NeverarGreat

Mielr said:

I was watching a TV show the other day, and they were discussing the possibility of Hillary Clinton running for president a 3rd time. A comedian on the show said something like “we need another Hillary candidacy like we need another Star Wars sequel.” The audience groaned, but it made me think: in the minds of the general public, has Star Wars finally “jumped the shark”?

The comedian sounds like they were talking about Star Wars sequel fatigue, which I would definitely agree with.

But that seems different to me than ‘jumping the shark’, which implies that Star Wars has had a moment of such tonal absurdity that it can’t be taken seriously or even earnestly anymore. I don’t think that’s happened, despite some questionable moments in TLJ.

Just finished watching it. It’s really nice, seeing decent film scans of Star Wars in here.

The more I think about this movie the more I’d like to see a substantial paring down and reorganization of the scenes. The movie really works on a visual and emotional level, but a lot of the quips, jokes, and complicated exposition really detract from a simple story that is essentially about failure and remorse.

The movie also loses a lot of its emotional heft in strange editing. For example Luke’s death is handled very oddly.

In its current order:
Salt Flat: Luke tricks Kylo Ren. Ren Screams in anger.
Island: Luke collapses, then struggles to get up.
Hills: Rey looks back, and Leia looks troubled.
Island: Luke gets up.
Hills: Rey continues looking.
Island: Luke dies. Music becomes mournful.
Crait Base: First Order marches in, Kylo finds the dice, and looks up suddenly.
Crosscut between Rey and Kylo, then she shuts the door on him.
Crait Base: Dice disappear and pan out on Kylo.
Falcon flies away from Crait, with musical sting.
Falcon: Everyone has a happy reunion, then they sadly talk about Luke.

There are two issues with this. First, the dice don’t disappear when Luke dies. More importantly, the music of Luke’s death is interrupted by a short First Order theme which tramples on the moment.

I’d consider reordering it to play like this:

Salt Flat: Luke tricks Kylo Ren. Ren Screams in anger.
Island: Luke collapses, then struggles to get up.
Crait Base: First Order marches in, Kylo finds the dice.
Hills: Rey looks back, and Leia looks troubled.
Island: Luke gets up.
Hills: Rey continues looking.
Island: Luke dies. Music becomes mournful.
Crait Base: Kylo looks at dice as they disappear. He suddenly looks up.
Crosscut between Rey and Kylo, then she shuts the door on him.
Crait Base: Pan away from Kylo.
Falcon flies away from Crait. No music.
Falcon: Cut happy reunions. Start with the shot of Finn getting the blanket out of the Jedi book drawer, and leave the reunion for the final group shot.

JEDIT:

Actually, I would change the final ending of the movie further if it works to put the Luke Skywalker kid’s story right before the Canto Bight prison break.

The Falcon flies into camera, cutting the entrance to Hyperspace.
The Falcon scene happens without reunions as stated, ending with the group shot and no exterior in Hyperspace.
End of the Broom Boy scene with the ship streaking across the sky.
Cut to credits.

Dat_SW_Guy said:

“Star Wars - The First Order Is Not Intimidating & Here’s Why” By Jeremy Jahns

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3il2rcqIMA

That’s a very good point.

It’s some of that, yes, but I think the Scouring of the Shire was more specifically about Tolkien expressing his fears about industrialization in Britain after the wars, and using this as a way to bring the conflict home to the characters on a deeply personal level.

And that’s a good message for a book, but not at all cinematic to have an extended cleanup after the main conflict has ended. Peter Jackson understood that at least.

yotsuya said:

Frankly the idea that they reset it makes no sense with IX being the saga finale. No sense at all.

For almost 40 years, movie three of the OT was the end of the Star Wars saga. You know, the movie where all the major villains were killed and everyone assumed that the Rebellion had won, and which in TFA’s backstory it actually had. George’s idea for sequel trilogies was constantly changing, and was at times going to be about the Wookiee planet, or the world of the Midichlorians, or about Luke finding his mysterious twin sister across the galaxy and requiring her to defeat the Emperor, at least before he got tired of Star Wars and rushed to the conclusion in ROTJ. Why are we taking George’s plans seriously at all anymore?

