Star Wars Episode II - A New Thread

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Re: Star Wars Episode II - A New Thread

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Postby robersora » Fri Jan 10, 2020 3:40 am

I've stumbled into Star Wars 9 despite not having any other movie in the franchise except for Star Wars 7
What can I say?
I really enjoyed the first half, in which they showed us all those interesting worlds - Star Wars has a great aesthetic... But then when the plot kicked in, it was kinda boring, though. The only participant, I'd call a character was Kylo Ren. It was an entertaining blockbuster Hollywood movie, not offensive at all, kinda soulless and generally not interesting at all. I can see how this product will make a lot of money.
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Postby kuribo-04 » Fri Jan 10, 2020 3:45 am

Now imagine having seen prior films in the saga that are basically the same story but much better lol. Not much value to this one.
I'm glad you were (somewhat) entertained though :)
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Re: Star Wars Episode II - A New Thread

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Postby Gazdakka Gizbang » Fri Jan 10, 2020 5:20 am

View Original PostGendo'sPapa wrote: IE. Johnson killing off Snoke is pure.


I think his Wine Tasting film gave away what he'd do with the plot beforehand:

https://youtu.be/5S4Ss5bK-ws

In all seriousness, my views on both films generally fall around the vicinity of those shared by the likes of RedLetterMedia and MauLer. However, Snoke being killed early is not something I agree with personally. It would be like saying Episodes 3 and 5 of Game of Thrones Season 8 were good episodes because of their subversion that opens up possibilities for the final episodes to go anywhere (spoiler alert: they're atrocious).

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Postby FreakyFilmFan4ever » Fri Jan 10, 2020 7:31 am

I mean, simply because a self-respecting artist like Rian Johnson frees a franchise to go wherever doesn’t really guarantee that other artists will follow suit afterwards. I agree that TLJ is a mess, but at least it’s an interesting one. TFA and TROS are all soulless pseudo remakes, narratively speaking. In TFA’s script, there is no clearly defined character for Rey. On screen, there’s a pretty solid performance by Daisy Riddley that’ll convince most people otherwise, but that doesn’t fix the issue that the script had no character. Her character wasn’t set up as someone we could be to sympathetic at the moment, but rather as a mystery box to be explored at a later time. If you were sympathetic to her then more power to you, but that wasn’t the intention of the writers at the time of writing that film.

Also, if you really need J.J. specific reasons as to why he’s a bad, terrible, no good writer, remember that TROS is the second space-opera sequel he’s ever directed (the first being Star Trek Into Darkness), and in both space-opera sequels he wrote in a way to cure death, minimizing the stakes for any future movies in their respective franchises. I mean, how much more obvious does it need to be that he’s a bad writer than that? He ruined Into Darkness with this stupid writing trope, he ruined TROS with it, and if he writes/directs any other space-opera sequel, he’ll ruin that with the same trope as well. J.J. didn’t even have an excuse for his Into Darkness movie because he had creative control over the whole rebooted series up until then. This is just his bad and terrible tendencies as an uncreative, unthinking writer.

Besides, regardless of what anyone else does to a movie in the franchise, an actually talented group of writers can still overcome it and make something great. Even if you disagreed with Johnson’s TLJ, a truly great writer still could have pulled off something amazing with Ep 9. But that clearly didn’t happen, because it’s obvious that no talented writers were hired. I mean, if The Mandaloran can take inspiration from the Star Wars Holiday Special (a program so bad that even George Lucas wanted to destroy all existing copies of it) and turn it into something that’s actually engaging to watch, then there’s literally no excuse for TROS to be as bad as it is, regardless where of how you feel about TLJ. None whatsoever. (Unless, of course, TROS was written by a bunch of talentless hacks.)

View Original PostGazdakka Gizbang wrote:I think his Wine Tasting film gave away what he'd do with the plot beforehand:

https://youtu.be/5S4Ss5bK-ws

You should see RedLetterMedia’s new Star Wars video, where they retrospectively realize that Johnson was better than Abrams the whole time.

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Re: Star Wars Episode II - A New Thread

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Postby Gazdakka Gizbang » Fri Jan 10, 2020 9:24 am

View Original PostFreakyFilmFan4ever wrote:if you really need J.J. specific reasons as to why he’s a bad, terrible, no good writer, remember that TROS is the second space-opera sequel he’s ever directed (the first being Star Trek Into Darkness), and in both space-opera sequels he wrote in a way to cure death, minimizing the stakes for any future movies in their respective franchises. I mean, how much more obvious does it need to be that he’s a bad writer than that? He ruined Into Darkness with this stupid writing trope, he ruined TROS with it, and if he writes/directs any other space-opera sequel, he’ll ruin that with the same trope as well. J.J. didn’t even have an excuse for his Into Darkness movie because he had creative control over the whole rebooted series up until then. This is just his bad and terrible tendencies as an uncreative, unthinking writer.


