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[hector13]

That's not from the novel. That was totally implicit in Episode III. Have you never heard the tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise?

I mean that was an implication, but then in that book they were like hey yeah this happened, donezo.

I don’t think it did, but it was a while ago I read the book and I was stupendously disappointed with the manner that Plagueis died.

[scriver]

Then handed it back to Abrams? Fuck, prepare for yet another retread...

What's worse than a Death Star Planet? A Death Star Star! The released race horses from TLJ returns to wage guerrilla war against it. A new Emperor guy will appear out of nowhere too.

You mean a retread like the Battle of Dry Hoth?

Don't presume my opinions on the matter, they are conserved in this very thread

While I enjoyed TFA, it was almost a carbon-copy of A New Hope. I was ok with it because it felt like a lead-in to a new Star-Wars universe and since they'd cut out the EU it was like, ok, so you're acknowledging the previous stuff (from a certain point of view ha ha oh me), ok cool let's go forward from here.

I also enjoyed it, but I think less and less good of it in hindsight because of this. The whole "it's the Death Star again but BIGGER AND BADDER it's now A PLANET!!!!! LOOK IT JUST OBLITERATED ENTIRE STAR SYSTEMS IN MINUTES ISN'T THIS AWESOME" inflation/upping the antes too far is what does it the most.

And I say this as somebody who still think a planet terraformed into a giant battle station (Space Switzerland anybody? Or Space North Korea since they're the bad guys) is a really cool idea.

Anyway, Abrams is probably gonna fail hard. He lacks the creative sense to view a movie or work as a whole. All he can envision is a handful of separate cool scenes and then he forces them together with the mallet he calls editing without regard how it all comes together. I mean I'm not fond of TLJ but you can still feel the haphazardly "this was envisioned as separate and then forced together" feel of Abrams producing touch on it.

[Persus13]

oh here we go again

Sorry, had to put in my two cents there when I see a wall of text.

Then handed it back to Abrams? Fuck, prepare for yet another retread...

What's worse than a Death Star Planet? A Death Star Star! The released race horses from TLJ returns to wage guerrilla war against it. A new Emperor guy will appear out of nowhere too.

You mean a retread like the Battle of Dry Hoth?

Personally, the final third of TLJ was the one thing I enjoyed. If you replaced the first two thirds of the movie with something else until you hit the hyperdive sequence, I wouldn't mind seeing that movie again. That would probably require chanign what happened in TFA, but I'd be okay with that too.

[Teneb]

oh here we go again

Sorry, had to put in my two cents there when I see a wall of text.

Then handed it back to Abrams? Fuck, prepare for yet another retread...

What's worse than a Death Star Planet? A Death Star Star! The released race horses from TLJ returns to wage guerrilla war against it. A new Emperor guy will appear out of nowhere too.

You mean a retread like the Battle of Dry Hoth?

Personally, the final third of TLJ was the one thing I enjoyed. If you replaced the first two thirds of the movie with something else until you hit the hyperdive sequence, I wouldn't mind seeing that movie again. That would probably require chanign what happened in TFA, but I'd be okay with that too.

Don't get me wrong Red Salt Hoth was pretty good in general barring a few things here and there. But come on directors, give us a new setpiece battle.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

Y'know TLJ has been out for over a year now and I've vented my anger towards it far and wide, but honestly, I'm just... still perplexed by Disney's decision making process?

I mean... maybe they approached it from the angle of a soft reboot, but we got a lot of visual redesigns that just felt out-of-universe. The Dreadnought, the new AT-ATs, a lot of the interiors to ships felt over-designed--like I get it, we have better technology now, but so many of the backgrounds (specifically during the Finn-Phasma fight) were just cluttered messes. It really bordered a "this doesn't feel like Star Wars any more" line.

Most of the best storylines of yore were not the ones that were carbon-copied or seen to their appropriate conclusions. Luke's influence was negligible to say the least, and Rey's whole time with him was a complete joke (where she LITERALLY discovered nothing about herself). The aggressively quick collapse of the New Republic was disappointing (especially considering all the politicking storytelling potential there). As many have said before, I think we were all willing to give TFA a free-pass on the originality as it felt like it was just drawing us back in to Star Wars. The decision to even SELECT Rian Johnson is... weird, imo. He doesn't really have a lot of experience with the kind of film that Star Wars is. Regardless, if TLJ was... just not a Star Wars film... IDK, I might be able to get excited about it, but at the end of the day it wasn't made in a creative vacuum, and Johnson not only obviously doesn't understand the Star Wars secret sauce, he was pretty explicit about not caring about even trying to make "A Star Wars film".

