Star Wars Episode IX released 12/20/2019

[BrianC]

Personally, I think Star Wars should've ended with the original trilogy. Everything after that was unnecessary.

It's too bad that Episodes I-III were changed from what was originally planned (or so I heard). I read that episode I's script was very different, at least.

[Xyga]

Ok lets' make a Star Wars reboot.

*runs away*

[Squire Grooktook]

Yea, Return of The Jedi was the end of The Heroes Journey. I don't remember "cash grab sequel" being part of the Monomyth, to be honest.

[BryanM]

Ok lets' make a Star Wars reboot.

*runs away*

That was The Force Awakens.

Granted they could have gone farther than that and gone with a shot for shot... ? wait...

....

Farther....

Further....

Further... farther?

Aren't these two words, like, exactly the same? Or really close to it? Why do we have two words doing the same job?

[Zen]

It's a glitch in the matrix, showing our collective semantic prison.
Jump out at the next available exit, BryanM

[Xyga]

Further... farther?

"Luke, I am further. I mean your farther. No I..er. Shit."

[BIL]

Plinkett review is up.

[BryanM]

It says a lot that I don't even feel like talking about Mike and Rich's comedy video and am way more interested in a continued discussion on the etymology of "farther/further". There's 1020 episodes of Pokemon and growing, each identical to the last - no one is meant to watch all of that. It's built for churn, with maybe a one to five year long attachment rate.

That episode of Star Trek TNG they take that clip of Barclay expressing independent thought isn't that bad. No villain, though there is some ambiguous menace. The characters have moral debates about what to do about his new and mighty intellect. Miss this kind of stuff. Hopefully The Twilight Zone reboot isn't noisy flashy garbage.

The example I always like to bring up is the first episode of The Muppet Show. A lady performs a ballet dance, and no further (or farther... no, it's further.. boy, maybe these words are more different than I thought..) commentary is added. You're not told what to think or feel, a snarling brutish British man doesn't judge her and give her a score. You're left to make up your own mind. It was a different time.

Something like reddit is ridiculously good at silo'ing people off from one another. If 45% of the forum's readers agree with you, you can get downvoted by -1000 or more. If 51% agree, you can feel high and mighty about your +3. It's designed for circlejerking, shitposting and stagnation. Sometimes I think Black Mirror isn't The Outer Limits of our times, and is actually an optimistic take on the future, like Star Trek was.

[Zen]

Plinkett review is up.

Good watch. Fair analysis. Light on the blatant cultural assassination, though.

It says a lot that I don't even feel like talking about Mike and Rich's comedy video and am way more interested in a continued discussion on the etymology of "farther/further".

"Luke . . . I am your Fuhrer"? There I said it

Really, BryanM, your feigned disinterest is as transparent as your obfuscation. You are here for the Star Wars.
Learn from that sodden lump of cankerous soy, Rian Johnson; the Archetypes will out.

Even as he schemed Luke's isolated demise onscreen, all he managed to do was have us reconnect with the injured Arthur, recuperating on the Isle of Avalon.
This puppet was seemingly so oblivious to this fact, that he travelled half way around the world to find Hy-Brasil for this scene.

Killing an Archetype? Good luck with that.

[BryanM]

Nah, I only like one of the movies. It's all about the impotent reddit rage, my man. A consolidated forum of everything is extremely useful, but why did they combine the worst aspects of tweeter and facebook with it? How did that get to be the standard? A long-form thread like this one that goes on for more than a month is absolutely impossible to have there, by design.

Your talk about archetypes reminded me of my favorite Sensei character (no not Yoda): Chiun from The Destroyer. Wonderful stereotype Chiun. He got some great lines in the movie adoption.

Watched a bunch of Galaxy Quest clips today and had to appreciate how well the jokes were written. I present this one as an example: Early on, Guy worries that he might die because he played a disposable redshirt that died on the show. In a later scene, he has a full blown panic attack while on the dropship with the rest of the crew, realizing he probably made a huge mistake (thinking it was safer to be near the main characters, but that he might be eaten by a monster on the planet). Gwen tries to comfort him, adamantly telling him that isn't going to happen. When it is proven there are indeed ravenous monsters on the planet, Gwen is the first to flee yelling "Let's get outta here before they eat Guy!" And then there is one final ironic punchline for the attentive: everyone but Guy gets killed later on.

