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Star Wars Episode IX

Started by JOE SOAP, 10 July, 2018, 01:50:53 AM

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blackmocco

Quote from: radiator on 18 December, 2019, 10:47:36 PM
Rich Evans of RLM may have hit the nail on the head when he said, years ago (I think just after the release of TFA) that he thought that while Star Wars as a property had the illusion of great depth, it actually had very limited scope for future stories, and that Disney would struggle to continue it in a meaningful way, and I think the last few years may have possibly proved him right.

Spin-offs, side stories etc can work, but will inherently be a bit niche in appeal and seem to maybe be better suited to the medium of novels and videogames. To all intents and purposes, the mainline films had a pretty definitive ending in 1983, and it's hard to see how long you can artificially extend it beyond that until you have to start resorting to cheap tricks like just straight up resurrecting old dead characters. In some ways its a bit like Ghostbusters - it was such lightning in a bottle and such a product of its particular time and place that it's impossible to synthesize.

Or not, I'm not sure. Maybe Abrams simply wasn't the right pick for writer/director.

Yeah, it's a tough one to settle on. Abrams really doesn't do depth as a director but as RLM say, SW has never had much in the way of depth and when Lucas tried to introduce some nuance in the prequels, the saga collapsed in on itself. The original trilogy are just very simply told adventure stories and looked at it from that angle, it seems crazy to think there's no way to continue those adventures through sequels. Yet here we are.
"...and it was here in this blighted place, he learned to live again."

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DrRocka

Just got back from a triple bill. I thought it was dreadful, but hugely enjoyable!
Never ever bloody anything ever

GrudgeJohnDeed

Quote from: DrRocka on 19 December, 2019, 03:12:04 AM
Just got back from a triple bill. I thought it was dreadful, but hugely enjoyable!

This speaks to me.

I'm going to see it with my mates this Monday coming, it'll be fun seeing friends, munching popcorn and soaking up the CGI! It could be terrible like I thought TLJ was but as I'm no longer being invested, I'm going to be able to turn off my brain and just enjoy the spectacle!

broodblik

Quote from: GrudgeJohnDeed on 19 December, 2019, 03:31:42 AM
I'm going to see it with my mates this Monday coming, it'll be fun seeing friends, munching popcorn and soaking up the CGI! It could be terrible like I thought TLJ was but as I'm no longer being invested, I'm going to be able to turn off my brain and just enjoy the spectacle!

I feel the same I will watch it for the cool special effects and great action sequences. Disney must proof to me that they can make a Star Wars movie. So far the only good stuff they made is The Mandalorian and Rogue One, the rest well is just  :'(
When I die, I want to die like my grandfather who died peacefully in his sleep. Not screaming like all the passengers in his car.

Old age is the Lord's way of telling us to step aside for something new. Death's in case we didn't take the hint.

karlos

I'll be seeing it Monday afternoon, with very low expectations and slightly pissed.

It's the only way.

Hawkmumbler

Honestly, it can't win.

People who hate the previous two will say it sucks because of SJW, social marxism.

And people who loved the previous two will hate it because it intentionally did away with a lot that made TLJ great to placate to the former group.

Mike Carroll

Leonia and I really enjoyed it. It's not a perfect movie by any means, but we had a lot of fun and came out of the cinema feeling good about, and that's what counts.

Don't expect too much of it, and it won't disappoint: it's a Star Wars movie -- you get what you pay for!


Tiplodocus

I enjoyed that but I would be hard pressed to tell you why.

Not a single stand out set piece to talk about... that can't  be right.
Be excellent to each other. And party on!

radiator

Haven't seen ROS yet, but I did get around to finally rewatching The Last Jedi, and I'm willing to hold my hand up and say that it isn't nearly as bad as I thought it was on first watch.

It certainly has its fair share of faults and odd creative decisions (most of them concerning the Finn and Poe subplots which I still find mostly either exasperating and/or boring) but I have to admire how little out and out fan service there is in the film and respect that its overall far more cohesive, ambitious and thematically rich than The Force Awakens.

