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Star Wars General Discussion Thread

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bluntblade said:
Has anyone watched The Director and the Jedi, out of curiosity? A couple of friends have said they were struck by how much it painted Johnson as very distant to the cast and crew, which feels out of whack with what I've heard about Knives Out and Looper.
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Not the impression I got from watching it at all. He's very relaxed and familiar with all the cast. He's got a whole roll of film of candid photos he took on set too, some of which he's shared on twitter.


 
Vympel said:
Not the impression I got from watching it at all. He's very relaxed and familiar with all the cast. He's got a whole roll of film of candid photos he took on set too, some of which he's shared on twitter.


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Fair enough. I'm kinda tempted to watch it, but eh, I just got a box set of Kurosawa's samurai films and that's gonna take priority for sure.

Also, finished Rebels. It grew into something really great in the end, and
oh god, Kanan's death. That broke me.
 
bluntblade said:


What is even...

And inevitably, it's been deemed Rian Johnson's fault. Damn you Rian Johnson, for making a totally different movie, years prior, that other people seemingly felt the need to undo.
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I mean you really should not be surprised at the depths of people's shittiness. Oddly with some people peddling fake bullshit, I feel like we've stepped back in time to early 99's Star Wars fandom were being an asshole towards people for 'ruining' a franchise was a thing, and you had people like Supershadow peddling crap.

Mind you I don't why people might be pissed Star Wars is commercialized and soulless since you make that argument at least since the Prequels, under good ol Lucas who might as well have been a hack and sell out some people.
 
BBadolato said:
Mind you I don't why people might be pissed Star Wars is commercialized and soulless since you make that argument at least since the Prequels, under good ol Lucas who might as well have been a hack and sell out some people.
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That is so stupid. George Lucas did the things he did in the prequels because he wanted to. If he was selling out and had to pander to a specific audience or executives we would have had "The Force Awakens" but prequel basically. And Star Wars was always commercialised. The franchise basically invented modern merchandising for movies.
 
Yeah, that's how we even know some about Lucas old ideas for the Jedi purge and other things relating to the background that ultimately ending up differing from what we got in the much later made prequels because he wrote out background material for Star Wars Licensees back in the days of the original trilogy.

Other stuff old background such as the fall of the republic and rise of the emperor popped up in the original novelizations as well especially for the original film whose novelization actually came out months before the original film hit theaters and was a best seller even before people started seeing the first film of course in Return of the Jedi's novelization we got the emperor's inner musings on his rise to power and of course the emperor's ability to gloat even in his own head.
 
There are still plenty of things in the Prequels that smack of hedging bets. The way that the Anakin-Padme romance in Episode II basically turns into Titanic for a half hour for one, and arguably the sudden influx of wuxia into lightsaber combat.

Not that some of the new films haven't also attempted it with stuff from outside the franchise too. Just look at TRoS doing a chase in the desert with bikes because that makes it like Fury Road, right? Not to mention it and Solo cribbing extensively from Marvel's playbook.
 
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bluntblade said:
There are still plenty of things in the Prequels that smack of hedging bets. The way that the Anakin-Padme romance in Episode II basically turns into Titanic for a half hour for one, and arguably the sudden influx of wuxia into lightsaber combat.

Not that some of the new films haven't also attempted it with stuff from outside the franchise too. Just look at TRoS doing a chase in the desert with bikes because that makes it like Fury Road, right? Not to mention it and Solo cribbing extensively from Marvel's playbook.
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You're absolutely right about the franchise pulling from other sources but I think cynically painting it as "hedging bets" isn't at all accurate because...

Well...

Star Wars has ripped from other movies since day damn one. The opening scroll that's become synonymous with Star Wars was taken from Fritz Lang's Metropolis. Its setting and lore reek of old sci-fi serials. The plot of the original movie is famously pulled from Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress. OT era lightsaber duels are based on Samurai movies.

Now, I'm not saying anything from a place of cynical "How dare they not be original!" cause nothing's original. I'm saying it cause to understand Star Wars (and Indiana Jones frankly) you have to understand one simple notion.

George Lucas is a fucking nerd.

