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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.