while the underlying tactics and strategies stay the same. The Razor Crest can fight the much newer TIE fighters and win, Y-wings have a place in fleets for decades, Star Destroyers get little more than a makeover, etc. If there’s an increase in power, it comes at the cost of greater size such as the enormous Death Star and even larger Starkiller.

This all seems in keeping with the surrealist fantasy of Star Wars. Of course, there are notable instances where technology does evolve in this universe, such as Clones making droids obsolete, Hyperspace Tracking/ramming dramatically shifting the calculus of resistance, Death Star Destroyers making a mockery of the power scale rule, etc. Each case feels off for Star Wars because it cleaves to an otherwise realistic expectation of technology, but it violates the surrealist fantasy because it brings the technology from unchanging background to crucial foreground. We must focus on this disruption and that means that the game state of the world has changed; it no longer has the veneer of timeless mythology.

It has been traded away for mere science fiction.

But the real question is, does she keep the beard?

The last time I watched the whole trilogy was probably 2015 or 2016. Since then, I’ve watched bits and pieces from them on occasion, but I think the oversaturation of Star Wars from TFA onward has cooled my interest for sure.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o048xeNQ3Wo

JakeRyan17 said:

So, y’all still complaining about JJ Abrams making Luke abandon everyone he cared about in The Force Awakens? Or are you still blaming the person who had to pick up and tell that story thread rather than the person who came up with it?

I didn’t see anyone blaming a particular director, no.