NeverarGreat

Matt.F said:

Dre, you state “there is no doubt the First Order control the galaxy.”

I, and others claim that there is ‘some’ doubt!

The second sentence of the crawl says ‘now deploy’ meaning present to the events of TLJ. Plus barely any time has passed since the destruction of the Hosnian system.

But most pertinently we don’t see the FO controlling anything. They don’t have a presence on any planet. The Empire had troops stationed on a total backwater like Tatooine but the FO aren’t on any of the planets we see, so yes there is ‘some doubt’ over your “total control of the galaxy” claim.

Obviously the First Order doesn’t have military control of the galaxy yet, that’s explicitly stated in the crawl! The point is that the first words in the crawl are “The First Order reigns”. What does that mean? That means they’re in charge! Even if they aren’t in military control of anything yet, as Rey says it’s only a matter of weeks before they do.

I think that one of the big weaknesses of this new trilogy is that we don’t get to see the big picture, so we have to rely on things like exposition and character dialogue. But this dialogue is quite clear.

Another thought related to the idea that the Mon Cal cruiser and bombing fleet is the final form of support from the Republic:

Vice Admiral Holdo could be explicitly identified as part of the Republic military.

For backstory purposes, she was only to be the one in charge of delivering the ships to the Resistance, except that when the Hosnian System was destroyed she became a member of the Resistance by default.

This would make Poe’s suspicion of her more believable, and make her role in the story more meaningful - she’s the last of the New Republic (as opposed to the Resistance) military leadership. Even her sacrifice is more poetic, since she’s more explicitly avenging the destruction of the New Republic.

yotsuya said:

Many comments here have taken the First Order superiority so far to be that they are in charge. There is no evidence of that.

“The FIRST ORDER reigns. Having decimated the peaceful Republic, Supreme Leader Snoke now deploys his merciless legions to seize military control of the galaxy.”

Reign:
a : royal authority : sovereignty

b : the dominion, sway, or influence of one resembling a monarch

To subvert expectations, you must first establish those expectations. This is one of the things that bothers me about TLJ, since either way it’s looking to the past instead of finding a new way forward. There’s no rule that you have to have a planet-destroying superweapon, or an AT-AT battle on a white planet, or a confrontation in a throne room that mirrors ROTJ.

It reminds me of my first attempts at writing an alternate PT. Even after writing the synopses of dozens of concepts that I thought were unique and brilliant, it was only upon later reflection that I realized that my mind was still subconsciously following the OT plot. It took a lot of time and thought and writing to find something genuinely original to say about this universe, and there just wasn’t enough time for JJ or Rian to do this.

Yeah, I got it to play in VLC by changing the demuxer to h.264, but it really should be in a more useable format.

Handman said:

8mm. A format of unusually high quality.

Even Master Yoda doesn’t have a quality that high.

The settings would need to be adjusted for each shot.

Sunset would be an easier time than night for sure, but since I just finished it, here’s the final video for the scene at night:

https://mega.nz/#!2JNmTaYK!F7r_Ozv2KWMkxPJVSXdPquFV6G32ApoA0kL8QDD0GJI

I don’t even know what to do about the first shot, since there are bright reflections in the water and it’s clearly mid day. The rest of the shots are some level of workable, though the closeups of Anakin are very rough. It might work better to just cut the longer shot out entirely since you’re just getting rid of creep factor, if you decide to go with this. Oh, and maybe boost the green and blue in the shadows, since it’s still a bit red.

For comparison purposes, here’s what I came up with for the sunset scene way back when this was first being worked on:

http://www.framecompare.com/image-compare/screenshotcomparison/00JNNN8U

The closeup goes way too red.

Here’s a test of the scene at night:
https://vimeo.com/250045636
Password: sand

I had to selectively brighten our heroes and key out the water, which was only moderately successful.

Hal 9000 said:

Here is the nighttime scene for anyone to take a stab at. I’ll edit the prior post to include it:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1ijkUtOTbBsQu3OChi0hRm9FMjU3tdq0K

I’ll take a look at it and see what I can do. I recall doing some mockups of the scene at sunset, which is easier to achieve than night. Day for night often requires some artificial brightening of just the faces in a scene for it to look at all reasonable.

For the Death Star prototype, have you considered replacing it with some sort of Imperial shipyard constructing their new fleet? That would tie into ANH (“It would take half the Imperial starfleet and more firepower than I’ve…”) and it would save the Death Star reveal for Rogue One. Someone skilled in CGI could probably manage it.

Alternately, if you wanted to keep a very early part of the Death Star construction, maybe you could contact this guy and his brother to see if they could provide you with footage from their already existent model: https://vimeo.com/246936220

I’d like to see it!

Also, in terms of a general update, I got a 5.1 speaker setup for Christmas 😃

I thought there was a good point about villains in this article:

“Our current reality is a complicated one, colored in shades of gray, and we’re well past the fairy-tale idea that in this world there is good and there is evil just because. Movie villains that are simply cackling wrongdoers in this day and age register as false.”

Maybe this is one reason why people have so much of a problem with paltry and secondhand Snoke character elements lifted from the Emperor - the Emperor was a villain from a more morally polarized age.

