SparkySywer

I think the problem is that most Star Wars fans have been introduced to Star Wars now in its diluted form. A lot of the original ideas have been lost, and I see a lot of people talk about Star Wars as if it were just another cliche-ass fantasy story. When you have generations of people who know the Force as midichlorians, don’t be surprised when Star Wars loses a lot of its mythicality. The people who are making Star Wars are appealing to them.

My unabashed love for TLJ incoming: I think, though, that TLJ is the closest thing to the very knowledgeable deconstruction of Star Wars we’ll ever get. Despite what the youtube comments section will tell you, Rian Johnson knew his shit when he was making the Last Jedi. Although I’m not going to turn this into a long ramble about TLJ.

The Last Jedi actually addressed and added to the ideas and themes of the Star Wars Trilogy, and it’s almost certainly the most divisive movie of the decade. Possibly the most divisive movie of the century so far, but don’t quote me on that.

There are a lot of people who want Star Wars to be shallow popcorn action-adventure movies. There’s nothing wrong with that, there’s a need for that in cinema, and it’s all a subjective matter of opinion anyway so who am I to say that’s wrong. But if you want Star Wars to recapture its magic, and for it to no longer be an imitation of itself, they are your main adversary.

Or, maybe I’m just being a moron. I might also be falling into the “Episodes 4 5 6 and 8 were totally indie arthouse kino flicks and Episodes 1 2 3 and 9 were soulless corporate garbage” sentiment, which is also wrong.

You’re correct. Temuera was added in 2004. Generally I just refer to any post-1997 cuts as the Special Editions, though.

imperialscum said:

Omni said:

Pretty sure George didn’t give a shit about him either, hence how he died on ROTJ. I must say, with as much Boba Fett fanboy-ism going on after Mando, I like his silly death scene more and more - we shouldn’t be thinking too much of the bad guys, focus on the heroes, dammit!

Having some cliché grand duel for Boba Fett’s death would be boring and stupid in my opinion. I think they way his death was done in ROTJ was great actually. It is kind of a homage to how some of the famous gunslingers of the old west died (e.g., Wild Bill was shot in the back, etc.). It kinda points to the fact that, in the end, no matter how good and skilled your are, eventually your luck will run out and one bad luck moment and you are gone in this kind of business.

He didn’t have to die screaming and then have the Sarlacc burp, though.

canofhumdingers said:

Second, he DOES do some cool stuff in ESB. He actually talks back to Darth Vader. Twice! And he gets away with it! All while imperial officers are dropping like flies for the slightest infractions throughout the movie. Plus he sees through Solo’s trick. He looks AWESOME. He even SOUNDS awesome (adding the spur sound effects to his walk was a stroke of genius). He’s this intimidating, mysterious “Clint Eastwood/man with no name” “strong silent type” guy in a cool armor suit who does a super cool job (bounty hunting) and even has to get singled out by the big man himself to be explicitly warned not to disintegrate his target!

I completely agree, and it bothers me to no end that people think Boba Fett looks cool, does nothing, and then dies. People need to rewatch the damn movie.

Boba Fett also outsmarts Han Solo. In a lesser movie, it might come off like the Empire are morons for letting Han hide in their trash, and Han’s a dumbass for letting himself get followed. But it comes off like Han’s a genius for thinking of disguising the Falcon as trash, where the Empire isn’t going to look, and Boba Fett’s an even bigger genius for seeing that coming.

Boba Fett also hears Luke cock his gun, which is a minor cool moment if you notice it.

I sort of blame the Special Editions for people thinking Boba Fett is lame. There’s a lot of people who have only heard the subservient, weak Boba Fett, and not the intimidating Man With No Name Boba Fett who’s Darth Vader’s equal. No shade to Temuera Morrison, he’s great, but it sounds like they only did one take. Plus Lucas’s awful direction.

Maybe we should brute force our way into this project

When it comes to the fall of Rome, historians will typically say something about how Rome never really fell, it slowly faded away over centuries, but if you really need a specific date, here are some good candidates (235 AD, 476 AD, 1453, etc). One of these is usually used as THE date Rome fell (476), but almost always with the clarification that that’s not actually how it worked out.

Maybe it could be something like that with the Galactic Republic/Empire. Here’s the date where the Jedi were officially declared enemies of the state. Here’s the date where the position of Emperor was created. Here’s when the Republic began imperializing the Outer Rim. Here’s the first major policy shift away from democracy toward autocracy. Et cetera.

Maybe the date where the Jedi were declared enemies of the state is the 476 AD of the Republic/Empire. Generally accepted to be the turning point, where yesterday you had the Republic, today you have the Empire, but it’s just a convention created millennia later. Not all that much actually changed, and other historians in other contexts would use different dates for different reasons.

fmalover said:

The only thing he has going for him is the undeniably cool looking suit of armour. Apart from that he does absolutely nothing noteworthy, and in TESB they only call him “bounty hunter”, just to show how little Lucas thought about him.

This is the most grievous misconception in the Star Wars fandom. People really need to go watch ESB and see how much “”“nothing”“” he does.

His treatment in RotJ is inexcusable, though.

