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

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Eh, we can live in denial all we want but a lot of the rumors that came out midway in the speculating period for the The Force Awakens turned out to be pretty accurate. The ones that didn't pan out, I still see the crumbs of truth they contained within the Force Awakens.

The reason why I give these rumors some stock is because they would immediately explain away problems that I had with Rey in VII. Immediately. They just make her character make...sense. It would even make Star Wars make sense.

And it goes with everything Hollywood currently happily intellectually masturbates to. And I do mean happily. It has avatars, tree worship, and evil primal males. I cannot see them passing this up. They couldn't do better if they got Joss Whedon himself to write it.
The problem is, the avatar concept now is ten years overused. Seen it, done. Some stories have done it badly some have done it well (Avatar : The Last Airbender...big fan of it)

Well, they got a problem with me. I'm a citizen living at the end of the age of a republic and I've seen a lot of entertainment. Buffy, Matrix, Avatar( the movie and the Last Airbender cartoon) have all done the above mentioned concepts and did them well. Why do I want to see those ideas rehashed again in a far inferior format? Meh.

LFL I demand my right to be entertained. Gimme something new. For if there's one thing a citizen used to bread and circuses cannot abide is boredom.

That being said I predict that the tree will talk. And somehow the Sith dude abuses it.

Add whatever tropes from the last ten years you can think of into that mix.

 

I agree with you

If I go see E8 and these Spoilers are true (and I think they may have some truth after what has been reported and shown on set) then I shall not be back for E9.

 

Well, one of the guys starting rumors admitted he made it up.

 

That's what he wants you to think!

More seriously, this is what we do now, huh? Go nuts over dubious info?

 

Its withdrawal symptoms. Always happens right before the Celebration.

 

"Now"?!?

 

Well, if you were part of that crowd Sinny, the weather report would be that hell had frozen over.

And V, well, yeah, it ain't new, but this just seems worse than precedent cases.

 

So, one of the Lucasfilm concept artists opened his mouth and let a little Rey info slip:

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"But here’s where it gets interesting… The meat really came at his mention of Rey, and then her mysterious background. He spoke of how Qui-Gon and Shmi had a romantic affair in early-mid drafts of TPM, and how you can still see the remnants of this idea in the final film. He also teased that (paraphrasing) ‘though none of these prequel-related concepts were able to be used outright, these ideas remain in the Lucas ecosystem, and filter through.’ AND, though he spoke thus quietly, he almost certainly then said: “…And now we have a new Skywalker.” To me, this confirms without a shadow of a doubt that Rey is, if not Luke’s daughter, certainly a Skywalker of sorts, and that her backstory will involve a grey Jedi (Luke?) having an affair with a citizen – perhaps with a child born of another virgin mother through the Force."

 

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Yay, no Rey-incarnated First Jedi that lives under a tree!

 

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I'm not against the idea of Rey being descended from a Shmi/Qui-Gon love child. But I'm a bit skeptical for a few reasons:

1) It's hard for me to imagine Lucasfilm, let alone Disney, being comfortable in their heroine being the product of a Jedi Master impregnating a slave woman during a one-night stand.

2) It's even harder for me to imagine Lucasfilm and Disney wanting to make Rey's origins so heavily fixed on one of the prequels, especially TPM and especially in a way that is a "it happened off-screen" retcon.

3) It opens a lot of plot holes about why Qui-Gon never told Obi-Wan and Yoda during his time as a ghost, or why Shmi never told Anakin in AOTC, etc.

 

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Yup, there are definitiely subtle hints in TPM that the two could've ended up engaging in stuff otherwise known as the name of the former senator Gary Hart's boat.

As for this being probative of Rey's origins, well maybe ....Seems to me we assume too much is fixed. It was never that way with Lucas, and I don't think the existence of a Story Group means everything is laid out well beforehand. Rey's backstory is vague in TFA for a reason, maybe several reasons, and one reason might be to give the creatives flexibility to take the story in directions that might seem more natural later on.

