fantastic_four

There's an open story point I was expecting Abrams to insert something into in Rise, but he didn't. And now I'm expecting someone else to eventually do it. How was Anakin conceived? Shmi said she doesn't know, and Qui-Gonn hypothesized that he was conceived by the Force itself. After I heard Palpatine say he created Snoke, I was wondering if Abrams would have him say he created Vader, too. I bet he considered it but didn't do it fearing a fan backlash. Probably doesn't make much sense anyway, but where Anakin came from is still an open question I bet someone tackles. If he had created him, why would Palpatine let Anakin get raised under semi-random, non-ideal conditions as a slave on Tatooine who ended up joining the Jedi? Seems more ideal to raise him quickly and under controlled conditions similar to the way clone troopers are, and to create lots of him instead of just one.

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.

Didn't realize they fired Trevorrow, interesting. Wasn't paying attention to Star Wars much the last two years due to all the bad news so I'm not surprised I missed it. Was the three different directors idea a reaction to Abrams declining Episode 8, or was that the original plan? My memory from 2016 is that they didn't announce that Abrams wouldn't return for a few months after Episode 7, and given the massive critical and box office success of the film it didn't make sense at the time not to bring Abrams back if he would have actually agreed to do it.

David Heyman was the curator of all of them, wasn't he? And he's also producing the Fantastic Beasts follow-ups?

This is also my guess, and I'm hoping Abrams eventually either confirms or denies it. But I doubt he does that within the next year or two.

Hulk is a limited character anyway. He's got the same problem Superman does--he's so powerful, who's he going to fight? With Superman, everyone loves other Kryptonians like Zod best, but that's just so unoriginal. Same with Hulk--Abomination is his ultimate foe, but really he's just an uglier copy of Hulk. I still freaking love Incredible Hulk. Or more specifically, I love every scene with Tim Roth, and I revere that last Abomination/Hulk fight. That's the absolute pinnacle of Hulk on screen. Ripping a taxi in half and using the two halves as boxing gloves to punch Abomination? WHAT MORE DO YOU PEOPLE WANT?!?! Hulk probably isn't in the top ten of my favorite comic superheroes, but everything that film gave me exceeds whatever it is I do like about Hulk. But yea, everything else in that film is meh...when I re-watch that film, it's just the Blonsky highlights and that last fight. My adrenaline still goes up when Hulk crawls out of the street and Abomination starts taunting him to fight.

Was that Feige letting that happen or Perlmutter and the Marvel Creative Committee? He was still under their thumb back then. I've also heard Norton did some parts of the screenplay, but I've never heard which parts, have you? I've heard him comment on Marvel several times in interviews including in 2-3 interviews this year, but he's not at all forthcoming about what went wrong with Marvel. He mostly denies that ANYTHING went wrong, but clearly something wasn't entirely great for them to switch from him so fast.

I can't wait until the first time someone sitting right next to me does that...my immediate instinctual reaction will be to ask them to hold my beer so I can go to the bathroom.

Exactly. As if George Lucas didn't have a generic formula he consistently repeated and co-ordinated it with toy sales. It's been a money grab since they started offering it with the success of the original. You could come up with a list of 100 things to hate about Empire OR Return of the Jedi. Billy Dee as the token black guy, or Yoda merging the Muppets into Star Wars, or Ewoks and Endor replacing Wookies and Kashyyyk just because Chewbacca toys weren't selling as well as teddy bears would have. I could keep going, but what we lacked at the time was twofold--the Internet to create an echo chamber of hate, and a generation of kids too young to see the weaknesses of the original trilogy who were old enough to see those problems by 1999 once the Phantom Menace and every subsequent film came out.

