Official Star Wars Thread

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Re: Official Star Wars Thread

Post by Daniel » November 2nd, 2021, 1:23 pm

I meant Mando's voice, Pedro Pascal. ;)

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Re: Official Star Wars Thread

Post by Daniel » December 1st, 2021, 3:11 pm

"The Book of Boba Fett" will be seven episodes. Character posters:

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Re: Official Star Wars Thread

Post by Daniel » February 11th, 2022, 4:27 pm

Obi-Wan Kenobi will stream May 25th:

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On the 45th anniversary of the franchise! Simple, yet effective poster.

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Re: Official Star Wars Thread

Post by Bill1978 » February 11th, 2022, 8:42 pm

Honestly this is the first Star Wars series on Disney+ I'm actually interested in checking out. Fingers crossed it's decent.

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Re: Official Star Wars Thread

Post by Ben » February 12th, 2022, 3:54 am

Then you'll find my lack of faith disturbing… ;)

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Re: Official Star Wars Thread

Post by Bill1978 » February 12th, 2022, 5:32 am

Haha.

I was going to write that I've learnt I'm more of a Jedi fan with Star Wars but then I remembered all those animated spinoff with Jedi/Force people that I never watched. I'm at least prepared to watch the first episode. Although I have no idea what it could involve cause isn't Obi-Wan meant to be keeping a low profile until A New Hope?

All I know is that whatever the show is about it will disappoint the super super super die hard fans who will complain that the series contradicts a book or their own head canon. Much like the prequels ruined the imagined story in their head.

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Re: Official Star Wars Thread

Post by James » February 12th, 2022, 9:05 am

Remember those Mindy and Buttons cartoons during Animaniacs? If you don’t, they basically all followed the formula of an oblivious toddler (Mindy) doing things she shouldn’t be doing and being saved by her dog (Buttons) who usually is on the receiving end of whatever consequences she would have faced. In the end Buttons never gets credit for everything he did to protect her, but usually gets in trouble for some minor issue. (Made up example: saved Mindy from going down a waterfall but gets kicked out of the house by her parents for being a wet dog.)

Part of me hopes that how Kenobi goes! Every week is a different story about Luke getting into some kind of trouble only to be secretly saved by Obi-Wan, but in such a way that in the end everyone thinks he’s a crazy old man!

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Re: Official Star Wars Thread

Post by Ben » February 12th, 2022, 10:54 am

My main worry is that Star Wars explicitly has Ben and Vader meeting again for the first time since Revenge Of The Sith. Maybe they don’t actually ever meet up in this, but it’s already been leaked that they will have a "rematch" (before they meet again…)…argh, it doesn’t make any sense!

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Re: Official Star Wars Thread

Post by ShyViolet » February 12th, 2022, 10:15 pm

Even “better” would be finding out what the heck was happening to R-2 and Threepio during this whole interval of time. :roll:

(And just WHY Obi, years later, said to Luke that he “doesn’t recall owning a Droid.”)
You can’t just have your characters announce how they feel! That makes me feel angry!

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Re: Official Star Wars Thread

Post by Randall » February 13th, 2022, 12:10 am

My son thought it was time to revisit the sequel trilogy, which I've been dreading. But we decided to go with The Force Awakens tonight.

I can't believe I liked it when I first saw it. Nostalgia is powerful, and it made me feel like a kid again when I saw it in the theatre several years ago. But now that the dust has settled... the plot holes, ridiculous contrivances, poor storytelling, barely-sketched characters, and murky sense of time & place make it more grating now than ever - particularly since we now know what comes next. There was no plan for any of it, and the journey wasn't worth it. So sad.

And so much of the film still confuses me, after all this time. It's pretty obvious that the script and the production was rushed, even as great as the film still manages to look.

Still, I could maybe still manage to like The Force Awakens, despite all its flaws as a film, if it didn't trample on the original trilogy so horribly. But having Luke fail so miserably in his attempt to restore the Jedi, and Han and Leia fail as a couple and as parents, while the Empire just keeps on going, is really just unforgivable. It was hard to see how the next two films could repair that damage, but I held out hope. Until the inevitable happened, and the next two films simply couldn't make up for the first one. The original trilogy was left a moot point; the Empire really won after all, the Jedi never came back under Luke, and Han & Leia couldn't stay together. So what the the point of the original trilogy?!?!?

Now, The Last Jedi I always disliked. I wonder if I'll like it any better the second time around, when we watch it next weekend? Probably not.

