I'm ok with all of the stupid stuff except for that scene. It's Star Wars, it's fine to be stupid, but "my name is Han and I'm here by myself" crossed the line.
Andor is the kind of show where I would literally recommend it to someone who hates Star Wars. It's just such an incredibly raw, powerful, and vital piece of media. One of the finest works of anti-fascist art I've seen in a long time.
Anyone who hasn't watched that show is robbing themselves. Moments like "one way out" and Luthen's "sacrifice" monologue are going to live with me for a long time. Season 2 can't come soon enough.
Also B2EMO is the best droid in all of Star Wars (Fun fact; his voice is the puppeteer's, but it wasn't supposed to be. They were planning to overdub, but then the guy did such an amazing job on the set that they just gave him the role).
Honestly, fair (and I say that as someone who is a huge, huge, HUGE fan of Andor). Like, if you're looking for some cheesy fun science fantasy schlock about space wizards, do not watch that show.
Never did watch 9. My biggest problem with 7 ?and other reboots like Jurassic World) is it was literally almost a rehash of 4, except with an even bigger “Death Star”. Rather than going for a unique plot.
I thought they did really well on coming up with new characters, and original stories, I enjoyed most of their arcs and adventures in 7.
The biggest death Star was the biggest letdown of that movie for sure.
But hoo boy, after I watched nine, my irritation at the laziness of a bigger death Star is nearly insignificant compared to some of the plot points in 9.
When I saw the starkiller I rolled my eyes, but I literally could have walked out during 9 from
spoiler
the knife and sith island
I was already bummed out at eight that there was no Luke or character development for finn.
Then all of nine was pretty bad but especially the idiotic plot device mentioned above and a couple other things ruined that trilogy for me and definitely tarnished my enthusiasm for 7
The bigger Death Star was worth it for the Han Solo line "so, it's big... you can always blow those things up." I'm there to see Han Solo giving no fucks, and the movie delivered.
My reaction upon leaving the theater was "Wow! They did Star Wars almost better than Star Wars!"
In the days that followed, the more I thought about the movie, the less I liked it in retrospect. I was hoping for a continuation of the saga, not "Star Wars: The Remake".
The Force Awakens is pretty meh itself, but we were not prepared for what was coming. It feels as foreboding as rewatching Game of Thrones S5 or S6 and knowing that the deteriorating writing will only get worse.
I know it's probably an unpopular opinion but I liked Solo too. The parts I didn't enjoy were the callbacks and stuff. I didn't need to see all those, but I watched it twice and didn't regret it.
8 really ruined it. 7 had problems but I could forgive some of them because "Disney still trying to figure it out."
Then 8 happened. Closed off all story threads from 7 without any fanfare at all, and closed off all of its own potential threads within itself, leaving absolutely nothing for 9 to follow up on. Multiple character assassinations, and the entire Canto section could be deleted from the film and zero context would be lost.
9 was never going to succeed. It couldn't have. There was nothing for it to build on from 8.
What story threads? There were no story threads. There was hopeful fans who wanted to create things out of thin air. That's about it. There was more from 8 to lead off from than 7.
7 put Luke hiding on an island while a war was going on and left 8 to take the flak for explaining why. There was no way to make 8 without pissing people off.
If you think 7 is good you are a hopeless movie watcher, it set up nothing just typical jj abrams mystery boxes, is a straight up rehashing of A new hope and it did nothing of note. 8 tried to deviate from another shadowy mysterious bad guy aka Wish.com palpatine and do something different and it did it well.
And then 9 is a straight up piece of shit the only good part of it is the first montage with Kylo Ten being the boss and fucking shit up, they really dropped the ball by backpedaling from 8
A pity they already had the entire EU to work from and decided to obliterate it all... until they fucked up their own shit so badly they started bringing it back.
We could have had another trilogy centered around an established strong female character.
Mara Jade.
Sure, mix and match in some new ideas to make it work better as films than novels. The idea of Finn (a defecting stormtrooper) absolutely works in this setting.
But the original cast is too old for that time period!
Well we've now seen that Luke can be portrayed reasonably well with another actor and face and voice changing tech.
Have a whole trilogy set in basically the Mando/Asoka time period, but use the Mandalorians in a more adult story about the difficulty of establishing and maintaining alliances when the New Republic is young, the Imperial Remnant still exists, and now basically its chaos as various factions are picking sides.
Thrawn can be the big bad, but his presence is barely hinted at in 7, makes his appearance in 8 and has a major victory, and is defeated in 9.
You could even work in Boba Fett and Asoka! Maybe Thrawn sends Fett to assassinate Luke in 8 and he is seriously wounded or his new gaggle of Jedi trainees are fucked up, but Asoka helps Luke fend him off on the Millennium Falcon!
But uh nope, instead we got A New Hope v2, A B and C plot clusterfuck with a side of break hyperspace and all space combat lore, followed by Duct Tape and Bullshit.
We could have had another trilogy centered around an established strong female character.
Mara Jade.
The character that could've broken the barrier against having older women do action would've been Princess Leia. And they were too gutless to have her do anything. She was in a coma for most of TLJ and hid in a bunker (too afraid to face her own son) for the rest of it. They say they make movies about strong women, but it's only if they're young. You can have older men do action, but they aren't going to have an older woman do action.
the local theater (we had one in our town) kept star wars playing (and only star wars) for a year. it wasn't until around grease and jaws2 that they played anything else.
same thing happened for the other two films of what became the original trilogy.
basically turned me off to the whole 'franchise'. all the films star wars kept from me as a small town kid by being on eternal repeat in the only theater accessible to me at the time.
i did see the original first three films--one time each, the first week of their initial runs.
