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I went into this show with an open mind, loving Ewan McGregor but not being a fan of the prequels. It's gotten so bad that my mind is now fully closed on it. I don't mind that the quality is patchy, I have to pick the bones out of wildly inconsistent Star Wars stuff all the time, but I do mind it just doesn't have a story to tell. Take the fact that baby Princess Leia has been captured, and Obi-Wan has to sneak in and rescue her, and during the extraction process is pursued by a powerful dark side force user and then they fly away at the end of the episode while watched by the dark jedi and bafflingly no Imperial navy tries to stop the departing ship. Which episode am I describing? Because that's both episode 2 and episode 4. The only difference being at least in the first case Obi-Wan at least tried to have a bit of a disguise going in. I can live with them recycling some SW tropes, it's that kind of franchise, but when they're repeating entire mini arcs within the same 6 episode mini series I find that indefensible. On top of everything else like Vader just watching them leave (twice), airspeeders doing an attack run on a secret base without being intercepted on the way in or out, the constant blundering, the poor chase sequences, the baffling tunnel, the "just walk around" gate, the total whiff on the music for the show... Not angry about it. There'll be more good Star Wars along soon enough. This seems like such a waste though. At least the prequels were visually stunning at times, and were dumb enough to be ironically fun (and very memeable).
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Jun 19, 2022 10:00
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Interesting convo with a workmate today. She loves Mando, and even has a Mando T-shirt. But she did NOT know that Book of Boba Fett is a stealth Mando season 2.5 and now she’s going home to watch episodes 5 onwards to catch up. As someone who loves the show and bought the merch, I wonder how many others like her exist who will have missed those, let’s be frank, loving essential parts of the Mando arc when S3 starts.
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Jun 19, 2022 17:44
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Big Mean Jerk posted:- The legend of Luke’s sacrifice on Crait sparks hope for a new galaxy-wide rebellion and the conflict with the First Order is now a full-blown open war. What sacrifice? To the handful of observers there, it was basically AT-ATs shooting at a dude and the dude then vanishing. Luke force hologramed himself across the galaxy to just get shot at, briefly annoy Kylo Ren, and then die on a hidden planet with no witnesses. Maybe some viewers of the movie find it inspiring, but nobody in universe is going to be motivated by whatever version of the story they hear. This is the same film that told us the whole galaxy just went "new phone, who dis?" to the one (1) small ship of rebels despite the bad guys having just blown up all the planets holding the new seat of government. Is it supposed to be inspiring because it's Luke Skywalker? That he returned? Because how does that conversation even go? "Did you hear Luke Skywalker is back?" "Awesome, what did he do?" "Got instantly blown the gently caress up by the First Order" "..." "Want to join the Resistance?"
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Jun 22, 2022 08:35
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There's an Actually Good story arc for Vader in the VR game Vader Immortal. In that game there was ruins of an old civilisation on Mustafar and a big powerful macguffin crystal thing that Vader was trying to use to bring back Padme who he is still in mourning for. Instead of being motivated by just anger or ambition, he comes across as a more tragic and tormented figure burdened down by grief and loss and holy poo poo that game is barely 90 minutes of story and Vader is in maybe a third of that and he still comes across better than he does here. loving magical in this finale that after finally remembering that they can chase a fleeing starship (after failing to do so in three previous episodes) that the ISD just vanishes when it's time for the tiny spaceship to leave. A tiny spaceship that absolutely would not fit into that already small transport ship. Just no loving way. It would need to be stored in that one big room everyone else was in, and yet it wasn't. The space chase didn't even make the Imperial navy look good because they seemed to spend hours, literal hours, pursuing that one small unarmed transport ship and when it splits into two they completely forget they have TIE fighters and they have to choose which one to follow. One of the best things about Star Wars as a kid is that (stormtrooper aim aside) the villains were scarily competent. General Veers leading that assault on Echo Base, even slight slip ups like Admiral Ozzel getting choked out because incompetence isn't accepted.
