fantastic_four

Bought this for XBox One X this month but haven't played it yet, mostly because I'm a Marvel zombie. I'm hoping it's great, particularly given the spectacular critic reviews.

I don't know how much money it will make or how good it will be, but what I do know is that every single person reading or posting in this thread in protest will absolutely, positively be seeing Episode 9. What's surprised me about "Last Jedi" the most is the number of people suddenly proclaiming a comparative love for the prequels. All I recall during the 2000s about fan reactions was a neverending supply of complaints about how badly George Lucas had raped the minds and childhoods of every Star Wars fan.

Yea, that wasn't perfect, but I loved seeing the original footage and hearing the story about how they didn't include it in the finished film because Lucas couldn't figure out any great way of creating a half-ton giant slug.

This is an example of the type of biased audience score I've been seeing for years on Metacritic: http://www.metacritic.com/game/playstation-4/nba-2k18 That is a REALLY good game with an 80% critic rating and a 16% audience rating. I don't disagree with what the audience people are complaining about with nickeling and diming users with microtransactions, but come ON, you don't even have to play the mode with the microtransactions, and I never do and LOVE the game. The audience rating is insanely biased, and it's obvious the haters are far, far more motivated to post than the people who enjoy the game. On Rotten Tomatoes we have 130K users posting as opposed to just 500 or so on that Metacritic review for one game on one platform, but it's representative of why I can't tell whether or not to trust Rotten Tomatoes audience ratings--I can't tell how skewed they are relative to the tens of millions of people who saw the film.

I liked pretty much everything Lucas did with his enhancements, particularly the CGI. The only one I had an issue with was putting Hayden Christensen as a Force ghost at the end of Return of the Jedi. WTF? We get old Obi-Wan, but young Vader? That made so little sense; they should have stuck with the original actor for the unmasked Vader in there.

Even if Disney gets access to the 20th Century Fox name and that familiar song flourish, will they use it? I bet they don't because they like the Disney brand better. I didn't pay much attention, did they show the Disney logo at the start of Episode VII and VIII? I remember the Lucasfilm logo, but I didn't notice the others.

Them getting rights to the old films just means they get to control and profit from where the movies get shown. It has nothing to do with what they include in new movies.

That 20th Century Fox music was only on Episode IV, wasn't it? I thought everything from Episode V onwards was distributed by Lucas, and of course later Disney for the last two.

I really do not have any feel for this deal at all. What I mean is that the most valuable property I can imagine is Star Wars, and we just saw a price tag on that of $4 billion a few years ago. So if you were to break the Fox deal down into the properties Disney gets and put a price on each one, what is it? I have NO good feel for the totality of the properties they just bought. All of the reports list a few, but the ones listed don't add up to $60 billion. But if you add up dozens--or is it hundreds?--of film and television properties together, maybe it makes sense. I'd have to see a line-item breakdown of all the major properties they got to have any real feel for the deal. Correspondingly, I have very little feel for what this does for a Disney competitor to Netflix. I get that it adds a few hundred movies to it, but Netflix has tens of thousands. I have no feel for how Disney stacks up against Netflix, how Disney plus Fox stacks up, or even what content is going to draw me to Disney. I listened to Bill Simmons talk about how he will 1000% subscribe to a Disney service, but I'm not sure why. I guess I have only a rough feel for what we're talking about here.

I NEVER assume I'm smarter than the director on any film. It's too common a mistake, one that most people make. If I'm unmotivated by the work I'll just drop it without opinion, but I'll never assume there's no explanation for an outstanding question on any work of art in any medium without at least giving it the benefit of repeat viewings (or hearings for songs, or whatever senses are used for the medium in question). In this case, I just need to hear (or see a transcript of) the dialogue from those sessions with Rey on the island another time or two.

And here's why I'm still developing my opinion on Luke--I still don't fully understand why he thought the Jedi had to end. But since it's the center and title of the film, I presume Rian's intent was far better developed than I've been able to glean so far.

For the sake of discussion to help form my own opinion about the film. Overall, I liked it, but I'm not at all sure I like the treatment of Luke any more than anyone else does. But it's not enough to make me dislike the film overall, because it's clear Rian has a purpose in his un-heroic development of an otherwise heroic character. The simple arc I see is hero up until he almost kills Ben, fallen hero, hero risen again when he projects the hologram. But then that death is just SO damn weak, I don't think I like the take overall. I'd rather they just leave him alive, Kylo shows up at the island at the start of Episode IX, and Luke gets whacked in dramatic form then. Or just SOMETHING more satisfyingly epic.

