thebluefrog

Ed Slushie said:

thebluefrog said:

sade1212 said:

They’re not going to retcon the Sequel Trilogy. Like how the previous generation had to come to terms with the prequels being forever a part of Star Wars, the current generation will have to come to terms with the sequels. There’s hope for them to be slowly improved and augmented with ancillary material - what you could consider a slow retconning, maybe - as the prequels were,

Yes and no–when Disney took over Lucasarts, they erased all of the prequel era ancillary material.

What are you talking about? They erased almost all ancillary material, period. The Clone Wars was one of the only things they left in. And a lot of other famous prequel material like CW03 and Republic Commando had already been decanonized in favor of The Clone Wars.

Yes? The context of what I was saying was the erasure of the prequel era EU since we were talking about the prequel era material slowly retconning things for the better. And then they are slowly picking and choosing what parts to recanonize, i.e. Ahsoka.

You may have misunderstood what I said since I wasn’t saying anything about any other material (OT, etc) that was also erased since it wasn’t relevant contextually.

sade1212 said:

They’re not going to retcon the Sequel Trilogy. Like how the previous generation had to come to terms with the prequels being forever a part of Star Wars, the current generation will have to come to terms with the sequels. There’s hope for them to be slowly improved and augmented with ancillary material - what you could consider a slow retconning, maybe - as the prequels were,

Yes and no–when Disney took over Lucasarts, they erased all of the prequel era ancillary material. And in fact they very obviously pushed the sequels to ignore all of the prequel-introduced concepts (Darth Plagueis where are you) and soft-reset the entire series.

I wouldn’t be so 100% convinced no big erasures will never happen again.

Also, cheap “redeeming” retcons of villains is just distasteful and weak writing. I recall some story that attempted to retcon Anakin’s youngling killing into “actually, he just drew his lightsaber and then ordered the clones to shoot them.” Kylo “accidentally” blowing up the school reeks of the same attempt to make bad guys into good toys. May as well make Book of Boba have a cameo by Han Solo where they become friends because Boba was ACTUALLY trying to protect Han from Vader and also deliberately missed when trying to kill Luke.

Mocata said:

Yeah but Grogu isn’t going to be at Jedi School long or there’s no future for this series right?

Well, all of the tv series are in a weird place, writing-wise, since everyone but Rey will be dead in 10-20 years. It kind of neuters any narrative tension to know it ends with “and then Kylo kills everyone.”

They really have to think hard if they want to keep the sequels as the inevitable future.

Movies Remastered said:
There’s a lot to catch up on but changing Rey using a mind trick on the stormtrooper to escape and eliminating most of the fight with Kylo, leaving it to just one force/lucky/rage blow and having the ground open up straight away taking away her standing over a “defeated” Kylo removes any “mary sue” feel she has, imo.

Exactly. To have a villain have gravitas and be a threat in this sort of straightforward good vs bad story, he can’t be defeated in the opening act like that. If anything, edits should somehow make Kylo win that first fight.

Imagine if ep 4 had ended with Luke completely beating up Vader. The scary imposing monster is now weakly crippled on the ground, breathing heavily, sparking armor: totally defeated. Take the ROTJ ending and put it into ep. 4.

There wouldn’t have been an Empire Strikes Back. Or, rather, there wouldn’t have been a Darth Vader cultural icon as the image of the unstoppable, overwhelming, intimidating villain that carried the franchise. The image of him being defeated would be the final imagery that the audience remembered when they finished watching, and the hero’s journey is over. The bad guy has been beaten. He’s not interesting anymore.

Rey’s journey was crippled by having her win too early. There was no threat of Kylo beyond that point. If TFA was the ONLY movie and had zero movies before it or after, it could’ve worked as a self-contained hero’s journey. But as the opening act? That was a terrible writing decision that had ripple effects in the other movies; it should be noted she doesn’t lose the other 2 climactic fights with Kylo, either. TLJ: Kylo knocked out and she leaves. ROS: she stabs him and leaves.

I like Rey as a character fine, but I totally understand why her protagonist status did not resonate with audiences.

Hal 9000 said:

So, R2 is totes the one who saved Grogu at the Jedi Temple, right?