 

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I think people are misreading this. It's more likely what Karl is interpreting - not that Rey is descended from a Qui-Gon/Shmi "love child", but that the idea of a Jedi's secret child he may not know about is being reused, presumably with Luke.

Though, again, I'd remind people that apart from being less ridiculous-sounding, this isn't any more solid fact than the tree rumors were.

 

OK, not talking about spoilers that may be lies here, but...

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Star Wars is generally a far inferior format to The Matrix or Cameron's Avatar? Wow.

 

That's basically season 2 of the Legend of Korra.

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In what sense? There being a big tree?

Book 2 of Korra didn't introduce reincarnation, or the avatar, to that franchise. Nor did it cut Aang out of the picture. It elaborated on existing material. Not particularly well -- I think that season was a let down in almost every respect -- but still.

There's a marked difference between Avatar fans finally learning about the first Avatar and what being the Avatar entails, a subject of speculation since the show began, and Star Wars fans being introduced to an entirely new mythology divorced from anything that came previously.

Anakin - > Rey, I can at least understand. Darth Vader is the OOU icon of the Saga and the IU messianic figure born to restore balance. Revealing that the Chosen One is also reborn to keep balance, while risky, is essentially just doubling down on that. They could spin it as being the natural progression of the narrative with little difficulty.

"No, Anakin was a false prophet and Rey is actually important because she's the reincarnation of this totally new character, here have a flashback to ancient times" would be a tougher pill to swallow. Especially given all her "Skywalker" trappings.

Like. Crikey. Even "flashbacks to ancient times" on its own would be a bad idea. Everything else on top of it? Too much.

 

Agreed it's a bad idea. I think it's the writers trying to......... Branch out

 

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What if Rey's the anti-christ character? Like she's part of a prophecy of a doomed individual destined to do horrible deeds? Of course that's just flipping the PT on it's head... but maybe that's what scared Luke. Maybe he found out about some myth and he doesn't want a part in it, because he knows what how that screwed up the old Jedi Order.

Plus Mortis balance blah blah. Anakin brings balance to the force by destroying the overpowerful dark Palpatine, someone else is destined to restore balance by destroying... Luke?

Don't start that in here!

 

I'm ready for Rey being

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Anakin's reincarnation right about now. It would definitely explain a lot of her mysterious Jedi skills in TFA, where she outdoes Anakin+Luke combined while barely training with a saber. Plus, Avatar already did it, and Filoni is heavily involved in the new canon, so it would be old-hat to him to work in another franchise that had that as a plot-element.

 

I still don't understand the fuss over Rey being "better" than luke and anakin. Okay, she overpowers some guy in a fit of rage while he was shot in the stomach. Luke blew up the most heavily fortified fortress in the galaxy with 5 minutes of flight time.

 

I don't think Rey out did either Luke or Anakin, really. For a short time she got herself out if the way of the Force working through her. Luke was able to look like a trained swordsman with a couple words about relaxing and feeling. Jedi training is as much about getting your ego out of the way of the Force as it is about accumulating skillsets. The skillset training is only to provide a muscle memory base, for the most part, that enables a Jedi to let the Force work through them in those particular ways that they often encounter as knights.

Rey has some martial arts, for a bit she was able to let the Force work through her and beat Kylo. I don't think she can manage that again without training, to make that openness to the Force a regular occurance. She has to learn non-doing.

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See you opening day 2019!

 

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Oh dear Carrie I'm pretty sure carrie just let slip that han's funeral happens between VII and VIII

 

Johnson confirmed at the LFL Lucasfilm future filmmakers panel there is no time-skip between TFA and Episode VIII. Which also kind of confirms why we don't have any post TFA media content in between the movies. While a part of me kind of wants the movie to go long time ago title card - Luke meets Rey cold open and THEN title blast crawl (with timeskip) I think that's unlikely. So I would assume while the opening crawl may containing some element of recapping TFA, surely something must have happened off screen during TFA that the crawl will fill us in on which would be relevant to the plot.