Star Wars Megathread

Even with the return of J.J. Abrams allegedly under additional guidance from George Lucas, I still have no interest whatsoever in seeing Episode IX. Why? Because even if it were made with the best intentions in the world, from a sheer logistical standpoint, it simply cannot be the grand finale to the main series we deserve. The best we can hope for is a well-executed clean-up of whatever small percentage of Rian Johnson's devastating mess it's even possible to fix.

The way in which the entire sequel trilogy has been handled is mindblowingly unprofessional in ways I couldn't possibly have imagined just four years ago. With The Force Awakens, Abrams actually did a pretty good job of establishing the new characters and setting up some interesting plot threads. I naïvely assumed that (as was the case for both previous trilogies) there was a long-term roadmap for all three films, and that whoever replaced Abrams would stick to that brief. As it turns out, there was no plan at all. Cuck Johnson was allowed to just strut right in, completely disregarding and even directly contradicting numerous key plot points of The Force Awakens, leaving a shit-ton of catastrophic plotholes in his wake, mischaracterising, unceremoniously killing off and otherwise desecrating beloved 40-year-old characters for the sole purpose of pushing the most explicitly hateful anti-male ideology the film industry has ever seen, before spending an entire year relentlessly attacking his paying customers on social media for daring to object to the utter abomination of they were sold under the guise of the latest installment of their favourite film series.

The Last Jedi would have to be entirely expunged from canon and a new Episode VIII created in its place for me to even consider giving Disney another chance with this franchise.

Talking of mismanagement, Rogue One co-writer Gary Whitta has called out EA over their treatment of the brand after yet another game has been cancelled and believes Disney should revoke the lisence. https://screenrant.com/gary-whitta-rogue-one-disney-ea-star-wars-license/

ClockworkOcean wrote:The way in which the entire sequel trilogy has been handled is mindblowingly unprofessional in ways I couldn't possibly have imagined just four years ago.

The sequel trilogy is what happens when Hollywood publicly announces movies and locks in release dates before anyone has even been hired to start working on them movies. I love The Last Jedi and don't understand a lot of the hate it gets, especially in regard to Luke, but it's no surprise there are so many issues with the movie when it was rushed out like that. The movie started filming only a week or two after the premiere of TFA, meaning Johnson will have had to write TLJ based off earlier drafts and started pre-production before the final edit of TFA even existed.

An early rough Episode IX poster and character sheet recently leaked

http://www.theforce.net/story/front/Star_Wars_Episode_IX_Poster_And_Characters_Revealed_In_New_Image_Leak_183509.asp

Mark Hamill is saying the poster is just fan art but it's clearly not the case. Looking at C3PO I'm hoping this is just a bit of fun the marketing team made to share with each other.

Loaded up Battlefront 1 (the original). Haven't played it in years.



Fun game.

RIP Peter Mayhew.

Zarius wrote:RIP Peter Mayhew.

No-one could do a Chewi howl with character and distinction like him.
He'll be missed indeed.

ClockworkOcean wrote:I naïvely assumed that (as was the case for both previous trilogies) there was a long-term roadmap for all three films, and that whoever replaced Abrams would stick to that brief. As it turns out, there was no plan at all. Cuck Johnson was allowed to just strut right in, completely disregarding and even directly contradicting numerous key plot points of The Force Awakens, leaving a shit-ton of catastrophic plotholes in his wake

For a time I thought maybe what had gone wrong was that Leia was meant to be revealed as Rey's mum, but with Carrie Fisher's death leaving them unable to film a revelation/reconciliation scene, they'd had to jettison that plotline and decided to kill off everything that was leading up to that (perhaps why they decided there was no point keeping Snoke around either).

But that was me when I was being charitable and making excuses. Since then I've seen far more the makers for the philistine, bullying arseholes they are and their work for the soulless product it is.

Apparently Abrams was working on a story-plan going forward for after The Force Awakens, but said he'd need another year to get it fully developed and finished. The studio however had their release date set and refused to give him more time, so his plan just got jettisoned with Rian just chucking Abrams' half-done script in the trash. It wouldn't have been great going with Abrams' plan, I imagine, but it would've at least been some kind of plan and some kind of clear coherent consequential line from A to B.

Game of Thrones - in its third episode (of six) in its final season - just delivered an episode that reminds me a lot of the Last Jedi.

Has every reason to be spectacular and they manage to fuck it up in the most bizarre ways possible.

I'm going to try not to spoil anything, basically it was a big battle between the 'living' (most of the main cast being there) and the 'dead'.

So much hype; the 'best' director; the biggest budget; the longest episode; the biggest battle sequence on TV; the (we assume the beginning of the) payoff to a storyline built up since the first scene and chapter, over eight seasons; two pretty slow (though good) episodes building up to it, the second episode especially seems to be all about everyone preparing for their inevitable death in this unsurmountable situation.

