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Star Wars General Discussion Thread

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bluntblade said:
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.

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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Compared to Rey/Finn/Poe, Anakin and Padme come off much better.

Liam Neeson is a good example of being used well in The Phantom Menace; he's arguably one of the best things about that movie.
 
Zhang Jiao said:
Compared to Rey/Finn/Poe, Anakin and Padme come off much better.

Liam Neeson is a good example of being used well in The Phantom Menace; he's arguably one of the best things about that movie.
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How do Anakin and Padme come off better? One is a petulant overgrown adolescent who one day tips into murdering children, the other flips from icy reserve to whimpering platitudes at a freshly minted mass-murderer.

But my point is that the visual storytelling generally doesn't bring us into their emotions, which turns stilted performances into an even bigger problem. The camera remains largely at head height, observing events, rarely using movement or the framing to add to the emotion or tension in a scene.

With Rey and Finn, we get pretty much inside their heads early on. Paige's death is wrenching to me because while I never hear her speak, I'm made to feel every ounce of her desperation and determination.

Neeson has some inherent gravitas which is pretty hard to dim, but it's a pale shadow of what he brought to, say, Raas al Ghul. He's just stuck playing an alleged wise man who does some really questionable things. Like taking a child into a warzone.
 
bluntblade said:
How do Anakin and Padme come off better? One is a petulant overgrown adolescent who one day tips into murdering children, the other flips from icy reserve to whimpering platitudes at a freshly minted mass-murderer.

But my point is that the visual storytelling generally doesn't bring us into their emotions, which turns stilted performances into an even bigger problem. The camera remains largely at head height, observing events, rarely using movement or the framing to add to the emotion or tension in a scene.

With Rey and Finn, we get pretty much inside their heads early on. Paige's death is wrenching to me because while I never hear her speak, I'm made to feel every ounce of her desperation and determination.

Neeson has some inherent gravitas which is pretty hard to dim, but it's a pale shadow of what he brought to, say, Raas al Ghul. He's just stuck playing an alleged wise man who does some really questionable things. Like taking a child into a warzone.
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Raas al Ghul is nothing compared to the heart and warmth of Qui-Gon Jinn. As for Anakin/Padme, I mean, they had character, that's for damn sure, even if they could be frustrating. I felt nothing for Rey/Finn/Poe because at least two out of three of those characters were completely useless. And Rey mostly hogged the spotlight. No synergy. And she was pretty one-note besides.
 
I feel like we've been watching entirely different films. I mean, to be clear, I have major issues with how the Abrams films handle their leads, but in terms of making them characters that I want to be around, they work, and they do blossom in the second movie because it actually digs into their headspaces and has them drive the story.

Anakin is woefully mischaracterised, for my money. He's made into a petulant manbaby who neither seems capable of the atrocities ascribed to him, nor the nobility that is ascribed to him elsewhere. His fall ends up as both too little and too much. TCW Anakin works because they remember that you're actually meant to like him.

But to emphasise, my point was that the direction in the Prequels hinders the emotional connection to those characters, quite aside from the performances. That is what I meant by sterility - along with the heavily digitised sets, the PT has this very detached perspective for much of the runtime. You're kept back, simply observing, and it adds to the unemotional feel of the films.

Anyway, to talk of positive things, I did another fic: Form, in which Rey delves into the arts of lightsaber combat.
 
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bluntblade said:
I feel like we've been watching entirely different films. I mean, to be clear, I have major issues with how the Abrams films handle their leads, but in terms of making them characters that I want to be around, they work, and they do blossom in the second movie because it actually digs into their headspaces and has them drive the story.

Anakin is woefully mischaracterised, for my money. He's made into a petulant manbaby who neither seems capable of the atrocities ascribed to him, nor the nobility that is ascribed to him elsewhere. His fall ends up as both too little and too much. TCW Anakin works because they remember that you're actually meant to like him.

But to emphasise, my point was that the direction in the Prequels hinders the emotional connection to those characters, quite aside from the performances. That is what I meant by sterility - along with the heavily digitised sets, the PT has this very detached perspective for much of the runtime. You're kept back, simply observing, and it adds to the unemotional feel of the films.

