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Star Wars General Discussion Thread

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bluntblade said:
But doesn't he want to at least look like he's a sincere artist?
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I mean, for all we know he does think he's a sincere artist. Like yeah us nerds (IMO correctly) think his shit is shallow and insincere, but presumably everyone else in his professional and social circle is "Damnit Abrams, you've done it again!".

He's crying all the way to the bank.
 
Arthur Frayn said:
I mean, for all we know he does think he's a sincere artist. Like yeah us nerds (IMO correctly) think his shit is shallow and insincere, but presumably everyone else in his professional and social circle is "Damnit Abrams, you've done it again!".

He's crying all the way to the bank.
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I mean... I can picture that. Took me four and a bit years to go off TFA, after all - and you still have so many people pining for the things that they're convinced Abrams had planned. People talk about how complex his portrayal of Finn's trauma was throughout the first movie, and how carefully he works to make Rey fallible. The illusion does work.

Anyway, trying to not just circle back like I know I so often do. I read Rule of Two recently. It's decent, but I wish we hadn't timeskipped most of Zannah's training and growth, and her arc could've been stronger, with more temptation (even if her evil deeds do escalate satisfyingly in the end).

Which also constitutes an issue I have with the PT. Anakin's training is a missed opportunity to handily convey just what the vibe is with the Jedi, build up his and Obi-Wan's relationship, and show how his own mind works.
 
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bluntblade said:
I mean... I can picture that. Took me four and a bit years to go off TFA, after all - and you still have so many people pining for the things that they're convinced Abrams had planned. People talk about how complex his portrayal of Finn's trauma was throughout the first movie, and how carefully he works to make Rey fallible. The illusion does work.
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Hopefully the illusion continues to fade. On social media at least, I've seen more and more recognition that TFA basically loses any interest at all in Finn after the first 20 minutes, and he's written so carelessly and without regard for what his background is that you'd barely know he wasn't just some random hero archetype if you walked into the movie late.
 
Hard to say, given that we have other properties written that same way which people similarly project lots into.

Keeping on my Darth Bane train, I find myself trying to gauge if certain character hypocrisy is deliberate or not. To whit:
Serra's bodyguard, a former Gloom Walker who served the Brotherhood of Darkness, is brimming with resentment over how the Jedi and Republic neglect and are "tyrannical" towards people on the margins. And yet she serves the widow of a crown prince on a world where the labouring classes are quite clearly disenfranchised by the monarchy.
 
SeaSirocco said:
Y'know, I've been thinking and the sequel trilogy + Solo were really rough with the Millennium Falcon. Like In TFA we see Re drag her along the ground as she's trying to get the hang of the controls, but later in the TIE chase the Falcon straight up bounces off the ground, slides along another for a few seconds. Later the Falcon crashes "has another happy landing" on Starkiller base. The Last Jedi doesn't do anything too egregious, with the only enviromental damage the Falcon taking being the lower gun being destroyed by scraping on the ground. In the Rise of Skywalker, the Falcon bounces off a corridor and then smashes through a wall of ice. Plus, in Solo, aside from the incredibly awesome powerslide scene, the Falcon also bounces off an astroid, hits a TIE like a frying pan and is almost torn to pieces by The Maw.
Just something I've been thinking about.
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So one of my favorite iterations of starwars is the freemaker adventures, its one of the LEGO cartoons. The conceit is that in the Allstars season the parents of the protags are the MCs.

because of this, it all happens during the "solo-ish" time period because the main series happens during the OT.

Any way they meet Lando while he owns the Falcon, then they meet Han when he owns the falcon.

there response is " holy crap, that's the Falcon?"

the upshot being Han Solo is a hell of a pilot, but he is a terrible mechanic.
 
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kjyl said:
the upshot being Han Solo is a hell of a pilot, but he is a terrible mechanic.
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Han is a genius when it comes to cool modifications that make the Falcon faster, but I get the feeling he has never heard the phrase Preventative Maintenance in his life.
 
SeaSirocco said:
Han is a genius when it comes to cool modifications that make the Falcon faster, but I get the feeling he has never heard the phrase Preventative Maintenance in his life.
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heres the thing, the falcon made the Kessel run that made it famous while it was set to lando's specs, which I would remind you included a cape room, and a full bar.

Han fixed shit with duct tape and bailing wire.
 
Getting to the tail end of The Burning Sea, and I think Charles Soule's portrayal of Vader might be my favourite in any medium.
 
kjyl said:
heres the thing, the falcon made the Kessel run that made it famous while it was set to lando's specs, which I would remind you included a cape room, and a full bar.

Han fixed shit with duct tape and bailing wire.
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Han is, canonically, a guy tooling around with his dog in a beat up, souped up Mustang dealing drugs IN SPAAAAAAAAAAACE.
 
Lando knows how to turn other peoples money into bling and results, which gives him more access to other peoples money.
Han knows how to make high risk questionable decisions and somehow get away with most of your stuff in one piece when things go wrong....

Han is Murdoch, Lando is Face, Chewie is BA and all they need is someone they'd follow anywhere who keeps them together and they'd be the Starwars A-team.
 
