Vladius

oojason said:

Andor Season 2 Is A Star Wars Manifesto From 1981

www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUv7j5Gj3Us - a 27 minute ‘Andor: Season 2 Review’ from the Spaceman youtube channel.
 

The blurb: 'Andor Season 2 tells the story of a Rebellion: growing, overwhelmed, and entirely too prescient. It is a beautiful love letter to our own history, to the era we find ourselves in now, and to the people who choose to sacrifice their lives so that we may live on. From incredible color theory and amazing setpieces, to astounding monologues and gorgeous cinematography – Andor is the greatest Star Wars of the 21st Century.

Please remember, this is just one lone man’s opinion. I hope you enjoy.’

 
^ Well worth a watch of anyone’s time. Insightful, thoughtful and entertaining - as usual… from Spaceman.
 

This seems like a youtube channel tailor made to irritate me

degoyib said:

Mocata said:

https://x.com/starwars/status/1913133212349726755 Geometry Dash

Maul - Shadow Lord, a Star Wars Original series, arrives on DisneyPlus in 2026

Not sure about this. It’s just more animation but isn’t his story over in TCW? Do they need viewers enough to bring him back, again?

Your skepticism about Maul: Shadow Lord is understandable, given Maul’s extensive history in Star Wars media and the franchise’s reliance on familiar characters to draw viewers. However, the series’ setting in the early Imperial Era, its focus on Maul’s criminal empire, and the introduction of a new padawan (potentially Darth Talon) suggest it could offer fresh storytelling while bridging his TCW and Rebels arcs. Sam Witwer’s return and the incorporation of George Lucas’ ideas further hint at a project that respects Maul’s legacy while exploring new territory.

Why are you using LLMs to write forum posts?

WHO COULD HAVE FORESEEN THIS TURN OF EVENTS

The song is the one and only change in ROTJ that I would be okay with, though Yub Nub doesn’t bother me either. I feel like the somber Force theme when Luke cremates Vader is the “real” ending music, and Yub Nub is a sort of diegetic song that Luke and the others are hearing around them with the ewoks while you’re getting ready for the end credits. The special edition celebration music is more appropriate for what they were trying to do with it summing up six movies on a massive galactic scale instead of Luke’s personal story, but neither approach is inherently better.

darklordoftech said:

I wonder why KOTOR didn’t try to appeal to prequel haters by having Jedi be allowed to marry and start training as adults.

Attack of the Clones barely existed for a year at the time when KOTOR came out, so KOTOR was just following what was established there. Prequel haters weren’t a demographic on the radar because they just barely existed too.

Also notably as the player character you do (re)train as an adult, and characters like Jolee Bindo are openly critical of the “love” part, using characters from Tales of the Jedi as an example. You have romance options including with other Jedi and no one cares.

KOTOR 2 was largely about ripping the setting established by AotC to shreds, so it had to keep what was there to do that.

That doesn’t change anything. If anything that makes it worse, because you would expect it to have more lasting effects if you think he’s getting tortured for longer.

It was easy to understand that Saw had Bor Gullet because he’s crazy. Not everyone knows or cares about Filoni shows. The problem is more that Bor Gullet doesn’t do anything. It temporarily messes with Bodhi and then nothing happens, he gets over it right away and there are no lasting changes to the plot.

The real message of Star Wars was always about how success comes from personal virtue, growth, restraint, respect for life, free will, a sense of greater purpose, and redemption. The Rebels vs. Empire stuff was the background and set dressing. It’s much easier to swallow if it’s about #Resistance though because that doesn’t demand anything from the viewer other than picking whichever side they’re told to pick on any given political issue.

Throwing stormtroopers around is a fun novelty, the graphics were nice, but that’s about all I can say with positivity. I hate the main character and he’s not interesting. QTEs are awful and take away from the feeling of player skill. Once you get enemies that can’t be instantly grabbed with the Force or killed in a few hits, the power fantasy goes away and it becomes a somewhat frustrating average action game. While the idea that the Emperor and Vader accidentally created the rebellion is some fun irony, I don’t think it should be canon and it detracts from the rebels getting set up on their own.

