ST Snoke/Andy Serkis Discussion Thread

DarkGingerJedi, people who argue in favor of this trilogy basically are required to have good imaginations because that is the only way to salvage this wreck of a trilogy.

Now, Andy Serkis is one I would have preferred to be the lead villain of this trilogy. If not, at least for the first two films. The problem is, as I've said before, we get the calm, wise Snoke who seems like a Dark Jedi in TFA. Then all of a sudden he's a lot more Sith-like. He's like this evil version of Hugh Hefner, and that's fine. WE COULD have made that work. Lol. But he should have just been played as Vitiate lite, not this vague *******. I think Snoke could have been a good, subtle version of Vitiate if they had written him properly. Maybe as some guy who's come back to life multiple times like some, ya know, messed up combination of Darth Sion and Vitiate. That would have been interesting. But what we got here was a great preference for a character who's way too vague.

Anyhow, there are no Palpatine hints in Snoke anywhere in TFA and TLJ. None. Nada. Nil. Snoke is Ren's boss in those movies. Plain and simple. Palpatine shows up out of nowhere because Johnson got rid of Snoke and Abrams needed a replacement. That's why he went along with Kennedy's plan to resurrect Sidious. Now, if Sidious Palpatine came back in TFA, that would have been fine. But what we got here was something that made Dark Empire look subtle...which is a hard thing to do. Lol. There is no indication that Snoke is working for Palpatine or that Palpatine is animating him through dark side sorcery.

I mean, Palpatine isn't even that much of a sorcerer. He's more of a Force-wielder. He's a god-level Force-wielder who could have killed Vitiate with some difficulty in the EU, sure, and he would have struggled with Darth Krayt. I think Darth Krayt is the only Sith Lord who could have beaten Palpatine. End of story. But like I said, I would have preferred a lite version of Vitiate in Snoke. Or I would have accepted over-the-top Krayt. That would have been fine. Better than this mess.

 

yeah no i don't remember yeah you seem to have a bias against me because you picked me out and i never once, they exist wow

 

i really think picking on me is rude lol

 

No one is picking on you.

First you said you had quotes from TLJ to point to Palpatine. I asked to you to post them. You didn't. Couldn't. or just wouldn't.

Then you said it was subtle. But still offered nothing direct.

 

lol okay but like that was like several months ago. you know please do not put words in my mouth like saying i wouldn't say. i told i don't remember so quite it .

 

If you are going to ignore that i don't remember, well then you are picking on me but if you don't ignore this time then no

 

Nobody planned to bring back Palpatine before TROS. Anything that foreshadowed that, such as the Aftermath books or character similarities in TLJ, is a lucky coincidence. But any comments by Lucasfilm or Bad Robot about it always being part of the plan are just marketing.

Knowing Abrams’s past work (and loving it, actually), I’m fairly sure he intended for Snoke to be a bigger deal. He opened the door for him to have a compelling mystery behind him that other directors and writers could use to build a richer story. Some people deride him for his love of mystery, but I appreciate a fruitful mystery and the rabbit holes it can take you through. I think all the speculation about Snoke that emerged after TFA was precisely the sort of fan engagement Abrams wanted to create. It’s the winding twists and turns of the puzzle that are the point with him, not the short-lived climax.

Johnson, however, was clearly not into mysteries. At least not mysteries without a clear and clever-looking answer at the end. He rendered Snoke’s mystery inert by making him more similar to Palpatine. Any resemblance in his character or speech in TLJ is more likely a result of this rather than a deeper connection to Palpatine as the secret villain behind Snoke. Abrams may not be great at finishing what he starts, preferring to keep pursuing ideas as they come up, but Johnson is too uneasy with uncertainty and the unknown. He gives you a plain, postmodern anticlimax that’s just as short and unsatisfying as any action movie’s real climax but unexpected and thus “clever.”

I will always prefer the mystery of TFA’s Snoke over the flaccid disappointment of TLJ’s Snoke. And the corporate mess of TROS’s Snoke is not something I even want to touch on right now.

