Star Wars

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Mothra
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Re: Star Wars

Postby Mothra » Fri Jun 03, 2022 6:20 pm

Thad wrote:
Mothra wrote:Dude this Obi-Wan show fuggin' suuuuucks

I really liked the first episode. Haven't seen the other two yet.

Büge wrote:I understand they just sorta took the same premise as the Mandolorian, only with Obie and Baby Leia instead of Mando and Baby Yoda

I'd heard that they intended it to be Obi-Wan protecting Luke until Mando debuted with more-or-less the same premise and so they decided to change it around.

It's...a little surprising that all they did was change who the kid was. But based on the first episode, I really like the little girl they got for Leia, I like how her scenes are written, and young Leia is inherently a more interesting character than young Luke; Luke's whole deal is that he's a backwater farmboy wishing something exciting would happen to him. Plus it gets them the fuck off Tatooine. So it's a good change even if it still winds up kind of being the same premise anyway.

And Flea is a good casting choice! That dude is scary-looking!

Dying to see your reaction to eps 2 and especially 3. God damn.

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Re: Star Wars

Postby Thad » Fri Jun 03, 2022 8:31 pm

I watched a bit of Clone Wars on my lunch today. Wife walked in near the end; she isn't a big Star Wars fan but is vaguely aware of the arc.

She asked "So is he evil yet?"

And I'm like "Well he just committed a war crime, so yes, but he's not Darth Vader yet, no."

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Re: Star Wars

Postby beatbandito » Mon Jun 06, 2022 10:38 pm

Kenobi episode 1 is fine

2 is mostly fine, only real complaint is when kenobi is pinned down by laser fire on a roof, gets distracted by leia falling, stops the fight to slow her fall and save her, then walks around the corner where she just landed in one unbroken shot on the ground. and the pursuers are just gone

3 is idiotic, everyone trades being the idiot who does something dumb for no reason even if the last scene they were the one saying specifically not to do the thing. and teleportation is just a thing, multiple characters run down narrow hallways towards each other and end up in completely different places
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Re: Star Wars

Postby beatbandito » Tue Jun 07, 2022 8:25 am

curious on people's opinion on the twitter take about Kenobi being portrayed as having been hot for padme. I think maybe the writers don't actually intend for it to come off like that, but it is very horny writing/acting for describing a kids' mom and your relationship with her.

the only interest I have going forward with this show is how well they do the inevitable scene where he finally tells leia to stop calling him ben and call him obi-wan, such that she would decide to use that name in her message for a new hope
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Re: Star Wars

Postby Thad » Wed Jun 08, 2022 12:32 am

I liked the second episode too. I still like Leia a lot, I liked Kumail Nanjiani's character and his arc, and stuff like the homeless Vietnam vet clone is grim but in a cool world-building way. And it answered the question I've been wondering this whole time, which is why Jason Isaacs didn't return to the role of the Inquisitor. Different guy! I should have known from the forehead.

And I looked it up and Ewan McGregor is actually not that far off from the correct relative age to Alec Guinness? He's 12 years younger than Guinness was in the original film, and the time difference is supposed to be 9 years. So just this once it's not a problem with the timeline, it's that people just used to look really old. I assume from the constant smoking and drinking.

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Re: Star Wars

Postby Mongrel » Wed Jun 08, 2022 12:47 am

You also get a variety of aging from family to family anyway.
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Re: Star Wars

Postby beatbandito » Wed Jun 08, 2022 5:55 am

Thad wrote:And it answered the question I've been wondering this whole time, which is why Jason Isaacs didn't return to the role of the Inquisitor. Different guy!

This is a universe where the main bad guy is 99% technology after having his corpse pulled out of lava. If the reveal is that the rebels high inquisitor is a different guy with the same affectations and design, other than face paint and exact armor layout, this show can actually eat my entire ass.


Related: Kenobi made me go back to clone wars. The early stuff is about as rough as I remember, but the first episode is very good. I legitimately don't know how someone could watch kenobi and clone wars episodes 1 back-to-back and think kenobi is the better show.
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Re: Star Wars

Postby Thad » Wed Jun 08, 2022 12:24 pm

That's the first episode with Yoda, right? Yeah, that was a good one even if a lot of season 1 was rough.

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Re: Star Wars

Postby Mothra » Wed Jun 08, 2022 11:17 pm

I'm gonna keep watching this because it's something to put on while I work out, but holy fuck guys this show blows.