*Honorable mentions: Phasma going nowhere. Rey's parents going nowhere. Rose (Poor Kelly Marie Tran, she didn't deserve the hate). Han's descent into decided uncoolness. Snoke going nowhere. Et al. Poe suddenly becoming braindead. The regression of all prior character arcs in TLJ.

Honestly the best part of the new trilogy thus far has been the characters/acting--IMO, that's usually a bad sign in terms of quality. Despite TFA's generic-ness JJ actually did a pretty good job of setting up Rey, Finn, Poe, and Kylo--Johnson managed to butcher all but Kylo (who, despite initially being a flimsy character in TFA, ended up being the only saving grace of TLJ--weirdly along with Benicio Del Toro).

A general inconsistency in the feel of it all, small stuff like the space bombers and the hyperspace suicide--say what you want about shitty ole George Lucas, but never once in the original or prequel trilogy did you see something like that feel out of place.

[insert continued endless list of problems with the new movies]

TO BE FAIR,

It's not all bad. Kylo is great and Adam Driver is carrying the whole biz on his fucking BACK. Rogue One proved that there are still people out there who can make a movie that FEELS like Star Wars. Solo had a lot of good ideas, even if Ron Howard didn't bring his A game, and I can't blame him, the circumstances of his ascension to director made it difficult for him to really max out the film's potential. Despite TLJ's extreme awfulness (at least in the context of the series) Johnson is still a good director and gets some of the small moments right--Yoda, Luke's initial character (terrible development, backstory reveal, and conclusion though), Kylo just being a weirdo the whole movie lol. TFA gave us the best, in my opinion, lightsaber fight outside 2003 Clone Wars. Going forward, we've still got a pretty talented cast of actors.

BUT IN CONCLUSION,

Disney doesn't know what the hell they're doing. They saw an opportunity to pounce on some good IP, as is their modus operandi, but were not at all creatively prepared for it. They made the decision to "marvelize" Star Wars, but just didn't really understand the fan base. Obviously, it's also always the right decision to try and appeal to a new generation of fans (as Star Trek and other Sci-fi franchises have successfully done), but they did it in such a shallow and pandering way that pretty much blew up in their faces (in a lot of ways). Honestly, they are at least competent enough to hire GOOD directors, but they're so commercialized, so done-by-committee-d, that they just can't hire the RIGHT directors--even when the winning combos are right in front of them.

A lot of the problems, creatively, just kind of stem from modern American cinema in general--Star Wars is a surprisingly SLOW series--because even though it's a "Space Opera" it's really a "Roman Western" (that combines a lot of elements of almost spaghetti westerns and that trademark decline-of-society present in sword-and-sandal movies). That's not the direction our filmmaking is heading towards though, it's so aggressively quick that until Disney realizes that Star Wars only works when you get REALLY close up with the personal moments and REALLY far out with the epic battles and politicking and subterfuge stuff, it's just not going to work. That said, I doubt Disney is going to change their way of doing things/

[hector13]

Benicio Del Toro’s character wasn’t that great actually. It felt like Disney putting him in to be an anti-Han Solo.

Presumably because there was no Wookiee counterpart to make him “know what he’s doing.”

[smjjames]

Not bothering with quotes because too much hassle to do multi quotes on mobile.

@dunamis: TFA? I think you meant TLJ? And the Darth Plagueis using the force to create life to create Anakin sounds dumb and has a bunch of plot holes that it would have to resolve like, why did Qui Gon have to enhance Anakins midichlorians in the first place, wouldn’t Darth Plagueis have infused the life with it in the first place, and there may be timeline issues, gonna go look up Darth Plagueis real quick though.

@scriver: what even are you talking about? There wasn’t a Death Star planet in TLJ. Nothing stopping them from digging into a planet and creating the giant laser there, but they’d have to use some sort of wormhole tech like what the long-guns in the Shlock Mercenary universe use. Otherwise you get into absurdities like how do you move the planet around and give it angular velocity so that it doesn’t fall into the star.

