yotsuya

rocknroll41 said:

Now that I’ve had even more time to digest the leaked details from Colin’s script, I gotta admit that I’m finding more and more things that I like, mainly with Finn’s arc. Some sorta combo between Colin’s version and JJ’s would’ve been the ideal. Ultimately tho, if I had to pick just one version, I still prefer the movie we got.

That being said, I recall thinking back in the day that the ideal endpoint for Episode 9 would be for Rey to create a new order that merges light and dark, cause I couldn’t think of any other way to make this new trilogy feel “important” with respect to the rest of the saga. However, having now actually seen the movie, I think that by bringing back Palpatine and implying through Anakin’s one line that the prophecy is a cyclical thing that’s destined to keep repeating, JJ found a more fitting way to give this trilogy a sense of “importance” when put alongside the other movies.

In a weird sorta way, I think Colin’s version is the more fitting end to this trilogy specifically, while JJ’s version is a more fitting end to the saga as a whole. And personally, I think the latter is the more important in the grand scheme of things.

I think Rey’s yellow saber really implies she is going to go forward with a more balanced order. I think that Yoda training Luke and Rey training herself from the most ancient texts (from when there was balance) gives us a difference. Anakin was supposed to balance the force and he sort of did, but left his Jedi trained son to carry on and this time we got a different ending that brings better balance. Plus after ROTJ, someone helped Palaptine survive so we have to face him again (a very mythic redo to the previous defeat).

Broom Kid said:

idir_hh said:

They wanted a Hollywood reboot, hence JJ Abrams.

Star Wars has never not been Hollywood, though. They’ve always been major studio releases.

The notion that they were ever “independent” films in any way has always been back-patting exaggeration on Lucas’ part more than anything. They all went through the studios, they were made to appeal to all four quadrants, the budgets only ever got bigger and bigger… they’re the definition of Hollywood. The last movie Lucas made that was at all difficult or in any way “indie”… was the first movie he ever made. Everything after that was Hollywood as hell, and unapologetically so.

The big difference is that Hollywood got better at making his movies than he did. Which is what always happens. New sets of shoulders to stand on, and then the next guy stands on THOSE shoulders, so on and so on.

Technically you are incorrect. Star Wars in 1977 was a studio movie. Controlled and funded by 20th Century Fox. They owned the distribution rights until Disney bought them. Eps 5, 6, 1, 2, and 3 were technically indpendent films made solely by Lucasfilm and only distributed by 20th Century Fox. All that Star Wars merchandise from 77 through 80 paid for TESB and continued to pay for the others. Pepsi fed in a huge sum to buy rights during the prequels. But Lucas didn’t have to answer to anyone for any of those 5 films, only himself. Most people think of independent as small budget, but the real aspect is a lack of any major studio influence. Lucas’s forward thinking with regards to merchandise tie-ins on the first film funded the other 5 films. That’s why the digital versions of the other 5 films had the 20th Century Fox fanfare removed. Lucasfilm was the only production company involved.

ZigZig said:

AotC was digitally shot in 1,5k… So there is really no need to restore it in 4k.

It was shot in HD and then cropped. Restoring it in 4k from film will keep the full detail from printing the digital image to film. It is also the only way we will be able to compare it frame by frame to finally find all the changes. The in theater camera recording lacks the resolution to really be sure. We’ve found a few, but Rick McCallum indicated there could be more.

That’s how it was scanned. I found it amusing to use it, same with the blurry and scratched shot after the crawl. The crawl is the only important part, though it is useful to see that everything lined up to 4k77 so while in 1981 they cut off the 77 crawl and spliced on the new crawl, the timing (and audio) remained unchanged so all we have to do when we have an 81 crawl we like is drop it in.

Well, I compared the D+, my 81 redo, and the 4K77 side by side and this is the result. I think the stars work.

https://vimeo.com/385291097
password:81hdcrawl

I think I need to add a small bit of blur to the text and fix the color. I’ll see if that fixes the problems.

TheHutt said:

Nice!
The aliasing from the crawl letters - is it the vimeo compression?

Not sure. One of the things I need to look at. I took the 2011 BR and processed it to isolate the yellow letters. Then it has been scaled to match the image from the SSE 81 crawl, so some things have been resized to match that. I might need to put it through a couple of steps to clean it up. It might benefit from being rendered in 4K and then resized. I’ll try a few things to see if something works. I’m also still not happy with the stars. I need to do a side by side with the 4K77 and a few others to see if the stars look comparable.

DominicCobb said:

yotsuya said:

DominicCobb said:

idir_hh said:

I disagree, a story is like looking at a finished picture puzzle, the specifics are the pieces that make the puzzle, if you have two puzzles with different pieces but end up with the same picture it’s really irrelevant that the pieces were different.

