I can’t wait until the Force Lightning color is fixed; it was the main reason I found this movie unwatchable.
Any chance I could get a link?
What I took out of RoS which I really liked the idea of was how it explained Palpatines “stike me down” lines both in RoS and return of the jedi. I like to think that meant that if Luke struck him down in return of the jedi with anger he would of possessed Luke the same way Rey would of been possessed if she stuck him down in RoS through the sith ritual.
This is actually something I don’t like about TRoS. The literal nature of a possible spirit transfer being the real motivation behind one of the crucial moments of the original trilogy cheapens the moral implications for me. In Return of the Jedi, I always thought Palpatine was saying that anger and hatred were corrupting and destructive forces, and that even if Palpatine were to die, he still would have won by corrupting Luke. I realize that doesn’t literally make a ton of sense given Palpatine’s ambition and ruling an empire, but it makes sense in the context of the morality tale that the original trilogy was. This added motivation means there’s a reason for Luke to resist temptation other than showing poise and maturity in the face of evil.
I’m totally with you.
To me Palpatine was always such a great character because he was a fanatic of the Dark Side. He was strong, yes, but he wanted an apprentice capable of surpassing him. Even in the prequels, when Anakin finds out that he’s Sidious, he smiles at Anakin becoming angry. Later, during the fight with Yoda, he’s excited because Anakin will become more powerful than him. He knows that he could be killed, and he knows that this act would strengthen the Dark Side.
Right now… he’s just a Dragon Ball villain. A Cell. Or a Majin Bu. I’ll steal your body so that I can live forever. (On the other hand we could say that in the prequels he’s obsessed with immortality, and that in ROTJ he clearly mistrusts Vader, and so he probably should have a contingency plan about that, being the mastermind that he is)
“They think inward, only about themselves.”
This idea that Sidious, the exemplar of Sith philosophy, would be so selfless that he would risk his life just to see another rise above him in power, feels totally at odds with his character. In a strange way, the Jedi seem more obsessed with selfishly gaining immortality than the Sith.
Maybe I’m just not seeing something (and it’s definitely a discussion that should happen in another thread) but the Sith stealing bodies to live forever is entirely on brand for me.
What I took out of RoS which I really liked the idea of was how it explained Palpatines “stike me down” lines both in RoS and return of the jedi. I like to think that meant that if Luke struck him down in return of the jedi with anger he would of possessed Luke the same way Rey would of been possessed if she stuck him down in RoS through the sith ritual.
This is actually something I don’t like about TRoS. The literal nature of a possible spirit transfer being the real motivation behind one of the crucial moments of the original trilogy cheapens the moral implications for me. In Return of the Jedi, I always thought Palpatine was saying that anger and hatred were corrupting and destructive forces, and that even if Palpatine were to die, he still would have won by corrupting Luke. I realize that doesn’t literally make a ton of sense given Palpatine’s ambition and ruling an empire, but it makes sense in the context of the morality tale that the original trilogy was. This added motivation means there’s a reason for Luke to resist temptation other than showing poise and maturity in the face of evil.
My man.
Also was part of palpable plan: Luke tries to kill him, Vader would protect and start duel. If Vader wins, Luke threat done. If Luke won, he could manipulate him since he started the dark path. So simple.
I hate the sith transfer thing. No wonder Lucas didn’t go to the opening. Lol.
It seems pretty risky to bank on Vader protecting you when he was actively plotting your destruction in the previous film. It’s actually rather strange that Vader protects Palpatine. On the spectrum of ‘protect your master’ to ‘protect your son from falling to the Dark Side’ there seems to be a big grey area of ‘conflicted’ which would lead to inaction in that critical moment.
As for Luke’s additional motivation, he wouldn’t know of this Sith power anyway, so it doesn’t detract from the purity of his motivation in my book.
Something that I can never quite get over is how real Yoda is as a character. It’s totally believable for this puppet to be a wise Jedi Master, and it’s so good that you forget how damn impressive that is. The model work throughout the film is solid to excellent, and the Imperial Walkers continue to be frightening despite being stop-motion. Apart from Hoth, there are no real locations in this film but it never feels like the world is anything but boundlessly vast.
In addition, none of the characters feel shortchanged by this film. Everyone gets their moment to shine and the small moments between characters feel authentic in a way that hasn’t been achieved since.
Finally, this movie distills the message of Star Wars into its purest form. Yoda’s speech to Luke IS the gospel of the Force, and Luke’s coming of age story is as timeless as storytelling itself.