 

It was last month. And I honestly forgot all about you internet person. That is until YOU responded to the question and reiterated that there were subtle hints. That apparently you can't remember.

See ya.

 

In TFA, was it implied Han and Leia knew Snoke? Has there been ancillary material about the dealings of Snoke before he just popped up in charge of the Empire, sorry, First Order?

I thought Serkis did a grand job playing the character.

 

Many fans do think it was implied in TFA that Han and Leia knew Snoke, not just knew of him. Especially in the deleted scene where Leia says Snoke had always been working to turn Ben, even early on, from the shadows. That scene was reworked to refer to Palpatine in TROS, but it was about Snoke originally.

Books, comics, and reference materials never added more to this. Many seemed to hint at possible connections or future links to Snoke, but there was never anything solid. And that was even before the TROS retcons, likely to allow the filmmakers full freedom, which they clearly took regardless of what the publishing people prepared.

Looking back on TFA and ignoring all the extra material and expectations, I think the most likely implication back then was that Snoke and the First Order were an offshoots of the New Republic. So he would’ve know the Solos from his time in the Senate, presumably as a representative of former Imperial systems that later would later form their own separatist faction.

The reason I think this is likely because it’s a familiar story, an echo of the sorts of things in the prequels that TFA was fine with alluding to but never too strongly. So I can imagine the filmmakers thinking there’s no need to provide a backstory if it’s essentially the same as what Lucas made in the prequels.

 

I got the opposite impression. First Order is an offshoot of the Empire. It’s what filled the void and picked up the pieces on former Imperial worlds which refuses to join the New Republic.

The Republic looked after its own members but systems that refused to join were left to fend for themselves. No protection and support / infrastructure.

The First Order brought security which was fanatically supported on former imperial worlds that had fallen into chaos.

Leia and Han know Snoke as the diplomatic voice of the First Order who successfully placated the New Republic government into not considering the First Order a threat.

Snoke doesn’t fool everyone, resulting paramilitary Resistance led by Leia.

 

Your impression does make a lot of sense. It matches the idea the early books introduced that the Empire survived the old wars as a rump state. Later books seemed to drop this idea, but it does fit very well with what TFA presents and it makes a lot of sense.

One part that's still confusing to me in that scenario is Snoke's connection to Ben. How did Snoke tempt Ben to the dark side without any of the adults in his life noticing? If Snoke was already the leader of an opposing government, that seems like a difficult task.

But of course, early materials like the TFA novelization and the deleted scenes it includes do mention that this temptation seemed to have occurred in secret.

TROS implies there was some kind of Force connection between them, but I'm skeptical of any explanations that come from that era of storytelling as indicative of anything that was considered before.

Anyway, Snoke being the leader of an Imperial rump state also matches early rumors about the state of the galaxy. In those rumors, Snoke had corrupted the New Republic Senate by offering Senators the change at obtaining the wealth and power they would've had in the old days if they mostly left the First Order to its own devices. And that idea is certainly supported by early materials and ideas like the Galactic Concordance.

 

That I do not know. Did Snoke as a Force user ever meet Luke and Leia under a banner of peace? Did Luke only find out Snoke’s influence the night he read Ben’s mind?

For me that’s a secret left for a future TV show or movie to unravel.

That makes sense. And given Hux speech in The Force Awaken about the Republic allowing ‘disorder’ I think there are a lot of free systems who aren’t part of the New Republic that didn’t join the First Order. Some of them must be quite formable against individual free systems. The Republic doesn’t get involved with them if they don’t mess with the Republic. And it’s outside the Republic’s jurisdiction interfering with two free systems. (That would also serve as incentive for free systems being bullied to join the Republic and get protection.)

So if there are hostile free systems who don’t harass the Republic but do other systems, it gives a reason why the First Order is building up a military that the New Republic doesn’t see as as direct threat to use against them.

