A/V Episode VIII - THE LAST JEDI - Official Movie Discussion Thread

I prefer to think, until proven otherwise, that Snoke is an emperor with no clothes - a charlatan of sorts. There have been sufficient hints that he's different from Palps that may support the possibility.

 

TFA is a SW story, so I'm invested in it. Snoke does leave a bit to be desired though. Just give me something I can work with to tie the old EU and NEU together. My fandom isn't riding on Snoke matching or surpassing Palpatine. I got other villains for that.

 

Forget Snoke for second, are you able to care about Rey and her mysterious Lightsaber connection ?

 

I care. I mean about Rey as a character and not just how she ties into the older films. Snoke not so much.

Sent from Hell--depending on whether or not it exists.

 

My persona view is... say that Snoke has nothing to do with Palpatine or Plagueis or the Sith. Rey has no relation to Luke or Han/Leia or Obi-Wan or anyone from prior films. Luke and Leia join Han in getting killed off by the end of IX. Rey kills Kylo Ren. Lando remains AWOL for the rest of the sequel trilogy. Those are all things I've seen forcefully argued, both here and on other sites. I don't necessarily think all of those will come to pass, but I do think it's not out of the realm of possibility. But if so:

1 - If the whole point of the sequels is to introduce an entirely new non-Skywalker cast, kill off the remaining Skywalker bloodline, and have a threat with no connection to the past of the saga be the catalyst for wiping out the Skywalkers and everything the Rebellion fought for... why is this a saga film trilogy? What does that even do to the concept of there being an actual "saga" of nine core movies?

2 - If the above stuff does come to pass, the sequels will be way more bleak and way more disrespectful to the setting established by Lucas than anything the NJO or LOTF or whatever else the movie purists liked to claim about the old EU.

 

I actually have a fair counter-argument for all of your points. Specifically, there IS no point. Abrams, Kasdan and everyone threw stuff at the wall to look cool. There's no master plan, no secret history, and a bunch of connections which no one settled on.

It's all being written by the seat of one's pants.

Rey is ANYTHING because her backstory was never nailed down and there was no secret plan against the Skywalkers because they had no plan whatsoever.

 

We might need another trilogy for it all to connect.

For the Old EU, I like the progression of the enemies.
Palpatine for the first 6 movies. Then fallout of his death.
Yuuzhan Vong come after the fall of the Empire, which, Palpatine knew about.
The Killiks rise up from 3 Force users going MIA during YV War.
Remaining Palpatine Force-user Lumiya helps raise tensions in the GA and corrupts Jacen.
After that Jedi in Shelter during the YV War came down with Force psychosis, Luke and Ben traveled Jacen's Force Odyssey, met the Lost Tribe, marooned from an earlier war.
Abeloth is released after destruction of Centerpoint Station from LOTF and everything that came before.
Decades later, Darth Krayt (a PT era Jedi who escaped the Purge) took over the galaxy.
Then, Darth Wredd rose up later because of the Krayt war.

Wasn't perfect and can figure out a couple ways to tie things together better in a re-write, but did progress pretty well imo.

 

On my end, I see Mark Hamill seems fairly okay with returning to Star Wars as a guest character like Ewan McGreggor has stated.

As such, I can see both of them showing up in movies for the next decade or so.

 

I don't think that's so much a "fair counter-argument" as just pointing out the fairly obvious.

And I don't think it's unreasonable for people to not be happy about that, especially since it's being done by people who do nothing but talk about how much they worship Lucas and the first three movies (but only those, even though of course as Lucasfilm employees everyone knows they're actually brilliant films that are just misinterpreted by an ignorant public) and are completely respectful of the series and that this is going to be a 100% actual true real continuation, not like those books We Don't Speak Of that just completely Didn't Get It and Disrespected The Franchise.

 

Projecting much?

Look, *I* hate LOTF (though not the NJO), say as much often, and genuinely cannot imagine how the ST could *possibly* wind up worse than that. But I'm not really seeing a widespread attitude of slagging the EU as a whole and talking about how their story is So Much Better from TPTB. At most there's some exaggeration about how radical a development the Story Group is.

 

TFA is basically already as bad as LOTF. A pathetic, regressed Han Solo was killed by his own son, who prayed to Darth Vader to give him strength, and apologized to him for having a conscience. Wut. That actually happened.

The destruction of previous character development in TFA is very similar to the destruction of previous character development perpetrated by Denning.

JJ Abrams is the Troy Denning of Star Wars movies.

