Star Wars: Disney Era

[chrisvilla4]

On 12/04/2019 at 18:17, theboyangel said:

Episode 9: The Rise Of Skywalker

great teaser! 

 

Well that just got me all emotional.

 

Chris, aged 43.

[Lichfield Dean]

Oh. Meh.

I still haven't even even seen episode 8. JJ ruined it all for me. Although I was always more into Trek than Wars.

But then I also don't really like the new Trek movies or even Discovery much (although it has some redeeming things, mostly everything apart from the writing).

Now I'm going back to watch the latest episode of The Orville which is actually good.

[Skruff]

That 180 look spin. Where's that from? Must be from an Anime or something. Looks like an iconic scene I've seen somewhere, sometime. 

[Chindie]

 

[sne]

Unless to you turn into red dust, then you're really gone.

Or are you?

[villa4europe]

Star Wars Fallen Order trailer doing the rounds too, no gameplay, good setting but not enough shown to excite me especially after the 2 battlefront games, certainly not a scratch on the old republic trailers which look better than the films most of the time 

[dAVe80]

17 hours ago, Xela said:

That'll be your old age. 

Anymore of that talk, and I won't offer you one of my Werther's Originals! 

[Stevo985]

TLJ completely destroyed my hunger for Star Wars. Never bothered with Solo and can't say I'm particularly excited about this one.

Hopefully I can get a bit more excited for it by the time it's released.

[sne]

26 minutes ago, Stevo985 said:

TLJ completely destroyed my hunger for Star Wars. Never bothered with Solo and can't say I'm particularly excited about this one.

Hopefully I can get a bit more excited for it by the time it's released.

Same here.

I actually watched Solo and it's an OK matinee flick/heist movie.

But other than it borrowing Chewie, the Falcon and a bunch of character names from, Star Wars it feels as much of a Star Wars movie as the old The Ewok Adventure & Battle for Endor movies they made back in the 80's

[Raver50032]

As ever, the teaser trailer looks cinematically wonderful. They did this with TFA and TLJ though as well. Problem was, TFA was a nice welcome back to the franchise offering, with a pretty much millennial updated safe space version of Episode 4 and TLJ upset a lot of people for various reasons. That's what you get when in successive films, you vandalise and kill off two generally beloved gammon white male heroes. Both of whom, seem to have become 'toxic' (modern buzzword in gender politics) in their older age. Neither of them represented what we saw and felt at the end of ROTJ. In terms of eye candy and musical score, TFA and TLJ are more than decent. The general vandalism of the story structure, and the heroine's journey in the latter though are specious.

Anyway, back to the new trailer. It's visually crisp and promising. It wasted too much time on a heavy breathing lead female character in a desert setting. For me, having been fooled by the first two sequel trilogy film trailers (even further distant, the Episode 1 trailer looked fab), I can't get excited by this one, other than the sharp uprising musical ejaculation into Leia's theme.  What is almost certainly the ruins of the second death star seen in that shot near the end looks really nice and I have no idea what to expect from their adventure to that location - Endor system? Not necessarily the forest moon of Endor. But... unless it's a flash back, that Palpatine laughter... good grief... another slap in the face of the original trilogy fans if Palps survived that. Totally poops all over Anakin's legacy from ROTJ... another person dying in vain and no real victory for the Rebellion ensemble. They have to be careful with where they are going if indeed, Palpatine really is back in play. At least we know that Kylo Ren cannot be the main bad guy... Rey's already beaten him twice. Okay, he was a little injured in TFA, and in the second, he's left unconscious after their duel in TLJ, where Rey pops up moments later in the Falcon giggling that she's just shot down 3 (three) Tie-Fighters with one shot.

Rey's Force Leap into the air to seemingly jump over the Tie-Fighter was neat cinematography. Some time has passed since TLJ, so I can buy into the fact that Rey is actually now capable of doing things. However, in both TFA and TLJ she was a Mary Sue, and unless this is properly explained in Episode 9, her iconographic legacy for little girls around the world will be a little hollow. I have no problem with female leads... just poorly written characters, and both JJ and Ruin Johnson need to take a share of the blame for the 'meh' value of Rey's character. Her journey has felt far too quick and un-earned, with no real peril or danger. I get that they want to promote women, and rightly so, but you can't just give out such an easy, un-earned victory every time at no personal cost. It diminishes the value of what you are trying to promote.

