The Snyder Cut

[Fyraltari]

Ohhh, i getcha. Yeah, definitely some bit of planning/hope. Glad it worked out for them, I remember watching Eragon (one of the ones I got paid for, thankfully)

Wait you used to get paid for watching films? Were you a film critic or something?

and feeling bad for anyone who liked it

There are such people? Truly the world is full of wonder and unbelievable things.

[Peelee]

That said, her career trajectory at this point put her in a high enough position that she's largely getting credit/blame for other people making the products. The Mandalorian is good, but is it her work? Eh, probably not. You can say the same of, the rest of the new Star Wars stuff as well, and hey, we at least have photos of her on the sets of some of those. So somewhat more involvement. But overall, the Star Wars franchise doesn't seem to be running at 100%.

I agree more or less with the rest you wrote above this, but wanted to bring into it a bit of extra commentary on my part: I believe she is the exact same level of responsible for the sequel trilogy as she is for the Mandalorian.

Frankly, I don't really care too much about her, but I do dislike when people try to lay the whole thing at her feet.

Episode 9 is honestly...trying hard to cope with the last two movies.

If Abrams has to cope with one of his own movies, I'm hardly going to give any benefits of any doubts. He **** the bed and then had to lay in it, to alter the analogy. Pray I do not alter it any further.

[warty goblin]

I think Star Wars isn't a great comparison to the MCU in terms of managing a big film series, because SW movies have way, way tighter plot integration between films than the MCU does. Sure there's some holes, particularly in the OT, but the focus is in the same characters fighting the same bad guys towards the same objective.

The MCU movies are extremely independent by contrast; Title Superhero punches a one-off bad guy for two hours, there's a couple non load-bearing scenes that advance the larger continuity a bit, and at the end we're back at 95% of the original status quo. They kinda feel like they're super interconnected, but it's almost entirely an illusion; it's really trivial to skip movies or watch them out of order, and still follow along just fine. The movies are structurally so similar, its pretty easy to just intuit the background for some hero or villain from a movie you haven't seen.

I think a lot t of this difference is that the Star Wars (or at least Lucas era Star Wars) movies are inherently about a political situation evolving through time, with personal arcs unfolding inside that. The OT is specifically about destroying the Empire as a ruling body, so it cares at least a little bit about things like how the Empire retains control and is broadly aware that military might as expressed in terms of warships and so on matter to the overall political situation. The PT is about the fall of the Republic, so we need to know something about the Republic's system of government and power within that system. Basically the universe as a whole matters, at least a bit. The universe as a whole pretty much only matters in a Marvel movie as a prop for the hero to demonstrate their current level of empowerment with. Because of this, the background can't meaningfully change, because then it's current state would end up mattering more than what the heroes are feeling at any given time.

Ultimate example, contrast the end of Infinity War with Revenge of the Sith, and how everything unfolds from there. In both, the heroes have utterly failed, and the bad guys have won. Marvel gets Endgame, where the universe obligingly lets the heroes redo time so they get right back to having succeeded with really not a lot of cost - and not a lot of cost still makes it way more expensive to the heroes than most other MCU movies. For StR Wars it takes another 3 movies, a generation, and a huge interstellar civil war to even begin to undo the damage of the Empire. And that effort ultimately only succeeds because a sidekick with no intelligible dialog hijacked a tank.

Looked at that way, maybe the problem with the Disney SW movies is that they start to fade into the structure of an individual MCU movie, but are stuck with the need for a global structure like the originals. These two things don't get along very well, because they have entirely different needs. The MCU movie structure needs everything to start and end at the same blurry equilibrium point, SW's multi-film structure needs the context to change, and that change to materially impact the choices available to the heroes.

[Peelee]

Wait you used to get paid for watching films? Were you a film critic or something?

Film projectionist. Film movies came on multiple reels, we had to build them and then watch them to make sure they were built correctly and had no problems (eg sent two Reel 2's instead of a Reel 2 and Reel 3, accidentally put Reel 4 on upside down, etc.). You remember in fight Club, when Brad Pitt talks about the cigarette burns in the top right corner of the screen that pop up every so often? Those are real and indicate reel changes so the projectionist knows what reel it is. They're round in flat, oval in scope, one hits 6 seconds before the second, which is about 1 second before the end of the reel. Once you work projection, you can't watch a movie on film anymore without seeing those. It's just an ingrained thing after a while.

Anyway, that means that I got paid to watch movies every week. I'm not gonna pretend it wasn't great - like, I got to do the MST3K treatment privately with a couple friends for movies like King King back in the mid to late aughts, but I also had to sit through a lot of crap.

There are such people? Truly the world is full of wonder and unbelievable things.

Any such hypothetical people I will give the benefit of the doubt.

ETA: Also, some of the huge blockbuster movies would padlock their film cans and only release the codes the day before, and also usually had midnight screenings for the public, which meant they couldn't be screened. So the way to make sure they were built without any errors was "hope you don't get fired if you're wrong".

[Tyndmyr]

I agree more or less with the rest you wrote above this, but wanted to bring into it a bit of extra commentary on my part: I believe she is the exact same level of responsible for the sequel trilogy as she is for the Mandalorian.

Frankly, I don't really care too much about her, but I do dislike when people try to lay the whole thing at her feet.

