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Taika Waititi to direct new Star Wars film

HeWhoAdds said:
Surely Disney bears some responsibility for greenlighting a trilogy of movies without know what that trilogy would be about :V
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That's two separate issues. Disney was incompetent for giving their franchise to a bad director, and the director is incompetent for making bad movies.

Disney being incompetent doesn't somehow make J.J a good director.
 
Cloak&Dagger said:
J.J. Abrams not planning for a trilogy in his debut Star Wars movie expected to be a trilogy and with a massive budget is nothing but his own incompetence.

Even if you claim that the executives demanded he shoehorn in Palpatine or whatever other stupid shit, J.J. still sucked at making them work. A direct Dark Empire adaptation would be better than his garbage.
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As I said, J.J. Abrams did make things worse, but the lack of planning for a trilogy being a problem doesn't fall on the Director who at first was only explicitly hired for one movie, that kind of is the territory of the people who are producing the films, in this case Disney, the executive, and the people they empowered to make those decision. After all they have a lot more power in the relationship as was shown when they kicked off the first Director from what became TROS and then recruited J.J. Abrams to replace him.

So if you want a name, then I'd put the blame on Kathleen Kennedy whose attitude towards the first two films was reportedly the Directors with clearly at odd visions would get to make their movies how they wanted, irregardless of the nonexistent long term plan for the trilogy as a story.
 
Vylinius said:
As I said, J.J. Abrams did make things worse, but the lack of planning for a trilogy being a problem doesn't fall on the Director who at first was only explicitly hired for one movie, that kind of is the territory of the people who are producing the films, in this case Disney, the executive, and the people they empowered to make those decision. After all they have a lot more power in the relationship as was shown when they kicked off the first Director from what became TROS and then recruited J.J. Abrams to replace him.

So if you want a name, then I'd put the blame on Kathleen Kennedy whose attitude towards the first two films was reportedly the Directors with clearly at odd visions would get to make their movies how they wanted, irregardless of the nonexistent long term plan for the trilogy as a story.
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If J.J. was told Episode 7 would be a one-off movie and made it that way, that would be one thing, but I highly doubt that was the case.

Instead he made the first movie of a trilogy with absolutely no idea of where the fuck he wanted it to go, so the next director in Episode 8 had to basically tear 7 apart and remake it from scratch because the foundation was flawed.
 
Sunder the Gold said:
If you're being serious, tell me what your favorite franchise is, and I'll test how much you really believe that.
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I know this wasn't directed at me but personally I think it would be great if Star Wars had multiple different continuities. People talk about Star Wars as a sort of modern day myth. A lot of the old myths had multiple variations, why shouldn't Star Wars?

Also, I'm a fan of Macross, a franchise whose main main creator responded to an interview question about what was canon (Macross often had big differences between various versions of its stories) by declaring that it was all in universe historical fiction. :p
 
Darthtabby said:
I know this wasn't directed at me but personally I think it would be great if Star Wars had multiple different continuities. People talk about Star Wars as a sort of modern day myth. A lot of the old myths had multiple variations, why shouldn't Star Wars?

Also, I'm a fan of Macross, a franchise whose main main creator responded to an interview question about what was canon (Macross often had big differences between various versions of its stories) by declaring that it was all in universe historical fiction. :p
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Star Wars does have multiple continuities. It's called Disney Canon and Legends.
 
Cloak&Dagger said:
If J.J. was told Episode 7 would be a one-off movie and made it that way, that would be one thing, but I highly doubt that was the case.

Instead he made the first movie of a trilogy with absolutely no idea of where the fuck he wanted it to go, so the next director in Episode 8 had to basically tear 7 apart and remake it from scratch because the foundation was flawed.
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I mean that's fair. The product J.J. made was terrible, but it was a product ultimately approved by the people at Disney who hired him in the first place. If they'd have a plan for the trilogy or higher standards then 7 wouldn't have been made the way it was. Not to mention 7 could have been smoothed over as long as 8 and 9 worked together. But, they didn't and they didn't either work with 7, so 7 feels like an original sin, but really the sin lies with those who went into making a trilogy of movies with no idea what that trilogy would be and no conviction to stick to any particular vision.
 