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Re: Star Wars

Postby beatbandito » Tue Jun 14, 2022 6:41 am

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Re: Star Wars

Postby Thad » Tue Jun 21, 2022 12:48 am

Still a couple behind but yeah episode 3's a mess, standard escape-and-then-get-captured-again time-wasting. Obi-Wan makes stupid decisions just to advance the plot ("welp, our contact isn't here, let's immediately abandon the meeting point and fuck everything up, but first a Zach Braff cameo"). And...they can't walk around the fence? If this is a Blazing Saddles reference then I love it, but that is the only possible way it makes any sense whatsoever?

The best thing I can say about the Obi-Wan/Darth Vader confrontation is that I get what they were trying to do. From the individual shots, I can tell it looked really fucking cool in the storyboard phase. And I understand the character beat they were trying to hit -- this series is all about Obi-Wan at his lowest, wracked with guilt and self-doubt, and so when he faces Darth Vader it's not just that he's looking at a ghost and being haunted by his own failure, it's also a deliberate contrast to how cool and self-assured he is when they meet in the original movie. The idea is that he's a quivering mess now, but sometime between now and Ep 4 he pulls it together and transcends his past failures. All that has real potential; there are some good ideas in there; it's just that the execution falls flat. They overdo it; Obi-Wan isn't just off-guard, he's sniveling and weak. There are definite issues with the plotting in this one, but where this scene breaks down isn't in the writing or the storyboarding, it just doesn't quite come together in the actual execution. I think it would have worked better if they'd underplayed it, if instead of running away and cowering he'd clenched his jaw and stood his ground but clearly been shaken-up and lost the fight as a result. McGregor's got the chops; he could have pulled that off. Star Wars has never been good at subtlety, it's a fucking opera and every emotion has to be oversized, and that's often to its detriment. I think this could have been a really good, intense scene if they'd trusted McGregor enough to have him go small instead of big.

I do think Vader's characterization in that scene pretty much worked out that way, but I'm not sure how much of that was deliberate and how much of it was just a result of the dual-casting. We have a Vader who sounds like James Earl Jones but acts like Hayden Christensen, for very obvious and literal reasons, but it ends up working really well on a metaphorical level, too. He wants to be the Vader of the OT, but he isn't yet; he's not as in-control as he appears, he's fucking furious. Obi-Wan survives because Vader's too emotional to just fucking kill him when he has the chance; he wants to make him suffer. I think there's something there, with Vader trying to appear calm but actually being emotional underneath it; I think if they'd had the conviction to show that same struggle with Obi-Wan, they could have really saved the entire scene.

Anyway. For all that it fell short, it had its moments. Still loving Vivien Lyra Blair as Leia. And for that matter the rest of the cast is pretty great too, Zach Braff cameo and all, even if the material's not quite there this time around.

And like I say, there were some really cool shots that I could tell looked a lot better in the storyboarding phase. And Vader's introduction was cool. The Imperial March, the breathing, the voice. Watching him get put together like fucking Voltron. And LBR, getting burned up in a volcano and then building your fucking house on it is baller as hell.

It was frustrating, but not a total loss, which is an accurate description of most of the Star Wars franchise, really.

Anyway that's episode 3. Haven't seen 4 or 5 yet but yeah for a series that's only 6 episodes long it's already hit the point where it's feeling needlessly padded. And that ain't great, but that's one more thing that's also very Star Wars.

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Re: Star Wars

Postby Mothra » Tue Jun 21, 2022 3:02 pm

Yeah it sucks pretty hard. Not as bad as Fett, but it's certainly up there.

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Re: Star Wars

Postby Thad » Tue Jun 21, 2022 6:21 pm


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Re: Star Wars

Postby Thad » Wed Jun 22, 2022 1:01 pm

Meanwhile, I'm also finishing up Clone Wars, and the last season has plot threads that tie it to Solo and The Mandalorian and it's like huh. So this is what it feels like when Star Wars continuity is actually planned in advance and coordinated across multiple projects instead of people just making it up as they go along.

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Re: Star Wars

Postby Thad » Fri Jun 24, 2022 4:41 pm

Halfway through the four-part Clone Wars finale and god damn this is good Star Wars right here.