But what you’re describing is that the whole picture is just the plot. That’s silly. The picture would be the story. The plot would just be what the shapes are that put the pieces together. But it’s a bad analogy.

Think of it more like a building. The plot is just the foundation. It’s what you build on top of that that really matters.

Um… a story is the overall chain of events. A lot of real stories can be boring. You could make a movie about someone’s day at work and if you pick a normal day the movie would be boring. Plot is the literary device that takes a story and elevates it to something special. The plot is the specific chain of events (sometimes a web of events if you have multiple characters) with one thing leading to another. Plot would be using flashbacks to take that otherwise boring seeming day and making it something unusual. For Star Wars, the crawl sets up the story and the plot. You can also think of story as timeline and plot as how the scene connect. Story tells you someone died, plot tells you how and gives you the emotional impact.

Nope.

Sorry, but the way I learned it is the story is the events, and plot is how you arrange them to tell them. For instance, in The Upside, we start with two guys in a car. That scene is toward the end of the story and after we jump back to the beginning of the story, we work our way forward until we get to the scene again and then move past it. That is the plot. We tell the story by rearranging the events to make them have more impact. The plot of the movie jumps from the later scene to the beginning and works back. Also, the book The Cloud Atlas is arranged as 6 stories, each broken in the middle. We start with one the move through them to the center one and then back off each one and finish the story. The movie version took that story and changed the plot by interconnecting the 6 stories into a different narrative. And by casting the same actors in roles in each of the settings, it wove the main idea of the plot into the fabric of the film in a different way. The two stories are identical, but they are plotted differently.

And to use the word in a related way, when you plot a course on a map, you are picking point A and B and deciding how to get from one to the other. Different people might take different routes and create different plots. Additionally, in the early days of CAD, drawings were made using actual pens. The device was called a plotter because it plotted the lines on the paper as the computer told it to. A plot is the line the connects the points. The same way you plot a course by sea or air, you plot a story’s course through the events. Plot comes from a French word for plan or project. You don’t provide a story summary when trying to sell your writing, you provide a plot summary. It is how you are going to tell your story, whatever story that may be.

Pickle2503 said:

forgive me if this is a dumb question, but don’t we already have the 81 crawl in the SSE?

It is in sorry shape. Horrible grain and over contrasted to the point there are only a handful of stars. It was unusable. There just was no way to recover the very crushed blacks.

They are junk speeders and falling apart. The weapon is about to blast a whole in the very thick door and Finn is trying to fly down the barrel. His ship starts disintegrating around him and his weapons are destroyed. It took no brain power for me to understand Finn was going to kill himself and do no damage the first time I saw it. Nothing needs to be added or explained. None of it is fan theory. The movie properly shows us what we need instead of giving us a boring speech to lay it out. Show don’t tell is basic writing 101.

The weapon is about to cut through a door several feet thick so Finn’s craft is likely to just vaporize if he flys down the barrel. No weapons and no ship to make impact (and a flimsy one to start with that wouldn’t have taken out an AT-AT). So Finn was making a useless sacrifice because he was desperate to do something.

DominicCobb said:

idir_hh said:

I disagree, a story is like looking at a finished picture puzzle, the specifics are the pieces that make the puzzle, if you have two puzzles with different pieces but end up with the same picture it’s really irrelevant that the pieces were different.

But what you’re describing is that the whole picture is just the plot. That’s silly. The picture would be the story. The plot would just be what the shapes are that put the pieces together. But it’s a bad analogy.

Think of it more like a building. The plot is just the foundation. It’s what you build on top of that that really matters.

Um… a story is the overall chain of events. A lot of real stories can be boring. You could make a movie about someone’s day at work and if you pick a normal day the movie would be boring. Plot is the literary device that takes a story and elevates it to something special. The plot is the specific chain of events (sometimes a web of events if you have multiple characters) with one thing leading to another. Plot would be using flashbacks to take that otherwise boring seeming day and making it something unusual. For Star Wars, the crawl sets up the story and the plot. You can also think of story as timeline and plot as how the scene connect. Story tells you someone died, plot tells you how and gives you the emotional impact.

StarkillerAG said:

If you like this movie that’s fine, I’m not trying to take that away from you. But you shouldn’t dismiss the complaints of people who don’t like the movie by saying that they’re nitpicking and biased, or that most people like it, or that the movie actually makes complete sense in a way the critics just don’t understand. I don’t have a problem with people liking this movie, I have a problem with people who like the movie getting defensive when someone criticizes it. If you can just accept that some people have a different opinion than you, you’ll be a lot happier in life.

