Lets talk all things Star Wars

[harrisonp]

See for me I really liked Luke in TLJ once it clicked that we weren’t getting him in TFA as “saves the day” Luke. He has a solid arc in that movie (maybe one of the few in the ST?) and ends in a great place. The dialogue between him and Yoda always sticks with me and is something I think about now as a parent etc.

All of that said, I totally understand why so many people are disappointed in not seeingTHE Master Skywalker the way the EU portrayed him. It goes hand in hand with my larger ST gripes, nothing our OT pals did really stuck. They ended up broken up over it, which while realistic is kind of like reading LOTR by Tolkien and then picking up a sequel series written by Martin. The OT is Arthur, it’s mythology, not a character study on the human condition, just let our archetypes be who they are.

I think something akin to the Vong (or an adaptation thereof) would have been an interesting way to go instead of Empire redux.

 

[sztriki]

Ok, when are the destined to fail? 2025? 2030? What is your timeline.

I don't understand what you mean. In case you didn't understand me, I meant prequels in general as a storytelling method are usually failures.

Me, I think think they work great. As I said previously, The Phantom Menace at the top half of my Star Wars movie list.

Great, happy for you.

I also don't think the prequels suffer from knowing the end. We don't really know the complete ending just some elements. It's about the story and getting there. There are plenty of great movies that people like even though they are historical events, biographies, or remakes in which people have a preconceived notion about how it ends.

This is what I meant. Unless the storytelling is really clever and/or brings on a hitherto unknown aspect I don't see the point of prequels in general.
In case of SW for example again, if you watch them in episode order all reveals and twists in the OT are deflated. We know Vader is Anakin. We know Obi-wan is Ben and that they know each other. We know Yoda is the jedi master and not just a funny dwarf.
If you watch them by release date then the way the prequels are built up and executed suffer from almost like a tickbox exercise approach. We need to have the Anakin is a great pilot part. We need to have the big eeeepic lazorsword duel, we need to have the suit going on, we need to hamfist scenes where you can see that "ooh, that is the dark sidey Anakin now, it's becoz he will be Vader", etc. Anything that would be the merit of the movies on their own is then deflated by seeing the OT first and then the PT. For some reason it's presented as a mystery that Palpatine is Sidious and is playing these two decks of cards against each other. Yea we know...
I think the prequels would have flown better if it wasn't directly about Obi-wan, Anakin and Palpatine. New set of characters caught up in the war, maybe get a few glimpses of the OT heroes here n there. Something to make it stand on its own and not act as a broken crutch for the OT.

 

[Mara Jade's Father]

This is what I meant. Unless the storytelling is really clever and/or brings on a hitherto unknown aspect I don't see the point of prequels in general.
In case of SW for example again, if you watch them in episode order all reveals and twists in the OT are deflated. We know Vader is Anakin. We know Obi-wan is Ben and that they know each other. We know Yoda is the jedi master and not just a funny dwarf.
If you watch them by release date then the way the prequels are built up and executed suffer from almost like a tickbox exercise approach. We need to have the Anakin is a great pilot part. We need to have the big eeeepic lazorsword duel, we need to have the suit going on, we need to hamfist scenes where you can see that "ooh, that is the dark sidey Anakin now, it's becoz he will be Vader", etc. Anything that would be the merit of the movies on their own is then deflated by seeing the OT first and then the PT. For some reason it's presented as a mystery that Palpatine is Sidious and is playing these two decks of cards against each other. Yea we know...
I think the prequels would have flown better if it wasn't directly about Obi-wan, Anakin and Palpatine. New set of characters caught up in the war, maybe get a few glimpses of the OT heroes here n there. Something to make it stand on its own and not act as a broken crutch for the OT.

You are focusing on all the wrong things. There is plenty revealed. How does a Sith take control of a government? How did the Jedi serve the Republic? Who was Luke and Leia's mother? What were the Clone Wars? Why does Anakin go to the dark side? Etc... Besides learning these things we are also introduced to new characters and aspects of Star Wars we never had a clue about and saw that story unfold. It's ridiculous to focus on story aspects because they are not surprises. Not every element in a movie has to be a "No, that's impossible moment". People don't say half of Godfather II sucks because we know he becomes the Godfather.

