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NeverarGreat

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11-Sep-2012
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6-Jul-2025
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Post
#1225446
Topic
The Existential Thread
Time

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.

Post
#1225426
Topic
The Existential Thread
Time

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.

Post
#1225400
Topic
The Empire Strikes Back bluray regrade (LUTs Released)
Time

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.

Post
#1225243
Topic
Episode VIII : The Last Jedi - Discussion * <strong><em>SPOILER THREAD</em></strong> *
Time

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.

Post
#1224911
Topic
Episode VIII : The Last Jedi - Discussion * <strong><em>SPOILER THREAD</em></strong> *
Time

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.

Post
#1224838
Topic
The Force Awakens: Starlight (V1.1 Released!)
Time

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.

Post
#1224447
Topic
The Force Awakens: Starlight (V1.1 Released!)
Time

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.

Post
#1224403
Topic
Episode IX: The Rise Of Skywalker - Discussion * <strong><em>SPOILER THREAD</em></strong> *
Time

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.

Post
#1223978
Topic
Episode VIII : The Last Jedi - Discussion * <strong><em>SPOILER THREAD</em></strong> *
Time

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.

Post
#1223704
Topic
The Force Awakens: Starlight (V1.1 Released!)
Time

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…

Post
#1223167
Topic
The Last Jedi: Official Review and Opinions Thread ** SPOILERS **
Time

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.

Post
#1223075
Topic
The Last Jedi: Legendary (Released)
Time

Hal 9000 said:

The Internet has changed since the days of 2005ish. It seems that the initial reaction to this particular fan edit of TLJ has been to conflate it with the no-women cut, the petition to remake the movie, and other unhelpful garbage.
Even though I think anyone who listens to my commentary track would easily see that those are far from my intentions, I probably could have made the edit’s documentation a little more forthcoming about what the edit is NOT trying to do. Honestly, it didn’t even occur to me that such a thing would be necessary, given what fan edits have been up to this point. With this film’s reader-response dialogue, I should have anticipated the need for doing so.
I have added an addendum to the “intention” portion of the documentation, in the hopes that this project not be so easily assumed the worst of due to an intertextual sense of hatred toward the film for morally questionable reasons.
People are right to point out that most of the changes I’ve made are nitpicky and unnecessary. Of course they are; I wouldn’t have produced this edit if there wasn’t some sort of ‘critical mass’ of changes to get it started. But, while I am at it, I’ll take care of things here and there. I am not going to alter the changelist, as I could type at length for each change. The reality is that people who are predisposed to view any fan edit as anathema will reject it out of hand, and the only way for those interested to assess it is to invest the time into viewing it themselves. It’s merely an alternative; fan edits are destructive of the original version.
As my commentary track makes clear, I like this film a great deal, which is why I want to produce an edit like this, as opposed to doing nothing. I’m preaching to the choir, but wanted to reflect on the initial reception this edit has gotten on the Internet at large.

Sadly, a lot of people will have the knee-jerk reaction to a fan edit that it’s merely an exercise in cutting jokes and unwanted characters, when it could be (and often is) so much more, like reconstructing deleted scenes, bringing back character arcs, and restoring the score.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that fanedits should not be about killing what you hate, but saving what you love. 😉

Post
#1222731
Topic
Episode VIII : The Last Jedi - Discussion * <strong><em>SPOILER THREAD</em></strong> *
Time

Chewielewis said:

What if Holdo WAS a just feminist manhater who withheld information from Poe simply because she personally didn’t like him. Does this make it a bad film?

Because this is EXACTLY how the audience is supposed to feel in this situation. Angry that we aren’t being given the information by someone who appears to be the wrong person for the job. Everything about her character design and introduction is supposed to illicit that response.

I’d say it casts the Resistance in a bad light when we should be rooting for it to survive.
It might be one reason why so many people didn’t particularly care what happened by the end of the movie, or what would happen in Episode 9.

(and I think she’s not a feminist manhater, she just made bad decisions)

Post
#1222667
Topic
The Force Awakens: Starlight (V1.1 Released!)
Time

Just another set of ideas for the crawl:

The last Jedi has vanished.
Without this vision of hope,
some in the Republic favor
a return to Imperial rule.

With an Imperial First
Order growing in power,
the weakened Republic
secretly enlists the aid
of Rebellion extremists,
already investigating
rumors of a terrifying
new superweapon, to
find the legendary Jedi.

Discovering a clue to
his location, this newly
formed RESISTANCE
sends their most daring
pilot on a mission into
Imperial space, unaware
of sinister forces lurking
in the darkness beyond…

Post
#1222565
Topic
Episode VIII : The Last Jedi - Discussion * <strong><em>SPOILER THREAD</em></strong> *
Time

DrDre said:

TV’s Frink said:

Once again it boils down to “I didn’t get what I wanted.”

Actually it doesn’t. Neverar clearly feels that certain plot developments in TLJ are lacking, and has provided several examples of how it could have easily been changed, such that it makes more sense, and I agree with him. This doesn’t imply that he or I wanted the story to strictly play out that way, just that it doesn’t work for us as it is now, and that alternative story lines are not difficult to come up with that don’t have these issues.

Thank you.

Post
#1222548
Topic
Episode VIII : The Last Jedi - Discussion * <strong><em>SPOILER THREAD</em></strong> *
Time

DominicCobb said:

The extent of the equation is simply “time is running out.” Nothing more complex than that.

If they wanted to do a simple ‘time is running out’ plot, they could have had the First Order take a planet hostage and say it would be razed in X hours/days unless the Resistance surrendered.

Badabingbadaboom done.

Post
#1222547
Topic
<strong>4K77</strong> - Released
Time

BobaJett said:

From what I can view of my fragmented download, the one thing that really caught me off guard were the Tatooine scenes. Was everything really that yellow in the theatres? If so, I guess Ive been conditioned by all the home releases that give it a more natural look instead of the extreme yellow cast over everything.

The home releases were definitely graded to be more muted in their grading, for example Tatooine was quite yellow and the cantina was quite red in the Tech prints compared to later releases.