Star Wars might have been the best contained story of the series, but Empire feels more than any other film like you have stepped into an ancient world where things of myth and archetype are happening all around you.
Also, TFA isn’t a remake of ANH. I have no idea how that idea became so common. Besides a few surface-level callbacks, the movies are nothing alike. And I don’t think that not resolving character arcs in TFA should be considered a criticism, given that it was intended to be the first installment of a trilogy.
It’s definitely cut from the mold of ANH in terms of its basic plot, going so far as to recreate elements that actively work against the events suggested by ROTJ.
You’ve got the evil empire more powerful than the scrappy rebels even though these things should be reversed. We have another big planet-destroying superweapon which is destroyed by the end even though there’s no reason for such a threat to exist nor a reason for it to be destroyed.
And these ‘surface-level callbacks’ make up an astonishingly large part of the film, and again they are mostly inexplicable. The McGuffin is hidden in an easily-identifiable droid on a desert planet, except that this time there’s no excuse for the bad guys to not immediately find it. Han and Chewie are back to being smugglers who go to a cantina to get a ship except that this time they have a perfectly good one. The bad guys have a planet-destroying weapon that they want to use to terrorize the galaxy, except that this time their enemy is based on a single easily-identified planet so they have to blow it up then pretend that they haven’t already won.
I could keep naming examples, but the point is that in each case, the only real creativity on display is when the writers realized that there were problems with cannibalizing elements wholesale from another film and set out to make sense of them. So now the droid escapes capture because Kylo is a conflicted and unstable character, Han is going to the cantina because he doesn’t want to face his responsibilities, and the bad guys haven’t won because they are actually really scared of Luke getting over himself and training some more Jedi at some point. They’re not great explanations, but they do change the context of these moments somewhat.
The reason is that this wasn’t how Sith worked back then. This is perhaps the single good thing TROS did in making the Sith spirit canon, and I’d gladly take a retcon that improved the OT even if it makes the PT a little more silly.
I don’t think I understand this- by Sith spirit do you mean the idea that literally every spirit had transferred down the line and they were “all the Sith” inside Palpatine that he mentioned? I thought the general assumption was this wasn’t literal
But then why does Palpatine seem to gloat as he describes Darth Plagueis not being able to save himself from being killed? Shouldn’t he just be Plagueis?
Maybe because Palps killed him in his sleep and the person being killed needs to consciously transfer their spirit to a new host?
Well that confuses it a bit more- if the original point is the case, would all the Sith have built up in Plagueis only for Palpatine to not take them?
I simply saw it as Palpatine saying all of the Sith had figuratively led up to him, but he was just trying to use the transfer-power with Luke and then Rey (or Kylo) to get into a younger, healthier body.
I assumed that Palps meant that the spirits of all the Sith literally resided within him, otherwise he would have some new power that previous Sith did not have when he tried to transfer his consciousness to a new body. It would be weird to say that he was the first Sith to figure this out when this theory of spirit succession fits so well into the otherwise bizarre practice of the Rule of Two.
The reason is that this wasn’t how Sith worked back then. This is perhaps the single good thing TROS did in making the Sith spirit canon, and I’d gladly take a retcon that improved the OT even if it makes the PT a little more silly.
I guess that would be my top pick as well, and makes sense since ANH was based off of a Tech print.
As for fan-grading, Team Blu’s GOUT upscale was the gold-standard for me until 4K77.
Yep.
Well, except that in the second draft he’s avoided joining the First Order due to Snoke and Kylo being so similar to the erratic Force user that lost himself the Empire. When he sees the potential for a Supreme Leader he can control, he makes his move.
A lot of the flat look has to do with the fact that Marquand came from a primarily television background, in which flat lighting was the norm.
This is more of a starting point than a full-fledged idea, but I was thinking that it might have made more sense if the Sith Eternal established themselves as an enemy of the First Order as well as of the Resistance.
One thing that’s always bothered me about TLJ is how its ending doesn’t really lend itself well to being “Part 2 of 3” because of the fact that all of the remaining conflict can be resolved by one event - Kylo being redeemed. Luke says “the war is just beginning” and Rey says they’re going to “build a rebellion” but I feel like if I were seeking to overthrow a regime run by someone whom I knew personally, whom I had a means of communicating with, and who didn’t 100% believe in what he was doing, then I’d probably put all my resources in persuading him to my side and having a peaceful transition of power. The movie may have shown him doing some terrible things, but it never really convinced me that turning him to the Light Side would be hard enough to justify waging a bloody war instead. So it occurred to me - in order for the movie to redeem Ben while keeping him in power (which is presumably, something we’d want to see because of how much “Supreme Leader Kylo” was built up in the Last Jedi), the Resistance and First Order would have to team up against a common enemy. Kylo could spend most of the movie doing the right things for the wrong reasons, and his return to the light could be more smooth and gradual.
