A Long Time Ago In a Galaxy Far, Far Away.... - Star Wars General Discussion
- Thread starter SHIELD Agent 47
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My neck started twitching with that last line. The Sequel trilogy doesn't have a story, as they never sat down and hashed one out, leaving it to whomever was writing it as they went along. There are some good moments in the Sequels, but Force Awakens is a film full of setup that gets wasted in the Last Jedi that gets ended in Rise of Skywalker like a last minute thrown together term paper.
And that is the sequel trilogy downfall and all of the BS that surounded it, if they simply laid out a basic plan that respected the legacy characters and answered JJ's mystery boxes, Lucasfilm wouldn't be the laughing stock of Hollywood right now!!
If you go back and read about the Original trilogy in development it was just as made up as it went along as the sequels, George changed his plans a ton of times about very big factors while each of those films was being developed.
I honestly think it was more of a problem with Disney not planning rise of Skywalker well enough and trying to force way too much into that last film.
Force Awakens has a ton of potential, Last Jedi does a wonderful job of playing with that potential and taking it in lots of great unexpected directions, then Rise just tries to do too much in one film and doesn't manage to be satisfying because of that.
-ZacWilliam, if Rise had been two films, the first about the rumors of the Emporer tracking down the map and dealing with Kylo, and the second one had been about the final conflict with the New Sith and the diad, maybe a stormtrooper rebellion... I think both would have been greatly improved and had room to be better films.
I honestly think it was more of a problem with Disney not planning rise of Skywalker well enough and trying to force way too much into that last film.
Force Awakens has a ton of potential, Last Jedi does a wonderful job of playing with that potential and taking it in lots of great unexpected directions, then Rise just tries to do too much in one film and doesn't manage to be satisfying because of that.
-ZacWilliam, if Rise had been two films, the first about the rumors of the Emporer tracking down the map and dealing with Kylo, and the second one had been about the final conflict with the New Sith and the diad, maybe a stormtrooper rebellion... I think both would have been greatly improved and had room to be better films.
I am aware of the many changes that Lucas made while making the OT. However, he still had a general plan/outline for the story. Things like Anakin becoming Vader, Leia being Luke's sister, the other hope Yoda mentions in ESB, Wookies meant to be on Endor instead of Ewoks, all the changes he made, but he still had an outline. When he made the Prequels, he had it locked down, which is why they work so well as a story. I am glad that the Prequel haters finally get to see how bad Star Wars can be with the Sequal trilogy and are giving the Prequels their props now.
Any planning on Disney's part really. They literally released TFA with no idea how to follow it up or where the story would go. Disney planned on making money, and that was about it. In the process they tarnished the entire franchise and if not for all the Disney+ series being done by two actual fans, we would all be lamenting Lucas selling to Disney right now.
I kind of disagree on that point. I fully believe that Last Jedi wrecks the entire sequel trilogy. The only thing it gives us is another epic Super Dreadnought, a hyperspace ram, and pointlessly kills off yet another legacy character. It freaking ruins and wastes Luke Skywalker. It was so bad that Mark Hammil got in trouble for trying to warn fans before the film dropped.
The Force Awakens had some potential coming out of it, but honestly, Last Jedi did nothing with it. Po actually takes out a fleet killer dreadnought and is punished for it since they lost their bomber squadron in the process. Their base is destroyed and 90% of our heroes are on this slow death march until they run out of fuel the entire film. They pointlessly bicker among themselves, and even mutiny after Ackbar is ceremonilessly killed off. At this point we don't have anything for our heroes to do, so we sneak half of them off to get help disabling the Macgufifn. This of course achieves nothing. Then when they get to the planned destination, it's a last stand, and Luke shows up via Force Zoom call, resulting in his death. This major legacy death gives them about 5 extra minutes to evacuate everyone that is left into one single ship.
See that, take those two films and replace TLJ and ROS with it, and you already put more thought into it than Disney ever did.
Like I said, there never was a plan and Johnson had no idea where to go with this film and tried to make it about character conflict instead of the actual galactic scale conflict the setting takes place in. How it got green lit is the biggest question I have. It should have never made it past the script stage.
Actually Leia was not planned to be Luke's sister. That's one of the big things I'm talking about. The first plan was for RotJ to introduce an entirely new character to be Luke's sister. Lucas had very little plan and changed plenty of core things about what little plan he did have.
