On a somewhat related note,

http://collider.com/star-wars-spinoffs-on-hold/

#%&*$# me, Snake, I think you're right. We've been blindly munching on Rebel lies, all these years.

Nevermind the thousands, no, millions of Imperials murdered when the first Death Star imploded, nor the countless lives saved by quashing Alderaan and the Saudi-esque IV sieve of cash they blocked from feeding Rebel hands--we've simply misunderstood the arrangement, entirely. Undoubtedly Luke and Han were psychopaths, and I truly doubt Han had any trepidations when he murdered Greedo. Hell, the deed probably never happened, and if it did, surely wasn't in a bar. Most probably the poor twat had his throat slit as Han was snatching covert information, or molesting street urchins. Of course, the Rebel propaganda nicely left that out. Same as it left out how Leia was keeping a gaggle of sex slaves aboard that transport, selling intergalactic hand jobs to imperial officers while pilfering secrets from their pockets and decrypting their minds with spanner scanners.

Filthy Rebels! We've been had!

Well, it's not shown in the film, but the basic premise is this - the Death Star hovers above the force shield projector on Endor.
From the angular size of the Death Star in the film scenes you can estimate its orbital height. As it turns out, it's just a few hundred kilometers, not tens of thousands for a stable geostationary orbit. As soon as it gets blown up you have the remains of a 5,000km diameter porous, burning iron sphere crashing into the atmosphere of Endor. The resulting environmental disaster will make Endor uninhabitable within a few days. There is no capacity to evacuate the Ewoks. So they all die. After the credits roll. The responsibility for that lies squarely with the Rebels.


Well, I think it's safe to say that they botched it. At no point do we get a hint that they actually have a plan what's supposed to come after killing Palpatine. So, the assassination plot is successful, Yoda and Obi-Wan have successfully brought their puppet Luke into the right position to emotionally compromise Vader (note that they knew from the start that Luke would have no chance whatsoever to pull it off by himself). So, that's your Rebel Alliance - a murderous rag-tag band of violent terrorists who single-mindedly assassinate the emperor without any plan whatsoever what or who is supposed to replace it (it's not as if the old republic was highly functional). These are incompetent, dangerous radicals who threaten to push the entire galaxy into a giant civil war.


Like I wrote, (bad) propaganda from the rebel scum's PR department. The rebels are like the sick, forbidden love child of ISIS and flower children - with space planes, robots, and laser guns.


Depends on where you draw the line what counts as "empire assets".
Sure, the Death Stars were military installations, but what about the plumbers and janitors (and probably their families) there?
What about the dead librarians at the end of Rogue One?
And while the Jedi in Ep I...III were mostly busy killing droid armies, they also fought clone armies. Were these clones "assets of the empire" - or human beings that happened to be enslaved and indoctrinated by a master race of thin bioengineers on a very wet planet? Were they ever given the choice to say No? Fin seems to be the only one with a "manufacturing defect" that lets him decide to quit the army job. Maybe all the storm troopers were such bad shots because they didn't WANT to kill? What about Poe, he's definitely a cold-blooded, sociapathic killer. In the very first scene that we meet him, he kills an innocent pedestrian that just happens to be in the wrong spot at an inconvenient time. What about Solo, definitely not an upstanding citizen but a murderous criminal (charismatic, admittedly) who shoots a law-abiding headhunter (at least we have no proof that Greedo is not).
Think of young Obi-Wan, using his Jedi mind tricks to destroy a young entrepreneur's career. He could have said "Thank you for your offer to sell me those perfectly legal Deathstixx, but respectfully, I decline. Please bother me no more." Instead he robs him of his free will with his, paternalistic at best, attempt to force him to "reconsider his life". Well-intentioned or not, he doesn't use the power of the argument, but casually hypnotizes a free citizen merely for convenience, under the guise of benevolence. Qui-gon tries to use Jedi mind tricks to get a discount from a local dealer who is barely getting by in the attempt to get his most prized possession, a flight-worthy spaceship, and the sole mechanic that he has. How is that not an attempt of embezzelement if not fraud, or theft?
If these two are model Jedi, what else do the rest of this order do while we're not watching them? How can we believe that the Jedi are "the good guys" when they show such abject moral behavior?




Okay, half of this is tongue in cheek. But I'm serious about those "mind tricks". They aren't just simple "tricks". The Jedi are robbing other people of their free will, and it's tyranny in the name of benevolence. Is there anything more heinous and terrifying? Your average genocidal dictator at least doesn't attack free will. Maybe you were forced to obey Stalin's or Hitler's rule while living in their power sphere. Maybe they force-fed you propaganda and made you pay lip service to their horrid ideologies. But they did not attack free will. How's opposition to the reign of the Jedi even possible? How can there be freedom if plainclothes thought police agents are roaming the streets, purging "bad thoughts" by hypnotic order on anyone who doesn't happen to be immune by nature?

Well, they were in the employ of a military power. How does the deaths of the plumbers and janitors in the death star compare to the people in Alderaan and whatever planets were blown up in Ep7? A lot of those people didn't have anything to do with the war!

If you think what the Jedi were doing were bad and you're willing to go outside of what the movie presents, spare a thought for how the Sith are using these very tools? I don't think they practice Force Lightning to charge iPhones.

Bah. Those Alderaan scum were all family members of the Saudi-esque funding ploy. Every damn one of them was working hard to give money to the Rebels. They had to be eliminated, there was no choice, and if they hadn't, who knows how many more Death Star and Ewok incidents might have occurred. Thank heavens, though, it did, and the results spoke for themselves when Leia's ship ran out of gas.

