star wars 9 spoilers and postmortem shit talk

TBF, the two I just watched were about as good ('good') as I remember them being the first time around. I have a sneaking suspicion, though, that the third is gonna suffer by comparison when I watch after finishing The Clone Wars. Because you'd expect the work of a culturally iconic director to pale when compared to an attendant TV spinoff that looks like a Jak & Daxter cutscene.

Ned and Old Lunch upthread: that's the fight scene I was talking about! Just "Get on the ship!" and a lovely blur of action and then on to the next boring beat.

watching revenge of the sith tonight

https://i.imgur.com/bPBRfck.jpg

from my point of view, the jedi are evil!

Evil is a bit of a stretch, but definitely dickheads

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llLKar19XhA

If you wanna be happy for the rest of your life
Never make a Naboo Senator your wife

jeez i really love revenge of the sith

i feel like the whole "you're so beautiful" "it's only because i'm so in love" "no it's because i'm so in love with YOU" exchange got a lot of shit but it's stilted bc they're lying to each other. the scene afterward where anakin tells padme about his prophetic dream of her death is prob the best acting christensen and portman ever did together

i do sometimes wish this movie were 100 percent shots of anakin and/or padme looking at coruscant at night

everyone is so depressed

except for palpatine he's having a grand old time

https://i.imgur.com/kOpsymU.png

brad otm

i'm really glad lucas had the cronenbergian industrial horror of the darth vader transformation sequence in him

i'm sure i got this from posts on this board, but it'd be soooo much more interesting if more of that horror and transition were spread over the preceding films, gradually losing pieces of his soul. he gets the robot arm in Clones but it never quite lands as the first step of him becoming "more machine than man, now, twisted and evil." if this was gonna ever work as a three-part tragic fall saga, i'd want a real sense that this likable character is gradually being corrupted, making bad trade-offs, following his feelings down dark paths. that could be amazing. but for me, it doesn't land - he's not likable, and lucas's screenplay is so ham-fisted that the emotions he's dealing with are just like teenaged angst and horniness, and the transitions are these two big, forced wallops: he goes on a murderous rampage in #2 (which nobody else seems to really know about, except amidala, who doesn't care!), and then palpatine very elaborately cons him into a position where he'll kill mace windu, after which it's just like "hey go kill these people" ---- "okay boss."

I read somewhere that Palpatine had the Tusken Raiders abduct Anakin's mom, and I'm assuming Lucas avoided making this explicit in AOTC because the audience isn't supposed to know at that point that Palpatine is Sidious and that he's pulling Anakin's strings in a number of ways, but it's kind of a missed opportunity imo. I mean it pushes Annie in a dark direction but it just seems like an incidental thing that happened rather than an event orchestrated toward that end.

That whole story with his mom is incredibly clumsily handled. He's apparently just been completely out of touch for ages, to the extent that he doesn't know she was freed and got married and was then abducted, but he gets his shit together to check up on and 'rescue' her juuuuuuuust immediately before she expires from the strain of her ordeal.

Even if Palpy was inducing dreams of his mom, I'd say that Anakin was already heading toward the dark side after unaccountably giving her the cold shoulder for half his life.

(And don't even get me started on what I realized was a pretty fucked up plot in TPM, where Qui-Gon visits Shmi after the pod race and is like, 'Soooooo the good news is that Anakin is no longer a slave! You might want to sit down for the rest...')

I just read that (typically strong) Tom Breihan piece on the original Star Wars in the AV Club. He makes a good observation, that Harrison Ford was already 35 years old by the time he was cast as Han Solo, and while he had been floating around Hollywood for a while, only Lucas seemed to understand his natural charisma well enough to lure him out of semi-retirement doing carpenter work. Which made me think: why, then, when Lucas was casting Indiana Jones, was Ford apparently not his first choice?

xp the jedi non-intervention ("we're not here to get into local culture and stop slavery, but your son is a jedi and we'll give him a good life") is maybe the first indicator in the prequels that the jedi order and moral code has some obvious holes

the audience isn't supposed to know at that point that Palpatine is Sidious

They do everything but stop the film and hand-scribble a cowl over Palpatine at the end of TPM. A friend of mine still gets ribbed occasionally about gasping at this point.

imo Lucas has a pattern of casting known actors when he wants them to embody a *type* but errs on the side of finding newer faces -- or at the least, actors not known for playing that type -- when it comes to leads

so casting older British horror icons as bad guys or wise sages makes sense, as does casting Mark Hamill as the lead

plenty of exceptions that step outside of this rubric, especially when it comes to smaller roles (hi, Samuel L. Jackson) but I get where he's coming from. fwiw he seemed to short-change Ford as well. perhaps apocryphally, the told story is that Ford was around his office and sat in to do lines opposite actors reading for other roles, but he hadn't auditioned on his own

Lucas not immediately going to Ford as Indiana Jones absolutely makes sense, because it's easy to see Indiana Jones as charismatic 1930s archeologist Han Solo, and it's slotting the same actor into the same type of character

Xpost "lol Darth Sidious looks and sounds like less fucked up looking Emperor. Senator's name is Palpatine! I wonder....!"

He's coming from wanting to get Jackson to stop standing on his lawn with a boombox playing the Imperial March, iirc.

Palpatine as the Emperor's name is a deep cut for people who only saw the original trilogy (and didn't have the toys, I think?)

