lmao

is the argument "star wars needs to have christopher nolan" or "luke should just crush baddies"

RIP star wars not enough iron man

The short version is that Disney bought the creative apparatus that created Star Wars and assumed that organization was capable of creating more Star Wars. Companies don’t mess with the structure or culture of an acquisition because that’s the thing they paid money for. At least not quickly, or until they figure out it’s not working.

plz giv me a star war without politics and just crushing the villains and luke flexing muscles i dont need story

plz donate to my #remaketlj campaign i have a meeting with holly wood

You should watch that one then, if you haven't seen it. It's incredible.

The people who liked TLJ all seem to project this onto everyone who didn't. Yeah, there is a minority that want to remake the film, which is pretty absurd. A think a majority just wanted to see TLJ made with some care.
Maybe I'm missing something, what makes TLJ so brilliant?

I'm not putting that on "everyone." Comments like "It's all downhill from here" and the ilk are just boring ways of rehashing "i didnt like it."

Good criticism is wanting to see something done well / improved upon / etc. I also dont care if anyone thinks its "brilliant" Im not even sure I do. I think its a very good star war film that does interesting things with its characters. I think it absolutely was made with care, but I've already gone over that in this thread. I think a careless star wars movie would have been Luke crushing villains left and right.

I think it’s pretty careless to misinterpret GL’s “Star Wars is political” to mean social issues rather than intrigue.

oh no social issues oh noooOOOooo

I’m not criticizing inclusion of social issues, I’m criticizing the exclusion of intrigue.

yeah man lets get the trade federation back in here

Yeah, absolutely. I’ve read about the original notes and concepts for the trade federation and its relationship with Naboo. A more skilled writer would have had a lot to work with there. It would be a great fit for ANH’s turn-around plot to use the Death Star plans as bait to find the Rebel base, among others.

A good story can address social issues without just... ****in, like, straight-up talking about social issues. Tying a narrative to social issues is one place where political intrigue is especially great. It’s not just an exposition of what people have done, it’s an exploration of what people are willing to do. TLJ had a story to tell about how the First Order arms itself. They could have made the movie about discovering where the weapons come from, and in the process discover the terrible secrets of the casino people - the weapons deals, alliances, slave labor, animal abuse - and leave the viewer to consider whether those issues are relevant for the real, modern word. Instead, Rose says “well, ya don’t get rich without doin’ bad stuff”. It’s not a coincidence that people complained about the casino sequence feeling out of place and heavy handed, because it was exactly both of those things. And just because someone points out those very real flaws in the movie doesn’t even mean they disagree with the message.

a funny way to address social issues is to make make the various alien characters conform to racial stereotypes

SHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH nonono

where are those droidekas

u read that in nute gunray's voice

May I ask what you liked about what TLJ did with its characters? I find the opposite to be true: the movie made some sound and fury as though cool things were going to happen, but by the end I felt no character had any significant change.

Like, I guess Rey now knows her parents didn't matter, or something, but as someone who didn't give a damn who her parents were from square one, that entire reveal felt like alot of sound and fury for no reason. And I guess she's still the pro-Jedi resistance fighter she always was. I guess she figured out Luke was kind of a dick, but he ded. I have a hard time knowing why any of what she did in the movie was significant for her in any way outside of driving the plot forward.

Maybe I'm missing something big here, I'm not sure.

The thing with her parents is a good example of meta-narrative wrecking narrative, actually.

There's very little to go on in TFA to suggest the identity of Rey's parents matters. IIRC there's one short scene which mentions them, but in no other way does it appear important, relevant, or interesting. Okay, fine, they don't matter and I'm cool with that.

Then apparently mass fan speculation came out. Okay, everybody thinks she's related to somebody.

TLJ comes out, and it's clear the writers knew about this speculation, because now suddenly it's kind of relevant. Not actually relevant to the main plot, or any of the relationships in the movie (other than Kylo Ren, but it's not relevant to him so much personally), and we get a bunch of screen time devoted, and.. what's made of it? Seriously, what role does any of it play in the movie? What would be lot from cutting all of it?