Vylinius said:
I mean that's fair. The product J.J. made was terrible, but it was a product ultimately approved by the people at Disney who hired him in the first place. If they'd have a plan for the trilogy or higher standards then 7 wouldn't have been made the way it was. Not to mention 7 could have been smoothed over as long as 8 and 9 worked together. But, they didn't and they didn't either work with 7, so 7 feels like an original sin, but really the sin lies with those who went into making a trilogy of movies with no idea what that trilogy would be and no conviction to stick to any particular vision.
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That was also J.J.'s fault though. He was in charge of 7, set the standards for 7, and fucked it up on his own. Then when he came back for 9, he was in charge of 'smoothing out' 7 and 8 and 8 to 9 as you say, and he totally fucked that up too, instead trying to burn 8 to the ground out of spite, and that was an obvious disaster that was his own fault.
 
Cloak&Dagger said:
That was also J.J.'s fault though. He was in charge of 7, set the standards for 7, and fucked it up on his own. Then when he came back for 9, he was in charge of 'smoothing out' 7 and 8 and 8 to 9 as you say, and he totally fucked that up too, instead trying to burn 8 to the ground out of spite, and that was an obvious disaster that was his own fault.
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Directors aren't absolute monarchs when it comes to film making. Their decisions have to meet the approval of the producers making the film and in this case the giant megacorp which owns the rights and has hired the director. J.J. made terrible movies that are part of a terrible trilogy. The terrible trilogy is what Disney made with its decisions.
 
I loved Ragnarok so I'm excited for whatever Waititi makes. It'll be good to have something in Star Wars that I'm looking forward to since 2015
 
I mean, people harp on the fact that the ST wasn't "planned out ahead of time" as being a critical flaw, but if you ask me that's not the case. They didn't need some grand master plan or even a vague outline for the ST to succeed. Us turbonerds fetishize that because it sounds cool and important and shit, but it's not necessary at all. The reason why the ST ended on a thud was twofold - Abrams is a director who is single-mindedly focused on pleasing the audience in the short term by any means necessary, and because Disney refused to budge on the two year model.

Abrams has a background in television, so his storytelling model is "keep the audience entertained and guessing so they don't lose interest/keep tuning in every week", so he just kind've tosses out vague Big Ideas that tickle our nerd lizard brain, but they're always exactly what they seem to be - undercooked approximations of actual big ideas. He never seems to have a theme or a point of view on a subject beyond "This is fun!"

At the same time, Disney insisted on Lucasfilm developing, producing, and finishing a Star Wars film every two years (with the Anthology/Story films being the "Winter Olympics" to the main episodes). For IX, Disney blew a year or so on Colin Trevorrow's aborted film, then brought Abrams on with something like four months to develop an entirely new film from the ground up (why he didn't polish Trevorrow's draft is a mystery for the ages).

It was a perfect storm, basically - you had a famously indecisive writer/director who absolutely sucks at sticking the landing given a mammoth project with an incredibly short window of opportunity to develop an entirely new film, and the major star who was tacitly understood to be the emotional lynchpin had died a year prior. I guarantee you that if Disney had brought in one of the ringers from the MCU (like, I dunno, Jon Favreau or something) and pushed the release date things would have worked out differently.
 
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I mean, it's been discussed that TLJ did set up a fairly decent pathway to a sequel in terms of Ren v. Rey. Get someone to stick that landing and you honestly have a decent trilogy, even if it's not as good as the original. TFA's sins wouldn't be as obvious if they hadn't double-downed on them and added a bunch more in TROS. That's basically why the movie was generally well-regarded until then, because people thought it was just a way to get things going again. It's not too different from how the last GoT season made the 'holy shit D&D aren't very good writers' takes go more mainstream.
 
daedalus725 said:
I didn't
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Then you used the external elevator mentioned in the metaphor.

But why did you skip the first floor?

Did you not care about Star Wars before the sequel trilogy? Were you too young to care about even the prequel trilogy, with no older relatives to introduce you to the franchise?

Or did you enter the franchise from the Clone Wars cartoon? Which is... a part of the franchise a little trickier to frame within the "building" metaphor. Something like another series of basements outside of the prequel basements, which can be accessed from its own external descending elevator.
 
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This is pretentious and pointless. @ me when there's something about the actual movie the thread is ostensibly about to discuss.
 
Sunder the Gold said:
Then you used the external elevator mentioned in the metaphor.

But why did you skip the first floor?

Did you not care about Star Wars before the sequel trilogy? Were you too young to care about even the prequel trilogy, with no older relatives to introduce you to the franchise?