This is just one of many threads in the movie that don't just take one or two scenes - they take the entire movie to fully setup and deploy. Modern stuff is more like a tweeter post - Ghostbusters 2016, modern Simpsons etc. Bunch of random wackiness. Nothing is tried that takes longer than 10 seconds start to finish. Nothing is subtle that you might miss. "Loud sound scare me." God knows I love my shaggy dog stories, but the difference between Norm McDonald telling one and a phone book are leagues apart.

I bet the writers of Galaxy Quest could make an excellent Star Wars movie even I'd like to see. But the Galaxy Quest TV series is more important.

...It's been some pages and months since Logan: Superhero Movies Get Old was posted, right?

[GaijinPunch]

Why Star Wars: The Last Jedi is a Complete Cinematic Failure

[Mischief Maker]

Why Star Wars: The Last Jedi is a Complete Cinematic Failure

I am currently raising money to pay my lawyer who is trying to keep me out of prison. I don't want to talk about it on this here YT page, but you can read the details on my GoFundMe. Don't feel guilted into giving me anything, your support of my work is thanks enough:

[GaijinPunch]

Lol. Had to click "read more" to get that nugget.

[Zen]

Why Star Wars: The Last Jedi is a Complete Cinematic Failure

Most of it was on point until #9. ALL YOUR HEROES ARE DEAD.
The inevitable, "I don't understand the point of bringing back all our favourite characters and showing us that they're sad, old failures."
All reviewers drone on and on, with the same unanswered mantra.

Showing the Heroes as sad, old failures, WAS the point! JESUS WEPT!
The Heroes were allways going to get "current year'd" up the wazoo.

Han and Leia have a emo son, who literally larp's his father to death! Let that sink in.

Upon Han's death, Leia inexplicably gives comfort to equally inexplicable new Mary Sue, while ignoring Chewbacca's grief. Surreal.

Yoda says; "FUCK WHITEY!", sorry, I mean he says; "BURN IT DOWN!".

And Luke . . . Luke, as I predicted on this very forum, maybe a year before the release of TLJ, Luke would have to be debased.

[dan76]

Why Star Wars: The Last Jedi is a Complete Cinematic Failure

I didn't want to go back, but I did, and it's pretty good. Rather than having the fascination of watching a train wreck in slow motion I'm now just depressed. Not only with what has happened to Star Wars, but what now passes as a film.

There is so much wrong with TLJ, but it's a different kind of wrong to the prequels. The prequels have had a bit of a rise in popularity, with fools saying they're not so bad. If that doesn't tell you how shit these new films are I don't know what will.

My gf isn't really a Star Wars fan, so there was more that annoyed me about TLJ than her. She thought Rose was garbage and that whole plot line boring, the Holdo hyperspace chase / secret plan dumb. Poppins Leia cringeworthy, as was Rose saving Finn. The misplaced humour... All that stuff is just bad in any film, doesn't have to be Star Wars. Pointless subplots, confusing motivations just don't work. She did like some of the "gotcha" moments.

As I am a Star Wars fan, Luke and the hyperspace thing really bothered me. As he says in the video, it basically makes any space battle pointless. Why didn't anyone say anything?!?

Luckily the OT can be viewed without any of this shit influencing it. Yes, TLJ fucks up space battles, but it doesn't matter because these films have absolutely nothing to do with with the OT. They're old films from a time when great films had yet to be made (!).

Can't wait for episode 9

[GaijinPunch]

Most of it was on point until #9. ALL YOUR HEROES ARE DEAD.

Agreeish. The part that hit home w/ me was the absolute piss-poor, hammer over the head execution of feminism delivered by Laura Dern's character. Isn't the best way to push diversity/women by making them a respectable/badass role? People seem to think Wonder Woman did as such, even though it was done (probably*) better and 25 years prior by Ripley & Sarah Conner. TLJ's dialogue (Finn and Rose especially) is kind of a poster boy for the old boys club.

*didn't see WW.

[Zen]

Most of it was on point until #9. ALL YOUR HEROES ARE DEAD.

Agreeish. The part that hit home w/ me was the absolute piss-poor, hammer over the head execution of feminism delivered by Laura Dern's character. Isn't the best way to push diversity/women by making them a respectable/badass role? People seem to think Wonder Woman did as such, even though it was done (probably*) better and 25 years prior by Ripley & Sarah Conner. TLJ's dialogue (Finn and Rose especially) is kind of a poster boy for the old boys club.

*didn't see WW.

Disclaimer; from my perspective, feminism, like all the other "isms", is a neurosis. It doesn't exist. So with that being said ;

It seemed to me, that after writing purposefully "feminist" roles, they were left desperately and disastrously writing everything else around them. It was awful.