So yes, George Lucas and JJ Abrams and Michael Arndt reset the conflict in the universe for another trilogy. To draw a comparison: Mordor is again filled with bigger, meaner orcs with another evil spirit leading them, Aragorn has given up on the world of Men and gone into hiding, and another hobbit hero will need to find a wizard mentor and make everything right with the world. Again.

And it’s just a shame, since the seeds of greatness are within TFA from the beginning. A Republic split between a strong, centralized ‘Imperial’ government and a united confederation of self-ruled star systems would provide ample opportunity for conflict. Add to this the questioning of bringing back what is essentially a state-sanctioned theocratic order, and the rehabilitation of generations of soldiers conditioned for war, and you’ve got the beginning of a truly new chapter in what can really call itself the continuing Star Wars saga. And it actually is that sort of a movie, until the Senate is blown up by another superweapon and the Resistance becomes the Rebellion.

Finally, I’m somewhat amused at how much faith you put in a man who is famed for his inability to stick the landing of his stories, when he has to do it now not just for this trilogy, but for the entire Star Wars saga.
I don’t envy him his job.

chyron8472 said:

I don’t think this will ever not make me laugh.

One minor point as I rewatch the movie - Finn and Rose are able to escape the Raddus undetected by either party and go to another planet. Since Holdo’s plan is to rely on reinforcements from the Outer Rim after boosting the signal from Crait, why couldn’t a few Resistance soldiers have taken that cloaked hyperspace ship and gone to Crait ahead of the Raddus? Or have been ferrying people off the Raddus onto Crait for hours, preventing a situation where all of the Resistance’s eggs are in one basket?

Frink would say I’m trying to dislike this movie.
But I like nitpicking the plot.

dahmage said:

NeverarGreat said:

Does this man’s paradoxical thought lead him to believe that all roadways are simultaneously both black and white, and therefore step off the sidewalk any old where and get run over? Surely not, since the zebra crossing is definitively stated as the location of the man’s demise.

What I’m trying to say here is that the joke doesn’t quite work.

i think it is more that he actually proved black was white (just as he proved God didn’t exist, and therefore God did not exist), his ‘proof’ actually made it so. this is a paradox, and when he encountered this paradox (at a zebra crossing), the paradox destroyed him.

This is too much for my frail monkey mind.

Does this man’s paradoxical thought lead him to believe that all roadways are simultaneously both black and white, and therefore step off the sidewalk any old where and get run over? Surely not, since the zebra crossing is definitively stated as the location of the man’s demise.

What I’m trying to say here is that the joke doesn’t quite work.

yotsuya said:

The only thing I have to say is that I think the GOUT is the key to finding out what TESB is supposed to look like. When I found a nice color correction for ANH and applied those settings to ROTJ, it came out very close to the grindhouse ROTJ scan. So I’m assuming that if you have a correction for ANH that works for ROTJ, that using that on the GOUT for TESB will get you something close to the real colors. Enough to guide a shot by shot regrade and possibly provide a basic correction that works for most scenes.

It sounds to me that Poita’s 35mm scan that has been in cold storage has the best chance of giving us an accurate representation of the color, without the guesswork of GOUT or anything else.

Layman: Why does this thread exist?

Philosopher: There is no ‘why’.

Layman: Okay, does this thread exist?

Philosopher: No, for nothing can exist without reason.

Layman: But this thread has no reason.

Philosopher: Dammit.

yotsuya said:

mfastx said:

DrDre said:
I agree. The PT ends where the OT begins, right down to the twin sunset on Tatooine. Going from ROTJ to TFA is far more jarring to me, where an obvious total victory is suddenly and without explanation completely reversed, while all the victors have become shadows of their former selves. General Solo has again become a smuggler in debt with everyone, who hides from his problems. Luke’s hiding from his problems on a rock, and has closed himself off from the Force. Even Leia has been demoted from princess, and senator to the general of an even smaller band of rebels, whilst Han and Leia have apparently won the worst parents of the year award.