It looks like it's going to be the best episode the show has ever given us.

They fuck it up.

They fuck it up to such an extent that I am honestly completely puzzled.

You literally cannot see fuck all for most of the episode. This is an example of the grand battle we saw on TV:




Versus what it should have actually looked like.



But forget about the lighting, maybe it will look great when the Blu-Rays come out and I invest in a plasma TV for better blacks or whatever.

How about the directing? Yes, Sapochnik has a lot of talents, but apparently he has a lot of flaws too. How about the complete dissolution of tension when the entire army of the living seems to be completely wiped out within the first 20 minutes, yet the dozens of 'named' characters that were initially at the very front of the battle end up surviving the entire episode? For essentially the whole second half of the episode it's literally just the named characters being swarmed by the dead. Formula: a named character looks completely fucked, camera cuts away, cuts back - they're fine. Repeat over and over and over.

This is Game of Thrones. It's supposed to avoid these kind of tropes. The writer of the book series George R R Martin even complained about this very same thing here ~2:30: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cspPt3-PFjw&feature=youtu.be

There were character deaths in the episode, some were very well handled - albeit strongly telegraphed beforehand - but it completely takes you out of this supposedly impossible stakes situation when a named character has escaped from a mortal situation for the 20th time in that one episode.

There were other problems with the episode but hey, there were enough great moments to offset that at this point. A lot of it was handled really well. We're coming to a close with this beautiful montage - reiterating that everyone is completely fucked. How are they getting out of this? I'm sitting there thinking of a dozen mind-blowing ways this could play out, based on crazy shit that we've seen before on this show.

This is THE main storyline. This is the whole point of the series. So obviously this isn't going to end with three episodes left and where most of the main characters - especially those very much tied to this particular story - haven't done anything all episode, with related arcs to complete.

Nope. A character that has NOTHING to do with this storyline literally falls out of the sky and 'ends' it.



The threat is gone. The main storyline of the series is over half way through the final season. Most of the character storylines we've seen over the course of Eight Seasons are rendered pointless.

Now ... I don't want to believe this is true. Surely this is a fake-out? It makes no narrative sense for this plot to end here and in these circumstances. I can think of a few ways the fake out could work.

I want to say this is definitely a fake-out, but I don't want to risk false hope. It's certainly not unforeseen for a great TV series to have a shit, almost series-ruining ending - maybe that's what we're in for. The (generally very good) writers of the show have made some pretty stupid decisions before, moreso recently - but not with the ending, surely?

If they DO fix the ending the episode might be elevated to 'good' status. Fix the lighting as well please bois.

I'm not someone who follows Game of Thrones, but it sounds to me like the conventional explanations of what actually went wrong, don't seem to quite fit here.

What happened to Star Wars The Last Jedi can be put down to Kathleen Kennedy running the franchise with an ideological tyranny and firing writers/directors who disagree with her at the drop of a hat, which doesn't exactly nurture talent or a coherent vision.

What went wrong with the Chibnall era is that like back in the 1980's the best talents behind the scenes had moved onto finer pastures, leaving the lowest rung options for who was available to keep making the show.

As far as I know this is not the case with Game of Thrones. It sounds to me like this was indeed a lot of talented people somehow making a crap product.

The equivalent I would draw is what experiencing Let's Kill Hitler was like back in Series 6 of New Who.

Up to that point, Moffat's track record had been largely solid, and even when he'd been sub-par he'd not produced something as nightmarishly bad as this. And similar to how you describe, this was a story that carried a lot of anticipation of where the arc and the Doctor's titanic fight against the Silence was heading next. And it seemed unthinkable that the talent involved could be so incompetent at how they followed it up.

But what we got was, similar to how you described, one cop-out after another, until there's nothing left to care about or have emotional stake in, including the occasional fake-out where apparently the Doctor is mortally poisoned and seconds from death, but not so badly that he can't take the time to change his clothes and leave us falsely with the impression he's been cured after all, off-screen, only to realize he's still dying.

Now in hindsight the explanations for what happened with Moffat are there. He was snowed under by working on Sherlock at the same time, so we weren't getting his dedicated best from him. He was pandering more to the American market which had recently opened up to him, hence why he was taking it in a stylistic direction that jarred horribly. He'd also, as a result of that success, been able to cast off some of his executives who'd previously been reigning him in.

And of course it was clear that Moffat the fairly solid writer was starting to give way to Moffat the insecure fanboy who had all kinds of complexes about the classic show's nerdish stigma and seemed to now be doing this season purely to prove Doctor Who could be the 'bad boy' of kid's television. And so gave us something frankly tasteless, desperate and sociopathic that looked like an exercise in burning money for 45 minutes for the sake of it.

....

