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I know everyone here will be ecstatic to hear JJA is back in the driver's seat for Ep IX!

https://www.sideshowtoy.com/blog/star-wars-episode-ix-j-j-abrams-to-write-and-direct/

Star Wars Into Darkness!


What the franchise really needed was another terrible trilogy.

Shrug, he's done fine so far.

If you mean "Thank god, it was better than Lucas" well, ok...

Lens flare or Jar jar binks.  Pick one.

In fairness, Into Darkness was written by Damon Lindledof and JJ Abrams made no secret of not being a big Trek fanboy.

I think he'll do fine with Episode 9 if they can figure out what to do about Leah being dead. The Force Awakens is in my top 3 Star Wars movies, warts and all. Why? Pretty simple. No Ewoks. No blind man accidentally killing Boba Fett. It therefore squeaks by Jedi which has, sadly, only really got the Luke and Vader arc to recommend it these days along with the Sarlac Pit fight. (Jedi is really where you can see Lucas starting to lose his grip on good film making. A trend the prequels continued and Crystal Skull cemented.)

Or, to put it even simpler: JJ Abrams is vastly preferable to Collin Treverrow.

What has Treverrow done that's so much worse than Super 8 or STID? 

And I'm surprised at all the TFA love.  It was a weak film for all the reasons that STID was weak, and as self-indulgent and empty as a later Peter Jackson film.  Just like STID, the more I think about TFA, the more reasons I find to dislike it, all of which come down to the direction or the writing.  I have zero faith in JJ Abrams.

Also, I found RotJ's biggest weakness, beyond ewoks, was the handling of the characters.  TFA does no better.

I rank TFA 4th, just slightly above Jedi for exactly what Riggs outlines. The ewok thing just sucked the life out of the movie, and I cringed when it came out. (I rank 4,5 and Rogue One better than TFA).

So I'm ok with this one. I wouldn't mind the overt nostalgia being dialed back a lot, but the dude still made a Star Wars movie, which hadn't happened since the early 80s.

Into Darkness is also the best Star Trek movie  :grin:

Jurassic World.

I...forgot that existed.  Still, I'd rather watch that twice than STID once.  Or neither, really.

Just going to weigh in with some Abrams love. Well, maybe not love, but like. Well he's all right. Sometimes.

He does some things really well, and the things he does not that good are still okay.

So I'm okay with it.

I've got no problems with his direction. I've got a few with his writing, BUT I think with some oversight you can avoid the solid 'memberberry pie. We'll see how Episode 8 goes.

Kennedy's the one in charge and setting direction and tone for the Franchise. The team did great with Rogue One, despite some jarring continuity problems it created. EP7 was a complete apology to the older fan base and attempt to get things back on track for the bitchy old men... who continue to bitch.  Hopefully Lucasfilm have said fuck-it and just focus on expanding the world.

Everything so far is still better than the prequels and THOSE have a strong, strong fanbase among the 20 and early 30-somethings.

Continuity problems ?

Abrams will be fine on Ep IX, so long as they keep Lindeloff away, which I'm sure isn't a problem. Abrams worst movies have still been watchable - Into Darkness and Super 8 were both watchable, even if ID was fucking awful if you took 2 seconds to think about it at all.

Abrams is a lot like Lucas in that he needs to just shoot the movie and have little creative control over the writing and story.  As a pure behind the camera director, Abrams is one of the best out there, he just needs to be kept away from anything resembling a pen.

1) R2 and 3po were at the base when the fleet left and when the fighters scrambled to catch-up. Leia was nowhere in sight, yet the Tantive IV was on the Admiral's ship at the end. Wasn't she going after Obi Wan? Why suddenly head to Scarif?

2) In ANH Vader states they had received a coded, directed transmission, not a physical hand-off.  After LITERALLY seeing the Tantive IV escape he makes no mention of this to Leia or Antilles who act as if they'd just been cruising along in space on a diplomatic mission. Everyone goes along with this (now) bullshit story instead of Vader calling the bluff by saying, "No, I saw this ship flee."  

3) Why the sudden, abrupt change of stance on maintaining secrecy. Vader tells Krennic that Jeddah will be announced as a mining disaster but less than a few days later Tarkin blows-up Alderaan as a demonstration of force.