This is my main issue with the ST. Despite the fact that they’re very good films, the story is just so nonsensical to me. What we’re told happened between VI and VII is far more interesting to me than what’s happening in VII and VIII. We’re right back where we started in the OT (if not worse, the rebels are down to a handful of folk on the falcon), with no real explanation as to how we got there after the triumphant victory in VI.

I would have much more enjoyed a story of how Ben got seduced by Snoke, how the First Order came to be, etc.

Many who don’t like it see things back where the OT began, but it isn’t. That is my point. While there are echoes of the OT in the ST (there were in the PT as well), the ST is telling a unique story that I don’t think we will totally see until the third story is out for us to follow the plots. In TLJ, the First Order has not yet taken over. Rey says it directly. While the Republic government and fleet have been wiped out, the First Order still has to actually seize power. They have only eliminated the other power that Snoke thought could stop him. We are no in the same place at the end of TLJ that we were at the beginning of ANH. It is a must different landscape. For one thing, there were no Jedi on the Galactic stage in ANH. There is Luke and Rey in TLJ and Luke has just left a lasting impression to give power to the new rebellion. Please find that in the years leading up to ANH. Even Rebels doesn’t have such a public display of power, and definitely not one that spread like wildfire across the galaxy.

The problem with saying that the First Order hasn’t technically won yet is that we’ve seen almost nothing of the Republic’s power in these new films, and what little we’ve seen of their planets shows them being filled with First Order sympathizers or in the process of being destroyed, or both. In the OT and the PT we are constantly shown the relative power of each side of the conflict, but as far as the visual storytelling of the ST so far, the Republic is no more.

And everyone keeps talking about Luke’s ‘public display of power’, but he didn’t defeat the First Order’s forces, or even defeat Kylo Ren. He just delayed them a little while at the cost of his life, and who would have seen this display of power? The remnants of the Resistance were running for their lives. Luke blowing up the Death Star surely had a bigger public impact than that. And now that you bring it up, I remember that Rebels did have a bigger public display of the power of the Force in the series finale, with the entire capital city of a planet watching in fear of their lives.

The mere existence of the Resistance and Leia’s role as its leader tells us that the new Republic is not what she had hoped and that she fears they do not take the First Order seriously. It paints a picture of a complacent Republic that is probably more worried about internal squabbles than a theoretical outside threat. That they had so few ships that the entire fleet was in orbit of the capital shows that it it was a very weak republic.

And I’ve seen several comments about continuing the OT the way George would do it, and guess what, they are. The basic plot elements, some of the very ones people are complaining the most about, were penned by George. They created their own cast of characters, but the broad arc of the trilogy seems to be following George’s treatment. Luke’s exile is the single item we can point to with absolutely certainty as coming directly from George himself, but the broad arcs fit with that. As does Luke now being the mentor as Ben was in the OT. The fact that George had an idea for a sequel and that it went so far as a treatment means he had conflict. It means he is the one who decided to derail the happy ending many imagine for post ROTJ. He seems to have given them a decade or two before ruining things for them Han and Leia have a son, there is a new Republic, but you can’t have the next chapter of a saga if things are all still rosy.

I seriously don’t get what some of you want. Do you want a sequel trilogy with a story or a pointless story set in a perfect Utopia? To get a story you have to have conflict and the easiest way to get it is for things to go wrong. In the ST we are getting, things went wrong about 15-20 years after ROTJ (and ROTJ wasn’t the last battle). That is 15-20 years when things went right. The Republic was flourishing and Han and Leia were together. And the worst part is you are blaming Kennedy, and Johnson and leaving out Lucas and Abrams. This whole ST is Lucas’s doing. He created a treatment, he sold his company, he turned it over to Kennedy. How much of his treatment they are using is unknown, but they are using his girl force sensitive hero and his exiled Luke and I bet there is a lot more they are using. But let’s sit tight and wait for IX before we write off the ST. We can’t even tell what the main story is, just like the redemption of Anakin/Vader didn’t become part of the story until ROTJ. In the PT, we all knew where it would end up so we knew the arc from the moment we heard the name Anakin.

