Lurker > darkknight109

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

OhhhJa posted...

I'm sure not every Taiwanese person feels this way

They don't, obviously, or Taiwan would already be part of China.

There are pro-China and pro-Independence factions in Taiwan, as well as a sizable group of people in the "political centre" who favour the status quo, which is effectively independence without actually claiming independence (mostly to keep China from throwing a temper tantrum and potentially invading).

At the moment, the pro-Independence faction is at historical highs. A lot of the current tension with China comes from the fact that Taiwan elected a government that was relatively pro-independence a few years ago and China didn't like that the parties in favour of closer ties with the mainland lost power.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

THEGODDAMNBATMA posted...

but in reality Taiwan wants to be THE China and wants the mainland to be part of THEIR country.

No, they don't.

That ship sailed a good 70 years ago now.

Amuseum posted...

muh freedoms, while every western democratic nation is in lockdowns

Because targeted limitations on movements to try and combat a deadly global pandemic are totally the same as a repressive totalitarian regime completely crushing any dissent and disappearing the perpetrators.

Krazy_Kirby posted...

we wouldn't have to pay back our debt

I mean, that's debatable, because presumably China wouldn't just magically poof out of existence. The US would still owe debt to whatever entity replaced it, which would almost certainly take over its obligations (both owing and owed).

This is also ignoring that the vast majority of US debt isn't foreign-owned; two thirds of it is owned by American businesses and individuals. China only owns about 4% of America's debt. Hell, they're not even the largest foreign holder of American debt - that would be Japan, which owns about $200 billion more than China.

Finally, not having to pay back China isn't really the boon you think it is, because America doesn't have to pay back that debt *now*, so long as they continue paying the interest. America sells debt to China to finance its own operations; accordingly, the single most damaging thing that China could do with that debt is to stop buying it, so having China suddenly disappear would leave a considerable hole in US finances that would need to be filled.

THEGODDAMNBATMA posted...

I'm literally just looking out for AMERICA'S best interests. Avoid conflict!

You realize that Taiwan is responsible for about two-thirds of the *global* supply of semiconductors? Hell, a single Taiwanese company - TSMC - produces more than half the semiconductors for the entire world.

If, God forbid, China were to take over Taiwan, you're handing them a virtual monopoly of an incredibly important strategic resource that is needed for everything from cars to computers to military tech.

Even ignoring the humanitarian aspect of allowing a people to fall to tyranny, it is absolutely in America's interests that Taiwan remain free from China.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

The 50s was that time where it was legal to segregate and discriminate against black people, yeah?

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Mega Man Xavier is the overall better series of the two, as long as you don't go any farther than X5 (which, incidentally, was where the series was supposed to end - and also where it absolutely should have ended).

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

BlackScythe0 posted...

I genuinely don't understand with the shit I've had modded for in the past how tc is able to avoid having his threads deleted.

Well, he's banned now, so I think the problem has resolved itself.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Cacciato posted...

kinda just wished youd shut the fuck up instead of bailing on topics.

Well, looks like you got your wish.

The_tall_midget posted...

It means "Japanese sword."

Ackshuwally it just means "sword", if you're doing a direct translation.

"Nihonto" is "Japanese sword."

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

CaptainStrong posted...

Most of their exclusive games are first party games.

Most of Steam's exclusive games are absolutely not first-party.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Revelation34 posted...

I should have included "no matter what" at the end of that post.

No, you shouldn't have, because it would have been wrong.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Revelation34 posted...

Debarking is animal cruelty.

In most cases, yes. However, it is considered a best-practice for lab animals (for those that will be euthanized as part of the tests), because the constant noise of the barking stresses the dogs out (and can also lead to hearing damage in the researchers).

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Unsurprisingly, this has already been thoroughly debunked.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/10/25/fauci-puppy-experiments-conspiracy-republicans/

Cliff-notes version:
-The Tunisian study which was the subject of the original article was not actually supported by NIAID; other research in Tunisia *was* supported by NIAID and the New York Post seemed to fuck up and get them confused (no surprise there, considering it's a Murdoch rag), but said research did not involve animal testing.
-The dogs in that Tunisian study weren't trapped in cages and fed to flies; they were given a vaccine and allowed to roam freely, because they were the main reservoir host - and flies the main vector - of the disease being studied (which has a mortality rate of ~6% when infecting humans).
-A *third* study, which was also randomly collated into this mess, did involve "de-barking" beagle puppies and euthanizing them after the study, but that is because:
a) It is necessary to use young dogs to see the drugs' effects on growth
b) It is legally mandated that animal testing (on non-rodent mammals) be conducted on HIV-AIDS drugs and it is required that they be euthanized afterwards so that researchers can assess their organs for damage.
c) It is recommended that dogs being used for this research be de-barked because otherwise the constant barking stresses the dogs out (not to mention the researchers).
d) This was all to research next-generation antiretrovirals for the treatment of HIV/AIDS.

In other words, not nearly as controversial as the right-wing trolls are trying to paint it as.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Revelation34 posted...

Neither of those sites welcome conservatives.

Of course they do - both sites are fucking filled with them.

Hell, probably 90% of the times I see conservatives complaining about being censored by big tech, it's on a Facebook post or tweet, which is all kinds of hilarious.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Simply put, Youtube has profit sharing, which is something basically no other platform is willing to offer. Youtube offers basically everything that Twitch does now, including paid memberships, tips (aka "superchats"), custom emotes, so on and so forth. About the only thing they don't have, to the best of my knowledge, is integrated gaming where chat can participate in games like Jackbox or Move or Die, but they also give you a cut of the ad revenue from your videos. Also, Youtube has the biggest viewerbase with the possible exception of TikTok, which is an obvious draw.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Ogurisama posted...

New World

Dark Cloud 2, one of the most amazing games on the PS2.

Sarcasthma posted...

And my game did start with a "p". I just added extra steps to spice things up.

Your game started with a , not a p - two different characters.

I mean, if you posted a name starting with , would you say that started with an f or an h? Because neither is quite correct, as the sound that is used for the character doesn't really exist in English.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Elite: Dangerous

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Depends - I "know" people in that a couple of relatives of acquaintances died of it, but - knock-on-wood - no one I've actually met personally has died of it so far as I know.

I am somewhat lucky in that regard, in that I live in a country that mostly handled the pandemic pretty well (at least until the fourth wave) and I happen to live in one of the areas with the lowest COVID rates nationwide.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Rarest: 1994 Blockbuster Video Game Championships II for the Sega Genesis. One of only a handful in the world (it was 2-3 a few years ago, though I think a couple more have surfaced since then).

Most valuable: 1990 Nintendo World Championship (grey edition).The last confirmed sale was a couple months ago, for $180,000, but that's much higher than historical sales, which makes me a bit suspicious. It's probably worth closer to $25,000 - $30,000 right now.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

If it was a purely platonic friendship, no, I don't think that's reasonable. It speaks to a lack of trust in the relationship, which is a bad sign for the future.