That whole generation of filmmakers are. They were some of the first people in Hollywood to have walked out of college with a little something called a Film Studies degree. They were derisively called something like "the Film School Kids" by established Hollywood people who thought of them as naive children who needed to learn about film making "the old fashioned way" which in no way involved being in a classroom researching filmcraft (though to be fair most of them did that too; most famously under famous B-movie producer Roger Corman). I mean, Scorsese (still a friend of Spielberg and Lucas) is pretty much a professional film critic as a hobby.

I bring this up to say that Lucas loves movies as a medium and that love bleeds through into his movies where, if you know your stuff, you can see the thousand little inspirations that make up his creative well. In that manner he's the precursor to Quentin Tarantino (sans foot fetish). And this bled down into the PT (Podracing is pretty much Space!Ben-Hur Chariot Racing and Jar-Jar's physical comedy is in some cases taken shot for shot from Buster Keaton). I honestly believe the reason why the lightsaber dueling in Eps I-III is the way it is was cause Lucas was watching Wuxia films (cause I totally see Lucas as a big enough nerd to have watched a lot more than what the little bit that made it into mainstream American theaters) before pointing at the screen and saying, "That! I want to do that!" Lucas isn't a guy to chase trends as a way to make money. He chases trends cause he honestly thinks they're cool.

Now, that doesn't mean the people running the show now are the same way but even then I can't complain on that front because, again, Star Wars takes stuff from other movies all. the. time. and has since the moment it emerged from Lucas' mind palace. It's part of it's character at this point, like a mix between The Blob and the Thing that consumes and assimilates parts of the film landscape to feed and evolve off of. And I think that's fine because one of the roles of great art is to inspire more great art. Now, is it always going to be a hit? Probably not. But I honestly wouldn't change it for the world. The most I would do is try to make the people in charge of the product more competent with their execution and more daring with their ideas. We hit the sweet spot of those two things a lot less often than we need to for the health of the franchise.
 
bluntblade said:
And inevitably, it's been deemed Rian Johnson's fault. Damn you Rian Johnson, for making a totally different movie, years prior, that other people seemingly felt the need to undo.
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The only thing good to come out of this was that Variety's tweet sharing that heinous article was widely ratioed. SWT and his cultish asshole subscribers may be able to extract apologies from Lucasfilm for literally nothing, but everyone else just thinks that that disengenuous little turd needs to be shoved into a locker somewhere.

LFL kowtowing to this breed of human sewage is so disgusting.

(I also used to think Gina Carano would surely be fired, but frankly given the way the wind is blowing I think the rot of kowtowing to the worst elements of the fandom is starting to show.)
 
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Star Wars was Hidden Fortress meets Attack Run with a dash of Fist full of Dollars remixed in the style of Flash Gordon.
 
I've seen it said that one of the Issues with JJ's Star Wars is that he only takes influences from past Star Wars films, instead of taking in influences from a wider variety of films.
 
Hmmm...

Dammit the plot bunnies are happening again cause a common theme in Wuxia is honorable individuals (or subcultures) trying to survive and do good in incompetent/tyrannical regimes.

In other words, a heavily Wuxia-inspired story about Jedi fighting back against the Empire pre-RotJ sounds really fun right now. You even have the evil rival school in the form of the Inquistors!
 
MagicMan333 said:
You're absolutely right about the franchise pulling from other sources but I think cynically painting it as "hedging bets" isn't at all accurate because...

Well...

Star Wars has ripped from other movies since day damn one. The opening scroll that's become synonymous with Star Wars was taken from Fritz Lang's Metropolis. Its setting and lore reek of old sci-fi serials. The plot of the original movie is famously pulled from Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress. OT era lightsaber duels are based on Samurai movies.

Now, I'm not saying anything from a place of cynical "How dare they not be original!" cause nothing's original. I'm saying it cause to understand Star Wars (and Indiana Jones frankly) you have to understand one simple notion.

George Lucas is a fucking nerd.

