The General Star Wars Thread

Genuinely bad-bad to the point that even the actors could barely contain their disappointment.

Ah. Thank you. "Legitimately bad" and "It's literally impossible for this to live up to the hype" are hard to distinguish sometimes.

On a more Star Wars-y note, the Resistance Reborn novel will feature Old Man Wedge, who as it turns out is the stepfather of Wexley, the Porkins lookalike from TFA who actually lived this time.

To be fair, at the time they were probably hired the two had had criticisms levied at them - to be sure - but it was before everything really went to shit.

David Benioff's father Stephen Friedman is the former head of Goldman Sachs and is also on the Council of Foreign Relations with Richard Pepler, the head of HBO during Game of Thrones.

That's probably important.

Edited by Tuckerscreator on Oct 28th 2019 at 9:35:40 AM

No no no, you misunderstand. It wasn't that they didn't have the time.

They didn't WANT the time. HBO outright offered them more episodes and they refused.

But yeah, every single actor hated how the show ended, they just likely couldn't express their dislike for it while the show was still going on.

Good lord if they ruined Go G just to get to Star Wars faster then it was All For Nothing.

"It's literally impossible for this to live up to the hype" is also apparently the reason there is no Half-Life 3.

It's hilarious to me that supposedly they're leaving the Star Wars deal for one with Netflix, considering how Disney+ is coming and so many investors expect it to spank Netflix aside.

If you want to see how bad it was, Lindsay Ellis did a two-part video breaking down the show and the last season:

Edited by alliterator on Oct 28th 2019 at 9:56:28 AM

Move that discussion to the Game of Thrones threads in "Live-Action TV".

I mean, there's consequences when you lie your way into a job you're not qualified for and then half-ass it all.....

Regarding that "Han shot first" situation, Peter Mayhew pretty much confirmed that in the original script, Han indeed shot first.

Anyway, are you guys looking forward to The Rise of Skywalker this December?

Edited by gjjones on Oct 29th 2019 at 3:54:15 PM

Oh yes I am.

I am quite invested in its ending yes.

Seriously the last few years have been very tumultuous to say the least, why would I not want to see how it all ends?

Edited by slimcoder on Oct 29th 2019 at 12:54:23 PM

Hopefully it is with a bang and not a whimper.

I’m feeling a lot of things towards TROS, personally. There is the excitement for a new Star Wars movie, the sadness that it’s almost over, the nervousness that it won’t stick the landing, the joy of seeing my favorite SW characters Finn and Rey again, and just general exhaustion from this entire ST ride.

I said in the TROS thread that this era of Star Wars wasn’t my favorite but that mostly has less to do with films and more to do with everything else. I think this movie will be genuinely good, especially if learns from the previous two. Give us the great character interactions and development from TFA and couple that with the unpredictability and depth of TLJ and we’ll have a great film.

Just no Reylo or killing off Finn, please.

Even if the story was somewhat wonky, the sequel trilogy had a great style. Rey and Finn and Poe are great characters.

I do wonder what the retrospective impression of the ST when complete will be, especially considering that opinions on the Prequels have improved pretty stunningly in recent years; even people who think their execution was wonky still tend to admit that they're pretty hugely important movies from an artistic/thematic perspective these days.

I was reading an article by Film Critic Hulk and he makes what I think is a pretty good argument about how people look at the prequels (and movies in general). (Warning, there's a big spoiler for Infinity War in the article).

Basically he says there are two important elements when we judge a movie, the text and the texture.

The texture is what we can most tangibly feel when watching the film. The performances of the actors, whether the lines sound clunky or natural, the music, the cinematography, etc. All the surface details.

The text is the basic construction of the story, the characters and their arcs, and how they fit together.

He argues that the prequels are the best examples of films with awful texture. He says that George Lucas actually has a pretty decent story sense and that if you look at the basic construction and broad ideas, you can see a good, solid foundation for good films.

But the problem is all the stuff that went on top of that foundation was bad. The performances generally were very stilted and wooden, the dialogue is clunky and unnatural, the scripts all feel like rough first drafts that weren't sufficiently rewritten to iron out the kinks, the characters never really feel like they're in the environments they're supposed to be in, and so on. That's basically what people mean when they say "good ideas, bad execution". Lucas just wasn't able to make the films come together in a satisfying way.

FCH also argues that the opposite problem (great texture, bad text) is much harder to have discussions about because deeper story issues are much harder for people to diagnose and articulate, and that people usually latch onto surface level stuff because they don't realize what's actually bothering them.

He argues that Force Awakens has that problem, where it has a very nice texture and captures the feeling and aesthetic of Star Wars very well, with very good performances, but he feels there are deeper story issues past that which compromise his enjoyment of the film. (For the record he loved Last Jedi and has vehemently defended it since it came out).

Edited by Draghinazzo on Oct 30th 2019 at 5:58:40 AM

I think that’s an excellent assessment of the prequels. The problems wasn’t “too much politics” (GOT showed that we can happily watch people in a fantasy world talk politics for hours), it was poor dialogue, acting, and the like.

And Star Wars: The Clone Wars did a great job with the foundation the prequels laid, but with better acting and plotting. There's nothing wrong with the prequels as an era, but they just... well, they had bad texture, as said.

While I have enjoyed the sequels so far, I do agree that they have more underlying problems that still haven't been explained. The characters are great, but there are too many plot elements that look weird when you step back and think about them. For example, the idea of the First Order as a bunch of Empire-fanboys who are more dangerous than expected is great, but they fall into Offscreen Villain Dark Matter too much, while simultaneously not delving in quite enough to how villains like these could truly arise. Though that might be largely due to the limits of screentime; Star Wars Resistance did a better job of illustrating how a seemingly normal person could end up as a fascist, but they had a full season to show it.

That got away from me a bit, but what I was going for is this: Prequel-era expanded universe stuff fixes the characters, because that's the problem. Sequel-era expanded universe stuff has to focus more on the plots and world-building, because that's the problem.

Edited by Discar on Oct 30th 2019 at 3:26:47 AM

Yeah, the main characters of the ST (at least, Rey and Finn) are fine, it’s the worldbuilding that doesn’t add up. (And the tactics, but you don’t need another TLJ rant.) It’s fine if you want to write space-ISIS or space-Altright as the villains, but if you do, they should have the resources or a terrorist group, not the resources of a superpower. Their superweapons and flagships are larger than the Empire’s! It feels like cheating.

Especially when the old EU did a decent job, in The New Rebellion, of showing how someone with fairly limited resources could still pose a threat to the stability and the ideals of the Republic.

I also think a valid option would of just been the Empire fought the New Republic to a stalemate and still controls a decent chunk of the galaxy. That way they would still have the resources of the Empire, just not the Empire at it's height.

The First Order would then of been an extremist faction within the Empire that only recently seized control from a pro-armistice faction that had held power in the Empire since a ceasefire was declared a few years after Endor.

The Resistence would of then been a group of Rebel Alliance members that never stopped resistinting the Empire in defiance of the ceasefire. They would of been officially disavowed but secretly supported by some members of the New Republic, and Leia would of then resigned from the Senate to join them after the First Order took over the Empire.

Edited by Falrinn on Oct 30th 2019 at 7:21:53 AM

All that was implied in a few side story elements, but it didn't get mentioned in the films and I think might have been dropped entirely.

More about why D&D left the Star Wars deal.

I imagine it doesn't help that it seems like they were pretty extensively quote-mined in the reporting about their panel.