It seems a little late in a trilogy of trilogies to have a title of 'The Rise Of Skywalker...' It's all open to interpretation I guess... Is 'Skywalker' the new name for the cult of light side Force users going forward? Is Luke coming back from the dead? Is Rey now ret-conned to be a Skywalker all along? Is Kylo Ren (semi-Skywalker) to be redeemed? Personally, I think Ren is too far gone, thought after killing children in the Jedi Temple, even Anakin was ultimately saved, despite it costing him his life.

Stormtroopers with jet packs look promising... it isn't Kylo Ren fixing that helmet... that crashing/on fire A-wing seems to be flying around a Clone Wars era Star Destroyer (look at the red trim if you watch it back in slow-mo), I believe that the individual with whom Kylo Ren is tussling with in the forest is potentially one of the Knights Of Ren... and where the **** is R2? That new mini-unicycle droid 'D-0' is the new 'porg' and 'must have' toy... and it's good to see the Millennium Falcon with a circular Sky dish on the roof again - just in time for a new bit of merch flogging. Lando returning is nostalgic fan service, which is okay I guess but it didn't grab me like it seems to have with others... I bear Lando no malice, but... dude... where have you been??

Yeah, as much as I like Star Wars... I'm not buying into the hype just yet, or engaging in a Disney circle-jerk. We've been here before. Hopefully, 9 is more Rogue One than TLJ. It's criminal that the original cast didn't get one last scene together before the break up and vandalistic killings began. Not even a holo-call.

And there I was, thinking that if Lucas sold to anyone, that Disney would be a proper, safe pair of hands. They're paying for the lack of planning and continuity, unlike the success we're seeing with Marvel and it's grandstand planning over more than a decade. It's stinks, because Star Wars deserves more than the cash cow it has been used as.

--

I'd prefer to see films, instead of shelling out for another subscription just to see The Mandalorian TV show. I'll wait for that to come on DVD thanks. I'm not paying for BT, Now TV (for the F1 is quoted as best part of 200 notes for the season!!), Netflix, Amazon Music and Disney. Sorry... I just am not. At Star Wars Celebration over the weekend, they actually cut off the live stream service on YouTube for us paupers who didn't go to Chicago for it when they showed the 'sneak peek' at footage from the new series. Words Removed. Yeah, treat me like that, I'll wait for the DVD thanks.

[villa4europe]

I liked the trailer right up until the palpatine laugh, now im near convinced that they don't know what they're doing, the arc of the trilogy suggests it wasn't actually written as a trilogy, snoke was a complete waste of time, Brienne of tarth was a waste of time, too much of the writing has been poor, saw a few comments suggesting (maybe lazily) that JJA is now stealing a lot from ROTJ

this film has a lot to do to wrap this up satisfactorily 

 

[Chindie]

There is nothing in that teaser that does anything for me. Even the title is shit imo.

The new trilogy has turned out to be a bit of a damp squib, and Disney's era generally isn't good.

The Force Awakens is a cynical rerun of a New Hope whose biggest successes are laying the seeds for mysteries that would be solved later, and setting up a new kind of villain who isn't just Vader again. It's otherwise bland with a bland protagonist and nods and winks to the required Star Wars touchstones and feels more than a bit tired, so tired that characters actually joke about how played out the ideas are.

Rogue One is the highlight of the new films, and is itself still not incredible. It takes a fundamentally good idea, a hole in the original story that you could slot a little largely self contained story into, and does it reasonably well. You could ditch a fair bit of it, all the stuff with Forrest Whittaker's character is rubbish, most of the characters are underused, Felicity Jones' acting is not good... But the fundamental plot is good, really good, it has really good Star Wars-y action, possibly the best action scene in the entire franchise... It's ultimately a nice take on an 'old' Star Wars movie.