4) Some fuckery to minor things like: Wedge being flight control so he doesn't see the Death Star before ANH, Mon Mothma being around for this movie but absent in ANH a short week or two later.  Why does Vader slaughter everyone solo, but then send Stormies in first an hour or two later.

So yeah, small things in the big picture and far less fucked than some Trek continuity problems. Still there, though.

That Henry movie is supposedly what did him in. Uhh...The Book of Henry? I haven't seen it but everything I've read makes it sound pretty damn bad. Jurassic World was fun but still...outrunning a trex in high heels almost made me give myself a concussion from face palming too hard.

I utterly disagree with you about TFA. It was nothing like ID which was extremely heavy handed audience service with no understanding of the source material and why WOK is still a beloved Trek movie. TFA, on the other hand, was a purposeful attempt to win back the older fans and it mostly succeeded barring a few who were like "Eww...icky, a girl in the lead? SJWFEMINAZICHILDHOODRUINED!!!!"

I enjoyed Luke and Vader in Jedi. In hindsight and doing a recent rewatch (as in last Friday while putting together my super expensive Lego Falcon) Harrison Ford is so clearly going through the motions. Also, Han comes across as an insecure jealous dick for most of the Endor parts of the movie. In contrast, in TFA he actually appears to be having fun and felt more like ANH/Empire Han than he did in Jedi. Luke and Leah are basically side characters so it's impossible to comment on.


This isn't real clear in the movie but they basically boarded the Tantive IV and docked with the Admiral's ship because, they had hopes of getting the plans and Obi Wan back to Alderaan ASAP. It wasn't a brilliant plan but the Rebellion never seems to be about strong strategies.


They did receive the transmission? That's what the entire Scariff scene is about? Yes, it was beamed to the Admiral's flagship then taken to Leah's ship but the essence is still the same. And Vader does essentially call the bluff. "You're not on any mercy mission this time, you're a part of the rebel alliance and a traitor." He doesn't explicitly say "Bitch, I saw your ship fly away" but it's pretty damn close. He doesn't even let her try to get her full bs excuse out.


This is actually really, really simple and is explained in A New Hope with the briefing scene. "The Emperor has dissolved the Imperial Senate permanently" immediately followed up by "fear will keep the local systems in line." It's hard to say how much time passes between the end of Rogue One/start of ANH and that briefing scene but regardless, a major political shift has happened in the Empire and the Emperor no longer even has to pretend to play nice and make excuses.


The stuff with Wedge really depends on timing. Did he jump out before the Death Star arrived? Was he even a pilot then? ANH definitely implies that at least a few of the pilots were new, likely to replace losses at Scariff. (It literally shows Red 5 die.) I wouldn't be surprised if both Wedge and Biggs, for example, were put into active duty after Scariff. As for Mon Mothma, this is shown pretty clearly in the movie itself. After that meeting at Yavin the various leaders take off, scattering to the four winds for various reasons.  Poor Bail Organa returns to Alderaan and I think Mon Mothma is going back to the Senate or something. As for Vader and Stormtroopers, I didn't worry about that. I just chalked that up to "Things we can do now vs things we could do in 1977." In universe it could be as simple as Vader being like "I'm tired after killing those dudes and the 501st is itching to shoot people, I'll let them get it out of their systems."

8 will go a long way to determining 9. Give us a good story!! If the story is good and the writing is half decent 9 won't have too much chance to derail (ala whatever the fuck STID was).

Fuck Abrams.

The Director.  Not the tank.

No wait.

Fuck that tank too.

Apparently I think too much during the movies, then, or have a different definition of watchable.  However, I will admit that Super 8 could have been a very good movie if he just cut out the monster and focused on the human characters.  (I never thought I would advocate for that, but there it is.). STID was shit on multiple levels.

That's a big part of it, but he still has pacing issues and scale issues.  There was no time to catch your breath or let an emotional beat sink in in TFA.  And how big was the Republic?  We're all those planets in one system?  Is the Resistance one bunker full of guys? 

Was Super 8 really not that well liked?  I thought it had its flaws, but was overall above average and fun.  Certainly not a bad movie.

Into Darkness was a shitty trek movie, but totally fine/watchable as a sci-fi action movie to eat pop corn to.  Way worst things out there.  Like Jurassic World (now that movie pissed me off).