A bit more about this. I've been praising Kevin Feige as something akin to a genius in these forums for years now. "Genius" overstates it drastically; really he's just the first of his kind that needs to be duplicated. What he's doing isn't entirely unique, it's just unique within the film industry. Television producers have known this since forever, and comic editors have known it, too. Feige is really just acting in a similar role that Stan Lee, Jim Shooter, or Joe Quesada did at Marvel in making sure that authors don't stray too far from universe canon. Gene Roddenberry did this for Star Trek back before he died. Kathleen Kennedy is doing a LITTLE bit of this kind of curating--most evident when she fired the original directors on Solo--but for the most part, she has mostly just relied on a VERY long tradition in filmmaking known as auteur theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auteur The idea is simple--films are better when one person controls every aspect of the creative concept. That's why aside from actors we focus on directors more than any other role in film. In general, this is absolutely the way to achieve the best possible films. Christopher Nolan wasn't interfered with in any way by Warner Brothers, and as a result we got the Dark Knight trilogy and TDK as the best comic book film ever made. And when we get Feige's predecessor Avi Arad breaking auteur theory and ham-handedly forcing Sam Raimi to shove Sandman AND Venom AND Green Goblin 2 into one film in part because his toy company Toy Biz knew those villains were all among the most popular sellers of toys, then we get cruddier films even from great directors as we did with Spider-Man 3. However, when we're talking about a serial UNIVERSE of content like Star Wars, Marvel, or DC, the auteur theory breaks down. You can't just let film directors have creative control over each film and break canon within the universe. This is one of the reasons MANY film critics have limited respect for Marvel movies, and it's an element in the criticism Martin Scorsese had for Marvel films earlier this year. He has absolute reverence for the auteur theory of film and has mostly been allowed to operate under it himself throughout his career, and just the fact that Marvel can't use it means that their directors are inherently limited in what they can do. Which is in part what he was alluding to with his comments about Marvel movies being more like "theme park rides" than cinema. He's not wrong at all, but he's being overly pessimistic. But if you're going to do serialized fiction--and unlike Scorsese (BTW he admitted in his New York times follow-up editorial to his comments that he can envision a different version of himself that may have taken to serial/universe-based films had his background been different than it was) I absolutely, positively believe it's worth doing--you can't let directors have absolute control. There has to be a curator to keep the overall universe consistent. Ideally that would have been Lucas, but my past experience with his ego is that he's not really capable of doing it; he's far too negative about other people's ideas and far too narcissistically controlling over the creative process to do the job. Unfortunately, it seems clear that Kathleen Kennedy either isn't willing to do it or just isn't very good at it. I certainly don't look at Solo, TLJ, or Rise as failures at all and I enjoyed all three, but they're not among my favorite Star Wars works, so I'd rather have someone like Dave Filoni, Pablo Hidalgo, Feige, or whoever step up and fill the curator spot. Star Wars is not alone in this--few or no movie franchises have ever had their competent curator. DC hasn't had one yet, and the Fox or Sony Marvel movies didn't, either. Hollywood has never been geared towards the best way to do serialized or universe fiction and has always revered auteur theory, so for now, it's rare for a studio to know to hire or to find a guy like Feige.

I'm hoping Abrams opens up at some point about what conflict between he and Disney may have led to Rian being allowed to venture out onto his own. Abrams almost certainly had something in mind about where Snoke came from and who Rey's parents were when he left those threads hanging in Force Awakens, but my understanding is that the main reason he didn't direct Episode 8 is that Bob Iger pissed him off by not pushing the release date and forcing him to work 100+ hour weeks for months, so by the end of the film he had enough. But did he and Rian ever collaborate or talk at all? And why did he come back, did Iger and/or Kathleen Kennedy come and kiss his arse, perhaps? And if he and Rian did have diametrically opposed ideas about Rey and the Force being tied to genetics, why not go a different way than he originally planned that would fit in Rian's take?

An old republic epic would be fantastic, if they can build it on the foundation of the birth of the sith and jedi, I havent seen anything close to that yet, unless KotOR counts +2 I'd kill for HUGE Jedi/Sith battles. The big lightsaber battle in Attack of the Clones was super-fun at the time, but I'd like to see more.

That does seem to be the biggest canon difference between Rian and Abrams. The fact that two directors can have that kind of disagreement without being mediated by Kathleen Kennedy is why someone else needs to take her place as curator of Star Wars. My recollection is that Lucas flip-flopped on this over time, and I don't know that it was ever crystal clear where he ended up. He's been quoted when asked early on in the 1970s as saying that anyone can be Force-sensitive and it's not genetic, but unless I'm forgetting or have overlooked something, everything he actually ended up putting in the movies suggests it's genetic.

I have some of the same questions you do, but I haven't seen all of Clone Wars or Rebels yet and presume at least some of the answers lie there. But this question burned me throughout the scenes where they showed the amphitheater. Whoever they were, they weren't terribly skilled in the Force to all get taken out at once like that. I'm guessing they were all clones of someone because they all looked to be the same size in the closeups, but who I'm unsure of. Could have been Palpatine clones, could have been Snoke clones, or possibly someone else. The only reason Snoke occurred to me is since Palpatine said he created Snoke and we saw a few terminated clones of him in glass vats. I'm wondering if the main story of the Mandalorian ties into this. Snoke started the First Order, and Palpatine controlled Snoke, and I believe that the First Order does exist in the timeframe of the Mandalorian, it just hasn't risen to power yet. It could be that Snoke is the most Force-sensitive being Palpatine had available to clone aside from himself, and in the Mandalorian we're seeing him trying to obtain "The Child" for cloning to create an elite Sith army. He must not have obtained him, however, because whoever was in the ampitheatre was significantly larger than Yoda's species. Or maybe they were supposed to be the Force ghosts of all dead Sith since Palpatine was claiming that he was channeling the power of a thousand Sith. But I would have expected their sizes to vary far more significantly if that were the case...maybe it was just hard to tell under the extra-loose cloaks?