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Jun 22, 2022 10:08
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Kinda annoyed how rubbish Vader’s lava fortress looks in this compared to in Rogue One. There it felt expansive, and he had attendants. But here it’s one very small room with a single chair that manages to make Vader look small and uncomfortable. I think that it’s the armrests being too high that does it. He’s like a small child in an armchair, and he’s having to lean forward a bit too and he just lacks menace. Add some shaky handcam cinematography on top and it’s like a videogame cutscene from the FMV era. Also, him have a little desktop equivalent of the hologram space phone is okay in some circumstances, but even in ESB it was shown that he has a giant one he kneels in front of when talking to the emperor. It’s just not correct for him to chat with Reva and Palpatine on the same device. In ESB it’s the small one for the fleet commanders only. I know this sounds like the pettiest of nitpicks on some level, but they did just sit Vader down on a chair that doesn’t fit him and got him to have a conversation with nothing and managed to have it look like poo poo and go against the existing established way of doing things because they were too cheap to build a second room for the Mustafar set and… I dunno, it bothers me.
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Jun 22, 2022 14:31
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Vintersorg posted:Had to go back to the Mustafar scene in Rogue One and revel in how much better they portrayed Vader here and the catty "be careful not to choke on your aspirations" . This entire scene is so good. The reveal of the Mustafar fortress, the glimpse of Vader in the bacta tank to show his life is constant agony, the door opening to cast a massive Vader shadow standing next to a quaking tiny Crennic who is usually fearless. It's 3.5 minutes and does more to explain the internal Imperial power struggles and then Vader's place it than 6 episodes of this latest show. Rogue One remains the best thing to ever come out of this franchise. It is the best Star War.
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Jun 22, 2022 15:42
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I can't get over how dumb the space chase is, I just can't. Three times previously they just watched a ship fly off without pursuit, and it's four if you count Obi Wan getting off planet past the missing Star Destroyer. So we have this one chase, and it's dumb because the only reason it's even happening is that the transport can't engage its hyperdrive because... uh, gently caress knows it's just broken. In ESB the same thing happens, and it's pre-established that the Falcon's hyperdrive was being fixed earlier. The frantic TIE pursuit is because the ISD can't tractor beam the Falcon as it's too agile, but the TIEs are wearing it down. When the hyperdrive looks unfixable in time, taking cover in an asteroid field is chosen. There's a constant sense of urgency for both parties which is why it works as a sequence. If the transport can go into hyperspace, you gotta destroy/disable it before it does so. That's a small window. Launch fighters, holy gently caress launch fighters, once it warps off you've lost it forever unless a tracker is on board. The TLJ slow space chase was dumb as gently caress too, but at least they had the excuse that they could be tracked as the reason they couldn't just peel rubber. And this chase takes hours, based upon the passage of time on the Tatooine stuff. Owen has time to travel all the way back from town while the transport is chugging along shrugging off the fire of a capital ship. And we know it's flimsy as Vader ripped one to pieces with his mind in the last episode. Meanwhile Obi Wan explains his plan to a crowd of randoms, to Leia, then the gently caress up fake Jedi, then Leia again, then random rebel captain dude. I mean, if you're gonna go, just go, so many goodbyes which further add to the sense that they have all the time in the world and those ISD gunners must be poo poo to be missing that many shots for that long. Contrast that with Rogue One where Vader's ship arriving and instantly cutting off the escape of several rebel ships and immobilizing the rebel cap ship shows them as scarily efficient enemies. I miss competent antagonists in Star Wars. I did kind of like a lot of the glowstick fight, just wish it had less shaky cam, and none of those aerial shots which were constantly distracting. It was at least the level of fan service rematch that is just dumb enough to enjoy for its own sake.