About Last Jedi we're gonna have to agree to disagree. It is one of the absolute best Star Wars anything's imo. Just bellow ESB as best SW film. It takes every bit of potential Force Awakens has and uses it to reverse every single cliched Star Wars trope and show the other side of it, while still remaining deeply true to Star Wars. Honestly anyone who doesn't love Last Jedi IMO doesn't understand it or Star Wars very well at all.
-ZacWilliam, but I do agree Rise is a week follow through. There are good bits to it, but again it's trying to do too much in too little space.
About Last Jedi we're gonna have to agree to disagree. It is one of the absolute best Star Wars anything's imo. Just bellow ESB as best SW film. It takes every bit of potential Force Awakens has and uses it to reverse every single cliched Star Wars trope and show the other side of it, while still remaining deeply true to Star Wars. Honestly anyone who doesn't love Last Jedi IMO doesn't understand it or Star Wars very well at all.
-ZacWilliam, but I do agree Rise is a week follow through. There are good bits to it, but again it's trying to do too much in too little space.
There is simply no redeeming any story that brings Palpatine back after Anakin's sacrifice.
And while 1994's Dark Empire might be holding on line 1, it's worth noting that the Bantam-Spectra SWEU writing stable tended to hold that comic saga at arm's length even as they dealt with the fallout from its events. (Timothy Zahn even went so far as to have Mara Jade -- a former Emperor's Hand able to hear her old master from anywhere in the galaxy -- express doubt that Clone!Sidious was the real deal.)
Still, Julius Sykes' rework fic "The Test of Wills" (which basically reframed Dark Empire using all the lore we knew post-prequels) was a pretty good take on a concept at least as out there as Kenner's 1986 proposal to continue the saga (which had a clone of Wilhuff Tarkin leading the Imperial Remnant....)
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Last Jedi is a terrible film, poorly paced and a terrible story and it effectively killed the trilogy by taking out the core villian, Who was Snoke, nobody, just some rando to be killed off to make way to Kylo Ren, who already had his butt kicked by the Mary Sue, Rey, I have thought that film through in my heads multable times and I can see that its a giant mess of a film, what was the point of the side trip to the casino planet? The First order ships unable to catch up to the slow moving rebel ships, treating Poe as a rouge commander who took a bunch of ships into combat against the enemy on the doorstep, its like having a group of soldier having a campfire and then getting attacked by bandits and then saying you aren't meant to fight those bandits despite the fact they are the attacking force, so the sequel trilogy was completely directionless and that is why it made less and less money with each installment and Lucasfilm pretty much into panic mode after the backlash to Last Jedi, Solo was the first Star Wars movie to bomb, ep9 barely crossed the billion mark and from what I gathered, it never actually broke even due to the reshoots and stuff! Mano was the light of hope until the linchpin for the future got terminated by Lucasfilm and then things just go wrong even further for the brand as people no longer care about Star Wars and that is reflected in the mech sales!
Which is why I brought it up along with the Other Hope that Yoda mentioned in ESB. It was supposed to be a new character, but the outline wasn't changed, just a better wrap up of the three main characters.
I don't know what to say to this. What made it the best? The pointless death of Luke? His self-imposed exile? Rey's pointless trippy dark side vision? The green milk? Porgs? The Casino World? The ridiculous saving what we love scene? The pointless mutiny? The Leia Poppins scene? The fact that the resistance can now fit entirely into a RV sized starship at the end?
Just below, or like 9 spaces below, right underneath the Clone Wars animated film?
How? It literally puts most of the heroes in a submarine that is being slowly stalked the entire film, giving them nothing to do but pointlessly fight amongst themselves. Almost like in Knives out where the characters are trapped together while they bicker.....
Oh, I understand it quite well. I also understand that Rian's next Star Wars film will come out around the same time as we can build our own Deathstar. I get that you liked this movie for some reason, but honestly, it's where the sequel trilogy goes off the rails.
Yeah, maybe they could have stretched into more movies, but I think that people were tired of it at that point.
Another element is how little turnaround the sequel films had. Even with the prequels, you had a good 3 years between each film to allow each film to "breathe", to take a step back and reflect. I firmly believe that Revenge of the Sith ended up as good as it did because they had the time to reflect and address issues and concerns by the time that film went into production.
