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.
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.
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.
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 😃
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.
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.
If I were to do that, it would end up being a complete re-imagining of the sequel trilogy with different characters, factions, and themes. Not that I haven’t considered such a project, but in fanwriting I find it more fun and interesting to work within the constraints of the pre-existing characters and story, which is more a creative exercise than an imaginative one.
Impressive work! This would make a fine addition to any TFA edit.
Honestly, neither version of the lines changes their underlying inanity. shrug
But she’s already in Episode 1.
After becoming a Skywalker in TROS she uses her teleporting abilities to move through time, changing her name to Shmi and completing the circle of the entire saga.
Looks good to me 😃
Looks pretty good. I have a couple nitpicks, like the door behind her is a little blurry and Rey looks to be a bit less contrasted than her surroundings. Other than that though, I wouldn’t have thought twice about seeing that in the finished movie.
Have Ben live, Leia’s vision of his death changes, they get married, Reylos unite! Everyone wins.
Have Ben live, but slip away into exile to go be a wandering Robin Hood-type who tries to redeem himself by helping the downtrodden across the galaxy because there’s no way he would be accepted with Rey’s Resistance buddies after what he’s done
This is the obvious answer. Shame there’s no way to implement it.
Yeah, I changed my avatar. Really it was just changing something for the sake of changing it and remarking about it like it made any difference whatsoever.
So I chose an image at random.
I’m trying to remember, was Anakin’s crystal broken in half at the end of TLJ, or was it just cracked with a split body?
“Nothing that a little off-screen duct tape won’t fix” -JJ, probably.
Another thing which places Star Wars firmly in the fantasy/surrealist camp is that the OT never showed a scientist or engineer, or at least never showed one at work. The closest we get to a truly STEM profession is mechanic or technician. The story is focused on soldiers, pilots, generals, captains, emperors, farmers, smugglers, bounty hunters, crime lords, peasants (droids), monks, masters, and all manner of human and alien civilians. It’s very much a medieval view of a world dressed in the illusion of technological sophistication.
That would be interesting to know. I mainly base my conjectures on the McQuarrie artwork that shows monolithic stones:
JEDIT: I found the part in The Making of Star Wars which discusses it on page 45:
McQuarrie: “We (Lucas and McQuarrie) had quite a thorough idea of what it was like. To me it was really one of these seven wonders of the galaxy, a pile of giant disks that were so dense that you almost had the feeling that there was less gravity inside this thing. It wasn’t fully a real place.”
There’s more on page 263 when it comes to translating it to the McQuarrie art to the matte painting:
“I had done squares, almost Mayan-like. I put it together, showed it to George…and he sat there in dead silence, which means he doesn’t like something. Then he said, ‘Would it be possible to make it look more like Ralph’s?’ So I went back and repainted it to make it look exactly like Ralph’s painting.”
I assume by ‘squares’, he means that he had broken up the solid stone disks into smaller stone pieces as more of an architectural structure rather than a monumental one.