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Robot Style posted:I mean, they did want to try and sell the possibility of Rey going dark, and having all the white armor shatter off her, leaving her in the black undersuit could be a pretty cool visual metaphor. You know what, that scene would’ve been the absolute best had they used it in the throne room in TLJ.
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Dec 17, 2023 10:32
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TheDeadlyShoe posted:You can write a powerful scene and work backwards from there, filling out your world, plot and characters based on how what course of events would result in that scene happening. The problem is that that isn't really what JJ is doing. JJ is creating awesome visuals - 'Trailer Moments'. And he does a bunch of these each movie; if they are hard to reconcile, too bad. He doesn't appear to give too much thought to plot or characters. That's how you end up with the weird contradictory stuff like quantum chewie and zori bliss making it to Exegol. Everything is subordinate to the *current* scene rather than subordinate to the narrative. This is the kind of thing that gets repeated a lot, without much examination. Rise Of Skywalker was a rushed, and otherwise meddled-with production that certainly would have fared worse if there weren’t at least those ‘powerful images’. With Zori and Chewbacca being not-dead, for example, that’s a case where they were primarily concerned with the characterization, above everything else. The basic point of Chewbacca being “dead” is that Rey legitimately did almost burn him to death. She’s dangerous and unstable, and, even if she got lucky this time, this really bothers her. Zori’s magic token is a blatant reference to the concept of an underworld - heroes paying the ferryman to enter Hades with a coin or whatever. The point of it is resurrection and redemption; the token was Zori’s ‘ticket to a new life’, allowing her to pass through hell and emerge from the other side as a new person. Rey uses this token to try and undo the killing of Chewbacca, but learns more about the source of her rage issues and autocratic leanings in the process. This is symbolized, onscreen, with the dagger that was pulled from her patents’ bodies, and now literally points her towards her fate of becoming the Antichrist. That’s the primary conflict of the film. Turns out that NecroPalpatine killed Rey’s patents and manipulated all other aspects of her life as part of a decades-long psychic ritual to trick the shithead NeoFeudalists into conquering the galaxy. Like, it’s not an accident that there’s a comedy sequence where C3PO is killed, has his corpse briefly possessed by Satan, and then is reborn as literally a new person. It happens to like four other characters. It’s the same themes! What you’re talking about is streamlining the plot to remove redundancy, but losing this characterization in the process. ‘Why bother killing Chewbacca just to bring him back?’ The use of the dagger is consistently mocked as a skippable “fetch quest” from videogames, but that’s only true if you approach the film as a videogame - one that we can speedrun by taking a faster route to the Kill NecroPalpatine endboss objective. In actuality, it doesn’t matter if there are other routes, when this particular hole is the one that was made for Rey. Also, killing NecroPalpatine is revealed to be a bad thing. Rey’s actual mission is to kill herself. This doesn’t speak to the quality of the film, of course. The movie’s got all kinds of problems - but they’re just not this.
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Dec 17, 2023 15:28
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TheDeadlyShoe posted:You can write a powerful scene and work backwards from there, filling out your world, plot and characters based on how what course of events would result in that scene happening. The problem is that that isn't really what JJ is doing. JJ is creating awesome visuals - 'Trailer Moments'. And he does a bunch of these each movie; if they are hard to reconcile, too bad. He doesn't appear to give too much thought to plot or characters. That's how you end up with the weird contradictory stuff like quantum chewie and zori bliss making it to Exegol. Everything is subordinate to the *current* scene rather than subordinate to the narrative. And not worrying about how it screws with the canon. 'Lightspeed Skipping' and Lightspeed Ramming were mistakes.