The real stars of the game were supposed to be the Euphoria AI system that would have gotten used in the cancelled Indiana Jones game they were doing, and wound up in GTA 4, and the particle-based physics engine where you can deform materials in realistic ways, wood splintering, metal denting, etc. Both made it into the game but in very light and limited ways. Stormtroopers will grab onto stuff but don’t behave in a particularly intelligent way, and there are some wooden beams, metal doors, panes of glass and so on but they’re infrequent and as soon as you destroy them they vanish. I don’t think either piece of tech became anything more than a gimmick, but I think they could be really cool with today’s hardware.

I don’t think they wanted to be Anti-Star Wars, they just wanted to make it without depending on existing Star Wars to make it good or interesting. They wanted it to be more Star Wars rather than recycling existing Star Wars.

Jar Jar Bricks said:

I’m not sure where else to post this. Has anybody seen this excellent video of the Palpatine/Mace duel?

https://youtu.be/YC8VRvDNw1k?si=K24jw4HL_yBILYNS

I think the only rough spot is around 2:33 with their spinning moves, but I can’t believe how much better the duel flows by just being sped up a bit. The CGI backflip doesn’t really feel out of place anymore.

I’m okay with stuff like this.

The only thing that bothers me is when people call it “lore accurate” or something. The movies are the lore! You’re seeing the lore with your eyeballs!

The pre-special edition VHS tapes I grew up on, looks like it was the 1995 box set

My biggest problem with Dark Empire is that Luke’s plan works. It’s an understandable error for a hero to want to infiltrate and sabotage the enemy from the inside. It’s understandable why that’s a bad idea when the dark side is involved. But it basically does everything it was supposed to with no lasting consequences. He gets the world devastators shut off and saves everyone. Then when he would go evil, Leia saves him and he’s fine. It trivializes the whole concept of turning to the dark side and makes the Emperor look idiotic for gambling everything on trying to turn Luke twice in a row.

I think Timothy Zahn noticed it and tried to retcon in the idea that there were lasting effects. I think it’s in Vision of the Future. Mara Jade tells Luke that there’s always been something off about him ever since those events and it affected his judgment during a lot of the other EU stories.

Still though Luke’s plan seems like it was the only way out of that situation, at least in the short term when Palpatine had everyone dead to rights.

G&G-Fan said:

I’m a Jabba scene hater as much as the next guy, but am I the only one who kinda finds the theatrical transition awkward and sometimes wishes there was still a scene in between? Maybe with Vader/Tarkin, or a Jabba scene where he’s portrayed with a practical effect.

As a person who grew up with the special edition, its odd having a very quick crossfade between two shots that look almost identical in composition yet are very different in mood.

I’ve never noticed

G&G-Fan said:

The first time someone refers to Luke as “Skywalker” is himself when telling Leia who he is.
It wouldn’t be smart for the Lars to give him his father’s last name while in hiding. So his name on Tatooine was Luke Lars.
Him announcing himself as Luke Skywalker is him reclaiming his father’s last name after finding out the truth about him (“I want to learn the ways of the Force and become a Jedi like my father.”)
He started calling himself Luke Skywalker in his own mind after Ben told him his father was a Jedi Knight. Him introducing himself to Leia is the first time he verbalizes this.

I like this one

After trying out Rogue One after Andor, I’ve been doing the original trilogy next. As I suspected, it resonates a lot more with Star Wars 1977/A New Hope than ESB or ROTJ. ANH starts with Leia as a senator, the Imperials talking about how the Emperor dissolved the senate, Luke living as an average person, and of course the Yavin base and the rebels taking on the Death Star. After that though, the rebels are the background for the main characters. Andor barely deals at all with the rebel pilots and ground troops, and other than the main characters, they’re the main stars of all the battles in the original trilogy.

Andor isn’t “better” than the movies, it’s a completely different tone and genre so you can’t really compare them. Han Solo wouldn’t exist in Andor, and neither would Obi-Wan, Yoda, Jabba, or Boba Fett. Vader and the Emperor were deliberately excluded. You could make a case for a toned down, less adventurous version of Luke, Leia, Tarkin, R2D2, and maybe C3PO or Chewbacca. No classic alien monsters like the dianoga, the space slug, or the rancor. Andor is cool but by comparison it’s dreary and a little bit lifeless. That fits for its genre but the idea that it’s somehow better than everything else in Star Wars is contemptuous. It’s just different.

