The Gaming Den

Koumei wrote:I mean, they cut a "less than one second" lesbian kiss from the release in one of the homophobic countries, do you really think they're going to try something that will ruffle feathers in more countries and also is more of a big thing that is harder to cut?

I've seen it twice here in China, the lesbian kiss is still in the movie here. (I don't really have a point, just giving some input.)

The criticisms I've seen levelled at S08 of GoT applies to this movie I think. The things that happened aren't so much the problem, it's how we arrived at what happened that's lacking. Like, nothing was earned or hinted at or foreshadowed (Emperor's return, Hux's betrayal, Rose's whole sidelining, new Star Destroyer fleet, etc)

First time I saw it, I was pissed that they invented yet another way to fuck with the established rules for hyperspace (takes time to plot a course, can't do it in atmo, basic TIE don't have hyperspace engines...). Second time I saw it, I caught that they were. calling it "light speed skipping". SW doesn't ever call it light speed or FTL or whatever, it's always hyper-* (space or drive or...)

Koumei wrote:

Prak wrote:making Rey, Finn and Poe an explicit triad

I mean, they cut a "less than one second" lesbian kiss from the release in one of the homophobic countries, do you really think they're going to try something that will ruffle feathers in more countries and also is more of a big thing that is harder to cut?

At the end of the day, if you want inclusiveness and even a hint of backbone, you can basically set fire to all of Hollywood and "stuff that gets advertised on commercial TV". I'd generally suggest pornography as a good start.

Oh, obviously. I was just saying shit I'd do do if I were the one writing RoS.

Kinda makes me wonder what they'd do if a scriptwriter turned in something like that. Can you imagine the uproar by fanatics if they had to say "We're pushing back Rise of Skywalker because we're looking for a new writer after the first one finished the script?"

Prak wrote: Kinda makes me wonder what they'd do if a scriptwriter turned in something like that. Can you imagine the uproar by fanatics if they had to say "We're pushing back Rise of Skywalker because we're looking for a new writer after the first one finished the script?"

They did actually factually do that. Rise of Skywalker was made on the shortest production schedule of any of these things because they scrapped the movie they were going to make and brought Abrams in to pinch it and make a different movie in a hurry.

The best pithy description I've heard is "The Prequel Trilogy is a good story told badly. The Sequel trilogy is a bad story told well."

-Username17

Haven't seen RoS yet (wife doesn't want to spend money on it, and I tend to agree on this point). Personally, I'd argue that the Sequels are a bad story told mediocrely, but with great production values.

FrankTrollman wrote:
The thing is that there are still a lot of Samurai works to rip off and set in space. A New Hope is basically The Hidden Fortress. The Mandalorian is basically Lone Wolf and Cub. You know, Kurosawa made a lot of films, and you could rip a lot of them off for more Star Wars properties.

-Username17

Plus, the cross pollination between samurai films and westerns is now intense enough that there's tons of things that get the vibe right even if Kurosawa didn't explicitly come up with it. I would watch 310 to Yuma in SPAAAAACE.

Whipstitch wrote:Plus, the cross pollination between samurai films and westerns is now intense enough that there's tons of things that get the vibe right even if Kurosawa didn't explicitly come up with it. I would watch 310 to Yuma in SPAAAAACE.

This is the thing that I just can't believe - WHY haven't "they" ripped off more of the samurai/western movies for SW? It's widely known that ANH was a rip-off of one, why hasn't anyone done it again for SW? It's so easy, there's tons of material, it's practically already written for them just palette-swap the setting and characters...I would think lazy money-hungry executives would be flooding the market with these "new" SW movies, but nary a one...

phlapjackage wrote: This is the thing that I just can't believe - WHY haven't "they" ripped off more of the samurai/western movies for SW?

They're Disney, and it's Star Wars. They don't have to put in even the slightest effort to make piles of money. "They" are all about taking something interesting and repackaging it in the most bland an inoffensive (to old white people) way.

phlapjackage wrote:This is the thing that I just can't believe - WHY haven't "they" ripped off more of the samurai/western movies for SW? It's widely known that ANH was a rip-off of one, why hasn't anyone done it again for SW? It's so easy, there's tons of material, it's practically already written for them just palette-swap the setting and characters...I would think lazy money-hungry executives would be flooding the market with these "new" SW movies, but nary a one...

Maybe I'm not the only one who remembers Battle Beyond the Stars......

Iduno wrote:

phlapjackage wrote: This is the thing that I just can't believe - WHY haven't "they" ripped off more of the samurai/western movies for SW?

They're Disney, and it's Star Wars. They don't have to put in even the slightest effort to make piles of money. "They" are all about taking something interesting and repackaging it in the most bland an inoffensive (to old white people) way.

My guess is that Disney's script requirements are actively harmful to making a coherent story.