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Jun 22, 2022 20:40
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Owlbear Camus posted:I'm just glad we finally learned how Luke got the model airplane he's seen briefly dicking around with in A New Hope. That question has nagged at me since I first saw it. I didn't mind this so much, because it wasn't really given any weight (unlike say, Han's dice in the Falcon cockpit which I had literally never notice in 50 viewings of the films). It was kind a nice idea that Obi Wan is taking an active interest in the kid and Owen is telling him to stay the gently caress away. They did ruin it for me a bit by having the Jawa go on about how they don't make those things any more, like it's some kind of collectible of value that had to be hunted down, when we know that later on Luke grows up to own and fly that same craft. It was a nice frothy and harmless connection until they fumbled it. (Yes the Jawa could just be hyping up the value but if we have to try and make excuses for even stuff like this...)
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Jun 22, 2022 20:59
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twistedmentat posted:With all this content between Ep3 and Ep4, i'd like to see a show that is purely focused on the birth of the rebellion. We have seen later stages of it, and we'll be seeing more of it with Andor but something thats got political drama paired with blowing up space fascists. Have you watched Star Wars Rebels? Because I hadn't watched it until a couple of months ago when I binged the whole thing and I was FURIOUS that nobody had told me how good it was. It's just so loving good, and there's like 27 hours of it with surprisingly few filler moments. The finale had me sobbing like a baby, because this big dumb children's cartoon had the sheer nerve to make me feel things and care about its characters. Anyway, there's a whole lot of what you are asking for baked into that show. Empire at its peak, early part of the assembly of the rebel alliance, some nice callbacks to the lingering prequel threads to get tied up.
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Jun 22, 2022 22:32
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It’s so odd how non-memeable the show is. The prequels, poo poo as they are, are full of dialogue that can be mined a line or two at a time. The memes, love them or hate them, are part of the redemption and affection that the films have. This show though, there’s just so little. Obi Wan’s “I will do what I must” leaped out as something you could use out of context (even though he very much did not do what he must), but most lines were so… empty, flat, insipid, mundane. Considering that the main audience for the show is people who would be into this stuff, it’s odd how aggressively anti-memeable the material is. I think I’ve seen more from the trailer than from the show itself. Give the people what they want, holy poo poo.
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Jun 26, 2022 20:49
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The REAL Goobusters posted:The RLM prequel reviews are terrible This feels revisionist. Those reviews back in the day were redemptive, turning those films into something we could enjoy mocking rather than just angrily complaining about. The fact that it springboarded a decade of RLM just sitting around talking about films and being mostly wrong about them is another matter entirely.
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Jun 29, 2022 10:45
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Vintersorg posted:It's true. I listened to those soundtracks when building my Lego sets. It's kinda crazy how GOOD the AOTC love song is and a shame the onscreen stuff is not believable at all. The AOTC love theme is incredible, and I also really like Rey's theme from TFA which is the only really memorable tune from the sequels but it's grand.
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Jun 29, 2022 19:59
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Top five Star Wars moments: Vader's redemption Kanan Jarrus and Hera making eye contact again Vader going ham in the corridor in Rogue One Battle of Hoth "Call up a Hammerhead corvette" (but basically all the battle of Scarif really)
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Jun 30, 2022 13:51
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The biggest crime in the Rogue Squadron games was that if you failed, the mission ended instantly. Just let me fly around and shoot poo poo and have fun. GoldenEye was great for that because you could just gently caress up a mission and just enjoy shooting dudes, because sometimes all you want to do is shoot dudes. The time limits in some Rogue X missions was such that you never had the freedom to explore the level and do anything other than concentrate on the objective. I never minded failing, but I always minded failing and then being kicked out of the playroom.
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Jun 30, 2022 19:41
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That DICK! posted:now i want a "what if" where the stormtroopers intercept luke and ben before they get to the lars homestead and turn them into spooky skeletons and beru and owen go on a death star exploding revenge spree Well we never saw Beru and Wedge Antilles together in the same room. Make u think.
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Jun 30, 2022 20:14
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The only way those posters could be any worse is if they had a SA forums account.
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Jul 2, 2022 10:10
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I'll never not be furious at how CHUDs treated Kelly Marie Tran. She was so happy to be in Star Wars, and was goddamn adorable in all her interviews as she gushed over how great it was to be part of this universe. Nobody ever deserves any of this poo poo, but some people deserve it even less (if that makes sense).