I actually forgot about that part of Into Darkness. Aside from that, even though I liked TFA there were telltale elements beyond mystery box writing that were bad. The one that comes to mind as I briefly mentioned before was Captain Phasma. She was hyped up to be the new Boba Fett by everyone, including her actor Gwendoline Christie, and....she says a couple of lines of dialogue before getting captured. That's it, pretty pathetic.

FreakyFilmFan4ever wrote:Besides, regardless of what anyone else does to a movie in the franchise, an actually talented group of writers can still overcome it and make something great. Even if you disagreed with Johnson’s TLJ, a truly great writer still could have pulled off something amazing with Ep 9.


That could be used to talk about any box office failure, and extended to the ideology that you can make a sequel or reboot about anything as long as you hire the right people to write it. Respectfully, I disagree. I think there are some things that you cannot continue or recreate successfully, and when the previous work funnels you down a specific direction the task becomes more difficult.

To disclose my perspective, I think TLJ would have worked better if it was not a Star Wars film. Rian is decent making singular films that he creates himself - though nothing amazing, I enjoyed Looper when it came out.

Gazdakka Gizbang wrote:]
You should see RedLetterMedia’s new Star Wars video, where they retrospectively realize that Johnson was better than Abrams the whole time.


I have, and much like how they insist that the prequels are still bad films regardless of the quality of the sequel trilogy, I maintain that TLJ (at least as a Star Wars film), is still a bad film regardless of TRoS's quality.

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Postby Gendo'sPapa » Fri Jan 10, 2020 12:45 pm

Gazdakka Gizbang wrote:Captain Phasma. She was hyped up to be the new Boba Fett by everyone, including her actor Gwendoline Christie, and....she says a couple of lines of dialogue before getting captured. That's it, pretty pathetic.


To be fair, that's an accurate description of Boba Fett. A nothing of a character who looks cool, is interesting in concept, has been hyped up by everyone around the original series as a major threat who says a couple lines of dialogue and then gets killed by accident.

Only thing separating Boba Fett and Captain Phasma is one has been built up in nostalgic viewers minds over the last 4 decades as this amazing fully-formed creation because older viewers grew up playing with Boba Fett action figures and absorbing the hundreds of ancillary Extended Universe Boba Fett stories in comics, books, video games and cartoons. Maybe Boba Fett is an interesting and cool character. .... He ain't cool or interesting in the context of the original trilogy though.

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Re: Star Wars Episode II - A New Thread

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Postby FreakyFilmFan4ever » Fri Jan 10, 2020 4:23 pm

View Original PostGazdakka Gizbang wrote:I have, and much like how they insist that the prequels are still bad films regardless of the quality of the sequel trilogy, I maintain that TLJ (at least as a Star Wars film), is still a bad film regardless of TRoS's quality.

I mean, I'd probably be hard pressed to find anyone that has a particularly strong connection with any Star Wars films post 1983, so yeah. I wouldn't call ANY of the Sequel Trilogy good, per sé. I'd actually describe them as being the "Anti-Prequel Trilogy." The Prequels had a very clear and decisive overall narrative goal throughout, but the scene-by-scene execution was lazy or mediocre at best. The Sequels are the opposite, with excellent scene-by-scene technical executions throughout, but it suffers from a sloppy and meandering overall story line. As Palpatine himself once said, "Now, you will pay for your lack of vision!" and I think that sums up the sequels pretty well.

This isn't to say that the Originals were great because they were planned throughout. In fact, the originals are very much the poster child for seat-of-your-pants writing turning up an excellent film experience. But that was lighting in a bottle that can never be recaptured, and it was a mistake to even try to begin with.