The First Order is concealing how powerful a military they are building up. They make it lucrative for New Republic senators to not find out. I also think the New Republic at large is still exhausted from the last war. Saber rattling about the threat of the First Order is not popular on a voter level making it even easier for the senate to ignore the threat.

 

While by no means a solid answer, one of the editors for TFA, Maryann Brandon, did mention in an interview years ago that the early scripts for the Force flashback showed Rey a brief scene of Snoke with a boy. Presumably, this boy was Ben, and the intention was that Snoke met him when he was fairly young. If Snoke was the diplomatic head of the Empire, whatever his title then, then it’s not impossible that Ben could’ve accompanied Leia on an official state visit and met Snoke that way.

I wonder if Bloodline, which used some ideas from Michael Arndt’s early Episode VII scripts, did not hint at some of the political dynamics that disappeared from the movie’s world-building. While that book is all set in the New Republic, I can imagine certain characters, like the Imperial sympathizers and Lady Carise, being based on what could once have been actual Imperials. And even Serkis once referred to Snoke in an interview as “Lord Snoke,” which could simply have been an accident or could illustrate some of what they had in mind for the character early on, if he was one of the Imperial nobles mentioned in the early reference books.

 

Just rewatched TFA today for no reason, probably.
When I first saw Snoke back in Dec 2015 I got excited because I thought SW/Disney had created their own version of the Yuuzhan Vong: a mysterious/unknown race of giants from the...Unknown Regions ready to make their move after the fall of the Empire or something; Snoke looked really alien, HUGE, and unreadable, perhaps the only known Force user of his race; then TLJ ruined everything; anyway, I still look back to TFA's Snoke with some fondness...so much wasted potential.

 

Yeah but do you notice something? you speculated what you thought about Snoke and i didn't turn out to be the case. So Rian ruined it because it didn't match what you thought the character would be.

But then lets remember, Palpatine has gone through at least 3 versions of himself that the audience have had expectations over. The original monkey eyes look in Empire in 1980, to then his final look in ROTJ which was either him being disfigured or just extremely old. And then of course the PT made Palpatine a normal looking guy that people speculated for years about. And yeah many wish that his disfigured look was just him that was covered up by force magic or whatever. And many still want to speculate that was the case. But lucas made it so he was disfigured by his force lighting. None of this likely met any sort of expectation.

Either way with Snoke. He was practically a Palpatine Clone anyway. A mysterious clearly meant-to-be disfigured dark sider who appeared by hologram, just like in Empire. Calling him the "Supreme Leader" didn't change much when it was just a new way of calling him The Emporer.

 

I preferred actually seeing him up close in TLJ compared to a murky hologram

 

Snoke proposes a different function in the narrative, than Palpatine. Palpatine served the structure of a looming presence that the general audience held no preconceived structure about, because that narrative introduced the story with him as that presence. The OT isn't a sequel to anything, so there's nothing for the OT to explain about Palpatine or his rise to power and he's a character whose only really personally directly introduced in the last of that trilogy, because there's nothing for the audience to question about how things happened inbetween movies, because there is no movies released before it. The PT expanded on Palpatine, but that wasn't needed for the OT's narrative, as is. That is, however, the case with Snoke, as a character who rose inbetween the OT and the ST, the nature of what he is and who he is, in his place in the narrative structure, asks questions.

Palpatine, when explained, even in the OT, is still a character on his own. Snoke isn't. He may be an Emperor clone in TFA, and I think that's on JJ, but I think it's on RJ that he chose to essentially copy/paste it all onto him more.

I think there's very little excuse for a series of movies made by a billion dollar corporate goliath, with dozens of creative people at their disposal, to be a worse constructed product than what a guy sitting at his type writer in the 1970's/80's, with limited resources and creatives, did.

 

Abrams didn't want Snoke to be so similar to the Emperor. And in TFA he really was more different than people remember. He became less of a unique character with each work that followed. But based on TFA behind-the-scenes info, I get the impression that he was meant to be quite distinct.