But Shannow has the right of it I think.  If they do a great job in 8 of expanding the story line and giving the overall plot of the trilogy a direction for JJ to run off of, he should be fine.  If not.....

Super 8 was another sub par carbon copy of a better film.  That's his problem.  He's so unoriginal it's not real.

I will totally acknowledge that.  You can argue over how good of a job he actually does at making them, but most of his stuff is just throwbacks or cliche.  Which is why, if Episode 8 really sets the tone and plot for the remainder of the trilogy, he should be ok.  If it ends up being really self contained or vague, leaving it up to him to come up with the whole ending..........

fuck.

I remember when Episode 7 came out and I was like " this is just a shitty remake of episode 4" and ya'll was like "yo that's cool man, great to have star wars great to have stars". Now Episode 8 is around the corner and your worried about a director, whose only talent is rehashing older better movies into sub-par soulless remakes, is going to make a sub-par soulless remake after you just praised him for making a sub-par soulless remake?   :oh_i_see:

TFA was way worse than pod racing + darth maul, probably better than Jar Jar + droid army (most of the suck has been erased from my memories i'm betting) and tbh I've never managed to actually sit through the entire 3rd prequel so I can't compare them. Its not that its bad but I just don't give a fuck after prequels 1 & 2, I didn't see it in theaters and at the first or second commercial break on tv I always find something else to do/watch.

JJ Abrams is trash, Into Darkness was carried hard by whoever cast it.

Remember when JJ went all mysterious and "hey we are going to have a past Trek villain and its totally secret and its going to be a total surprise and awesome!" And the entire internet went "It's going to be Khan, isn't it?" and he went all "HOW DARE YOU SUGGEST THAT!!!!!"

The Prequels were bad. But in the "some idiot who doesn't know how to make a movie is making a movie way" Not in the "eat a face full of memerberries to enjoy this" kinda insulting bad that I reserve for most hollywood remakes.

JJ Abrams gets away with being a hack because he is good at making movies. Doesn't make his movies good. But you don't stop watching it half way through, you don't go "that's stupid" while watching it. He gets you into the theater, assaults your senses, treats you like the vegetable grade cash milk that you are, and leaves you regretting you even sat through the damn thing. He's that one night stand you don't quite remember agreeing to between the first and third mimosa.

The Prequels are forgivable in how bad they are, like dating a really awkard guy who has no idea what he is doing and only going off that one positive interaction with a female friend who lets him hang out with her in public.

Rank TFA as low as you want but the prequels never get a pass, ever.

Aye, this thread has left me confused.

Maybe it's a different wave of posters, though.

Nope, just crazy posting.

TFA in and of itself was a good movie most of us here enjoyed.  It was perfectly fine for the first movie of the new trilogy, but I can also acknowledge its flaws concerning originality.  It only really becomes a problem in the later half of the series if he keeps that up (and JJ doesn't have the best track record).  This is why we can be totally fine with how the first movie turned out, but still fear how the trilogy will end, done by the same person.

FUCK THAT GUY.

Shovel him a butt load of praise for being derivative but competent and expect him to not be derivative but competent the second time around is like literally not learning from his hat trick with star trek.

And no TFA is not prequel bad. TFA is just unoriginal triple AAA gaming bad. Congratulations JJ star wars is now the movie equivalent of call of duty.

I'm pretty sure the movie equivalent of COD is what most Star Wars fans (or really any fans invested in a franchise brand) really want. And considering how Rogue One played with that formula a bit, I'm willing to give the Star Wars folks the benefit of the doubt.

Really, this next movie either makes Episode IX by forcing Abrams to execute a new story to go along with the new characters or it screws Episode IX by leaving Abrams to figure out what's the overall arc of these three movies, at which point he'll just have the Rebels blow up another killer superweapon while working with cute aliens while Rey finds the goodness in Kylo Ren and saves him from Snoke.

I didn't find TFA objectionable because it was an attempt to figure out what was attractive about Star Wars by re-enacting it. This movie and Episode IX become objectionable if they do the same. If The Last Jedi really mixes it up and tells a new story about the engaging characters that TFA created, Abrams is enough of a journeyman director to finish that story out in a good way. If he's left without guardrails, he'll descend into his more typical hackery.