(Yes, Ben, we should watch a Woody Allen movie instead!)

Fortunately, my son is in agreement. We're watching these to make fun of them and just enjoy the space battles.

Except... The Last Jedi is basically just a two-hour slow speed chase. Oh, man. I'm still going to hate it.
Last edited by Randall on February 13th, 2022, 12:52 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Official Star Wars Thread

Post by Farerb » February 13th, 2022, 12:18 am

I always thought that The Force Awakens was unremarkable, but I used to enjoy it (kind of the same way I enjoy MCU movies). I did like The Last Jedi and I still think it was the strongest film out of anything that was released under Disney, but truthfully I don't think I get Star Wars or why people love it so much, and that feeling only grew after I watched Denis Villeneuve's Dune.

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Re: Official Star Wars Thread

Post by Ben » February 13th, 2022, 4:51 am

The thing with Force Awakens (silly title) was…ANTICI…PATION!

Everyone was gagging for it, as we were for Phantom Menace, and look how that turned out! And…come on…almost EVERYbody liked Awakens (even to just a certain degree) when it came out, fuelled by that anticipation.

Nostalgia dictated that we anticipated the movie. Once it started, we anticipated seeing the old characters. We anticipated seeing them getting back together. And then, at the end, when it was sadly clear they weren’t all going to get back together, we anticipated seeing Luke. And when we finally did, THAT expression meant we could kind of forgive all that came before because we had a renewed anticipation: to see what came next! The Force Awakens was all built on teases, before, during and after actually watching it! And we lapped it up because we, as fans, wanted it to be good. Or, at least, better than the prequels.

So, yeah, I’d argue that pretty much everyone "liked" it — or at least didn’t hate it and thought it was better than the prequels — when it came out. Me? I thought it was okay, but missed several beats. I actually think I enjoyed it more on the second viewing on disc, wher that anticipation made way for just accepting what we got, and that it was indeed better than the prequels.

We got Rogue One in between this and the next one, and in retrospect I think they’d have been better off just issuing the anthology films after the main saga had concluded. Rogue One was a SW film that wasn’t a SW film. It didn’t have John Williams music, or the STAR WARS main title. It broke too many traditions and, lavish budget aside, felt like a TV movie. The usually dependable Giacchino's score didn’t help, feeling close to, but not, Williams' music, adding to the "cloned" (haha) feel. And digital Tarkin and Leia really didn’t help, especially as a last shot. And yet it had the best Vader action out of the lot of them, and didn’t ultimately embarrass itself as much as it could have done. So not a total failure, but not a laser-blaster sure-fire winner either. Could it be the best of a bad bunch, though?

A year later, and The Last Jedi I was mixed on right from the start. I actually enjoyed it immensely *as I sat watching it in the cinema*, and as totally befuddled as I was by the whole thing. In this one there was no anticipation, just a whole bunch of "stuff" being thrown at the screen, like a fan being given too much money and control over something he loves so much that he ends up breaking it. Which is what happened. So many weird choices that betrayed a spoiled kid wrecking the playset and making it unusable for others. And the second the credits rolled, my enjoyment turned to hate. And that hate turned to anger, yoda, yoda, yoda… No, seriously, the film fudged my brain. I’d actually had a really good time watching it, for all its unexpected turns, but as soon as it ended and I returned to my own galaxy, I was just like, "WHAT!?"

Unfortunately, all these films were making billion or two dollar bank at the box-office, so Iger got greedy. In a way, releasing Solo in May was the right thing to do, being a traditional SW release point. But they’d shifted that to Christmas, which kind of fed into that "feel like a kid again" nostalgia and got us excited for SW again even when we knew they might not be as good as before. But the toxic reaction to franchise breaking Last Jedi meant a lot of people skipped Solo, which had its fair share of trouble already from a botched production standpoint. Certainly the earlier, unfinished version I saw (when it was rumored to be called the much better "Solo's Game") was funnier and more "old SW" than the film we ultimately got, which I admit I waited to come to disc to see and have only watched the once. It just wasn’t really "fun", and I still don’t really see the point in it. Solo himself can’t have been much older when we see him in Star Wars proper, so none of it really added up.