Yeah, at least some of that is on others, and she's the convenient person at the top to blame. Fair or not, being the person in charge does tend to attract a degree of credit/blame for what your underlings do.

If Abrams has to cope with one of his own movies, I'm hardly going to give any benefits of any doubts. He **** the bed and then had to lay in it, to alter the analogy. Pray I do not alter it any further.

While certainly true, and even episode 7 wasn't amazing, Rian's attempt in the middle probably thoroughly screwed up all of his plans. He seemed to want to basically ape the initial series, but with some added sense of scale. Snoke was the new emperor, and thus..probably intended to have him around to die in Ep 9.

If he'd been in charge of all three, we'd have probably gotten something still kind of mediocre, but at least tonally consistent. The Snyder Cut vs the Wedon Cut, if you will.

[Peelee]

Yeah, at least some of that is on others, and she's the convenient person at the top to blame. Fair or not, being the person in charge does tend to attract a degree of credit/blame for what your underlings do.

Which I would even be more accepting of if she was at the top. She was president of Lucasfilm and would have been effectively the top before 2016 or so, but once she has to take the knee to Disney, they can run ramshod all over her on a whim. When you drop four billion, you're looking for an ROI, and I don't believe for a second they were hands off when they had just gotten the golden goose.

While certainly true, and even episode 7 wasn't amazing, Rian's attempt in the middle probably thoroughly screwed up all of his plans. He seemed to want to basically ape the initial series, but with some added sense of scale. Snoke was the new emperor, and thus..probably intended to have him around to die in Ep 9.

If he'd been in charge of all three, we'd have probably gotten something still kind of mediocre, but at least tonally consistent. The Snyder Cut vs the Wedon Cut, if you will.

Which is fair, but he also gave Johnson nothing to work with. What do you do with the second movie of a sequel where you're in the exact same spot you were three movies ago? Now, granted, just saying "nothing matters anymore" and having all the walking of LOTR with none of the rest of LOTR and also set in space is definitely not the way to go, but the hsip he was given was in the middle of an ocean with no navigational markers. He pretty much had to just pick whatever direction he thought best and go with it. It stunk, but at least he tried to do something new, which is more than I can say for Abrams. I'd rather someone try and fail then just go back to the same well over and over and succeed.

[Tyndmyr]

Which I would even be more accepting of if she was at the top. She was president of Lucasfilm and would have been effectively the top before 2016 or so, but once she has to take the knee to Disney, they can run ramshod all over her on a whim. When you drop four billion, you're looking for an ROI, and I don't believe for a second they were hands off when they had just gotten the golden goose.

Fair, though folks also don't mind bashing the mouse. It may be that they meddled a fair bit, but if so, we don't have a great deal of insight to it. But sure, I don't mind assuming that they at least ought to share in the blame.

Which is fair, but he also gave Johnson nothing to work with. What do you do with the second movie of a sequel where you're in the exact same spot you were three movies ago? Now, granted, just saying "nothing matters anymore" and having all the walking of LOTR with none of the rest of LOTR and also set in space is definitely not the way to go, but the hsip he was given was in the middle of an ocean with no navigational markers. He pretty much had to just pick whatever direction he thought best and go with it. It stunk, but at least he tried to do something new, which is more than I can say for Abrams. I'd rather someone try and fail then just go back to the same well over and over and succeed.

Yeah. There was a good bit of failure all 'round.

The two things I liked initially about Episode 7 was the initial setup of the awol Stormtrooper, and Kylo as a villain. Both of those were fun threads, sadly, the first got dropped really hard.

The second wasn't dropped so badly, but ended up getting closely tied to Rey's story, and thus, sort of drawn into the lack of plot progression there.

I think all three films definitely could have been something more than they were.

[Ronnoc]

Which is fair, but he also gave Johnson nothing to work with. What do you do with the second movie of a sequel where you're in the exact same spot you were three movies ago? Now, granted, just saying "nothing matters anymore" and having all the walking of LOTR with none of the rest of LOTR and also set in space is definitely not the way to go, but the hsip he was given was in the middle of an ocean with no navigational markers. He pretty much had to just pick whatever direction he thought best and go with it. It stunk, but at least he tried to do something new, which is more than I can say for Abrams. I'd rather someone try and fail then just go back to the same well over and over and succeed.

This is pretty unfair. There were numerous plot threads set up in The Force Awakens, Rey's ancestry, the History of Snoke, what Luke had been up to, Finn's entire character development etc. They may not have been plots you liked or were interested in but they were definitely there. Rian Johnson then turned around and threw all of them out which unsurprisingly resulted in the third film being a complete mess.

There was no way to write a good Rise of Skywalker after the last Jedi. They could have ended the series at movie two but there was no way to get a satisfying concluding chapter after the second film. You were always going to end up with a tonally confused mess because chapter 2 deliberately tore down everything chapter one set up.

[Fyraltari]

Film projectionist. Film movies came on multiple reels, we had to build them and then watch them to make sure they were built correctly and had no problems (eg sent two Reel 2's instead of a Reel 2 and Reel 3, accidentally put Reel 4 on upside down, etc.). You remember in fight Club, when Brad Pitt talks about the cigarette burns in the top right corner of the screen that pop up every so often? Those are real and indicate reel changes so the projectionist knows what reel it is. They're round in flat, oval in scope, one hits 6 seconds before the second, which is about 1 second before the end of the reel. Once you work projection, you can't watch a movie on film anymore without seeing those. It's just an ingrained thing after a while.

