fantastic_four

I need to set up a daily Amazon subscription of cheese to go with the neverending flow of whine this thread's going to be providing over the next few years.

My top ten Star Wars sequences: Darth Maul vs. Qui-Gonn and Obi-Wan (Phantom Menace) Vader hallway (Rogue One) Yoda vs. Dooku (Attack of the Clones) Anakin and Obi-Wan vs. General Grievous's fleet (opening sequence from Revenge of the Sith) Anakin vs. Obi-Wan (end of Revenge of the Sith) Millennium Falcon vs. Imperial fleet (Empire Strikes Back) Millennium Falcon vs. Imperial fleet at Death Star 2 (Return of the Jedi) Obi-Wan vs. General Grievous (Revenge of the Sith) Imperial AT-AT walkers vs. rebel forces on Hoth (Empire Strikes Back) Clone army vs. Trade Federation army (Attack of the Clones)

A unique saber called the Darksaber first shown in the Clone Wars cartoon. It was the weapon of the first Mandalorian Jedi. https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Darksaber

Agree about Rogue One. It's also got the only WTF MUST REWATCH OVER AND OVER moment of the Disney era with that Vader hallway sequence.

What's that thing? Last episode was enjoyable but not one of the better ones. The TIE fighter crashes but doesn't explode and they don't think to go check it? He's tasked with finding out about the child, and the one guy who knows all about it falls right over there and he doesn't even check?

The better the art, the less likely you are to absorb it on a single reading or viewing. If you can read most Shakespeare once and get everything there is to get about it you're either a genius or you're kidding yourself. Try reading a Dickinson poem once and getting the whole thing on that first read--it's not going to happen. It's difficult or impossible to absorb almost ANY great work on a single reading/viewing, so the idea that anything you can't read or see once and get in its entirety is the mark of an inferior work is absolutely, positively wrong. That doesn't directly imply that an overly-complex, arcane plot or story is inherently superior. But simplicity itself isn't a virtue.

I always found it interesting that Tokien hated the title of the third book "Return of the King" for a simple and obvious reason--the title gives away the ending. Tolkien didn't title any of the three books himself, and I tend to agree with Tolkien on that, which begs the question--why didn't he protest more? Or if he did, why did they end up going with that name?

Perhaps each season will have a title like that.

Sauron is the Lord of the Rings and he's been alive throughout the entire 50,000+ year timeframe Tolkien ever covered in his books, so the title is broad enough to cover far more content than what was covered in Hobbit and the trilogy. Tolkien himself wrote what became a trilogy as one big work titled Lord of the Rings, so it doesn't match his original intent, but when his editor made him split it up into three books each had its own subtitle with Lord of the Rings as the overall title, so given the way it ended up getting released it's not entirely misleading to also name all of the earlier content under the LoTR umbrella.

You'd have to have read The Silmarillion to have any chance of recognizing character names from the time period covered by the Amazon series since it's set thousands of years prior to Hobbit and LOTR.

He was once great, but he always struggled with overindulgence. Particularly with eating, but it spilled over into most of his life including his ability to maintain concentration and stay rational. You'd do just as well searching for meaning in most things he said after 1965 as you would searching for it in the random patterning of clouds.

that was also terrible. It seems that you misspelled "mind-blowingly awesome" there somehow.

He seemed to be saying this. Couldn't tell how literal he was being, but if he WAS being literal, it sounds really, really dumb. What is all of this Force taking over your body nonsense? Is it new, or has it been in the extended universe before?

By this logic Mace Windu was a Sith right before he died, too. Killing someone evil for justice, retribution, or even vengeance isn't the same as killing them because you get off on killing people.

He wanted her to strike him down offensively just as he wanted Luke to do it in Episode VI. Instead, she killed him defensively while he was attacking her with Force lightning. She didn't give in to hatred. I don't buy any of that by the way, it's just the way Lucas seemed to be telling it in Episode 6 and the way Abrams mirrored it in Episode 9. I'm more with Mace Windu in Episode 3--Palpatine is too dangerous to leave alive. And just because you kill him for that reason doesn't mean you're suddenly a Sith and not a Jedi.

it was more the way that Richard Marquand had them behave. If they had been little bad-asses who happened to look like teddy bears, then yea, I would have gotten the message you're describing, but instead they hobbled around and were zany as heck. Leia meets her first one, talks to him like he's a child, and he comes up looking for a cookie. Listen to their munchkin songs! Look at that wacky glider! That one spun his sling around and bonked himself in the nose! Look, they're hitting dudes in plate armor with sticks and they seem to stand no chance--oh well, let's go with it! AT-STs may LOOK powerful, but they're no match for rolling logs! They didn't just LOOK like children, they acted like them and the rules of engagement seemed more akin to a Tom and Jerry cartoon than Star Wars. Yoda, on the other hand, was entirely different. I lost my sheet when he opened up a can of whoop-arse on Dooku. THAT was bad-arse...Ewoks weren't.