This also goes for the people sneering at the awards ceremony for Luke and Han destroying the Death Star. Andor doesn’t change anything. Okay, they joined the rebellion like a day ago. So what? Everyone would jump at the chance to celebrate the people who finished the mission after so much sacrifice. Luke’s aunt and uncle, the people who raised him, got turned into charred skeletons and his home was burned down. Leia was tortured and had her planet (including her entire family) destroyed in front of her. Han gave up dealing with a bounty on his head to risk everything and join the rebellion, and he later got tortured and frozen into a block of carbon for his trouble. If there was any mission in Andor that was dangerous and risky, that probably goes double for going into the belly of the beast in the Death Star itself and making it out alive. Yes Vader let them escape so they could go back to the rebel base - there’s nothing saying he had to let anyone other than Leia do that. Luke, Han, and Chewie could have been killed or worse. Setting aside blowing up the Death Star by itself, they’ve got their rebel bona fides even if they got them relatively quickly.

Meanwhile Andor-version Mon Mothma gets to be head of state because she was born rich, went to a lot of parties, and reluctantly let her daughter marry a boy she wanted to marry. Let’s give some champions some medals, I think it’ll be okay.

I wouldn’t say Rogue One is a good transition point either because it has its own problems, but that’s another story.

Spartacus01 said:

Vladius said:

Superweapon VII said:

*yawn*

Our concept of hell doesn’t have biblical origins

yawn yeah it does

Can you elaborate?

I’m not going to watch that video but at the very least the title is misleading. Hell comes up in the bible as either Sheol/Hades like the Greek concept as a place for dead spirits, or Gehenna, which is named after a valley in Israel and symbolizes fiery torment and burning. It’s worth noting for all the people here who are fans of sanitized 21st century-friendly hippie Jesus that Christ talks more about hell (Gehenna) than anyone else in the bible.

Of course different Christians have different interpretations of how all this works, who goes to hell, how long it lasts, what the nature of it is, what the difference between Sheol and Gehenna is, etc. but it’s clearly right there in the text. The imagery and the concept of a place of punishment is obviously biblical.

Superweapon VII said:

*yawn*

Our concept of hell doesn’t have biblical origins

yawn yeah it does

DuracellEnergizer said:

I’m not a Gnostic. I find its dualism problematic, actually. But I can still appreciate it. The Old Testament’s portrayal of God isn’t 100% ugly, but it still ascribes much ugliness to God. The Gnostics rightly recognized that ugliness as antithetical to the overall message of Jesus and rejected it; they just went a little too far.

Jesus is the Old Testament God

Darth_Detritus said:

[screams in the void said:]
I have a new order to recommend: the Spoiler Order, one that preserves the famous “twists” of the franchise for longer than either the Release Order or the Machete Order.

I am curious to hear others opinions on this…

I watched a YouTube video recently that made a good case for watching chronological vs release order. Almost everyone knows of the famous “I am your father” line at this point, even non-fans, which works against the biggest reason to suggest release order.

It was a real treat watching it with someone who didn’t know the line see it for the first time.

But even if you know the twist it’s still better to do release order in my opinion. Going from Return of the Jedi to Phantom Menace is much less jarring in terms of technology and visual aesthetic compared to going from Revenge of the Sith to Star Wars. The prequels also have a lot of in-jokes, callbacks, and “coming full circle” moments that don’t mean anything unless you’re already familiar with the original trilogy. That’s how it works even if you’re just listening to the music, there’s a lot of leitmotifs that are references to themes that were already developed elsewhere.

Yeah I think the strength of the show was how it handled everyday life for people in the setting and not necessarily the grandiose speeches. What they should take away from it is:
*More subtle writing that takes a little bit more audience inference and has some mystery to it without spelling everything out.

*More of an attempt to cover areas in the setting that don’t fall into the typical mold WITHOUT resorting to a pastiche of some other genre. Not “let’s have a Godzilla episode” or “let’s have an homage to this specific western/samurai movie”, but “let’s show this guy eating cereal with his nosy mom and worrying about his career.” It’s difficult to do without making it too mundane and boring, and I think they failed at it hard when they tried to do something similar in Mandalorian season 3 because it was so incongruous with everything else.

*Practical effects, props, and especially sets with a priority for shooting on location where possible. It’s okay and often better to re-use the same sets several times as you get familiar with the place.

*More attention paid to casting. The existing characters (Cassian, Saw, Mon Mothma, etc.) had already been cast elsewhere but all the new people fit their roles flawlessly. Even minor characters were more memorable because of the casting.

