Star Wars: The Disney+ Empire Strikes Again and Again and...

lol thats p good

There’s nothing quite as sad and hilarious as middle aged men complaining about dialog and logic in a Star Wars movie. Like, did you even see the first trilogy? The dialog is corny af and forced and riddled with terrible acting. The worst thing about Star Wars is easily Star Wars fans. I saw both episodes. There was pew pew and space ships. It was entertaining.

Like, did you even see the first trilogy? The dialog is corny af and forced and riddled with terrible acting.

This is absolutely true but that doesn't make it unreasonable to want something made in 2022 to be better! Sitcoms in 1977 sucked too and if they launched a new half-hour show set in the Extended WKRP Universe I would expect the acting and writing to be held to a higher standard than the original.

I mean....the difference between asking someone and extracting info = one is easy and one is work. doesn't seem that much of a stretch.

having to extract info from someone while there's a Jedi in the same room also gives the Jedi an advantage because you're distracted

My kid pointed out that when Third Sister was interrogating Owen, the other Inquisitors were right nearby, which meant she couldn't get away with Jedi-prying stuff out of his mind.

mind-extracting seems to be a new Force skill because the Force has just been code for "LOL MAGIC" since 1977

Talk about a forced confession har har

I skipped Boba Fett because I heard it was awful. Was it? This looks more promising.

would take a vision quest to know for sure, but we're out of nose lizards.

The Batch: still Bad

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JX5OW8cOec

Sitcoms in 1977 sucked too and if they launched a new half-hour show set in the Extended WKRP Universe I would expect the acting and writing to be held to a higher standard than the original.

Network sitcoms today are many times worse than WKRP though.

Roz otm

i'll probably keep watching this because the Ewan stuff is JUST compelling enough. and because i like the Star Wars world and find many of its accoutrements aesthetically satisfying as well as comfortingly familiar. but a lot of it doesn't really grab me. and a lot of the story choices aren't grabbing me either, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and watch the rest before i start ranting. let it suffice to say that I think Mandalorian (which wasn't trying to closely slot into spaces between other stories) had it easier.

a big thing me is that the oomph and magic and grandeur of Star Wars just doesn't translate down to TV scale, for me, even though the costumes and lightsaber effects do. some shots of the seedy space town looked ok, but a lot of them really showed the signs of being a big green screen room with a few extras scrolling about to populate the scene. the forest chase felt very Hercules/Xena I'm sure everyone involved worked really hard and did many clever things to make possible what they have, but for whatever irrational reason i didn't embrace it. the Tattooine stuff worked better I thought.

i used to love Ewan McGregor pre Star Wars so i am enjoying watching him in particular

the kid bothers me not gonna lie
how is she even leia with no fire or stubbornness or attitude

No attitude? Seems like she has a lot of it!

the bar is too low for kid actors imo

she's fine, but the role needs "special," and it's really hard to find that, or draw it out on set (especially with a huge complicated production with a ton of other moving parts). more rehearsal time, super valuable for actors generally, could easily deaden a child's performance. and meanwhile she has to make sure she's hitting all the marks for the digital effects stuff. so we're back in prequel land in several ways.

Some good things:

* I did find the Inquisitors convincingly menacing and weird, even if their methods don't really make much sense. Main Baddie Sister is fine as a TV show villain but if this devolves into weekly "I'll get you next time, Kenobi!!" scenes, we're in trouble.

* I liked the approach to showing Kenobi's workaday grind in the desert, and what his priorities are at this point.

* I bet Smits was thrilled to finally get to play Bail in a complete, character-driven scene after all these years, and it worked well onscreen.

* Happy to have Edgerton back as Owen! He feels very natural and lived-in.

* Basically the first ep, apart from the forest bit, worked pretty well for me -- edit it down a little and it's a great first act for a lovely 95-minute Star Wars TV special.

-force mind reading had an established precedent in ROTJ, i thought ("sister... so... you have a twin sister..."), maybe this is just like an aggressive version of that.

-i enjoyed the T-16 skyhopper model that obi-wan bought for luke, nice callout ("i used to bullseye womp rats in my T-16 back home")

-sung kang has a nice sansho the bailiff vibe going with that hat

-kumail was not bad for what he was given, his character has this watto vibe going on. i assume he's formerly jedi academy adjacent, maybe even flunked out? hence the motivation to help obi wan.

-when is obi wan going to get confronted about meat-stealing, we keep on getting shots of him wrapping chekhov's hunk of krayt-ribeye in butcher paper. (ok, i know that's not a krayt dragon but i don't know any other tatooine megafauna it could be, maybe a franchise-crossover molduga from zelda?)

-otherwise roz and doctor casino otm, the action sequences feel so lifeless and clunky. it feels as wooden as the pre-mandalorian episodes of boba fett, i wonder if there's some edict from on high at disney to make everything slow and bad. i'm betting these episodes would be a lot better as a director's cut? also annoying how video game-y these episodes feel (go talk to character A to collect plot device B in order to take the offworld transport at location C)? amazing how much better the andor trailer looks, i assume everything is just a lot better when you get to white sheet the story/characters and not feel confined by trying to fit something in on a timeline between the prequels and the original trilogy.

i assumed the meat was a permitted daily ration. it's not really presented that way, but since Obi-Wan's entire status quo is "keep a low profile, don't attract attention, the boy is the only purpose remaining," i couldn't imagine him taking the risk of stealing stuff at work every day. also he's a single man, living way the hell out in the boonies with apparently few expenses - if anybody can possibly survive on the crappy pay of a short-term carcass-slicer, it'd be him.

hmm i thought it was to show how he can't keep his jedi instincts under warps even in exile since he feeds the meat to his tatooine camel - is star wars the franchise where being kind to animals marks you as a good guy or am i thinking of some other franchise?

the Andor trailer does look quite good

i think the relative cheapness of the production is simple economics stemming from the subscription model. really great-looking action takes time and money. not that you need infinite dollars to make a fight scene exciting, but it does take time to put the camera/lights in interesting places, rehearse exciting fights, etc. and maybe they just want a few good-enough Star Wars shows a year, to keep on board the people who only signed up for Mandalorian in the first place. if you've already got McGregor in the title role and are promising fans an exciting and untold chapter in several major chatacters' stories, maybe there's not as much support from above when the creators want to push all these elements to be their best.