With the sequels? They were LITERALLY back to back in production. There was no time to collaborate, to plan, because they were already turning around to film the NEXT film as soon as the prior was released. Because Disney needed its Star Wars film EVERY YEAR.
I am fine with the fact that some people like Episode 8. I really am. But when you make a movie in a tentpole popcorn franchise like Star Wars and divide the fans on it, you failed. It could have been anything. They didn't have a binary choice to please these fans OR please those. Nobody hates Empire Strikes Back. Most fans liked Episode 7 and Rogue One and the Mandalorian. Rian could have made an Episode 8 that pretty much everyone liked and he just didn't. Glass Onion and Knives Out are great. Rian can make a movie. But when he was making a Star Wars movie, there's no excuse for bringing one out that half the fans don't like. It wasn't necessary.
Personally, I didn't like hardly any of the choices that Rian made. (The only choice Rian made that I liked as far as I can recall this moment)was making Rey just a random nobody and Episode 9 came along and undid that...). If you liked it, you liked it. But I think just about anyone really ought to acknowledge that the middle movie of a trilogy is supposed to be a heavy hitter, deepening the material in the first movie and setting up the third. Episode 8 accomplished almost nothing trilogy-wise. What it did accomplish was to remove two of what seemed to be the most important pieces from the table in Snoke and Luke. At the end of Episode 8, we have a ragtag bunch of heroes on the run after an important victory and a narrow escape, a burgeoning Jedi just finding her way, and the bad guys regrouping after a setback. They changed some details, but that's basically what we had at the end of Episode 7, except without the mysterious new villain and everyone's hero Jedi. Rather than deepening Episode 7, he shallowed it. And there was no setup for Episode 9. Episode 9 almost could have followed directly on the heels of Episode 7 without Episode 8. They'd just have to say "Also somehow Luke and Snoke died."
Episode 9 literally just said things got back to normal for a while after Episode 8 until suddenly there was a brand new conflict out of left field that it made up in its opening crawl. That's how you open a brand new trilogy. That's what 1 and 4 and 7 did. But 9 had to do that because 8 didn't set anything up unless it was going to be a last showdown between Ben and Rey and they couldn't do that because it would be thematically absurd. "Sometimes good guys go back and you just have to kill 'em"
Personally, I didn't like hardly any of the choices that Rian made. (The only choice Rian made that I liked as far as I can recall this moment)was making Rey just a random nobody and Episode 9 came along and undid that...). If you liked it, you liked it. But I think just about anyone really ought to acknowledge that the middle movie of a trilogy is supposed to be a heavy hitter, deepening the material in the first movie and setting up the third. Episode 8 accomplished almost nothing trilogy-wise. What it did accomplish was to remove two of what seemed to be the most important pieces from the table in Snoke and Luke. At the end of Episode 8, we have a ragtag bunch of heroes on the run after an important victory and a narrow escape, a burgeoning Jedi just finding her way, and the bad guys regrouping after a setback. They changed some details, but that's basically what we had at the end of Episode 7, except without the mysterious new villain and everyone's hero Jedi. Rather than deepening Episode 7, he shallowed it. And there was no setup for Episode 9. Episode 9 almost could have followed directly on the heels of Episode 7 without Episode 8. They'd just have to say "Also somehow Luke and Snoke died."
Episode 9 literally just said things got back to normal for a while after Episode 8 until suddenly there was a brand new conflict out of left field that it made up in its opening crawl. That's how you open a brand new trilogy. That's what 1 and 4 and 7 did. But 9 had to do that because 8 didn't set anything up unless it was going to be a last showdown between Ben and Rey and they couldn't do that because it would be thematically absurd. "Sometimes good guys go back and you just have to kill 'em"
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What I actually came here to say is that I wore a Mandalorian helmet for an hour and a half trick-or-treating with my daughters and the most amazing thing about a Mandalorian is not their mad fighting skills. The most amazing thing is that they have mad fighting skills with that helmet on.
To be fair, the Mandalorian helmets in Star Wars are probably lighter and have an integrated HUD and sensors to improve combat awareness. Of course the Mandalorian helmets were inspired by those of the real-life Spartans who did quite a bit of fighting in the things.
Considering it's almost indestructible, I wouldn't leave home without it.
I ran into my daughter several times.