 

[cboath]

I could get behind it if Shia is cast as Jaxxon. Come on. We need that character in a movie like Solo 2. (Duo?)


We all had ideas, mostly from the various incarnations of the EU, and honestly, a lot of them came true:
-Han and Leia's son turned bad and betrayed Luke's Jedi school
-There was a young woman who was both an ace pilot and a powerful Jedi and just awesome at everything. In the EU it was Han and Leia's daughter. In the movies, it's Rey.
- Palpatine came back through cloning or some other Sith magic.
- Luke wasn't the perfectly good superhero that people expected.
And I think we all expected Han was a goner.

Except that with nearly 100 books by the time E7 hit, the odds of them not hitting a number of the ideas put out in the EU was zero.

And all of that came after the first 25-30 books as well - except the emperor bit (Dark Empire).

 

[sztriki]

You are focusing on all the wrong things. There is plenty revealed. How does a Sith take control of a government? How did the Jedi serve the Republic? Who was Luke and Leia's mother? What were the Clone Wars? Why does Anakin go to the dark side? Etc...

And we disagree on how those are revealed. Not just plot-wise but presentation-wise.

Besides learning these things we are also introduced to new characters and aspects of Star Wars we never had a clue about and saw that story unfold. It's ridiculous to focus on story aspects because they are not surprises.

Mmm...such as? Mace Windu or Dexter Jettster or Jar Jar Binks or...? This is what I'm talking about, the prequels practically place their eggs in the baskets of the OT carryover characters and tick their boxes to get to the OT. There's barely anything else of substance in them. Heck even the greatest galactic war seems to have minimal effect on anything really.

Not every element in a movie has to be a "No, that's impossible moment". People don't say half of Godfather II sucks because we know he becomes the Godfather.

Nobody said it has to be. You're focusing on the wrong thing here. As for GF2, the flashback story is never strung as if it's supposed to reveal something hitherto unknown that was already in the first movie. Instead it places emphasis on the characterization and it's carefully constructed and presented. It also helps of course that those scenes were in the original book and were written as one piece originally. If I have criticism for GF2 it's the "present" plotline which sometimes feels like padding and that the goal was to do the flashback scenes.

 

[cboath]

You are focusing on all the wrong things. There is plenty revealed. How does a Sith take control of a government? How did the Jedi serve the Republic? Who was Luke and Leia's mother? What were the Clone Wars? Why does Anakin go to the dark side? Etc... Besides learning these things we are also introduced to new characters and aspects of Star Wars we never had a clue about and saw that story unfold. It's ridiculous to focus on story aspects because they are not surprises. Not every element in a movie has to be a "No, that's impossible moment". People don't say half of Godfather II sucks because we know he becomes the Godfather.

Maybe, but....

the main point of the PT as told was Anakin's fall and the rise of the Empire. Before the first frame of E1 was shown you knew:

• Anakin becomes bad/Turns into Vader
• The republic falls and the emperor takes over
• We're going to find out how luke/ben came to be on tatooine.
• How Leia was separated and wound up an alderaanian princess
• Who mom is/was.

That's a LOT to know about what's coming. Yeah, we don't know how, but it absolutely lessens the impact when you know the outcome going in. Throw some surprises along the way. Don't make it clear mom dies or that anakin actually became vader, etc. You do mess up the experience of the OT by answering the questions it answered ahead of time.

Was it important how the Sith took over? No. The story it's based on was a world where it was a done deal decades prior. How did the jedi serve? Again, not anything important. Nice info to have, but not really important. Especially when what we saw was the dying embers of it, not what it really was. What were the clone wars, again, not super important in the grand scheme. We knew it was a war fought with clones. Did we really need more than that? Why did anakin fall? I think that would have been better left untold vs what we got I'm sorry, none of us is going to go annihilate a pre-school to save a loved one, yet, we're expected to believe just that.