I have seen 95% of the Clone Wars and Rebels, other than easter eggs they added nothing to my understanding of the movie. I do not think those shows significantly fill any of the plot holes. I'm fairly sure Valiantman wasn't calling them plot holes, and I know I wasn't. So I can't tell if you're talking about something entirely different than his questions or not...for example, you're saying that NO Sith history was ever covered in either series? It definitely was in some of the Clone Wars episodes I've seen, and I assume there's more in episodes I haven't. There's a rule of thumb about plot holes in films--80% of the time when a fan calls something a plot hole, it isn't. Sometimes it is, but the nature of fandom is whatever we don't understand we often lazily deem a plot hole even if there's an explanation somewhere in the film's lore that wasn't explicitly shown.

Been hearing this same mess for 20 years now ever since Phantom Menace. I generally enjoyed it. Not as much as Force Awakens, but I'm not sure yet. I do want to see it again which wasn't as much the case when I saw Last Jedi, which I didn't hate but also didn't love. There's no doubt that the action sequences were ratcheted up to 11, and that's usually enough for me to have a good time.

I have some of the same questions you do, but I haven't seen all of Clone Wars or Rebels yet and presume at least some of the answers lie there. But this question burned me throughout the scenes where they showed the amphitheater. Whoever they were, they weren't terribly skilled in the Force to all get taken out at once like that. I'm guessing they were all clones of someone because they all looked to be the same size in the closeups, but who I'm unsure of. Could have been Palpatine clones, could have been Snoke clones, or possibly someone else. The only reason Snoke occurred to me is since Palpatine said he created Snoke and we saw a few terminated clones of him in glass vats. I'm wondering if the main story of the Mandalorian ties into this. Snoke started the First Order, and Palpatine controlled Snoke, and I believe that the First Order does exist in the timeframe of the Mandalorian, it just hasn't risen to power yet. It could be that Snoke is the most Force-sensitive being Palpatine had available to clone aside from himself, and in the Mandalorian we're seeing him trying to obtain "The Child" for cloning to create an elite Sith army. He must not have obtained him, however, because whoever was in the ampitheatre was significantly larger than Yoda's species.

I'm not sure you guys understand--Solo has a 70% Rotten Tomatoes rating whereas this has a 58% rating. Clearly, Solo was better. Let's ramp up the negativity...this thread has almost become bearable with all the gushing fanboy positivity within the last 24 hours.

It takes a special kind of hate to make less money overall than you took in on opening weekend. I'm guessing that angry viewers demanding refunds accounts for that $4.1 million decrease in revenue overall on Last Jedi! No, it's a simple misprint--that $24.6 mil isn't a total, it's the amount it made after opening weekend. So the actual total is $28.7 plus $24.6. Just the fact that Iger is pulling Feige in tells me he knows what to do--it's time to get someone with vision in to helm the franchise. My current hope is that Dave Filoni is that guy...he's certainly proved his worth with Clone Wars, Rebels, and The Mandalorian. I'm not sure he actually wants to be an executive type like Feige, but I sure hope he does. Realistically, my guess is that's not what he wants because creative people usually want to do creative stuff instead of sitting behind desks wearing suits. Geoff Johns ultimately didn't want that with DC and is writing up a storm since he stepped down.

I can't decide if this episode is the best or episode 3 where he steals the kid and all of the Mandalorians fly in to save him is the best. I lean slightly towards episode 3 because that shootout is just too cool, but Giancarlo Esposito tips it right back to episode 7...so I just can't decide.

And now we've left Tatooine, so is that now a dropped thread? Or will it resurface in the season finale?

Indefinitely long. The types of 3D printers available on the consumer market are awful...I still haven't figured out why anyone bothers with them. I see people printing action figure accessories with them and I really hate the way they look. All 3D-printed items have highly visible banding lines that make it impossible to miss them and that make most of the plastic items you'd find in dollar stores look spectacular by comparison.

It's more likely she just moves to another position. She's still one of the top five most successful producers in film history, she's just not a good content manager for an expansive universe like Star Wars. And that's true of the vast majority of producers, too. Kevin Feige is really the first of his kind. You can't just fire Kennedy and hope to hire another Feige in her place since for now he's a unicorn among film producers. Even if Feige takes the head role in Star Wars--or even more likely picks someone else to do it like Pablo Hidalgo, Dave Filoni, or whoever--that doesn't necessarily push Kennedy out, it just removes her from any kind of creative position. There's far more to being a producer than helping guide the content, and she's repeatedly proven herself to be excellent at many or most of those parts of film production.

This is almost certainly the end of Kathleen Kennedy being at the helm of Star Wars.

Hard to want to read Medelson's review if he's going to start a tweet with that much hyperbole.