StarkillerAG

Fan_edit_fan said:

Can we just…please…stop bringing up personal politics when talking about the quality of SW writing, acting and directing? 🤷‍♂️

Yes, please. If a black character or female character is written like crap, it’s not because they’re black or female, it’s just because they’re written like crap. Anti-wokeness is the biggest disease that infects modern movie discourse.

Channel72 said:

Surprisingly, I think Darth Vader never sits down in Return of the Jedi. Objectively.

WRONG! If you watch the deleted scenes, he CLEARLY sits down right after arriving on the Death Star in order to contact Luke and persuade him to join the dark side. You utter imbecile. You should be ashamed of yourself. 😉

NFBisms said:

godfrey reggio’s star wars

I would kill for that, to be honest. Just a bunch of candid documentary footage of people walking around Galaxy’s Edge at Disneyland, with trippy atmospheric music in the background. It’s the only thing that can save this franchise.

Anjohan said:

The prequels had story, but lacked characters. The sequels had neither. That is why they are objectively the worst trilogy.

Huh? Literally no part of that makes any sense. Both trilogies had story and characters, whether good or bad, and “objectivity” can only rarely be applied to art (and certainly not here).

And again, this is not about your personal feelings regarding the sequel trilogy, it’s about what makes the most economic sense for Disney to do. I have plenty of issues with the sequels, don’t get me wrong, but box office numbers don’t care about your feelings.

Hal 9000 said:

It made for an abrupt ending to a short scene to remove it.

Well, maybe one of the VFX wizards around here could try their hand at extending the shot just before? I understand the need for seamless editing, but keeping in even a single moment of Anakin’s creepiness actively harms your goal with fixing the romance IMO.

Hal 9000 said:

I’ll bear it in mind, but I don’t see cracking AOTC open again anytime soon.

Not even to remove Anakin’s rape-face during the packing scene? It’s pretty much the only part of your edit that still makes me cringe when I watch it.

Vladius said:

Why? Why do we have to accept it?

You don’t have to, but I’m sure Disney would like other people to.

Why would it divide the fandom further?

Because there are people out there who actually like the sequels (believe it or not), and Disney suddenly saying “that never happened lol” would majorly piss them off. That’s exactly what happened with TFA going out of its way to shit on the prequels, and I doubt Disney wants to repeat that mistake.

What is wrong with dividing the fandom?

Disney wants money. Fans give Disney money. If Disney pisses fans off, they stop giving Disney money. I could not make this more simple.

Why is it better to salvage something?

Because then the people who still like at least a bit of the sequels will become much more pleased with the franchise as a whole, and the people who unconditionally love the sequels will just be pleased to have that story expanded on. Again, when this strategy was applied to the prequels via the Clone Wars show, it was received much more positively than “just pretend it didn’t happen” was for TFA.

Why is it possible to salvage anything?

Again, it may not be possible for you, but there are plenty of people out there who see at least a few redeeming qualities in the sequels’ story. If Disney can expound on those mostly-liked elements, while rationalizing the bits that pissed fans off, I think the sequels can be redeemed in the fandom’s eyes.

Why are they “the main saga?”

Because Disney branded them as such, and contradicting your own branding is almost never a good idea.

In a nutshell, it feels like you’re seeing this from a subjective, opinion-based point of view, while a corporation like Disney will go with what’s most economically sound. And from what I see, attempting to redeem the sequel trilogy is the most economically sound direction to take the franchise. No matter how you feel about the sequels, they will always be part of Disney’s canon.

Anchorhead said:

It could have been Andor in space

I thought Andor was already in space? 😉

Daiyus said:

I’m probably being blind, but is there a cut of Revenge of the Sith that includes The Siege of Mandalore and HAL9000’s Labyrinth of Evil?

I don’t think anything like that exists yet. It would be awesome if it did, though. Maybe you could make it yourself?

yoshif8tures said:

StarkillerAG said:

yoshif8tures said:

Here’s the next step for you Eddie, doing a fanedit with Hayden’s voice as Anakin!

https://youtu.be/H6sSrpyNPpg

Honestly, I’d prefer Matt Lanter’s voice for live action Anakin. Hayden is a great visual actor, but his voice is… not the greatest.

I beg to differ. TCW Anakin is too much like Han Solo imo.