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Re: Star Wars Episode II - A New Thread

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Postby kuribo-04 » Sat Jan 11, 2020 1:48 am

∆ Add TLJ to the OT and you have my list of great SW films. Made the sequel trilogy worth it as well (which, ignoring IX, works as a story).
Shinji: "Sooner or later I'll be betrayed... And they'll leave me. Still... I want to meet them again, because I believe my feelings at that time were real."
Ryuko: "I'm gonna knock ya on your asses!"
-Asuka: THINK IN GERMAN!!! -Shinji: Öh... Baumkuchen...
Hayashida: "As game developers, our work is special. All of us here can put smiles on very many people's faces with our work."
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Postby Gazdakka Gizbang » Sat Jan 11, 2020 8:11 am

View Original PostFreakyFilmFan4ever wrote:I mean, I'd probably be hard pressed to find anyone that has a particularly strong connection with any Star Wars films post 1983, so yeah. I wouldn't call ANY of the Sequel Trilogy good, per sé. I'd actually describe them as being the "Anti-Prequel Trilogy." The Prequels had a very clear and decisive overall narrative goal throughout, but the scene-by-scene execution was lazy or mediocre at best. The Sequels are the opposite, with excellent scene-by-scene technical executions throughout, but it suffers from a sloppy and meandering overall story line. As Palpatine himself once said, "Now, you will pay for your lack of vision!" and I think that sums up the sequels pretty well.

This isn't to say that the Originals were great because they were planned throughout. In fact, the originals are very much the poster child for seat-of-your-pants writing turning up an excellent film experience. But that was lighting in a bottle that can never be recaptured, and it was a mistake to even try to begin with.


Agreed. Unfortunately with the popularity of Star Wars and the huge amount of money spent purchasing Lucasfilms, we're going to have more trilogies churning out in the future. This one marks the end of my journey with any mainline entry, and that's a shame because I love Star Wars, but I won't pay to watch it degrade and embarass itself any further. Shy of writing these out of canon, I simply don't care what happens next or whose corpse they reanimate through CGI to pull at my nostalgia strings. I still intend to check out Fallen Order and The Mandalorian, but for all intents and purposes I've closed the book.

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Postby kuribo-04 » Sat Jan 11, 2020 10:14 am

Also gotta add, every single Star Wars film has massive fans. The prequels are more popular than ever, and these films have fans, plus the kids that are watching them will most likely forever have fond memories of them.

(Not necessarily related to the quality though)
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Ryuko: "I'm gonna knock ya on your asses!"
-Asuka: THINK IN GERMAN!!! -Shinji: Öh... Baumkuchen...
Hayashida: "As game developers, our work is special. All of us here can put smiles on very many people's faces with our work."
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Postby FreakyFilmFan4ever » Sat Jan 11, 2020 2:04 pm

^ Oh, I know. You don’t even have to look into the next generation for that either. I have a friend who’s my age and loves Jar Jar Binks. But even if they have fond memories of the prequels, that doesn’t mean that they’ll think that those are the best SW movies.

I mean, I can even see how The Phantom Menace is fun to watch. It’s got a lot of nice production design, the Pod Race scene is absolutely killer with the right home theater system, and Duel of the Fates is amazing regardless of who you are. But it’s not better than Ep IV or V.

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Postby kuribo-04 » Sat Jan 11, 2020 9:21 pm

In my experience it's a little different.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a huge fan of the prequels either. But there are many I'd say.

I mean, even AnnoCinema, who is a guy who AFAIK some people on this forum know and follow, and who most definitely knows about film says Episode III is his favourite film of all time.
Shinji: "Sooner or later I'll be betrayed... And they'll leave me. Still... I want to meet them again, because I believe my feelings at that time were real."
Ryuko: "I'm gonna knock ya on your asses!"
-Asuka: THINK IN GERMAN!!! -Shinji: Öh... Baumkuchen...
Hayashida: "As game developers, our work is special. All of us here can put smiles on very many people's faces with our work."
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Postby FreakyFilmFan4ever » Sun Jan 12, 2020 7:08 pm

^ Recently I rewatched all of the non-Disney Star Wars movies, and realized that there are some truly great things to enjoy about RotS. You don’t think of George Lucas as much of a visual storyteller with the prequels, but that wordless sequence where Anakin and Padme are both struggling with the effects of the Dark Side of the Force is really amazing. And I do appreciate how the Prequels as a whole take a postmodern approach to typical destiny/“chosen one” narratives. There’s some good stuff there, even if I can’t get excited about all of it.

Anywho, here’s a response video I made about the sequels: https://youtu.be/jcKOsP_M7fQ
It’s only about 30 seconds long, so have fun with it.

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Postby cyharding » Sun Jan 12, 2020 8:02 pm

^Two questions:

1. What is the name of your cat?

2. Is Episode IX at least better than Episode II?
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Postby kuribo-04 » Sun Jan 12, 2020 9:17 pm

You don’t think of George Lucas as much of a visual storyteller with the prequels, but that wordless sequence where Anakin and Padme are both struggling with the effects of the Dark Side of the Force is really amazing.

I agree, really like that one.