Centering Maul as Cassandra is an inspired choice. What prequels are really good at is foreboding, at the sense of inevitability, of the audience knowing something the characters don't. The audience knows what's happening -- Obi-Wan even shows up to establish where we are in Episode 3's timeline here; Anakin has killed Count Dooku and the Jedi Council has sent him to spy on the Chancellor -- but none of the characters know where this is all heading, except for Maul. And nobody listens to him, because he's Darth Maul. From the bit where he tries to tell Ahsoka what's going to happen to Anakin to the ending where the clones are arresting him and he shouts that they don't know what's coming, we see the only character who understands what's happening, who's terrified of it, but who can't convince anyone to help him stop it because of the whole murderous Sith crime boss who overthrew the government thing.

Plus they brought Ray Park in for performance capture!

A big part of why the OT worked was that Lucas had people around him to find the ideas that worked and emphasize them. I think that's pretty much what Clone Wars is in a nutshell -- at least, the good parts. Filoni's really adept at focusing on the stuff that works and almost making you forget about all the stuff that doesn't. He makes you look back at Episode 1 and just remember how fucking cool Darth Maul was, and not all that other stuff that happened in it.

Anyway! Liked that one. Two to go.

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Re: Star Wars

Postby Friday » Fri Jun 24, 2022 5:25 pm

Plus they brought Ray Park in for performance capture!


Yeah, this fight is the first lightsaber duel I've cared about since Maul vs Kenobi in the desert.

I love the little single foot hops Park does, it really lends dynamic tension and weight to his strikes. Plus I heard that the speed isn't exaggerated, and in some cases Park was actually faster than the computer could keep up with so you're actually seeing his performance in slight slow motion at times. That could be bullshit, though, I just read it in a comment somewhere.

Unfortunately, the fight is guilty of the cardinal sin of movie fights: it cuts away from the action. I fucking hate when directors do this, and it happens all the time. First rule of any movie fight: never cut away from it for basically any reason. Keep the camera on the fight until it's over.

For those curious about the actual fight, here's a fan edit that cuts out the dialog, the cutaways to other scenes, and adds Duel of the Fates for good measure.



I generally do not like the flashy, spinny, overwrought style of saber fighting that Phantom Menance ushered in with Maul, preferring the original Trilogy's more measured serious swordfighting. That being said, I think Park is a skilled enough martial artist to make that style work. It doesn't work with cartoon Maul because that's not Park, so normally Maul looks just as silly as everyone else waving their lightstick(s) around. But the mo-cap for this fight brings back the old Maul, one last time.
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Re: Star Wars

Postby Thad » Mon Jun 27, 2022 5:45 pm

Finished Clone Wars and it stuck the landing. For all the splodey shit going on, the last two episodes have the good sense to center on character and tell a story that's ultimately pretty small in the scheme of things -- after a huge number of credits in the first part of the finale, the last part only has 4 voice credits. And one of them is Dave Filoni doing droid beeps.

Because ultimately, while I may have had some curiosity about how Rex neutralized his control chip, I'm far more interested in how Rex felt. And Filoni understands that.

The end of the series isn't about how Rex and Ahsoka and Maul got away. It's about the terrible human cost of war.

Clone Wars was always about how war dehumanizes people and treats them as identical machines. In the finale, the metaphor becomes as literal and explicit as it's ever been, but it never feels clumsy or didactic in the way that Star Wars so often does.

Fucking brilliant, affecting stuff. It's what Star Wars aspires to be but usually isn't. It took a lot of bullshit to get to this moment, from the prequels to the episodes about banking regulations to that fucking Mon Cala arc that would not end to that guy who was shocked to learn that a group called Death Watch was untrustworthy. But it was worth it. It was even worth those episodes about gungans and droids.

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Re: Star Wars

Postby IGNORE ME » Mon Jun 27, 2022 6:14 pm

I had the overwhelming impression that the show should have capped off with the ending of Season 5, but I guess that's me.

EDIT: Oh, there's a Season 7 now. I get it. Star Wars is getting as hard to follow as Marvel now, and I'm losing interest for the same reason.

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Re: Star Wars

Postby Thad » Mon Jun 27, 2022 6:52 pm

Then you 're really not gonna like finding out about The Bad Batch.

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Re: Star Wars

Postby Thad » Tue Jun 28, 2022 1:09 am

Jesus, though, now I'm thinking about what it would have been like to be a kid watching the premier of Clone Wars in 2008 and then 12 years later it ends on a shot of a mass grave.

That is fucking bleak, and I'm speaking as somebody who was 10 when Batman: TAS premiered and 18 when they did that movie where the Joker tortures and brainwashes Robin.

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