I know what a film projectionnist is, thank you. Just because you're an old timer doesn't mean that the "yung uns" are ignorant of everything that happened in your days. Also, I saw Cinema Paradizo.

all the walking of LOTR with none of the rest of LOTR

Also known as the New Zealand tourism industry.

Fair, though folks also don't mind bashing the mouse.

Well, the Mouse ain't people. Corporate persons don't have feelings, not even corporate ones.

I think all three films definitely could have been something more than they were.

Star Wars in a nutshell.

Rey's ancestry

Rian Johnson did build up on that, in fact he used the only non-terrible answer, in my opinion.

the History of Snoke

Abrams did not set up that thread at all. He just had Kylo Ren answer to somebody and washed his hands as to how that fit in the established lore.

what Luke had been up to

Given that Abrams established that Luke responded to his student turning school shooter by going to the First Jedi Temple and not doing a thing to combat the rise of the First Order I'm not sure what exactly you would have wanted Johnson show happened before the movie. More fishing?

Finn's entire character development

Yeah, that arc was dropped hard.

There was no way to write a good Rise of Skywalker after the last Jedi. They could have ended the series at movie two but there was no way to get a satisfying concluding chapter after the second film. You were always going to end up with a tonally confused mess because chapter 2 deliberately tore down everything chapter one set up.

I disagree, TLJ ends with Kylo Ren solidified as a vilain and Luke reaffirming that the Rebellion/Jedi will fight him. TROS is a tonally confused mess because Abrams wanted Kylo Ren to be reedemed so he had to spring another vilain from wherever he could and he decided to slap an Indiana Jones style hunt for a McGuffin over the war narrative for reasons that escape me.

TLJ had defaults sure, but you can't blame it for TROS, in my opinion.

[Peelee]

This is pretty unfair. There were numerous plot threads set up in The Force Awakens, Rey's ancestry, the History of Snoke, what Luke had been up to, Finn's entire character development etc. They may not have been plots you liked or were interested in but they were definitely there. Rian Johnson then turned around and threw all of them out which unsurprisingly resulted in the third film being a complete mess.

They were a mess to start with! Those plot threads had no answers, they were just random bull**** thrown out for the sake of throwing them out. That's what Abrams does, and it's hardly fair to blame someone else for not coming up with answers when Abrams can't be assed to do it. Those weren't plot threads, threads connect to something. Those were plot lints. Random stuff you can find that wasn't even supposed to connect to anything and was just there to make people look at it. Sure, you can make a thread out of it, but that's difficult and it shouldn't be incumbent upon the person who has to pick up the lint to make a thread and weave something out of it when they can instead take actual plot threads and work with those instead.

And frankly, speaking just for myself, the best thing Rian Johnson ever did for Star Wars was try to make Rey's lineage a non-issue, because that's what it should have been to start with. Nobody is clamoring to find out who's loins Kenobi or Palpatine or Yoda or Broom Kid or anyone else sprang from, and it shouldn't have mattered for Rey except for how it would affect her personally. And the actual "answer" we got from Abrams? Yeah, that didn't. It was just keys being juggled for the audience to look at for a minute because that's all that hack can do. That and throw plot lint around.

[Ronnoc]

They were a mess to start with! Those plot threads had no answers, they were just random bull**** thrown out for the sake of throwing them out. That's what Abrams does, and it's hardly fair to blame someone else for not coming up with answers when Abrams can't be assed to do it. Those weren't plot threads, threads connect to something. Those were plot lints. Random stuff you can find that wasn't even supposed to connect to anything and was just there to make people look at it. Sure, you can make a thread out of it, but that's difficult and it shouldn't be incumbent upon the person who has to pick up the lint to make a thread and weave something out of it when they can instead take actual plot threads and work with those instead.

And frankly, speaking just for myself, the best thing Rian Johnson ever did for Star Wars was try to make Rey's lineage a non-issue, because that's what it should have been to start with. Nobody is clamoring to find out who's loins Kenobi or Palpatine or Yoda or Broom Kid or anyone else sprang from, and it shouldn't have mattered for Rey except for how it would affect her personally. And the actual "answer" we got from Abrams? Yeah, that didn't. It was just keys being juggled for the audience to look at for a minute because that's all that hack can do. That and throw plot lint around.

And do you have an interview or quote where you hear that nothing was planned? At the moment you're just asserting that Abrams didn't have anything without any evidence. Despite the fact that you haven't enjoyed Abrams work Fringe and Alias were enjoyable and in the case of Fringe was paying off plot threads in a satisfactory fashion five seasons in. Yes Abrams has thrown flops in plotting (Lost) but it's not all he's done.

I would also argue that if you're directing the second movie in a trilogy it very much is incumbent on you to build towards a pay off from what was established in the first movie.

[Peelee]

And do you have an interview or quote where you hear that nothing was planned?

https://www.ted.com/talks/j_j_abrams...ox?language=en

When a director tells me, in a planned speech where he specifically and solely talks about his style, that he makes up questions that don't have any answers because the answers are wholly unimportant, then I, for one, will choose to believe him.

