Dominic wrote:I am not saying it is worth jumping up and going to see.
But, how does it "dismantle" Episode 6? It does not dismantle Episode 6 any more than Episode 5 dismantled 4.
Funny you should ask that, I posted on SSG that very discussion yesterday, so I'll paste it for you:
Based on what I've read and heard about the film, here's what it sounds like is going on:
ROTJ
- The Emperor is destroyed
- The Sith are destroyed
- The Empire is being overthrown on its capital and across the galaxy (SE cements this)
- The Death Star 2 is destroyed, taking with it a massive amount of the Empire's resources and personnel
- The Executor is destroyed, along with another massive amount of the Empire's personnel
- At least one more Star Destroyer is destroyed in the battle
- The massive shield generator and its complex is destroyed on Endor
- A legion of the Empire's best troops are captured or killed in the ground battle of Endor
- Our heroes find peace within their relationships
TFA
- A new, more dangerous leader has arisen
- A Sith-worshipping cult of Dark Side Force adepts who eschew their former identities has arisen
- A new empire, the First Order, has taken hold of a significant portion of the galaxy
- A death star-like weapon that is several orders of magnitude larger than the Death Star 2 has been built and is fully armed and operational, more deadly than any previous by a significant factor
- Our heroes have failed at the relationships they previously created, both with themselves and with the power of the Jedi
Is that about right? To me, that reads as not just appropriating from the original Star Wars, but deconstructing the original saga's ultimate ending. The galaxy was appreciably better at the end of ROTJ, and has since lost every goal it gained, while somehow hemorrhaging resources that it then easily in a short time reacquires in greater volume. That's quite the commentary on our heroes' efforts, basically saying that no matter how hard they tried, everything they would do would be for naught.
O6 wrote:Alright, here's the thing: It's Star Wars. It doesn't have a lot of plot. It doesn't need it. It's about feelings and emotions and big cool spaceship fights and lightsabers, and witty dialogue. That's what this movie has. It fucking delivers.
You young people are both spoiled and ruined by corporate Hollywood into believing this is a real thing so as to justify going to lesser films (The Scorpion King). It's not tho', Star Wars had an incredibly deep, rich plot; it just knew what to cut out of the shooting script and final edit so that the audience didn't feel weighed down by the story. There's a reason ANH was nominated for the following 10 Oscars and won 7 of them (the most of any that year, 3 more than the next closest):
- Best Picture
- Best Director
- Best Original Screenplay
- Best Film Editing (won)
- Best Supporting Actor
- Best Original Score (won)
- Best Costume Design (won)
- Best Sound Mixing (won)
- Best Sound Editing special award (shared award)
- Best Art Direction (won)
- Best Visual Effects (won)
- plus awarding a Scientific and Engineering Award to John Dykstra and team for developing the Dykstraflex camera control system for Star Wars
I haven't seen the film yet, so I'm not commenting on TFA's quality, but Hollywood has been ripping off the megahit big release popcorn film genre from Star Wars for 38 years now almost entirely without realizing that there is still a particular level of care and vision which delivered that success. There's a reason Ghostbusters works but Evolution didn't, you need more than a similar recipe and cribbed ideas. Unfortunately, Hollywood has gotten a recipe of marketing and visuals together to cover up for its flaws, so you get a lot more Transformers '07 than Matrix films succeeding, and now a whole generation of moviegoers has no idea that even popcorn films are supposed to be Raiders of the Lost Ark over Minions, Mad Max Fury Road over The Amazing Spider-Man 2.
To be fair, now I walk with a cane sometimes.
Dom wrote:It does not dismantle anything. The Empire had recovered from losing capital equipment before (Episode 4). No reason to think they would crumble after Endor.
