Either way, the line’s awful and I fully support cutting it. Because, no, JJ, fear wasn’t what kept Luke there. That’s the kind of gross misinterpretation of TLJ you’d find on Reddit.
Mace Windu’s poop is purple.
Instead of using magic to vanish the poop away, they just use the Force to “cast” it as a projectile attack against their enemies.
Change everything so that the force is really about alcohol. When Obi-Wan says, “Use the force, Luke.” Luke finds a can of beer and guzzles it down. The first shot of Luke on Cloud City will be digitally altered so that Luke is drinking a pint before his confrontation with vader. In Episode II, when Mace Windu and friends arrive on Geonosis, every single jedi turns on their lightsabers and opens their bottles. Add in a line that mentions that Vader’s suit is fueled by alcohol which is why he is strong in the force. Also, redub and/or alter every line said by jedi and sith so that their speech sounds slurred. The list of changes could go on forever.
SparkySywer said:
it’s something that needs a lot more work from a storytelling perspectiveWhat an understatement.
Intentionally lol
That’s an interesting idea, and the fact that you can pretty seamlessly edit Midichlorians entirely out of the movie is good evidence for that.
Tatooine causes people to age in dog years.
I agree somewhat with this, but i also look at force users as people who age faster the closer they are to the force and how they harness it.
Obi-wan aged the way he did because of a mixture of stress, the planets conditions & the force within him causing him to age that way.So you’re saying that without the Force, Yoda would have lived 2,000 years?
Maybe that’s why Grogu is 50 and still acts like a baby, despite Yoda having been training Jedi at 100ish.
Tuesdays are awesome because I have Tuesdays off from work
The Force and the microbes are separate entities. And yet doing a blood test for them is normal, as if the Force power level is measured in Midochlorian XP. Once again the prequels try something vaguely interesting but muddle it so badly that it never works. Mysticism and biology become blurred making the whole thing reductive and stupid.
Now try and re-write this by saying that they are attracted to a Jedi somehow, maybe that would work. Maybe those who train hardest can absorb more of them and gain mysterious wisdom or something. But claiming that they talk to the Jedi and it never gets mentioned again? Just nonsense.
At the end of the day people like feeling as if they can vicariously live out the adventures of Luke etc. But if you say Luke is only strong with the Force thanks to his high M-cell count because of hereditary traits? Big surprise everyone hates it.
Because the more midichlorians someone has, the better they’re connected to the Force, because midichlorians are the bridge that connects things to the Force.
Also Luke literally says “The Force is strong in my family”. In fact there are multiple lines in Return of the Jedi that talk about how the Skywalker bloodline has a hereditary affinity for the Force (I believe Yoda also says this to Luke), so this isn’t a prequel concept.
It’s possible to read the Force being strong in the Skywalker family being more about how destiny swirls around the Skywalkers, yaddah yaddah yaddah, instead of “The spells we and our dad cast are stronger than other people’s spells because of heredity.”
Even if you don’t buy that, destiny swirling around the Skywalkers is a better explanation for why the Skywalkers have hereditary power than midichlorians, and Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan just being able to feel something along those lines in the Force would’ve been a better way to introduce that in the Phantom Menace.
There are dissertations shorter than this, I’m gonna need an abridged version to know what the hell either of you two are saying, it’s like I’m reading Infinite Jest over here!
lol
As for what’s going on in this thread right now instead of a few days ago, Vader committed far worse crimes against the galaxy, but Kylo committed far worse crimes against the audience in TFA alone by killing Han Solo. Plus, Vader’s arc in the OT seems to mostly set him up more and more for redemption, but in TFA and TLJ, Kylo just goes deeper and deeper into the dark side. The only time I really hate Vader is at the end of Empire, most of the OT it’s the Empire you hate, and Vader’s just an agent of the Empire. Kylo is good/humanized more often than Vader is even in RotJ, but he also swings to the rotten through and through end of the spectrum more often than I think Vader did.
I don’t think this necessarily means Kylo can’t be redeemed, but it’s something that needs a lot more work from a storytelling perspective than Darth Vader.
The 1984 Deniece Williams hit “Let’s Hear it for the Boys” was actually a cover of a 1914 British WWI propaganda song used to promote recruitment, which, given the historical context, makes it feel a lot darker.
Now try and re-write this by saying that they are attracted to a Jedi somehow, maybe that would work. Maybe those who train hardest can absorb more of them and gain mysterious wisdom or something. But claiming that they talk to the Jedi and it never gets mentioned again? Just nonsense.
A lot of people on the internet seem to think that that’s how it was always intended by Lucas, and that’s how midichlorians are in the prequels and also current canon.
Just to say this before someone else says that, that’s not true at all, at least according to Lucas, the prequels, and current canon. Midichlorians are not just innocently attracted to the Force in current canon. Like Mocata says, this would require a rewrite.