Anyway, to talk of positive things, I did another fic: Form, in which Rey delves into the arts of lightsaber combat.
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That's interesting.

Honestly, I feel like we're watching two different sets of movies, as you yourself said, and I agree with that sentiment precisely, though I don't mean it in a bad way.

The thing about the prequels was that: you knew who the characters were. You knew what to think of them. At the time, Anakin was meant to be a fallen hero and Obi-Wan was meant to be the conservative student (and then teacher with Anakin). Qui-Gon Jinn was more of the ideal Jedi than the frickin' Jedi Council. And Mace Windu is the stern and foreboding badass while Emperor Palpatine is rightfully called one of the best things about what the prequels because he's the Magnificent Bastard, as Tvtropes would say.

I just felt that the trilogy after the OT did not have a clear idea of what the characters were supposed to be, and they had no synergy with each other. Rey is, quite frankly, more important than Poe and Finn and both those characters could be absent for the most part and it wouldn't even matter.
 
Speaking of Order 66, I think I felt my brain invert reading this:


So. Dude. You want Order 66, the massacre in which the Jedi were butchered by a stroppy incipient fascist and his soldiers, who had just had the humanity they had fought to have recognised for so long overwritten and overridden... to play as a badass power fantasy.
 
bluntblade said:
Speaking of Order 66, I think I felt my brain invert reading this:


So. Dude. You want Order 66, the massacre in which the Jedi were butchered by a stroppy incipient fascist and his soldiers, who had just had the humanity they had fought to have recognised for so long overwritten and overridden... to play as a badass power fantasy.
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Against kids.

lmao

This is the type of 1990s/2000s edginess that I thought we were done with.

Probably not completely though lol
 
"Master Skywalker there's too many of them what are we going to do?" is the greatest line read in all of Star Wars and we cannot surpass that moment in showing Anakin's Order 66
 
I know it's a very serious and dramatic moment and that it's incredibly dramatic and horrible, but prequel memes have ruined that scene and whenever I think of it a primordial part of me just can't help but laugh.
 
Honestly I have to admittedly its mainly the the scenes at the temple and Yoda's reactions to feeling the deaths caused by order 66 though the force that really the things that have stuck with me over the years when it comes to order 66, not even later attempts at visiting the events of Order 66 like the finale of the CGI Clone wars never really had the sort of impact for me as those scenes.
 
That SWT guy is one of the dumbest, most mendacious chuds in the 'big name fandom'. He sucks. I think I might actually prefer the openly toxic TFM crowd? At least their fanbase is openly horrible, as opposed to the army of morons who follow this guy and insist he's a force for 'positivity' rather than a 'who, moi?' troll who weaponises his slavish fanbase against anyone who shit talks his dumb takes.

But yeah, what a shock that he wants yet another hallway scene to jerk off to. You can set your watch to it.
 
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bluntblade said:
Anyway, to talk of positive things, I did another fic: Form, in which Rey delves into the arts of lightsaber combat.
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Shit, this ain't bad, I might steal some of this...

Edit: Especially since the Forms have been heavily altered on my ST rewrite due to the Age of the Empire and the purge causing huge alterations to the Forms.
 
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MagicMan333 said:
Shit, this ain't bad, I might steal some of this...

Edit: Especially since the Forms have been heavily altered on my ST rewrite due to the Age of the Empire and the purge causing huge alterations to the Forms.
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Cheers, that's very flattering indeed :D Holocrons are a handy resource in that regard, and there's a stash of those in Legacy's End, whose fate I think is open to interpretation.

I have an idea for Rey, decades down the line, codifying a more measured variant of Form IV. Not sure what she'd call it, though.
 
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bluntblade said:
How do Anakin and Padme come off better? One is a petulant overgrown adolescent who one day tips into murdering children, the other flips from icy reserve to whimpering platitudes at a freshly minted mass-murderer.

But my point is that the visual storytelling generally doesn't bring us into their emotions, which turns stilted performances into an even bigger problem. The camera remains largely at head height, observing events, rarely using movement or the framing to add to the emotion or tension in a scene.

