Lit A/V The Force Awakens and the EU [TAGGED spoilers.]

So, Gareth Edwards will be at CA tomorrow, but there's no word on what he's actually doing there aside from an interview on one of the livestreams. Maybe part of the closing ceremony will be something related to Rogue One? It's good presenting, you open on a high note (the TFA press conference and trailer) and you leave with a little something to keep the audience salivating for next time ( RO casting announcement? story details? who knows?).

 

It might just be the panel. Rian Johnson was there as well on Friday and he didn't do anything official, except for learning the importance of chinstraps.

 

You have to be a computer virus, surely. No human being would continue to post as insufferably and repetitively as you do.

 

According to the agreement between Paramount and Disney over their respective movies with 'Rogue' in the titles, Celebration is supposed to be the only time they can promote Rogue One until after Mission Impossible Rogue Whatever comes out.

 

Yeah, that's some of DHC's best work right there but it's the exception not the rule. Only TOTJ had positive cooperation from all - even Lucas didn't frell it over. Knight Errant? Excellent case of how to make books and comics work, oh wait, both written by the same author. Legacy? DR couldn't wait to wreck it and they certainly tried in a case of quite stunning continuity vandalism.

I'm not saying there wasn't good stuff, I'm saying there should have been far more of it and far less of the corporate politics and power games. DHC should have had far more back-up and support than they clearly got. Despite that, they still did a successive array of excellent series.

Being sceptical about the new way of working is entirely separate to the mess of the old way.

Though you doubtless think they lead to a different conclusion, those emphasised sections are the same as I what I've posted. If there was a working system in place, none of that stuff would have happened!

I mean Lucas was practically hell-bent on wrecking SW and, for quite a lot of people, did that with the BR editions - the NOOOO in ROTJ? That was the response of a lot of people to that addition.

I'd see 3 ages of Legends:

• 1991-1999: Whole load of people try to make it all work, most of whom are stunned to be writing SW at all but it's cautious. That caution works in its favour and nothing too bad happens, while some great stuff comes along.
• 1999-2005: The PT age. DR think PT = end of the line so let's nuke the galaxy cue NJO. Meanwhile tie-in stuff is done, some great, some dreck. As usual DHC is where the bulk of the good stuff is, even though Nom Anor was stolen from them. Meanwhile, God of SW Lucas sees no reason to be consistent with himself.
• 2006-2014: A slow death due to authors running wild, including Lucas and oversight that couldn't give a toss. DR gave us the cancer that was the Denningverse and that came to dominate the perception of the line, which personally infuriates because there was so much better stuff being done in other eras. And then there was the continuity steamroller / combine harvester that was Lucas' this-time-it-is-real Clone Wars.

All I've summarised is the stuff we've been talking and complaining about for the last 15-20 years.Before it was little things here and there, but assemble into a collective mass? Yeah, it's going to look a whole lot bigger and badder, to the point where it's easier to say: No, no way was it that bad!

For the first few years it had no competition either, so could get away with any corporate flaws, but from 2000 onwards Trek picked up the interest in a more coordinated continuity, despite none of its books being canon. For the last decade, for me, they've out-done Wars on the books but had three crucial advantages:

• They don't have a crazy creator forever interfering and screwing them over.
• They don't have bad corporate relations with IDW.
• They don't have authors hell-bent on screwing each other over.

Someone saying the old system didn't work as well as it could have shouldn't be a surprise to some of us because we saw it all! Yet when someone says what we knew anyway, it's all: Oh but it did! It really did!

Why?

(I'll admit I find any sense of loyalty to a particular system of work mystifying, don't see why anyone would be inclined to think that way.)

Yeah, that marketing I agree is needlessly irritating and isn't required. You can recognise the validity of what came before while selling the new.

 

That my friend, is just ****ing awesome.

 

Sigh. Thank you for being condescending about this. Your interpretation of what I think could be seen as "serious wrongness", but I don't want to turn this here into a Trek/Abrams discussion that's basically a "the thinking individual vs. the internet mob" scenario (and thus a nice THX 1138 homage, come to think of it). I can give you a detailled breakdown of what I think about all of this in a PM, if you like, but don't feel obliged; I'm just as happy not to spend another hour typing about this topic.