Completely spitballing, it’s possible the Republic could have transitioned into the Empire gradually enough that you really can’t strictly say Year X was the Republic, Year Y was the Empire. There’s nothing textual that supports this, but it fits in with the metaphor for American Imperialism.

yotsuya said:
This firmly plants the start of the Empire at their birth. Why? Vader did not know Luke had a sister which means he was not present at the birth. So the event that turned Vader and started the Empire happened between conception and birth of the twins.

I don’t think we can necessarily assume that Vader turning to the dark side and the rise of the Empire happened at the same time.

hellscape_navigator said:

I think I agree with Servii’s point that we can’t make all art pieces immune to criticism because “taste is subjective,” but I don’t think there’s been any shortage of critical voices trying to hold creators accountable for making bad art.

I don’t think anyone who thinks art is subjective is trying to make it immune from criticism.

I don’t really think TFA screwed over TLJ & TRoS that hard. Redoing the Rebels v Empire conflict was a mistake, but they could have brought in the Republic military as late as in Episode 9, and there’s more interesting subtext to the conflict you can read into TFA and TLJ.

They don’t develop on the new concepts of the ST that much, but TLJ picks up the slack enough that I don’t think it’s a problem. At least in TFA’s case.

The Knights of Ren should’ve been cut, because there’s not really anything you could do with them. That’s kind of indefensible, but it’s not that big a deal either.

I don’t really know what else could be a case of TFA screwing over the rest of the ST, though.

They might end up just being white in that kind of lighting. They shouldn’t be purple, though.

Servii said:

Episode numbers were a mistake.

I agree, sort of. It hurt Star Wars in the long run, but it served an actually interesting purpose before the prequels existed. Back when the fact that the first movie was not Episode 1 was just a reference to old serials and not a gap that would eventually be filled in later.

Servii said:

Cthulhunicron said:

The Star Wars universe is pretty limited, and I don’t think there’s really anywhere for the story to go.

So, if movies can’t actually have their quality measured, then what’s the point of lists like the AFI Top 100?

Top 100 most important movies (which can be objectively measured)

Why create official rankings of movies that are generally considered great if there’s no way to actually quantify that?

Top 100 most popular movies (which can be objectively measured)

Borders are fuzzy. I’ve seen people say the zoomer generation starts as early as 1994 and as late as 2006. Almost an entire generation can fit in the grey zone.

The TRoS leak meme culture was something else. I’m gonna miss it.

theprequelsrule said:

imperialscum said:

SparkySywer said:

rocknroll41 said:

Servii said:

Rodney-2187 said:

I’ve already seen opinions of TFA and TLJ improve.

The OT is revered because it’s a well made set of films.

Art is subjective. If the OT was as objectively well-made as you say then why did places like Time Magazine and Empire Magazine shit on ESB when it was new? We also mustn’t forget that a lot of people also crapped on RotJ up until TPM was released.

Art is subjective, and the quality of a movie is subjective. But the OT is undeniably popular, and not simply just because it’s old or because le Star Wars fans are le dumb. It’s also incredibly influential, in a way the PT and ST, like them or not, never will be.

Agreed completely. As I stated so many times on these forums, films are purely subjective, there are no two ways about it.

Still OT has something special that extremely few films ever had or ever will.

To say “purely subjective” is a rather extreme position. There may be an element of subjectivity, but there objective elements. Is Britney Spears as good a musician as Mozart?

Mozart has a lot of qualities that Britney Spears doesn’t have, and they’re worth talking about. But whether or not Britney Spears is as good as Mozart is subjective.

theprequelsrule said:

imperialscum said:

theprequelsrule said:

imperialscum said:

SparkySywer said:

rocknroll41 said:

Servii said:

Rodney-2187 said:

I’ve already seen opinions of TFA and TLJ improve.

The OT is revered because it’s a well made set of films.

Art is subjective. If the OT was as objectively well-made as you say then why did places like Time Magazine and Empire Magazine shit on ESB when it was new? We also mustn’t forget that a lot of people also crapped on RotJ up until TPM was released.

Art is subjective, and the quality of a movie is subjective. But the OT is undeniably popular, and not simply just because it’s old or because le Star Wars fans are le dumb. It’s also incredibly influential, in a way the PT and ST, like them or not, never will be.

Agreed completely. As I stated so many times on these forums, films are purely subjective, there are no two ways about it.

Still OT has something special that extremely few films ever had or ever will.

To say “purely subjective” is a rather extreme position. There may be an element of subjectivity, but there objective elements. Is Britney Spears as good a musician as Mozart?

I think you do not understand the basic concept of objective/subjective. As a scientist and an engineer, I have a very clear idea of what objective and subjective is. The definitions of objective and subjective are actually pretty simple. Objective is something that can be quantifiable by a metric. On the other hand, subjective is something that cannot be quantifiable.

Are there some elements of films that can be quantifiable by certain metrics? Yes, there are. For example, like how many words from the script were faithfully reproduced in the actual dialogue in the film (you will get a percentage score). However none of the elements that are quantifiable really matter when we think about “how good the film is”. When we say “how good the film is”, we pretty much think of purely subjective elements. So what I said still essentially holds true.