I can understand a bit more hesitancy if you're meeting an ex alone - that's a (formerly) romantic relationship, so there's a bit more cause for anxiety there. I still think, ideally, partners should trust one another around members of the opposite sex if the relationship is serious, but a lot of it depends on the people involved and how mature the relationship is.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

OrangeDawn posted...

I know very little about Canadian politics but does the next election have to happen in 2 years or within 4 now?

Canadian elections are not on a set schedule, so they can happen whenever (with a maximum interval of four years). Minority governments can, at least in theory, last for the full four-year term, but almost never do, because at some point before that someone will find it convenient to call an election. Either the governing party likes how their poll numbers look and calls an early election to try and secure a majority so they don't have to work with the opposition anymore (which, incidentally, is why yesterday's election happened) or the opposition parties like how *their* poll numbers look and call a vote of no confidence (which, if passed, basically forces the government to dissolve) in the hopes of turfing the governing party and replacing them.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Nichtcrawler X posted...

No other parties would want to form a coalition with the Liberals?

Canada has never had a coalition government, even though our laws allow for it. We came close twice recently. The first time the Liberals and NDP (our centre-left and left-wing parties) were going to form a coalition government with the support of the Bloc (a regional separatist party) to oust Harper in... I think 2007(?) as a result of a Conservative scandal involving how much Canadian military officials knew about torture going on in Afghanistan, but Stephen Harper, the Conservative PM prorogued (basically shut down) parliament before the vote could happen and the deal fell apart shortly thereafter. The second time was in 2015, when it was looking like the Conservatives might win the election but not a majority and Harper had become so toxic that no one from the other parties wanted to work with him; the NDP suggested that in the event of a Conservative minority they and the Liberals could form a coalition government to oust them - the Liberals were non-committal and Trudeau wound up winning a majority, so it was a moot question, but there was strong public support for it amongst both Liberal and NDP voters, so chances were good it could have happened if the electoral results were different.

Minority governments here tend to operate on loose agreements with the other parties rather than strict coalitions. Sometimes - especially with the Liberals - they will rely on different parties to support different parts of their agenda.

Blighboy posted...

I'd really want to wait until the next election and see if they keep growing before laughing at the PPC. This could be a one off due to covid, or it could be a legit right wing split.

They were around last election too and did just as miserably.

I think the PPC are basically going to become the right-wing version of the Greens, if they don't fold altogether; a rump party that does little beyond sapping Conservative support.

I don't think they'll ever be a full "right-wing split", because there's not enough right-wingers in Canada to support more than one party. The only reason the Cons have any shot at governing at all is because their hold on everything right-of-centre is basically uncontested (and even then they struggle to break 35% popular support). Every time the right splits, they lock themselves out of government until they invariably reconcile a few years later.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Flappers posted...

Is it election time for them?

Man, I don't even know. And they watched our election in the US like it was a fucking reality show because, let's be honest, that's what it was.

Your guys' elections honestly seem exhausting. They go on for-fucking-ever (a "long" Canadian election is anything over two months from start to finish) and it infects everything. Politics up here is comparatively low key, which I look at as a positive.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Metalsonic66 posted...

From the Before-Fore Time, when memes weren't called memes

Yeah, I haven't seen a Numa Numa reference in probably at least a decade. It's definitely been a while...

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Kanatteru posted...

i have a feeling the liberals will keep their minority give or take a few seats.

That seems the most likely outcome right now. That said, the Liberals have punched above their polling weight before, so it's not inconceivable they scrape out a majority.

I'll be interested to see how much of a spoiler effect the PPC has this election. They don't quite seem like the null-factor they were last time around.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

adjl posted...

By and large, I do actually like minority governments. There are some disadvantages, certainly, particularly in that the opposition has an official duty to basically say "no lol" any time the leading party suggests something and that interferes with getting anything big/decisive done, but ensuring that a more diverse set of viewpoints has a voice in Parliament is generally a good thing and leads to more well-rounded policies than what happens if one side can just push through whatever they want.

The only thing I dislike about minority governments is how unstable they are which itself is also a product of first-past-the-post, given that a change of a few percentage points in the polls can change the ruling party from being in the minority to either being in majority territory (incentivizing them to call an election - incidentally why we're having one today) or being out of power altogether (incentivizing the opposition to call a vote of no confidence and force an election).

I would be far more comfortable with a Proportional Representation system. Yes, it would be perpetual minority government, but I don't look at that as terrible, largely for the same reasons you brought up here and it would do away with the instability that plagues the current system. This is especially true given that minority governments seem to be growing more common these days as the proportion of the population that could be considered swing voters shrinks and political alignments solidify.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

streamofthesky posted...

See, that shit would piss me off and make me feel the election was stolen, if 60-70% vote left of center and a right wing party wins.

It's pretty annoying, but people don't seem to want to change.

I live in BC, arguably the most left-wing province in confederation, and we had a referendum a couple years ago to switch from first-past-the-post to a more representative system (several were on offer if the referendum succeeded). First-past-the-post won and not by a little bit either - over 60% of voters said they wanted to keep the current system.

Voters are dumb sometimes.

streamofthesky posted...

I'd sooner vote for the lesser evil than see the diametrically opposite political party sweep into office with a mandate of *checks notes* 30% of the vote.

No one wins a majority with 30% of the vote - in fact, you probably wouldn't even form government at all with a vote total that low (the 30% figure I gave above is basically the current floor of Conservative support; when they lose all their swing voters, that's usually roughly the vote total they wind up with). You need roughly 40% to have a realistic shot of forming a majority government and if you don't have a majority, you need the opposition's votes in order to get anything done, forcing you to work with them (a situation not dissimilar to a situation in the US where both houses of congress are held by different parties or the president and congress are of different parties). It tends to curtail the worst of the abuses, but the situation is still kind of ridiculous, if you ask me...

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Metalsonic66 posted...

Took me a second.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

They're not the Progressive Conservatives - haven't been for almost 20 years now. The PCs merged with the Canadian Alliance to form the Conservative Party of Canada back in the early 2000s.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

streamofthesky posted...

Just worried, the way this is being framed, it sounds like two leftist candidates splitting votes to enable a minority plurality victory by some ass hole on the right...

That happens up here. Canada is a fairly left-wing nation, so in any given election about 60-70% of our electorate votes for centre-left or left-wing candidates. The Conservatives only ever win because the left-wing vote is fractured amongst four major parties (the Liberals, the NDP, the Bloc Quebecois, and the Greens) whereas they have spent the last couple decades with no one to compete against on the right (though the PPC is now gaining ground as a hard-right party, which is both sad for its commentary on our politics at present and amusing because it will only hurt the Conservatives by splitting the already-small right-wing vote). We used to have two major right-wing parties - the Progressive Conservatives and the Reform Party (later the Canadian Alliance) - but they merged in the early 2000s to form the Conservative Party.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Sycophant posted...