The Last Jedi is a weird movie that seems to bear a grudge against everything that came before it. It takes all the mysteries TFA laid throughout its runtime and throws them away with abandon. It's plot is stupid and as a way of driving the film forward is absolutely absurd. It has a whole subplot whose entire purpose appears to be to make a (in fairness, well intentioned) point about the rich and powerful being evil, and that morality is grey, but has no bearing on anything else. It culminates in what should be one of the most impactful moments the series could do, and it does it in a completely low key tossed aside manner which has curiously low levels of emotion or catharsis. It has dreadful humour, and some of the worst scenes I can recall in any blockbuster of recent years (notably Leia's non-death. Whoever thought that was a good idea needs to be locked away from scriptwriting for the sake of the cinema industry)On the other hand, it has some nice action, looks beautiful, has ideas that are new to the series and takes things in ways that subvert expectation. Unfortunately most of those subverted actions are disappointing. It ultimately leaves a new blank sheet, but it's an unsatisfying one as it rejects every question and set up that were TFAs highlights.

Solo is a mess. It's fairly entertaining, but it's a mess. It has cynicism dripping off it (you can play Han Solo bingo with it. Take a drink with every reference to Han's 'mythos' - you'll end up in A&E). It has characters it throws in and gets rid of with no impact. It's ugly - it's one of the dingiest, darkest, weirdly shot blockbusters I've ever seen, with loads of awkwardly framed scenes that you have to suspect come from Ron Howard's last minute reshoots. The cast is... passable? Ehrenreich has a thankless task doing a Harrison Ford impression and he isn't up to it. Emilia Clarke is a bad actress. The droid is a weirdly horrible character. Donald Glover is the highlight doing a caricature of Billie Dee Williams, while Woody Harrelson is fine in a role he can do in his sleep. The tie in to the wider universe is crap and there's set pieces and ideas that are simultaneously rubbish or undercooked. It's not awful but it's not particularly good either, and it feels so cynical and unnecessary.

With that background looking at the teaser it just doesn't... have... anything. It's nicely slot and the CGI looks good. But all of them, bar Solo, have managed that. I don't have much, if any, investment in most of the new characters - Rey is too bland, Poe is a cardboard cutout, Finn has a cool set up that the Last Jedi has completely tainted and arguably closed. Kylo has the best arc and, with the best will in the world, he's the villain. They aren't going to do that much more with him. And then the Emperor stinger... It's just so cynical.

There's so much that can be done with Star Wars. They never should have done a trilogy directly following the original. They should have done something completely removed from it, forging their own mythology in the framework of Jedi, Sith, lightsabers, etc etc. Gone back to the Old Republic stuff, or pushed far into the future. And build films around it that either widen out their world (in the way that the Mandalorian series seems to be - making a story about a bounty hunter in that world) or ones that fill gaps in the existing mythos, things like Rogue One, dealing with the natural gaps in the story - Obi Wan between trilogies, Vader between the trilogies (the Rogue One nod towards that is awesome), origins of superfluous characters that don't matter like Fett which are blank slates, not ones like Han who can only disappoint.

By making a direct sequel series they set themselves up for a fall. They invite comparisons between them, which the new series can only disappoint in - Rey is Luke, but Luke is iconic because he's the audience's eyes in this new world who becomes an archetype, whereas Rey is a new character in a world we know who is playing a role we know. Even if she's written stunningly (and she isn't, she's the blandest bland that ever blanded), she'll disappoint. The established mythology also hamstrings everything, as the connections invite expectations or highlight holes - Luke coming back will only disappoint because he's the old hero and nothing you can do is going to please what people will want from him (although the Last Jedi barely tries), and the new evil empire seems incongruous with what we know. And it'll feel cynical, because it is. The studio isn't prepared to gamble on a new totally fresh take in case the Star Wars name alone won't sell it, so they go for the safety blanket of making a new world that is connected to the old that made the series. This isn't too say that a completely new series would avoid comparison, or cynicism, it wouldn't, but by having that connection so clearly it'll make that comparison more stark and also weightier, because fans will feel the new taint the old that they hold dear.

I feel like Disney need to take stock after this film. They need to do some rescue work, and a hiatus won't hurt it either, to bring back that feeling of Star Wars being something special.