You’re sacrificing your life for us, Mark? 🙄 Go complain somewhere else, we’ve all got problems.
Replace all footage of Darth Vader with YouTube videos of cute adorable bunny rabbits.
Don’t replace the entire shot; just motion track the YouTube video over the top of the space Vader occupies in frame.
I foresee arguments arising about which moment exactly to start adding the adorable bunny rabbits when editing ROTS.
Start inexplicably putting them over C3PO
Hey we have another one of these threads, neat.
I mean, yeah, they’re not literally the Force. But the Phantom Menace made it so that they are the reason for a Jedi’s power, and that’s what people are getting at.
Maybe Robot Chicken should have said “…and [the source from which Jedi’s power originates]? Well, that’s just microscopic bacteria in your bloodstream called midichlorians.” That might’ve cleared up the confusion, but it also would’ve been wordier.
The film misinterprets basic concepts of the Jedi and the Force … acting like the Jedi are meant to be pacifists.
I don’t think TLJ is the one misinterpreting basic concepts of the Jedi and the Force.
That’s not what Yoda meant in context. The Jedi are meant to defend the innocent, and that often involves striking down those who would harm others. ANH has Obi-Wan cutting off an assailant’s arm. They absolutely are willing to resort to the use of force to fight someone who threatens innocents. That’s why they carry lightsabers in the first place. This notion that a “true” Jedi doesn’t actually even use his saber to defeat someone is a misinterpretation by Rian Johnson of what the Jedi actually are. Striking down Kylo, or at least genuinely trying to talk him down, could have saved countless lives and ended the war. This notion of a Jedi being purely pacifist never reflected George’s vision or intention. Rian doesn’t know Star Wars better than its creator. In fact, I think there are a lot of people who understand Star Wars better than Rian does.
Called it in the inb4!
What? Look, I don’t want to go through the motions of this argument again, so here’s a flowchart that debunks the whole “Jedi are pacifists” thing, which really is just an invention of Rian Johnson’s imagination.
I think that flowchart’s pretty dishonest. I don’t think literally anyone has said that a Jedi is never, ever, allowed to use violence ever.
I mean, in ANH Obi-Wan lops off a guy’s arm and they were clearly involved in a war, somehow, and Obi-Wan encourages the deaths of millions of Stormtroopers on the Death Star because it meant preventing the deaths of billions, trillions more innocent civilians.
But they still are pacifists. They avoid violence and only use it when necessary.
And again, it’s not like Luke came out and said “Haha Kylo, I owned you non-violently because a Jedi is never allowed to use violence, get bent, son.” Rian Johnson’s intent was never to make any statement on the Jedi, and his reason for putting that in the movie had nothing to do with the nature of the Jedi. So… how Rian Johnson managed to misunderstand the Jedi or invent anything about them in that scene is beyond me.
The question is, what would you have preferred? Because simply removing the astral projection from the scene, having it be a simple action scene played absolutely straight, not only would it create a ton of problems, but it’s the exact kind of thing I’d expect from a hypothetical version of the sequel trilogy that was actually nothing but a lazy cash grab, no creative energy involved.
And I don’t mean to sound negative toward that, there’s room for both, and if you did just want a simple action adventure popcorn movie out of the ST, there’s nothing wrong with that. Personally I would’ve liked that for Episodes 7-9, with TFA and TLJ being 10 and 11. Have our cake and eat it too. But you can’t criticize the ST for being uncreative while also saying the ST shouldn’t have done the parts that were actually creative.
But I don’t want to presuppose your beliefs, so I’m all ears.
The PT has massive amounts of worldbuilding. The sheer volume of worlds, species, factions, and cultures introduced
Like what? Like who? The closest thing we get to that I can think of is that they have some new alien designs, but that’s art design again, not worldbuilding.
in the PT provided so much fertile ground for new stories to tell and history to flesh out.
The EU picking up the slack for the PT does not make the PT good. The EU doing worldbuilding does not mean the PT had any, in fact it just highlights the sheer lack of worldbuilding in the PT.
We finally got to see the Republic
We get to see the Republic is a really shallow ripoff of the United States government made by someone whose understanding of the US government clearly didn’t go beyond, like, 7th grade civics class. We don’t know anything about how it functions other than that the Chancellor is the leader of the executive and that the Senate has some legislative authority, and there is a third branch that is never relevant, despite us being told it’s supposed to be in, like, 2 lines?
Compare, like, literally any other fantasy Republic, or even any other fantasy government. There’s so much more interesting nuance that could be here, but is ditched for a really shallow-ass allegory about how Bush did 9/11 or some shit.