Nothing. Because it actually was not part of the narrative, it was part of the meta-narrative. The scenes come and go, and nothing happens of it, besides the characters doing something they would have done anyway. It felt like the writers wanted to say "lol it don't matter who they are, stupid" to the audience. I felt they had wasted my time with unimportant ****.

I mean, compared to the old trilogy, where in ANH we're shown Luke is persistent in asking about his father from his uncle. His uncle won't tell him, so Luke knows very little, and Obi-Wan tells him Vader killed him, and all the stuff about fighting together. Okay, so that's motivation for Luke not liking Vader, motivation Luke to stick with Obi-Wan and trust him. Then, of course, it all leads to the Vader reveal in ESB.

You see how, like, Luke wondering about his parents gives him credible motivations, and was actually pertinent to the plot?

ok jon. i actually liked canto bight more on second viewing. i think it could have been done better, but mostly from an editing standpoint i think. i dunno. its been a while.

Reid: They wrote TLJ before TFA was out in theatres. The fan speculation of who Rey is was HUGE so yeah, I get that people felt "let down" or whatever, but it does push the story to some interesting places. Namely, moving away from the idea of being "born into power" or w/e. You can have important parents and have that be interesting. You can also be a "nobody" and ALSO have that be interesting.

My quick summary of what I liked about the characters: They were all given the chance to exist as real people, and make real decisions. Their paths didn't (seemingly) get influenced by what the fans wanted. Their paths felt, to me, like they were doing what they needed to in that universe, and not the universe bending to them.

also another funny (bad) take I saw on twitter was

"we buy the merch so we should get a say on what the story is"

I mean, that was never really a theme in Star Wars, though. Unless there's some EU thing I don't really know about, I thought it was clear from, like, how in the prequels the Jedi order basically kidnaps children for Jedi training, that your ability to use the force does not depend on bloodline.

I don't feel it answered something that really existed, is the issue. It feels like a post hoc rationalization of a socially progressive message they wanted the film to have, when Star Wars wasn't broken in that way to begin with.



Okay.

I agree the fans shouldn't dictate the film. That's why I think they shouldn't have said anything about Rey's parents at all. Them mentioning it felt like commentary between the writers and the fanbase.

I'm not sure how much of TLJ was actually set before they saw fan reception of TFA. I'm doubtful that they had it planned how they did before seeing the fan reception, and if they did, then I'm being kinda judgey about their writing ability.

It's hard to say, though. At least with TPM, we got to see the behind the scenes footage which showed some real tension between the producers and GL, and made it clear where some of the problems were in development. With Disney, it feels like there's a polished gilding over all aspects of development, so we don't get to know why the writing is how it is.

I guess what I'm saying is, social media is toxic and puts writers far too close to the fanbase. I think writers talking too much to fans had negative impacts on TLJ's script. So really we ought to delete Twitter and Facebook.

Social media also puts you into a bubble that teaches you that anybody who disagrees with you does it for wrong/bad reasons, and trains you to respond appropriately.

E.g. “If you hate the ghostbusters remake you’re sexist”

Like, people don’t RT/@/pile-on the well reasoned or nuanced arguments, they do it to trolls building straw men or morons who are just as well. Everybody does it, it’s what these platforms are designed to facilitate.

So like in the Ghostbusters case, the social media discussion stopped being about the movie and turned into people screeching about MRAs and others screeching about SJWs. And none of them even realized that’s what they were doing. They all thought they were the reasonable ones.

I thought it was such a cop out. So much of TFA had been spent building up anticipation for a big reveal. The parents could've been new characters that didn't connect her to the Skywalker lineage, or to any characters from earlier movies. Just... have them be alive, or give them faces, or something! Some kind of satisfying resolution, and not some twist that was reflective of something totally extraneous to the story, and instead reflected the process of making the movie -- such as the fact that Ep 7 and Ep 8 were made by different directors/writers with different artistic visions.

i mean toxic fandom is a thing. MRAs are real and *******s about women ruining their movies. Its not just social media because boy golly have I met those idiots. Are there _valid criticisms of those movies_. Of course. I'm not here to say "you can't criticize." I'm just bored of "omg Disney is tanking it." There are going to be a lot of Star Wars movies, so the reality is there will be bad ones.