Sure, we were introduced to new characters - but we knew they were all toast as well. The ones that did survive barely were even in PT itself, they came from TCW tv show.

 

[Psab keel]

Just like Solo it answered questions no one was really asking. The PT feels threadbare because the plot it contained was summerized perfectly by the OT. Those references to the Clone Wars and how the Emperor gained power and all the major pieces of the PT were merely world building elements to set the stage for those original stories. When it came to the PT itself most of the best elements were either glossed over or rushed through often giving unnecessary screen time to random plot threads that went nowhere.

A big missed opportunity was to set the PT during the height of the Clone Wars which would have brought out the best or worst in the characters. Much like the OT was set during the galactic civil war.

 

[Sluis Van Shipyards]

See for me I really liked Luke in TLJ once it clicked that we weren’t getting him in TFA as “saves the day” Luke. He has a solid arc in that movie (maybe one of the few in the ST?) and ends in a great place. The dialogue between him and Yoda always sticks with me and is something I think about now as a parent etc.

All of that said, I totally understand why so many people are disappointed in not seeingTHE Master Skywalker the way the EU portrayed him. It goes hand in hand with my larger ST gripes, nothing our OT pals did really stuck. They ended up broken up over it, which while realistic is kind of like reading LOTR by Tolkien and then picking up a sequel series written by Martin. The OT is Arthur, it’s mythology, not a character study on the human condition, just let our archetypes be who they are.

I think something akin to the Vong (or an adaptation thereof) would have been an interesting way to go instead of Empire redux.

I didn't necessarily want the EU Luke at all. There was definitely a way they could have made a disheartened Luke and not make him a complete jerk. It's almost like they wanted to knock down the myth of the OT characters to build up the lesser new characters.

I definitely would not want the Yuuzhan Vong stories. I didn't hate them though they wrecked Coruscant which is one of my favorite EU planets, and then I always thought the Force absence thing was hokey. I mean they could have done it (it worked for the Vornskr things in the Zahn books), but how it worked varied from one book to the next. Just because they can't be felt in the Force shouldn't have meant a Jedi couldn't use the Force to throw an object into them or something. In most of those books the Jedi couldn't do anything except fight them with a lightsaber and there's no reason they couldn't chuck things at them. I actually would have liked the ST to expand on the Imperial Remnant story a little more than to just have them show up with almost no explanation.

 

[harrisonp]

Balancing the new and the old was very important and I don’t think they succeeded as well as they could have.

I gotcha with the Vong I think I just like the idea of an unknown enemy showing up. They would definitely have needed to strip some of the hokier elements from their mythos.

Im ALWAYS on board for Remnant stuff, I love seeing the status quo flipped. The way they’ve touched on it in The Mandalorian is one of my favorite parts of the show. I’m pretty sure I talked about it in one of these threads already, but if TFA opened with a ragged Imperial remnant suddenly striking at the New Republic I would have been much more interested. It frustrates me to no end how shiny and

 

[Psab keel]

I remember seeing the TFA teaser and when the shot of the stormtroopers came up my initial thought was, they're still fighting the Empire 30 years later? I know they did it in the EU but even then it got old fast.

It would have been interesting seeing some other kind of threat. I mean it does make sense that the remnants could have continued fighting for years because it happens in real life too. It just would have been interesting to have seen them take it in another direction, especially when they ended up just retreading the same threat of the Emperor himself.

 

[ghostryder]

I CANNOT believe I'm posting something Kanye said, BUT...

https://twitter.com/x/status/1320097171686019072

 

[harrisonp]

I remember seeing the TFA teaser and when the shot of the stormtroopers came up my initial thought was, they're still fighting the Empire 30 years later? I know they did it in the EU but even then it got old fast.

It would have been interesting seeing some other kind of threat. I mean it does make sense that the remnants could have continued fighting for years because it happens in real life too. It just would have been interesting to have seen them take it in another direction, especially when they ended up just retreading the same threat of the Emperor himself.