Maybe it could be said that spending too much time on the functionality of the Republic would be a bad idea and detract from the story. I’d probably agree. But that’s a justification for the prequels’ lack of worldbuilding, the fact of the matter is that there is a lack of worldbuilding, and the little bit that is there is downright uncreative.
We got to see the different corporations that formed the CIS.
Aside from the Trade Federation, we get name drops for the different corporations that formed the CIS. That’s it.
You don’t even have to leave Star Wars to see this done right, compare the depth the CIS gets in the EU and TCW to the complete lack thereof in the prequels.
Even the Trade Federation is literally just the GOP. They’re not even trying to hide it. Nute Gingrich + Ronald Raygun = Nute Gunray. While I hate the Republican Party, the Trade Federation as a criticism has the depth of tin foil. We don’t know anything about their beliefs, private or public, we don’t know anything about why their policies are bad, we just know that they’re evil and greedy and mean and they’re in league with George Walker Hitler.
As an instance of worldbuilding, they have even less depth than tin foil.
The Trade Federation is not the GOP. If anything, they have much more in common with groups like the East India Company.
I personally used to think that the Trade Federation was a state like the Phoenicians, except more modern. A small Empire built around trade, whose government essentially existed to defend those trade routes. This would also explain why they have a seat in the Senate: They’re not a corporation like the East India Company, they’re a state just like Naboo or Malastare.
The fact this is so unclear is sort of my point. We don’t know anything about the Trade Federation. We know pretty little about the Republic, and the groups that form the CIS are literally just name drops in one scene. Maybe this is breadth like you said, but it isn’t impressive or interesting when there’s almost literally zero depth.
Outside of the Phantom Menace, the world doesn’t feel like it’s exceptionally complex. I really don’t feel like there’s anything interesting going on behind the scenes in AotC or RotS. Even though the Canto Bight sequence in TLJ is probably the worst part of the movie, I feel like there’s far more going on behind the scenes then than I do in Revenge of the Sith. We learn about the economy of the galaxy, and how war profiteering has become the most profitable venture someone can participate in, and how that is a big driver in neofascism and the rise of the First Order.
Admittedly though I find it pretty hard to throw TPM under the bus here. It’s the best (least bad?) prequel by far.
The prequels actually added something significant to the story.
I really have to disagree hard on this. The Last Jedi feels like an actual contribution to Star Wars. It developed on interesting characters introduced in TFA, and gave Luke a character arc I was interested in. It contributed to the Star Wars mythos, and I kind of think you have to ignore the whole movie to say there wasn’t a lot of passion and care put into this movie or that it didn’t add anything significant to the story.
I’d say the opposite. You’d have to ignore large portions of the movie to claim that it was a product of love and care for the mythos. The film goes out of its way to debase and trivialize what came before. It repeatedly trips over its own messages (i.e. the message about whether self-sacrifice to defeat an enemy is good or bad). And it’s filled with so much bloat that’s not deep or cerebral in the slightest and drags the movie down from whatever lofty heights it was aiming for.
I wouldn’t say there’s a whole lot of debasing or trivializing what came before. That’s not what I got out of the movie.
TLJ is downright poorly executed in some places. I mean, starting off Luke’s character arc with a screw the audience joke was a quick and easy way for the movie to shoot itself in the foot in terms of getting people on board with its story. But there is a great story in there, and you don’t have to strip the movie down to its bones’ bones to get to it like the prequels.
I think a no bathos (or an a lot less bathos) fanedit would really help the movie. Because the movie’s biggest problem is that most of its serious scenes get undermined by bathos. Or, maybe it shouldn’t be called bathos because apparently bathos is supposed to be unintentional? I don’t know.
But a lot of criticisms made against the ST seem to be because they weren’t totally vapid. Especially ones having to do with Luke Skywalker.
There is a massive middle ground between “pathetic hobo Luke” and “invincible Force god Luke.” Luke in the OT was a great character not because of his power, but because of his kindness and compassion. He was the right person to restart the Jedi Order because of his wisdom and moral quality. TLJ doesn’t make Luke more interesting. It just removes all of Luke’s personality traits and surgically transfers them to Rey.
I think “pathetic hobo Luke” is a serious misinterpretation of Luke’s character in TLJ and it’s a shame that that’s what a lot of people got out of the movie. He’s not on the island because he’s a depressed asshole.
I don’t think Rey is a copy of Luke in TLJ either, and what sorts of character traits she has that came from Luke besides, like, a general protagonistiness, is beyond me.
I sort of think Rey becomes a rehash of Luke in TRoS, but moreso that they plagiarized his arc from ESB & RotJ. As a character in and of herself, I don’t think she’s that similar to Luke.
No, it didn’t. Anakin’s reason for turning was already being set up in TPM.
The idea that Anakin would turn to the dark side over a fear of losing loved ones from death wasn’t conceived until late 2003, after Revenge of the Sith was already shot. They talk about this on the Behind the Scenes documentary included with the 2005 DVD.