Every think about how wild it is that we went from people complaining about "too much politics" in the Prequel Trilogy, to people complaining about a lack of political content in the Sequel Trilogy? :V
 
Mechasaurian said:
Every think about how wild it is that we went from people complaining about "too much politics" in the Prequel Trilogy, to people complaining about a lack of political content in the Sequel Trilogy? :V
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They also complain about too much politics in one of the new films, so YMMV there. Though with the Abrams films at least, there is definitely an aversion to doing anything the PT did - so not just no politics, there isn't really any world-building until the second film, nor is there any explanation of what the bad guys are about. There's no scene in the style of the Death Star conference, where we get to see how the First Order rolls apart from that they kill people.

I'd still argue that the politics stuff in the PT works at the plot level but as delivered within the films themselves lands with a series of thuds. Big, big thuds.
 
Mechasaurian said:
Every think about how wild it is that we went from people complaining about "too much politics" in the Prequel Trilogy, to people complaining about a lack of political content in the Sequel Trilogy? :V
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The problem with the sequel trilogy was that (and this goes especially for The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker) were that they were too samey and this is often what people complain about. And nobody really complained about the politics while the prequels were still going on. It was sort of a wedge issue that got brought up during the premieres on YouTube of the RLM reviews of them. But it wasn't really what made the prequels "bad."

If anything, I liked the politics of the prequels.
 
I wouldn't say the Abrams films are really any more samey than the PT. It's just a matter of generic blockbuster run-run-run versus the unexpressive flatness of the PT, which was then crowded with CGI. The Prequels are consistently shot in the least imaginative way possible, except for moments in the wholly CGI sequences... which don't really gain anything. The oner that begins Revenge of the Sith feels like a flex and little more to me.

And again this puts TLJ in the weird position where people will talk about how it was shot wrong for a Star Wars film (I've seen people fulminating about a lack of wipe cuts), and it also gets accused of being samey. Which is just weird to me, because like Rogue One, it feels meaningfully different to just about any other live-action Star Wars property from pretty much the first shot. There's a particular character to the visuals and the film goes further into the weird stuff than anything outside of the animated series and comics (there's a bit where the camera dips into a cross-section of the earth, the way that Holdo's strike on the Supremacy is presented, and Rey's Under the Skin-inspired vision in the cave).

Stylistically though, I'd say that TLJ and Rogue One (along with The Clone Wars and, to a lesser extent, The Mandalorian) show that to make a good Star Wars film, your influences must go beyond older Star Wars and other blockbusters. They go back to the sources of the OT and find other elements too - TLJ drawing on more surreal fare and David Lean films, while Rogue One takes cues from spy movies - whereas the Abrams movies and Solo do not. They're largely content to just do old Star Wars, but faster and with modern VFX.

Also, people totally complained about the politics of the PT, or at least how they were presented. There was a lot of grumbling over the choice to make taxation and trade a key part of the conflict in TPM:
 
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bluntblade said:
I wouldn't say the Abrams films are really any more samey than the PT. It's just a matter of generic blockbuster run-run-run versus the unexpressive flatness of the PT, which was then crowded with CGI. The Prequels are consistently shot in the least imaginative way possible, except for moments in the wholly CGI sequences... which don't really gain anything. The oner that begins Revenge of the Sith feels like a flex and little more to me.

And again this puts TLJ in the weird position where people will talk about how it was shot wrong for a Star Wars film (I've seen people fulminating about a lack of wipe cuts), and it also gets accused of being samey. Le sigh.

Stylistically though, I'd say that TLJ and Rogue One (along with The Clone Wars and, to a lesser extent, The Mandalorian) show that to make a good Star Wars film, your influences must go beyond older Star Wars and other blockbusters. They go back to the sources of the OT and find other elements too - TLJ drawing on more surreal fare and David Lean films, while Rogue One takes cues from spy movies - whereas the Abrams movies and Solo do not. They're largely content to just do old Star Wars, but faster and with modern VFX.

Also, people totally complained about the politics of the PT, or at least how they were presented. There was a lot of grumbling over the choice to make taxation and trade a key part of the conflict in TPM:
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The Last Jedi (supposedly) is meant to be different even when it's not so I don't really get where you're coming from. Also, much of the hate during the prequels (and I mean from roughly 1999 to 2005) was directed toward Jar Jar or the love interest (among other prominent in-your-face shenanigans). That's what I remember. That's what everyone talked about. It was only afterward that people started examining the prequels and picking it apart (during the turn of the 2000s into the 2010s before Lucas gave up Lucasfilm to Disney).
 
Zhang Jiao said:
The Last Jedi (supposedly) is meant to be different even when it's not so I don't really get where you're coming from. Also, much of the hate during the prequels (and I mean from roughly 1999 to 2005) was directed toward Jar Jar or the love interest (among other prominent in-your-face shenanigans). That's what I remember. That's what everyone talked about. It was only afterward that people started examining the prequels and picking it apart (during the turn of the 2000s into the 2010s before Lucas gave up Lucasfilm to Disney).
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For me, it's still within the realm of blockbuster filmmaking - of course it is, I'm not pretending it goes full Lynchian - but there's a noticeable different to the look and feel of the thing. There are plenty of shots in it which are noticeably stranger and more expressive than in the two films either side of it (I mean, there is a section which is literally influenced by Under the Skin), and philosophically it makes a point of pushing the characters and the ethos of the series forward.