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Jul 25, 2022 21:12
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Nothing in TLJ stands up to close examination, if we take it at face value. That dreadnaught is just the start of a bunch of "wait, what?" design decisions. It's a Star Destroyer, but flatter and more boring, because Rian Johnson wanted a big flat surface for Poe to fly across. That huge ship then has no turbolasers, none at all, and only 16 point defence cannons. And all 16 of them are on the top of the ship, with the underside where that massive "shoot here to disable this ship's utility" cannon is is completely undefended. Apart from by TIEs, which they didn't launch. The Resistance bombers were slow lumbering pieces of poo poo that were inferior to B-wings in every way, and as assets that were going to easily get blown up then using the to take down a "fleet killer" which is about to destroy the fleet... Poe was right. I mean, the dreadnaught shouldn't be that dumb, and the bombers shouldn't be that dumb, but in the context of the moment in the story and what was there, Poe was right.
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Jul 27, 2022 23:56
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If the bombers weren't supposed to destroy the dreadnaught, then why does Poe even do the whole thing where he shoots the point defense lasers? Those aren't the bits that will be shooting at the fleet, it's the giant turbocock of doom on the underside. He does the prank call and "look how good I am at flying" booster run at the defense guns to clear the way for an attack on it.
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Jul 28, 2022 08:55
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The ST was trash because it insisted on making the bad guys big and good guys small when it would have been far more interesting to just flip things and have a fragile New Republic dealing with the growing resurgence of fascism that threatens to topple it… you know, like what is happening in the real world and art is a mirror to life furthermore…
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Aug 2, 2022 22:08
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mweber posted:Obiwan and Owen are brothers, right? Only in the old canon. Then they decided to make "uncle" Owen be literally Luke's uncle instead.
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Aug 17, 2022 13:47
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Jerkface posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4HjzJgG0e0 Still daring to hope this will actually be good. All those short clips at the end look so... solid? Weighty? There's a proper chunky filmmaking feel to them which has been missing from so much of the other Star Wars stuff.
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Sep 2, 2022 21:34
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Oh poo poo, forgot this was tomorrow. People are probably sick of me saying how much I loving love Rogue One, but can I just mention that I loving love Rogue One.
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Sep 20, 2022 18:52
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One episode deep, and HOLY poo poo IT'S ACTUALLY REALLY loving GOOD. The production values are insane, this is actual prestige TV Star Wars. I'm so happy they dropped three episodes because I'm going back in to binge the other two right the gently caress now. All the characters so far feel like real people, the dialogue they are speaking feels like real conversations between real people. That town set they built feels like a real place for once. (Regardless of your feelings on BoBF, all those immaculately straight Mos Espa streets with the buildings all neatly aligned at 90 degrees to the road felt so artificial.) Rogue One stays winning.
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Sep 21, 2022 16:05
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OK, that was some loving top-tier Star Wars. All the time spent making all those side characters feel real paid off in the arc's finale. Ep 3 "You hear that sound? That's the sound of a reckoning" and seeing the growing sense of unease on the space cops' faces. The little swig from the hipflask of the sgt. major type. The sadness on Mama Andor's face as she realises he's gone from her life. The mirroring of the takeoffs in past and present. Bix's emotions at losing someone she cared for despite him being an rear end in a top hat who betrayed her because people are complicated. The very blue collar solution to dealing with air cover. The feeling of weight to the action in the chain sequence. The score, particularly during that whole ending sequence, was phenomenal. The way everything comes together at that point had me feeling actual emotions. Torn now between devouring episodes as they drop, or trying to hoard them to get a full story arc at a time.