Anakin’s reason for turning to the dark side, behind the scenes during the production of TPM, was his age. He was in the exact sour spot of too old to have a fresh reset when joining the Jedi, too young to be able to make the mature decisions required for such a drastic lifestyle change.
Behind the scenes during the production of AotC, his reason for turning to the dark side was his mother. I don’t know much about what this entails, maybe it was something along the lines of blaming the Jedi for not saving his mother, or maybe he wanted to reverse death. But it had nothing to do with Padme, or saving anyone currently alive, yet.
During the production of RotS, his reason for turning to the dark side was that he thought the Jedi were trying to overthrow the Republic. After they already finished shooting RotS, though, George Lucas changed his mind one final time and came up with the saving Padme from death angle. Literally anything that has to do with Padme dying comes from reshoots, and the old plotline was (IMO, really sloppily) cut from the final version of the movie.
The who “my friends” line in TROS isn’t earned at ALL!
Idk man, when you were younger did you ever have that one guy in your friend group that nobody really was that close with, but they thought you guys were super close?
I’d rather they go the JK Rowling route and say they just poop their pants, except without the part that they use magic to erase the evidence.
The film misinterprets basic concepts of the Jedi and the Force … acting like the Jedi are meant to be pacifists.
I don’t think TLJ is the one misinterpreting basic concepts of the Jedi and the Force.
That’s not what Yoda meant in context. The Jedi are meant to defend the innocent, and that often involves striking down those who would harm others. ANH has Obi-Wan cutting off an assailant’s arm. They absolutely are willing to resort to the use of force to fight someone who threatens innocents. That’s why they carry lightsabers in the first place. This notion that a “true” Jedi doesn’t actually even use his saber to defeat someone is a misinterpretation by Rian Johnson of what the Jedi actually are. Striking down Kylo, or at least genuinely trying to talk him down, could have saved countless lives and ended the war. This notion of a Jedi being purely pacifist never reflected George’s vision or intention. Rian doesn’t know Star Wars better than its creator. In fact, I think there are a lot of people who understand Star Wars better than Rian does.
Called it in the inb4!
Also, Rian misinterpreted “Balance of the Force” to mean “the balance of Light and Dark.” This is sadly a very common misconception, when George clearly stated that “balance” meant the destruction of the Sith. The Sith are not a natural result of the Force achieving balance. They only exist as an unnatural corruption of it that must be purged.
You can find quotes by George Lucas going literally both ways. George Lucas is a pathological liar, contradicts himself on the reg. He’s a time traveling revisionist whose “true, original vision” changes every other hour. His word is almost entirely meaningless.
“The Force has two sides, the good side and the evil side, and they both need to be there.” -Lucas 2002
“The third [trilogy will] deal with moral and philosophical problems … Eventually you have to face the fact that good and evil aren’t that clear-cut and the real issue is trying to understand the difference.” -Lucas 1983
Ironic that advocates of a more grey aspect of Star Wars also claim that Lucas totally supports them, especially because of the prequels.
I’m personally not a huge fan of the sort of grey “light and dark are both good, balance is in between” angle, but it’s not unfounded.
The PT has massive amounts of worldbuilding. The sheer volume of worlds, species, factions, and cultures introduced
Like what? Like who? The closest thing we get to that I can think of is that they have some new alien designs, but that’s art design again, not worldbuilding.
in the PT provided so much fertile ground for new stories to tell and history to flesh out.
The EU picking up the slack for the PT does not make the PT good. The EU doing worldbuilding does not mean the PT had any, in fact it just highlights the sheer lack of worldbuilding in the PT.
We finally got to see the Republic
We get to see the Republic is a really shallow ripoff of the United States government made by someone whose understanding of the US government clearly didn’t go beyond, like, 7th grade civics class. We don’t know anything about how it functions other than that the Chancellor is the leader of the executive and that the Senate has some legislative authority, and there is a third branch that is never relevant, despite us being told it’s supposed to be in, like, 2 lines?
Compare, like, literally any other fantasy Republic, or even any other fantasy government. There’s so much more interesting nuance that could be here, but is ditched for a really shallow-ass allegory about how Bush did 9/11 or some shit.
Maybe it could be said that spending too much time on the functionality of the Republic would be a bad idea and detract from the story. I’d probably agree. But that’s a justification for the prequels’ lack of worldbuilding, the fact of the matter is that there is a lack of worldbuilding, and the little bit that is there is downright uncreative.
We got to see the different corporations that formed the CIS.
Aside from the Trade Federation, we get name drops for the different corporations that formed the CIS. That’s it.
You don’t even have to leave Star Wars to see this done right, compare the depth the CIS gets in the EU and TCW to the complete lack thereof in the prequels.