Grogu will be conveniently saved from Anakin the same way he has to be conveniently saved from Kylo in 10 years.

Guarantee there’s some handwringing at Lucasarts of how they have to reconcile Kylo’s school-shooting with Grogu carrying the franchise.

If they’re brave and want to do bold writing, they’ll make the sequels a form of inevitable fate that current Luke has to work to prevent, perhaps via Jedi vision. Make it so the tv series’ tension is how the heroes will prevent the bad future from happening. Save the timeline, Luke!

…but it’s more like they’ll just weakly say “Um…Grogu happened to be away from the temple that day when Kylo snapped. Also Luke forgot about him when he hid on his island.”

sade1212 said:

It’s a stretch to describe Rey vs Kylo in TFA as a humiliation. She barely defends herself, then unexpectedly goes at him in a rage, and after a struggle lands a single blow. Plus, not to reiterate tired points, but Kylo had also just been shot, was riding something of a post-patricide emotional rollercoaster, and wasn’t trying to kill her. It’s certainly not as humiliating as having your spaceship blown up by a ten year old by accident, or having twenty years worth of R&D on a massive space station rendered moot by a lucky shot from a redneck.

Those details aren’t the relevant parts. This is about the feelings the audience gets. They saw the hero beat up the villain at the end of the story–she stands triumphant over him and he’s on the ground. This is the imagery that resonates in the movie medium, and why people didn’t connect with Rey as the hero: she already won.

That’s not a good starting point for Rey’s journey–if anything, that’s the starting point for Kylo.

Note the absence of any comments about the Midichlorians or the microscopic Whills universe idea. In other interviews that was yet another sequel plotline.

Almost feels like he had multiple ideas and he gave this particular one to Disney, since it’s not that far off from the sequels overall.

idir_hh said:

So…Big Three back on the table?

No way they’ll get Harrison Ford to even come close to the franchise ever again.

Having the main hero humiliate the main villain in part 1 of a 3 part story was the critical mistake. You can’t have a standard hero’s journey and have the villain straight up lose 1/3 of the way in. It doesn’t work with audiences to establish the antagonist as a credible threat to the hero. To empathize with the hero’s struggles, they have to actually STRUGGLE and grow and learn.

Now, if Star Wars were a more cerebral and genre-defying franchise, that’d be a different story, but it’s not. The people want your familiar hero’s journey, and when they don’t get it, they get confused and dislike the feelings they get.

It’s as bad as the people that said the droids were ruined by dubstep.

I didn’t even notice until people complained 10000 times and I rewatched.

Amazing no leaks of Luke happened.

They must’ve had massive security and secrecy for filming that.

Almost each individual piece of concept art tells an amazing story on its own.

What a loss.

Maybe we’ll get lucky and they will use all the great ideas still, maybe even in some sort of re-imagined future sequel trilogy.

Make the sequel trilogy into a possible future that Luke sees in a Jedi vision.

Thus we can FEEL his trepidation and fear about how REAL that felt, because, in a way, it was. It’s very real, and the fact it IS real is why Luke has to work so hard to prevent it.

Make a story about his desperation to prevent that from happening. As an audience, we’d want him to succeed and find the “happy ending” that we already know won’t happen–thus creating narrative tension.

Looks like they’ve realized the OT is, and always will be, the most popular era, so they’ll be building on it with all the tv series going forward. They may be brave enough to rewrite/retcon the sequels at this rate.

Ed Slushie said:

https://youtu.be/yix_9g_Ob74?t=165

This new(-ly released) footage from Han and Leia’s first kiss vastly improves the scene, imo.

A lot of really good alternate-angle shots for a lot of scenes there.

Would make for a good “slightly different” edit of the films that still are the same storyline but feel like a new experience.

The basic issue is that TFA and TLJ’s characters are not the same characters. It’s very clear the respective directors wrote their own versions and they are very hard to reconcile. This doesn’t mean any one is particularly better–just that they are different and uneven.

A smooth edit would have to reconcile the characters in either direction–either change TFA or TLJ’s portrayals.

Let’s be honest, Snoke was pretty much wasted. The rich playboy appearance would be fine if it wasn’t erased in 4 minutes after introduction, so that image was also useless. I’ve said this before; there was a huge missed opportunity with Solo to fix the majority of Snoke’s issues–instead of Maul, make him Q’ira’s boss. One cameo explains what Snoke was doing in the OT, how he got power, and fits his rich crimelord image.

