JCC Embrace The FU - Formerly the STAR WARS IS BAD thread

It changed cinema. Not eviscerated. But it has blurred the line almost completely between different types of media.

After the huge amount of money Star Wars made in 1977 it seems every movie production company tried to chase that pot of gold with their own fantasy / sci-fi film. George Lucas even tried it again with Willow. But no one really got close. In the optical / photo chemical days of filmmaking it was too gargantuan a feat. Lucas barely pulled it off with his three films.

Fast forward to the late 90s and how profitable Star Wars being re-released in theaters to the VHS generation was plus the new digital filmmaking tools used for the The Phantom Menace. That’s when movies changed. The digital tools made huge productions manageable. And people owning movies at home created space for profitable multi film spanning stories. That leads from the prequels to lord of the rings and Harry Potter to MCU. And now streaming where TV shows are part of a movie series with the same high production values as theatrical releases.

 

No - not at all. It's an interesting topic if you are analyzing a movie - I will say that it's pretty hard to know what the intent even was for a lot of these scenes. I do always find it amusing when there are funny scenes in movies that are clearly not meant to be funny.

HA - well the world would be boring if we all liked the same stuff. I will die on the hill of Rogue One being awesome though..... I've been watching SW crap since like 1980 and that's the only movie I've really liked since ROTJ. I had actually reached the point where I figured that maybe I had just grown out of SW before they released that.

I cared more about Chirrut's death than every PT jedi combined .

 

Baze & Chirrut are awesome.

Some Jedi deaths in Order 66 do hit harder after TCW, because some of them (like Plo Koon) got fleshed out more

 

was Chirrut the one that kept repeating things over and over ? he was annoying.

 

HERETIC!

 

Yeah I've never really watched TCW - but I could imagine how that would be. I am a micro-series guy... and the micro-serious makes Greivous about 1000x better - so I could imagine TCW could do similar things for other characters.

 

^that was a good scene , but the bit at the end where he's wandering across the battlefield repeating himself - STFU already!

also , kinda related , I'm always annoyed in ROTS when Kenobi complains that his windscreen is covered and he can't see - why would that matter , you're a Jedi aren't you?!

 

But with little room for the old school craft that came with succinct screenwriting and editing, particularly just the concept of montage or pure cinema filmmaking. I think that's specifically what I mean when I refer to the evisceration of cinema, besides the obvious MCU / blockbusters overtaking everything thing. There are still great stories being told, but they aren't being told particularly cinematically.

 

The prequels contain a much bigger story than the OT. More story than the movies can hold. Having The Clone Wars - a TV series - officially expand what’s on screen is at least ten years ahead of its time. That’s normal now.

Used to hear people disregard the Clone Wars as TV or a cartoon and not counting the same as the movies. In 2009 someone might say - “You shouldn’t need a TV show to understand a series of movies. That’s a basic rule of story telling.” Flash forward to 2019 and people are more excited about the season final of a Star Wars TV show than they are Episode 9.

 

Mainly because the Mandalorian was good, most of the ST was not

 

I think that has more to do with the rise of social media discourse and marketing (also synchronous release) than the quality of the ST or of Mando. It's just easier for something to get traction on social media when everyone's watching it at the same time.

 

That's what I like, the only thing I like, about The Rise of Skywalker: it’s impossible to tell what they were trying to accomplish. It seems so anti-commercial, anti-fan service, anti-anti fan service, too botched to be considered commercially exploitive in any meaningful way, but also unartistic and devoid of narrative. It's very endearing except in the sense of wanting to ever watch it again.

 

It's neat to have shows to flesh out things for super fans (and I've heard that TCW is good - I've never been able to get into it because honestly the early episodes I've tried to watch are pretty bad - are the later seasons better? I've seen people say that). The problem is that it can't be a crutch.... like I'm not going to watch 5 seasons of a cartoon so that the plot of AOTC finally makes some kind of sense. It's like the Grevious example above - if you watch the micro-series he's actually a really cool character, but if you only watch ROTS he's a close to a complete waste of space.

I'm not just trying to pick on the PT here - the ST is actually quite a bit worse. At least the PT does some world building and gives me background in the movies... so I know what's going on for the most part. You have to read a bunch of books and spend hours on wookiepedia to even know what the damn backstory is in the ST.

"What's the First Order anyways?"

"Oh - just read these 5 novels and buy this visual guide and it's explained"

 

K-2SO's death is the most emotionally impactful death in all of Star Wars, and the second most emotionally impactful death of a droid/robot in any movie ever.

 

What's the first? Johny 5 in Short Circuit?



In all seriousness - what is your first? The pop culture answer would probably be Arnie in T2 I would guess.

(I agree with you on K2SO... one of my favorite characters)

 

I can still remember crying in the movie theater when I first watched this scene, no death of a robot/droid will ever be more impactful than this:

 

Meh. The lonely fate of Dewey in Silent Running is the most emotionally satisfying robot moment in all of si fi cinema.

 

K2 is the only reason I'm remotely interested in the Cassian Andor series

 

Is that going to have K2SO? If so now I'm excited

 

I don't know if K2 will be in it from the start, but surely at some point.
Potentially the only thing that will make the show interesting, Cassian is a very dull character.

Most fans want K2

 

Also movies have gotten much longer. I find it so refreshing to watch a movie (old or new) that tells a complete and satisfying story arc in under two hours. It’s over and you feel the same experience as a three hour film.

That one’s not really on Star Wars - Lucas liked brevity. That’s a modern lesson learned from Titanic, Lord of the Rings and The Dark Knight. The Dark Knight is the one that really did. It has an extra final act that was unique at the time for Comic Book movies. It became standard story telling in the 2010s.

It feels like the movie was made out of obligation to complete the trilogy. Disney had these grand movie series plans going into Star Wars, but half way through release of their five films the company’s focus switched to streaming. They might have cancelled The Rise of Skywalker in favor of a streaming series if it wasn’t the conclusion to their story.

 

I'm sure until the pandemic hit the idea never occurred to them that their streaming service could function without a pipeline of major theatrical releases. The Mandalorian became the standard bearer for entertaining Star Wars at the same time that the Rise of Skywalker became the standard bearer for terrible Star Wars. I'm not sure it's accurate to say the focus "switched" to streaming. It was all going to be part of a synergistic whole until the bottom fell out of moviegoing.

 

Long term though, streaming is more profitable.

Cinema attendance will be impacted by the Covid fallout, so spending $250million on a movie that isn't playing in full screens everywhere anymore is no longer viable.

If you can make shows like the Mandalorian, with a movie quality look for about $60m cost at equivalent running time ($15m per 30 minute episode Vs 2 hour movie), you can easily make that back & get profit through subscription money.
Also, if you make a movie the same way and release it to a reduced cinema audience it doesn't matter if it only makes $500m if it only cost $100m max to produce.

 

Do not grieve. Soon I shall be one with the Matrix.

puts on sunglasses

 

It wasn’t just Star Wars that was effected. In addition to streaming - theatrical priorities were changed by the 20th Century Fox buyout. There are like a dozen Disney and 20th Century Fox films from 2018 to 2020 that seem effected.

Once Disney owned Avatar that meant Star Wars was taking a break from movie theaters and going streaming. Plans for more near future Star Wars movies were no longer happening. Solo and The Rise of Skywalker were sort of dead ends.

That’s the pre-COVID part of Star Wars switching to streaming.