We knew from Episode 1 that the galactic conflict was going to be Sith versus Republic.
We knew from Episode 4 that the conflict was going to be Rebellion versus Empire.
We should know from Episode 7 that the conflict is Resistance (made of Rebellion forces) versus First Order (made of Imperial forces).

For a sequel trilogy, they could easily have treated the war as if it never really ended. Our heroes from the last movie have been fighting for a new Republic for decades and have grown weary of the battles, and realize that their vision of a Republic and Jedi Order restored must fall to a new generation. You could even have the same backstory for the ST, with a First Order which has gained power in the Senate with the disappearance of the Jedi. Heck, even keep Luke’s cynical turn in questioning the Jedi religion. It would have similarities to the PT, but this time there’s no Snoke and no Starkiller Base, no sinister Sith to pull the strings, only a fight for the soul of the Jedi and what it truly means to bring peace and justice to the galaxy.

I really like this version of the scene, especially since it’s the only scene with the big three in Empire.

DominicCobb said:

As usual I’ll have to strongly disagree. IV, V, VI, VII, VIII is already far more emotionally satisfying than I, II, III, IV, V, VI ever was. Going from III to IV is much more jarring a shift than going from VI to VII (and I’m not talking about quality). Just because nothing important plot-wise happens in between the PT and the OT doesn’t make them a cohesive and continuous unit, far from it. Lucas’s conception of the six episode saga was incredibly faulty and unsatisfactory. Hard to say how the nine episode saga will look without having seen the last chapter, but it can’t be anymore slapdash than the six episode one (if anything it’s working to rectify the problems).

Um what?
Between 3 and 4 the Empire grows in power as does the Rebellion, Luke and Leia grow up, and the Death Star is finally completed after 20 years. All of these things were set up in 3, and in fact one of the issues people have with that movie is how much hand-holding it does to make the universe continue relatively unchanged for two decades.

Between 6 and 7 the civil war officially ends with the Imperial remnant being exiled to the unknown regions, a new First Order arises from this remnant, Han and Leia officially get married then have a kid and Luke starts to form a new Jedi order then the Solo kid goes bad and destroys the order and Han and Leia break up and Luke goes into exile. Oh and the First Order is being run by a totally new warlord who is strong in the Force but unrelated to the Sith, they’ve somehow found a way to build a weapon much larger than any built by the Empire at the height of their power, and they’ve infiltrated the Republic Senate so far as to cast Leia out and force her to start her own miniature Rebellion.

darthrush said:

Tomorrow I will put together a crawl that is mainly your first and third paragraphs from your previous crawl, with a reworked second paragraph that still introduces the super weapon.

I would like to see how you manage to include information about the superweapon without it feeling too wordy. I’ve just about hurt my brain trying to do that.

In the meantime, I’ve reworked my more ‘geographic’ crawl in a way that implies (but doesn’t state!) that Luke had a mission beyond just looking for the first Jedi Temple:

The Republic is in crisis.
While mapping uncharted
Imperial space, the legendary
Luke Skywalker has vanished.

Desperate to know the
full power of the Imperial
FIRST ORDER which
controls these regions,
the Senate supports a band
of rebels in their quest to
return the last Jedi and
his vital intelligence to
the Republic.

Learning of a clue to the
Jedi’s location, this brave
RESISTANCE has sent
their most daring pilot
across enemy lines,
unaware of the sinister
forces lurking in the
darkness beyond…

The reasoning behind this crawl is based on my trying to make sense of the maps in this movie. For example, it is a well-known fact in the EU that the galaxy has a vast unexplored region, and this is where the Empire was exiled. However, this is never stated in the movies. Also, we are told that the Resistance doesn’t have enough information to locate Luke with just the piece of the map given by Lor San Tekka. Since the piece of the map is quite a large section of what looks like the entire galaxy, and since it is established in TLJ that this isn’t a map of another galaxy, then it means that Tekka’s piece is part of this vast unexplored region of Imperial space.