The example you give of Ripley, shows how wrong TLJ got it.
During most of Alien (1979), it did not register with me what sex Ripley was. The viewer is too engrossed in the character and the plot, to care.
The quality of the script, gave Sigourney Weaver equal standing, (then they went and fucked it all up, with the underwear shot but that's another story)

Then we have TLJ and a purple-haired Laura Dern, folding her arms and craning her neck down towards a diminutive and hyper Oscar Isaac,
with an "OMG! Mansplaining!", look on her face.
Man, Woman, child, no healthy human being, has time for that shit!

Thinking along the lines of "diversity" in film, Art and everything else, is a flawed notion and inevitably ends up doing more damage in the end.
TLJ being a case in point. Does, did or will "The Force Is Female" have any bearing on women in the film industry?
The whole thing was a farce.

[BryanM]

Purple Hair is indeed a blatant expy of Hillary Clinton. The "secret plan" stuff is like all the hoops people were jumping through creating a fantasy of Obama's eleven dimensional chess, instead of simply accepting the obvious surface level grifting was all there ever was. I suppose this is what their overpaid marketing people and MBA's view as a hero.

...though my mind wanders more to what terrible murder hobos the protagonists in the OT are. Perhaps the storm troopers don't miss because they're incompetent or the heroes have magical plot armor... perhaps they miss on purpose. Because they're not coldblooded murder cops, but nazi space janitors just working for a paycheck to get their kids through space college.

Disclaimer; from my perspective, feminism, like all the other "isms", is a neurosis. It doesn't exist.

lol, this is like that scene in Metalocalypse where the guy was like "religion doesn't exist" and Nathan is like, what are you talking about? There's a bible sitting right there.

Thinking along the lines of "diversity" in film, Art and everything else, is a flawed notion and inevitably ends up doing more damage in the end.

Ghostbusters where every ghostbuster is Egon is flat and uninteresting. Variety is the very core precept at the heart of alleviating boredom and monotony.

Flat cosmetic surface level variety is really what you're talking about. Shallowness, without any underlying depth.

This disinterested laziness obviously goes further than just skin color - an easy example I always go back to is the townfolk naming their town "New Tristram" in Diablo 3. No actual, real, person would want to live in a town named after a place every single person died in a fire or got eaten or had their bones explode out of their bodies and turned into a skeleton monster. (If they were lucky.)

We call these sort of content producers "hack frauds".

[Mischief Maker]

I dunno why people think Disney is some kind of SJW corporation when they fired their most talented director at the behest of the alt-right. And it wasn't at the behest of Rebekah Mercer, or even Steve Bannon, they fired the only director that made a Marvel Movie that stands on its own two feet as a film and not an exercise in fan-service, at the behest of Weird Mike Cernovich, the Fredo of the alt-right.

Anyway, here's how you make the Laura Dern character work perfectly as written: The Empire v.2 was tipped off because there's a spy among the Rebels v.2. Leia and Purple lady suspect the spy's still onboard their ship, so they can't reveal their secret plan. In fact when Poe starts mouthing off, that only makes Dern even more suspicious that Poe may be the spy.

Fuckin' simple. Does Kathleen Kennedy read this forum? I could use a new job.

[Zen]

lol, this is like that scene in Metalocalypse where the guy was like "religion doesn't exist" and Nathan is like, what are you talking about? There's a bible sitting right there.

I do not know the Metalocalypse reference, so I don't know whether you are being facetious of not.

By "exist" in this context, I obviously mean "real".
It of course "exists", in the same way a Religious text does. That is to say, as fiction.
Which was my point.

The Women's suffrage, to which you linked, suffers the same neurosis.
Factually, it was a point of equality.
Would it not have been more effective for them to stay within the bounds of this concept, rather than to play semantic word magic?

Suffrage, Feminism, Antisemitism, Racism and lets not forget the "phobias"; Islamophobia, Transphobia, Homophobia, Xenophobia.
Hypnotic, flashing-light words, designed for the rubes, to ensnare them in their ignorance.

No to mention, the conflation of intent, with action.
A fellow can get sent down now, for "hate", apparently.

The chaps that came up with this stuff over the years, must have had a pretty high verbal IQ, what do you reckon, BryanM?

Anyway, here's how you make the Laura Dern character work perfectly as written: The Empire v.2 was tipped off because there's a spy among the Rebels v.2. Leia and Purple lady suspect the spy's still onboard their ship, so they can't reveal their secret plan. In fact when Poe starts mouthing off, that only makes Dern even more suspicious that Poe may be the spy.