[villarule123]

Before TFA I was like a little kid on Xmas eve, and I liked that film. After seeing the disgrace that is TLJ, which I've never re-watched, I'm finding it hard to give a shit about Episode VIIII. I never thought I'd say that.

[dAVe80]

So not am I only really looking forward to it, I may be in a minority of wanting more Star Wars! I can't get enough of it! I want Episode 9 now! I want the Mandalorian now! I want the Rouge One spin off now! Then when that's done, I want every other spin off you can think of!

Young Admiral Ackbar? Yep, I'll watch that!

The Great Alderaan Bake Off? Damn straight!

Tatooine's Got Talent? Erm, hell yeah!

The X-Wing Factor? Too bloody right!

[HanoiVillan]

Great post that @Chindie, a really good summary of the state of play IMO. 

Just wanted to add some thoughts on some of it:

10 hours ago, Chindie said:

Rogue One is the highlight of the new films, and is itself still not incredible. It takes a fundamentally good idea, a hole in the original story that you could slot a little largely self contained story into, and does it reasonably well. You could ditch a fair bit of it, all the stuff with Forrest Whittaker's character is rubbish, most of the characters are underused, Felicity Jones' acting is not good... But the fundamental plot is good, really good, it has really good Star Wars-y action, possibly the best action scene in the entire franchise... It's ultimately a nice take on an 'old' Star Wars movie.

I agree with this, and Rogue One is the only one of the new films I have any interest in re-watching. The idea of creating a story that fit a hole in the original trilogy and then creating a bunch of standalone characters, who were basically believable in the universe of the films, who had an important part to play but then didn't actually matter that much to the mythos, was a really good one. And the planet/whatever they ended up on was beautifully conceptualised and art designed. 

10 hours ago, Chindie said:

I don't have much, if any, investment in most of the new characters - Rey is too bland, Poe is a cardboard cutout, Finn has a cool set up that the Last Jedi has completely tainted and arguably closed. Kylo has the best arc and, with the best will in the world, he's the villain. They aren't going to do that much more with him. 

I think an additional problem here, to be blunt, is that a Adam Driver is a really good Actor, with a genuinely impressive CV, and he just looks like he's in a different, better series of films than everything else happening around him. 

10 hours ago, Chindie said:

There's so much that can be done with Star Wars. They never should have done a trilogy directly following the original. They should have done something completely removed from it, forging their own mythology in the framework of Jedi, Sith, lightsabers, etc etc. Gone back to the Old Republic stuff, or pushed far into the future. And build films around it that either widen out their world (in the way that the Mandalorian series seems to be - making a story about a bounty hunter in that world) or ones that fill gaps in the existing mythos, things like Rogue One, dealing with the natural gaps in the story - Obi Wan between trilogies, Vader between the trilogies (the Rogue One nod towards that is awesome), origins of superfluous characters that don't matter like Fett which are blank slates, not ones like Han who can only disappoint.

I agree as well, and have said this all along. I've probably said this before on here, but when I was younger I had one of those choose-your-own-adventure Star Wars books, which was set on a planet completely remote from the overall story, and the first part of the story (I never got very far, I was unbelievably crap at it) was based on this bloke repairing transports and essentially trying to avoid detection in a sort of low-key dystopian, slightly post-industrial Imperial surveillance society. The only connection to the main story that I could tell was that I kept getting killed by Boba Fett. But I've thought more about the world that book was set on than I have ever thought, or will ever think, about either of the two trilogy parts in recent times. A setting like that - doesn't have to *be* that, obviously, but something well away from the main storyline but of the same universe - would be the chance to make a really good Star Wars movie that's actually a really good movie, in the way that 'Logan' is a good superhero movie that's also a good movie. They literally have an entire universe to imagine, and the best they've been able to come up with is either repeating what was done 40 years ago, or bringing all that stuff back from the dead. It's a catastrophic failure of imagination or risk-taking. 