Also, yeah, lots of it was directed at Jar Jar, who was a dreadfully grating presence. But it wasn't like people picked a few strawmen. You also have the wooden performances from legitimately great actors, stemming from the script and direction, both of which came in for plenty of criticism at the time. The filmmaking itself in the Prequels is thoroughly basic (not necessarily a problem on its own) but also, because Lucas keeps us at a distance from the characters, heightens the sterile, emotionless feel of the movies.
 
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bluntblade said:
For me, it's still within the realm of blockbuster filmmaking - of course it is, I'm not pretending it goes full Lynchian - but there's a noticeable different to the look and feel of the thing. There are plenty of shots in it which are noticeably stranger and more expressive than in the two films either side of it (I mean, there is a section which is literally influenced by Under the Skin), and philosophically it makes a point of pushing the characters and the ethos of the series forward.

Also, yeah, lots of it was directed at Jar Jar, who was a dreadfully grating presence. But it wasn't like people picked a few strawmen. You also have the wooden performances from legitimately great actors, stemming from the script and direction, both of which came in for plenty of criticism at the time. The filmmaking itself in the Prequels is thoroughly basic (not necessarily a problem on its own) but also, because Lucas keeps us at a distance from the characters, heightens the sterile, emotionless feel of the movies.
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The films are far from sterile, imho. The Last Jedi certainly feels sterile compared to the prequels, and I certainly felt that way (though mostly, I felt bored). Like I said, I recall that everyone was directing most of their anger toward the things that "stuck out" (Jar Jar, Hayden Christensen's acting chops, Anakin's whininess, etc.)

The "politics thing" only came a bit later, which I remember it being a bit before 2008 (or just around that time, when Star Wars: The Clone Wars was coming out).
 
One of the problems with with Lucas as a filmmaker is that he has always been far more interested in the technical and experimental aspects of film making rather than the actually hands on directing people aspects of it which is alright if you have veteran actors as that can give you leeway but tends to spells disaster with child actors and inexperienced actors who require careful hands on direction to produce good work especially with the dialogue Lucas tended to produce in his scripts which his first two prequel films heavily depended on with the actors who played Anakin as a child and grown up.
 
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Zhang Jiao said:
The films are far from sterile, imho. The Last Jedi certainly feels sterile compared to the prequels, and I certainly felt that way (though mostly, I felt bored). Like I said, I recall that everyone was directing most of their anger toward the things that "stuck out" (Jar Jar, Hayden Christensen's acting chops, Anakin's whininess, etc.)

The "politics thing" only came a bit later, which I remember it being a bit before 2008 (or just around that time, when Star Wars: The Clone Wars was coming out).
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I remember the politics being far more contemporary, but I live in the U.S, which the Prequels generally strayed very very close towards contemporary criticism of the Bush Administration and Republicans of the 1990's-2008.
 
BBadolato said:
I remember the politics being far more contemporary, but I live in the U.S, which the Prequels generally strayed very very close towards contemporary criticism of the Bush Administration and Republicans of the 1990's-2008.
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Yes. There was no problem there, at least before the turn of the 2000s into the 2010s when people had more time to think of it.

The reason being: Bush was just plain unpopular and everyone literally had their own take on the Bush administration and the Republican Party in general. I remember those days well. Even Valorum's impeachment was just an example of some corrupt schmuck getting impeached and quite possibly backstabbed like Lucas probably believed Clinton had been (or at least, so the liberal narrative goes; I won't get into the politics here as I'm pretty much to the left of Clinton and would probably just put in my own views).
 
Alane1 said:
One of the problems with with Lucas as a filmmaker is that he has always been far more interested in the technical and experimental aspects of film making rather than the actually hands on directing people aspects of it which is alright if you have veteran actors as that can give you leeway but tends to spells disaster with child actors and inexperienced actors who require careful hands on direction to produce good work especially with the dialogue Lucas tended to produce in his scripts which his first two prequel films heavily depended on with the actors who played Anakin as a child and grown up.
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I'd say technological rather than technical, to be specific. Lucas was very enamoured with the possibilities of technology for film, but compared to contemporaries like Spielberg, he never really evolved in terms of his visual storytelling. If anything, he regressed over the course of the PT.

Which accentuates the stiltedness of the performances. We're generally not aligned with Anakin and Padme's emotions like we are with Rey, Finn, Jyn, Poe or Rose. Instead we're mostly held at a distance, observing them.

That's what I mean by sterility, compared to what are, for me, the much more vibrant shots of Rogue One and TLJ. Things like the Star Destroyer emerging from the shadow of the Death Star dish, or the First Order fleet seen starkly from above.

And I think even the vets were undermined by the scripts and direction. Christopher Lee doesn't bring the full majesty he did as Saruman. Samuel L. Jackson becomes very one-note, and Liam Neeson suffers a similar fate.
 
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