Maybe somewhere in there, that's the explanation for what happened with Game of Thrones that week. The talented makers had had a string of successes and got complacent and neglectful, took the fanbase for granted, and made a complete hash of the editing and post-production, and perhaps in the struggle to condense the crucial bits of the novel's events into less than an hour of television, ended up copping out and bringing in a deus ex machina to resolve everything in time, for the sake of their episode schedule.

It reminds me of the Last Jedi because:

-They were both incredibly hyped later installements in long-established and beloved series: and everything given beforehand seemed to justify that this hype was well placed: so much promise.

-Both were largely expected only to produce a fairly standard story, but a lot of spectacle. Instead they managed to botch the majority of the spectacle and provide a 'subversive' story - I.E: one that makes no sense and corrupts what has been established in the great expanse of material beforehand. Both were praised for being exactly that, 'subversive', when it was so obviously a bad thing.

-Both came from directors and writers that, beforehand, seemed more than competent.

Rian Johnson had a pretty good resumé, known for some great directing work in Breaking Bad etc.

Miguel Sapochnik is the most acclaimed director of the entire show. 3/4 of the episodes he had done up to now were amongst the most loved in the series, the other being up there as well - two of which were spectacular 'battle' episodes, one of those involved the 'dead' - making him an obvious choice for this episode. We were begging for this guy to come back. The writers for the episode were the series writers that have been responsible for writing 70% of the series.

-They both managed to disappoint in every way. Not one element of the directing or writing was consistently good, or even competent, in either. They disappointed to the extent that it's bewildering that they managed to make it to the screen in this state. There were a lot of very good things about both, but none of it lasted.

-They both featured plot points and 'endings' that were so obviously wrong that they effectively tainted everything before them.
This is the most significant thing and, maybe, both of them can be redeemed with the next film/episodes respectively.

Game of Thrones at least managed to avoid the politics that helped mire down the Last Jedi, and I am holding out for this episode to be raised to 'good' or maybe even 'great' status awaiting the later episodes, but I'm not entirely optimistic.

OK I read your post this time lmao. But yes, it is a similar inexplicable drop in quality after a strong track record.

I don't know how I'd explain it.

For the directing, I figure the lighting issues are a post-production goof that might not have been evident until broadcast. They should be able to fix this for the future, not really a huge issue.

But as for the problems with the 'stakes', I figure this is just a plain directing/writing flaw that wasn't so apparent beforehand. The only real way to explain this is with something really convoluted that I can't explain to somebody that hasn't watched it, yet I highly doubt the writers will actually use the explanation: and with the big 'event' of the episode it doesn't even make sense. If they are going somewhere with the surviving characters after this episode (avoiding the implications of the ending again) then this could be quasi-solved.

There were also a number of other smaller problems that really add up, but I'm fairly prepared to just accept these as part of a 'flawed but quite good' episode.

As for the overwhelming plot fuck-up - it COULD be fixed. And it SHOULD be fixed. If the show is following the outline of the (otherwise unfinished) book series at least in the major point of the ending - I cannot see how this part is over. Still, I'm trying not to get my hopes up.

But as for the problems with the 'stakes', I figure this is just a plain directing/writing flaw that wasn't so apparent beforehand. The only real way to explain this is with something really convoluted that I can't explain to somebody that hasn't watched it, yet I highly doubt the writers will actually use the explanation: and with the big 'event' of the episode it doesn't even make sense. If they are going somewhere with the surviving characters after this episode (avoiding the implications of the ending again) then this could be quasi-solved.

....

As for the overwhelming plot fuck-up - it COULD be fixed. And it SHOULD be fixed. If the show is following the outline of the (otherwise unfinished) book series at least in the major point of the ending - I cannot see how this part is over. Still, I'm trying not to get my hopes up.

I think there's usually ways something disastrous could've been easily fixed with a few rewrites. Hell, even Warriors of the Deep could've been fixed and made redeemable with just a few more rewrites (or even a few less).

The problem is often it can't be retroactively fixed after the fact.

it sounds to me like the necessary fix would've been something a bit cumbersome or convoluted (but then it also sounds like the writing problem itself is that too). And generally if it takes that much to fix a story, its a sign of it being a poor development that can't be gotten across with satisfying, channeled, cathartic succinctness, and maybe one that the executives won't bother with because it will hold the subsequent episode up too much.

TL;DR version, it sounds like the writers bit off more than they could chew and weren't as clever as they thought they were, and might indeed even be about to just sweep this plotline all under the carpet because it got too much.