I think they might take the wrong lessons away, like feeling an obligation to a “dark and gritty” tone, morally gray characters and actions, or focusing even further on the already saturated period between episodes 3 and 4.

So I tried out watching Rogue One immediately after the show. I know I said it improves it before and it does, but it had strange results.

The first half of Rogue One, which I think is weak, is greatly improved. Knowing Cassian, K2, Saw, Krennic, etc. helps it flow very naturally and helps you to care a lot more about what’s going on. Same with the rebels generally. Since the pace of the show is so slow, Rogue One, which normally feels slow early on, feels much faster by comparison. Almost too fast. Cassian almost rises to the level of secondary protagonist because you know him so well by this point. When he decides not to snipe Galen Erso it’s much more meaningful. You know his modus operandi under Luthen was to gun down anyone who could potentially be a problem, and you see that at the beginning of the movie with his contact on Kafrene. The theme toward the end of the show where he starts to embrace the Force a little bit carries through pretty well.

The part where he tells Chirrut that “this is a first for me” when he’s in Saw’s jail is hilarious because they either forgot about it or he’s lying, given that there’s an entire arc in the show about him escaping a hell prison.

There’s also an interesting dynamic with Krennic’s character. We saw him as the intimidating upper manager figure in the show, but when we see him next to Tarkin and Vader he’s in the junior leagues. There’s a feeling that everything has gone up a level and there’s a natural progression from spies running around to open conventional war.

Then the other half of the movie, which people generally see as much stronger because it has most of the action and the big battle, actually gets weaker. The idea that Jyn steps up and becomes a leader figure right away looks even more absurd because we’ve just seen how paranoid and distrustful the rebel command is and how long it’s taken them to trust Cassian. There’s some of that discussion in the council with some of the worst senators ever but it’s still odd. Then they naturally defer to her to give an inspirational speech to the soldiers on the landing craft, when Melshi is clearly their real leader. The way she suddenly becomes the most important figure in the universe with the ability to single-handedly take out a dozen stormtroopers in melee comes across as more Mary Sue-ish next to the more grounded feeling of the show where everyone receives a lot more development. Baze and Chirrut similarly feel a little more out of place.

The ending feels even more abrupt. There’s no real breather where you take in that everyone died, it just slams right into CGI Leia and credits with little explanation. This was more understandable when this was just a fan film prequel for the original movie but now it feels almost insulting, for lack of a better word.

There were some subplots that didn’t end up going anywhere. Some of it is a result of the season compression but other stuff I think they just didn’t know what to do with. The big ones are:
*Mon Mothma, her family, and anything to do with the wedding. The only major thing that affects anything else is Luthen taking out Tay Kolma. The rest is all fluff. Mon already made the “sacrifice” of marrying off her daughter in season 1, we don’t need to see it play out.
*Bail Organa staying on Coruscant. Doesn’t matter at all, he’s teleported to Yavin after the timeskip.
*Wilmon going with Saw to steal special fuel and inhale it for some reason. It seems like it’s going to lead to another bigger mission and like he’s going to join Saw’s faction, and this was a rite of passage. But the next time we see him he’s with the main rebel/Luthen group like nothing happened.
*Similarly it seems like Bix is going to start doing missions in the middle and she’ll have a Bonnie and Clyde thing with Cassian but really they were just taking revenge on the torturer guy. Her worries about killing the innocent soldier guy on their last mission, and her drug problems, don’t go anywhere either. Although it is nice that she’s happy at the end and you can say that that was the point all along.
*On a related note there’s the setup where Lonni and the other ISB guy are going to supervise the other Imperial intelligence branch working with the torturer and making sure they don’t screw it up, which could have been entertaining. But that’s dropped when he’s killed right away. Maybe that was to make it more shocking when Bix takes him out? Who knows.

Overall I still thought it was satisfying and well done and the time skips were useful for getting to the good parts quicker.

I don’t even know what to call this

Star Wars
Empire Strikes Back
Return of the Jedi
Phantom Menace
Revenge of the Sith

Picking up K2 off the ground makes perfect sense. Those droids are extremely deadly and almost impervious to blaster fire. They don’t have any counter to it. If Cassian is already hopping on a truck and it’s right there, why wouldn’t you take it back? You would want to study it for weaknesses, reverse engineer it, or use it. He stole an experimental TIE interceptor at the beginning of the season for the same reason.