You are wrong and bad. The Death Star 2 was a significantly larger operation than the first, its loss alone would have probably bankrupted the Empire. Then the Emperor brought together more of his forces in one place to entrap the Rebellion only to have a major portion of those forces caught or killed, as I mentioned above. ROTJ's ending shows the Empire being overthrown on multiple worlds across the core, inner, and outer rim territories. Their centralized political structure was destroyed, their capital was cut off from them, they had lost massive resources. The loss of the Death Star 1 was devastating, it's why they doubled down in ESB to track down the Rebellion that much harder, and that doubling down ultimately put too many chips on the table in ROTJ for them to recover. There's a reason Wedge and Lando are dancing with Ewoks at the end of the film instead of killing TIE Interceptors and Star Destroyers: they decisively won.
Scale of time and distance are common problems for soft sci-fi. But, they have been common for long enough that anybody working on soft sci-fi should at least have mastered the work around for for that. I do not care how far a given planet in SW is from another. But, I do care about the people making the movie having the sense to demonstrate that there is some distance (requiring some time) to cover. It is the same reason that I expect comics published in 2015 to not read like they were written in 1985.
Abrams seems to have issues with this. His hyperspace sequences involve the characters pushing a button, sitting back, and then showing up wherever they are going inside of a few minutes (if even that much time) with no scene change to imply time. Everything in Episode 7 seems to be too local.
This is a spoiler thread, fuck using spoiler tags.
Anyway, that is a notable problem Abrams had in New Coke Trek as well, he'd put someone in a turbolift and within seconds they'd be on the opposite side of the ship. He'd put someone in a transwarp transporter and they'd be across the quadrant in seconds. Sounds like he did this in TFA as well.
Because Abrams' narrative logic is apparently comparable to a child's play session.
A little bit this. He's not childish, but his story crafting is a lot of shortcuts, he's too inside to recognize that he's using storytelling shortcuts on top of storytelling shortcuts making it overly simplified because he wants to get to the part he wants to get to. That's fine if incredibly sloppy and unintentionally meta for his own works, but he seems to work hands-on entirely with others' franchises now and it's insulting there. He's trying to be the Cliff's Notes version of Spielberg.
andersonh1 wrote:The Empire Strikes Back had time problems, and it's often considered the best of the Star Wars movies. During the time that the Millenium Falcon leaves Hoth, flies/hides in the asteroid field and goes to Cloud City, a time span that's hours or a couple of days at most, Luke has apparently spent weeks on Dagobah with Yoda. Unless we're meant to assume that Jedi training only takes a few hours, which is always possible.
Should I admit that I went to see The Phantom Menace eight times in theaters? I was pretty hyped at the time.
I still like the prequels, for all their flaws. I really don't get the hate for them.
That is one of the most irritating things ESB got wrong, that passage of time needed a fucking title card or something to convey that Luke grows over the course of a long time, that Leia and Han's relationship develops over the course of that long time, that the Falcon is in limp mode, that there are more things going on. It does take place over weeks, and the audience doesn't realize this because nobody even changes their damned clothes, much less says a line of dialogue symbolizing it. But if that's the biggest flaw in ESB, and I'd argue it is, then it's certainly a much easier to swallow pill than anything in ROTJ or the Prequels.
I saw TPM about 8 times in theaters as well, 3 on opening day alone, a few more during the next few days, and then the very first Texas Instruments DLP digital projection on the one month anniversary, as well as a horrible different digital projection using a satellite transmission system that overcompressed the movie. Unlike you though, I don't like them at all, they're incredibly clumsy stories told in a terrible manner, and I didn't bother with AOTC or ROTS on their respective opening days, and only saw them once that way (and only once or twice on home media after, which I only bought because that was the singular way to get the OT on Blu Ray); TPM is sadly the "best" and "most Star Warsy" of the prequels, it has the thinnest spark of that Star Wars magic only to let that get lost in every wrong but easy choice possible. The Plinkett reviews nail them to the wall, but they're hardly the only ones. I hear Kylo Ren's angry brattiness is the type of character that Anakin should have been in the prequels.
O6 wrote:Looper is not a movie devoid of problems but it IS awesome
Looper, I like to liken it to this: Looper is 2 good movies that have JACK SHIT to do with each other.