Something like the Sith Empire might have been a good change, the biggest sell for me is it being a surprise. It would kind of end up as a New Jedi Order adaptation but seeing Luke and his students go against a formidable Force-based threat would be fun.

 

[Psab keel]

What's to say that despite the positive effects of overthrowing the tyranny of Imperial rule that the Rebel's victory led to a perfect peace? The transition back to democracy is often complicated and at times bloody. Our trio may have been great freedom fighters but perhaps weren't as well equipped to deal with the moral ambiguity of diplomacy.

Perhaps the galaxy was hesitant to join a unified government for fear this New Republic would slowly transition back to the rule of corrupt leaders who would make the same mistakes of the past?

I mean some of these ideas were explored in the EU but I don't recall them really delving into it as deep as they could have. Not to mention it could have offered more complex character motivations where the old cast slowly were relegated to the part of supporting cast and the new characters took the lead to head up this new government or fight the conflicts that arose during this period.

Plus there would certainly be plenty of room for battles with all the spectacle we enjoy from this series like dog fights and personal conflicts between Jedi and things like that.

That's just one approach though there were many other ways to take it. But hey, we got what we got. It's just fun to theorize about what could have been.

 

[harrisonp]

That is a bit of what the new canon books are covering, which is why I’m sort of into them, but it’s something that shouldn’t have been hastily added to fill in the gaps. Those should be the stories we see on screen.

 

[Sluis Van Shipyards]

I mean some of these ideas were explored in the EU but I don't recall them really delving into it as deep as they could have. Not to mention it could have offered more complex character motivations where the old cast slowly were relegated to the part of supporting cast and the new characters took the lead to head up this new government or fight the conflicts that arose during this period.

They did try that quite a bit because there would be major threats that they 100% would have called Luke out to help on, yet some lesser characters would be the main part of the story. It's like watching Agents of SHIELD and there are aliens invading and you think "Um, shouldn't the Avengers, or at least like one of them, be handling this?!?!" There's no question, at least to me, that you can make a great SW story without the main characters because we had stuff like KOTOR, the X-Wing book series, Republic Commando series, Darth Bane Trilogy, etc.

I just always liked the idea from the Zahn Trilogy where some officers with brains jumped their ships out from the Endor battle because they knew they had lost and needed to fall back. I don't know why, but that intrigued me. A lot of it was very cookie cutter in the books, but I always like Warlord Zsinj, mainly in the Wraith Squadron books, because he's sadistic and he's nuts, well at least lets people think he's nuts.

One thing I always thought the EU really failed on, other than a couple books, one being The Courtship of Princess Leia, is Luke searching out information on the Jedi. I've said it before on here, but they could have done some really cool Indy like books where Luke is going into old ruins and finding info on the Jedi. Rebels did more of than than any of the books.

 

[HeartBlade]

I often disagree with Kanye on politics but he is right about Star Wars here. Yes, the PT is flawed but it was ambitious. It tried to tell a different story and delve into the galaxy, showing a different one from the tyrannical ruled empire we were familiar with in OT.

The ST was by the books with TFA essentially being a checklist.
Jedi protagonist....check
Comic relief...check
Lightsaber battle...check
Death Star equivalent...check
Sand planet...check
Funny but useful droid...check

there is nothing really new about TFA. TLJ was new but was narratively terrible and TRoS was just a joke.

I do think a rebuilding story would have been much more interesting. The rebels were held together because they had a common enemy, the empire. Now that they are gone, there is a high probability of infighting since who knows who should take power? Leia seems an obvious choice but what if she died? Han? Luke? Some other rebel leader? Revolutions go through this very process.

Nevermind the fact that the empire wouldn’t be destroyed completely. There are still soldiers and commanders who pine for the good old days when they were in control. Now would be the time to strike since the rebels are in disarray.

It would have made a much more grey Star Wars with less clear good and bad for Star Wars’ more mature audience. Luke can’t go in lightsaber swinging and force pushing for solutions because it’s a battle of ideals. The new generation of Rey and Finn would have a vested stake in the fight because they will be the ones living and supporting this new system.