What do you think?
I agree, and that’s sort of what my rewrite is about - the Resistance’s plan in Act 1 is to capture and turn Kylo Ren. I don’t think that a dramatically new threat is warranted in the third movie, so they are just up against Hux as the new Supreme Leader who is allied with Thrawn, who gives the First Order some much needed competence.
My first draft of the idea on this forum had Kylo turn at the end of Act 1, but the more I thought about it the more it felt too abrupt, as you say. The second draft has him only begin to turn at the end of Act 1, and all of Act 2 is him realizing that his goal - destroying the Jedi and the Sith - has been undermined by Snoke’s sinister plot throughout the trilogy to become a new Sith spirit through Kylo. Act 3 will have him turn fully against evil while still holding to his conviction that the Jedi and the Sith, as they have been known, must die so that the cycle of conflict can end.
Is Revenge of the Sith any good? It’s as good or as bad as any other Star Wars movie.
Sure the movies all have flaws, but there’s gotta be a bounds of reason here, right? Why even have a discussion if AOTC or the 2003 Clone Wars movie is on the same level as SW or ESB?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHowJ7ULNfo
The most epic duel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdyXKJ8NcNI&feature=youtu.be
Deeply saddened that you’re moving on, oojason, you’ve been a great moderator and voice on these forums.
I had no idea that the attacks you’ve received have gone so far, it’s absolutely disgusting behavior.
“Somehow, Hal’s computer returned.”
Absolutely. I’d say that the final entry should have been primarily about the First Order losing power from within, as their kidnapped troops were won over by the actions of Finn and Rose. That TROS casually murders these troops offscreen in the final scenes of the movie is the dagger in the back of the entire sequel trilogy.
I wonder how much that has to do with being a beneficiary of the Clone Wars tv show, where it was largely able to resuscitate the characters and provide a more compelling war narrative than the movies.
I feel the other shot better rhymes with TPM and ANH and just feels more Star Warsy…or at least it would be those things if it weren’t moving! I really want to end on a static version of that shot because it just looks wrong when the iris to credits happens on a pan, but I don’t see any way to remedy it here.
Your version just cuts from space to space so it looks really weird.
I had used the same starfield so that the cut would be invisible, but I can accept that it would seem weird since that ‘invisible cut’ has never happened in Star Wars before.
However, ESB used a cut from space (with ships) to space and in my eyes that looks a lot weirder since there’s still an iris out between starfields.
It has three scenes that don’t suck though - The Invisible Hand crash landing, Padme’s Ruminations, and Order 66. Padme’s Ruminations is one of the best scenes in Star Wars, period.
But yes, the rest can take a running jump.
Yeah, I couldn’t get it to work with that group shot and also ended it with the Falcon to Hyperspace. Here’s the end of that edit btw:
Password: fanedit
Dude, whataboutism ain’t gonna help your case. AOTC was a fluke because of the Spider-Man movie coming out at the same time, and the OT fit the same box office pattern that the sequels did. TROS made 1 billion dollars at the box office, that’s pretty damn good to me.
Comparing box office totals as a judge of audience interest isn’t whataboutism, it actually has a fair amount of bearing on the argument. And the OT doesn’t really fit the sequel box office pattern domestically, since TROS made less than TLJ domestically while ROTJ made more than ESB with the same metric. Comparing worldwide gross and the pattern isn’t really there however. The takeaway from that seems to be that 4, 5, 1, and 7 all did extremely well compared to their sequels, telling me that the only trilogy starter that wasn’t a disappointment was the original. TFA and TPM both depressed turnout for their sequels. Only TLJ seems to have unequivocally depressed the turnout of the final installment, since the domestic numbers for ROTJ were actually better than ESB and there are as you said extenuating circumstances in the case of AOTC.
Finally, every saga movie made over a billion dollars worldwide, accounting for inflation. The shocking thing is that TROS only barely made it.
On my latest rewatch of the trilogy, both Star Wars and Empire felt timeless. Jedi, however, felt like a movie constrained to its time.
That said, Jedi towers above every subsequent entry.