Also, since R2’s map has a specifically-shaped missing piece and also includes a continuation of the orange dotted line from Tekka’s piece, R2’s map cannot be merely an old bit of Imperial data. It almost has to be that Luke completed this portion of the map and either gave it to R2 before vanishing, or completed the whole map and split the sections between Tekka and R2. It seems unlikely that Tekka came up with his part of the map independently of Luke, though that is still a possibility. Either way, the almost-complete map in R2’s backup memory must have been a relatively recent addition since it has evidence of being part of his search for the Jedi temple.

All of this implies that the unknown regions of the galaxy are now much less unknown after the events of TFA, which really should be mentioned in the text of the movie somewhere. Focusing on this part of Luke’s activity in the crawl allows for this, as well as orienting the viewer in the galaxy for maybe the first time in the saga.

ZaneFlare92 said:

Well I’ll defiantly will be looking forward to your second version.

How defiantly?

That’s certainly an interesting take on crawl. It reads like three separate ideas, which is probably needed to establish everything that’s going on in TFA, but I feel like the paragraphs of a Star Wars crawl should flow from one idea to the next in a strong and logical manner.

The original TFA crawl does this in a way:

Luke is gone.
Because of this the Empire 2.0 now exists.
They want vanished Luke dead for some reason.

Because of this, Leia has formed the Rebellion 2.0.
She wants Luke to solve everything.
A Republic exists again by the way, and is helping.

Leia sends her best man to find a clue on Jakku.
The planet’s name is Important Somehow.
Pan down to movie.

The ideas don’t make much sense in themselves, or are derivative of the OT, but they at least form a narrative.
The ideas in your crawl do connect, but I’m having trouble following the flow from one idea to the next.

TV’s Frink said:

SilverWook said:

We have a forum for such things.
https://originaltrilogy.com/discussion/Feedback-Forum/id/5

I’m pretty sure, based on past responses, it would be a waste of time.

They have top men working on it.

TV’s Frink said:

Because markdown is the dumbest text editor I’ve ever seen and I don’t understand why every other forum refuses to use it but this one.

In fact it’s so irritating it’s got me unable to properly construct a sentence about it.

So you mean that you ****** DO ******* understand why every other forum refuses to use it but this one.

TV’s Frink said:

I still just see some people trying really hard to dislike certain things about TLJ.

I see Dre view the world of Star Wars as if it were a real, physical place, and TLJ holding up well with this filter.
I see Dom view TLJ as a movie separate from the other movies, with messages and characters, and it holding up well with this filter.

“Princess of the Rebellion”

I guess Zahn will need to take a number.

I agree with all these criticisms, and I definitely want to keep some version of this last paragraph.

There is just too much information. I want to talk about why the Jedi are important, how the First Order has gained power, what the political situation actually is, etc, etc. But it all feels clunky as you say.

So here’s a version that focuses just on the geography of the situation, and though I’ve taken a few liberties with some things I think it makes a lot of sense:

The Republic is in crisis.
While searching the galaxy
for a mythical Jedi temple,
Luke Skywalker has vanished.

Fearing his capture by the
Imperial FIRST ORDER
which patrols this unknown
space, the Senate has
secretly mobilized a band
of Rebellion fighters to
follow the path of the
last Jedi and return him
to the Republic.

Learning of a map to
his last known location,
this brave RESISTANCE
sends their most daring
pilot across enemy lines,
unaware of the sinister
forces lurking in the
darkness beyond…

It’s actually hard for me to find big things to actively dislike in the story of TLJ despite my nitpicks.
I like what they did with Luke’s character
I like the message of Canto Bight
I like the flawed leadership of Holdo
I like the arcs of pretty much every character

It’s just that there is too much in this movie, even with a 2.5 hour runtime, and nothing gets room to breathe or even get fully explored. Combine this with its overall tonal issues and it feels like I’m a stone being thrown across the surface of a lake, never slowing down enough to become immersed in the world.