Was it my cinema but I struggled with how dark the film was!! the scenes and all the special effects were lost in the darkness!
Haven't seen it yet, but that's certainly how the trailers looked.
Was it my cinema but I struggled with how dark the film was!! the scenes and all the special effects were lost in the darkness!
what is the deal with Mauls eyes? Is it like that in the movie. It is bad enough he is in it but if he looks like that just wow. What is the deal with the lightsaber. That made it too? Is that so you know it is Maul.
There's a bit in there to
unpack... "Splinter..." was given the go-ahead by George to ADF (who ghost-wrote the Star Wars novelization) from his notes, figuring he'd never make "Star Wars 2". When a sequel did happen, that became the first big instance of canon contradicting ancillary material, with Luke facing Vader for the first time in both pieces. People have rationalized for some years that the "Vader" Luke faced on Mimban (note: the planet Han is serving on in this film!) was a vision or Force-projection or similar, augmented by the unusually large kaiber crystal there.
For the rest of the OT, there were three Han Solo and three Lando Calrissian books, the Marvel comics, and the Archie Goodwin newspaper strips, and that was it. The latter two had the problems comics always do -- needing to come up with a new "gag" every strip/issue, so there ends up being far more content than the time period would really allow for, and readers sort of had the tacit understanding that they were only to be accepted for the broad strokes of the story. That handful of books, though, was accepted as depicting actual events in the characters' lives. Luke and Leia did go on a mission right after the Yavin base was evacuated. Daley's Han Sollo trilogy was what Han was up to before Luke met him in Mos Eisley. Etc.
After that is where things started to go off the rails. On the heels of RotJ, George was semi-involved with the Ewoks TV movies and the Ewoks and Droids cartoons. But those were, at the time, the death-rattle of Star Wars. When West End Games got the role-playing game rights in the mid-'80s, it was cheap because Star Wars was considered a dead property, but one with a fan base that inexpensive things like that could be sold to. And then Heir to the Empire happened.
The Star Wars Renaissance that kicked off in the early '90s was when the EU really came into being. Dark Horse got the comics license, and would eventually far outstrip the measly hundred-ish issues Marvel had released. And starting with the Thrawn trilogy (which George said at the time he considered to be Episodes 7, 8, and 9), we got more than three times as many books as in the same period originally. And George wasn't really keeping up with any of it. So when he got to the Prequels, he included the couple things he'd noticed that he liked (like Coruscant) and didn't worry about whether his new films worked with the rest of it or not.
So the books and comics and games were always "secondary" to the films. Sort of... "canon until they aren't", as we never knew what George would overwrite next -- like Boba's backstory. But starting during the Prequels, the licensing arm of LFL started trying to get the new ancillary material to align with the films and with each other more and more. This coalesced in '08 with the official formation of the Story Group. So the last five to ten years of the EU are sort of "more canon" than the earlier stuff -- i.e., less likely to contradict or be contradicted. Obviously, everything set post-RotJ is gone*, but everything during and prior to the OT is tacitly still in, in one slightly tweaked-to-fit form or another. All of the KOTOR-era stuff kicked off by the Tales of the Jedi comics, set roughly four thousand years before the films, is well structured, internally consistent, and has gotten many references in the canon, and vice versa.
[*And at the same time, not gone -- but to a less-tnagible extent than the pre-RotJ stuff. We have a scion of the Skywalker bloodline named Ben -- but it's Leia's kid, not Luke's. We have a young Force-sensitive named Jacen, but he's someone else's kid. We have a young female Force prodigy, but she's also (as far as we know) not part of the Skywalker line. We can treat the old post-RotJ EU as the garbled account of events from a couple hundred years further on -- uncertain details about what exactly happened when, or trying to elevate someone's importance by tying them to the Skywalkers making things less than reliable.]
But because George was almost as involved in Clone Wars as in the movies, that series was elevated to the level of the films as far as "what really happened". Bad moments and all. Maul not being dead? All female Dark-Sideers being Dathomiri Nightsisters (or exiled Dathomiri Nightsisters, in the case of the Witch of Endor)? Dave Filoni's misunderstanding of Wulff Yularen's uniform in ANH? Savage Opress? The Father-Brother-Sister Force avatars? All every bit as sacrosanct as "Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi -- you're my only hope".
And, since George retired, all new ancillary content is directly and deliberately the same level as the films and Clone Wars. Not counting Young Adult and younger, we have the new Marvel comics, which are largely worth reading, and conveniently available as inexpensive (or check-out-able-from-the-library) trade paperbacks; and only a dozen or so novels to contend with. Not everything is a fit for everybody, but there are few enough yet since 2014 that one should be able to read first-chapters online to see if they'd be interested in the whole story, and if one has any time to read worth mentioning, one could read (or read the Wookieepedia summary of) all of them by the time Episode IX comes out... And not worry about any of it being for naught as a new film tosses it out the airlock.
(And, for what it's worth, I still swear by the old Brian Daley Han Solo books as God's Honest Truth, regardless of the Prequels' screwing up the uniforms...)
So, while I feel you definitely don't have to have read every single piece of ancillary fiction to come out over the past forty years, some of it is worthwhile, and the newer stuff, especially, enriches one's appreciation of the films... *sigh* ...In no small part because of how much important information and character development the films leave out, for one reason or another. I recommend the Shattered Empire comic miniseries, the Aftermath trilogy, Bloodlines, Phasma, and the Force Awakens novelization, at least, just to frikkin' understand what's going on in the Sequel Trilogy.
--Jonah
It's clearer in the film, and he appears to have an Inquisitor saber. He looks older, and somewhat haggard.
View attachment 819701
Anyone else notice the Indy fertility idol in bad dudes office? It was right under the big crystal skull, lol
It's clearer in the film, and he appears to have an Inquisitor saber. He looks older, and somewhat haggard.
View attachment 819701