@LN78 In the ever changing landscape of leaks, the latest are pretty much sticking to a lot of what I've repeated here unfortunately. Some even adding quite a lot of new detail to the movie running order.
In their panic to drum up interest, the waves of TV spots and new footage Disney is putting out are only serving to confirm a lot of it, and since the marketing strategy seems to be rather defensive (JJs recent interviews throwing veiled compliments to TLJ, a lot of retread of 'toxic fan' reporting and the revising down of the expected box office) I'd say that Disney aren't expecting too much of a winner.
I won't put any more up since we're so close to release, but I feel like I've seen it now. Chances are I'll see it over the Xmas break anyway. But I'm in no rush.
PSN: KALofKRYPTON (so you can see how often I don't play anything!)
Twitter: @KALofKRYPTON (at your own risk, I don't care if you're offended)
"Fate: Protects fools, little children, and ships named Enterprise." - Cmdr William T. Riker
@LN78 Well, then I applaud your strength of conviction, and forgive me for asking!
Pretty sure that there'll be individual trilogy releases as well, if not right away then eventually. They've done that before, on both DVD and Blu-Ray, so I can't see why they wouldn't with 4K. Maximises revenue opportunity, not only from those with a strong preference (such as yourself) but also from those who haven't got hundreds for the full collection, but can part with £40 every birthday or Christmas.
Although, given how Disney have screwed up international Star Wars home media releases before (looking at you, The Clone Wars: The Lost Missions), I'd keep at least two fingers crossed.
Think I read someplace that George Lucas sold Disney the original trilogy "as-is", with all of his improvements (I use that word for my own personal point of view; please don't throw things at my head) in place, because he doesn't consider there to be multiple versions of each film, just the one he finally let go after so long. Not sure whether the cinematic releases even officially exist anymore; if that's the case then, despite my own opinions, I'm sorry for you and others who'd like to see and own them.
"We want different things, Crosshair. That doesn't mean that we have to be enemies."
@LN78 Same here! LOTR is one of my favourite film trilogies of all time, it was such a good deal, especially as it was new off Amazon, I couldn't pass on it.
In my opinion The Hobbit trilogy is nowhere near as good as the LOTR films but not many films are tbh, I still enjoy them both equally.
@LN78 Just want to say The Last Jedi is a disaster of a film and if it didn't write off the New Trilogy already then Rise Of Skywalker looks to being the final straw that broke the camels back.
Rogue One is so much better than all the new SW films made since TFA
@LN78
Well. Chiefly the issue is that it just isn't a very good film. It isn't well written. It isn't well directed and the only real saving grace is that it's really difficult to make a film with that sort of budget and backing look bad.
Within the film itself (meaning devoid of the external context and myriad reasons to dislike Rian Johnson and his take on Star Wars) we're given a film made by someone who really just seems to not like Star Wars all that much, or at least doesn't like you for liking Star Wars. We are presented with an immediate follow up to the events of The Force Awakens, a film with plenty of its own issues, but generally it was entertaining to watch, which is an important point, since TLJ really isn't entertaining.
The first hiccup and a sure sign of things to come is the very first scene, Poe facing off in his lone X-Wing against the enormous dreadnought of the First Order. The dialogue here is atrocious. Absolutely diabolical. It wasn't even until my second watch that I noticed that Poe was actually trying to make a joke at the Expense of Hux's name! Anyway, during this rather tepid interaction, the shot is framed in a way that simply doesn't convey the power play at all; Poe's X-Wing is seen from behind and fills the frame for the most part - missing completely the supposed David and Goliath nature of the scene. There isn't a full frame dreadnought shot showing the size difference between the ships until much later, at which point expository dialogue has already robbed the scene of any impact. It is bad filmmaking, and that sort of thing continues throughout.
Then there's the bombing run - and I really don't care if the bombs are 'magnetic' somehow - this is one of the dumbest bits of space combat ever committed to film. Many years before these events, the Rebellion made use of the Y-Wing, a heavily armed, versatile fighter-bomber that could hold its own against Imperial Tie Fighters. I'm Ok with the idea that perhaps the Resistance (we're still not entirely sure why it exists) didn't have access to Y-Wings. Fine. Instead though, to use ships that are only able to function in what can only be described as kamikaze tactics due to their need to matain proximity to their target and utterly unable to fly at any pace (a recurring issue) is madness. We don't really need Star Wars to display the tech-savvy depictions of Star Trek, but when it makes so very little sense that you spend a lot of the film just thinking, "why" - it's definitely failing. Then of course, there's the tight formation they go along in, and also try to maintain despite it having all of the tactical nouse of a melted m&m!
From here, the film doesn't recover. Not once. Huge chunks of the plotting, characterisations and movivations just don't make sense.