I’m fine with people not liking it. But a great many critics (and most specifically the pro-critics on RT) were nitpicking in ridiculous ways. I like the more thoughtful and detailed comments here, but sometimes I can tell someone just didn’t like it and is trying to figure out why. And sometimes the complaints are ones that could equally be leveled at any of the Star Wars movies. Plus I don’t think any of this film contradicts or retconns any of TLJ’s ending. It does contradict a great deal of that film, but so does that film’s ending. A great many characters in that film start off being completely wrong and only Kylo ends the film that way. But a great many people have taken those wrong avenues to be the purpose of the film and it isn’t. TLJ is about getting on the correct path. Rey, Luke, Poe, Finn, and Rose all have to learn this. Abrams got that and carried on from where the characters ended the last film. He was a producer of that film after all, so he has been involved in every aspect of all three films. So yea, I love the film and I do question some critiques of it because they run very counter to my experience with it. When someone says a film doesn’t do something that I clearly remember it doing, I’m going to point it out.

So, this is where I have it right now.

https://vimeo.com/385077260
password: 81hdcrawl

I like the little bit right when they land and come inside. The rest seems out of place.

I’ve updated the first post with what I’ve found. One thing that was pointed out in one of the links provided, does not appear to have actually been changed in the streaming version. And I am ignoring everything that is just recoloring or that has been redone (all the 2004 and 2011 changes). I’m just focus on the new changes (which are sometimes an omission). I think that overall the new prints are vastly different. In my opinion TESB and ROTJ are not really any better in terms of color.

I don’t think the cam versions had any impact. They have been around since TPM and so have easy distribution of them. And it isn’t like ROTS where an actual lower quality digital copy of the movie leaked the week before the film came out. And it went on to do better than AOTC. I collect cam prints so we know what the original theatrical version really were. That is the only way we have the original AOTC.

JawsTDS said:

Broom Kid said:

I still don’t understand what the hell the editors were trying to do with that awkward “Darth Vader’s Death” remix.

They could have just left that whole scene completely unscored until Kylo showed up and it would have worked better. Better silence than dragging out the Return of the Jedi 2CD set and chopping it up.

THIS.

I know I’ve said it multiple times, but JJ splicing in pre-existing music is horribly lazy.

Well, if it is the right music for the scene, why not? It’s not like Williams reserves each motif for the exact circumstance. Each one has multiple uses. And it isn’t the first time music has been reused. For the OT they recorded the opening titles for each film. They recorded it for TPM and TFA, but reused that recording for the other movies. They recycled some music for Jabba for ANH SE. They only recorded Dual of the fates once and then used pieces of it here and there. I think that particular choice is perfect for that location. Most of the scenes in there in ROTJ featured Darth Vader’s theme. That has a nice haunting quality fitting for a deserted and ruined location.

And I wonder if you feel the same about Stanley Kubrick?

Here’s the thing about these movies. The audience likes them. Not everyone. Not everyone liked the original. But in general, a lot of people loved TROS. There have been lots of emotional reviews on social media. For a lot of people, it was a very emotional and satisfying film. Isn’t that what it is supposed to be? So it isn’t to some people’s liking. You can say that about each of the 9 films. Some are wondering why this one didn’t do as well as TLJ, well, perhaps we should also be asking why ROTJ didn’t do as well as TESB.

Back in 1977, one of the reasons that the first film was a success was that it touched something in viewers. It was faster and more intense than typical films of the day. Even than Lucas’s two previous films. I thought the PT films were too fast and intense. TPM less so and I really enjoyed it the first time I saw it. I have not felt that either TLJ or TROS was too fast and intense. I did feel that about each of the theatrical versions of The Hobbit films. And the original films are full of their own gaffs and plot holes. Most of us ignore them because we love the films. Well, that is how I feel about a lot of the things that were glossed over in TROS. I was satisfied with what the film delivered and I don’t need every single dangling story to be completed. The Sith dagger was obviously made after the Death Star blew up and crashed and recent enough that it was still accurate. Rey recognized the ship because it probably was her parents and the Sith assasin stole it. All these questions have rally easy answers that you can infer from what the movie gives you. But the specific answer isn’t important to the plot. Movies do not have to tie up every loose end. They are a short hand story telling format that often leaves things to the imagination. If we enjoy the story we suspend belief and don’t need the answers. None of these things are key to the main plot of the film.

So I, and many others have found the story to be soundly structured and emotionally satisfying. How they handled Leia was amazing and they gave her a proper sendoff. Palpatine’s return doesn’t really need an explanation beyond what Palapatine offers (mysterious sith abilities). Going into detail about any of these things is a rabbit hole we don’t need to go down. None of the OT films bother to tell us the details of how things work. We never get a breakdown of how the Death Star weapon works. We never get an explanation of how they built a second Death Star in 4 years. We never question the coincidence that brought R2 and Threepio to the very spot on Tatooine that they needed to be. If you put the OT to the same scrutiny you are giving TROS, it will fall apart just as fast. The whole point to Star Wars is that it is supposed to be a cheesy serial where heroes face impossible odds and win only to face the next challenge. Lucas wrapped it in mythology, samurai cinema, and science ficiton and gave the world he created solidity by making it used and battered, but it is still a unique twist on Flash Gordon and I think Abrams and Johnson managed to capture that and create some films that match modern fast paced films. And I don’t think it is coincidence that the way a lot of people are describing TROS makes me think of the Indiana Jones films. That is the same idea except it is set in the past rather than in space. Still a serial. The Bond films are very similar as well. And I found TROS to have more emotional impact than any of those.