-nice touch of bringing in temeura to play the homeless clone trooper

some shots of the seedy space town looked ok, but a lot of them really showed the signs of being a big green screen room with a few extras scrolling about to populate the scene.

yeah this was really bad, feels like there are directorial touches you can do to make a place seem a lot bigger and more lived in than it really is, using tight telephotos and zooms to provide a sense of depth - i suppose you can't do that with a greenscreen, everything is a big wide angle because you don't have a real set to work off of (the obvious call out is blade runner, look how much is done with just panning past the neon sign with a tight telephoto, some real depth to it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcwOApqmJMQ)

-is this our first time on alderaan outside of episode 3? i like how cheesy and 70s all the costumes and buildings were, also how much of a verdant paradise it's supposed to be, something very "inner light" about it, they're going overboard to make sure we understand how much of a loss it was for it to get blown up!

-force mind reading had an established precedent in ROTJ, i thought ("sister... so... you have a twin sister...")

ahh, yes, you are right! completely forgot about that

2 scenes of Vect slappin' the big console button. The child acting is bad. There are fun real life parallels involving child Jedi/actors and revisiting past mistakes going on. Slow start, but I'm into it now!

Ben (Ewan) must protect these force-gifted children (child actors) and get it right this time.

Pleading and persecuted young jedi vs pleading and persecuted young prequel loving fanbase

i'll tell you what, there's a reason most series don't open with a very long "previously on" scene, followed by an action scene, immediately followed by a "10 years later" intertitle and that reason is that you're like.. is the actual story going to start soon? and then you get the actual story and it's got something to do with some extremely boring invigilators or whatever pushing open the imaginary swinging doors of a tavern and expounding ludicrously on jedis while they clomp around like fools

this didn't feel that diff from an episode of Rebels tbh

Like Ewan but this was a bit boring imo

Boba Fett was also boring but I preferred that kind of boring?

NB I always have a nice twenty-minute nap during Star Wars movies so boringness is not a bug

Perhaps -- because I'm not really that into Star Wars -- I'm having the same "there's too much continuity and they all look the same!!!!" reaction people have to Marvel movies.

Baby Leia asks Ben to "make her float", begging Ewan to make this series a success like the one with a floating baby yoda.

I spent the couple episodes thinking how hard Obi-Wan was working at being extremely offline. So many bits where logging on for a moment were so tempting. Almost made it, until finally he had to use the force to catch Leia.

Picturing Anakin meditating in his bacta tube getting the "Obi-Wan is online" ping when that happened

is it possible to use the force to 'make out' remotely

lmao mh

xp

didn't that happen in The Last Jedi?

Seems Ben would have sensed the still living Anakin at some point before logging off.

It had never occurred to me that he didn't know. I guess he really intended him to slowly and painfully die on the side of a volcano. Seems kinda out of character, but what do I know? Odd that he somehow had never heard any mention of "Darth Vader" but I guess I dunno how much his escapades were being publicized by the Empire at that point in time.

he was just "new suit goofin'" for 10 years

I know in Rebels the existence of Darth Vader himself isn't well known in the time after the rise of the Empire, and Ahsohka Tano is devastated when she finds out it's Anakin. amazing moment in that series.

also some neat Darth comics about his early time on the job, where he's somewhat insubordinate and still traumatized by what happened to him on Mustafar.

The comics are kind of a series of "ahh, this is the moment when he really becomes Darth Vader" followed immediately by him getting some ideas and the Emperor swatting him down hard, only to come back even more powerful

Emperor def didn't go through HR-sanctioned sensitivity training

It must be true

Watching Obi-Wan Kenobi and I like to imagine that Flea's eccentric gang of hapless criminals is the same as his eccentric gang of hapless criminals from Back to the Future II, Big Lebowski and Baby Driver and they just travel through different IP universes to do bungled capers. pic.twitter.com/7GRiyhXIz0

— Alex Seitz-Wald (@aseitzwald) May 28, 2022

would watch Flea crew multiverse

Throw in the crew he was part of with Chet Baker in the Baker doc Let’s Get Lost.

Inquisitor: You have failed the Empire once again. Have you anything to say for yourself?

Vect Nokru:

Fuck you asshole
You homophobic, redneck dick
You're big and tough and macho
You can kick my ass

So fucking what
So fucking what

Anyway, episode 3, gotta love a cliffhanger.

is star wars the franchise where being kind to animals marks you as a good guy or am i thinking of some other franchise?

This falls into the category/trope of Saving the Cat, doesn’t it? The protagonist displays how inherently good they are by extending care to an animal in need and thus establishes character without the need for dialogue.

I’m trying to remember what I watched in the last 6 months that literally had the protagonist saving a cat in the opening bits?

the inverse is true too. Kevin Spacey put a suffering dog out of his misery in House of Cards first episode, and boom...pedophile

The comics are kind of a series of "ahh, this is the moment when he really becomes Darth Vader" followed immediately by him getting some ideas and the Emperor swatting him down hard, only to come back even more powerful

― mh, Tuesday, May 31, 2022 3:53 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink