|
Jack Gladney posted:Star Wars killed New Hollywood and must die in agony for proving that Jaws-level blockbusters could be replicated. Begun, the Clone Wars had.
|
#
¿
Dec 14, 2015 19:52
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 01:49 |
|
|
Steve2911 posted:We need a 900 page thread evangelising Avatar in excruciating detail. Be the change you want to see ignored in the world.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 14, 2015 20:07
|
|
|
Fred Breakfast posted:I remember reading somewhere that TPM got better reviews when it first came out, so I decided to see actual reviews from then. This one from the hollywood reporter stopped me in my tracks. He wasn't 100% correct in what he was predicting, but man was he prescient. I think Roger Ebert also nailed it pretty well, stating quite clearly that Lucas' work is meant to be looked at rather than listened to. quote:As for the bad rap about the characters--hey, I've seen space operas that put their emphasis on human personalities and relationships. They're called "Star Trek" movies. Give me transparent underwater cities and vast hollow senatorial spheres any day.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 16, 2015 18:57
|
|
|
Serf posted:I know my town didn't get the Internet until after TPM. Hell, when I was very young we still had a party line on our road. Ah, the good old days of actually waiting your turn to actually use the only phone line on the street.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 16, 2015 19:58
|
|
|
ComposerGuy posted:They should have just *started* with Attack of the Clones in terms of age. By which I mean had Anakin already learning from Kenobi. Then you could have spent 2 entire movies actually building a real friendship between them. Anakin interacts with Ben essentially zero time at all in Phantom Menace (Qui-Gon gets all that relationship-building time for no good reason. He's a completely superfluous character and nothing was gained by not having Ben do all the stuff he did), and by Attack of the Clones he's already petulant and there's no indication other than being directly told in the dialog that they're friends in the slightest. We never saw the shift. Spend your first two films exploring that relationship so that it means something in Part 3 when it all crumbles to nothing. One reason to start where he did is to have Padme be his mother (and the loss of his mother) all over again.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 16, 2015 21:23
|
|
|
Maybe Episode VIII will have a training montage where Kylo drinks raw rancor eggs and lightsabers hunks of bantha meat hanging in a meat locker.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 17, 2015 19:00
|
|
|
josh04 posted:Own up, which one of you wrote this. I thought this was pretty great read! Thanks for sharing. The author has not seen the film, so there are no spoilers therein. quote:All this is perfectly demonstrated in the sadly underappreciated Star Wars prequels. Here we’re shown the real truth of the situation in the original trilogy. The Jedi — a rich, powerful, aristocratic military order, unaccountable to any democratic oversight and pompously decked out in peasant robes — are shown marching into battle alongside the armies of proto-Stormtroopers as they wage a war of extermination against some poorly defined separatists, whose view that the Republic is essentially evil turns out to be absolutely correct. The Yodas and Obi-Wans and Skywalkers of the world are politically aligned with a nihilistic and omnicidal power from beyond the galaxy: they always were. quote:Based on the experience of the later James Bond films, and Abrams’ previous efforts with Star Trek, it’s very likely to be a dull soup of knowing, pseudo-pomo references to the original trilogy, to keep the fans happy; where the prequels tried to extend the story, the sequels will probably only recapitulate it. Vote Kreia in 2016!
|
|
#
¿
Dec 18, 2015 22:02
|
|
|
CelticPredator posted:In the art book it talks about Anakin's ghost being a weird hybrid of Vader and Anakin suggesting that when he died, he wasn't fully turned from the darkside ...what if that's what Snoke is?