There was no plan for Star Wars, there was only the mystery box. Because that's what Abrams does. He'll tell you that directly, in no minced words, to your face, on the record. He did.
the second movie in a trilogy it very much is incumbent on you to build towards a pay off from what was established in the first movie.[/QUOTE]

I would also argue that if you're directing the second movie in a trilogy it very much is incumbent on you to build towards a pay off from what was established in the first movie.

He did. They may not have been plots you liked or were interested in but they were definitely there.

[Ronnoc]

Referring specifically to Star Wars if you please. I don't consider an interview recorded eight years before his first Star Wars movie, which again was part of a larger series, to be particularly relevant.

[Peelee]

Referring specifically to Star Wars if you please. I don't consider an interview recorded eight years before his first Star Wars movie, which again was part of a larger series, to be particularly relevant.

You don't consider an interview where he lays out his specific, signature style of filmmaking to be particularly relevant to his filmmaking on a film he made?

Well, that's certainly one way to go about it.

[Fyraltari]

they can run ramshod all over her

I do not understand that idiom and Qwant is no help.

lints

Ooh, new word!

[Peelee]

I do not understand that idiom and Qwant is no help.

"Run roughshod" might get you more hits.

ETA: Maybe saying it wrong is a southern thing?

[Ronnoc]

https://www.ted.com/talks/j_j_abrams...ox?language=en

When a director tells me, in a planned speech where he specifically and solely talks about his style, that he makes up questions that don't have any answers because the answers are wholly unimportant, then I, for one, will choose to believe him.

There was no plan for Star Wars, there was only the mystery box. Because that's what Abrams does. He'll tell you that directly, in no minced words, to your face, on the record. He did.
the second movie in a trilogy it very much is incumbent on you to build towards a pay off from what was established in the first movie.

He did. They may not have been plots you liked or were interested in but they were definitely there.

Artists do develop their style over time and different projects require different approaches. Given that he's had series end since that interview that successfully concluded a narrative I'm not sure how applicable it is in this case. Finally if you can pull off improvisation well plots can be left vague if you have strong themes. This is the old architect vs. gardener approach to writing and a lot of excellent authors (Stephen King for example) land on the improvisational side.

I do like you using my line on me that was well done

More generally though you have to be careful about changing tracks in an ongoing series. Otherwise you get a supposedly uplifting moment about how heroically sacrificing yourself to buy others time is a bad thing immediately after you put out Rogue One. It's also extremely difficult to introduce new plots characters etc. in the third act of a trilogy which the ending of TLJ mandated. There needed to be a unifying villain because the previous movie left Hux and Kylo as a joke and killed Snoke. The Emperor coming back was a train wreck but I don't think pulling Thrawn or some Yuzhong Vong nonsense would have been any better.

Finn's plot didn't have a direction which was a travesty on it's own as defected Stormtrooper is fertile story telling ground. While the theme of corporations profiting off of the galactic conflict might have been interesting it would have needed to have started in the first movie and frankly I can't blame people not wanting to deal with intragalactic trade after the prequels.

[Fyraltari]

"Run roughshod" might get you more hits.

ETA: Maybe saying it wrong is a southern thing?

Thank you.

[Tyndmyr]

the second movie in a trilogy it very much is incumbent on you to build towards a pay off from what was established in the first movie.

He did. They may not have been plots you liked or were interested in but they were definitely there.

Ehhh. Episode 8 did essentially nothing to forward the trilogy as a whole. Every plot started in 7 was largely killed off or thrown out.

Some of them, like Rey's backstory, sure, we can argue that maybe they were not the ideal choice to start from. But, after a movie of it, well...we can't wholly ignore that Rey has been set up to be important, and her background is part of that.

A functional episode 8 would advance these plots some, giving us some developments to work with, and clues towards the eventual finale as everything theoretically comes together.

"Nothing" isn't really an answer, and since episode 9 walks that back anyways, it ends up just feeling...dissonant.

I agree that the Mystery Box thing is relevant to Abram's filmmaking style, and that yeah, there probably was no plan. But if you're on movie two of the trilogy, well, it's time to start making one. You're sort of stuck with the elements from the first movie, but you've got some options for how they fit together.

Interminable chance scene leading to almost the entire destruction of the rebellion is pretty brutal if you expect there to be a giant battle sort of final movie. Which, yknow, Star Wars. It sort of centers on these giant space battles. Plus, pretty much nothing that happens on arms dealer casino planet matters. We could skip from 7 to 9 and miss pretty much nothing.

[Yanagi]

Otherwise you get a supposedly uplifting moment about how heroically sacrificing yourself to buy others time is a bad thing immediately after you put out Rogue One.

The context in TLJ--a child soldier who's coping with his fear by overcompensating and resolving to die in a futile gesture, precisely because his training as a child soldier tells him the sublimate himself through self-destruction--is very different from that in Rogue One. Also, Johnson is making a conscious statement that fetishizing heroic death over survival isn't inherently a good thing: war isn't about aesthetic gestures, and if you're consciously attempting to be Horatius on the bridge you're doing it wrong. It is right and good to struggle, fail, and survive to try again.

It's also extremely difficult to introduce new plots characters etc. in the third act of a trilogy which the ending of TLJ mandated. There needed to be a unifying villain because the previous movie left Hux and Kylo as a joke and killed Snoke.