Though it doesn't always succeed in what it sets out to do - probably apt for a film primarily concerned with the acceptance of failure - it actually feels like a real movie by an actual filmmaker with original ideas and not just a shallow exercise in nostalgia, and because of that stands as probably the only truly worthwhile film in the series since Return of the Jedi.

JOE SOAP

And here, at the end of it all, it's Werner Herzog who ends up with the best line.


karlos

I find the (many) bad reviews far more interesting than the (handful of) good ones.

If anything, the bad ones are making me more intrigued.

Anyway, The Mandalorian is still ace.

shaolin_monkey



Pros:

Music was good.
Special effects good.

Cons:

It was a mess. No cohesive plot. Pacing all over the place. Fan lip service meant shoe-horning in folk for no good reason.



This is probably the only SW film I'm not likely to see more than once, unless it turns up on telly on a Sunday afternoon when I'm too hungover to reach for the remote.

Rusty

Quote from: Hawkmumbler on 19 December, 2019, 08:39:56 AM
Honestly, it can't win.

People who hate the previous two will say it sucks because of SJW, social marxism.

And people who loved the previous two will hate it because it intentionally did away with a lot that made TLJ great to placate to the former group.
Yeah, there's a lot of that doing the rounds off of knobheads with channels on youtube. the thing is, I disliked the previous two. Maybe not TFA so much because it was what it was, a soft reboot and hugely derivative fan service. It was mediocre the more I thought about it after the dust settled, but TLJ was a flat out mess and I've no plans on ever watching it again. I don't put any of this down to bollocks excuses like politics. I leave that for the mentalists out there to come out with that shit. The problem with thinking like that is that you'll see what you want to see regardless of reason or logic. It's toxic as fuck, and boring.

After watching this last night, it's just clear that the entire thing was just a really badly written trilogy from start to finish with no real plan, which is at the heart of the problem and absolute madness as far as Disney are concerned. It's like getting a chef to cook you a meal, only for him/her to leave half way during the preparation and serving the appetiser and another with a completely different style to come in and serve you something else out of the blue half way through eating it.

radiator

The thing is - and what most people don't seem to realise - is that almost all serial storytelling, including movie trilogies, book series and especially TV series are completely made up on the fly. The original Star Wars trilogy was constantly in flux from film to film, and was worked on by an array of different screenwriters and directors. Do you really think they intended Luke and Leia be siblings from the very beginning? Back to the Future 2 and 3 were totally tacked on after the fact. The writers of Breaking Bad were flying by the seat of their pants. I'm pretty sure that the majority of writers or writing teams at most have only a vague outline of an eventual ending in mind, which is totally subject to change in the making. Check out George RR Martin's original pitch outline for A Song of Ice & Fire to see what I mean.

Making it look like there was a plan all along - that's the real achievement. It's a miracle that so many series somehow don't go completely off the rails.

The main problem with this trilogy is that it was obviously rushed into production. They should have stuck to the original Star Wars schedule of one film every three years, not two, and put a lot more work into the scripts. But Disney had release dates set in stone from the moment the ink was dry on the sale of Lucasfilm.

QuoteTLJ was a flat out mess and I've no plans on ever watching it again

I would cautiously suggest a rewatch. I viscerally disliked the film first time I saw it, and have changed my mind on it a bit since.

broodblik

A lot of these movies you mentioned got equals just because the original made a ton of money. They never had any future plans when the first movie was made. I still think the problem with the current trilogy is that their was no clear outline what they want to achieve. Writers were hired and fired and at the end the director became one of the co-writers (and the movies suffer because of this). The worst decision was to try and remake the original trilogy and by stage 2 it looked like Johnson want to be controversial by turning everything on its head. It still feels to me the movies were made by people who do not know Star Wars at all.
When I die, I want to die like my grandfather who died peacefully in his sleep. Not screaming like all the passengers in his car.

Old age is the Lord's way of telling us to step aside for something new. Death's in case we didn't take the hint.