Will the embodiment of the status quo and stagnant hate for the population reign or will the great Jagmeet Singh prevail victorious!?

NDP literally have a 0% chance of winning this election. 2011 this is not.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

ReturnOfFa posted...

It's not racist to point out that it's a bit contradictory when a POC supports Republican-line thinking. I understand you disagreeing with that, but it's a bit funny that you'll go hard on calling this racist but then defend Trump who says constant far more direct racist things.

Don't expect consistency from Zeus. He once got on someone's case saying it was racist to call people "animals"; when I pointed out that Trump had done it multiple times, his response was, basically, "It's OK when he does it."

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

The beak.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

InfernalFive posted...

Everyone knows Trump had surprisingly strong minority support.

In 2016 Trump literally had the lowest support amongst minorities of any successful Republican candidate in over 50 years. And including the failed candidates only bumps him up to third from last, trailing McCain and Romney (both of whom had the handicap of running against the first ever black presidential nominee).

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Good games. Origins seemed more polished, but I liked them both.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Starkiller Base isn't stupid because it's inherently stupid, but because it's treated as a throwaway plot device in a story that doesn't really justify its existence.

I mean, isn't this exactly what I said in my original complaint?

Starkiller Base brings nothing new to the table that wasn't already done (and done better) in the two previous iterations of the "planet-killing superweapon". I didn't mind the Death Star II because at least there were new aspects that made it interesting; Starkiller Base was just dull.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Who needs a superweapon? Just build a really big ship to minimal specs, put it on autopilot, and jump it to lightspeed directly into the nearest population center on a planet.

I mean, that was always an open question in the Star Wars community: why couldn't you just build a hyperspace bomb by attaching engines to some asteroids or cheap ship husks and ram them into your opponents at light speed? I know I had plenty of discussions of that long before TLJ was ever a thing (or even before the prequels were a thing).

Easiest answer is one that still works just fine after TLJ: you just can't. There "some rule" in the universe that prevents it from working most of the time. What is it? Who knows, not important. If it was that simple, someone would be doing it already.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

And hell, the Resistance is having trouble recruiting and supplying? Why bother? Go buy some old decommissioned medium-size ships for cheap, some old droids for cheaper, then fix the hyperdrives and have the droids fly them straight into all of the First Order's most expensive capital ships. Whee!

There's several in-universe reasons why this wouldn't work (even ignoring the "it just wouldn't" excuse above) and most of them revolve around economics.

TPM established that a ship's hyperdrive is its most expensive part (which makes sense - it is the most technologically-advanced thing on most ships and, even in real life, those tend to be the most expensive), to the point where the hyperdrive is worth about as much as the rest of the ship put together. Thus, if you're going to spend money on a hyperdrive-capable ship, that's almost as expensive as just buying a functional ship to use normally.

The second issue is exactly why you don't see many suicide bombers in real life: they're a really shitty use of resources. Like, let's say that I buy a medium-sized ship that has enough energy to blow up a Star Destroyer as a hyperspace bomb. Great - I can use it and blow up a single Star Destroyer, at the cost of that vessel getting destroyed. Or I could spend a little more money, get a functional warship, destroy a Star Destroyer and still get to keep the ship. Hell, if I'm lucky I can pip multiple Star Destroyers with this thing.

And neither side is going to get good use out of kamikaze ships, because they are expensive and inefficient. If I'm the Resistance and I blow up a Star Destroyer... well, the First Order has tens of thousands more and I'm going to run out of money for new vessels long before they run out of ships. And if I'm the First Order and blowing up a Resistance vessel... well, why don't I just use a few of those Star Destroyers of mine to blow it up the old-fashioned way? It's cheaper than constantly having to buy new hyperspace rams.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Luke has essentially been shown that NO ONE is beyond redemption, and that violence and hate aren't the answer. He KNOWS this. It is the fundamental core of all of the character development he went through in three movies. It is the entire point of his story arc, and the culmination of who he becomes.

So then he has a bad vibe about Ben and immediately goes to murder him in his sleep, going so far as to ignite his lightsaber and just stand there feeling guilty about it.

Except that's not what he does. He wasn't there to murder Ben, he was there to try and save him. Luke himself explicitly explains this - he stands there reading Ben through the Force and it was only in that instant that he realized the problem was far worse than he had anticipated. That was the moment where panic overrode reason and he drew his lightsaber... only to immediately come to his senses.

That fits with everything we've seen from Luke up to then. Even in RotJ, when he had resolved not to kill Vader despite the insistence of others, he eventually breaks. He attacks Vader in a rage, overwhelms him, beats him down, then carves his arm off, barely stopping himself from killing him. He loses control and only regains it through supreme force of will. Is it so far-fetched that he would (far more briefly) lose control again when confronted by a similar threat?

Oh, and what caused Luke's rampage in RotJ? A threat against those he loved. That was enough to push him over the edge and have him go berserk. What does he see in his vision of Kylo's future? The destruction of everyone and everything he loves.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Turning that around and going "Yeah, no, Luke can totally feel like Ben's going to be evil and the ends justify the means" kind of negates his entire story arc.

Except that objectively doesn't happen. That's what I'm trying to get at.

Luke never thinks the ends justify the means - he doesn't even get to that point in his thought process. He panics. In a moment (and I do meant "a moment") of weakness, he gives into his need to protect those he loves, then immediately realizes he's about to make a big mistake. Had Ben not woken up at that exact moment, the whole thing probably would have played out very differently.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

All three of the older characters feel like pointlessly broken echoes of who they once were being shit on and shoved out of the way to make the new characters shine, which is a large part of why there's so much negative blowback against those characters.

On the one hand, I don't disagree.

On the other hand, old broken Luke was fucking fantastic. Mark Hamill fucking killed that role. Quite possibly the best performance in the entire sequel trilogy. He made the character believable, yet was still able to channel bits of young Luke when the situation called for it.

And I do think that you are going to have difficulty in a sequel to something like Star Wars in explaining why the old characters don't just swoop in and save the day if those characters are still around. In essence, you need those characters to be "broken" in some way. They don't have to go through the emotional tumult the ST gave them, but they need to be handicapped. Captured by the bad guys or too old to adventure anymore or something similar. And it becomes very easy to overshadow your new leads with the old characters if those characters aren't appropriately managed.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

I still think it works much better if you skip the stupid TPM stuff, though.

I mean yeah, if you're going to do a full-scale teardown and rebuild of the prequels, TPM is an excellent place to start. The entire story is unneeded and superfluous; you could start someone on AotC and if they didn't notice the number on the title card, they probably wouldn't even realize they'd skipped a movie.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

ParanoidObsessive posted...