PT showed that representative democracy can fail
OT showed tyranny failed

What is the answer the ST wants to present? Independent planets loosely aligned? Aristocracy? You can still please the kids with ship battles and lightsabers swinging but also the adults by presenting a more mature and complex storyline.

 

[Psab keel]

I'd considered that too after I responded last.

What if the galaxy decided to not have a central government and be a loose confederacy of independent systems to try and prevent another Empire?

This could present a solution to the tyranny concern but would open the story up to new types of conflicts other than the Empire Rebellion type conflicts that would have galactic consequences. The galaxy is a big place but not every conflict has to be on that scale to feel vast.

Besides who's to say that Leia or the Rebellion members would be great civilian leaders? They were freedom fighters and not diplomats (other than Leia) but even then she'd spent most of her life helping command an army. That's not always congruous to leading a nation or government and could easily place some distrust among those who feared she or the rebels would try and seize power in the vacuum left from the Empire's demise, no matter how benevolent they appeared? The Thrawn trilogy touched on this a bit with some systems fearing to join the New Republic for this very reason.

Instead of an internal threat like the Separatists from the PT ( who were a front to distract from the internal threat of Palpatine), or the Rebellion trying to defy the rule of the Empire in the OT, the threat came from another source entirely removed from the central governing bodies in Coruscant?

Which is why the High Republic Era, or whatever this new book series is called, could be interesting because it might explore the idea of the systems coming under a unified body that becomes the Republic whether they are willing or not? Idk.

 

[HeartBlade]

A little unrelated but do you guys think the era of movies/Hollywood is now over?

I was watching the Witcher and the quality in streaming shows are quite impressive, maybe not avatar level but good enough.

Streaming is going to be more popular than movies in the future. Why get off your butt, put on some clothes and go watch a movie and buy expensive popcorn and a ticket when you can watch a long epic in your underwear from the comfort of your home. Corona definitely boosted subscription rates and once adopted, I don’t think people will go back.

Sure the movie theater has a huge screen and surround system (and 3D/4D) but that seems like you are going for the unique experience, like a rollercoaster ride.

the inevitable issue with movies and storytelling is that they only have so much time (2 hours is pushing it) while tv shows have no such constraint. You could argue that the clone wars cartoon show could tell a much more compelling story with tons of character development compared to the PR movies because they had so much more time. Nevermind the lower cost per episode and large number of episodes, directors could take risks and just leave the episode as a one off if it fails.

A ST focusing on the various political ramifications, interests, and the resulting infighting while giving each political group their due would be impossible to adequately achieve in a 6 hour narrative divided into 3 parts. But it would make for an amazing 9 seasons of a tv show.

 

[Psab keel]

Or the films could focus on one key conflict as opposed to several. Then they could develop shows that would be a deep dive into the whole picture, carving a path for the new characters go carry the story forward and allowing the original cast to eventually bow out of the story entirely.

But again this is just theoretical. Yeah the movie experience, which I thought would fade some but never entirely die off, may just be relegated to the past. Corona certainly has been a nail in that coffin. We may have reached a point where theaters will become few and far between and I'm sure depending on how long it takes for this pandemic to come under control we may start seeing multiplexes dropping off like flies.

It also makes me wonder if the age of movie stars is finished too? As much as I enjoy the movies there is a certain satisfaction in contemplating the self importance of a great number of celebrities being put in check.

 

[HeartBlade]

I don’t think the cinema experience will ever truly die off but it’s going to need to be something new. I did see movies like Black Panther in 4D and it is an experience that just can’t be recreated in home theater. But it will be more niche. I mean when is the last time you went to see a play? I’m no expert on the cash flow in cinema so I could be wrong.

I don’t think celebrity culture will ever die though. There have been celebrities as long as there have been forms of entertainment with even popular gladiators promoting their sponsors like ancient era Nikes lol. I do think society places too much value on the opinions of celebrities though. Hopkins agreed with your sentiment lol.

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