Even the Trade Federation is literally just the GOP. They’re not even trying to hide it. Nute Gingrich + Ronald Raygun = Nute Gunray. While I hate the Republican Party, the Trade Federation as a criticism has the depth of tin foil. We don’t know anything about their beliefs, private or public, we don’t know anything about why their policies are bad, we just know that they’re evil and greedy and mean and they’re in league with George Walker Hitler.
As an instance of worldbuilding, they have even less depth than tin foil.
I mean, yeah, a sequel to LotR wouldn’t work. The ending to LotR has cosmological significance. It’s the end of an era of reality itself. The ending to the Star Wars Trilogy is more character-oriented, the story ends here it’s where Luke becomes a Jedi and the conflict between him and Vader is resolved. To the galaxy, the events at the end of RotJ are almost incidental. Sure, it’s a big win for the Rebels, and Vader and Palpatine dying are pretty important, but there’s no way anything significant changes in the state of the galaxy. It’s been the butt of jokes for as long as I remember and it’s no surprise that in both Legends and in the New EU, not only do Imperial Remnants, pretenders, successor states, and Empire-adjacent factions live on for a really long time after RotJ, but the Empire proper lives on for a while after RotJ. 7 years in Legends and a little over a year in the New EU.
I have absolutely no problem with the Empire surviving for years post-RotJ. I do have a problem with the Empire rising to full power out of the blue with no buildup within the lifetimes of the original characters, and tearing down everything they worked for with nothing surviving. You can still have the Empire exist as a faction. But the ending of RotJ still needs to mean something to the world as a whole. Because it was absolutely meant to.
Maybe you could invoke some of the Chosen One stuff from the prequels. Anakin fulfills the prophecy and it has the same cosmological significance as destroying the One Ring, but the Chosen One prophecy was always something arbitrarily slapped onto Star Wars decades after the fact. The OT has nothing to do with it, and it seems that George Lucas was quick to abandon it, considering that one of the four ST ideas he’s had that we know about involves Leia having been the real Chosen One.
Nevertheless, the Chosen One prophecy is etched into the canon now, and whether it was George or someone else making the sequel trilogy, it would be important to honor that and make the story work within the context of the prophecy. George came up with the prophecy partly to give RotJ’s ending a greater sense of finality and importance. The ending wasn’t just a personal victory for Luke. It was the destruction of the Sith, and a crushing blow to the Empire that they shouldn’t have been able to fully recover from, at least not off-screen.
Before the prequels, maybe you could make some OT-centric era argument. Star Wars is fundamentally about the Empire and the Rebels, so the story of Star Wars has to end with the end of the Empire, which is at least bound to happen by the end of RotJ. Which, back in the 80s or 90s when Star Wars avoided anything too far before or after from the OT, fair enough, but the prequels have kind of blown that door wide open. Now we have so many wildly different eras of Star Wars, it’s almost inevitable that a sequel dealing with the galaxy 30 years after the OT would have happened.
Which makes it all the more a shame that they decided to rehash Rebels vs. Empire again. As you said, Star Wars had grown beyond just being about those two factions. And again, I’d be fine with this new Empire existing as long as it wasn’t just a more cartoonish copy of it with comically oversized, overpowered super weapons, and if we had a proper New Republic instead of just a Rebel Alliance palette swap. And there were several EU stories set decades after the OT that introduced brand new factions to oppose the New Republic, as well as different splinter factions of the Empire with their own distinct cultures and divergences from one another.
Not so with Lord of the Rings. I don’t think I need to explain myself here, but while there’s tons of stuff written by Tolkien which details what goes on long before Lord of the Rings, there’s absolutely not for after Lord of the Rings. Even with what goes on before Lord of the Rings, it all relates to the events of Lord of the Rings. There’s no Knights of the Old Middle Earth.
Sequels to Star Wars and Lord of the Rings would be wildly different, and while one is pretty much doomed by the basic facts of the story, the other feels almost inevitable.
The prequels actually added something significant to the story.
I really have to disagree hard on this. The Last Jedi feels like an actual contribution to Star Wars. It developed on interesting characters introduced in TFA, and gave Luke a character arc I was interested in. It contributed to the Star Wars mythos, and I kind of think you have to ignore the whole movie to say there wasn’t a lot of passion and care put into this movie or that it didn’t add anything significant to the story.
Because it’s really easy to imagine a sequel trilogy that actually was totally vapid and just gunning for the box office. At the very least, it would have made the polar opposite decisions that TLJ made, and there’s a lot of decisions that TFA made that wouldn’t line up with this.
I’m not about to tell you that the ST was the next Citizen Kane or anything, because it wasn’t. Rebels v Empire 2 was a shame. Starkiller Base is indefensible. Most of TRoS is indefensible. Etc.