That whole generation of filmmakers are. They were some of the first people in Hollywood to have walked out of college with a little something called a Film Studies degree. They were derisively called something like "the Film School Kids" by established Hollywood people who thought of them as naive children who needed to learn about film making "the old fashioned way" which in no way involved being in a classroom researching filmcraft (though to be fair most of them did that too; most famously under famous B-movie producer Roger Corman). I mean, Scorsese (still a friend of Spielberg and Lucas) is pretty much a professional film critic as a hobby.

I bring this up to say that Lucas loves movies as a medium and that love bleeds through into his movies where, if you know your stuff, you can see the thousand little inspirations that make up his creative well. In that manner he's the precursor to Quentin Tarantino (sans foot fetish). And this bled down into the PT (Podracing is pretty much Space!Ben-Hur Chariot Racing and Jar-Jar's physical comedy is in some cases taken shot for shot from Buster Keaton). I honestly believe the reason why the lightsaber dueling in Eps I-III is the way it is was cause Lucas was watching Wuxia films (cause I totally see Lucas as a big enough nerd to have watched a lot more than what the little bit that made it into mainstream American theaters) before pointing at the screen and saying, "That! I want to do that!" Lucas isn't a guy to chase trends as a way to make money. He chases trends cause he honestly thinks they're cool.

Now, that doesn't mean the people running the show now are the same way but even then I can't complain on that front because, again, Star Wars takes stuff from other movies all. the. time. and has since the moment it emerged from Lucas' mind palace. It's part of it's character at this point, like a mix between The Blob and the Thing that consumes and assimilates parts of the film landscape to feed and evolve off of. And I think that's fine because one of the roles of great art is to inspire more great art. Now, is it always going to be a hit? Probably not. But I honestly wouldn't change it for the world. The most I would do is try to make the people in charge of the product more competent with their execution and more daring with their ideas. We hit the sweet spot of those two things a lot less often than we need to for the health of the franchise.
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That's a fair point. I am certainly aware that Star Wars was a hodgepodge from the very start - I just bought a box set of Kurosawa's samurai films and am keen to see what I can trace from there to the OT (particularly having just seen Rashomon, whose influence as at the very heart of Episode VIII). And yeah, it's quite likely that I'm being ungenerous with Lucas' motivations.

And admittedly, after running through both Clone Wars and Rebels... I'm kinda wishing that the Sequels had integrated the Wuxia stuff now, as opposed to throwing it all out.

Edit: I'm particularly interested to see what I make of Throne of Blood, as my Episode IX fic draws quite heavily on Macbeth, which Kurosawa adapted.
 
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I still find myself in two minds with the Wuxia thing - I think part of it is now down to me really, really wishing that Episode VII had started with Luke's New Jedi Order being intact. I still think that Johnson did pretty much the best that could be done with the setup he was given, but there were so many possibilities which got squashed immediately by "Luke Skywalker has vanished" and "Skywalker, the last jedi". Including the Wuxia-esque fighting.
 
This one will always boil my brain.

On a more positive note, I concur with the notion that Kanan and Hera might be Star Wars' best couple.

Jcogginsa said:
I've seen it said that one of the Issues with JJ's Star Wars is that he only takes influences from past Star Wars films, instead of taking in influences from a wider variety of films.
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Agreed. I think it's possible to also not dig deep enough into those influences - often I feel like The Mandalorian takes a rather stock setup when it ought to update it a little - but then you have The Clone Wars seemingly referencing Gravity and pulling it off.

Abrams doesn't have anything he wants to bring to Star Wars. Edwards brought in a realist angle and added modern war and spy movie aesthetics to the pot. You can see shades of Monsters and Godzilla in the framing of the AT-ATs, and the disaster element of the latter is very much there in Rogue One. Johnson pushed in a very different direction, embracing the animated shows (and thus making TLJ the most surrealist Star Wars movie by a mile) whilst also tunnelling hard into the samurai influences (Kurosawa obviously looms large, but he also included Three Outlaw Samurai among the films he requested the cast and crew watch in the lead-up to production) and bringing his usual sprinkling of Noir into the mix. Abrams, in contrast, seems to just make things bigger and have them move faster.
 
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bluntblade said:
This one will always boil my brain.