|
|
#
¿
Dec 30, 2015 16:36
|
|
|
hiddenriverninja posted:went back aways in the thread, didn't see this: This was fun, I hadn't seen this before.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 30, 2015 20:01
|
|
|
SuperMechagodzilla posted:What is actually happening, on the level of storytelling, is that Finn's terrifying/traumatic experience manifests as Ren. Finn had been going about his day to day life, but now he sees this grim spectre ready to destroy him. While Finn says he's terrified of the First Order, he actually just sees them as an obstacle to escaping Ren (or, more specifically, what Ren represents to him: the fear and trauma, and so-on). When others call him a traitor, Finn is just annoyed. It's only when Ren calls him a traitor that something snaps in Finn's brain - because Ren no longer appears to him as a monster, but as 'just another stormtrooper'. And if anything, Ren is more a monster at the point that happens than when Finn thought he was a monster. Also, regarding droid personhood, Jedi mistaking Force correlation with midichlorians for Force causation by midichlorians is totally in keeping with their misguided systematic dogmatism. It's also important to remember droids need restraints and memory wipes regularly to keep them tractable. Personal computers were absolutely not common when A New Hope came about, so the word "memory" would not have meant "computer memory" for most viewers.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 2, 2016 18:53
|
|
|
The grey phantom Smoke, the shimmering and shallow Phantasm, and the blustering and maneuvering Huckster seem about as coincidentally-named as the selfish loner named Solo traveling with his space dog, as was already pointed out. The Republic is gone and the powers driving the First Order implicitly lack substance, except for Kylo Ren. The political side of things has even less substance than A New Hope did and -- I realize this was clear to a lot of you before -- it looks as though they decided what people understood most from the original six movies was Darth Vader is conflicted and hunts the roster of stereotyped "good" guys, so they quickly wrapped up every other theme in this first new movie. Superweapon? Gone. Political differences? Gone -- we don't even know what kind of government the First Order is. Wondering what the Force is, and learning to use it? Rey already's using it pretty well.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 4, 2016 17:00
|
|
|
crowoutofcontext posted:I'd say "Jedi Rocks"can still be considered racialized. But a little less exotic than the other examples to an American audience. We know they're bad. We just don't know what they are. In ANH, we knew there was an emperor and a senate. My takeaway is that Disney decided that Star Wars fans care only about good guys vs. bad guys, and they are probably right.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 4, 2016 19:15
|
|
|
Phylodox posted:Except the main antagonist, Kylo Ren, is more nuanced and conflicted than any villain in the previous movies. J. J. Abrams decided to present the large ideological conflict through personal struggle rather than galactic politics. Kylo Ren represents the battle between darkness and light. That's literally what I said in my post before that one. Disney decided Star Wars was Darth Vader is conflicted and hunts the roster of stereotyped "good" guys, and either didn't add or quickly wrapped up everything else. The other bad guys have illusion-y names, only Kylo Ren matters.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 4, 2016 19:43
|
|
|
Black Bones posted:I thought Awakens was all right, but fairly disappointing as an Abrams/Star Wars joint. It definitely felt too safe, and not crazy or weird enough. I got a blu-ray player and Episodes I-VI for it over the holidays, and watched The Phantom Menace (my third time seeing it). I am one of the prequel-likers, but even I was struck with how weird and "not safe" it was compared to The Force Awakens. Child actor, relatively complex politics, Padme's dual identity, Palpatine's obscured role, sympathetic enemies (I found the Trade Federation droids and the Neimoidians much funnier this time) . . . The Force Awakens is at the shallow end of an already shallow Star Wars pool.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 4, 2016 22:08
|
|
|
It is "Star Wars Greatest Hits," an album that deletes some of its own tracks after you listen to it once. The twin destruction of both the Republic's and the First Order's planetary hearts gives them license to say that many things they might not want to bother with are gone. If they never want to bother with 527 different kinds of legacy TIE fighter or B-Wings or whatever, they can just say they all were destroyed.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 5, 2016 16:20
|
|
|
Filthy Casual posted:If Greedo shoots and misses at that range, it eliminates him as a credible threat...he's right across the table. If Han has the reflexes to dodge a point blank shot at his head, he's showing straight Jedi skillz. In the original scene, Han says "I bet you are" and blasts him, which flows a lot better than a retaliatory shot. If Han attempts to jump to light speed and fails, it eliminates him as a credible pilot -- his ship has got a lot of custom modifications. Not having anybody fail at anything flows a lot better.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 5, 2016 22:40
|
|
|
Nessus posted:Oh yeah, fun filmic detail. While thinking about matters, it occured to me that in ESB, the ground is always precarious. Ice, the inside of a space slug, swampy, suspended in the sky... Hey, that's a good catch. The only "safe" place is on board a ship that's in space.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 6, 2016 03:56
|
|
|
Nessus posted:Even that's hardly safe. Leaving aside the scenes on Imperial starships, all of the protagonists are always wading through some kind of garbage. Probably the most stable is Dagobah but even that consumes the X-Wing. Hoth has "solid ground" but it'll kill your rear end. Luke's ok in his X-wing (when he's in space), and he and Leia are fine at the end of the movie.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 6, 2016 04:19
|
|
|