Or did you enter the franchise from the Clone Wars cartoon? Which is... a part of the franchise a little trickier to frame within the "building" metaphor. Something like another series of basements outside of the prequel basements, which can be accessed from its own external descending elevator.
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Maybe he was like me, saw Episodes 1-3 first, decided Star Wars was the lamest shit that was ever written and only saw the later films in his teens without any of the childlike wonder a lot of people have, thus ANH is an at best a 7/10 space opera with a bad script and the worst CGI edits I've ever seen in a remastered film. Frankly, the fact that people decry the ST as some great betrayal while also holding up the PT as some grand story because it was "original" despite being about as well crafted as a film as most of the things MST3K would have featured tells that either they have literally zero taste and even less understanding of the art of films/storytelling or they're suffering from nostaglia goggles thick enough to stop anti-tank rounds.
 
I want to be keen for Waititi's, but find that tempered by my disappointment with TRoS and Solo (haven't seen The Mandalorian yet) and Jojo Rabbit at Waititi's end. I have to confess to having cooled on Ragnarok somewhat.

On the general Star Wars front I would say that not planning a full trilogy (Matt Reeves took over the Planet of the Apes trilogy after the first film and that went just fine) is much less of a sin than failing to properly plan the individual film. TLJ's script was locked before TFA entered theatres, whereas both Abrams' entries were being rewritten and reshot as little as two months before release.

Abrams has other fundamental problems in his approach - "the answer doesn't matter" and all that - but that hobbles Episode IX especially. I was admittedly a new Star Wars fan who'd been brought aboard by TFA and then Rogue One and TLJ made me a firm fan. TRoS seemed to say loudly that "the fans" didn't include people like me.
 
Everything I've heard about The Mandalorian inclines me to believe I'll like it (though I doubt I'll love it), it's just that I was sufficiently bummed out by TRoS that I haven't even revisited TLJ yet (and that's a film I actually purchased and which I've gone to bat for so many times). Right now even the franchise stuff I want isn't the Disney variety.

Perhaps I'll go revisit Hunt for the Wilderpeople and watch Boy, that should zhizh me up a bit.
 
Lunatic350 said:
I didn't know Han Solo started out as a bitter old man who'd effectively left his marriage, or that Luke began not as a wide-eyed farmboy but as a reclusive man who feels his life's work was a failure.
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The fact that this is where the OT trio ended up is, in fact, a source of complaint.

(Don't forget about Leia ending up exactly where she sharted 30 years ago - fighting an overwhelmingly powerful faction of space nazis with a ragtag air show).

I'd put the blame for that squarely on Abrams and TFA, mind you.
 
I feel like I need to have an idea of the premise of Waititi's film to really get a sense of how much I can get behind it. Star Wars feels right now like it's just colouring in some very familiar lines with the possible exception of recent Clone Wars. Rogue One and The Last Jedi feel rather aberrant (and Rogue One's heavy reshoots, as with Solo's, suggests that it got too far away from the comfort zone for the execs) in that they weren't just focused on remixing the past.

I have some other thoughts, but will put those into a new and more relevant thread shortly.
 
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Darthtabby said:
I know this wasn't directed at me but personally I think it would be great if Star Wars had multiple different continuities. People talk about Star Wars as a sort of modern day myth. A lot of the old myths had multiple variations, why shouldn't Star Wars?

Also, I'm a fan of Macross, a franchise whose main main creator responded to an interview question about what was canon (Macross often had big differences between various versions of its stories) by declaring that it was all in universe historical fiction. :p
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I've always loved Star Wars and never gave a single damn about it's canon. Granted, my first EU novel was one of the Triclops ones, so yeah
Also, in addition to also being a Macross fanboy, there's:

Gundam, with a massive snarl of separate universes, different version of single universes (theres like at least four separate OYW retellings), and universes that have other universe canon to their backstory, but are not the canon future of those universes

Warhammer Fantasy, which was recently killed off in favor of a new setting I cant care a single iota about, and will soon be resurrected
Warhammer 40k, where I refuse to accept the Horus Heresy books as canon because I think theyre dumb
Both of those also have a canon policy of 'whatever you want', with a good chunk of the lore being from in universe sources

Comic Books, where you would have to be crazy to care about canon

And Star Trek, where I pretend the franchise ended after DS9
 
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