I'd still disagree - Neeson does nothing with the character. And it's the combination of poor writing and his disinterested performance that makes the character feel like such a pointless waste.

I'm not sure he could have elevated the material if he'd really, really tried. But what I am absolutely sure of is that he didn't try, at all.

See, I don't get how you can rip Neeson for his performance in TPM but give McDonald a pass for his. Both were given terrible scripts with basically nothing for their characters to do in terms of acting. At no point are either of the Jedi called upon to express any emotion beyond the occasional flicker of vague annoyance.

Despite that, I felt Neeson was able to convey *something* of the sort of person Qui-Gon was and turn him into an actual character; I cannot say the same for... well, really anybody else in that film (aside from maybe Jar Jar, but Jar Jar has other issues).

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Yeah, but most of that isn't all that necessary for the first movie. Sure, you could throw in a couple significant questions or exposition comments, but the lack of them doesn't really ruin everything by their absence. Again, in a movie mostly focused on introducing Rey and Finn (and kinda-sorta Poe), you can mostly hold off on that sort of thing.

The thing is, much like in ANH, the conflict between the Resistance and the First Order underpins the story and contextualizes it, so the audience needs to know something of what's going on. ANH does a masterful job of giving us a bit of a picture of the galactic situation without spending needless amounts of time on it. We learn from Luke's comments to C-3PO that the Empire basically controls everything, we learn from Tarkin's speech to his underlings on the Death Star that the last vestiges of representative government have just been disbanded and replaced with totalitarian governors, we learn a bit about the history of the galaxy from Obi-Wan's stories recited for Luke, so on and so forth.

TFA gives us none of that and it's made all the more jarring by the fact that, if anything, we should know *more* about the setting since it's a sequel, not less.

No, their absence doesn't completely wreck the film, but it does detract from it when, on some level, you can't figure out what the fuck is going on and how strong the relative players are (ANH makes it clear that the rebels and the Empire are operating on entirely different magnitudes of power; even that much isn't clear from TFA, since we know from their outfits that the First Order is somehow related to the Empire, which had been defeated, and the Resistance is somewhat tied to the Alliance, which won, so logically the former should be weaker and the latter stronger than their OT compatriots).

ParanoidObsessive posted...

It's the sort of thing we kind of have to learn to accept, because it likely isn't going away any time soon.

Disagree. For as long as movies keep hiding bits of their story in other material (which is kind of insulting given that this is a product I already paid for), I'm going to complain about it.

For the record, Star Wars is the only franchise where I've run into this. Granted, I don't watch many movies, so perhaps this is a more common trend nowadays and I just haven't been exposed to it, but it certainly hasn't popped up in my corner of the universe outside SW just yet.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

I think the problem was very much an issue with TLJ's quality, because it simply doesn't work on any level. Even its best parts are fundamentally flawed.

Eh. Agree to disagree.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

The problem is, he didn't really set it on another path. He dropped a meteor on the existing path, then built walls on either side of the crater, and for good measure burned down the nearby forest and pissed on the ashes. Then called everyone who wanted to go down the original path an asshole and dared them to think for themselves. While also not actually making anything resembling a new path of his own to anywhere.

It's not Abrams' fault that he had to go back and fix the mess - that was pretty much an inevitability after Rian Johnson broke the toy Disney payed $4 billion for (and if Abrams hadn't done it, someone else would have). It's more Abrams trying to desperately salvage the crisis that could easily have killed the entire franchise for good for decades to come, because almost no one other than Rian Johnson wanted the franchise to go where Rian Johnson apparently wanted it to go.

You act like Rian completely torched the series and left it nowhere to go... but, really, what avenues did he close off?

OK, he killed Snoke - that was pointless and a waste of a character, granted. But what exactly did that character do in the series up to that point? Not much. He certainly wasn't integral to the plot and could just as easily have been replaced by Kylo Ren or some other Imperial warlord.

He also kills Luke, but honestly the trilogy needed its own characters to stand on their feet without being overshadowed by characters from the previous trilogy, so I'm fine with that and with the manner in which it happened. And, again, it's not like he was pivotal to the story as it was set up. By the end of TLJ he'd played his part and could exit the stage.

And he reveals Rey's parentage (at least until Abrams retconned it in the next movie) and I found Jonson's answer to be the far more compelling of the two, if only because of the drama it invoked. For someone like Rey, who has lived the first two decades of her life waiting for her parents to return, to be told that her parents were junk dealers who sold her for booze and are probably dead and could not give less of a shit about her, that's a pretty powerful emotional cudgel. Honestly, I wish the movie had leaned into that more and had Kylo really wield that knowledge as a weapon even more than he did.

And... that's really it. Nothing else is categorically walled off the way you're suggesting. Hell, the movie ends with a signal being broadcast out into the galaxy calling for potential allies to rise up and join them. There's all sorts of ways that could have been played. Abrams just abandons that plot line then apparently changes his mind, except he has Lando do the job of gathering every fuckin' ship in the universe to come fight with them, raising the question of what the hell kind of threat the First Order is if, even with their magical death fleet, they're outnumbered by the billion ships the Resistance can apparently muster.

But Abrams couldn't come up with anything, so instead he basically resurrects the issue of Rey's parentage, even though that was settled already and the entire Episode IX story could have run just fine (well... "fine" for a certain definition of the word, I suppose), with pretty much zero alterations, without that ham-fisted move, brought Palpatine back to play the sort of villain he wanted to have instead of the one(s) he should have been working with, and just generally failed to even attempt to build within the structure he was given.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Nichtcrawler X posted...

As a side remark to your Obi and Qui personality thing, we do have "Master and Apprentice" in current canon that focusses a lot on how their personalties clash.

Their personalities always clashed. In TPM, Qui-Gon was the free-spirited Force hippie, believing that the will of the Force was more important than the will of the Jedi Council, which was what made him a renegade in their ranks. By contrast, Obi-Wan was straight-laced and by the books and openly challenges several of Qui-Gon's decisions in TPM.

The problem isn't that their personalities don't clash (because they do), it's that Obi-Wan was put on the wrong side of that clash and all the time that TPM dumps into forming a bond between Anakin and a mentor goes to Qui-Gon instead of Obi-Wan.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

ParanoidObsessive posted...

But dropping Phantom Menace almost entirely, starting "Episode I" off with Obi-Wan as an already active Jedi Knight (fuck Qui-Gon, he's neither important nor necessary), and having him encounter Anakin as a hotshot teenage pilot (basically young Han Solo).

So, fun story about this - years ago, I had a get-together with some fellow Star Wars nerds and we did two creative exercises. One was rewrite a plot map for the prequels from scratch, no restrictions - just toss everything and start fresh. What I came up with actually sounds surprisingly similar to yours. I think I had Obi-Wan and a Jedi love interest meet a young Anakin who was already a hotshot pilot somewhere, with the Clone Wars already in full swing rather than not being started yet.