I don't think a professional writer being on twitter somehow negatively impacts their scripts. I would imagine a professional is… professional about how they do their work. If you don't agree, thats fine!

Anyway, I didnt think that reveal was a cop out. I think the fan speculation blew it out of proportion and that, to me, is not on the writers. It definitely wasn't what people were expecting, but I didnt find it to be a waste. Honestly better than if they were like "lol snokes reys dad." If I had to guess, it's setting up the finale for a bigger "Everyone is unique and powerful" or something.

listen all i'm sayin is more milk drinkin' luke

In a similar vein, it also teaches you that everyone's moral convictions are secretly the same as whatever yours happens to be (because whatever you believe is self-evidently correct), so if anyone disagrees with you, they must "know better" when they say things you disagree with, and so they must be speaking in bad faith.

It's surprising, because (despite this now perennial complaining about siloing) another thing social media does is expose you to a wide range of views. It's as if it's just too much to process all the noise and still have any convictions at all.

I've spoken with climate change deniers/skeptics who have thought pretty hard about climate change and have concluded that it can't be man-made. It's not as if they live a double-life where they *really* know that climate change is man-made, but they make arguments that it isn't, because that's what's politically expedient for them. Many of them are actually just wrong, and they have a lot very sincere conviction about their factually incorrect views. Social media, I think, makes it exceptionally hard to see that. There's a lot of pressure in social media to describe other people's failure to know certain things as a moral failure rather than a failure to be correctly informed.

Isn't social media moving away from showing you things you don't want to hear?

Could be, but certainly people are being shown a version of things they disagree with, if only to provoke them. I mean, that's what they've always done on TV anyway.

I think Spook is talking more about the case of strict consumption of media. For people who don't use the web like TV, they do plenty of seeking out opposing views, and then post rebuttals of them in their silos on their preferred 4chan board or sub-Reddit

Man, it's like I don't have to check the Trump thread anymore since I can get the same conversations in this one.

welcome back nikuguy

also, huh, we have a 'downs' smiley in 2018, haha yikes

Combine the entire forum into one single flat "mailing list", and then define threads by the tags users add to posts and then vote on. Then you can select which tags you want to show up, and you can just remove the ones with the "social media navel gazing" tag.

The film industry is a pretty messed up place. I've worked with a lot of the studios involved and seeing the way things are run it's no surprise that pretty much any movie in the last decade is full of the same problems.

Really the state of the industry makes me weep.



I'd argue this happens mostly through frustration, and social media is just full of it. I'm not surprised either, at some point after the 800th guy who claims "they're shoving SJW propaganda down my throat" before a movie is even released, people realize that no amount of deep nuanced arguments will ever sway them, so they give up (unless they're looking to convince some lurkers). Not that I condone them simplifying and jumping to conclusions in response, but I can't really be upset with them for it. Most of these people have tried to make reasoned arguments in the past (with varied success, obviously) or have at least tried to share someone else's arguments and have repeatedly failed to make an impact.

Frankly, though, I don't think comments like that are as common as is made out to be. At least not as common as people being upset about a woman or POC in their media. I mean did you see the response to the new Battlefield? Woof.

Also let's not forget that a group of people so pissed off went out of their way to hack and spread naked photos of one of the cast members and harassed her off of Twitter while other people defended their actions. Hard for me to focus my criticism on statements like "if you hate X you're sexist/racist/whatever" when **** like this is happening on the other side of the fence.



I mean, text space issues aside (240 characters isn't enough to make a good statement and chaining tweets isn't really adequate), it's a hell of a lot easier to make a negative simplified statement in a few words than it is a well rounded argument. Nobody reads long posts when they're upset and it's really hard to make a good nuanced argument in as many words as it takes to say "****ing feminists are ruining all my movies!"

I still prefer my forum restructuring plan.

I don't care about the downs smiley one way or another, but maybe what we need now is a :yikes: smiley.