Sebulba walks with his arms and manipulates stuff with his feet. Your move, Andy Serkis and *~practical effects~*.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 6, 2016 15:28
|
|
|
Neurolimal posted:I'm still not sure how this and other whinge posts aren't anything more than attempting to force opunion into fact. I mean, if I see a story where an alien race walks around with its asscheeks, I'm not going to go "thats better than Jabba the Hutt!" Because [in my opinion] having a weird gimmick doesnt provide such elevation. Speaking of forcing opinion onto fact, in my anecdotal experience, less than 4% of the new generation "appreciating practical effects" can even tell the difference between practical effects and CG in Star Wars films. They (you?) literally do not know what they (you?) are talking about, turning to one specious explanation after another for why the prequels are inferior. You actually don't need an excuse to dislike the prequels at all, but if you want some better ones, try: "I prefer stories of heroes triumphing over evil" "I prefer stories of hope over ones of defeat" "I enjoyed Anakin's redemption more than his downfall" "I enjoyed the lived-in/utilitarian look of the OT more" "I enjoyed the Force as a mysterious power held by a handful of people" These are obviously all reasons to like TFA more, also. Let go of the idea that your dislike needs to be grounded in "fact"! Your other point is a good one: the fact that Sebulba walks on his hands doesn't make it a "good" creature design, and I wasn't implying it was. I was pointing out that insisting on the superiority of practical effects and privileging them in your production design will necessarily limit what you are capable of doing in a movie. You won't see as imaginative creature design in future Star Wars as long as the fan base is tilting at the CG windmill.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 6, 2016 16:40
|
|
|
I liked the desert > forest > forest in a desert progression in TFA, and the yellow Jakku > transitional green Takodana > blue Starkiller. Jakku is a wasteland and a graveyard, then Rey is briefly transplanted into the teeming garden of Takodana, where the Force "awakens" in her. She is moved again to a wasteland (Starkiller), but this time to one that supports life and the Force.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 6, 2016 18:24
|
|
|
computer parts posted:There's absolutely no reason why Qui-Gon needed to die in Episode 1. I think he died for the same reason Luke needed to not be present for most of TFA: to put the focus on the main characters. It allowed Obi-Wan struggle with his own level of Jedi orthodoxy without there being even a former master to advise him.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 6, 2016 22:25
|
|
|
NecroMonster posted:to be extremely fair to the Jedi in this case, it doesn't appear to be easy, or maybe even possible, to educate someone in the proper way to behave/have a relationship with the force past a certain, very young, age. It doesn't appear to be easy to educate someone in the Republic Jedi way to behave/have a relationship to the Force.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 7, 2016 00:31
|
|
|
Gorelab posted:You know it always amazes me that they gave that hat and beard to Watto and no one in Lucasarts looked at it and said 'This could really really be taken wrong.' I like the prequels quite a bit, and while I'm not on the racism train for Jar Jar or the Neimoidians, I really think they should have gone in a different direction for Watto.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 7, 2016 15:42
|
|
|
euphronius posted:Snoke refers to training so if he ain't a Sith I don't know what the gently caress. He may be the new Dooku, trying to train an ally against his master, the real threat. That is probably too complicated for TFA's pretty reductive approach to Star Wars.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 8, 2016 17:21
|
|
|
Y Kant Ozma Diet posted:I kinda hope Lucas hears about it. He's mentioned in the past that peoples reaction to the PT has dissuaded him from directing any more Star Wars movies. His reasoning for not directing is, first and foremost, that he wanted to make movies he actually wanted to make. When Disney said they didn't want his ideas for Episode VII, he said "ok, I'd rather we go our separate ways" and he SEVERED. The fact that Disney was angling to do something the fans wanted is only indirectly responsible. Overall, while it was evidently difficult for him to let go of such a personal project (the "selling my children to white slavers" joke that turbohaters pounced on), having the time and money to do personal projects without regard to their commercial viability was more important to him. I think he would have been crazy not to take the deal, and I think whatever films he makes from this point on will reinforce this cycle of critical re-appraisal.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 8, 2016 19:38
|
|
|
I watched Attack of the Clones last night, my first time since being introduced to a lot of interesting ideas about Star Wars by this thread. I liked it well enough the previous two times I saw it, but it was a whole new thing (since it was also my first time seeing it on blu-ray) this time. Really enjoyable. Thanks, thread!
|
|
#
¿
Jan 8, 2016 21:38
|
|
|
Dubplate Fire posted:Why doesn't Chewbacca explain to Han Solo that the force is real since he loving knows Yoda? Definitely funnier to imagine Chewbacca and Han Solo bickering about the Force before they meet Obi-Wan. Solo's derision of the Force comes from being so sick of hearing about the magic green man Chewbacca says he met.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 8, 2016 21:51
|
|
|
George Lucas' opinion is that you should watch them in Episode order.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 9, 2016 05:42
|
|
|
SuperMechagodzilla posted:The big hugs and 'old buddy' stuff is a massive contrast to Obiwan's interactions with the younger Anakin: Neurolimal posted:A general consensus that many critiques come to is "George Lucas is great at visually distinctive shots, but bad at writing dialogue, encouraging actors, and providing an engagung plot, all drawbacks that he can manage when reigned in, which he was not for the PT".