As it stands with the current story, the smoothest edit would reconcile the fact he’s a clone/experiment of Palpatine. Especially as Mandolorian seems to be heading in that direction with Gideon’s experiments.

Nice, thanks for bringing this one to light.

OutboundFlight said:

So we have a Death Star 3. Let’s do something interesting with that.

What if instead of just destroying the Hosnian system, Starkiller destroys dozens of planets in one launch? This would explain how the Republic collapsed – they had ships at bases across the galaxy, but Starkiller was able to destroy all of them in a single mass launch.

Starkiller should’ve…literally killed a star. Wiping out all planets in the system.

Kind of strange no one at Disney saw that.

StarkillerAG said:

thebluefrog said:

JJ likely rewrote everything rushed last minute under orders from Bob Iger/Kathleen Kennedy. When they fired Colin Trevorrow, it fell on JJ to pull together all his scribbled unused ideas from TFA. This is why ROS doesn’t really feel like a story and just a string of random ideas–that’s exactly what it was. It almost seems like JJ was told NOT to use anything from the Colin script.

But he actually did use a lot of stuff from the Trevorrow script. A nebula leading to a secret planet, Rey’s parents being killed by a Sith, Kylo sacrificing himself to heal Rey, and Lando showing up with a huge fleet to save the day were all ideas taken from Trevorrow. So that line of thinking is clearly incorrect.

A nebula with a secret planet is hardly limited to Trevorrow. Star Trek: Beyond had used it 2 years earlier, and JJ DEFINITELY knew about that. No one remembers Ochi as a Sith (or a “loyalist”) because he was an unmemorable alien. Trevorrow actually had Kylo do it, which is a HUGELY different plot point than a random forgettable alien; they’re not remotely comparable. That’s like saying Kylo killing Han was the same idea as Starkiller killing Han a few years before.

Sure, you could argue Kylo sacrificing himself was a borrowed idea, but, really, how else would the story have ended under Disney? Other than like 3 ideas, the scripts are lightyears apart. No Coruscant, no Eclipse, no Star Destroyer theft, no Hux suicide, no mutilated Kylo, no Rey/Poe kissing, no stormtrooper rebellion, no double Jedi blade for Rey, no Chewie vs Knights of Ren, no Sith training for Kylo, no Tor Valum at all, no blind Rey, no new Jedi school at the end, no Luke training Rey, no Luke confronting Kylo, no Darksaber, etcetera…so for the 2-3 ideas JJ used, there’s 27 others that were not.

JJ likely rewrote everything rushed last minute under orders from Bob Iger/Kathleen Kennedy. When they fired Colin Trevorrow, it fell on JJ to pull together all his scribbled unused ideas from TFA. This is why ROS doesn’t really feel like a story and just a string of random ideas–that’s exactly what it was. It almost seems like JJ was told NOT to use anything from the Colin script.

We can reasonably guess that JJ had “–Kylo Visit Mustafar” in his idea list and just slapped it onto the wayfinder quest footage when it didn’t fit anywhere else.

RogueLeader said:

Why ruin a strong, emotional character moment with a hint to a dumb mcguffin chase three films down the road?

If anything, why not just recolor the Mustafar scenes in 9 and just make it a totally different planet, unrelated to Vader? It would definitely be easier to just regrade those scenes and make it Corvus, or some other random planet. I’m surprised you weren’t going to make this suggestion, since you’re more enthusiastic about recoloring different planets.

Yeah, JJ’s idea of it being Mustafar is very odd since it has zero relevance, thematically or plotline wise.

May as well make it a new video game quest planet for Kylo.

I bet when Mandolorian season 2 is done and there’s more links to the sequel trilogy (Snoke/Palpatine clones, maybe???), there will be an opportunity to create a better story with TLJ/ROS.

Great work! I’m following this project! Good luck!

I wouldn’t be surprised if Disney soon does an Order 66 story in a movie or in the Obi-Wan show.

Alternatively, find a way to incorporate the planet name into the opening text. Might have to restructure the film a bit.