However, the exercise I found more interesting was one where we had to make up to three *minor* changes to the prequels that would have the most payoff in terms of how much they could improve the film. In that one you weren't allowed to do anything radical like completely dumpster Episode I and give proper time to the clone wars rather than have it start right at the end of the fucking second movie and be over halfway through the third.

In this exercise, I actually came up with something that I still swear would have made Episode I roughly a billion times better: take the personalities of Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan (but *not* their roles) and switch them. Instead of being a Force hippie, make Qui-Gon the stern, dogmatic elder trying to reign in the wild and eager young Obi-Wan (i.e. not the by-the-book rookie of their buddy-cop dynamic that he was in TPM), who is chomping at the bit to make a name for himself and live up to the legendary reputation of the Jedi title. Instead of Qui-Gon going in to get parts in Mos Espa, he opts to guard the queen (or at least who he thinks is the queen) and sends his apprentice off for the supply run (which, really, kind of makes a lot more sense when you think about it).

Cinematically, it solves some of the issues with character focus and motivation in TPM. Now you're not wasting huge chunks of screen time on a character that's going to be dead before the end credits roll; instead, you're spending more time exploring Obi-Wan in his younger, brasher days. Watto pulling the "I'm the only guy who has the parts you need," routine and Obi-Wan not thinking of any alternatives is now youthful naivete and inexperience rather than Qui-Gon's seemingly early onset of senility. His attempted theft of the parts (i.e. trading them for worthless currency) becomes a brute force solution to a problem he is not yet crafty or experienced enough to handle properly. His discovery of Anakin takes on new light as he realizes (and is hubristically-blinded by) the fact that he could go down in history as the Jedi who discovered the Chosen One. His participation in the pod race and his bet with Watto to try and win both the parts and Anakin is not a really stupid plan that somehow works out, but is a deliberately reckless attempt at freeing Anakin and bringing him with them before Qui-Gon can catch wind of things and put a stop to it.

And it lines up nicely with what we hear of Obi-Wan's younger days in the OT. Obi-Wan paints himself as overconfident ("I thought I could train him just as well as Yoda. I was wrong.") and brash (Yoda: "Much anger in him. Like his father." Obi-Wan: "Was I any different when you taught me?" Yoda: "You are reckless!" Obi-Wan "So was I, if you remember."), which are not really traits we see in PT Obi-Wan. But give him Qui-Gon's personality and a chip on his shoulder and all of a sudden things start falling into place.

But the biggest gain would be that it would finally do justice to the friendship between Anakin and Obi-Wan that we hear spoken of in the OT. Instead of being just another Jedi who thought Anakin wasn't good enough, Obi-Wan becomes the only one who believes in him, the only one to support and champion him even when the rest of the Jedi looked down upon him and were ready to discard him. He becomes like a surrogate brother when he lifts Anakin out of slavery and takes him to the stars and the simple act of standing before the Jedi council and defending Anakin would give them an instant bond of camaraderie. And Anakin and his training, likewise, becomes a challenge that Obi-Wan's pride demands he pass, if only to prove that he was right about this boy and the rest of the Jedi were wrong.

Qui-Gon's death and Obi-Wan's promotion removes the last obstacle Obi-Wan faces to taking Anakin as his apprentice. In the actual story, it would make far more sense for the Jedi to assign Anakin to a more experienced master, especially since Obi-Wan wasn't really chomping at the bit to train Anakin before Qui-Gon's death and all of them - Obi-Wan included - recognized Anakin as dangerous, meaning his training would be difficult and particularly high stakes (and not something you'd really want to assign to a guy who himself was just a trainee not 24 hours earlier and whose biggest qualification to the rank of Jedi Knight is "just killed a Sith, woo!"). Obi-Wan's insistence that he will see Anakin trained, even to the point of wilful disobedience of the council's edicts, seems to come completely out of nowhere and contradicts everything the rest of the movie has shown us about his character. Yet in the alternate reality? Now it makes sense. Obi-Wan not only wants to train Anakin, he is veritably *demanding* that privilege, an unspoken acknowledgement of his role in finding the Chosen One with some youthful glory-hunting mixed in (a sign of the recklessness and inner-anger Obi-Wan refers to in the OT). He is willing to disobey the council because he sees the Chosen One and the fulfillment of the ancient prophecy as too important to be tossed away, no matter what anyone says.

And so Anakin and Obi-Wan become brothers in arms, sharing a chip on their shoulder and an "us against the world" mentality as they both seek to prove themselves to the Jedi for different, if related reasons. They become, in some ways, foils for one another - Obi-Wan is eventually able to rise above his pride and gain wisdom, while Anakin succumbs to his and falls to evil. And when that bond is finally destroyed in Episode III, it will be a legitimate brotherhood sundered, not like it actually felt like - the inevitable collapse of a mostly-antagonistic relationship that never seemed particularly stable or healthy to begin with.

......I may have spent too much time thinking about this.

---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

ParanoidObsessive posted...

I'm very much the reverse. I honestly can't think of a single moment in the prequel trilogy that means anything at all, because even in the coolest moments I can't stop thinking "Yeah, but this is just the cherry on top of a sundae made entirely out of shit."

And worse, even the cool moments tend to fall apart completely the moment you actually start thinking about them, or they go on WAAAY too long, or are ruined by the wooden acting of everyone involved.

Vader yelling "NOOOOOOO!" in the end is pretty much the perfect metaphor for the films. It's narmy and it undercuts everything that was cool about the character before. The prequels make the entire lore of the franchise's universe worse simply by existing, because they seem to give the worst possible answer to every possible question or mystery. We were much better off when we didn't know what the Clone Wars were or how Anakin became Vader. Or where Boba Fett came from. Or that there's a 1950s diner on Coruscant.

Fuckin' preach.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

I don't actually mind the Luke-as-cynical-burnout idea, or the idea that he gave into his fear and tried to kill Kylo (even though it's radically out of character for him and NEEDS a hell of a lot more in-universe justification to even remotely work)

Whenever people bring this up, I always wonder if they missed the third flashback scene where Luke actually gives the full context.

He didn't "try to kill Kylo" - the person who thought that was Kylo himself, working off an incomplete set of facts. Luke went to Kylo to confront him over his embrace of the dark side, not to kill him. When Luke got there, worked his Force magic, and realized how far Kylo had gone, he had a moment of panic and pulled out his lightsaber, but the key word there is "moment". In Luke's own words, "He would bring destruction and pain and death, and the end of everything I love because of what he will become, and for the briefest moment of pure instinct, I thought I could stop it. It passed like a fleeting shadow, and I was left with shame... and with consequence. And the last thing I saw were the eyes of a frightened boy whose master had failed him." Emphasis mine.