The less said about The Rise Of Skywalker: The Fall Of A Franchise the better. And we've all said it: these films had NO planning. Well, neither did the original trilogy — as I’ve also said many times before — but they had better writers, filmmakers and performers that elevated the material and got us where we needed to be, just about. The Last Jedi wrecked things so completely that I think the "trilogy" idea should have been abandoned. The only way to get out of it and not feel like an eleventh hour course correction would have been to reveal the Emperor was back…*as a cliffhanger* and lead into a final surprise trilogy that would see Rey train more Jedi to battle a growing-stronger Emperor over two further films, Voldemort stylee, before a final-final showdown in the third, in which a way might even have been found to bring back Luke, Yoda, and many past Jedi to use the Force to vanquish the Emperor completely.

How cool could that have been? Instead, they tried to accomplish that all offscreen, with an opening crawl that, *as one was reading it!*, made us think we'd somehow missed an entire movie or two's worth of plot! It was *terrible*! The Emperor was back? Ooh! He’s got a second Empire ready to go? Ah, er…? And a whole bunch of Sith that…don’t do anything? Oh… Forget it. This is silly. And literally only held together by John Williams' music (who deserves better than this) that does ALL the heavy lifting in trying to keep things true to SW and even then struggles to overcome the WTF plotting, both in its convoluted mess and total abandonment of anything that resembles even SW logic or coherence.

The title made no sense — even Kennedy couldn’t explain it in promotalk — and still doesn’t even after seeing it. And so many missed opportunities again, largely because of — again — a rushed and always changing production. It speaks volumes that, for all the things he has in development right now, a no-doubt burnt-out Abrams has not directed a film since and doesn’t have anything upcoming. As for SW, well, we all know how that’s going on television: Mandalorian again rode that wave of nostalgia and anticipation, but a so-so series and a second season that basically whored itself out over a toy (you know which one) has made way for a crossover show in Bloba Fatt that's basically turned out to be a covert Mando 2.5 that even the fans are scratching their heads over. I haven’t seen it yet, but I can’t say I’m being too bothered, based both on reaction and a growing tiredness at seeing Ming Na doing her Mulan Rogue thing again and again.

Even though all this is all so new, it all feels so old, and less and less so in that nostalgic way. Indeed, it’s now at a point where I can’t even get that much enthusiasm built up for Kenobi, which I fear will see a possibly decent one-time feature film concept dragged out to multiple television episodes full of filler.

The Force may have been awakened, but that anticipation has surely faded, and may have actually gone…if not for good, then certainly somewhere unattainable for now…

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Re: Official Star Wars Thread

Post by Randall » February 13th, 2022, 4:27 pm

It was worth making that post last night, just to get that funny and accurate rant as a response. :) Many good and hilarious points.

Right now, I'm none too excited about Star Wars these days. The poor, dead horse has been soundly beaten, past the point of recognition. And in a time when the MCU is showing the world how to do an expanded universe right, with so few true missteps (even if some efforts are unavoidably mediocre), Star Wars' failures become even less forgivable.

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Re: Official Star Wars Thread

Post by EricJ » February 13th, 2022, 5:03 pm

The one secret that pulled Force Awakens out of the fire that burned Rise of Skywalker to a crisp was that--for a movie that was intentionally supposed to be a Franchise High-School Reunion movie, and which literally invented "the Harrison Ford"--was that it was a movie paying tribute to a generation that only remembered the OT as their parents' legacy, written BY the OT-legacy writer of Empire and Jedi.

That gave the movie the sense of "forty years later" gravitas it needed to go for, as we get young teens born years after the Rebellion, with Rey as a next-generation Luke, Kylo as a geeky would-be Darth Vader cosplayer, and...I forget Snotty Guy's name as the new cadet-trainee version of Peter Cushing, in a landscape littered with wrecked TIE fighters from decades ago.
And then, in come gray, grizzled, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, and Mark Hamill to show the new clueless kids how the "legendary stuff" USED to be done. The metaphor was perfect.

Make a sequel to that, and you'd have something forgivably enjoyable like Force was.
But nope, Lawrence Kasdan goes off to write the crappy Solo movie because he's the best writer of dialogue for that character, and we instead get stuck with an Empire fanboy making the World's Most Expensive Fan-Film, trying to remake everything an Empire fanboy remembers, and the Emperor bit from Jedi, too.

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Re: Official Star Wars Thread

Post by Ben » February 13th, 2022, 5:20 pm

Have you even seen TFA, Eric? That was the point! They DIDN'T get the gray grizzlies to show the clueless kids how it used to be done. Luke wasn’t really even IN the movie!

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