I get what you mean. To be honest, I would prefer a completely new voice for Anakin, that combines Lanter’s baritone voice and sense of charisma with Hayden’s abrasive, angsty personality. That would require a ton of effort, though.

yoshif8tures said:

Here’s the next step for you Eddie, doing a fanedit with Hayden’s voice as Anakin!

https://youtu.be/H6sSrpyNPpg

Honestly, I’d prefer Matt Lanter’s voice for live action Anakin. Hayden is a great visual actor, but his voice is… not the greatest.

Acbagel said:

jedi_bendu said:

timdiggerm said:

I have to say, having someone say the words “Heir to the Empire” is a little on the nose

It’s definitely not as cool as her next line, “I can sense a dark force rising, we have to stop Thrawn before he can issue the last command.”

My favorite was right after that when she enters the World Between Worlds and said, “Perhaps by looking at these scepters of the past, we can receive a vision of the future.”

But even that line pales in comparison to what Hux’s dad says after Thrawn is defeated:

“It appears that your plan has failed, Pellaeon. We must move forward with Project Necromancer, in order to create… a Dark Empire.”

I agree with everyone else here, in that I’m almost shocked how good this episode was. It’s not a monumental storytelling achievement by any means, but it brought back a sense of emotion, drama, and good old fashioned fun that has been sorely missing from this season. The previous few episodes just made me roll my eyes in frustration, but this one made me remember why I even liked Mando in the first place.

As for the whole “desperately making excuses for why the sequels happened” thing, I think it’s something we just have to accept. The sequels were a botched attempt at recapturing the OT’s magic that just ended up feeling bleak and cynical, but they’ll always be there, and erasing them from canon would just divide the fandom further. It’s better to salvage at least something worthwhile out of those movies, rather than treating 3 installments of the main saga like the Holiday Special.

But overall, both the recent Celebration announcements and this newest episode of Mando have me cautiously optimistic for the future of Star Wars. If Disney can pull their act together and return to form after the increasingly diminishing returns of both their major franchises, I might start feeling happy to be a Star Wars fan again.

I know what you mean, Channel72. Despite me white-knighting hard for the sequels earlier today, I do recognize that they were pretty much completely unnecessary in the grand scheme of things. The exact same things that happened in the OT happened again, just with different people. And as a consequence, the sacrifices of the OT characters seem pointless.

After thinking about it for a while, I’ve come to the realization that the sequel trilogy would be monumentally improved if you made just one change: have Luke be part of the Resistance in TFA. Rather than his entire new Jedi Order being obliterated and him being in exile, have most of Luke’s apprentices survive Kylo’s downfall, with Luke himself still dedicated to defeating the First Order and restoring the Jedi.

In this hypothetical scenario, TFA would be centered around Luke’s efforts to find the first Jedi temple, with pretty much the entire first half of the theatrical movie intact otherwise. Luke would be mentioned throughout, but would only appear in person once the Falcon lands on the Resistance base, with a big fanservicey introduction scene of him training the six-or-seven remaining Jedi. He would stay on the base for the final battle, but the very end of the movie would feature him, Rey, and the other students landing at the first Jedi temple, aiming to establish it as their new home.

TLJ would have the same character arc for Rey, with her being tempted by darkness via her connection with Kylo, but it would be completely reframed in the context of a non-grumpy Luke attempting to train her as the latest addition to his Jedi school. Several scenes on the island would be mostly intact, but others would be almost completely new. Since Luke is on the island for most of the movie, the Resistance plot would play out like it did originally. At the end, Luke still pulls his teleportation trick, but doesn’t die: Luke now does it with the hope that his bravery will inspire Force-sensitives across the galaxy to join his temple.

At the start of TROS, it would be revealed that Luke’s wish came true: dozens of new Jedi are now being trained at Luke’s temple. However, Luke’s health is failing, and he knows that his time is near. Around the end of the first act, he gathers all of his students around his deathbed to hear his final lesson. He tells them that Rey will be the new master of the Jedi academy, and that he’ll always be watching them in the next life. And so, with his mission to restore the Jedi finally complete, Luke dies with a smile on his face.

I know that was a bit wordy, but I was just feeling a little inspired today. If the sequels actually played out like that, I’m sure a lot of their most vocal haters would like them a lot more. Too bad that will never happen.

Most impressive, Adywan! Every additional tease for this edit makes me more and more excited. Once your take on the trilogy is done, I don’t know if I’ll be able to watch any other version.

