NeverarGreat

actual lol

Red is the tactically superior choice, since it isn’t blinding in low-light situations.

However, my preference is the light blue of the original film. It’s just the best-looking of all the effects to me.

Hal 9000 said:

As Rey hears the voices of Jedi past, Mace Windu speaks, “I sense a plot to destroy the Jedi.”

Anakin’s voice joins the others in helping Rey: “You’re a Jedi too? Pleased to meet you.”

For everyone arguing that Rey’s power in TFA wasn’t unusual…the creator of that movie made a sequel to it where he acknowledges that it is unusual and explains it by tying her by blood to the most powerful Force user in the galaxy. I don’t remember the name of that movie, it might come to me later.

Regardless, TFA is designed to raise questions about Rey’s parentage and her unusual affinity to the Force. Otherwise TLJ wouldn’t try to explain it by tying it to a Force equation involving Kylo and JJ wouldn’t have tried to make her the spawn of Space Satan.

This isn’t to forgive TFA’s choices - a movie should stand on its own merits. The real issue with Rey’s power in that film is that it requires extra context to appreciate, and not because it’s necessarily unusually strong based on the prior films, but because it feels unearned.

Take the scene of Luke levitating a saber in the Wampa cave. Someone watching this film after the first one could complain that this is a bogus and overpowered new ability, but the scene sells that this power is the only thing that will save Luke’s life and he struggles mightily to achieve it. The music and camerawork, the sense of peril, all were necessary to generate the need for this new power.

Rey in contrast is never in mortal peril in her moments of crisis. Rather, in each one she chooses to pit herself against a superior opponent and comes out on top, sometimes to her own astonishment. And this makes all the difference in terms of earning a power versus merely acquiring it.

The final five minutes of RO is far better than everything else in that movie (which is pretty sub-par), but Solo is consistently bland, thus making people feel like RO was a better movie.

TestingOutTheTest said:

Wait a minute, what would explain the slaughtered people if the planet Kylo and his Knights are on if said planet is Exegol?

Maybe the bodies are meant to imply the death of her friends in the Resistance over Exegol? Spitballing here of course, but if that was made a bit more clear somehow it would be a nice touch.

Just adding a suggestion here from Hal’s TFA thread - putting some rain on Exegol at some point would tie the location to Rey’s vision from Maz’s castle.

It might make more sense to introduce Exegol with heavy rain in TROS, just until Kylo enters the complex. That way nothing drastic need be done to the vision to make it connect.

I just got to watch the last episode, and I’ve gotta say, that was certainly a…thing…that happened.

First, the Good:

The opening was solid, and the cruiser incursion was pretty good. The fight between Gideon and Mando was so much better than the previous fights with the Beskar spear, the glowing of the metal really helped sell the danger of the Darksaber. The Dark Troopers were similarly intimidating and well-utilized in the episode. Also, it was nice to see an all-female strike team in action. Din and the child were wonderful, and him taking off his helmet wasn’t cheapened by its removal in the previous episode for me since it felt like an organic process of slowly opening up to others. Luke’s role was good…on paper. Which leads me to

The Bad:

I’m not going to comment on Luke’s physical appearance here, since it’s been discussed enough. Rather, the far bigger problem for me was the way in which he was introduced.

From the moment the X-wing touches down on the cruiser, we suspect it’s Luke, even casual viewers such as my girlfriend who immediately asked ‘That can’t be Luke, can it? Is it Luke?!’ The question is almost immediately answered as we are treated to the cloaked figure and then the green lightsaber as he mows down dozens of droids leading to the bridge. Cut back to the bridge where we see everyone watching on the screens as this guy lays waste to the droids, and finally he arrives in the last hallway where we have another action scene of him destroying machinery in highly theatrical ways. Finally the doors open to reveal…Luke. The guy we revealed two scenes ago. He stands calmly, almost serenely, as our heroes behold him in almost religious awe. Artoo is by his side like an attendant cherubim, and Luke says the proper words to receive the child.

So yeah, this feels peak fanservice to me, and not in a good way. How much better it would have been if we had seen only the X-wing arriving, then had the droids continue their assault on the bridge? They might bring their weapons to bear on the door, and as it glowed red hot from their assault and they began to break through we would finally hear a commotion behind them and they would stop their assault. Din moves forward to investigate. Through a hole in the melting door he would see flashes and blaster fire. Could that be the sound of a lightsaber? Finally, a bright light flashes through the still-melted door accompanied by the squeal of a final dying droid, and is quickly drawn back.