I mean...you know what I mean. Clearly everyone knows but from a narrative standpoint it's an open secret. Even if Lucas does everything short of employing flashing subtitles that explicitly explain what's up, I generally think that it's a nice narrative touch that he keeps Palpatine and Sidious separate until the veil finally drops for the onscreen characters.

My favorite message board argument from 99 went something like:

"Any guesses as to whether Sidious might be the Emperor?"

"Senator Palpatine. Emperor Palpatine. Do I gotta draw you a map, you fuckin dork?"

Palpatine as the Emperor's name is a deep cut for people who only saw the original trilogy (and didn't have the toys, I think?)

― Andrew Farrell, Friday, January 10, 2020 1:04 PM bookmarkflaglink

Yea. I knew it tho, just can't remember how. Is he in the novel?

Emperor *Plop*atine

Yep, the novel. Thought so...

Aided and abetted by restless, power-hungry individuals within the government, and the massive organs of commerce, the ambitious Senator Palpatine caused himself to be elected President of the Republic. He promised to reunite the disaffected among the people and to restore the remembered glory of the Republic. Once secure in office he declared himself Emperor, shutting himself away from the populace. Soon he was controlled by the very assistants and boot-lickers he had appointed to high office, and the cries of the people for justice did not reach his ears.

Regarding the critical re-evaluation, my memory is that while there's a lot bad about TPM, Liam Neeson does pretty well.

As with so many prequel elements where I appreciated what Lucas was trying to do but thought he kinda whiffed it in the execution, his repeated trickery wrt the use of doubles (e.g. Palpatine/Sidious, Padme and her handmaidens) is cool but not handled with great alacrity.

maybe Senator Palpatine was Emperor Palpatine's less motivated cousin

I think Palpatine might've also been named as such in the Dark Empire comic, as well, which came out around the same time as Zahn's first novel.

Soon he was controlled by the very assistants and boot-lickers he had appointed to high office, and the cries of the people for justice did not reach his ears.

Haha, this reads like someone's controversial revisionist history of the rise of Palpatine.

It's very uncool how the Empire thwarted their intergalactic despot's desire to be excellent to everyone.

he had a plan, but few outside of the Imperial order seemed willing to hear him out

Aided and abetted by restless, power-hungry individuals within the government, and the massive organs of commerce, the ambitious Senator Palpatine caused himself to be elected President of the Republic. He promised to reunite the disaffected among the people and to restore the remembered glory of the Republic. Once secure in office he declared himself Emperor, shutting himself away from the populace. Soon he was controlled by the very assistants and boot-lickers he had appointed to high office, and the cries of the people for justice did not reach his ears.

― papa stank (Neanderthal), Fri

The novelization, which I got as an Easter (!) present in 1983 before the film's release, does not mention Palpatine/Sidious as Sith Lord, and, as you can see by the passive voice ("was controlled"), Lucas and his henchmen saw him as a puppet. The Palpatine-as-catalyst-for-everything didn't happen until the 2000s.

I mean, when Sidious fries Luke with Sith lightning in ROTJ it's still clear he's a Sith because we've never seen Vader do it (obv we know now why).

There was definitely ambiguity about what the Sith are, their relationship to the dark side, and whether "dark lord of the sith" (which I think was attributed to Vader at some point contemporaneously) was a title related to his role with some dark side organization or if it was just an honorific given to him specifically

*it's still NOT clear he's a Sith, rather

xpost

i had a star wars encyclopedia as a kid that called the emperor "emperor palpatine," so from the moment i saw the phantom menace i knew palpatine was sidious

you could see an alternative path where Palpatine is "dark master of the whills" and all the people wielding the dark side just get progressively more ridiculous titles

Lucas pulled in and revised from a myriad of stories related to the Star Wars properties in crafting a new canon for the prequels while discarding much more. The fans who insist this is something that happened post-Disney have short memories, or weren't around for the first run of extended property-mining

I think the parts of fandom that were super-literal missed the point -- the jedi were an established order of force users who declared that their way was the right way, took very young children into their care, and raised them to align with a specific set of beliefs and a jedi code.

The non-movie canon (and finally, the movies) establishes that a bunch of people have at least some ability to use the force, if not many more who can perceive it, and that the Sith are a group somewhat analogous to the jedi in that they've banded together and created rules, structure, and a different type of training program

the nightsisters of dathomir are still canon lol

i'm sure i got this from posts on this board, but it'd be soooo much more interesting if more of that horror and transition were spread over the preceding films

i feel you but i sort of like that each movie ends up having its own identity (pm: political intrigue/inconsequential adventure romp; aotc: star noir; rots: feels like ugly crying for 2.5 hours)

as an inveterate prequel-defender it is hard for me to agree that the story would be more powerful if anakin were likable. talented, arrogant, fascistic tendencies, chip on his shoulder the size of a planet: this seems like darth vader to me

after which it's just like "hey go kill these people" ---- "okay boss."

really it's "ok boss, as long as i can save padmé, who i am actually inadvertently killing by trying to save her, wow that's *darth sidious voice* ironic"

i love the shots in rots of anakin with tears streaming down his face every time he does something horrible, and i like to think vader is also just crying constantly behind the mask

Isn't that the primary motivation in the novels -- his self-loathing? That's what makes him uniquely powerful: the well of self-loathing is bottomless, and the Emperor's expert at coaxing him to draw from it.

There's a sense that Lucas decided Anakin's arc that leads to him becoming Vader happens during his extended adolescence and his redemption is the culmination of an adult life that took the wrong path. I get that as a narrative choice, but it meant we get hotshot emo terror for three movies