Luke fucked up and he knew he fucked up. He freely admitted it. Him drawing his lightsaber was a panicked reaction, not a planned action, and he immediately realized it as wrong.

I also don't see it as the slightest bit out of character. Dating back to the original trilogy, Luke is someone who acts on feeling and emotion, not rational thought. He leaps before he looks and has faith in himself, his allies, and the Force. His emotiveness is simultaneously his greatest strength - it allows him to facilitate Vader's redemption - and his greatest weakness (it very nearly kills or corrupts him more than once). When he sees Ben's darkness and a vision of the damage he would cause, it would land particularly hard because Luke has already lived that life. He saw the galaxy under the last Skywalker to fall to darkness, knew firsthand the Herculean effort it took to turn him back to the light in his final moments of life, and understood the tremendous cost in lives and treasure that his evil inflicted. A bit of PTSD is more than understandable, given the circumstances.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

He kind of saw it the same way you did, but my argument was more that TFA needed to feel more like Star Wars, because the prequels had turned a lot of people off the franchise. With even more people worried about whether or not Disney was going to ruin everything even worse (especially once they pissed people off by gutting the EU wholesale), they basically needed SOMETHING that could remind people of why they fell in love with Star Wars in the first place.

Making a thinly-veiled remake of A New Hope is the cynical answer, but done well it absolutely does the job. It's nostalgia-porn of the highest order, but that's the entire point.

After watching TFA, it felt more like a Star Wars movie to me than any of the prequels did. It made me optimistic about what Disney could do with the franchise

For all my complaints about TFA, I completely agree with this. Even at the time I saw it for what it was... but damn if it wasn't fun.

Disney can absolutely nail this shit when they try. I remember going on the new Star Tours ride in Disney World just before Disney bought the franchise and remarking that it was the most Star Warsy thing I'd experienced in years.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Hard disagree. He sleepwalks through that movie, and his complete and utter disinterest doesn't elevate the material in any way. Especially since nearly everything his character says and does is stupid.

Don't get me wrong, Qui-Gon the character is awful and, yes, behaves like he has early-onset dementia... but Neeson did what he could with the script and was pretty much the only one who made something out of that movie. Even McDonald, who turned in performances far better than Episodes II and especially III deserved, was a dud in this one.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

When you're starting a new story, with new characters, even in an existing universe, you don't really need to explain every detail. Leave it a mystery to entice viewers. Half the appeal of the first Star Wars film was all the cool things Obi-Wan mentioned that we knew nothing about (and then the prequels and Solo went and showed us all of it and made it all suck).

I agree you need not get bogged down in excessive detail, but TFA *isn't* a completely new story... or at least, it wasn't trying to be. If they'd set it 1000 years after the original Star Wars and none of the existing characters showed up, fine, do as you please. But even if Rey and Finn have no knowledge or interest of the time period between the trilogies, we, the viewers, do. When we are suddenly dumped into this new setting, there's a natural sense of, "Wait, why are all the familiar elements I'm used to gone? What happened to them?"

You need not dwell on it either - it can be a throwaway line of dialogue in most cases. Have Rey ask some question about the Resistance, like, "The Resistance? Aren't they just a wing of the Republic?" and let Finn or Han correct her. Have some First Order senior officers bemoan how things have changed since the days of the Empire and hope for better times ahead thanks to their new leader. Or something. Take 30 seconds of your run time and set things up.

As it is, it really does feel like a reboot... until the old characters show up and you're reminded that no, this is technically supposed to be a sequel.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

details that aren't overly important can easily be established in secondary media (which is exactly what they did), especially because the concept of the EU was already an established idea and Disney was obviously going to want to replicate their own version of it

The thing I dislike about this approach is that it assumes everyone is going to read that secondary media. Honestly, most people won't, if they're even aware it exists at all.

It's what always annoys me when people say, "Oh, well, the Clone Wars cartoons make the Anakin and Obi-Wan relationship from the PT so much better." Fine, good for the Clone Wars - that doesn't make the actual movies less shit as a result, especially if they've offloaded critical character development into an entirely different medium.

Now yes, if the details are not important to the story, by all means they can be relegated to an EU book somewhere... but I've seen too many franchises do that to elements of the story that really belong in the main story proper.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

The real problem is that JJ Abrams never had answers to those questions because JJ Abrams never has answers to questions (see also, Lost), and the people in charge did a piss-poor job of organizing their creative teams or keeping them on the same page. So rather than getting three movies that build on each other and support each other, we got three movies chaotically crapped out that immediately collapse into a smoking ruin.

The main purpose of TFA was to make a movie that FELT like Star Wars again, after the prequels kind of killed the magic. It's goal was to get an entirely new generation interested in Star Wars and make older, bitter, jaded generations optimistic about the future again. Which it mostly did, until TLJ came along and basically skull-fucked all the joy and wonder out of the franchise forever.

TLJ skull-fucking aside, I agree with all of this.

As said, I think TLJ was a good movie. Not great, but enjoyable - best of the sequels, in my opinion (though given that IX was terrible and I consider VII merely OK, that's not really a high bar). That said, I completely agree the entire trilogy was terribly organized and disjointed and watching Abrams and Johnson get into a creative pissing match just sapped the enjoyment, along with any narrative cohesion. The general map of the trilogy should have been established far, far earlier than it was.

I don't think the issue with TLJ was so much an issue with its own quality (though YMMV on that one) so much that Abrams set up shitty plot hooks in TFA (and, as you observed, Abrams never seems to come up with decent answers for any of the questions he creates), Johnson ignored most of them in TLJ, then Abrams tried desperately to wrench the story back where he wanted it to go in TRoS, even after Johnson had already set it on a different path.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

I'd agree with this, except the EU has been doing this for 25+ years without an ounce of shame.

Which isn't really a defence, especially when one of the first things Disney did when they bought the franchise is dumpstered the old EU (and not without cause - that thing was a bloated mess by the end). Also, even in an EU that was all over the map in terms of quality, the Sun Crusher and the Galaxy Gun - the two superweapons I'm assuming you're referring to with your description - were two particularly stupid entries and the less said about them the better.

That's not a template Abrams had to follow and it's not a template he should have followed. Johnson managed to make more tension and a more compelling final battle with a couple of Star Destroyers and a battalion of AT-ATs (or whatever the new king-sized ones are called, if they have a different name) than Abrams did with his planet-gun or his super robot death fleet.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

wpot posted...

As with many things, there was a lot of too little too late. Or maybe to subtle. Too much trashing, not enough appreciating such that I really believe it's going to happen.

I mean, what did you want them to do? Luke's conversation with Yoda was basically him realizing he was wrong and his presence in the final battle further cemented that. That's pretty explicit and he even vocalizes these views.

wpot posted...

It depends on the franchise. This franchise is Star Wars. This is definitely a series where million to one odds come off.