But that's the point: fascists are pathetic and a joke and can still kill you. Hux and Kylo as sad manbabies with WMDs are perfectly good antagonists without any third act additions. Battering people into submission with violence and terror isn't actually four-dimensional chess or Ultimate Evil, and wasn't even when the Emperor was doing it.

Whether The Force Awakens intended it or not, the First Order as presented on screen reads as a conscious in-universe attempt to replicate the Empire's core imagery by people who fetishize the Empire but fail to understand that the Empire had no meaning beyond the Emperor's whims. It's the second beat on "history always happen twice, first as a tragedy, then as a farce." There is a quality of parody to the First Order--they are poor photocopies of the Empire--and that's great storytelling. It's very real to life for present authoritarians to smear themselves in the ashes of past successful authoritarians in attempt to seem potent.

All the stormtroopers are children who've been dragged into ridiculous, empty-but-shiny organization that really has no belief system and thus just brutalizes them into compliance. Each one is a tragedy, but the system as a whole is...well, it's a demonstration the First Order has even less to offer than the Empire. In TFA the moment the the First Order could provide its thesis--Hux's speech--what comes out is screechy emotional overload about their lost power and right to hurt the people that took their power away. It's...frightening but it's also childish; wife-beater rhetoric but with planet-destroying weapons.

Snoke is just another creepy old man seeking out damaged children to use...Clare Quilty to the Emperor's Humbert Humbert...and he's necessary to the First Order because fascism is politicized aesthetics, and the Imperial aesthetic requires a creepy old magic dude.

Kylo is so directly attempting to be his grandfather as compensation for whatever unease he feels inside that he's own his own separate voyage through unthinking, shallow emulation even before a psychic creepy old man pushes him to literally pastiche Darth Vader. It is perfectly valid for Kylo Ren to become a worse person who doubles down on doing no self-reflection. It's deeply tragic precisely because we get to see little moments of Ben, a person who's done terrible things but has a recognizable core of humanity, and see how a single moment of broken trust with Luke set his resolve.

It makes perfect sense in TLJ to emphasize that these are basically teenage bullies with nukes, that Snoke is just another DeSadian libertine with superpowers consciously playing up Emperor-like mystique, and there's nothing wrong with establishing a villain for the third film that is overwhelmingly powerful but also little turd who's choosing to externalize his pain through superpowers and an army of traumatized children.

I don't like the complete assembly of TLJ, but I think it's choices are coherent with what TFA left on the table to work with. Nor do I think any of the answers provided voided or made difficult a third film. Rey's parents really being no one important, and being the kind of people that sell a kid, works: accepting that she can be important and valuable, and that found family is as meaningful as birth family...these would be great themes to explore especially when the antagonist has already been cued up as someone both wounded by their familial connections and further messing themselves up by trying to flatly emulate their most prominent familial figure.

[Especially since Rey is actually experiencing a life parallel to Anakin Skywalker when we encounter her first, but ultimately makes different decisions...while Kylo attempting to emulate Anakin Skywalker in a very shallow manner (literally preoccupied with the shell that Anakin wears) has simply let an authority figure push him into being a dogsbody Darth Vader. There is a ton of stuff you could do with this in a third movie]

Finn's plot didn't have a direction which was a travesty on it's own as defected Stormtrooper is fertile story telling ground.

The intuitive end point of Finn would be starting a child soldier rebellion because the real baddies are the cynics and sadists with power and money.

I'm actually nonplussed as why that couldn't be a good central plot; one that would even work with the Emperor returning and all his galactic genocide whatnot (not that I wanted the Emperor or his shenanigans...but you could tell a better version of that story). You could even take the central Finn images from each of the previous movies--the awakening he experienced watching his friend die up close, his attempt to die gloriously for the Rebellion in a way that recapitulates the entire fascist "die well" ethos he was raised with but also reflects survivor guilt and shame--to make a really satisfying emotional climax.

If Rey can be contrasted with Kylo Ren by her rejecting what he values--the idea of legacy and right to deference because of name or title or "I am special because Force diad"--Finn and the stormtroopers can be contrasted with Kylo and Hux (and shiny stormtrooper played by Gwendolyn Christie) in that they ultimately reject the easy and satisfying vague superiority attainable by authoritarian goons in favor of the hard process of being people and dealing with both the harm they've received and the harm they've inflicted.

While the theme of corporations profiting off of the galactic conflict might have been interesting it would have needed to have started in the first movie and frankly I can't blame people not wanting to deal with intragalactic trade after the prequels.

Was it that bad? I recall like five seconds of exposition on why the embargo was happening because of trade, then we get to a massacre of robots manufactured entirely from glass jaws and tissue paper. Phantom Menace is built on how the mundane grievance is inflated by Palpatine/Sideous because destabilization is more important than who wins or what the issue at stake is.

The bad part of the prequels is that they don't strongly convey the core story because the critical relationships are constantly interrupted by a screenful of writhing CGI. There's a sociological story--the collapse of stable political systems and the rise of dictatorship--and a personal story--one flawed man steered into depravity by a Machiavellian deceiver--and the prequels fully convey neither.