I watched it in the theater as a teenager on initial release, and the Ewoks made me cringe. But at the start, seeing Luke as a mature badass was satisfying and exciting.
You mean the one with the four armed cyborg with a silly name that made parents think it was a kids move which resulted in children watching a movie where a guy murders a bunch of children because his teachers didn't give him enough respect?
Star Wars (no, it wasn't "EPISODE IV A NEW HOPE"), Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi were the only good SW movies. The rest are embarrassingly bad fanfiction. Just because people laugh at the prequel memes doesn't make the prequels good. We as a society fell when we started laughing at all the horrible parts of the prequels and then asked ourselves "wait, if we're being entertained by the prequels, does that mean they were good?" and coming to the absolute wrong conclusion.
I think technology is the issue. When they made Star Wars, Empire, and Return the special effects tech was garbage (clunky, expensive, and time consuming) so they had to rely on good story telling and practical effects, as the special effects tech has gotten better the story telling seems to rely on the tech as opposed to overcoming the tech (this is all movies/shows not just this franchise). Iirc the death star was a bunch of models of battle ships and other things pasted together, not sure if they did fly-by-wire (Red Dwarf was really good at this practical effect) for the space battles. As an aside, we also tend to like the ones we grew up watching, I'm in the original trilogy is the best (pushin 50), but to those that were my age for the prequels think the prequels are the better series, not sure about the sequels.
Are you kidding? Star Wars had amazing special effects for its day. Yeah, they look clunky now. But you know what? The special effects in Wizard of Oz looked clunky in the 1970s.
As for good story telling...what? This is Star Wars we're talking about, not Fine Art. It's pretty much a reshooting of The Hidden Fortress ... in space!
It's a fun movie, but damn do people lionize it far beyond what it ever actually was.
When they made Star Wars, Empire, and Return the special effects tech was garbage (clunky, expensive, and time consuming) so they had to rely on good story telling and practical effects
I'm curious, have you watched the original trilogy with the original practical effects, and not the crappy CGI that George added later?
I had a professor who didn't even accept the whole trilogy, and (probably at least in part ironically) attributed some amount of societal problems to the third movie.
It's actually the second movie that fucks it all up. The whole point of Luke is that he wasn't born special, he could have been anyone. ESB throws that out the window and makes him a boring chosen one. Star Wars goes from being a story about the power of the workers to a story about force royalty
I am like you and that I like words to have specific meanings.
“Overrated” has to mean that the current rating is too high and should be adjusted, and those making such a claim should be prepared to prove summary bullet points.
I think the 50th Academy Awards nailed it. Not best picture. No actor awards. Best sound, best music, best costumes, best art direction, best special effects, best editing.
Outside of that, it was a great homage to Saturday serials that played at movie theaters in the 40s. Just like European orchestral classical music sometimes elevated peasant folk songs into a higher art form, Lucas did similar for those old short black and white kids movies my dad told me about from his childhood.
So, the first one, in my opinion, is not overrated. It’s rated just about right.
RotJ is where Lucas started to not have pushback on story ideas. It still mostly works but some silliness is leaking through. Especially in the Special Edition, but Empire is the only one that really wasn't effected by those.
I've always believed that the Star Wars universe needs a faction that is cognizant that the cycle of Jedi / Sith is irrational fanaticism of ideology and the force is ideologically neutral.
I have always believed the force is always meant not to be balanced via organization, but balanced per person, that the truth is light side and dark side are just concepts and bad conclusions based on centuries of orthodoxy.
Makes sense. Those people are ancient. The 6 movies are fine it is the crap Disney stuff that sucks. Apparently I am a "bad" Star Wars fan if I don't subscribe to DRM based streaming where you own nothing. Also the idea that there is a story line after the end is dumb and poorly done.
They are definitely more of an appeal to pathos. Unlike the sequels the prequels go from good to evil. It is a sad story plays out that ultimately leads into the sequels.
I wish my kid enjoyed some of the things I liked. Sadly this generation has spoiled him and seeing something that old is weird to him. Hoping when he gets a little older he can understand that just because it's old looking doesn't mean it's bad.
Hell no. The prequels are more ambitious in terms of world building but god awful in character development. They are all show and no go. There is close to no reason to buy into any of the characteristics of any of the main cast other than Obi-Wan. And even that is spotty depending on who he was interacting with on screen.
There is no compelling emotional attachment to any story or their struggle. It's a bunch of "it was the history of the original" novelty built in. It's cool. I still watch them.
But there is not a single fucking scene that is close to Luke looking out into the sunset wanting more from his life and the audience knowing what that's about. There is no "I love you" and "I know" moment where they have done actual things within the story to believe they actually love each other. There is no moment where the good in a person redeems themselves for all the bad they have done to save their son with the evil that they have always had to just be better for one moment.
There is no goddamn way the prequels will ever be better than the original in any universe.
I liked that they (the prequels) expanded the world of star wars and felt fun and fantastical (as I imagine the original triology felt when it came out). The Sequels tried to be too dark and moody in my opinion.