But if that happens all the time, it really starts to strain credulity. The heroes can't win all the time for the series to remain interesting. They didn't in the OT, they certainly didn't in the PT, why should the ST be any different in that regard?

wpot posted...

2) Yoda doesn't berate Luke for doing something that appeared awesome and successful.

What's "awesome and successful" about losing half your interceptors and your entire bomber wing blowing up *one ship* in a fleet that had several more?

---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Zeus posted...

Blandly terrible and forgettable seem to be your favorite movie flavors.

Really?

Since you seem to be keeping track, what other movies do I like?

Zeus posted...

While TPM is worse than its sequels in every way

True, it is worse in every way... Except the acting. And the plot. And script. Visuals as well. Characters too, now that I think about it. Logical flow, consistency, sound editing, and special effects too.

Other than that, AotC and RotS are great.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

wpot posted...

For the record I agree there. The world was intact within Lucas' vision. There were bad characters and dumb segments, but it wasn't bad per se. II was a dumpster fire, sure. I thought III did pretty well despite Hayden, although yes: it was unfortunate that he was in the center of it.

Episode I was mired by a plot that doesn't make sense if you think about it too hard (yet still somehow manages to be more coherent than Episode II), characters that have no development over the course of the movie and seem to have zero emotion or motivation, and pacing that drags. It's OK enough if you shut your brain off and try not to think about things too hard and the action sequences somehow look better than either of its successors (the fact that they were a little more judicious with their CGI use probably helped). To my eye it wins the "best prequel" award pretty much by default, because it's the only one of the three that doesn't have its head planted firmly in its own ass.

Episode II is one of the worst movies I've ever seen, especially considering its stature. Just utterly irredeemable in every aspect other than the soundtrack, which was one of Williams' best and is completely wasted on this trash heap of a film.

Episode III manages to be better than Episode II in my eye, but not by much and only because it would be difficult for it to be any worse. It manages to have the most coherent plot of the three, but it does that by basically drawing a straight line between the end of Episode II and the start of Episode IV, checking all the boxes it needs to along the way and doing basically nothing interesting on the side. It features the same terrible cast as Episode II and a script that is just wretched, and it makes utterly bizarre uses of its run time. Anakin's fall to the darkside is basically completed in under a minute and his purge of the Jedi - one of the most hyped events in the entire PT and possibly the most anticipated scene in Star Wars history aside from his climactic duel with Obi-Wan - was conducted almost entirely offscreen, which is an absolutely unforgivable cinematic sin, yet it finds time to waste on pointless bullshit like the Battle of Kashyyyk, where absolutely nothing of any importance happens, and General Grievous, a villain nobody ever asked for or needed. The Battle of Coruscant is a strong contender for the worst space battle in the series, as its laden with terrible CGI that makes it impossible to tell who is winning at any given moment or by how much. The action scenes feel hollow, largely because they're being fought by two armies of automatons (clones and droids) which are both ultimately controlled by the same guy, meaning there's no stakes or tension to any of the combat, because the outcome is a foregone conclusion even if the movie wasn't a prequel. None of the dramatic points land, largely because the trilogy failed to set them up properly - the death of the Jedi is supposed to be a big tragedy, but we never got more than a few lines of dialogue out of any of them, so we're just watching a bunch of extras with lightsabers getting shot in the back, Anakin and Obi-Wan's duel doesn't so much feel like two brothers-in-arms whose friendship has been irrevocably sundered as it does the inevitable conclusion of a relationship that never felt particularly close or stable to begin with, and Anakin's maiming didn't put me in the mind of a hero-king laid low, but of an arrogant shit getting some comeuppance that was long overdue.

It's not Episode II bad... but it's still pretty bad.

---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

wpot posted...

"All of this training/etc stuff you have been doing is pointless, there was never any meaning to any of it". Luke straight out says "so it's time for the order to end". Rian would have us believe that anyone can do what the Jedi were doing if they wanted to without intense training. I didn't see him "refreshing" the Jedi: he ended them, buried their memory, and gave their powers away for free.

When did Johnson suggest intense training wasn't required to become a Jedi? Yes, Rey didn't go through that in Episode VIII (but did in IX, under Leia's tutelage)... but neither did Luke in ESB (he was on Dagobah an indeterminate amount of time, but considering that he left as soon as Han and co. reached Bespin, it was likely a period sometime between a few days and maybe a month or two at most), so that's not unprecedented (and Luke didn't even have the benefit of another living Jedi to study from, nor a set of texts to read through).

And he never got rid of the Jedi, even without Episode IX. Hell, one of Luke's final statements in the film, directed towards Kylo Ren, is "I will not be the last Jedi". It was fairly apparent that Luke had a change of heart midway through the film and decided the Jedi were worth saving after all and that Rey was going to continue them.

wpot posted...

It's disappointingly like society these days. Laws/government/traditions/etc? That stuff is all meaningless crap...and heck, it doesn't even matter if you're skilled at something or not as long as you seem confident. You can just make it up as you go along.

I'll point out that the, "Let tradition die; kill it, if you have to," lines are spoken almost exclusively by the bad guys in the film. That's not meant to be the message you take away.

Yoda probably expounded upon it best. Some traditions are good, some are bad. Just because messed up stuff happens doesn't mean you throw everything away. The role of every master is to take the old, preserve the parts of it that need to be preserved, and improve the rest so as to hand the next generation something even better.

Nowhere in TLJ does it give the message that "you can just make up what you like and everything will work out fine." Hell, Poe, Fin, and Rose did that in their plan to infiltrate the Supremacy - not only did it almost get them killed, it very nearly annihilated the entire Resistance. I actually found that quite refreshing, honestly - it's the only time in recent memory I can think of a big-budget film where the heroes pull the, "this is our plan - it's a million-to-one longshot, but if everything comes together, it just might work!" trick and it works out like it actually would in real life: in abject failure.

wpot posted...

Poe returns and is chewed out for disobeying orders and taking losses...and the movie makes it clear the criticism is justified. Buzz kill.

He wasn't chewed out for blowing up a dreadnought, he was chewed out for getting three-quarters of their pilots killed in the process, all for a kill that did not need to happen, because they were running away anyways. This isn't Luke and co. blowing up the Death Star and saving the Rebellion; this was Poe being a gloryhound and not seeing the greater impact of what he was doing.

This has parallels in the OT as well. When Luke decides to disobey the advice of his mentors Yoda and Obi-Wan and rush off to Bespin in an ill-thought-out effort to confront Vader, it costs him dearly. He learns from the experience, as Poe eventually does from his, and it becomes a moment of character growth. Do you consider that a buzz-kill as well?

wpot posted...

Yes, and Rian/Co wrote that.

But so did Lucas in ESB - do you think ESB over-accentuated the negative as well? And if not, what separates that from TLJ?

wpot posted...