 

No, not really projecting much. Even just taking this forum alone, which is dedicated to talking about all Star Wars literature, whenever there's a thread about the EU there is a certain cadre of posters, who I won't mention by name but who everyone reading this I'm sure knows, whose mission is to go in and inflame things and raise enough hell that the thread gets shut down, all while making sure to blame everything on EU fans. And again, to state the obvious, these are posters here, on a forum dedicated to the EU. As for the powers that be, without saying any names, even within the story group there are certain people/person who makes sure to go out of his way to talk about how dumb the EU was and how much better everything is now and how anyone who likes the EU or wants to see parts of it back is an idiot.

And yes, I hate LOTF too, but if the ST ended by having all of the Skywalkers killed off, I do think that would be a far worse

 

Well, I've been here twenty years and take no shame in saying I think LOTF and FOTJ were awful.

You can love the EU but not all of it.

 

How can LOTF be worse than NJO?
All the skywalkers are pretty much dead by the end of ST, Han who married in is dead. Leia is going to die in 8. Luke is pretty much going to die in 9 of old age if not in combat. And Rey may not be a skywalker.

 

I didn't say it would necessarily be good - I just can't emphasize enough how profoundly incompetent on every level the DNT/LOTF/FOTJ era is. Like, I'll up your "Skywalkers all die" scenario with "and Luke goes 100% mustache-twirlingly to the Dark Side and dies unredeemed", and I'd argue it still wouldn't be as bad - since at least the narrative would actually ACKNOWLEDGE he was a bad guy instead of portraying him as the sole arbiter of morality even as he acts completely awful. I've talked before about how bad or mediocre movies may be common, but movies that are just genuinely horrible are actually exceptionally rare and noteworthy. Even accounting for the "of course Star Wars will sell" factor, it remains a profound mystery to me how the post-NJO existed.

 

How one author was allowed to so completely misinterpret the NJO and run with it is really hard to comprehend. But then again it isn't so hard to comprehend when basically the same thing has happened to the films.

 

The NJO had its pitfalls but at least they didn't make the heroes evil and die unrepentant. Kylo Ren works because he started as a character on the road to evil, not brainwashing an established martial pacifist as a psychopathic Sith Wannabe.

The scary thing is? Lumiya was a perfectly serviceable villain by herself.

Maybe not nine books worth but at least a trilogy.

 

1. Maybe. Probably not.

2. I doubt that since they treat poor Finn like crap. Jar Jar wins more fights. However, Rey IS supposed to be compassionate and kind so she's not some sort of brooding female antihero either.

3. I sincerely doubt they're going this route, especially given Carrie Fisher's passing.

 

I don't think there's the slightest chance of Luke going to the Dark Side - that was mostly just a rhetorical point about how terrible his characterization from the DNT onwards was.

 

I'm more worried about TLJ being ESB mk2 than that happening

See that's another thing I don't get, why would he pray to Darth Vader. From Kylos perspective wouldn't Vader be the greatest traitor they ever had, unless Luke didn't tell Kylo about Vader killing Palps but why wouldn't he do that ?

JJ is also the Denning of Trek as well

 

For Snoke... he needs to somehow be a consequence of Palpatine or Vader's actions in the PT/OT... or Plagueis himself or some similar figure... or else it feels so disconnected.

What are the two things that went wrong, post-ROTJ?

1. Ben was turned to the dark side, killed the other Jedi students ... caused by Snoke
2. the First Order rose from those who escaped Jakku to a true threat ... caused by Snoke (presumably)

If it wasn't for Snoke, the heroes would have gotten the "happy ever after" ending.

Snoke is the factor that changed it all.

So in order for this to truly feel like a Saga, either Snoke must have developed into what he is because of Palpatine/Vader in the PT/OT... or Palpatine/Vader developed into what they were because of Snoke. Snoke is either their last remnant in the galaxy, or their root cause.

To have Snoke have just been doing his own thing, completely unrelated, that's a bit like having the Lost Tribe of the Sith running around at the same time as the One Sith as well as Darth Caedus. Too disjointed. Two different stories, not one saga.

 

Jacen wasnt serviceable for 9 books. So...

Yeah, Snoke has to be connected somehow, someway.

Given the whole "Palpatine was searching for the origin of the dark side in the Unknown Regions" thing in Aftermath, i could see Snoke turning out to be some kind of ancient entity set loose by whatever it was Palpatine was doing with his Observatories.

I dont know. I want to say that I trust they wouldnt flub the ST this badly. As much cultural enthusiasm as there was for TFA and TLJ, if they botch Snoke that's going to be a couple decades of ST hate that will be worse than anything seen with the PT. The mere presence of Luke Skywalker wont be enough to mitigate that sort of disaster.

Sent from my SM-G920V using Tapatalk