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Sep 21, 2022 17:44
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It works so well because the eager young cop thinks he is the good guy, and from his perspective he *is* a good guy. He's hunting down a guy who killed two cops even though his commander is willing to let two deaths slide by to make the paperwork easier. We know he's bad because he's part of the overall fascist power structure, but he's just an eager and earnest dude trying to do what he thinks the right thing is under that framework. Which, as a tiny cog in a giant machine that for most of his life has just always been that way... sometimes it's hard to see boots on necks when its not your neck, and not your specific boot (yet). It's honest to god GOOD WRITING that he's not a bumbling cartoon villain, the true enemy is the system, and for good or ill he is just someone trying to make the world work according to The Rules as they have been explained to him. Man, you could write an entire thesis on just that one character and his motivations, and about where his individual story arc would go in the future based upon his reflection on these events. Compare and contrast that with "somehow Palpatine returned". And cry.
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Sep 21, 2022 19:50
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Darth TNT posted:Savage kids’ clothes were weirdly modern though. That's the point. They aren't savages, they're kids abandoned/orphaned living a Lord of thr Flies existence on a planet with no grown-ups. My guess is the Empire killed everyone there, and the last act of some of the adults was to get the kids to a hidey-hole. The way that one girl waves at the crashing ship as if they're expecting rescue, and the older kid telling her to knock it off as it might be dangerous. The clothes aren't modern, they're scavenged from either the remains of the destroyed settlements or from other crashed ships. We definitely haven't seen the last of them, there'll be more to the story of Cassian's sister and what happened on that planet.
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Sep 21, 2022 23:18
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Love that the actor playing the "Time Grappler" has the surname Bell.
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Sep 23, 2022 18:34
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Lobok posted:Parents thought it was the Ewoks being cute fuzzy teddy bears that endeared them to me at a young age. No, it was their brutally effective guerilla warfare tactics. tfw you suddenly realise the Ewoks were the most tactically proficient ground force in all of the Star Wars movies
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Sep 25, 2022 21:32
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Davros1 posted:The young guy in the group Andor joined up with looked like someone cloned John Hannah. If you haven’t seen it yet, he’s really good in The End of the F***ing World which you can find on The Netflix. (I strongly recommend watching the brilliant first season, and then not watching the incredibly unnecessary second season.)
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Oct 2, 2022 02:22
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twistedmentat posted:Naboos queens are elected. For some reason they always elect attractive young women. Hi, I'm Dateline's Chris Hansen...
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Oct 2, 2022 22:00
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Me: I hate goongasi say swears online posted:god please let jarjar be at the dinner party Also me: please god make this happen
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Oct 4, 2022 08:44
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A portly Jar Jar, enjoying a privileged life under Imperial rule, would be a great storyline to follow. Having him go full willing collaborator and loving it. Jar Jar likers will hate it. Jar Jar haters will have to deal with him being actually interesting.
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Oct 4, 2022 14:29
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You know what made me almost audibly yelp this episode? The loving seat fabric in Syril's home. That set, his mum's clothes, the tablewear, it looked so 1970s. This could come from any sci-fi movie made in that era. poo poo, I'm just old enough to vaguely remember how lovely the texture of the sofa fabrics was back then, all rough and scratchy and a massive massive fire risk. All holdovers from late 60s to late 70s still lingering in 80s homes. I have the urge to use the word Draylon for the first time in decades. Look at me gushing over chair fabrics. But while the Coruscant not-iPads and art deco limos feel authentically 2003 and also somehow timelessly generic space Manhattan, seeing them capture that cheap and grubby but still somehow lower-middle class aspirational home environment so well... I mean sure, the writing and acting and score and everything else was spot on, but that little dining counter set transported me back to the time period of my earliest memories. The loving quality of this show on every level.
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Oct 5, 2022 22:40
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There won't be a betrayal. The whole point of the ISB stuff that only that blond lady is taking the nascent insurgency seriously so far. This is a story of a heist in the days before the Imps realised they even had a rebellion to try and infiltrate. But it's also the story of a heist by an unprepared and unsupported group of proto-rebels. The drama comes in the "can they do it?" not "who will gently caress them over?" side of things.
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Oct 7, 2022 01:09
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God drat. So good. I love that they did such a good job early on of making one (1) TIE fighter seem terrifying, that I got actual nervous tinglings when they revealed *three* of them. Literally my only complaint is that I'm still owed a loving dinner party.