Mocata said:

But is the dagger made of magic Sith nano-metal that can shift with the tides or is it total nonsense

Why? Pieces that large are not going to move. It will take decades or centuries for the water to wear through or move them. All the beached ships around the globe kind of blow your complaint out of the water.

Cthulhunicron said:

DuracellEnergizer said:

StarkillerAG said:

pleasehello said:

Valheru_84 said:

You’re not meant to stop and think and try to make sense of it all Hal 😉

You jest, but it’s true. That’s the way Star Wars has always been. It’s emotional, not logical. None of it makes any sense logically and if you think about the viability of certain plot elements in those terms, it falls apart. So no, you’re not meant to make sense of it all.

That’s not the way it used to be. The OT makes sense, every action is justified.

The walkers don’t make sense. Neither does the two-dimensional space flight. Nor the idea of a giant slug being sexually attracted to humanoid women.

Apples and oranges. There’s a slight suspension of disbelief with the original three movies. TROS is complete nonsense by comparison. Palpatine is resurrected with no explanation. The Sith Eternal somehow create a fleet bigger than the First Order with no explanation. The Sith fleet can’t leave Exegol even though apparently ships have been coming and going for decades. A gigantic piece of the Death Star survives the explosion in ROTJ and re-entry through an atmosphere with no explanation. Ochi for some reason has a dagger that is shaped to fit along the skyline of the wreckage, and for some reason it has Sith writing, telling him where to find the holocron, even though he already knows where it is. Did he make the dagger? Did he find it? Who knows, cause the movie never tells us. Hux saves Poe and Finn, despite not having any real reason to do so. I could go on and on.

There’s a difference between a movie having a sci-fi/fantasy vibe where the science isn’t very accurate, and a movie being incomprehensible.

You say these things are incomprehensible. I say they make complete sense.

act on instinct said:

I agree the expectations going in were what led to the weak opening, the word of mouth is what’s inspired more recent talk of possibly not making a billion.

It would be almost impossible for it not to break a billion at this point. It will take months to get the final numbers as it goes to second run theaters.

I think expectation plays a lot into it. I think that after the controversy of TLJ and the failure of Solo, no one was expecting an Oscar quality film. I think the direction they took was not unlike TFA and the critics wanted something else. I think most people who didn’t like it were expecting something else (or expecting what we got but no liking that). I read a lot of the RT critic reviews and it seems unreasonable that the final installment of a trilogy, much less a 9 movie saga, is not going to have some story call back to the past. To some that is critically called fan service where I see a lot of that as just being inherent to a movie being part of a series. I don’t think Abrams played it as safe as he did with TFA. I think he took risks because this is the best work I have seen from him.

I find it odd with as good as I think the film is for the critics to blast it too harshly for being just what it is - the end of a trilogy and the end of a trilogy of trilogies. But I think that the critic response plus the lower audience reaction fits in with that. While the PT ended with a better movie, a lot of people find ROTJ to be the weakest film of the OT. I see several trends that indicate that this film was never going to make as much as TFA. That film was the start, something new. It had Star Wars starved fans and more casual viewers interested and entering it with an open mind. TLJ and Solo both disrupted part of that interest. So I don’t think the results are at all surprising. It was hard to know if it would do better or worse than TLJ, but my guess was (and where I got my number guesses from) it would do something close to TLJ and it seems to be on course to do that. Not as good, but still the numbers indicate a profitable film.

If you look at all three trilogies, interest wanes during the course of each. The first film does the best, followed by the second and then third (well, ROTS did better than AOTC, but not better than TPM and ROTJ did better domestically than TESB, but not worldwide or adjusted for inflation). So the three top films are ANH, TPM and TFA. Well, if you want them in order by adjusted domestic gross, they are ANH, TFA, TESB, ROTJ, TPM, TLJ, ROTS, TROS, AOTC. While not the order I would rate the films, that is the order I rate the trilogies (OT, ST, PT). So the ST has been more successful than the PT was. Disney has a lot to be happy about… except Solo.

yotsuya said:

A fun item to note, TROS has been nominated for 3 BAFTA awards. Original Score, Sound, and Visual Effects.

And now 3 Oscars. Hope Williams wins.

I personally prefer what Adywan did. He managed to change it so that it hardly looks different, but is still substantially more intense.