Also, great hair.
Shinji: "Sooner or later I'll be betrayed... And they'll leave me. Still... I want to meet them again, because I believe my feelings at that time were real."
Ryuko: "I'm gonna knock ya on your asses!"
-Asuka: THINK IN GERMAN!!! -Shinji: Öh... Baumkuchen...
Hayashida: "As game developers, our work is special. All of us here can put smiles on very many people's faces with our work."
~('.'~) (~'.')~ Dancin Kirby

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Re: Star Wars Episode II - A New Thread

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Postby FreakyFilmFan4ever » Sun Jan 12, 2020 9:49 pm

^ lol, thanks! :D

View Original Postcyharding wrote:^Two questions:

1. What is the name of your cat?

2. Is Episode IX at least better than Episode II?

1. Her name is Jiji (sometimes spelled Gigi).
SPOILER: Show
My mom found her dying on the side of the road back in 2009 and decided to at least give her a comfortable death. We accidentally ended up nursing her back to health, so I guess we're still working on that goal. The cat grew to liking me despite my younger sister being the one that actually nursed her back to health, so I ended up taking her with me when I moved out. I was gonna name her "Roadkill," after the rat in the Comix Zone video game and because of how we found her, but she looked like Jiji the cat in Kiki's Delivery Service. Also, my other sister was working at a French restaurant named "Gigi's" at the time, and the man who owned that restaurant had the same name as mine, so basically I decided that I wasn't gonna anger the universe by not naming my cat Jiji.


2. You're gonna have to ask me that later. As bad as Episode II is, right now I'm really feeling the amazing performances in the scene where Anakin's mom dies. (Say what you want about the rest of that film, but that scene is flawless.) Episode IX is certainly better executed on a technical level and has good performances that occur more than just once in the entire film, but I'm really not feeling any of it right now. It's just too much of a narrative mess in order for me to give two shits about it. The whole thing just came off as a $275 million fan fiction to me. It looks pretty, but I couldn't feel anything after 30 minutes in.

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Re: Star Wars Episode II - A New Thread

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Postby Blockio » Mon Jan 13, 2020 1:18 pm

This may be a bit of a hot take, but Episode II is actually my favorite out of the prequels, courtesy of the titular clones and the Geonosis battle
I kinda filter out most of the cringeworthy other stuff the fact that I've played the Lego Star Wars missions more times than I have watched the actual movie definitely helps, and combined with the fact that I'm not terribly fond of I and III for a number of reasons, it leaves II as best by elimination.

Also TCW made the thing a lot better by association alone
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Postby kuribo-04 » Mon Jan 13, 2020 11:33 pm

^ lol, thanks!

:D

I'm not a fan of the TCW artstyle, but for years now I hear people praise the show, so I should really check it out at some point. I think.
Shinji: "Sooner or later I'll be betrayed... And they'll leave me. Still... I want to meet them again, because I believe my feelings at that time were real."
Ryuko: "I'm gonna knock ya on your asses!"
-Asuka: THINK IN GERMAN!!! -Shinji: Öh... Baumkuchen...
Hayashida: "As game developers, our work is special. All of us here can put smiles on very many people's faces with our work."
~('.'~) (~'.')~ Dancin Kirby

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Postby Blockio » Tue Jan 14, 2020 4:38 am

The show is really really good. These people were right.
I can see why Gendo hired Misato to do the actual commanding. He tried it once and did an appalling job. ~ AWinters
Your point of view is horny, and biased. ~ glitz2hard
What about titty-ten? ~ Reichu
The movies function on their own terms. If people can't accept them on those terms, and keep expecting them to be NGE, then they probably should have realized a while ago that they weren't going to have a good time. ~ Words of wisdom courtesy of Reichu

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Postby MuscleRobo » Tue Jan 14, 2020 8:59 am

It's so weird that I just can't get into Episode VIII like everyone else and managed to enjoy episode IX. I think it's because by the time the Disney trilogy rolled around Star Wars had already broken me and I didn't have high hopes. Most of the serious dramatic things people seem to praise about VIII are either extremely poorly done or simple eastern philosophy 101 themes to me. For example why did Rose Tico have to show Finn, the child soldier, that war is bad? I'm pretty sure Finn knew war was bad and that it effected children. Poe was also pretty under utilized for one of the best characters in the new trilogy, hell Finn's arc in The Last Jedi would make more sense for a hot shot thrill seeking ace pilot like Poe. Also, anyone who has spent anytime reading about Buddhism must have heard the story about Bodhidharma and the creation of Zen Buddhism which is paralleled multiple times in The Last Jedi. It's supposed to be The Hero with a Thousand Faces not white guy who took intro to eastern philosophy. At least in Skywalker I got some decent action and Palpatine looked like Beast Machines Megatron.


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