Silence.

Din moves to open the door, his hand over the button. One of the others protests in fear, not knowing who or what is on the other side. Din lowers his hand. Then a deep rumble permeates the bridge, and the door moves of its own, to reveal a small, cloaked figure, his hood up. Behind him lie smoking remains. He lowers his hood. “Did someone call for a Jedi?” His eyes move over the room, settling on Gideon. “I’m sorry, were those your droids?” The child peeks out from behind a panel. Luke catches himself, as if he’s seen a ghost.

You get the idea. It’s still fanservice, but it doesn’t waste time with mindless lightsaber action. The focus should still be on Din and the others, not on badass Luke. Now if they go with a somber, religious-icon Luke, fine, but I fear that they did it for the same reason they made Rouge One Leia into a Madonna-like figure - they are just too afraid of audience rejection to give them any character at all.

Believe it or not, I liked the episode overall. The core of the story remains, and it did a lot right. It just makes the parts where it stumbles that much more obvious.

DuracellEnergizer said:

OT, PT, & ST fanboys hold at least one trait in common — a penchant for excusing the flaws in their favoured trilogy.

More of an observation than an opinion, really.

DuracellEnergizer said:

NeverarGreat said:

act on instinct said:

Mocata said:

Yeah but it’s less like the reaction to mass murder and more like a case of indigestion.

Could say the same or worse about Leia to her home planet. It’s not Rabbit Hole.

To be fair, we never saw her reaction to its actual destruction, only getting back to her hours later.

Nevertheless, this is a failure of SW '77.

Or just a deliberate creative decision. Leia is still technically a supporting character to Luke, so it makes sense to merely imply some character moments. After all, they shot a reaction for her planet’s destruction but chose to cut it, probably to keep the focus on Luke.

act on instinct said:

Mocata said:

Yeah but it’s less like the reaction to mass murder and more like a case of indigestion.

Could say the same or worse about Leia to her home planet. It’s not Rabbit Hole.

To be fair, we never saw her reaction to its actual destruction, only getting back to her hours later.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ua2v64mh9o

Some cool alternate takes of Luke and Yoda here. Also, I think there’s a new low angle of the Super Star Destroyer for a second.

It would be really neat if someone put together all these little alternate takes/deleted moments and made an edit with them like they did in War of the Stars.

DuracellEnergizer said:

I mean, how much more effective would it have been if Palpatine had whipped out Windu’s lightsaber when confronting Yoda, only to contemptuously toss it aside later in the fight.

That would have been great.

daveinthecave said:

StarkillerAG said:

This, 100%. I like Yoda’s prequel arc in theory, but having him swing around a lightsaber while jumping like an idiot was a huge mistake that devalues his character. Hal’s prequel edits are some of my favorite ones, at least partially because he removed every instance of Yoda using a lightsaber.

I don’t understand this point of view. I can see why it might break your suspension of disbelief, but how does it devalue his character in any way? We know that light-sabers are the weapon of the Jedi, and building one is supposedly some kind of right-of-passage according to Vader in ROTJ, so why wouldn’t Yoda use one?

‘What does God need with a spaceship?’

The image a lot of people had of Yoda and the Emperor in the original films was of beings who had no need for traditional weapons, since they could shoot lightning and lift X-wings with their minds.

It would be like Gandalf and Sauruman fighting in Orthanc with swords. Sure, Gandalf had a sword and used it on occasion, but Sauruman didn’t and he was seen as Gandalf’s superior. Their battle was one of pure magical will.

So when Yoda and Dooku pulled out their swords to go at it, this implied that swords still held some importance as to the winner of the fight. It’s even worse with Yoda against Palpatine. The fact that either of them thought that a swordfight would be decisive shows how small these characters really are.

I think people are reading too much into a line. “When I left you” doesn’t match very well the Mustafar encounter anyway, since Obi-wan did the leaving. It could easily be interpreted as Anakin leaving the teachings of the Jedi, having failed to gain mastery in their ways, but he’s now a master of the ways of the Sith.