Rogue One was fucking Miles better than that shite TFA.  Miles.  It's not even a comparison.

Not that I'm saying you were making one.

Sure, and it's partly because it didn't have to re-establish the universe, it just had to expand it into something that we hadn't seen before. Despite it being a prequel that had a very specific ending, it didn't have to be a movie that revitalized a franchise, it could be its own type of movie (which it was - a war movie). TFA is a pretty great movie when you consider how moribund the entire franchise had become and how much ill will it had to overcome. Did it do that by essentially making a love letter to the original Star Wars? Yeah. It didn't really have a lot of leeway to step off a well-beaten path. Now it certainly could have done so without repeating so many story beats, and with a more capable writer/director, it might have.

What Abrams has to work with after Ep. VIII will determine how well he can do. At the very least, the movie will be well-paced and watchable even if it's total shit (see Into Darkness).

He's an arse.  It'll be shit.

You heard it here first folks.

I actually really disagree. I apologize if I've linked this video before but it does an excellent job in breaking some of it down. In particular, Rogue One fairly consistently broke the rule of "show, don't tell" and Jyn is a very passive protagonist who just sort of gets dragged from scene to scene until the last 30 minutes or so of the movie.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsIQa7sH5_Y (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsIQa7sH5_Y)

I never need to watch Rogue One or TFA again so it doesn't matter which is better.

But fuck, even the prequels' characters are more memorable than the Rogue One cast.

Really? I thought they were very well-drawn characters.

I thought they were pretty blah, and especially Jyn Erso.  I remember distinctly thinking in the last act where they were getting the data disk that she was all dressed up for action and never did a god damn thing.  That said, this is all space lasers pew pew zwoosh zwiish kerboom in a galaxy far far away, and it all looked amazing.  Can say similar things about TFA, but of course that had Rey in it.  And I want to have Daisy Ridley's babies.  And, well, Kylo Ren is pretty memorable as well.

Yeah, me too.  Dirty Dozen in Star Wars.  Loved it.  (Yes, I see the irony.)

It's a pretty classic thing? It's not a problem to do it, it's only a problem to do it badly. I don't think they did it badly.

I think they did it terribly. Those kind of movies only work if you actually give a shit when the characters start dying at the climax. I didn't care about Jyn, blind force guy (aside from liking Donnie Yen), blind force guy's buddy, and... fuck I actually have to look up who the other characters were. Take out all the Star Wars stuff and just look at the plot, writing, and acting, and this thing is so unremarkable at best and outright bad at worst that it should be even less talked about than the Magnificent Seven remake. Even that last battle, while pretty, has all the emotional resonance of watching a Star Wars Battlefront stream to me.

Put me in the I didn't care about the characters camp. Not because of the acting, but because they seemed to fast-forward through most of the plot and I wasn't given enough time or back history with any of them to care.

I think the only thing I'd complain about is that Jyn Erso should have been fiercer, more angry, more passionate.

I think otherwise it's pretty much Dirty Dozen/Magnificent Seven/When Eagles Dare/Guns of Navarone or any similar film following this template. The characters are always broad sketches. I cannot think of a single "assemble a team of misfits to take on an impossible task" film where more than 2-3 of them are sketches or archetypes. They only seem memorable in some cases because we've not only seen the movie itself more than once, we've seen its echoes through pop culture in various homages and remakes. When I think on Magnificent Seven (original), here's what I get:

Bald honorable leader
Silent killer
Young impulsive punk who learns to be a man
Slightly shady gambler guy who might be a coward
Tough dude
Old friend of bald leader
I forget


When I look it up, that's sort of right but I've kind of misremembered some of the implied or quick-sketch backstories--and I've seen the movie four times. The only thing those stories are for is to tell us something about their combat proficiencies and specialities to help structure the action when it gets rolling, to give them some motivation to go on what is basically a dumb mission where they're getting paid shit for something that might get them killed, and to help fill in the two or so inevitable moments before the climax where we wonder if the good guys are going to give up or are going to betray the leader. That's it. They're not complex human beings with their own dramatic arcs.