There is a long list of characters that need to be included where no character arc or characterization have been provided in previous movies. There is a need to have cute merch aliens. There is a setting Bible made by a Disney committee that limits what things you can use or introduce. There is a mandate to make them conform to the original trilogy in tone.

We are honestly lucky to have gotten the muddled, incoherent mess that we did.

K wrote:
We are honestly lucky to have gotten the muddled, incoherent mess that we did.

No, we are not.

Gotta agree with DDMW here. Telling a story with arbitrary restrictions imposed by other people who don't know where your story was going is fucking Improv. It can be difficult... when you only have a few seconds to come up with a next declaration before you lose the audience. It can be difficult when you are DMing a game and someone throws a spanner in your plot machinery. But you know what's not difficult? Turning in a draft when you have millions of dollars and an actual year to do it.

Superficially, having Disney paper pushers give you irrational lists of dos and don'ts and equally non-sensical lists of action figures they want you to put on screen may seem like one of those party games where you have cards with dumb shit on them and you have to justify using them in response to prompts. But the superficial resemblances with the part where in the Abrams position you are literally allowed to spend months of real time working on these fucking problems and also too if you get actually stuck it would be totally OK to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to hire actual English literature professors as consultants to dig your ass out.

You know that weird hangup that George Martin has where he wants all the major story directions to be his original ideas? Well in Star Wars no one expects you to have an original idea! Not only are you allowed to rip off any Western or Samurai movie you want, and mine as much out of whatever Star Wars properties you feel like, you can just fucking call a friend. And get Disney to foot the bill, since script consultants are simply normal people you can hire at any time for any reason or no reason at all.

The idea that Disney interference kept Abrams from making a coherent story is bullshit. He easily could have told a coherent story. The various guest directors for Marvel do it all the time. He failed to present a coherent story because he's shit at presenting coherent stories. See: everything he did on Star Trek.

-Username17

-Username17

I decided to read the plot of Rise of Skywalker. What a fucking mess.

I feel worse for knowing what I do now than when I lived in ignorance.

I read an interview with Chris Terrio, who was co-writer on The Rise of Skywalker. The interview was useless pap, but it made me curious who this guy was. Turns out he was also co-writer on the Snyder Batman v Superman and Justice League. That's basically everything you need to know.

FrankTrollman wrote: ....Superficially, having Disney paper pushers give you irrational lists of dos and don'ts and equally non-sensical lists of action figures they want you to put on screen may seem like one of those party games where you have cards with dumb shit on them and you have to justify using them in response to prompts. But the superficial resemblances with the part where in the Abrams position you are literally allowed to spend months of real time working on these fucking problems and also too if you get actually stuck it would be totally OK to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to hire actual English literature professors as consultants to dig your ass out.

Yeh, except you aren't allow to do that because Disney won't let you. Script doctors like the comedian Patton Oswald have said in interviews that studios call in help only after all the major decisions and schedules have been made and contracts have been signed and there isn't a lot that can be done. They can change dialogue and scene order, but they can't push back to the studio with major changes like "hey, we can't tell a coherent story with 13 main characters, but we could with half as many."

Your argument is that the entire film industry should work differently. That's a valid argument in a different conversation.

There is a reason that improv works for comedy and not drama. Too many requirements makes you twist yourself into absurdity because your choices aren't coherent even if they are logical. Long lists of requirements are great for light-hearted party games because you are supposed to laugh at the impossibility of producing something decent.

It didn't have to be so complicated. The big take away here is that you should avoid presenting contradictory information unless you have a reveal and a payoff that makes that information both logical and satisfying. A New Hope had the enormous advantage of being the first film in the franchise and so the writers were able to spray exposition all over the place without any issues. There were more landmines to step on once you're 7 movies in but even so I think the degree to which Abrams undermined the results of the original trilogy is pretty indefensible given that he had the entirety of fucking space to work with and jolly well could have used a new set of villains that Skywalker & Co. hadn't already defeated.

Also, Frank's on point when he mentioned the new Treks since Into the Darkness is the best example of the sort of bullheaded nostalgia mining and disregard for consequences that we're dealing with here. Into the Darkness's reenactment of the Wrath of Khan warp core scene was an emotionally affecting callback and should have been a triumph. It had better actors than the scene it aped, Kirk's arc was satisfying and the alternate universe gimmick was sufficient enough that I was fine with a simple role inversion. But then Abrams shouted "PSYCHE!!!" and called back the consequences in record time. He paints himself into corners and then gets sulky when fans point out that his solution is to track paint all over the house.

Frank wrote: He failed to present a coherent story because he's shit at presenting coherent stories. See: everything he did on Star Trek.

See also: Lost. I really like qntm's discussion of Abram's "Mystery Box" writing style.

The ultimate sin of TROS is that it turned away from the meager "maybe we can have...new ideas" from TLJ that infuriated fans and dove directly back into beating fans over the head with "this is star wars" in a desperate attempt to pander.