But a lot of criticisms made against the ST seem to be because they weren’t totally vapid. Especially ones having to do with Luke Skywalker.
I don’t think the prequels were a straight cash grab, because it looks like there was actual effort put into the Phantom Menace. But overall we have:
-One movie with an actual story, but none of the events of this movie really end up being all that relevant, and it’s not even like this story is all that complex
-One movie that feels like it’s trying to be the setup to a new trilogy, but doesn’t have much of an interesting story of its own, and, you know, it’s actually Episode 2, and should be starting to wrap the story up.
-One movie that starts off by dropping all the setup done in the previous movie, farting around on Coruscant telling us exposition for over an hour, then acts out backstory we already knew from the OT (really inaccurately I might add), then goes on an ANH fanservice montage it didn’t earn or justify
Actually, we know behind the scenes that they kinda hard pressed the reset button after TPM, which is why pretty much nothing in TPM is relevant. I wonder if they also did that between AotC and RotS, although more of a soft press this time. Every single movie feels like the first movie in a prequel trilogy, but (believe it or not), they’re not all the first movie. So when the end of Revenge of the Sith rolls around, it feels like the story of an entire trilogy is crammed into the last 40ish minutes of the movie, and a ton of that time is devoted to overly long SFX sequences, not the actual story.
The only thing the prequels contributed to Star Wars is the very beginnings of the scaffolding the EU used to actually contribute to Star Wars.
Absolutely everything that you’d think the prequels could have or should have contributed is entirely absent from the prequels and mostly in the EU. Especially the Clone Wars. We see the very, very beginning, and the tail end is there in some SFX sequences, but the war itself is entirely absent.
Hell, we know surprisingly little about, like, anything to do with the galaxy during the time of the prequels. All of that is in the EU and TCW.
As for context to the OT characters, it’s so incredibly unclear that it doesn’t even really seem to matter. Mainly, Anakin’s reason for becoming Vader changed behind the scenes for all three movies, and even the final movie where it’s supposed to happen can’t seem to make up its mind on why.
I can’t even think of anything else that the PT contributed to the OT’s context to really argue for or against. That’s pretty much it.
The OT itself gives far better context than the trilogy that’s actually supposed to be depicting its context. All the PT does is make the OT more muddied.
Meant to post this right after I uploaded, but I didn’t.
A better attempt at editing the Victory Celebration song into RotJ, without the planets montage or Hayden Christensen.
I don’t think TLJ contradicts TFA on Finn’s arc or on the political situation.
The whole of TLJ treats Finn like he’s a selfish child who needs to be taught a lesson about the world and about committing to a cause.
That’s really not what I got out of TLJ.
The film misinterprets basic concepts of the Jedi and the Force … acting like the Jedi are meant to be pacifists.
I don’t think TLJ is the one misinterpreting basic concepts of the Jedi and the Force.
Edit: I don’t want to presuppose your beliefs, but I see this on the internet a lot, so let me inb4 this: Pacifism does not mean refusing to prevent harm, or allowing violence to be done simply because the only way to prevent it is violence. The Jedi being guardians and warriors does not mean they aren’t pacifists, and a prequel trilogy that actually understood the Jedi instead of making them into a weird bureaucracy might have either focused on them being forced into war with no choice, or actually spend time on how joining the war was super un-Jedi-like, instead of leaving it to EU writers.
Besides, it’s not like Luke comes out and says “I am a Jedi, and Jedi never use violence in their lives, ever.” What happens is that Luke uses non-violence. That’s it. There isn’t even really a statement on what the Jedi are like. So, why this seems to get brought up every time this scene is talked about is beyond me.
It’s worth mentioning that on TLJ’s director’s commentary, Rian Johnson mentions the reason that the astral projection was written into the movie, you have two options: Kill off Kylo Ren (really stupid idea, hopefully for obvious reasons), or repeat Han’s death in TFA, but this time with Luke instead. I’d argue there’s a third, even worse option, though: Have Luke look like a schmuck for picking a fight and then losing. But that’s beside the point. The point is: Rian never intended to make any commentary on the nature of the Jedi.
Besides besides, even ignoring all the Jedi stuff, if Luke just showed up and unloaded on the First Order without anything more going on, it would be really horrible. The astral projection was an actually cool moment in the movie, and just replacing it with a cliche-ass, boring-ass SFX sequence is a pretty definitively bad choice.
Plus, you’d have to invent some reason for Kylo Ren to not just do this. If you do, please don’t use the overused Harry Potter-ass “I have to be the one to kill him.” It’s ridiculous and never makes any logical sense given the characters’ motivations.
“Back away! I will death with this Jedi slime… myself.” Worst fight in Star Wars history. Worst action sequence in Star Wars history, honestly.