Canto Bight could provide a very interesting antagonist for a third film: the military industrial complex has an incentive for the First Order to keep going. If there has to be one guy to The Antagonist and it can't be Kylo Ren, then there's one guy steering the military industrial complex and doing their own version of Control The Galaxy Through Manipulation...heck, you could make that Emperor cult the secret string pullers, or make it Darth Plagueis the Wise out for some really abstract revenge in which he debases what Sideous assembled.

Though the most satisfying final antagonist would still be Kylo Ren, all powerful and miserable, screaming at the galaxy to give him more deference, being defeated by Rey, an orphan who's been acknowledged by his mother, his father, and his uncle/Master not because she's "special" in some kind of quantifiable sense but because she's a kind, generous person who's trying to do the right thing.

[Peelee]

Artists do develop their style over time and different projects require different approaches. Given that he's had series end since that interview that successfully concluded a narrative I'm not sure how applicable it is in this case. Finally if you can pull off improvisation well plots can be left vague if you have strong themes. This is the old architect vs. gardener approach to writing and a lot of excellent authors (Stephen King for example) land on the improvisational side.

I agree with the overall point, but given his work in the Star Trek movies which mostly spanned that time difference, I see no reason to believe he's changed his style. He doesn't care what makes sense for a story he only cares about getting a rise out of the audience. Why should anyone react when Benedoct Cabbagepatch super dramatically says "I... Am.... KHAN!"? In Space Seed, they namedropped "Khan" and nobody so much as blinked until they checked the history books. It meant nothing in the narrative, but it made Abrams giggle at just how clever he was being because the fans would gasp, and that's it. He's Michael Scott, he wants to get the reactions without bothering to earn the reactions or learn what elicits the reactions.

Amd that's another thing, why the **** is Sherlock goddamn Holmes playing Khan Noonien Singh, Indian warlord, FROM INDIA?! At least TOS got a POC, even if they still missed the mark by a mile, and one that looked threatening to boot, instead of a pasty twig who should be demanding his chamomile tea.

Sorry, I also love Star Trek.

I do like you using my line on me that was well done

I felt a little bad about that because even though I was saying it, it was also aimed at me just as much.

Ehhh. Episode 8 did essentially nothing to forward the trilogy as a whole.
[snip[
We could skip from 7 to 9 and miss pretty much nothing.

The problem is that Episode 7 also does essentially nothing to forward the trilogy as a whole and we could skip from 6 to 9 and miss pretty much nothing. The trilogy started off worthless, so it's hard to be upset that the second part simply continued to be worthless.

The context in TLJ--a child soldier who's coping with his fear by overcompensating and resolving to die in a futile gesture, precisely because his training as a child soldier tells him the sublimate himself through self-destruction--is very different from that in Rogue One. Also, Johnson is making a conscious statement that fetishizing heroic death over survival isn't inherently a good thing: war isn't about aesthetic gestures

The problem there is Rose resolves to die in a futile gesture by fetishisinz a heroic death over survival via an aesthetic gesture.

Seriously, the context of the scene undercuts everything that it's supposed to purport - so far as Rose knows, nobody is coming and this is their last stand. If the Empire First Order breaches the base, what's left of the Rebellion Resistance would be destroyed. No ifs, ands, or butts. She has zero reason to believe a legendary Jedi who went into hiding a decade ago will suddenly show up. Finn trues to destroy the cannon in a way that minimizes loss of life. Sure, uts tragic, but they're in a war. War sucks. War has horrible things happen. That's not fetishizing anything. Then, she rams her ship into his. They are incredibly rickety, so even if they have safety features, there's no reason to suspect they'll work. So right off the bat, she does something that is likely to end in her, Finn, or both dying to prevent him from dying. But wait, Billy May's says, there's more! She does this in the middle of a no man's land. There is nothing but flat, featureless, cover-free ground between the base wall/cliff face and the squadron of enormous walking death tanks that are shooting at anything that movies. So even if they survive the crash, they are certain to be shot dead by the insane, cartoonishly evil fascists in the giant walking death tanks. They don't, and survive, and make it back to the same base the First Order is trying to get into, purely because the plot needs them to. That is the absolute pinnacle of fetishizing aesthetic gestures over survival, and the fact that the movie chooses to ignore thos does not make it magically score any points for me in favor of its ridiculous argument.

[warty goblin]

The problem there is Rose resolves to die in a futile gesture by fetishisinz a heroic death over survival via an aesthetic gesture.

Seriously, the context of the scene undercuts everything that it's supposed to purport - so far as Rose knows, nobody is coming and this is their last stand. If the Empire First Order breaches the base, what's left of the Rebellion Resistance would be destroyed. No ifs, ands, or butts. She has zero reason to believe a legendary Jedi who went into hiding a decade ago will suddenly show up. Finn trues to destroy the cannon in a way that minimizes loss of life. Sure, uts tragic, but they're in a war. War sucks. War has horrible things happen. That's not fetishizing anything. Then, she rams her ship into his. They are incredibly rickety, so even if they have safety features, there's no reason to suspect they'll work. So right off the bat, she does something that is likely to end in her, Finn, or both dying to prevent him from dying. But wait, Billy May's says, there's more! She does this in the middle of a no man's land. There is nothing but flat, featureless, cover-free ground between the base wall/cliff face and the squadron of enormous walking death tanks that are shooting at anything that movies. So even if they survive the crash, they are certain to be shot dead by the insane, cartoonishly evil fascists in the giant walking death tanks. They don't, and survive, and make it back to the same base the First Order is trying to get into, purely because the plot needs them to. That is the absolute pinnacle of fetishizing aesthetic gestures over survival, and the fact that the movie chooses to ignore thos does not make it magically score any points for me in favor of its ridiculous argument.

