Star Wars VIII: The Last Jedi

[Lakov_Sanite]

I suppose if star wars is consistent about anything it's having newer movies shit all over older ones.

[Phildo]

Did Someone Say Headcanon ?

What can readily be deduced is that their first recruit, who soon became their top field agent, was R2-D2.

Bahahahaha

[Goumindong]

R2-D2 Rebel spy is all of

1) really dumb
2) the worst part of the prequels
3) clearly intentional by Lucas

[grebo]

I finally understand.

A. Rian Johnson is 5' 6".

B. Rian Johnson sounds like this:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji7f6Gb48Hw

It all makes sense now.

[IainC]

R2-D2 Rebel spy is all of

1) really dumb
2) the worst part of the prequels
3) clearly intentional by Lucas

That's essentially the twist in Excession except that Iain M Banks was a million times the writer than Lucas is.

[Threash]

Man, i loved all those books but the only one i can remember by title alone is player of games.

[jgsugden]

They announced today, oficially, that there will be a sow down on Star Wars releases following Episode 9.  They (Iger) consider SW fatigue to be a real problem.

[Trippy]

Or maybe the movies just suck?

[Khaldun]

You know, even if they didn't, I think fatigue would be an issue. It would actually start to feel like a chore even to see a really great continuation of the main storyline every 9 months or something like that.

[Ginaz]

You know, even if they didn't, I think fatigue would be an issue. It would actually start to feel like a chore even to see a really great continuation of the main storyline every 9 months or something like that.

And yet that isn't happening with the Marvel movies.  So yeah, I think I'll just go with the movies sucked.

[BobtheSomething]

Sadly, I thought Solo did a fairly good job of Marvelling it up by introducing us to various unseen factions and aspects to the universe as well as setting up some nice low level recurring story threads that could pay off later.  But it bombed, so now Star Wars is going to be all JJ.

[Khaldun]

It isn't happening with the Marvel movies because they're super-careful to have tonal variety. I don't think Star Wars is quite the same kind of property--comic books have that tonal variety to begin with. Star Wars as a cinematic property never did--it was primarily known for a single "epic" that blended pulpy and operatic elements with a bit of humor (a blend that went sour in the prequels).

Rogue One was the first to try to build up a bit more tonal range and start separate "genres" within the property. Solo was the second try. I think more than anything else, they just showed that suck or not suck, SW films are expected by most viewers to stay inside a narrower range, and that the SW universe as a whole may not have as wide a range of potential tonalities as far as most viewers are concerned. If you have to stay inside the same kind of tonal range for every film, fatigue is a much bigger issue.

Not to mention how butthurt some vocal fans get if you do anything even slightly unexpected inside that expected tonal range.

[schild]

It isn't happening with the Marvel movies because they're super-careful to have tonal variety. I don't think Star Wars is quite the same kind of property--comic books have that tonal variety to begin with. Star Wars as a cinematic property never did--it was primarily known for a single "epic" that blended pulpy and operatic elements with a bit of humor (a blend that went sour in the prequels).

Rogue One was the first to try to build up a bit more tonal range and start separate "genres" within the property. Solo was the second try. I think more than anything else, they just showed that suck or not suck, SW films are expected by most viewers to stay inside a narrower range, and that the SW universe as a whole may not have as wide a range of potential tonalities as far as most viewers are concerned. If you have to stay inside the same kind of tonal range for every film, fatigue is a much bigger issue.

Not to mention how butthurt some vocal fans get if you do anything even slightly unexpected inside that expected tonal range.

Eh

Every movie after iron Man bar incredible hulk, and the three Thors are basically the same. They're not Aaron Sorkin products but they have the tonal variety of Aaron Sorkin products. They all suck, except for the Jeff Goldblum Thor.

Also all the actors basically play themselves. There's less acting among the heroes in Marvel movies than there is in a high school play.

Meanwhile Star Wars is just bad actors acting badly. Which, typically, you don't want but it seems to be the primary characteristic a long long time ago, in a galaxy far far away.

Edit: actually, I'll grant tonal variety provided we're talking about color tone. They all have slightly different palettes. For example guardians of the Galaxy is that green and purple one. Star wars is brown. Like poop.

[Draegan]

I think once they finally put to bed the Skywalker sage, or whatever 1-9 is, and actually get some competent people to take over the Star Wars franchise you'll finally see some interesting stories that aren't bogged down by nostalgia from 1977.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/danidiplacido/2018/09/20/disney-still-doesnt-understand-why-solo-a-star-wars-story-failed/?source=bloomberg#422628035cf0

J.J. [Abrams] is busy making [Episode] IX. We have creative entities, including [Game of Thrones creators David] Benioff and [D.B.] Weiss, who are developing sagas of their own, which we haven’t been specific about. And we are just at the point where we’re gonna start making decisions about what comes next after J.J.’s. But I think we’re gonna be a little bit more careful about volume and timing.

That's from Iger.

I hope they plop down a storyline that's X years in the past/future to the current universe and just basically start over. I also hope they Marvelize the thing and just make individual movies about specific characters like Iron Man or Thor and then bring them together for major stories like Avengers.

But they'll probably just make stupid trilogies because reasons and it'll suck.

[Khaldun]

Schild notwithstanding, look at the MCU. Post-Avengers, they started to mix it up. Winter Soldier borrowed some elements of a political thriller. Guardians was a kind of caper film/space opera hybrid with fairly different sensibilities than the rest. Ant-Man went for stronger comedic elements. Black Panther went sort of Afro-Shakespeare and upped the drama. etc. They diverged visually more; they got more 'directorial'.