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Dec 17, 2023 15:36
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SolarFire2 posted:And not worrying about how it screws with the canon. 'Lightspeed Skipping' and Lightspeed Ramming were mistakes. Lightspeed kamikaze is cool and awesome and any supposed "why haven't we seen this before" bs should be ignored if it's cool and awesome. Meanwhile, lightspeed skipping is lame and stupid as holy gently caress and any "why hasn't this been a thing" analysis should be taken at face value if it's lame and stupid as holy gently caress. Nightmare Cinema fucked around with this message at 16:58 on Dec 17, 2023 |
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Dec 17, 2023 16:00
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Extra row of tits posted:And literally zero Jedi, they were apparently so rare that 20 years after the fall the galaxy at large doesn’t believe in them and even after the empire falls (at the hands of a Jedi) they are apparently an urban legend. I used to think this was stupid too but "Where was Obama during Katrina" was a thing in real life so it seems a lot more realistic now.
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Dec 17, 2023 16:48
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When I was younger, I thought the idea that Palpatine could democratically take away everyone's rights and create a racist fascist dictatorship out of a democracy in a matter of a dozen or two years was insane and stupid. Who would vote to give away their rights? Who would genuinely want to make things more abusive on people around them? I was convinced this didn't make sense logically.
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Dec 17, 2023 16:55
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Nightmare Cinema posted:Meanwhile, lightspeed skipping is lame and stupid as holy gently caress and any "why hasn't this been a thing" analysis should be taken at face value if it's lame and stupid as holy gently caress. That blew up TRoS for me just minutes into the film. But if that BS hadn't been in there, something else would have done it.
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Dec 17, 2023 16:55
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The thing about that is that it's not some secret trick that only Lucas and Abrams were privy to, it's an assembly line process that all the Disney movies do now (and to an lesser extent, other major studios). All of the drawbacks and complaints and critiques that you so insightfully identify about the sequel trilogy's "process" apply equally to basically 75% of blockbusters annually by volume.
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Dec 17, 2023 19:09
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Well, that was also a thing in JJ's Star Trek, where Scotty invents a means of intercepting a vessel traveling through subspace, only to have the Space CIA confiscate his notes and warn him off doing it again.
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Dec 17, 2023 23:08
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Halloween Jack posted:Well, that was also a thing in JJ's Star Trek, where Scotty invents a means of intercepting a vessel traveling through subspace, only to have the Space CIA confiscate his notes and warn him off doing it again. And then in the very next movie the bad guy uses a device small enough to fit into a duffel bag to teleport from earth to Klingon homeworld some 100 light years or so away.
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Dec 17, 2023 23:22
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To be fair, that guy was a genetically augmented super genius.
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Dec 17, 2023 23:33
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And by that I mean that it's a terrible cop-out, and also very laughable that the Kelvin timeline encouraged Starfleet to hunt down the Botany Bay and impress Khan into building superweapons for them.
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Dec 17, 2023 23:35
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well why not posted:playing video poker in a vegas tiki bar is the most retrofuture activity possible You can gamble on giant tv screens in the las vegas airport and watch a giant video sphere with Michelob ads from a safe distance.
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Dec 18, 2023 05:10
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Bogus Adventure posted:And by that I mean that it's a terrible cop-out, and also very laughable that the Kelvin timeline encouraged Starfleet to hunt down the Botany Bay and impress Khan into building superweapons for them. "Guys, we found Napoleon frozen in stasis. I bet he'd be able to build some awesome stealth bombers for us!"
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Dec 18, 2023 07:06
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They were right and he did?
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Dec 18, 2023 07:16
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Most historians agree that the stealth bombers Napoleon built were really lame.
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Dec 18, 2023 07:59
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Kingo Ligma posted:Yeah I like Ahsoka...Ahsoka my own dick
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Dec 18, 2023 08:33
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People here seem to have a lot of knowledge of stuff that was cut from the sequel trilogy or changed around during production so I do have a stupid question about that. Early on in TLJ it's a big deal that the First Order is able to track The Resistance through hyperspace, and working out how to stop that is one of the big parts of the flick. At first it sort of seemed like they were going to build towards there being a traitor on board but then that was a red herring, but then later Leia mentions them having this tracker that can tell them exactly where Rey is almost anywhere in the galaxy? In the moment seeing the movie it felt like there was something off or more meant to be going on with these things but did I just imagine something that isn't there? Like I know they sidelined Finn but was them getting tracked through hyperspace the way they were always going to be a thing or is this some half-baked left over stuff that still made it into the movie?
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Dec 18, 2023 15:54
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Happy eight year anniversary to Star Wars: The Force Awakens How we feeling about it now? How did you feel about it? What were your hopes? Where did you expect it to go? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erLk59H86ww https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGbxmsDFVnE Vinylshadow fucked around with this message at 16:28 on Dec 18, 2023 |
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Dec 18, 2023 16:26
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Vinylshadow posted:Happy eight year anniversary to Star Wars: The Force Awakens Max Von Sydow’s line about making things right subverted my expectations, I’ll say that.
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Dec 18, 2023 16:30
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I enjoyed it. Still enjoy it. I’m fine with 2 out of the 3 sequels. However I wish they never got made because I don’t like how awful and skewed the fandom became. It just sucks rear end to talk about honestly and I’d rather they didn’t exist to remove this anxiety from my soul.
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Dec 18, 2023 16:37
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Neo Rasa posted:People here seem to have a lot of knowledge of stuff that was cut from the sequel trilogy or changed around during production so I do have a stupid question about that. when Jyn Erso is looking through the imperial archives in Rogue One, she notes a file on hyperspace tracking. So there's a precedent. I'm not sure if that was ever confirmed to be an explicit easter egg or a coincidence.
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Dec 18, 2023 16:45
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Vinylshadow posted:Happy eight year anniversary to Star Wars: The Force Awakens The Force Awakens is the foundation of sand the rest of the trilogy lists on, although as a movie qua movie its not necessarily any worse than any of the Star Wars knock offs of the 80s (and its better than a few). It's biggest weakness is how confused it feels as a narrative; there's very little about it that makes sense in the absence of radiant Star Wars cultural assumptions, and it self-sabotages its more interesting ideas (much like its immediate sequel). Schwarzwald fucked around with this message at 18:14 on Dec 18, 2023 |
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Dec 18, 2023 16:48
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I think most star wars movies since the OT have had to varying degrees a problem of biting off more than they can chew in terms of characters, plot threads, action scenes, etc. One of the impulses of making a star war is just going wild and crazy jamming every somewhat cool idea someone had in there. I get that's even a virtue in the eyes of some. But TFA is kind of noteworthy as an exception. It's really pretty much basic, with an actual basic rear end three act structure. Totally granted that this may mostly come from copying new hope to such an extent. But it's kind of an interesting contrast point, or path not taken in most of the stuff that came after
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Dec 18, 2023 17:17
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The ST (haven't seen RoS and don't plan for that to change based on what I've read here) movies provoke a similar reaction to the JJ Trek movies: I watched once and generally thought they were OK (except for Into Darkness). Didn't leave too much of an impression. Probably wouldn't go out of my way to watch them again and much prefer the original movies.
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Dec 18, 2023 17:23
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TLJ probably has the best individual scenes in the ST but TFA is the strongest overall because its the only one that recognizes that Finn should be the co-protagonist instead of a guy who just runs around being confused and yelling. Huge missed opportunity to not have it be a trilogy about him going from stormtrooper to galactic saviour.
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Dec 18, 2023 17:50
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The sequel trilogy was an inevitability just like the future trilogies
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Dec 18, 2023 18:07
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F_Shit_Fitzgerald posted:The ST (haven't seen RoS and don't plan for that to change based on what I've read here) movies provoke a similar reaction to the JJ Trek movies: I watched once and generally thought they were OK (except for Into Darkness). Didn't leave too much of an impression. Probably wouldn't go out of my way to watch them again and much prefer the original movies. Yeah same here. My snide one-liner is that JJ is a below-average cover band.
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Dec 18, 2023 19:11
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Neo Rasa posted:People here seem to have a lot of knowledge of stuff that was cut from the sequel trilogy or changed around during production so I do have a stupid question about that. It’s not something we really know about in detail, but all the expository dialogue around how “hyperspace tracking” works is really sus - in the same way the “cloaking device”/“anti-cloaking scan” stuff is. That exposition was likely added to fix ‘plot holes’ and match the reshoots we know were done to make Poe and Holdo “more likeable”. Adding cloaking devices hypothetically makes Holdo’s ‘hide in plain sight’ plan less of an insane gamble - which is important because she complains about Poe’s plan being too risky: “You’ve bet the survival of the Resistance on bad odds, and put us all at risk?” If you watch the scene where Poe, Rose, and FN are building their plan, there’s a subtle bit where Rose is visibly annoyed that the men are talking over and ignoring her, which never comes up again and indicates that something was likely changed in realtion to that scene. The insanely convoluted exposition about how they can’t blow up the hyperspace tracker because every ship has a hyperspace tracker (but only one can be in use at a time (and the hyperspace trackers switch when destroyed (but not when paused))) is the likely candidate. It’s answering the question of why they don’t just destroy the tracker or do even more damage to Snoke’s ship, since they have a magic code to disable the shields. It’s the kind of thing where trying to “fix” a plot hole just draws more attention to it and makes it worse. Add that to, probably, attempts to downplay Poe’s misogyny. Rey’s magic beacon doesn’t look like a reshoot thing to me, though. It’s an easy and straightforward way to illustrate that Rey is connected to Leia, given that the film begins with them in different solar systems. However, it does also exist to clumsily pave over a ‘plot hole’: how was Rey supposed to find Leia if the base was being abandonner and they had no known destination? SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 23:34 on Dec 18, 2023 |
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Dec 18, 2023 19:26
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Vinylshadow posted:Happy eight year anniversary to Star Wars: The Force Awakens Was reflecting on this based on Facebook memories and a 1AM post after seeing it opening night  I like TFA for it's overall structure and plotting but TLJ is a much prettier movie to look at. We don't talk about TRoS
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Dec 18, 2023 22:57
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I think I could be more enthusiastic for TFA if its store brand trench run wasn't so ugly looking. It's tremendously let down by everything that happened after, but the lightsaber fight in the snow I still kinda like. Yet even in the movie's own context it's diminished by cutting back and forth to absolute cinematic barf
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Dec 18, 2023 23:00
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the TFA trench run really is appalling
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Dec 18, 2023 23:02
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Tros was a bit too silly for me to watch more than 2 or 3 times but I’ve really enjoyed 7 and 8 tons of times
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Dec 18, 2023 23:05
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The trench run shouldn't have happened because Poe should have just stayed dead and they should have had to do something other than blow up a third, even larger Death Star but take away those elements and the rest of it hangs together pretty well
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Dec 18, 2023 23:41
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Do we know if the trench run was thought of before or after they decided to keep Poe around, and who would've run it if he had stayed dead?
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Dec 19, 2023 00:30
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Zoran posted:the TFA trench run really is appalling Straight up didn’t even register it happened first time I saw it. I actually forgot how they stopped the Star killer
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Dec 19, 2023 00:41
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CelticPredator posted:Straight up didn’t even register it happened first time I saw it. I actually forgot how they stopped the Star Didn't they drop moldy peaches on Hux's stage?
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Dec 19, 2023 00:47
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I mean even if you do remember the scene you still can't really tell how they stopped Star Killer Base. Because the frame is mostly just a grey and brown smear with some x wings
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Dec 19, 2023 00:48
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Vinylshadow posted:Do we know if the trench run was thought of before or after they decided to keep Poe around, and who would've run it if he had stayed dead? The attack on Starkiller Base was around pretty early - early enough that they were working on designs for a shield-busting superweapon that the Resistance would use to attack the base rather than relying on the shields to be shut down from within.  We also know that Denis Lawson was offered a role in the movie, so it's possible the original intent was for Wedge to lead the attack rather than Poe, but after rewriting Poe to survive, Wedge was relegated to a cameo and turned the part down.
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Dec 19, 2023 01:05
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In retrospect the giant sperm was a pretty good idea. There’s a lot you could do with that
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Dec 19, 2023 01:07
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