His design started wildly different. He was originally conceived as a female villain, though they dropped that early on. Then they considered making him wolf-like, then reptilian. Finally they settled on a ghoulish humanoid, but he started out far younger than the version we got in the movies, and he had a golden robe much like in TLJ. He eventually ended up being an older character, which does bring him closer to the Emperor, but the point is that he wasn't meant to be a copy.



And even in the final product, in TFA, he looked a lot less human than in later works. His skin was marble white, and while he wasn't as large as his hologram form, he was still a giant. He also gave the impression of being old, possibly ancient, especially if we consider the parallel introduction of Maz Kanata as a counterpart. His inhuman design along with the only setting where he was seen, a dark cavern with a stone throne, further implied that he was an ancient evil. He was a manifestation of the dark side influence by the horror aesthetic, and it was implied he was a much more different villain that the character who Palpatine had become over the course of many movies.

And I think that part is important. He resembles the Emperor, but not the complex character who we got to know through the prequels. Not even the character we saw in ROTJ. He's based on the very initial concept sketches for the Emperor as a vague master of the dark side, as the ultimate evil to which all other villains bowed. That's so general it's almost an archetype, so his being based on that doesn't make him a copy. It's how the character evolved in TLJ and other works that really made him into a copy of Palpatine, figuratively and literally. But I think it's more fair to say that Snoke is based on what Abrams thinks the Emperor "should have been" based on his introduction in TESB.

On a related note, I wanted to get others' opinions on a line that Snoke delivers in the TFA novelization, which is likely based on a cut line from the script.

I always interpreted this to be a reference to the throne room confrontation in ROTJ. But the other day I read someone interpret it as a reference to the duel in Cloud City in TESB instead. Something that adds credence to this is that the "Forceback" vision that Rey has when she touches the Skywalker lightsaber originally featured her seeing part of the duel between Vader and Luke in TESB. This was followed by her seeing a young boy with a vague version of Snoke. Some of this is even still included in the novelization. But the original intent to include it, along with that cut line, make me think it may indeed have been a reference to the duel in Cloud City.

I haven't quite placed my finger on it, but this difference could change the way I see TFA. It makes me think of it not so much as a sequel to the OT, but now especially as a sequel and response to the movie that most old-school fans like Abrams consider their favorite: TESB. I bring this up because it might change the context of certain aspects of TFA. I have to give it more thought, but it might even re-contextualize Snoke to some degree.

 

Interesting idea!
Another thing I just realized is that Snoke essentially implies that had Vader killed his son, the Rebels would have been defeated, the Skywalker bloodline would have ended with Leia and Kylo would never have existed.
So the only reason Ben was born was that Vader perished and needed a replacement.

 

Well really that would depend at what point Vader kills Luke. If he killed Luke in Empire, then things possibly would have been very different. But if he killed Luke in ROTJ on the deathstar then wouldn't the rebels still have won either way? Vader and The Emperor would have been on the deathstar when it exploded. All luke was really doing is keeping them busy so the rebels could get in and destroy the deathstar.

In terms of how Snoke or Palpatine would see Kylo. Yeah they probably wouldn't see him as a real person but just as a bloodline replacement for Vader. Something potentially powerful to be used.

 

Sidious and Vader would not have been on the Death Star when it exploded. A post I made elsewhere a couple of years ago explains why:

 

Snoke was a very undeveloped, unsophisticated charicature of the Emperor, as seen in the OT... and when I state 'underdeveloped' and 'unsophisticated', I mean in terms of his prime function as a villain. I imagine that they did spend some time on trying to determine who Snoke should be... but ultimately fell back on the trope/path of least resistance i.e. a partially obscured, an old disfigured humanoid, in robes, reciting darkside philosophy.

 

Andy Serkis wants Snoke's lore expanded on.

Spoiler

 

Probably because Snoke was always meant to be Palpatine mark 2. Even in his brief scenes in TFA.