Servii said:

As for film critics, I have no trust in their opinions anymore. Anyone can become a professional critic. Granted, the audience score often isn’t a good metric, either, but I only think it counts as “review bombing” if it’s being done for reasons unrelated to the quality of the film itself. Maybe a lot of those people hated TLJ for the wrong reasons, but those were still the genuine opinions of people.

I get what you mean, but I heavily disagree with the TLJ audience score representing the “real opinions of people”. There was clearly at least a bit of manipulation going on to make the score as negative as possible: people using bots to spam multiple negative reviews at once, people who hadn’t even seen the movie rating it negatively because their favorite culture war grifter told them to, that sort of thing. Again, I know TLJ was controversial, but “40% on Rotten Tomatoes” controversial? That seems suspicious.

Of course, why all that vitriol was directed toward TLJ specifically, while TFA mostly got off scot-free, I’ll never understand.

Like I said before, it’s because “white male nerd outrage” wasn’t anywhere near as big of a thing prior to Trump getting nominated. There were still right-wing grifter channels back then, and they did hate TFA, but the idea of “anti-wokeness” wasn’t really mainstream yet. Luckily, the grifters sank back into obscurity once more after the Capitol riot failed, but the pollution of movie discourse that they started still persists.

Z6PO said:

The Force Awakens has a lot of flaws, playing it mostly safe, but one bold move (to the credit of J.J. Abrams?) is to have made our (male) heroes some sad old losers!

Why does it have to be a gender thing? Why are so many people on here acting like Disney Star Wars is some evil woke plot to emasculate white men and replace them with women and minorities? If you’re trying to portray sequel hate as entirely apolitical and not right-wing at all, using literal right-wing rhetoric does not help your case.

Like I said, TFA had tons of problems with how it decided to continue the OT’s story, but I’d say those problems were caused less by “wokeness” and more by laziness. JJ figured “Well, people hate the prequels and prefer the OT, let’s make the new era exactly like the OT! What do you mean, it would feel insulting to have the galaxy fall into darkness again after the OT heroes fought so hard to restore the Republic? We have X-Wings again, no one will care!”

Eyepainter said:

StarkillerAG said:

Night of the Living Dead. I tried watching it a couple days ago, but it has aged horribly. The protagonist is a “helpless screaming blonde” of the type that was unfortunately common in old Hollywood…

I’m pretty sure the protagonist was the black guy, Ben, which was a big deal in the 1960s due to the racial tensions that were going on at the time of its release.

I get that, and I understand that it was a big deal back then, but that’s what I mean by it aging horribly. A modern audience won’t recognize how revolutionary a competent black character was back then, they’ll just see the helpless screaming damsel in distress and the complete lack of any real suspense. “Living Dead” is better as a history lesson than as an actual movie.

WitchDR said:

StarkillerAG said:

But what if you think Rey was already a good character? I certainly did, at least until the whole “you are a Palpatine” fiasco. But I feel like a major goal of this movie is to rationalize and streamline some of the messiness of TROS, bringing the sequels’ reception back to the mostly-positive outlook pre-2019.

Remember, both TFA and TLJ had a more than 90% positive critical reception, and I feel like the audience score would look the same way if sequel hate wasn’t weaponized during the Trump-era culture wars. People liked the sequels before TROS, Disney just needs to figure out how to make people like them again.

For one I wouldn’t take payed critics opinions seriously

You lost me here. Anyone who seriously says to ignore the opinions of professional critics and trust obviously review-bombed audience scores instead is not worth paying attention to.

and second - this “Trump-era” culture war you speak of, I don’t think has anything to do with it. What happened is TLJ came out an completely destroyed Luke Skywalker. And people were pissed. You can try to blame outrage culture channels on Youtube for this. But the whole reason they ever rose to stardom in the first place is BECAUSE people were going to these sites to see if people felt the same way they did after leaving the theater from TLJ.

I know some people were genuinely upset by what happened to Luke (although I personally like it, YMMV), but the culture war grifters were the ones who turned it from individual dissatisfaction into a mass movement of right-wing nerd outrage. And it rubbed off on people of other political persuasions too: if everyone around you is saying “Rian Johnson ruined Star Wars”, you’re inevitably going to start believing it.

The only reason TFA was so positive is because it was a new mainline Star Wars movie after 15 years of none. And once that high wore off and TLJ came out, people looked at it far more critically. And it especially didn’t help that the movie itself was horrible.