Mrebo said:

I think there is something to that persuasion stuff but I agree with you, NeverarGreat. I think Adams used his own tricks on himself without realizing it. I think some of his ideas as dangerously wrong - like his “Law of Slow-Moving Disasters.”

Especially when he said this just a few days ago:

“Do you remember when experts said withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord would be a catastrophe? President Trump did it anyway because he didn’t like the deal. I’ve seen no indication that exiting the deal made the climate worse.”

This garbage is even worse than Trump’s lies to me, because he really should know better.

I like the sabers based off of rotating reflective sticks. Makes them look dangerous. It doesn’t hurt that the actors had to be very careful around them to make sure they didn’t break.

For that matter, I’d be all for going back to them using blasters made from real guns.

There’s some real consternation on set when the gunfights are that loud.

TV’s Frink said:

No, however, the creator of Dilbert is, to put it gently, an MRA asshole.

I forgot that he supported Milo Yiannopoulos.

Words fail.

Mrebo said:

The creator of Dilbert writes a lot about Trump’s supposed persuasion techniques. I don’t know. It does seem to work great as a distraction.

He’s a devotee of the Trump: Master Persuader hypothesis.

He predicted that Trump would win ‘in a landslide’, that it would be pretty embarrassing to be anti-Trump near the end of this year, that he would pivot to being presidential before he was elected (then predicted this again right after he was elected), that he would soon have world leaders eating out of his hand, that he would raise the public discourse so much that anyone attacking him would be laughed out of the room, that he wouldn’t attack Syria (he launched an attack the next day), that Trump would quickly build a wall and make Mexico pay for it, and that Trump would unleash some brilliant persuasive weapon against ISIS. This is just the stuff that I recall off the top of my head.

Scott Adams hopes that you don’t go back and review his past predictions, most of which turned out to be laughably inaccurate. But he’s so wedded to the idea of Trump as a brilliant person that he’s gone from being a fun contrarian popular with nerdy Dilbert engineer types to cultivating a petri dish of alt-right trolls in his comments sections.

As a long-time reader of his blog who occasionally ventures back out of morbid curiosity, what he’s done with the place is beyond pathetic.

I think that, for these new TIE and X-wing shots to work, they would need to be created with the technical limitations of 1977 in mind.

For example, in this shot

the TIE moves in a very smooth roll to the left, whereas the ships in the trench would usually only move from side to side.

Mrebo said:

moviefreakedmind said:

Mrebo said:

There are things he has done that I think were good, others were a mixed bag, and some bad. I personally know people who aren’t embarrassingly ignorant nor malevolent that support him. Many of them discount the crazier things he says and/or does.

I’m going to need specific examples of the good things and specific examples of the crazy things they discount.

Like Frink said. Most of the things on that list I gave I would say are good, some I have more mixed/negative feelings on. Pretty much all his outlandish statements are discounted by many supporters. Some just really like heated rhetoric aimed at ‘the enemy.’

Many of his supporters believe that his twitter rants are just an act to draw the media’s attention away from the ‘serious’ work of his administration.

That gives him way to much credit of course.

DominicCobb said:

Two great takes on Luke Skywalker here:

https://www.zacbertschy.com/blog/2017/12/29/my-hero-luke-skywalker

https://www.tor.com/2018/01/04/luke-skywalker-isnt-supposed-to-be-nice/

and a cool article on the score:

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/a-field-guide-to-the-musical-leitmotifs-of-star-wars

Good articles, and particularly the last one in illuminating one of the reasons Rian chose to portray Luke wielding his blue lightsaber in the confrontation instead of his green one.

You’ll just have to make do with hibernation mode.

TV’s Frink said:

Not sure if cute or horrifying.

But this is worse.

https://imgur.com/gallery/LdrO6

HerekittykittyX said:

TV’s Frink said:

HerekittykittyX said:

the fans who haven’t seen the prequels.

Those lucky, lucky people.

Agree but if you watch the clone wars it enhances the prequels

If you watch all three prequels together it enhances the prequels since it takes 1/3 the time to watch the prequels.

Gaffer Tape said:

Honestly, I feel TFA did resolve the whole parents issue. “They’re never coming back.” Bam. Done. Endgame. Nothing else needs be said. TFA never plays up their identities as a mystery. They’re nothing more than a plot device used to hold Rey back, to keep her from “accepting the call.” They’re an anchor around her neck, pulling her back to Jakku, and causing her to push away the actual family she is cultivating: Finn, Han, Chewie. So I honestly have no idea why fans obsessed over this for two years. I just rolled my eyes and crossed my fingers that no one would be stupid enough to ruin all of that and make them Luke Skywalker or some other such nonsense.

Obviously TLJ does tease the audience with this, with the expectations the fans have. And I’m okay with it here since it ultimately just serves as the perfect “pulling the rug out” moment, both for Rey and for the fans who pointlessly obsessed over something they could never hope to be right about. TFA didn’t create this obsession over who Rey’s parents are. The fans did.

Exactly. And that’s why it feels so weird. If it’s only a plot point limited to Rey avoiding the call to adventure, why toy with it further?

As to accents in Star Wars, as someone who is from the American South I found Red Leader’s accent in ‘wait for my signal to start your run’ to be very strange in the original movie. The accent of the Canto Bight alien was also off-putting, and I think it would give the scene much more of an alien feel if he was subtitled with alien dialogue.