On a more positive note, I concur with the notion that Kanan and Hera might be Star Wars' best couple.
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That right there is really emblematic of things. Soggy Death Star looks cool and is a Force User only fight while not being as OTT as the Mustafar fight where we learn Jedi don't easily catch fire and can breathe in hostile atmosphere. However, Rey's heritage / inclinations are only marginally relevant to the fight. Kylo doesn't believe she is even capable of killing him, and she more or less does. Oops. Impeccable timing Leia! It has nothing to do with a past or inherited war beyond that Kylo thinks he can be Vader.

As a metaphor for Rey Palpatine - arguably cool, doesn't mean anything - it works though.
 
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bluntblade said:
I still find myself in two minds with the Wuxia thing - I think part of it is now down to me really, really wishing that Episode VII had started with Luke's New Jedi Order being intact. I still think that Johnson did pretty much the best that could be done with the setup he was given, but there were so many possibilities which got squashed immediately by "Luke Skywalker has vanished" and "Skywalker, the last jedi". Including the Wuxia-esque fighting.
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I'm willing to go to bat for the ST for certain things but if there's one thing I will never forgive it for, it was wiping out both the New Jedi Order (offscreen!) and the New Republic. Even beyond it turning the OT into a Shaggy Dog Story, it wasted something that could have, one, made for incredibly interesting stories and made ST EU material a lot more viable and, two, would have been a great opportunity to do more stuff with the concept than what was done even in the Old EU.

Which is why the ST rewrite and n my head involves said new order.
 
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MagicMan333 said:
I'm willing to go to bat for the ST for certain things but if there's one thing I will never forgive it for, it was wiping out both the New Jedi Order (offscreen!) and the New Republic. Even beyond it turning the OT into a Shaggy Dog Story, it wasted something that could have, one, made for incredibly interesting stories and made ST EU material a lot more viable and, two, would have been a great opportunity to do more stuff with the concept than what was done even in the Old EU.

Which is why the ST rewrite and n my head involves said new order.
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Yup. It's what happens when you give the job of setting the stage to someone who just wants to write Stations of Canon, and has no desire or interest in setting up more than vague questions. One of the most galling things about the scrapped script by Trevorrow was that it had a timeskip of a few years, which left room to do a Rebels-style show, and actually made hay of the Resistance not being able to just do the same thing the Rebelllion had done.

Running the series on Rebels has, even more than Clone Wars, made me wish that there was any room for that timeskip. Not to mention starting to read the first Poe Dameron comic, plus revisiting Resistance Reborn (which feels like it's setting up several more books and a very different film). I can't help now but imagine stories where Rey gets to fly with Jess and Snap, Finn goes on missions with Shriv Surgaav, and we get to see more of the Galaxy that's being subjugated anew.
 
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Chloe Sullivan said:
Star Wars was Hidden Fortress meets Attack Run with a dash of Fist full of Dollars remixed in the style of Flash Gordon.
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Ehhhh...Kurosawa's influence over Star Wars has been overstated. Certainly the cinematic look (as in, the cinematography and staging) of ANH was deeply influenced by Kurosawa, but it was also deeply influenced by the western's of John Ford (who was deeply influenced by Kurosawa who was influenced by Ford and oh no I've gone cross eyed).

The Hidden Fortress gets hyped up as like, the missing link for ANH but really it doesn't have that much in common beyond some basic stuff. The plot really isn't all that similar, and while a few characters are kind've there it's really just basic archetypes. The two farmers are, for sure, a clear influence on R2 and 3PO, but "a short guy and a skinny guy provide running commentary on the action" isn't exactly groundbreaking stuff unique to Kurosawa.

Samurai, western, and WW2 films are definitely a part of the DNA, but there's a lot more thrown in there on top (muscle cars, 60's radical politics, half baked eastern mysticism, etc.), and the plotting is straight high fantasy/the Arthurian legend (a young farm boy finds out from an old wizard that he's the son of a great knight, inheriting his magic sword).

Basically, Star Wars' cinematography is taken from Kurosawa, the Production Design is taken from WW2 movies and SoCal muscle car's, and the story is basically King Arthur IN SPAAAAAAAAAAAACE.
 
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