I can buy that.
But what can be done with this?!;



My God, even the lego figure gives you an option to remove her face! (but not the scowl, unfortunately);



No, no.
Maybe if we follow "diversify" a little further, we may find our man, that is to say woman, or rather, actress . . or should that be actor, as;
"Some female thespians say it is offensive to be described as an actress"? Who the fuck knows! Anyway, here we are;

Spoiler

[Squire Grooktook]

What these movie really need is a more discernible arc and theme.


OT was the classic heroes journey, the monomyth, done to near perfection

Prequel Trilogy was going to be the classical tragedy. Hamartia. Fall from grace. Excellent mythic subject matter, too bad the actual movies were hot garbage.

When I saw the trailers for Force Awakening, with the emphasis on Finn, I was expecting the classical redemption arc. A guilty cog in a machine who journeys for atonement and eventually becomes a righteous paladin. And that would have been another excellent, archetypal theme befitting the Campbellian milieu the series was built on.


But without a plan (by their own word) that just becomes whatever. I know writing is tough, but I really don't understand how you can spend billions of dollars and manhours on special effects, shooting, production, advertising, etc. but for some reason writing a second draft of your plot is out of the question.

[Mischief Maker]

It's strange to me (not really) that reactionaries are going nuts over female authority figures bringing SJW values into Star Wars at all.

Because the much bigger front-and-center theme of the whole series all the way back to the OT is Antifa!

[FinalBaton]

It's strange to me (not really) that reactionaries are going nuts over female authority figures bringing SJW values into Star Wars at all.

Because the much bigger front-and-center theme of the whole series all the way back to the OT is Antifa!

[GaijinPunch]

This really should have been brought up by now.

[Zen]

It's strange to me (not really) that reactionaries are going nuts over female authority figures bringing SJW values into Star Wars at all.

Not reactionaries. Space Realists . . . oh God, that was bad!

Because the much bigger front-and-center theme of the whole series all the way back to the OT is Antifa!

How the hell would their moms manage to drop them off, at a Galaxy Far Far Away?! Fake news, MM!

"The Resistance" were radicals, though. They did a real number on one Luke Skywalker.



And we all saw how that worked out;

Audio NSFW. again; AUDIO NSFW!!

Spoiler

Jesus Christ, I'm going to hell for this!; https://youtu.be/Ro9sA5l3rd4

Aaaaanyway, talk of goodies and baddies in Star Wars, is so gauche.
What if I put it to you, that there never were any "Jedi".
Only Sith.

This really should have been brought up by now.

I wonder what their Union had to say about it? Maybe they were in on it!

[copy-paster]

Feel like bumping this because well...

[Jonny2x4]

Personally, I think Star Wars should've ended with the original trilogy. Everything after that was unnecessary.

It's too bad that Episodes I-III were changed from what was originally planned (or so I heard). I read that episode I's script was very different, at least.

From my understanding, the only thing that was planned ahead of time for the Prequel trilogy was Obi Wan and Anakin fighting on a volcano at the end of the Episode III. And even then, the prequel trilogy weren't even planned until the making of The Empire Strikes Back, which was originally subtitled Episode II on the script, not Episode V. George Lucas likes to retcon his own history and pretend that Star Wars was always this planned saga, but he was making it up as he went along. Return of the Jedi wasn't even supposed to be the end of the original movie series.

[dan76]

Yay, here we go. Anyone been reading those weird leaks /rumours? Some of them are so batshit crazy I wish they were true.

Spoiler

the one about Palpatine sensing Reys force power way back before The Phantom Menace. He somehow slips through time, brings her back and creates Anakin inside her. She escapes, shuts herself off from the force so he can't find her and gives birth to Anakin.

I mean, it must be fan fiction but given the writing in these movies I'd kind of respect something so desperate.

I still hold out some hope for The Mandalorian though.

[Sly Cherry Chunks]

FWIW the entire plot of Star Trek Discovery was leaked online complete with the teleporting ship powered by mushrooms. Holy shit that was funny. Of course the real joke was that it turned out to be true.

[Classicgamer]

I always felt like Lucas never did enough with the franchise. Now I feel like Disney should just stop making movies. They really suck at Star Wars.


Nothing good has happened to this series since the early 80's. They squandered every opportunity to make something awesome and I now have zero interest in ever seeing another Star Wars movie. The Last Jedi... More like the last star wars movie anyone will pay to see.

Rather than this washed up Skywalker BS, they should have gone back to the Old Republic and a time with thousands of Jedi and huge epic light saber battles n stuff.