The worldbuilding was barely existent, and by the end of the film, the galaxy had never felt smaller. The ending, which was supposed to feel inspiring and uplifting, instead felt empty and depressing.
Just like the Star Wars fandom needs to put the kibosh on the “Subverting expectations” phrase, it also needs to put the kibosh on “worldbuilding”. Because I see people talk about it all the time, but they’re always wrong about what worldbuilding even is.
I mean, honestly, the worldbuilding is barely existent in most Star Wars movies. 90% of the worldbuilding in the movies is in ANH, and 9% is in ESB. The other 1% is split between the other movies, unless you count the prequels contradicting the OT as worldbuilding. This isn’t necessarily a defense of the newer movies, I kind of feel like Star Wars’s worldbuilding alternates between stagnation and just openly contradicting previously established stuff. It’s all either living in ANH’s world without expanding upon it, or forgetting basic details to make way for lazy, boring sludge. But that’s sort of beside the point.
I don’t know. I’m not George RR Martin, but worldbuilding has been a hobby of mine since I was like 14. In some ways more conlanging than other aspects of worldbuilding, but whatever. I’m not a published author, but I still feel like I’m knowledgeable on this subject.
The worldbuilding I’ve done as a hobby, the worldbuilding done in other hobbyist communities, the worldbuilding talked about in RP circles, the worldbuilding talked about in every other fantasy story and its fandom, that’s all one thing. And then you have people talking about Lucas’s genius worldbuilding or how the sequels had a complete absence of it, and it’s like… what do you even mean by worldbuilding?
Because I can’t even say “No, that’s not worldbuilding, that’s X. Worldbuilding is Y.” because I have no idea what this worldbuilding even is. Outside of AHH and a little bit of ESB, the movies tell us pretty much nothing about the history of the galaxy, the cultures of the galaxy, the peoples of the galaxy, the individual planets of the galaxy and any details on them besides, like, a biome or two.
Do people mean art design? Or, like, building a world out of CGI? Because that’s the one thing within an arm’s reach of making sense, but even then, that has nothing to do with the storytelling and people bring it up in a storytelling context.
If there was ever a sequel trilogy to Lord of the Rings
I don’t think the Star Wars Trilogy and Lord of the Rings are really comparable in this regard. The story of LotR is the culmination of history itself in-universe, but the Star Wars Trilogy feels relatively self-contained. The nature of sequels to either of them would be very different.
I don’t think they’re as different as you believe. Tolkien actually did start writing a sequel to LotR, then scrapped the idea when he realized it was a dead end and would only undermine what he had already written, and be quite depressing.
I don’t really get your point.
I mean, yeah, a sequel to LotR wouldn’t work. The ending to LotR has cosmological significance. It’s the end of an era of reality itself. The ending to the Star Wars Trilogy is more character-oriented, the story ends here it’s where Luke becomes a Jedi and the conflict between him and Vader is resolved. To the galaxy, the events at the end of RotJ are almost incidental. Sure, it’s a big win for the Rebels, and Vader and Palpatine dying are pretty important, but there’s no way anything significant changes in the state of the galaxy. It’s been the butt of jokes for as long as I remember and it’s no surprise that in both Legends and in the New EU, not only do Imperial Remnants, pretenders, successor states, and Empire-adjacent factions live on for a really long time after RotJ, but the Empire proper lives on for a while after RotJ. 7 years in Legends and a little over a year in the New EU.
Maybe you could invoke some of the Chosen One stuff from the prequels. Anakin fulfills the prophecy and it has the same cosmological significance as destroying the One Ring, but the Chosen One prophecy was always something arbitrarily slapped onto Star Wars decades after the fact. The OT has nothing to do with it, and it seems that George Lucas was quick to abandon it, considering that one of the four ST ideas he’s had that we know about involves Leia having been the real Chosen One.
Before the prequels, maybe you could make some OT-centric era argument. Star Wars is fundamentally about the Empire and the Rebels, so the story of Star Wars has to end with the end of the Empire, which is at least bound to happen by the end of RotJ. Which, back in the 80s or 90s when Star Wars avoided anything too far before or after from the OT, fair enough, but the prequels have kind of blown that door wide open. Now we have so many wildly different eras of Star Wars, it’s almost inevitable that a sequel dealing with the galaxy 30 years after the OT would have happened.
Not so with Lord of the Rings. I don’t think I need to explain myself here, but while there’s tons of stuff written by Tolkien which details what goes on long before Lord of the Rings, there’s absolutely not for after Lord of the Rings. Even with what goes on before Lord of the Rings, it all relates to the events of Lord of the Rings. There’s no Knights of the Old Middle Earth.
Sequels to Star Wars and Lord of the Rings would be wildly different, and while one is pretty much doomed by the basic facts of the story, the other feels almost inevitable.
