star wars 9 spoilers and postmortem shit talk

but tbf they only had three hundred million dollars to work with

the documentary clips about the movie make it clear that they spent a lot more time and money on puppets and animatronics -- which are excellent! -- than on the battle junk or the plot

ok I'm done

I demand a tell-all about how *this* happened

Kathleen Kennedy bonked her head on a girder

The best thing about this movie is that it led me to the palate cleanser of better (or 'better' if you prefer) SW product of the past that I'd previously passed over, eg. Clone Wars.

well as noted, the debacle is mainly in terms of story and script - they maintained high production value and quality control to make it all feel "Star Warsy" etc. etc. seems pretty clear that, absent an actual planned story for the three movies (!!!!) they were counting on positive healthy handoffs between films. abrams isn't really good at finishing things story-wise, and in this case made a bad sequel both to johnson's film and to his own initial reboot film.

meanwhile, the films were made too quickly on each other's heels, so they made a lot of bad snap decisions based on overhyped early "fan" reaction to The Last Jedi. for example cutting Johnson loose entirely, and trusting that it would be a good look to ditch most of the exciting new stuff he did in that film. so nobody at the producer level was riding abrams to make sure this felt like a satisfying sequel, or saying things like "we can't just bring in the emperor as a villain, that's stupid, and anyway the last film ended by firmly establishing kylo ren as the new villain --- what can we spin that into?" etc. etc.

It just seems insane to me to decide at the start "we're going to go make a 3-movie trilogy where each movie is by a different director and not have planned out a story ahead of time."

It's like "DC Challenge: The Movie"

dr c has it nailed i think

also the acting is really bad, and i sympathise given the dialogue and the lack of any discernible character but at the same time, the acting is reaaaalllly bad

the scene where finn meets the other runaway storm trooper, if that was fifth year drama youd bust in halfway through with a "whats wrong with you? start that again"

xpost in theory it could be way better than having things too tightly-constructed and just be filling in some master outline --- it's good to be able to pause and see what popped in the first film, where the energy is, which character dynamics are clicking. i think they just blew it on the pausing. even johnson i think kinda missed the boat a little by not really developing one of the strongest threads from TFA, the finn/rey relationship, though i liked everything else he did with those characters.

i think TFA is hugely overpraised tbh

rogue one otoh is a legitimately excellent action movie

even johnson i think kinda missed the boat a little by not really developing one of the strongest threads from TFA, the finn/rey relationship

agree with this, tho i know where johnson was coming from, echoing the separate-missions-until-they-converge-at-the-climax structure of empire strikes back.

uh of the two towers

TFA has some serious issues (mainly everything to do with the bad guys and their Death Planet), but it's got momentum and energy and really really charismatic characters (IMHO). i've grumbled enough about rogue one on the appropriate threads - it doesn't work for me at all as an action movie or as a heist/mission/war/whatever movie. still arguably the best-looking one of these, apart from some of the TLJ sequences.

xp not all the plots converge in the two towers!

I was about to say.

TFA definitely had more going for it visually than this did. plus it actually breathed on occasion

I get the entire giant room full of shadowy figures concept, but with one of the major complaints with digital projection at theaters being bad reproduction of darker scenes, why the fuck did they choose to do *that*

I wonder how many theaters had people complaining about the projection quality only for the staff to have to explain, no, it's really supposed to be nondescript and dark

It just seems insane to me to decide at the start "we're going to go make a 3-movie trilogy where each movie is by a different director and not have planned out a story ahead of time."

It's like "DC Challenge: The Movie"

I appreciate this reference but it is also like "Star Wars," the original trilogy

jrrsplaining itt smdh

Eh, only technically, there is a very big difference in that George Lucas was working on all three of them, whereas there really was supposed to be a new guiding artistic vision on each of the three new ones. Or, 'vision'...

each movie was by a different director, and Lucas didn't have a story planned out ahead of time.

xp i hate richard e grant

― ole uncle tiktok (darraghmac), Tuesday, 24 March 2020 22:01 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

^^^the correct position, get a grip ppl he's bad not good

no

he's great when he's good but he kinda sucked in this, mainly because the character as written is terrible

Lucas planned the first story, and he stayed on to plan out the rest of them. It's not like Richard Marquand could go in and say 'actually, I've always wanted Obi-wan to be Luke's father!'

good things with terrible ham REG being entertaining in them: Withnail & I, How To Get Ahead In Advertising, The Player, karaoke, Cold Lazarus, Franz Kafka's It's A Wonderful Life, Spice World, Doctor Who: The Curse Of Fatal Death (1999), Gosford Park, Can You Ever Forgive Me, his first book, the 2008 Sydney production of My Fair Lady

bad things with REG elevating them via energetic hammery: Hudson Hawk, Pret-A-Porter

good & bad things that he kinda sucks in: Henry & June, Jack & Sarah, Frasier, Doctor Who: The Time Of The Doctor (2013)

Karaoke, not karaoke, though I bet he would be fun at it

Lucas planned the first story, and he stayed on to plan out the rest of them.