One, as I already told you, a lot of people like TLJ. Stop acting like your opinions are objective.

And two, it being a “new mainline Star Wars movie after 15 years of none” didn’t stop people from hating TPM. You can have issues with how weak TFA was as a setup to the sequel trilogy (God knows I do), but the vast majority of people genuinely loved that movie. And it also helps that the “culture war” thing wasn’t anywhere near as big in 2015: I remember grifters trying to make people hate TFA because “How dare they have a female protagonist” or “How dare they have a black stormtrooper”, but no one listened to that stuff back then.

But anyways, I’ve said my piece. If you seriously don’t believe there was at least some political element to TLJ hate, you clearly weren’t paying enough attention back in 2017. Does that 40% Rotten Tomatoes audience score really look genuine to you?

Fan_edit_fan said:

I think cynicism is allowed when there’s already been THREE whole movie attempts to make Rey a good character or not. Why would you not be cynical with them forcing a fourth attempt?

But what if you think Rey was already a good character? I certainly did, at least until the whole “you are a Palpatine” fiasco. But I feel like a major goal of this movie is to rationalize and streamline some of the messiness of TROS, bringing the sequels’ reception back to the mostly-positive outlook pre-2019.

Remember, both TFA and TLJ had a more than 90% positive critical reception, and I feel like the audience score would look the same way if sequel hate wasn’t weaponized during the Trump-era culture wars. People liked the sequels before TROS, Disney just needs to figure out how to make people like them again.

Jesus, you people are cynical. It’s starting to be hard to tell the difference between this site and Red Letter Media’s comments section.

Personally, I think this movie has a ton of potential. Most people outside of hardcore fandom were okay with at least some parts of the sequels, it’s not an “unsalvageable” aspect of the franchise. If they can create a nice, satisfying epilogue story that makes it so people’s last memory of the sequel era isn’t TROS, I think it would do a lot to heal the divide that those movies inflicted on the fandom. That’s a big ask, though.

Hal 9000 said:

The best one is Ascendant.

https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/The-Rise-of-Skywalker-Ascendant-Released/id/71835

You can tell how much fanediting has engrained itself into the Star Wars community, when people have decided to fanedit a movie that hasn’t even begun filming yet. 😉 But seriously, the potential for this film to be edited into alternate takes on the sequels (much like the edits that incorporate Kenobi into the prequel trilogy) is mind-boggling.

One idea I’m already considering is using this movie to realize George Lucas’s original plans for a 12-episode Star Wars saga:

• Episode I would be TPM turned into a standalone “prologue”.
• Episodes II-IV would be a “Clone Wars trilogy”, consisting of AOTC, a movie edit of the Clone Wars cartoon, and ROTS.
• Episode V would be an “interlude”; either a movie edit of Kenobi, or a sagafied edit of Rogue One.
• Episodes VI-VIII would be the OT.
• Episodes IX-XI would be the sequels.
• Finally, Episode XII would be the Rey movie turned into an “epilogue”.

It’s not necessary by any means, but I think it would still be cool, just as a “what could have been” sort of thing.

I saw the new poster for the rerelease on Reddit today. Right now, it’s one of the most active threads on the site, for a reason that I’m sure a lot of people here will be proud of: Pretty much all the comments are demanding a release of the theatrical OT.

As a member of the site that created the Despecialized versions, it was so satisfying to go through that thread and see all the people saying things like “Will this be the original version?”, or “I wish Disney would release the original versions”, or “This is why I only watch Despecialized”. There are even people spreading the news about the 4K77 project to people who think Despecialized is still the best option to see the original movies in HD.

I thought people had pretty much stopped caring about the theatrical OT, but I think this proves that there’s still a ton of demand. If Disney releases the original versions, people will watch them. It’s a shame that they probably won’t.

I, for one, am pretty excited for the Rey movie, if for no other reason than the potential to edit out all the TROS references and retitle it “Star Wars Episode IX”. 😉

The Filoni movie could be good, but we’ll have to see. It all depends on if the Mandoverse can get its act together after the catastrophic failure of BOBF and Mando season 3. A decent finale could make all the crap worthwhile.

But overall, the movie I’m most unambiguously hyped for is Mangold’s Old Republic movie. It’s exactly what I’ve been demanding for years: a fresh start for the movies, in a mostly new time frame. I just hope Indy 5 does well enough that Disney won’t consider canning him, like they did with too many directors before.