I don’t really agree that TFA set up any of that, and I didn’t at the time either from 2015-2017.
I didn’t believe that Rey’s parents or Snoke were going to be connected to anything. At the time, I was downright confused why anyone thought it would be this big mysterious reveal, although in retrospect there was a lot of ancillary media that seemed to support that. TFA’s novelization has Kylo say “It is you” about Rey. But the Last Jedi is a sequel to the Force Awakens, not its novelization.
I don’t think TLJ contradicts TFA on Finn’s arc or on the political situation. Until TRoS came out, I expected the political situation post-TLJ to be more of a power vacuum than the First Order controlling everything, TLJ said the First Order was going out trying to conquer the galaxy, they didn’t say the First Order had the level of control that the Old Republic or the Empire had.
Hux’s role is the only main difference between TFA and TLJ I think is actually there, but it’s minor enough that I really wouldn’t call them disjointed because of it.
I don’t see how the Producer of the Last Jedi could’ve had little to no role in its development.
But the overarching story of the prequels has good bones.
If you keep stripping down the prequels, you’ll eventually get to a point where they sound good. But you can describe the Room as a heartbreaking tragedy of a man and his ex going through a nasty breakup, and that’s certainly in there, but it’s not the experience you get when you watch the movie.
You don’t have to strip the prequels down nearly as far as the Room. But Revenge of the Sith is not a heartbreaking Shakespearean tragedy yaddah yaddah yaddah, it’s a soulless cash grab where they took the backstory to the OT and played it absolutely straight as an arrow, with almost nothing new or interesting you can get from this movie that you couldn’t get from an exposition scene from the OT.
Attack of the Clones, the prequel which sounds best IMO when you strip it down, isn’t actually a thrilling adventure in where Obi-Wan uncovers a conspiracy to undermine civilization itself as Anakin and Padme fall in love while running for their lives. The conspiracy plot line doesn’t go anywhere and Anakin and Padme’s plot line gets dropped in favor of spending a surprisingly large portion of time showing Anakin and Padme sitting around doing pretty much nothing at all.
The Last Jedi is far more deserving of the “Good story, bad execution” title than the prequels. The Last Jedi has a compelling story about the legacy of the people and events of the Star Wars Trilogy, which is unfortunately undermined by bathos too much, but it’s still there.
The Force Awakens, I think it’s the weaker of the two, but because it doesn’t really have as much substance as the Last Jedi. Maybe that’s “Meh to okay story, good execution”. Maybe we can fault it for that, but the first movie in the other two trilogies were a lot less complex than the latter two movies, and they were both probably for the better for that. It was an enjoyable movie and the Last Jedi picked up the slack for it.
The Rise of Skywalker is the one that’s rotten to the core, fundamentally broken, but that’s its own fault. The first two sequel movies were coherent, and gave ample opportunity for 9 to be as cohesive, but that’s where they dropped the ball.
Speaking of which, one cool thing about 7 and 8 that was missing for 9 was the metanarrative about the IRL legacy of the OT told through the in-universe legacy of the OT. Pretty much everything interesting about 7 and 8 was dropped for 9.
If there was ever a sequel trilogy to Lord of the Rings
I don’t think the Star Wars Trilogy and Lord of the Rings are really comparable in this regard. The story of LotR is the culmination of history itself in-universe, but the Star Wars Trilogy feels relatively self-contained. The nature of sequels to either of them would be very different.
Replace each crawl with an opening narration by the main character of the respective films.
This narration continues as the interior monologue of the main characters ala Lynch’s Dune.
The monologuer is Tommy Westphall
Eh, JJ doing 7 and Rian doing 8 was fine. JJ continued to work on 8 and Rian was involved with 7, so it’s not like there was a hard reset between each movie like some people think for some reason.
The reason the trilogy feels disjointed is because when Colin was fired, they legally had to throw away everything Colin was involved with (or else, shock horror, Disney would have to pay him for the work he did!). They did plan out the trilogy about as much as your average 2010-era movie series, but then for the conclusion of the series they essentially had to restart from scratch. With the same release date.
Duel of the Fates is seriously overrated, but further drafts would’ve been better, and it would’ve been more cohesive and just a better ending than TRoS.
The sequel trilogy could’ve been made more cohesive if there was one central vision behind it, but after the prequels I don’t think that would’ve been a good idea. Better to keep it as a group project, but, you know, not toss out the most important third of your trilogy.
Gareth Edwards directing would be an awful idea. He’s good with action sequences, but pretty awful at everything else. That’s why Rogue One is the way it is, good with action sequences, pretty uninteresting with everything else.
“Who’s that disembodied voice?”
“Disembodied? Oh, crap, have I had my invisibility on this whole time?”
I’ve never played KOTOR 2. Only KOTOR 1.