Let’s be honest, the man writes short stories in song form and I had to draw the line somewhere.
But if you wish, you may of course continue. 😃
Weird Al: The Jackson Park Express
[Verse 1]
Tuesday morning, 8:15
I was riding to work on the
Jackson Park Express
Seemed like any other day
Then my whole world changed
In a way I never could have guessed
Cause she walked in
Took the seat right across the aisle
I knew we had a special connection
The second I saw her smile
She smiled as if to say
“Hello, Haven’t seen you on this bus before”
I gave her a look that said
“Huh, Life is funny, you never know what’s in store
By the way, your hair is beautiful
I bet it smells like raisins”
She looked at me in a way that asked
“Did you have a nose job or something?
I’m only asking, cause your nose looks slightly better
Than the rest of your face”
I arched my eyebrow, ever so slightly
Which was my way of asking
“Do you want my old Hewlett-Packard printer?
It still works, Kinda
And I got a bunch of ink cartridges left”
Then, she let out a long sigh
Which, I took to mean, “Uh
Mama, What is that deodorant you’re wearing?
It’s intoxicating
Why don’t we drive out to the country sometime?
And collect deer ticks in a zip-lock baggie”, Oh yeah
I gave her a penetrating stare
Which could only mean
“You are my answer, my answer to everything
Which is why, I’ll probably do very poorly
On the written part of my driver’s test”
[Chorus]
Yes, It all happened
On the Jackson Park Express
On the Jackson Park Express
On the Jackson Park Express
On the Jackson Park Express
[Verse 2]
I knew she was starting to fall for me
Cause she crinkled her nose, which unmistakably meant
“Baby, lets wear each other’s clothes
And speak in a thick German accent
And, maybe someday we can own and operate
Our own mobile pet-grooming service”
I couldn’t hold back my feelings
I gave her a look, that said
“I would make any sacrifice for your love
Goat, chicken, whatever
I could never hold you close enough
Let’s have our bodies surgically grafted together
Oh, surgically grafted together”
She picked up her newspaper, and started reading to herself
Which I’m sure, was a way of telling me
“When you’re cold, I will warm you
When you’re shivering, I will hold you
When you’re nauseous, I will give you Pepto-Bismol every hour
For as long as the symptoms persist
Oh, I, I never, ever want to see you cry
So, please let me cauterize your tear ducts with an arc welder”
Then, I glanced down, at her shirt, for a second
In a way that clearly implied
“I like your boobs”
[Chorus]
[Verse 3]
I cleared my throat quietly, and then, I looked away
And I’m sure it was obvious to her, just what I was trying to say
I was trying to say, “Hey
I’d like to make a wall-sized mural out of all the dead skin cells
That you slough off while you sleep at night”
Whoa-o-Oh, “I’d like to rip you wide open
And french-kiss every single one of your internal organs
Oh, I’d like to remove all your skin, and wear your skin, over my own skin
But not in a creepy way”
Then, I’m pretty sure, she looked at me, out of the corner of her good eye
And, though, she never spoke a word, this is exactly what I heard
She was saying, “Oh!
I wanna make out with you, in an abandoned toll-booth, in the middle of a monsoon
I wanna ride dolphins with you, in the moonlight
Until the staff at Sea World kicks us out
I want you inside me, oh, like a tapeworm”
I pointed to the side of my mouth, as a way of indicating
“Hey, I think you got something on the side of your mouth”
She licked the corner of her lips, as if to say
“Here?”, I nodded, implying, “Yeah, you got it”
And, then the bus stopped, at 53rd Street, and she got up suddenly
“Where are you going?”, pleaded my eyes, “Baby, don’t you do this to me
Think of the beautiful children we could have someday
We could school them at home, Raise them up the right way
And protect them from the evils of the world
Like Trigonometry and Prime Numbers, oh no
Baby, please don’t go”
She brushed my leg, as she left the bus
I’m sure that was her way of saying
“I’m sorry this just isn’t working out
You’re suffocating me
I need some space to find out what life’s all about
So, goodbye forever, my love”
And deep inside, I knew she was right
It was time for us both to move on
And though, I never got her number, oh no no
She never bothered to leave her address, oh
But, as long as I live, I’ll never forget
Those precious moments we shared together
[Outro]
On the Jackson Park Express
On the Jackson Park Express
On the Jackson Park Express
On the Jackson Park Express
On the Jackson Park Express
On the Jackson Park Express
On the Jackson Park Express
On the Jackson Park Express