I think it's less fetishization of an aesthetic* than it is the only thing that matters to the movie - and pretty much the movie's internal reality - is how a very small number of people feel about something happening. Finn is a main character, so him dying would be sad, therefore bad, therefore he can't die, therefore any action that keeps him alive is good and sensible and justified. Dying is for B-tier characters and extras. Or see Poe's entire campaign of blazing command incompetence for the first part of the movie; he's a main character so getting the bomber wing utterly wrecked and leading the world's stupidest mutiny is just a chance for character growth. Or the whole detour to save the space horses; mistreated space horses make the protagonists feel bad, so they should obviously take the time to halfass rescue them even though the fate of the entire galaxy apparently depends on them getting back on a very tight time table. And that they then bring a dude who sells them out, in doing so wrecking an entirely sensible evacuation plan and horrendous losses to their army is OK because they meant well and who could possibly have guessed than an unscrupulous rando they met in jail wasn't actually automatically on their side? Oh, and let's not forget the ending, which has the sheer gall to try to pass off a nearly total defeat that reduces the Resistance from having their own small fleet and land force to like 15 dudes jammed in a space Winnebago and finding out that (quite sensibly) nobody else in the galaxy is willing to go die for this bunch of losers as a triumph, because the cast learned something.

The entire thing is like a hair's breadth away from collapsing into some sort of weird main-cast collective solipsism.

*Although aesthetically the Sequel Trilogy sure does fetishize the hell out of the Original Trilogy.

[Fyraltari]

What Yanagi said.

[GloatingSwine]

Seriously, the context of the scene undercuts everything that it's supposed to purport - so far as Rose knows, nobody is coming and this is their last stand. If the Empire First Order breaches the base, what's left of the Rebellion Resistance would be destroyed. No ifs, ands, or butts. She has zero reason to believe a legendary Jedi who went into hiding a decade ago will suddenly show up. Finn trues to destroy the cannon in a way that minimizes loss of life.

Nobody who actually watches that scene and comprehends its visual language would expect the attack to work.

The speeders are literally falling to bits on their own and the cannon is exceptionally sturdy. Everything in the scene is telling you "this is a futile waste of life and will definitely achieve nothing".

[Peelee]

Nobody who actually watches that scene and comprehends its visual language would expect the attack to work.

The speeders are literally falling to bits on their own and the cannon is exceptionally sturdy. Everything in the scene is telling you "this is a futile waste of life and will definitely achieve nothing".

Im not saying that attack would have worked. I'm saying Rose's "solution" should have ended in a futile waste of two lives and would definitely achieve nothing, if not for blatant plot contrivance of having them not die for no reason whatsoever. It's a bad scene.

[Tyndmyr]

The context in TLJ--a child soldier who's coping with his fear by overcompensating and resolving to die in a futile gesture, precisely because his training as a child soldier tells him the sublimate himself through self-destruction--is very different from that in Rogue One. Also, Johnson is making a conscious statement that fetishizing heroic death over survival isn't inherently a good thing: war isn't about aesthetic gestures, and if you're consciously attempting to be Horatius on the bridge you're doing it wrong. It is right and good to struggle, fail, and survive to try again.

So, I don't think that's actually justified by talking about Rogue One. We have a "heroic sacrifice" in this very same film. Admiral Holden kills herself to blow up the big pursuing ship. Why is that sacrifice okay and others ain't?

But that's the point: fascists are pathetic and a joke and can still kill you. Hux and Kylo as sad manbabies with WMDs are perfectly good antagonists without any third act additions. Battering people into submission with violence and terror isn't actually four-dimensional chess or Ultimate Evil, and wasn't even when the Emperor was doing it.

Not really. Hux in particular is just not actually scary to the audience. He doesn't appear competent, and he lost his WMD in movie 1, so...all he has are disposable mooks that keep failing to accomplish anything. You can't carry the finale of a trilogy on just wave after wave of minions dying, that'd be exceedingly boring.

Pulling a big bad and a planet full of ships out of nowhere was kind of lame, but they did need some sort of danger.

Kylo is interesting, but at this point, he's far too personal with Rey. They have a thing to explore, but Kylo literally doesn't care about any of the others.

Whether The Force Awakens intended it or not, the First Order as presented on screen reads as a conscious in-universe attempt to replicate the Empire's core imagery by people who fetishize the Empire but fail to understand that the Empire had no meaning beyond the Emperor's whims. It's the second beat on "history always happen twice, first as a tragedy, then as a farce." There is a quality of parody to the First Order--they are poor photocopies of the Empire--and that's great storytelling. It's very real to life for present authoritarians to smear themselves in the ashes of past successful authoritarians in attempt to seem potent.

Eh. That feels the case with Kylo. He's embracing that motif hard, and it becomes a tragic tale for him, and it mostly works. Seeing him as the rage filled Vader wannabe? Yeah, I'm down with that.

But the rest of it all seems rough. The First Order as a whole isn't anything but a discount Empire. Too much parody, and you end up trying to make Spaceballs. And we already have Spaceballs. You shouldn't try to make Spaceballs when you've been hired to make Star Wars.