I've got to figure out why these different measurements of audience reaction vary so widely before that question interests me. I do trust post-viewing polls far more than people who are pissed enough to go write a negative review on Rotten Tomatoes. Most people who enjoy a film aren't nearly as motivated to write positive reviews as people who are pissed feel the need to share their rage with others, a fact that's VERY easily visible across Metacritic audience reviews on great games where an unrepresentatively small handful of fans cause audience scores to plummet. But I'm not sure it's that simple with the Rotten Tomatoes score...maybe it is, maybe it isn't.

When has ANY film suggested such a thing? Everything I've seen across all the films, Last Jedi included, suggests that dark or light is a choice, not a destiny.

If you had better writers creating the story you wouldn't be put in that situation at all. That's quality writing, so I have no idea what you're referring to as an alternative that would be so clearly better. I don't necessarily extend that description of "quality writing" to Luke deciding to go to an island to live out his life alone, but this is probably the center of why the critics liked this film but the fans didn't--most critics don't have the emotional connection to Luke to track the consistency of his character across all the films or to be disillusioned by him deciding to no longer be a hero.

Of course he couldn't just make him a cameo. He wanted to develop a story around where he had gone, and what had become of him. That statement doesn't necessarily suggest that, but it also doesn't reference the last three parts being about the next "new hope" either, so who knows if he had gone from Luke being a cameo in his 1976 statement to Luke being the center of a new trilogy by 1980. "What happened to Luke afterward" could have been as simple as one character stating a summary of what happened to him all the way up to an entire film--or even the entire third trilogy--dedicated to it.

That scene didn't imply anything nearly that simple. Luke was reacting to the evil that was already there, not the evil to come. Yes, he probably did change Ben's exact path to the dark side, but nothing about that scene suggests Luke is who turned him to the dark side.

That's the exact same quote I cited a few posts back, and it's the one that suggests Lucas would have only used Luke as a cameo. http://www.starwars.com/news/the-long-winding-and-shapeshifting-trail-to-episodes-vii-viii-ix

There's one VERY surprising bit in the conversation in this linked article between George Lucas, Lawrence Kasdan (the screenwriter for episodes V, VI, and VII), and Richard Marquand, the director of Episode VI: So did the Force work this way all along, or did Lucas go back and forth about whether or not anyone could actively control the Force like the Jedi did? I'm very confused about this point, particularly so since he conceived of midi-chlorians all along. Anakin didn't "take the time to do it," he was the "Chosen One," implying he was born with his Force sensitivity. I particularly don't understand what Rian had Luke thinking about why the Jedi had to end...so what, we should get rid of all the yoga studios, too? I don't see his issue with a group devoting themselves to learning to control the Force for the benefit of civilization like the Jedi did.

The best part of what Rian did with Luke was to set up the situation of what he should have done once he saw Ben Solo's future as the likely next Darth Vader. The idea of him drawing his saber, then hesitating, then Ben waking up and reacting is complex and compelling. I'm fascinated by the question of what I would have done in that place...I'm still not sure. I lean towards killing Ben, but I probably would've hesitated, too.

I enjoyed the development of Darth Vader, Palpatine, and the politics of Palpatine transforming the Republic into the Empire. Every time I see that scene where Anakin's mom dies, he gets that look of hate, then slaughters the sandpeople, I choke up with emotion, feeling almost the same way Anakin does in that moment. I never thought Lucas would make me identify with Vader's point of view like he did in that scene.

It does seem unlikely that Lucas would have done that with Luke, but it's equally true that he very likely wouldn't have done much of anything with Luke. He certainly wouldn't have centered the story of Episode VII around him like J.J. Abrams did. I rather doubt that Abrams would have done what Rian did, either.

Phasma did nothing at all except wear a very shiny stormtrooper outfit.

You wouldn't have gotten it from Lucas, either, and in all likelihood you would have gotten MUCH less of Luke, Leia, or Han than Disney ended up giving you. He communicated a vision in the late 70s for twelve total films, and he told Mark Hamill that he would only have a cameo in the one after Return of the Jedi that involved him passing on the mantle to the next generation of Jedi. Who knows if he would have eventually changed it, but certainly a lot of what he had mapped out at the time did come to pass. He definitely wasn't one to be overly-sentimental towards characters, so I'm sure that the focus would have been on the new generation. http://www.starwars.com/news/the-long-winding-and-shapeshifting-trail-to-episodes-vii-viii-ix Interestingly, he had the storyline of the prequels pretty much mapped out by 1981: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/22/star-wars-prequels-return-of-the-jedi_n_3313793.html Fascinating to see that while many of the details of his prequel outline changed 17 years later, it mostly stayed the same.