Central characters are either sidelined and recharacterised to serve a weak plot (Poe) or regressed completely to a worse version of themselves from the previous film (Finn). I think the Finn one hurts the most. He's on a redemptive path from the first scene in TFA. He scoundrels his way to the resistance and come good in the end to the point where he faces down a sith lord on his own! But, nope - we have to be subverted, Finn has to be a coward 'saved' by Rose (both from running away, and from saving everyone!), a paint by numbers character we're almost instructed to like by her sibling's death on the kamikaze run.
We learn precious little about Rey, but at least we do get to watch yet more subversion as our childhood hero and eternal optimist Luke Skywalker is old prick now! Yay! Not only that, he's also a total failure as a jedi, also yay! And the jedi texts are so meaningless that ghost Yoda sets them on fire! Yay! 🙄
Even I've had enough of thinking about TLJ now, never mind you having to read this.
Anyway. Snoke is nobody special apparently, the worst lightsaber fight in the whole of Star Wars happens, Rey apparently excapes the First Order dreadnought and links up with Chewy 🤔
Urgh...
Look at that, I think I'm done and I even managed to not mention Canto B... Damn!
Or the dumbest part of the whole film, the very slow space chase. Which not only make no sense in Star Wars terms, was completely avoidable 🙄
Anyway, outside of the film we have Rian Johnson. As arrogant as he is belligerent. Giving him free reign to the amount that he enjoyed on TLJ was a mistake. It was a mistake to try and sell Star Wars as if you're forwarding any particular agenda, but having Johnson do it such sneering terms and let him make a film practically screems 'I'm smarter than you so you should like this, if you don't - you probably just don't understand it'.
Again, it's a film made by someone who either just doesn't really like Star Wars, or would just prefer it to be something else.
I fully expect, that in the end putting TFA and TROS together, you could miss out TLJ altogether. It did almost nothing to further the new story.
PSN: KALofKRYPTON (so you can see how often I don't play anything!)
Twitter: @KALofKRYPTON (at your own risk, I don't care if you're offended)
"Fate: Protects fools, little children, and ships named Enterprise." - Cmdr William T. Riker
Y'know the bit where all but a dozen of the resistance are left outside to shoot at super-gorilla AT-ATs from the trenches (never to be seen again) while the others head out in some rickety speeders with no weapons to do... Cool trails in the salt 🤔
There's the nonsensical Rose/Finn save, there's tripple shot Rey showing up with Chewy...
PSN: KALofKRYPTON (so you can see how often I don't play anything!)
Twitter: @KALofKRYPTON (at your own risk, I don't care if you're offended)
"Fate: Protects fools, little children, and ships named Enterprise." - Cmdr William T. Riker
@LN78 Actually, if the sequel trilogy has managed to do one good thing, it is that I appreciate the prequel trilogy a whole lot more!
I've certainly spent enough time hating on them.
If nothing else, they look fantastic, sound fantastic and are perfectly happy being Star Wars films. I'll happy sit and watch most of TPM, AOTC is by far the weakest but at least a third of ROTS is solid gold!
Yes, most of the first unit direction is pretty pedestrian, but the plethora of fx and stunt material more than make up for it. For every unnecessary bit of dialogue or character connection, there's a Delta 7 vs Slave 1; every (poor) Jake Lloyd or Jar Jar cringe, there's the ROTS opening space scene.
They are unashamedly Star Wars, and very much at their best when they aren't trying too hard to explain or contrive.
Another point against TLJ! Do you remember any music from it? No? Nor me.
William's Rey suite from TFA was great, and did a wonderful job of selling the character early on on Jakku and maturing the overtone as the film went on. I can't remember any particular music cue moments or use of motifs in TLJ.
@LN78 Given how Disney seem to be desperate to claw back fans they've inadvertently alienated, I wouldn't rule out an "original" original trilogy release someday, if it's possible. I'd also like to go on record as a massive hypocrite, because as much as I'll defend a filmmaker's right to alter their work ad infinitum, I hate the changes made to the cinematic versions of The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones ahead of their Blu-Ray release (except CGI Yoda in the former; that just makes sense). I also dislike one specific change made to the original trilogy, namely Vader's new "No!" in Return of the Jedi. I don't mind the idea of it, but its execution was awful.
As for The Last Jedi, well... @KALofKRYPTON just knocked it out of the park, so I'll try to keep my own problems brief. I'll freely admit that some parts, taken out of context as snippets of audio-visual entertainment, are enjoyable (the Falcon flying beneath the surface of Crait, Finn's duel with Phasma, anything BB-8 does) but then I'd imagine I could, with some significant arm-twisting, get you to admit that the sound design of the podrace was awesome.
Biggest problem is the character assassination of Luke. Whoever the heck Mark Hamill is playing in this movie, it isn't Luke. Period. I also thought that the magnificent Laura Dern was wasted on a character who was only in the film to engineer false tension, inviting a mutiny because she didn't once say "Don't worry, guys, I've got a plan to get you out of this!" like any good, reassuring leader would in such an apparently-hopeless situation (even though that whole ship chase thing was just awful, and boring). And I've nothing against Kelly Marie Tran or her actually-quite-good performance, so please nobody lump me in with the hideous people who hounded her with death threats, but Rose simply shouldn't have been in the film. She's just a bad character, who cheapens Finn and exists to narrate subtext as, well... text.