JJ Abrams planned the first story, and the Lucasfilm Story Group stayed on to supervise the rest of them. Striking denials are making the analogy become more powerful!

spice world is good i agree (tho he is annoying in it), can't really agree abt any of the rest of that list (some of which i haven't seen tbf and never will: gosford park? just no)

english ppl always suck in us sitcoms, it's the law

I'm trying to think of a better exception than...Peter Serafinowicz in Parks & Rec if that counts

Sic, Lucas doing the first and helping to do the rest is not the same as Abrams doing the first and some others helping to do the rest and it's really weird you can't see that...

It's okay, enjoy your goalpost.

Dude

I believe "Lucas planning the first" was referring to A New Hope

The LucasFilm story group has explained on multiple occasions that they're there to answer questions, point out glaring backstory issues (like if someone says Leia's from Yavin or something), and catalogue all of the new characters/locations/etc. They have as much story direction and veto power as the director and the producers give them, that's about it.

It's not like Richard Marquand could go in and say 'actually, I've always wanted Obi-wan to be Luke's father!'

iirc Leigh Brackett came up with that plot point and it was ok'ed by Lucas. He gets a lot of credit for the broad strokes of the story, but they were... very broad.

it mostly comes down to Lucas being a hands-on producer for eps 4-6 and lucking into decent writers and hiring directors who were very much pros that were there to keep the ship going in the right direction while keeping a high level of craft

I feel like there wasn't a firm hand on the till, although with Disney nudging Kennedy and all the market forces of the modern era in the mix it's a tricky job. Lucas basically had sole proprietorship

of those things that are meant to be good, only gosford parkn is good and none of that is because of richard e grant

of those things that are not good, none of them are improved by richard e grant

the english malkovich, the english spacey. talk slow and someone will fall for it.

if you cant move your fuckin face youre not a fuckin actor

all fair, but the qualification for commanding an Imperial force is that you have to sound like a prick and do it with an English accent iirc

surprised but not shocked that you hate The Player (1992), would not be surprised if you love The Game (1997)

Ralph McQuarrie is the author of the original trilogy

WTF Richard Grant is great I will not hear this

xp fair take imo

that is quality work sic

I feel like there wasn't a firm hand on the till, although with Disney nudging Kennedy and all the market forces of the modern era in the mix it's a tricky job

yeah there were clearly a lot more chefs puttering about in the kitchen on these movies than on the others and it shows. unlike with the marvel movies which emit a consistent grey slush due to hypercompetent management and the DC movies which are all over the place in an occasionally fun or somewhat interesting way because of...I guess a mix of Snyder's psychosis and a wackier batch of characters. IX was just deeply inept, misconceived and rushed really. it really is something how much better-sounding the movie Trevorrow wanted to make was based on the synopsis, I suspect it would still have been visually bleh tho

Richard E. Grant is wonderful in Can You Ever Forgive Me?, and clearly he was hired for this farrago to bring malicious fey Britishes to a ghost role.

I was thinking Herzog would have been fun for that but they cast him in that other thing instead.

terrible decision to halve domhnall in order to foreground yet another nothing character

also, was it left open as to whether reg was in fact a deep rebel agent, because i insist that it was

i am sick enough of star wars that i've started writing my own hatefic spec script, rewriting the prequel trilogy into one movie where the jedi are corrupt and hypocritical pederasts who spend more time fighting each other than opposing the possibly-mythical "sith lords". it's not original by any stretch of the imagination but it's been a lot of fun to write so far! i still have to figure out if/when i can incorporate han, lando, c3po, and r2d2 into it, though

Society-style shunt them into a single character imho

is that a reference to the 1989 brian yuzna film? haven't seen it. or "re-animator". from what i'm reading about it, i'm afraid what i'm doing _really_ isn't that creative.

I ended up watching Rise of Skywalker and re-watching the rest of the sequel trilogy because my kid got into it. TLJ was better than I remembered and ROS was really entertaining. All three of them are far from perfect, but I'm not going to spend my time searching for plot holes or anything.

searching!

searching!

my fuckin telly was swallowed by a fuckin plot hole when put this on

you know i couldn't hit it sideways