|
|
#
¿
Jan 9, 2016 15:59
|
|
|
Neurolimal posted:This is because not every person needs to be reined in. There are artists who can contain their vision to ensure a stronger overall work all on their own; there's a reason Vinci's public works were not littered with scribbles of unfinished and nonfunctional helicopters and paper wings. He knew that not every idea positively contributes to a work or is flawless. What is "artistic excess"? This is what I am getting at. Imagine you are an artist, you have a strong concept of what you want to create. You have the means to create it. Of what use is anyone's opinion, if it makes the work less like what you wanted to create? I bring up the profit only to deny the profit motive for altering the work; George Lucas didn't need to be reined in to break even or whatever. If it is your money and your project, why would you take any suggestion you don't like more than what you started with?
|
|
#
¿
Jan 9, 2016 17:51
|
|
|
Zoran posted:In the novelization, when Kylo talks to Snoke, he's pretty insistent that she's just a scavenger who randomly has great Force potential, nothing more. But obviously (even in the film) he knows her, or suspects he knows her, from somewhere. It seems pretty clear he's hiding who she is from Snoke. Perhaps she was the not-Ahsoka to his not-Anakin at their Jedi commune.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 9, 2016 17:58
|
|
|
Sir Lemming posted:It also can't be understated that the Special Editions of the OT contribute to this perception. Many people viewed these as a way for Lucas to disregard and override other peoples' contributions to the films -- especially the directors of ESB and ROTJ -- just because he could. This erased the benefit of the doubt in a lot of people's minds. But he always had the right to disregard and override other people's contributions, no? He had final cut on all six films. Nothing changed with the release of the Special Editions except the technology to make the final cut even more like what he wanted. Neurolimal posted:You shouldn't need to defend the concept of critique and restraint to be allowed to hold an alternate opinion.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 9, 2016 18:40
|
|
|
Dubplate Fire posted:You are obviously not an artist. You don't even understand the process at all. Go for it, artist. It's a discussion thread. Tell us why you would take somebody's suggestion without believing the suggested change would improve the work.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 9, 2016 20:29
|
|
|
HoboMan posted:Unironically comparing Gorge Lucas to Mozart? You must be skimming the thread. I brought up profit because that would be a reason to rein somebody in -- some films are made primarily in order to make a profit. The prequels did, so Lucas didn't need to be reined in for the sake of the box office. As for comparing Lucas to Mozart, Mozart was the first guy I could think of accused of artistic excess ("too many notes"). Thanks for half-reading I guess!
|
|
#
¿
Jan 10, 2016 06:04
|
|
|
I do think Obi-Wan and Anakin love each other, but Obi-Wan loves Anakin like a brother and, since he is charged with teaching, spouts Jedi dogma where he should express fraternal affection. Anakin loved Obi-Wan as a father, but their relationship was poisoned by the interaction of Anakin's insecurity and anger with Obi-Wan's crap teaching. This is all made explicit or heavily implied in Attack of the Clones, if you're specifically watching their relationship.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 10, 2016 16:31
|
|
|
CelticPredator posted:The toy also had quick draw action, which meant when you hit the little button, her arm shoots up, pointing the gun at whomever. But they didn't realize that the Force caused the other arm to fall off.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 10, 2016 21:53
|
|
|
Red posted:You're right, it was Ren. How is it a kick to the PT's balls? The clone side won, destroying the Separatists and the Jedi.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 11, 2016 15:46
|
|
|
corn in the fridge posted:I think at this point I enjoy watching the prequels more than the OT Me too. I know a big part of that is because I've seen the OT so many more times.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 11, 2016 17:54
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 01:49 |
|
|
Padme has already been portrayed as very, very cool-headed, even cold-blooded by that point. She says that she is not afraid to die before she enters the execution arena in Attack of the Clones, and everything that she does from that point onward backs that up. She, rather than the leapy Jedi, gets on top of her column and fights off the nexu. The comparison of Padme firing her blaster with Rey doing the same is pointless -- they're different characters -- and Padme checks off droids like it's her job. She is much more like Leia in that regard than Rey is.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 11, 2016 19:30
|
|