Speaking of which, Finn was my favourite of the new cast, with tons of potential as a turncoat Stormtrooper wasted on a meaningless side quest. Poe and Rey just aren't interesting, and we learn nothing new about them (except perhaps that Poe is a meathead and Rey is an overpowered nobody). Kylo's motivations are unclear at best, random and nonsensical at worst. I don't mind Snoke's sudden departure (or any other unanswered questions, really, as this was always going to be a trilogy) but I do mind its execution, if you'll pardon the pun. Everything feels mean-spirited, deliberately engineered to be so subversive and surprising that it actually isn't subversive or surprising at all. Any mention of love or hope sounds hollow and unconvincing. Nothing has any weight or conviction.
Now, I get what Rian Johnson was trying to do. In the right circumstances, given the right material, a deconstruction of Star Wars might be fascinating; unfortunately, he chose to do it in the middle of a trilogy (bad move regardless), using a cast of new characters who we didn't know well enough to care about, and classic legacy characters we care too much about to see be treated like this. I mean, he literally kills Admiral Ackbar in the background of somebody else's shot, out-of-focus!
Despite also being a mega-fan who absorbs anything and everything Star Wars, taking the "Force Skype" power out of a random book (which I have on a shelf right behind me) and making it a thing was just dumb. It looked dumb, it felt dumb and it was dumb, a desperate "let's find something really obscure to surprise the hardcore fans with" grab for bonus smugness points. Kinda illustrates why I separate a franchise's books from their films and television shows, as ideas that sound great on paper, scrawled out by an author trying to make a word count deadline, rarely translate well to the screen (like the dolphins who apparently serve aboard the Enterprise-D in cetacean science labs, wearing Starfleet uniform wetsuits and everything).
Second time around, I started to find all the technical stuff folks mentioned, like the bombing sequence, the use of hyperspace as a weapon, the choreography errors in the throne room duel, etc. and that just seemed to kick my opinion down even further. Usually, I can forgive such things if the story and characters make them worthwhile (hey, it's only a movie, and it's a sci-fi fantasy movie at that, so I'm in the "anything goes" camp) but with nothing good to focus on elsewhere, I just noticed them more. By the time the credits are rolling, after that disgustingly preachy epilogue with the slave kids, I'm just slumped in a heap of wasted potential, dreaming of the movie it could've been, should've been.
Star Wars is hopeful escapism. The Last Jedi is nihilistic garbage.
"We want different things, Crosshair. That doesn't mean that we have to be enemies."
@DonJorginho Apologies for the impenetrable walls of text (it happens sometimes) but just wanted to say, totally agree with you that Rogue One is the best of Disney's output.
Hope you enjoy your new "All Things Tolkien" box set over the holidays!
@WanderingBullet That video is amazing! Thanks for posting it, made me laugh a lot!
"We want different things, Crosshair. That doesn't mean that we have to be enemies."
@LN78 ooh. I hadn't heard that. I'll have to investigate!
@RogerRoger Far more articulate than I as usual! 😁🤘🏽
For a giggle/rage at the technical points, Robot Head does a pretty good job!
There's a very technical breakdown of the throne room fight out there, but this does the job. It's a shame that we've no lightsaber fights that come anywhere near the sword fights of the original trilogy, let alone the hyperactive jedi in their prime forms from the prequels.
PSN: KALofKRYPTON (so you can see how often I don't play anything!)
Twitter: @KALofKRYPTON (at your own risk, I don't care if you're offended)
"Fate: Protects fools, little children, and ships named Enterprise." - Cmdr William T. Riker
@KALofKRYPTON@LN78@RogerRoger These Star Wars diatribes are pure gold. 😂
Thanks guys for the entertainment. It has definitely motivated me to rewatch The Last Jedi now.
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
@KALofKRYPTON I think you captured the raw essence of "WTF?!" more accurately than I. Sometimes polite eloquence is nowhere near as effective as a bunch of eye-rolling emoji and a handful of soft curses. You're also spot-on about the music, which is a crying shame as John Williams is much, much better than this. His score to The Force Awakens has three hummable tunes, but he descends into musical wallpaper for The Last Jedi. At least he's been told to use the entire Star Wars back-catalogue for The Rise of Skywalker, ensuring that he can trade on pure nostalgia (Palpatine's theme, Duel of the Fates, etc.) if he struggles to carve out any new signature sounds.
@LN78 Always happy to help paddle an... er, yeah. Shutting up now!
@Th3solution Like I say, I'll be giving it another pass in the coming days, so there's a chance (an infintesimally-small chance, but a chance nonetheless) that I'll come back and say "Hey, I was wrong! Third time was the charm, I really enjoyed it!"
"We want different things, Crosshair. That doesn't mean that we have to be enemies."
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