Food for thought - if you classify Abrams as a mercenary for hire, you can try to deduce a style from that. Like, doing what's best for selling the product. Example: as I've said before, I don't see lense flaring as a style for itself but as a conscious attempt to make Trek relevant to the R'n'B-Pop videoclip cowd and Fast and Furious audience.

More food: A non-Trekkie producer/director probably wouldn't be the one in the team to make a homage. Theoretically, it would still be possible that he watched the most famous movie with the most iconic scene (as I said, "Khaaan" is an ironic meme by now) in preparation and told his team that he'd really love to do a homage to that (-> because retro make money, says the mercenary for hire), and the Trekkie guys then might have gone out of their way to make this homage as interesting as possible (in their minds) with Khan not simply being found in space, but being in the secret service etc., which I actually found an interesting take on the new timeline. Other possibility: Trekkie writers want to redo Star Trek 2 as much as possible, Abrams hates the idea but can't veto the script (which I have a hard time imagining - he's a big player by now and cited as the guy who revived Trek, not a bargain bin director who has to nod and say yes to receive his paycheck) so at least he's trying to keep the Khan connection as a twist, going for outright misdirection because he's basically embarrassed about it. If you ask me, I'd believe both scenarios if they were officially presented. I don't have any info on this, though. Third option: could he simply have phoned it all in, not caring about the script or staging of the scenes? Possibly, but I see no reason to insult Abrams like that without having any indication that this might have been the reason for the movie turning out as it did.

Stuff I'm not critizing about the movie, by the way, is stuff like Khan being in there at all, the team "lying" about Khan being Khan, or a Khan homage including the "Khaaan" scene. I know the internet is sore about all of this, but I'm okay with that. Any problems I have have more to do with quality, and I believe you could have done a great film with all of the above. Any script problems I have I definitely accuse Orci/Kurtzman/Lindelof of (as with all of their scripts), staging/visual problems I address at Abrams. And actually, as much as I bang my head against the wall whenever O/K write a script, their ideas for rebooting the Trek universe in the first movie while keeping the continuity (and destroying a planet to prove that it's a new timeline) and splicing Khan in in a very different way since he's obviously still around in the "new universe" are pretty cool. I wish they'd simply spin stories and then not write their own scripts out of that.

But you know what? I don't even know anymore why we're talking about this. Especially since I just wrote a wall of text without wanting to.

I'm listening to the Inherent Vice soundtrack right now, how's your Sunday?

 

Interestingly, it was DHC, who had their **** wired tight and control over what they published. They knew their playground!

 

As much as I'm perfectly happy with the reboot, I have to agree with you about that.

Like you, I wish they'd stop trying to make it sound like they've reinvented the wheel, because they'd have avoided a lot of drama had they just kept things simple and gone: "So, yeah, EU is done, we're doing things over, kthxbye" and left it at that. Simple.

 

Oh hell yeah, they could have gone even further if permitted.

Yeah, I think that's one thing we'll all agree on and that they need to stop doing it in their marketing.

 

The old system worked pretty well. I don't see the big deal with different sets of Death Star plans. It's a massive superweapon capable of destroying a planet. The Empire would have scattered falsified plans all over the place, with the one on R2 in ANH being the finalized one. Sure, LOTF karked some things up, but it can still be redeemed. A few bad books don't somehow override a decade-running story. A follow up to FOTJ could've easily redeemed both, if they focused away from 'why Caedus went bad' and present a trilogy or something specifically as a Prequel to LOTF which would 'fix' things up. My fan theory is that he was possessed by a space wraith and was struggling along. So while he lead the GA he was somewhat sane, but when he listened to Lumiya the wraith was just driving him to cause more chaos, until it finally snapped at Fondor.

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Space_wraith

Onto the Story Group though, when I read the statement all I saw was pretentiousness. A great deal of it. They don't want to admit it but Legends is still ongoing through SWTOR. It's a Catch 22 situation that works in favour of Legends fans and maintains the old Legendsverse as an alternate universe. EA have a deal with Disney, but Disney can't afford to piss off EA because EA wouldn't want a game that took half the US Military Budget to make (even if the result was extremely lackluster) be scrapped until they cut a deal to make an alternative. That and SWTOR was released 3 years ago, they won't end it until it's at least hit the 10 year mark, not when they can keep releasing expansions. Let's not forget that SWTOR has a massive playerbase, if EA-Bioware is smart they wouldn't want to piss them off. Then again, it's EA..