With Rey and Finn, we get pretty much inside their heads early on. Paige's death is wrenching to me because while I never hear her speak, I'm made to feel every ounce of her desperation and determination.

Neeson has some inherent gravitas which is pretty hard to dim, but it's a pale shadow of what he brought to, say, Raas al Ghul. He's just stuck playing an alleged wise man who does some really questionable things. Like taking a child into a warzone.
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The only actors in the PT that come out with their hides intact are the ones with classical stage training (basically the British actors), because at the very least they can fall back on "playing against nothing" and letting the emotions speak for themselves. You can watch BTS of the PT and Lucas' direction is like, sub-Film school 101 shit. We're talking treating the actors as basically posable figurines, with the actual direction being "Okay turn around on this word, and put some emphasis on "betray" this time, thanks". Everyone's just left to their own devices and just kind've bounce off each other willy nilly.

Honestly not sure if this goes here or in Unpopular Opinions on Fiction, but my Hot Take is that the PT walked so the MCU could run? Both have wild, free flowing action CGI action scenes that oftentimes feel totally divorced from the character stuff ostensibly driving the film, and oftentimes have the characters just state their emotional arcs/conflicts out loud to each other in conversations. The difference is that the MCU hires directors specifically for their talent directing actors (the Russos got their start in TV, after all), allowing them to make the oftentimes fairly basic character stuff work (sometimes really well!), while Lucas was hyper focused on getting the technical aspects of the PT right and so he basically just cut his actors loose.
 
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Arthur Frayn said:
The only actors in the PT that come out with their hides intact are the ones with classical stage training (basically the British actors), because at the very least they can fall back on "playing against nothing" and letting the emotions speak for themselves. You can watch BTS of the PT and Lucas' direction is like, sub-Film school 101 shit. We're talking treating the actors as basically posable figurines, with the actual direction being "Okay turn around on this word, and put some emphasis on "betray" this time, thanks". Everyone's just left to their own devices and just kind've bounce off each other willy nilly.

Honestly not sure if this goes here or in Unpopular Opinions on Fiction, but my Hot Take is that the PT walked so the MCU could run? Both have wild, free flowing action CGI action scenes that oftentimes feel totally divorced from the character stuff ostensibly driving the film, and oftentimes have the characters just state their emotional arcs/conflicts outloud to each other in conversations. The difference is that the MCU hires directors specifically for their talent directing actors (the Russos got their start in TV, after all), allowing them to make the oftentimes fairly basic character stuff work (sometimes really well!), while Lucas was hyper focused on getting the technical aspects of the PT right and so he basically just cut his actors loose.
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I'm curious to watch the BTS for TPM (having quit The Skywalker Legacy partway through). Is it on D+? I wonder if, had the actors had more scope to bounce (like in RotJ, where Ford was essentially improv leader to Fisher and Hamill) the films might've benefitted. That rigidity doesn't seem to allow other creative voices in.

That is a really interesting thought, never occurred to me before but I kind of see it. I feel like the MCU also makes a point of never, ever allowing itself to get close to being pompous (which admittedly comes at a cost sometimes), where the PT did suffer from that at points.

I still would be interested to see what would would happen if you framed and blocked some PT scenes differently, and how much of an impact that would have. Were I in film school, I'd honestly try that as an assignment.
 
Arthur Frayn said:
Honestly not sure if this goes here or in Unpopular Opinions on Fiction, but my Hot Take is that the PT walked so the MCU could run? Both have wild, free flowing action CGI action scenes that oftentimes feel totally divorced from the character stuff ostensibly driving the film, and oftentimes have the characters just state their emotional arcs/conflicts outloud to each other in conversations. The difference is that the MCU hires directors specifically for their talent directing actors (the Russos got their start in TV, after all), allowing them to make the oftentimes fairly basic character stuff work (sometimes really well!), while Lucas was hyper focused on getting the technical aspects of the PT right and so he basically just cut his actors loose.
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The PT crawled so that Avatar could run and the MCU could walk. :V
 
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