Yea I didn't think it was just certain families, but like any genetic trait in heredity--it can be inherited, it can surface from past heredity, or it can mutate instantaneously. Rey could have been like Shaquille O'Neal, one of the most massive humans ever with nobody anywhere near his size in his immediate family or known from his family tree. So tied to genetics in some way. Am I remembering wrong about Rian suggesting that you could achieve Force sensitivity without a genetic basis? Been two years now, I don't remember why I thought he was suggesting that, maybe I'm remembering wrong. But I got that impression, and I've seen others in both of these threads who had that impression as well.

I have always assumed he is not telling the whole truth in that scene. The Last Jedi plays better if you assume Rey has a link to Palpatine - for me at least. Me too about Kylo--I assumed he was either lying or leaving out some key piece of information about what he saw. My guess based upon his obsession with her in Force Awakens coupled with Leia's instant affection for her was that she was his sister or cousin...so now I'm left wondering why he was so obsessed with her and why Leia liked her so much. Were those dropped threads from JJ, or some kind of implied instant attraction between Force sensitives?

Interesting. I'm still in season one of Clone Wars, but your ideas now have me compelled to start binging forward to season 3 where I see the Mortis arc occurred.

He explicitly says that everything he knew came from looking at her own memories. So as ret-cons go--assuming it even was one, which I'm unsure of--it works to have Rey's father be Palpatine's son.

Yea, sorry, I meant Force sensitive, not necessarily a Jedi.

Lucas has another reason he said he used Ewoks instead of Wookies--he wanted the race on the planet to be primitive, but by the time we got to the third film Chewie wasn't being looked at as just a big walking dog anymore since he was shown both flying and fixing the Millenium Falcon in Empire, so he substituted in another similar race instead. But that doesn't rule out the cute factor of Ewok teddy bears as being primarily being chosen to appeal to kids. I was 12 when Jedi was released, so I rolled my eyes at the teddy bears. By the time 1999 came around I just looked at Jar Jar as another version of the Ewoks and ignored my instinctive reaction to not think much of it. As a 12-year old you're trying not to be a kid anymore, but by the time I was 28 I was fine with Lucas injecting elements geared towards kids.

I actually haven't seen Last Jedi since release weekend. I want to re-watch it now, but perhaps my memory is off...didn't Rian suggest in the film that being a Jedi is something anyone can do and wasn't necessarily just genetic? Or am I mis-remembering or reading too much into that in the film? Just because Rey had "nobody" parents doesn't mean she didn't still have genetic predisposition to Force sensitivity, as is also possibly true of that kid at the end swabbing the deck.

We didn't know that. Supposedly Pablo Hidalgo and/or Kathleen Kennedy were reigning these guys in, but now we know they either mostly weren't or that they weren't doing it very well. I didn't enjoy seeing the Solo directors getting fired because it's just chaotic, but at least it looked like Kennedy was trying to be a curator. And it seemed to work out in Rogue One with all of the reshoots they did in that, so I withheld judgement when she said in her public statement that they weren't sticking to the Star Wars feel and mythos. But at the same time my initial reaction was that you didn't want the Lego Movie guys to introduce weird and/or wacky humor into Star Wars, so you hired them...why? Let's set both Star Wars and Hidalgo/Kennedy as well as Marvel and Feige aside for a second. We both agree that the auteur theory of letting directors have control works really well, and given your "perfect world" comment above it looks like we both also agree that for serial fiction that defines a universe like Star Wars, Marvel, Harry Potter, or whatever, there needs to be a set of consistent rules that a director can't break. Can't there be a fairly loose set of rules that gives the director 95% control within any given universe? If so, is that 5% restriction really that limiting? You mentioned Taiki Waititi as an example of a director that would have done even better without the yoke of Kevin Feige and Marvel continuity around his neck. What I saw was a great Marvel film that was unique from virtually all others in its bizarre Taiki Waititi humor that was extremely similar to the same sense of humor I saw previously in the "What We Do in the Shadows" film. By far the most common complaint I heard here in these forums in the Ragnarok thread was that people didn't like his sense of humor...which I get, but I enjoyed it myself. And I like the fact that Feige both chose him and let him be himself within the bounds of Marvel's characters. What restrictions did you perceive that you objected to, or did you not notice any and just assume that he hypothetically had some--which I agree he almost certainly did--and that they just held him back in principle?

Welp, you just got exactly that--Rian with one idea and then Abrams ret-conning it. Working out great, eh? The auteur theory works for single releases or if the director or screenwriter is going to stay for the long haul. But what's the long haul for Star Wars--another decade or two? A century? It's unrealistic to let every director have complete creative control for an ongoing universe. I've come to really like Rian's movie, so yeah, I'll go with what I said. So you're also fine with Abrams ret-conning him then? One guy saying anyone can be a Jedi, and the next guy reversing it? I'm fine myself with either one of those ideas, but I'm NOT fine with every director choosing back and forth which one they prefer.