Eh. If The Force Awakens suffered from a failure of imagination, Rise of Skywalker seems to have been full-bore on the space wizard bullshit for no apparent reason. I swear there are more new Force powers in that movie than in the first six combined.

Despite everything, I still think pound-for-pound Attack of the Clones is the worst thing to come out of the movie franchise. I don't think it's the most damaging movie to the franchise (that would be The Last Jedi) but it's definitely the worst.

It's cringeworthy, convoluted, out-of-genre, makes the heroes look stupid, doesn't advance the metaplot, wooden, and worst of all: boring. The movie went out of its way to make Jedi -- the number-one selling point of the franchise -- look uncool and clunky. It's not even bad-but-salvageable, the entire movie needs to be rethought from the ground up. There's not one scene or element from that movie that I'd like to preserve. I can see some good in every other movie in the franchise, including The Force Awakens, but nothing about Attack of the Clones works.

The only virtue of this movie is that it's ambitious. Ambitious in the sense of a high-school couch potato competing in an Olympic triathlon.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:The only virtue of this movie is that it's ambitious. Ambitious in the sense of a high-school couch potato competing in an Olympic triathlon.

Lago, please.

Olympic triathlons are middle distance affairs. You're thinking of at least a half-Ironman.

I had forgotten quite how bad all the individual scenes are in Attack of the Clones. The mind literally rebels. Even little stuff just makes you hold your head and ask for brain bleach Like, why does Obi Wan go to a 1950s theme diner to get secret intel about astronavigation? Why is the new unstoppable army of the Galactic Republic smaller than the New York City police department? Why do they interrupt a manhunt to do a comedy bit with a guy named Sleazebaggano?

The love story is terrible. The mystery is complete nonsense. The political message should be strong but it misses on a couple of key notes. Anakin fails to be sympathetic or reasonable when he's considering going down the dark path.

I will say that some of the lightsaber fights are cool, and the Republic Clone Troopers look pretty awesome. Attack of the Clones set up a way for Clone Wars battles to look that had real resonance. It didn't look the same as the battle for Hoth or Endor but it still looked like Star Wars and it still looked cool. Set up some nice video game experiences for the period.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:The political message should be strong but it misses on a couple of key notes.

It misses a couple of key notes because it doesn't do a good job (or any job) connecting the clone conspiracy to the operations of government.

I mean, I understand what they were trying to get at. That the Republic is so ailing that they have no choice but to accept a hidden clone army into their ranks to fight rebels. But it's not a compelling plot point, for three reasons.

[*] The way they discovered it was stupid. The mystery doesn't connect together very well and then Dooku has to explain the conspiracy.
[*] The Jedi do all of the work of finding and mobilizing the clone army. There's a VERY different political message between Congress deciding to accidentally nuke its own capital and the CIA deciding on its own to nuke Washington D.C.
[*] Most importantly, they never emotionally connected the clone army conspiracy to the plot point of 'the Republic is dying'. The clone army shows up and saves the day and the movie has no sense of irony about it. Yoda and Mace never discuss how they might've cannibalized their own liver to live for another day, the Republic never goes 'what the fucking hell, this is serious', Padme never has a sit-down with Palpatine/the Jedi to discuss what this means.

That movie is so bad, it boggles the mind.

FrankTrollman wrote:Why is the new unstoppable army of the Galactic Republic smaller than the New York City police department?

This point, at least, is explained pretty well: Lama Su tell Obi-Wan "You will be delighted to hear we are on schedule. Two hundred thousand units are ready, with another million well on the way," and we see clones in various stages of growth and training during his tour. So the army that shows up at Geonosis is only a small part of the eventual full army (which will continue to grow throughout the Clone Wars), whatever portion happened to be ready for deployment at the time.

The numbers don't work out. 2 million troops, even heavily mechanized, is not enough to pacify even a single major continent on planet Earth. The Republic has thousands of planets.

More to the point, they can't work out, even if we increase the number to 1 trillion clone troops. The conspiracy needs to be small enough so that a couple of people can get it going underway AND integrate it into the Republic's planning with little fuss. But it also needs to be big enough to crack the Republic in two.

It's a basic unresolvable contradiction. You either have too many troops to keep it a secret conspiracy or too few to overthrew the military of a federation of thousands of planets.

The thing is, it was an easily solvable problem if they wanted to have a Clone Army plot and a conspiracy. Just reveal that Dooku and Sidious have for several decades commissioned cloners to replace people in government and military posts -- either through Pod People-style body snatching or legitimate elections. When the time is ripe, Sidious pulls a Manchurian Agent-style plot to cause mass rebellions and then using the existing military to declare martial law.

One million, nay, even hundreds of thousands, is still a tiny amount for national armies. Let alone planetary. Let alone galactic. The galactic republic’s clone army when fully grown would come in at #5 on the earth military active service list.