WXM said:

I’ll put this last one from my looking around, one that puzzles me most. I don’t know if these are real mountains or purely effects, but regardless it’s strange how the 4k frame is without as much detail…

https://caps-a-holic.com/c.php?d1=5240&d2=15006&s1=48928&s2=156526&x=665&y=172&i=16&a=2&go=1&l=1

I don’t suppose anyone knows if those are real mountains — is real footage that would’ve been scanned at 4k as claimed — or just pure effects/CG?

That’s a composite effects shot, like most of the shots in these movies.

Looking through all of the screencaps, every effects shot has a degraining and sharpening filter. There are only a few shots here which aren’t effects shots, and for every one of these there is a definite improvement to the image in color and detail. It’s just a shame that the composites, which predominate the films, are degraded in quality with flattened highlights and edge enhancement which makes each element look like a paper cutout.

I’ll definitely be giving these official 4K versions a miss.

Ed Slushie said:

As much as I still love and appreciate SW77/ A New Hope, I’ve found it to be one of the least… watchable of all the Star Wars movies. So much of it has aged horribly. The space battles feature ugly composite shots that get repeated over and over again, Han is so blatantly sexist that he uses the term “female advice” as an insult, the lightsabers look incredibly fake (and not even in a consistent or stylized way), and worst of all: some of the extras have mullets.

Which version are you watching? I ask because I’ve found that the lightsaber effects have gotten worse each time they’ve been recomposited (probably due to degradation of the elements), whereas 4K77 still has the original compositing and it looks great.

You know, after writing the 50-odd page rough draft of my TROS rewrite earlier this year and starting the second draft, I happened to sit down and watch Avatar, and actually got a bit irked that they had already done Kylo Ren’s character arc.

Speaking of Rey vs Kylo, my thinking has changed dramatically over these past months. In the begining (and in my rough draft), Kylo and Rey move towards each other in characterization, with Rey becoming a bit darker and Kylo turning back toward the light. There was also the implication of romantic feeling between them carried over from TLJ. However, this whole thing still felt rather wrong. Kylo is still a much darker and more troubled character than Rey even at her worst, and any romance would be founded on the toxic beginnings of TFA and TLJ. It’s not that such a relationship couldn’t work, but it felt like a bad message.

My current thinking is that Kylo’s redemption, if it occurs, must not involve Rey; the characters simply aren’t meant for each other. Rey could still interact and fight with Kylo, but he is not the antagonist to her character like Vader was to Luke. In my current thinking, Rey learns that her focus on Kylo as her antagonist is warping her reality whereas her true focus should be on finding other people like her who have been awakened by the Force to resist the First Order, and using the lessons and failures of the past to build a new Jedi Order.

I don’t find it obvious at all that Yoda is speaking of his failure in a grand, centuries-long sense. Sure, he could be, but it’s equally possible that he’s referring merely to his failure to kill Palpatine, which was the interpretation I had watching the film.

Ultimately, interpretations are formed based on the filmmaking, and there’s little to suggest Yoda’s thought process here. Minutes before this he was self-assuredly walking into the Senate saying how Palpatine’s rule was about to end and his faith in Vader and the Dark Side was misplaced. These words may be bluster, but at the same time they don’t reveal a deep conflict within Yoda. He seems to only question himself once he loses the fight, at which point he has decided to run off into exile before the speeder has even left the air parking lot. Maybe if we saw him gazing out at the still-burning Jedi Temple, the virtual camera lingering on the sadness in his eyes as he comes to a conclusion, it would be clearer that he views his failure as something more than losing a single fight. But that’s not in the film, and I don’t see why I should do Lucas’s job for him.

RogueLeader said:

It is starting to feel like Filoni and Favreau are just playing with Star Wars action figures, rather than writing interesting characters.

Perfectly said.

https://imgur.com/gallery/Lwzyu0w

I dunno, it feels to me like Rey should have been the one to convince Luke to come back. It would be like the ghost of Obi-wan going to Yoda’s hut for a pep talk before helping Luke destroy the Death Star.

If Luke had gone through with burning down the tree, believing that the Texts were still inside, then breaking down in tears alone after realizing what he’d done, that for me would have been far more powerful and kept Rey as the central figure in Luke’s return.

Ed Slushie said:

Has it occurred to anyone else that, if Grogu really was raised in the Jedi Temple, there’s a decent chance that he actually is the son of Yoda and Yaddle?

That was my first thought, which is indisputably canon for me now.