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Oct 12, 2022 20:08
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It's true, every single character feels real and fully-rounded, even those that appear in just a single scene with a handful of lines. The judge, the cubicle hell supervisor, the "sir, ma'am, sorry" ISB officer, Colonel Yularen, the actually (accidentally) good at his job shoretrooper, Andor's hot peezo hookup. All written so well that they all hint at so much more that could be done with them. Not a single laser blast, no lightsabers, no space combat, and yet this is still one of the best hours of Star Wars ever made. The problem with Obi-Wan was that it didn't make any part of Star Wars better, but it made many parts of Star Wars worse. This is so very much the opposite. God, I just want more ISB meetings and lovely beachworlds where the beach is just a concrete slope, and awkward car ride conversations, and half-empty senate speeches, and grim lower-middle class homes and office work... Obi-Wan took magical space wizards and made them mundane. This takes the mundane and makes it magical. I wanted a dinner party, and that was close enough to count as a dinner party. Now I want a longer and more "boring" dinner party. gently caress it, give me a 6 episode series which is just dinner parties.
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Oct 19, 2022 20:12
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zoux posted:We don't see an ISD in the atmosphere anywhere before Rogue One, right? Pretty sure it used to be canon that they couldn’t handle in atmo, which is why we always had shuttles with fighter escort heading to the surface. I guess at some point (probably in the making of Rogue One) they realised how insanely loving cool it would be to see these giant ships hanging low over cities and just ignored the Wookiepedia page on them. It was a good change and massively improved Star Destroyers. The opposite being Obi-Wan where a SD can’t knock out one small transport it’s been shooting at for 30 minutes, or launch TIEs. gently caress, that show loving sucked.
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Oct 20, 2022 17:43
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zoux posted:What was Grand Moff Tarkin's job before the empire? Like what did he do for the Republic? The entire senior officer corps of the Empire has to be almost entirely the senior officer corps of the Republic, right? I guess there could be a theme there about how people easily welcome fascism or the fascist tendencies of the Republic but since that's going utterly unexplored I can only chalk it up to Lucas' boneheaded decision to set the prequels 20 years BBY I can even give a real world example of how members of an old regime willingly embrace fascism when it arrives, being totally unbothered about boots on necks so long as they are the ones wearing the boots: Hong Kong. During the pro-democracy protests in 2014 and 2019, when kids were out there fighting for the things that were promised to them by China *in law*, many of the senior cops cracking open protestor heads and ordering the use of extreme state violence were all British cops who joined the HKPF back when it was a British colony and who stayed on after the handover. Anyone from Hong Kong can reel off their names from memory, Duncan McCosh, Paul Edmiston, Ian Cowieson, Justin Shave, Vasco Williams, David Jordan, Rupert Dover... a still existing clique of exclusively white British men who got their jobs back in the late '80s when they were hired straight from university with zero life or work experience, and put in charge of 40 native Hong Kong policemen, because that was the going rate under the racism of the day, and their white privilege is grandfathered into the new and increasingly authoritarian puppet government. Every single one of them will later retire, many of them back to the UK, knowing they always have that escape route should things get too uncomfortable for them there, but they've spent the last few years being willing little mercenaries overseeing the arrest of almost the entire political opposition, the brutalising of protestors, the jailing of people for literal speech crimes, the breaking up of all aspects of civil society from smashing unions and the free press to the imposition of one of the most draconian security laws ever written. I truly hope Andor digs deeper into this, because so many of the Republic officers and administrators would indeed have embraced their role in the new Empire willingly. It doesn't even have to come with the promise of new or expanded powers/benefits, it only needs to be a continuation of existing ones for them to be on board.
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Oct 20, 2022 18:33
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Like most goons I'm a bit faceblind, and didn't initially pick up on Kleya being Luthern's assistant during her little undercover stroll. I gotta say, she really looked like a young Carrie Fisher in that scene, and my brain going "wait, is this a young Princess Leia?" really made that convo about loose ends take on a whole other dimension.
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Oct 20, 2022 20:02
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