The Star Wars people panicked when someone was going too far off the house style with Solo. They are probably feeling gunshy now about the main stories because of all the thumbsucking by people who didn't like Last Jedi. But it isn't just about timidity by the producers and rigid conservatism by fans. The SW universe just doesn't have the tonal variety of comics as a source to draw from. It's a better example of world creation, but so is Lord of the Rings--and Tolkien's work just wouldn't support a lot of tonal variety, despite the relative gap between The Hobbit, LOTR and Silmarillion.

Making Star Wars into a platform that supports lots of characters and stories is more work than the people involved have reckoned with.

[Ginaz]

Schild notwithstanding, look at the MCU. Post-Avengers, they started to mix it up. Winter Soldier borrowed some elements of a political thriller. Guardians was a kind of caper film/space opera hybrid with fairly different sensibilities than the rest. Ant-Man went for stronger comedic elements. Black Panther went sort of Afro-Shakespeare and upped the drama. etc. They diverged visually more; they got more 'directorial'.

The Star Wars people panicked when someone was going too far off the house style with Solo. They are probably feeling gunshy now about the main stories because of all the thumbsucking by people who didn't like Last Jedi. But it isn't just about timidity by the producers and rigid conservatism by fans. The SW universe just doesn't have the tonal variety of comics as a source to draw from. It's a better example of world creation, but so is Lord of the Rings--and Tolkien's work just wouldn't support a lot of tonal variety, despite the relative gap between The Hobbit, LOTR and Silmarillion.

Making Star Wars into a platform that supports lots of characters and stories is more work than the people involved have reckoned with.

LOTR had great actors, good screenplays and a decent director.  None of which can be said of any of the new SW movies except for Rouge One.  The rest were just, at best, mediocre films.

[Khaldun]

It's really not about the actors, it's about the plasticity of the universe. Even when he's being light and fairy-taleish, Tolkien is earnest and moralizing etc.

You can't do a heist movie set in Middle-Earth that includes a goblin, two Black Numenoreans, a badseed hobbit, a naive elf and Radagast trying to steal Elrond's Sacred Codpiece from Rivendell. You can shift it just a bit and invoke/satirize, but if you own that actual IP and you want to work with that actual IP, you're inside a confined space. Bad actors or good actors, doesn't matter.

[schild]

What

[Ginaz]

It's really not about the actors, it's about the plasticity of the universe. Even when he's being light and fairy-taleish, Tolkien is earnest and moralizing etc.

You can't do a heist movie set in Middle-Earth that includes a goblin, two Black Numenoreans, a badseed hobbit, a naive elf and Radagast trying to steal Elrond's Sacred Codpiece from Rivendell. You can shift it just a bit and invoke/satirize, but if you own that actual IP and you want to work with that actual IP, you're inside a confined space. Bad actors or good actors, doesn't matter.

 

[Velorath]

There's plenty they could do with Star Wars. We know this because people have done it in books, comics, animation, and video games for decades now. I get that Disney wanted to start of with a Trilogy that was a direct sequel because the actors from the OT aren't going to be around forever (as fans have already been painfully reminded of once already). They could have gone off in any direction with the off-year movies though and they played it safe with stuff that tied into the original movies.

Alternatively, Disney could have gone on with a full-on Marvel template for Star Wars and still done a sequel to the OT if they hadn't been so slavishly devoted to continuing on with the Episode format. They could have done an X-wing Rogue Squadron movie with Poe (and Leia), a movie about a Stormtrooper that breaks away from the Empire/First Order, and a Force sensitive scavenger who has a run-in with Han Solo, and then had the stories intersect in later movies. This would have given them the chance to tell some character focused stories of potentially different tones and styles that could have still added up to something bigger as opposed to having a bloated movie like TLJ that has to juggle a bunch of sub-plots so everybody has something to do and can each get 1 character development.

There's a lot of things they could have done, but to start with they need to get good creative teams on these things and then actually let those teams see their vision through.

[Sir T]

There's plenty they could do with Star Wars. We know this because people have done it in books,

[eldaec]

There was nothing wrong with the basic idea of a low risk OT remake or the R1 concept, or a Han Solo heist movie.

There are problems. But not with the concepts.

And there is no problem on earth that is solved by paying attention to the old EU, with the possible exception of 'how can I light this campfire as I have no kindling'.

[Abagadro]

A lot could be fixed with the IP if they would jettison Kasdan and Kennedy.

[Cyrrex]

Well, not that I intend it as a defense of the EU per se, but the advantage of the books is that they have the time and the desire to explain things a bit more thoroughly, and as a result, they have sometimes thought things through in a bit more of a logical fashion.  Because they had to, if nothing else.

Simple things like "where do the First Order come from" and "who the hell is this main bad guy person".  Like it or not, these are really important questions.  In the EU, the equivalent problems come out in the Thrawn trilogy (as this is the sequel to the OT).  There is no doubt who the bad guys are, why and how they exist and what motivates them.  The books actually do some of the basic world building stuff much better than the new movies do.

They literally would have been better off copying the basic framework of the Thrawn stuff, while throwing out the more ridiculous bits.  I like the new stuff just fine, but there is nothing compelling about any of it.  I think 90% of their original decision making was based on the idea that they needed to be able to cast the Big Three in the new movies, which means they had to fast forward 30 years into the future, expecting us to fill in the gaping holes ourselves.

[eldaec]

A lot could be fixed with the IP if they would jettison Kasdan and Kennedy.

Maybe.

I don't think the problem is the presence of them so much as the absence of anyone managing the overall universe. For all the big fanfare when they clarified canon in 2014 - no one is managing it right now.

I don't think that stopped TLJ being good in its own right but Star Wars benefits when it feels like it is part of a wider world. Episode 7 & 8 don't feel like that, maybe with the exception of the bit on Jakku.