I know from reading Star Wars stuff that there’s this living planet (in the sense of being sapient) which involves the Yuuzhan Vong which later hyperspaces itself somewhere, but that’s really the exception.

[Teneb]

@dunamis: TFA? I think you meant TLJ? And the Darth Plagueis using the force to create life to create Anakin sounds dumb and has a bunch of plot holes that it would have to resolve like, why did Qui Gon have to enhance Anakins midichlorians in the first place, wouldn’t Darth Plagueis have infused the life with it in the first place, and there may be timeline issues, gonna go look up Darth Plagueis real quick though.

Pretty sure Qui-gon only measured Anakin's chlorines.midi

@scriver: what even are you talking about? There wasn’t a Death Star planet in TLJ. Nothing stopping them from digging into a planet and creating the giant laser there, but they’d have to use some sort of wormhole tech like what the long-guns in the Shlock Mercenary universe use. Otherwise you get into absurdities like how do you move the planet around and give it angular velocity so that it doesn’t fall into the star.

Are you ok? The whole plot of Ep.7 was centred around Starkiller, which was literally a planet converted into Death Star on steroids.

[smjjames]

@dunamis: TFA? I think you meant TLJ? And the Darth Plagueis using the force to create life to create Anakin sounds dumb and has a bunch of plot holes that it would have to resolve like, why did Qui Gon have to enhance Anakins midichlorians in the first place, wouldn’t Darth Plagueis have infused the life with it in the first place, and there may be timeline issues, gonna go look up Darth Plagueis real quick though.

Pretty sure Qui-gon only measured Anakin's chlorines.midi

@scriver: what even are you talking about? There wasn’t a Death Star planet in TLJ. Nothing stopping them from digging into a planet and creating the giant laser there, but they’d have to use some sort of wormhole tech like what the long-guns in the Shlock Mercenary universe use. Otherwise you get into absurdities like how do you move the planet around and give it angular velocity so that it doesn’t fall into the star.

Are you ok? The whole plot of Ep.7 was centred around Starkiller, which was literally a planet converted into Death Star on stroids.

I didn’t see that one, so, no, I didn’t know what you were talking about. And I think i’m Misremembering it because of a Darth and Droids comic strip

Also, I looked at wookiepedia and it sounds more like the midichlorians did it themselves in response to Darth Plagueis’s attempts rather than the other way around.

[ChairmanPoo]

No, it was hinted in the past and it was recently revealed that it was done by Palpatine directly.  Regardless of other Force sheanigans.

You sound... slightly confused?

[scriver]

@scriver: what even are you talking about? There wasn’t a Death Star planet in TLJ. Nothing stopping them from digging into a planet and creating the giant laser there, but they’d have to use some sort of wormhole tech like what the long-guns in the Shlock Mercenary universe use. Otherwise you get into absurdities like how do you move the planet around and give it angular velocity so that it doesn’t fall into the star.

As Teneb already said, that was referring to The Force Awakens, where that happens.

[smjjames]

No, it was hinted in the past and it was recently revealed that it was done by Palpatine directly.  Regardless of other Force sheanigans.

You sound... slightly confused?

Well, the legends page for Darth Plagueis probably needs to be updated a little, and I’m not familiar with that particular string of lore.

[ChairmanPoo]

No, it was hinted in the past and it was recently revealed that it was done by Palpatine directly.  Regardless of other Force sheanigans.

You sound... slightly confused?

Well, the legends page for Darth Plagueis probably needs to be updated a little, and I’m not familiar with that particular string of lore.

Legends is toast. This was in the new continuity. Which... borrows frequently from Legends, anyway...

[smjjames]

So, what’s the new line of lore? Probably not that Palpatine secretly had sex with Anakins mother.

[hector13]

I hope not.

Though it would make sense for Vader to

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

say “search your feelings, you know it to be true” when hetells Luke he’s his dad, ‘cause he had the same experience with Palpatine at some point.

I mean, if you’re going for a re-tread, you might as well do it with the biggest twist in the series.

Spoilered ‘cause you never know if someone’s been hiding under a rock for almost 40 years.