Edited April 15, 2019 by HanoiVillan

[Raver50032]

15 hours ago, dAVe80 said:

So not am I only really looking forward to it, I may be in a minority of wanting more Star Wars! I can't get enough of it! I want Episode 9 now! I want the Mandalorian now! I want the Rouge One spin off now! Then when that's done, I want every other spin off you can think of!

Young Admiral Ackbar? Yep, I'll watch that!

The Great Alderaan Bake Off? Damn straight!

Tatooine's Got Talent? Erm, hell yeah!

The X-Wing Factor? Too bloody right!

I'm looking forward to 9, just not buying into the hype for a third time with the main saga... I couldn't wait for Rogue 1, and I wasn't disappointed there really.

In general, I am with you for wanting more Star Wars... I can't get enough of it either! I don't believe I could ever get bored exploring the prosaic potential of the Galaxy it is set in. There are billions of stories... not all Force users. The possibilities are endless. I'm looking forward to more films, the two currently being produced TV serials (though I will probably wait for DVD as explained in my post) - most of all, well written characters rather than some of the filler we have been given.

I'm less enthused by the Fallen Order game, which seems like an updated version of The Force Unleashed. And I struggle (as a 44 year old guy) to get invested in the Clone Wars/Rebels animations.

May the Force be with you dAVe80 (just realised what you did with your screen name!! Cool!)

[villa4europe]

shame because the clone wars is a gold mine IMO the books are great, the old cartoon network series was great (between the books and the cartoon a lot of gaps were filled in, GG even became a decent character) not seen that much of the 2nd clone wars series or rebels but from what I have seen both are good

[Raver50032]

Yeah, don't get me wrong, I've got the Clone Wars stuff on DVD... it's just way down my Star Wars pecking order when I'm looking for a fix!!

[desensitized43]

22 hours ago, Chindie said:

The Last Jedi is a weird movie that seems to bear a grudge against everything that came before it. It takes all the mysteries TFA laid throughout its runtime and throws them away with abandon. It's plot is stupid and as a way of driving the film forward is absolutely absurd. It has a whole subplot whose entire purpose appears to be to make a (in fairness, well intentioned) point about the rich and powerful being evil, and that morality is grey, but has no bearing on anything else. It culminates in what should be one of the most impactful moments the series could do, and it does it in a completely low key tossed aside manner which has curiously low levels of emotion or catharsis. It has dreadful humour, and some of the worst scenes I can recall in any blockbuster of recent years (notably Leia's non-death. Whoever thought that was a good idea needs to be locked away from scriptwriting for the sake of the cinema industry)On the other hand, it has some nice action, looks beautiful, has ideas that are new to the series and takes things in ways that subvert expectation. Unfortunately most of those subverted actions are disappointing. It ultimately leaves a new blank sheet, but it's an unsatisfying one as it rejects every question and set up that were TFAs highlights.

I could kind of see what they were trying to do with TLJ in laser narrowing the focus to only a few locations (it's basically pretty much a chase movie). Problem is, it's not what anyone wants from Star Wars. People want to see sprawling locations across the galaxy, not be stuck on a single ship the whole time. It made the sin of making the previous movies seem nonsensical with changes to how people perceive what the "force" can do/not do. The scene with Leia in space was **** ridiculous.

22 hours ago, Chindie said:

Rey is Luke, but Luke is iconic because he's the audience's eyes in this new world who becomes an archetype, whereas Rey is a new character in a world we know who is playing a role we know. Even if she's written stunningly (and she isn't, she's the blandest bland that ever blanded), she'll disappoint

I've got big problems with Rey. Her characters progression feels very "unearned" to me. Beating a trained Jedi/Sith in single combat the first time she held a sabre. Force powers that she's not been able to use previously are suddenly fully developed and controllable with no training. Luke's progression was different in that we got to see him fail...a lot. We'd see a gradual increasing of his power and time jumps between each movie that imply he's been trying to master the art before successfully facing off against Vader/The Emperor. With no scenes indicating refinement of her abilities and with no time jump at all between TFA and TLJ it looks forced.

[Brumerican]

On 15/04/2019 at 17:13, dAVe80 said:

 

The Great Alderaan Bake Off? Damn straight!

 

Looking for loaf in Alderaan places ?