On another note, the Story Group are probably aware of the whole Give us more Legends movement, so the question is why are they essentially increasing the fire? Because that's all I see this leading into.

 

Interestingly, when Pablo and Leland were interviewed on the Celebration livestream, their statement was less "the EU didn't work, so we had to replace it with this thing that's better," and more a pragmatic "we love the EU, but by throwing it out for the new films, and not trying to tie the films into the preexisting continuity, it puts everyone on the same playing field and people don't know what's going to happen next."

(interview here)

 

Probably a little of both

 

Mmmmmmmmmeh it's only that I don't think there's enough out there to draw conclusions. Methodologically speaking, even if we've seen all these elements of Abrams in one place or another, we haven't seen them all in one film (pre-existing franchise + JJ as a major fan + taking a pass at the script + none of his usual collaborators). I just think it's a spectrum, and I'm not arguing that the validity of analysis with what we have is at 0%... maybe it's at 60%. But more importantly, it leaves no room for the whole to be greater than the sum of its parts. Even knowing that, all the made-up minds just start clouding things for me (and your mind doesn't seem made up, so it's not personal...)

Getting over a cold, so you could say "I'm losin', I'm losin', I'm losin', I'm losin' my vitamin C."

 

Bam.

Star Wars ‏@starwars 1m1 minute ago
A band of resistance fighters unite for a daring mission to steal the Death Star plans in Star Wars anthology film, Rogue One #RogueOne.
277 retweets 186 favorites

Edwards says there's no Jedi, just ordinary people trying to bring hope to the galaxy. And the term they're using for these films now is Anthology films.

 

"Star Wars anthology film" ?

 

That's what they're calling it instead of the more nebulous term "Spin-off". These films will jump all over the timeline and tell whatever stories they want.

 

From the liveblog: What are they going for? Edwards: “Real…This is a real place that we’re really in…The thing that interests me about it, is Star Wars was basically very black and white. Our movie is gray.”

Felicity Jones plays a Rebel soldier. Apparently, she's a huge Star Wars fan and dropped everything to take the part. They're aiming for a "Zero Dark Thirty" feel, with the same director of photography on board.

EDIT: The much rumored concept art:


EDIT 2: John Knoll, the ILM effects guy who came up with the idea for the story, is on stage now. Josh Trank couldn't make it because he's apparently sick.

Knoll: “I started thinking about which story would I like to see told? I informally pitched it around…One of the people I pitched it to was Pablo, and he was pretty enthusiastic about it as well…I made an appointment with Kathy and Kiri, pitched the 20-minute version of this, and got a pretty good response.” KK counters that she was at the job approximately 20 minutes when she heard his pitch and said there was no way she was going to say no.

Kiri Hart: “I feel strongly that we should involve directors early in the process.” Many people, including Jason McGatlin, recommended Edwards. Kiri and the team watch Monsters “and were really impressed.”

Edwards was humble and scared when they offered him the pitch, he almost didn't read it. But “I couldn’t sit in a cinema and know that someone else made this film.” He had to take it. Like Jones, he dropped everything and jumped into the project.

 

Wait, wait, wait... the Death Star plans again?

What'll the next anthology be about, a crack team during the Battle of Hoth?

 

"Anthology films"... hm. I like it.

 

Hmm.... Nah, don't like it.

Anthology has a meaning that these films don't match up to.

 

What do you mean 'again'? I haven't read any stories about Death Star plans. Neither has my Dad. Or most people watching the movie I bet.

Okay, okay. If I had been involved in the Star Wars EU before Disney acquired LucasFilm maybe my excitement for this film would be tampered as well. I don't know why I'm just more excited for this than Episode VII. Maybe because it has not yet been analyzed up and down the wahzoo.

 

See here for a nicely done summary: http://eleven-thirtyeight.com/2014/12/the-expanded-universe-explains-vol-x-the-death-star-plans/