And yes, Britney Spears can be as good a musician as Mozart, since it completely depends on an individual opinion. Music is also an art and therefore completely subjective thing too. Unless you will come up with objective metrics, such as “notes per second”, to quantify “goodness”, which does not make sense at all, as it does injustice to some of the great minimalist composers, like John Adams.

So taste cannot be measured? Talent can’t be measured? At least not by any quantifiable metric? Editing skill and decisions in film making, the pacing of the script, quality of special effects, composition of shots? These are all subjective by your definition, yes?

How would you measure whether or not any of these things were good or bad? You’d need some set of standard, but those set of standards can’t be objective. You can’t prove what blocking should have been used, or how long a take should have been.

It’s the is-ought distinction (Hume’s guillotine), you can’t prove what ought to be solely based on what is. You can only make claims about what should and shouldn’t be based on some set of standards, which are subjective.

Every attempt to define an objective set of standards, or prove whether some art is objectively good or bad, falls short. A movie can be objectively artistically complex, or objectively popular, or objectively influential, or objectively a box office hit, or objectively thrilling, but none of these are inherently, objectively good.

Especially because a lot of the time, people want different things out of movies. Sometimes the same person wants different things at different times.

Sometimes people want schlock BS popcorn movies with cringe dialog. Sometimes people want pretentious arthouse kino from 1729. You really can’t prove either of them wrong.

The planets montage never bothered me in theory, although in execution, I didn’t need more Jar Jar or shoddy CGI Tatooine.

I think though now that the sequels are out, tonally it works better without the planets montage. Maybe I should try editing it out again. I wasn’t ever able to get it quite right with the movie’s audio, but I got it pretty good with the soundtrack. Maybe a blend of the two would work.

thedewback2 said:

The theater I go to is doing private theater showings where you can bring your own Blu-Ray and they’ll play it for you and up to 25 people. I think I’m going to bring 4K77 one of these days.

I’m talking to my local theater about doing that, actually. Covid permitting, and my and whoever else having the moolah permitting.

Servii said:

I do wonder what George was picturing when he thought of the Clone Wars.

Hmm… so Obi-Wan was a vet of WWII. But we can’t exactly say WWII. Let’s come up with something less on the nose.

Well, World Wars I and II were both wars with the same name.

Same name is sort of like being the same war.

Same war… Cloned wars… Clone Wars.

Alright, on to the next scene.

rocknroll41 said:

Servii said:

Rodney-2187 said:

I’ve already seen opinions of TFA and TLJ improve.

The OT is revered because it’s a well made set of films.

Art is subjective. If the OT was as objectively well-made as you say then why did places like Time Magazine and Empire Magazine shit on ESB when it was new? We also mustn’t forget that a lot of people also crapped on RotJ up until TPM was released.

Art is subjective, and the quality of a movie is subjective. But the OT is undeniably popular, and not simply just because it’s old or because le Star Wars fans are le dumb. It’s also incredibly influential, in a way the PT and ST, like them or not, never will be.

theprequelsrule said:

Servii said:

Simply, Rey is not Luke, despite the films treating her like she is, and I honestly think it’s a reductive treatment of her character. She has a different personality, different goals, and different relationships.

The point is Rey should have been far more tempted to the Dark Side then Luke because of the environment she was raised in.

I disagree with the notion that people raised in bad environments are led into having questionable morals, and I really like that in the ST (or at least, TFA and TLJ), Rey was screwed over by the world, had parents who abandoned her, and lived a shitty life, but still had a moral compass that pointed north. Kylo had it made, and had parents who loved him, but he still turned to the dark side.

Screw the actual quality of the prequels or their hypothetical reboot, the angry zoomers alone would be worth it.

Reddit neet zoomers ruined the word Karen, have made boomer no longer a fun word, and they invented Simp so it was never good.

Add a framing device to the framing device of R2 telling Poe about the time he told Luke about the prequels.

I really think that they should loosen up on canon, or have multiple different continuities or something like that. Not in the same way as Marvel or DC, though. Maybe they should have no official canon, but a few continuity projects. I don’t know.

But with a fandom so big and so diverse as the Star Wars fandom, having one official continuity is an awful idea. I mean, for one, there might not have been such a poor reaction to the prequels or TLJ if they weren’t the only backstory for Darth Vader, or the only continuation of Luke’s story. If other people could try their hands at those stories, people wouldn’t care if this one particular one wasn’t right for them.

Especially if Lucasfilm wants to treat Star Wars like a modern mythology. There is technically a Sherlock Holmes canon, and a Robin Hood canon, and a King Arthur canon, but they don’t behave the same way that Star Wars’s canon does. They’re a central group of ideas and stories from which other stories radiate out from.

theprequelsrule said:

SparkySywer said:

I kind of wish they and the mods would reconcile so they could come back, but a lot of them have said they are no longer interested. Oh well. Can’t change that anymore.

Then you are still in touch with some of them outside of OT.com?

Most of them are on Fanedit.org, that’s where I’m in touch with them.