At a high level maybe not much, but again: it's the focus. The movie spent the whole time focusing on how the heroes were flawed. If that was done in order to be the backdrop for an amazing effort to overcome them, maaybe OK...but there was way too much degrading and far too little redeeming.

Hold on, are we talking about the heroes now or the Jedi? The part of my post you quoted here is about how the Jedi are perceived, not the heroes.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

papercup posted...

It blew my mind after I watched it that anyone liked that movie. About 15 minutes in I was sitting in the theatre in awe "wow, they actually went with this? is this a joke? when is the actual movie going to start?" and it was only downhill from there. It actually completely killed my interest in Star Wars for a good few years after I saw it.

I will say, even as someone who likes TLJ, the first ~20-30 minutes were awful. I thought the second half of the movie redeemed it, but even now I hate watching the opening.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

ParanoidObsessive posted...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7rffcRFwD0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egEGaBXG3Kg

Not sure whether you posted these in support or as contradiction, but they kind of prove my point.

The first video was a lava flow that had been cooling for *two weeks* in an area with ambient temperature roughly 20 degrees below freezing and which had a solidified rock skin (which serves to insulate from the worst of the heat) and it's a) Still hot enough to cook food and b) Hot enough to make the guy approaching it uncomfortable.

The second was someone in a specialized suit getting within a couple feet of a lava flow which, again, had a solidified surface and even that was considered extremely dangerous. Anakin and Obi-Wan standing unprotected a few feet above a lava flow which was so hot that its surface was molten rather than solidified (as in it looked orange on top rather than black) should have been cooked alive, with their clothes catching fire.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Zeus posted...

I would sooner rewatch EPII or III any number of times than EPVII

That doesn't surprise me given your opinions on everything else.

Zeus posted...

I notice you don't mention TPM, and I agree we should pretend it never existed

TPM is, at worst, boring. People slag on it because it came after RotJ, meaning it's the biggest high-to-low quality jump across the entire saga to date. But remove the sky-high expectations placed on it from back when Star Wars was almost universally considered amazing and you find a movie that is... I don't know, competent, maybe? Middling? It's not good, but I don't find it horrible either. It features a bunch of good actors trying to breathe life into terribly-written characters engaging in a nonsensical plot. It's dull and sits comfortably in the bottom half of the Star Wars movies in terms of quality, but even in its worst moments it's not nearly as bad as its two successors.

Whatever Liam Neeson got paid for TPM, it wasn't enough. He managed to anchor that movie and provide an interesting protagonist despite a terrible script. Would that Episodes II and III had a similarly-talented actor playing the main character...

ParanoidObsessive posted...

My stance on it at the time was that it was exactly the sort of nostalgia-masturbation we needed to cleanse our palates after the shit sandwich that was the prequels. But that its overall value almost entirely depends on what came after. If VIII and IX were good, they would elevate VII by virtue of it being their foundation. If If VIII and IX were bad, they'd drag VII down by virtue of making it pointless.

I don't know if I fully agree.

Yes, part of how Episode VII's legacy was always going to be how the sequels used it (or failed to) as a base. But even if Episodes VIII and IX had been amazing, there's some parts of Episode VII that are just terrible. The way it fails to adequately link up to Episode VI, for one thing. I got so sick of seeing umpteen-zillion discussions on "Who are the Resistance and why are they different from the New Republic?" / "Who are the First Order and why are they so powerful if the Empire was defeated?" / "Who is Snoke and where did he come from?". All those questions got answered in the ancillary material, which is not where information like that belongs. At the very least, it should have been touched on in the movie itself, if only to provide some context. In Medias Res is how you start an original story, not a sequel. There's also the fact that Abrams made the awful decision to have the BBEG be the Death-Star-By-Another-Name for the third time in seven movies. It was questionable when Lucas did it in RotJ, but at least he added some new elements to keep things fresh (fleet battle with the Star Destroyers, ground battle to bring the shields down, climactic duel between Luke and Vader on the Death Star itself); Abrams not only recycled a superweapon we'd already seen before (twice!), he somehow managed to make it less interesting than the very first time we'd seen it.

I think Episode VII had a "ceiling" for the quality of how it was going to be viewed, regardless of how its sequels panned out, and I don't think that ceiling was particularly high.

wpot posted...

He destroyed the Jedi (burn the books: everyone can do force stuff if they want to!), made Luke unlikeable, made us feel bad about blowing up a star destroyer, and generally focused on everyone's negatives.

Um... what?

OK, he burned the "sacred texts" of the Jedi... which were books that didn't exist prior to this movie, never had established importance beyond historical value, and which even Yoda himself admits were not exactly of great value. Oh, and as we find out at the end of the movie, it turns out Rey saved them anyways, so they never got burned at all.

Anyone can do Force stuff? Since when? The only characters who use the Force in TLJ are characters who have already been established to be Force Sensitives.

Made us feel bad about blowing up a Star Destroyer? In what way? I'm not even sure what scene you're referring to with that one, because all the Star Destroyer 'splodin' that I remember happening were painted as heroic victories.

Generally focused on everyone's negatives? I'd say Empire did that as well and everyone fuckin' loves Empire. Half that movie was Yoda calling Luke an impatient, angry, whiny kid and Luke doing everything he could to prove him right, up to and including nearly getting himself killed in an ill-advised attempt to rescue his friends that didn't even work. Star Wars has never painted its heroes as perfect - Luke's temptations with evil are a major theme of the OT; Han Solo being a wanted criminal and an arrogant jerk with a hidden heart of gold is one of the reasons he's so popular; Lando goes from slightly-sleazy businessman to backstabbing traitor before eventually turning Face; so on and so forth. Even characters like Yoda and Obi-Wan have their flaws, even if those are more subtly presented (Yoda is dogmatic and an impatient teacher and he and Obi-Wan both fail to recognize that Anakin Skywalker hasn't quite been fully subsumed by the evil that is Darth Vader).

wpot posted...

I don't need them to be perfect, but in the original series they were flawed individuals desperately trying to prevent planets from blowing up and greed from taking over the galaxy. They were unambiguously good guys, despite their flaws.

OK... but what about that changed? Luke's statement on them is not objective fact, merely how he views them, which is heavily tainted by his guilt at his own failure to train the next generation of Jedi and how two out of the last three generations of his family have become galaxy-threatening monsters. Rey herself is quick to point out the problems with what he's saying and the fact that he's only presenting one side of the issue. Much as Obi-Wan in ANH only recalled the Jedi's good points (which you can explain using Doylian logic as Lucas not decided on what the Jedi actually were or the Watsonian logic of Obi-Wan still wilfully blinding himself to the failures of his order), Luke is choosing only to recall their bad, when in reality they had both. Neither depiction of them is wrong, just slanted, something the movie itself points out.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!