Having seen Rogue One once, here's what I get:

Slightly angry, slightly post-trauma, woman who hates the Empire for what they did to her family
Rebel intelligence officer who is willing to do immoral or desperate things to help the Rebellion
Blind martial artist who is loyal to the Force
His friend who carries a big gun
Tech guy who is switching sides and is kind of nervous
Funny droid

So it feels to me roughly equal to those films. The nervous tech guy is very underdrawn and forgettable. The droid is memorable largely because he feels like he stepped out of an older Star Wars videogame; none of his quips really stick with me. The blind martial arts is memorable because he's Donnie Yen. (But look at the casting for all those other movies I mentioned and you'll see that's the principle there too.)  The intelligence officer actually felt like the most interesting character to me, but that's partly because he changes what we think of the Rebel Alliance (along with Forest Whitaker's character) in ways that offer some new story directions overall, not because he's an intrinsically interesting character.

For Star Wars made by *anyone* to have characters even more memorable or deep than its genre cousins is going to be very difficult. I'm not sure it's really built for that. Basically, I don't think you get interesting characters in action films unless the film is built around one or two characters in a very exclusive way (usually a protagonist and an antagonist), which is something no Star Wars film has done yet. It might be an interesting direction to take a future side film in, but it's also hard considering that the DNA of the franchise is the Saturday matinee, battle of good-and-evil, etc. It just might not be the platform for a story of a complicated hero versus a complicated bad guy.

Ya, if it was Star Wars Dirty Dozen you needed the training camp/exercise bits from that movie where you get to know the characters and start liking them because they were misfits rebelling against the system.  If they wanted to do that (and they should have), they should have dropped the entire father/daughter nonsense that went nowhere beyond setting up the McGuffin that could have been done better in 5 minutes of dialogue.

Fair enough. Jyn Erso's story certainly doesn't add all that much in terms of starting it off--it might have been better for it to be added indirectly as the story went along. That's the thing about Dirty Dozen/Mag Seven stories, there usually isn't a 'main character' whose story is strongly privileged.

Khaldun - I think you made a slight typo in your last post. Where you said "Rebel intelligence officer who is willing to do immoral or desperate things to help the Empire" I think you meant "desperate things to help the rebel cause" or possibly "hurt the Empire".
- well shit and you've already fixed that.  My bad.



I do agree that the characters were too lightly sketched in.  More backstory, or more time for the team to gel, or something, would have had a shot at my caring more about the entire team.

I still think it's a better movie than all of the prequels, and I definitely enjoyed watching it.  Not sure I would go out of my way to view it again though.

The problem I have is that Rogue One doesn't even have 2-3 memorable characters. The droid is somewhat entertaining I guess and maybe they could have done something with the fact that he's only fighting on the Rebel's side due to being reprogrammed but since they don't he's just a comic-relief character with zero agency. As leads, Jyn and Cassian don't have an ounce of charisma between them. If they had killed Jyn off and made Mads Mikkelsen the star of the movie as a galactic-scale Oppenheimer who has to stop his own creation they might have had something.

I realize it's not fair to compare anyone to Kurosawa and Mifune, but when Kikuchiyo starts telling the Samurai the extent to which the fuck over the lower class revealing himself to be a peasant in the process... that's how a well written monologue can define a character. Even some of the villagers get character development, and when characters die, even if they're lesser developed ones, you end up caring because of how it affects others. Again, I know Seven Samurai is considered a classic for a reason and there's no way Rogue One was ever going to stack up favorably against it, but you can look at it to illustrate how you do this kind of story right.

I was pleased JJA was doing tFA because he usually doesn't screw things up on the scale of Into Darkness, and at that point SW desperately needed at movie that wasn't abject shit.

But seems like a real step back from R1 and the promise of a tLJ directed by Johnson.

yeah, I fixed it, noticed it earlier. Sorry.

While I'm not going to wade too far into the conversation here, I think the current trend of over-editing isn't helping this. How can you have a coherent narrative when huge swaths of it are left on the floor, or the entire movie is shot with multiple scenes that may or may not be used?

The fiancee has a habit of asking me to explain films to her after she watches them, I get a long battery of questions. Now, this bums me out, because I mostly enjoy films at face value and don't get into things like, ahem, this thread  :why_so_serious: But we just saw something (I forget what) that was a mess and obviously was cut up pretty heavily in post. So I just told her movies don't make sense anymore (explaining the editing thing) and now I have a good out for those questions.