Daisy now believes Last Jedi backlash is "fair"

https://www.digitalspy.com/movies/a28256532/daisy-ridley-star-wars-the-last-jedi-backlash-rey/

Zarius wrote:Daisy now believes Last Jedi backlash is "fair"

https://www.digitalspy.com/movies/a28256532/daisy-ridley-star-wars-the-last-jedi-backlash-rey/

Officially sanctioned studio led damage limitation exercise. Tight lipped wording which simply says that everyone is entitled to their own point of view. Really??? Well thanks for that much needed championing of free speach. Gives the impression that the next film will be different. I personally doubt it will be. She might as well have said "Well you can kick off if you want but yer still wrong and we the film makers can do what we want because ... errr ... hmmm ... the future is female or some other such sh!t. Right on!!".

We are where we are because  lot of people who share an ideology are now in very powerful positions in the film industry. They also have their own economic interests to buttress and support. They aren't going to give up "putting things right" because a film flopped last year.

I’m not paying to watch Episode IX, that’s for certain. The sequel trilogy has exhibited nothing but a lack of new ideas, a lack of ingenuity, abysmal character writing and plotting, and a complete lack of respect for the OT. I quite liked TFA on release due to nostalgia for the SW iconography (though its myriad flaws became very apparent on repeat viewings), but TLJ is one of the most ineptly constructed blockbusters I’ve ever seen in terms of scripting and characterisation, and Rian Johnson’s inherently insecure behaviour on Twitter towards critical fans has simply made it more apparent that he had no passion or genuine dedication to writing that script and remaining true to the essence of Star Wars. I predict that Episode IX will resemble the finale to Game of Thrones: Episodes 3, 4 and 5 of GOT season 8 had plummeted the series of dignity akin to TLJ, and episode 6 was the tired, incoherent and cynical narrative aftermath of such catastrophic decisions. Episode IX will be no different, and will likely be equally cynical.

I've lost a lot of interest in Star Wars. I like the first two original films and that's about it. I'll watch Attack if it's on ITV because I like to look at Padme's midriff.

You have a point. The first two are the only really good instalments, in truth. Return of the Jedi is OK, but has dated badly compared to the other two (though the Luke/Vader/Emperor stuff is well handled). The prequels are all shit, with a handful of redeeming qualities. TFA is wholly unimaginative, Rogue One is OK (albeit nothing special), TLJ is fucking appalling, and Solo is plain dull. That’s only two noteworthy instalments.

Bernard Marx wrote:You have a point. The first two are the only really good instalments, in truth. Return of the Jedi is OK, but has dated badly compared to the other two (though the Luke/Vader/Emperor stuff is well handled). The prequels are all shit, with a handful of redeeming qualities. TFA is wholly unimaginative, Rogue One is OK (albeit nothing special), TLJ is fucking appalling, and Solo is plain dull. That’s only two noteworthy instalments.

I agree with all of this. The only other Star Wars thing I liked was that Clone Wars animated series from 2003. General Grievous was so much better in that show compared to his appearance in Sith.

I’ll be honest and say that I also really enjoyed the CG Clone Wars series in its latter stages, though I’ll admit that it’s not as consistent as the 2003 CW series. Grievous is awesome in it, as is the duel between Anakin and Ventress. I love the KOTOR series as well, though I know they’ll be ruining that in a few years anyway. But only two out of the ten official SW films are actually noteworthy, and I’m not even counting the Holiday Special and Ewok films- that’s a really bad track record!

Bernard Marx wrote:I’ll be honest and say that I also really enjoyed the CG Clone Wars series in its latter stages, though I’ll admit that it’s not as consistent as the 2003 CW series. Grievous is awesome in it, as is the duel between Anakin and Ventress. I love the KOTOR series as well, though I know they’ll be ruining that in a few years anyway. But only two out of the ten official SW films are actually noteworthy, and I’m not even counting the Holiday Special and Ewok films- that’s a really bad track record!

I much prefer playing the Star Wara games compared to actually watching the films. LEGO Star Wars, Battlefront II (the older version) and Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast are my favourites.

I adore the original Battlefront II and Lego Star Wars Games as well- played them endlessly at the time. Jedi Knight II was pretty damn good too, and makes for a far more appealing sequel to the OT than the current trilogy. I think Star Wars mainly benefits from external material rather than the films themselves for the most part- they’re usually better written as well (though I can only speak for the games I’ve played- I’ve not read anything from the Expanded Universe canon, mainly because I can’t be arsed due to the fact that I’ve heard they’re not always that great).

This just came out:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9Gn6Z6RbFeM
Wow- The Last Jedi asserts the plainly bizarre philosophy that killing the past is the best way forward, yet this sorry trailer panders to the past more than anything else. This film will be shite...

The sad thing is, I'm still a bit of a sucker for its viscera. For the hope it might be good, or at least exciting. Or at least might salvage something from the wreckage that was The Last Jedi.
I thought it'd be easy to remain disinterested and not care enough to see the new film. I thought I had no reason to care anymore. But I have a feeling it's going to be difficult for me this Christmas not succumbing to the curiosity to see it.