Now, yeah, maybe if we'd followed Finn's story more closely, that could have been interesting. I'd love to see that whole Stormtrooper aspect. But, as it was, there's no meaningful reason to use the first order livery instead of sticking to Imperial aesthetics, which honestly get repurposed a lot anyways.

Was it that bad? I recall like five seconds of exposition on why the embargo was happening because of trade, then we get to a massacre of robots manufactured entirely from glass jaws and tissue paper. Phantom Menace is built on how the mundane grievance is inflated by Palpatine/Sideous because destabilization is more important than who wins or what the issue at stake is.

I believe there was also some trade/diplomacy covered in the second prequel movie, but I couldn't tell you what. The film's mostly only memorable for lines about sand and such. I'm not against a grand political space opera, and hopefully Dune lives up to that when it comes out, but I can see not wanting to get too close to prequel territory.

The problem is that Episode 7 also does essentially nothing to forward the trilogy as a whole and we could skip from 6 to 9 and miss pretty much nothing. The trilogy started off worthless, so it's hard to be upset that the second part simply continued to be worthless.

It at least introduces characters. Yeah, the story is basically a recycled retelling, so there's nothing novel there, but you at least know the new characters and where they stand in relation to each other. 8 and 9 need to at least build on that, and frankly, that shouldn't be all that big of an ask.

This doesn't make seven great as a film or anything, but if you wanted to salvage the prequels, you at least would want to make sure all those characters had something relevant to do.

[The Glyphstone]

Does it depress anyone else that a bunch of random people on an Internet forum can take the building blocks of a Star Wars movie and assemble them better than the actual, professional director and screenwriters managed to do with those same blocks? You have to wonder what sort of tangled mess was actually going on behind the scenes to produce that.

[warty goblin]

Does it depress anyone else that a bunch of random people on an Internet forum can take the building blocks of a Star Wars movie and assemble them better than the actual, professional director and screenwriters managed to do with those same blocks? You have to wonder what sort of tangled mess was actually going on behind the scenes to produce that.

It's not like anybody's writing a script, or outlining a script, or anything remotely close to any of that. All that's been bandied about are very very loose ideas, and of course very very loose ideas read better than an actual finished thing. Loose ideas are mostly in the imagination, and therefore the best impossible version of themselves.

Its possible that there's somebody on this forum who could write a better script for Force Awakens. I find it extremely unlikely that they could write a better script that Disney would hack up a giant pile of money to film, be filmable, and then manage said filming, editing and assembly into something people would want to actually see.

For all our whining, we should keep in mind the absolutely fantastic amount of talent and effort that went into these movies. Also that it's kinda hard to say TFA or TLJ are in some substantive sense failures when many, many people enjoyed them considerably.

[Tyndmyr]

Does it depress anyone else that a bunch of random people on an Internet forum can take the building blocks of a Star Wars movie and assemble them better than the actual, professional director and screenwriters managed to do with those same blocks? You have to wonder what sort of tangled mess was actually going on behind the scenes to produce that.

Sort of?

This isn't to say that we're geniuses or that the professionals are stupid, but the process can be pretty crazy.

Writers in hollywood are a particularly crazy world of their own. It's ultimately a very, very limited field, with room for only a modest handful of professional script writers in terms of feature films. Heck, if you keep in mind how many films these days are adapted from existing properties, that further limits the field.

Yeah, you still need a scriptwriter to adapt a book into a movie script, but the bones are already there, so it's ultimately not entirely from scratch, hopefully. One scriptwriter could write several movie scripts per year, and Hollywood is only releasing around 700/yr total, even if we're counting all the small films that don't actually make it to the big screen.

And it doesn't even pay very well. If you make it into that elite few...you make an average of about $60k a year, which for a job centered in Hollywood is pretty amazingly low.

So, basically you have a group of people tossed a job that they probably need to crank through as rapidly as possible in order to continue to not be literally homeless, and also there's all the competing demands of fans, studios, directors, and all sorts of others.

It's something of a miracle that many films get made at all.

[Gallowglass]

Does it depress anyone else that a bunch of random people on an Internet forum can take the building blocks of a Star Wars movie and assemble them better than the actual, professional director and screenwriters managed to do with those same blocks? You have to wonder what sort of tangled mess was actually going on behind the scenes to produce that.

No because I don't agree with that sentiment.

The armchair quarterbacks in this forum would end up producing something far worse than what the seasoned professionals did. Especially if designed in committee.

Morover, I don't even see it on this forum. This entire conversation has been breaking down and complaining about the trilogy. No one has offered any substantive ways to "take the building blocks and build something better" other than vague suggestions as part of a complaint.

The truth is, there was no way to produce a follow up trilogy that was going to please everyone. It was an insurmountable goal, but that doesn't mean it wasn't worth trying.

Disney took the route of appealing to the majority with the force awakens. And, despite what a few vocal forum dwellers believe, succeeded. If you head out into the real world and ask any 100 people you meet if they liked it, 80-90 of them did. Here, in this forum we live in, you happen to have a disproportionate amount of haters.

I don't think the trilogy was perfect. I see the flaws. I dream of my own version of it, same as others. But I'm not so self-indulgent to think I know better or could do better.