Well, except that Kathleen Kennedy and her ilk have said they have an agenda to make the "force female" and that sort of thing.

But still, I could have forgiven the feminist and SJW nonsense (just like I did in Rogue One and Solo) if the movie had interesting characters, respect for the elements and characters that made Star Wars fun in the first place, or a plot that made sense.



Nah; it was just obscured by editing. If you ever read the original Star Wars novel, there is a conversation near the beginning, where Biggs and Luke are talking about flying and Biggs graduating the Academy, and Biggs tells Luke that he and several fellow graduations where planning to jump ship and join the Rebels at the first opportunity, before the Imperial military can draft them. The implication seems to be Biggs graduated from something like the Merchant Marine Academy or a civilian (space) flight school, so it is not implausible that Luke once to go to the Academy, but is not keen to serve the Empire. This and a couple of other Tatooine scenes obviously never made it into a New Hope.




Again, the novel makes it clear that Luke is (a) an experienced (at least as experienced as a 16-18 year old can be) and highly talented pilot who has already been essentially flying practice dogfights and intercepts in his T-16, and that the X-Wing control layout is near identical to his T-16. The jump in the book is more like going from T-6 to a P-51; still implausible, I will grant you, but perhaps, with latent Force abilities thrown in, not enough to entirely destroy suspension of disbelief. Anyway, even without the novel extras, it is still more believable (relative to the Star War universe) than Rey spontaneously learning everything she needs to be a Jedi while sitting in a FO interrogation room.

This actually works the other way.

Put two obviously bored troops at a gunnery station, where they are authorized to shoot stuff - and do nothing else. Trust me, after about two hours of sitting there, anything, from empty escape pods to bits of space junk, are not only fair game, but reason to have a debate on who's turn it is to shoot it.

I'm too lazy to see if I mentioned it before, but I like the fan theory that the whole series is a visual version of the tale as told by R2D2, which explains a lot of the plot holes (he wasn't there, but overheard people talking about it and filled in the blanks as he wished) and especially the painful "romantic" dialog between Padme and Anakin.

When one goes back and watches those scenes with the idea that it's a robot with no clue on how human romance works - but is determined to explain how they got together with dialog - it's not only hilarious, but makes perfect sense.

I love that R2D2 theory!

As for shooting stuff, I can see how that would be stopped rather quickly. It's not like that gun station is the only one on that ship or even on that SIDE of the ship and you can't have just one station on free fire and all others not allowed to fire, at the same time, you can't have all stations firing at just about anything that moves, so rules will have to be in place. I would imagine when a ship is on a mission like it is in that part of the story, any shooting of any sort will have to be monitored by some senior officer so they can report enemy attacks or escape pods with Rebel troops making it to the surface to the higher ups so appropriate action can be takes, such as possibly sending down a ground team after an escape pod.

As for the Force being female, I don't really care. So it's female. So it's male. It can be asexual or gender fluid for all I care! What I care about is whether it fits the story and if the story is any good. Just making the Force female does not really fix anything and the gender of the Force wasn't an issue that needed fixing in the first place!

That particular scene never bothered me. Especially since they were in the middle of a Civil War, and were operating near a planet that over which the Empire has limited jurisdiction, it might make sense the Imperials would go "weapons tight" once the Rebel corvette was in the hold. Given that the Imperial navy/space force is shown throughout the trilogy to be a bit cocky and careless (and also given C3PO's comment that suggests normally droids were not allowed to use escape pods), that the Imperial officer in charge of gunnery at that station would make a stupid and careless decision seems about par for the course.

I don't sweat stuff like that in movies, actually.

It was required to move the plot forward, so droids to the planet it was.

Indeed, I don't really dive too deep into any of the Star Wars stuff. At their heart, they're Sci-Fi movies for older children and young adults, and should be viewed as such. If anything, the latest Star Wars movies are failing because they seem to have forgotten that - as did the prequels in a lot of respects.

The Original Trilogy is Adult Authority Figures Bad, Young Rule Breakers Good with space wizards and lasers. It wasn't subtle or nuanced. Pretty girl in white is captured by scary man wearing black. In the opening scenes. Cut to a young man that is nothing special, except it turns out he's actually really special with magic powers on top of it. Hero's Journey starts in three, two, and where did that droid go? We all knew the ending, we just wanted to hear the telling on how they got there.

It's Quigley Down Under being treated as if it's Breaker Morant, which is unfair to the films themselves. Both are great films in their own right, worthy of watching and re-watching, but for totally different reasons.

+1 Dart


Science fiction is a VERY broad category and trying to judge the SW films by the same yardstick that is used to judge films like 2001, Blade Runner, Silent Running and Andromeda Strain is a huge mistake.

Heck, it's unfair to judge them against themselves!

Okay, so we have Star Wars. Great film, if simple in plot, well executed and my favorite. It did so many things well - introducing a whole new world in just a few scenes and making it seem plausible is a rare and wonderful thing in any genre, let alone SciFi.

The next two follow the same theme, and really they're one movie chopped in two. They were also made close enough together that the same production folks, from writers to directors to art folks to camera operators were the bulk of the workers. That's why they're seamless!

Also, Lucas was still nervous. He didn't know he could get crazy about times and money with the studio yet. The OrigTrig has very little padding in them, and every scene has a purpose, and when it's met they move on.

Then we wait a couple decades and try to revisit it in the prequels. Sigh. Lucas knows he's a juggernaut, and isn't nervous. Indeed, he went from being insistent on detail and consistency to being insistent that things be done his way. So we get lousy dialog (to his credit, Lucas admits he is terrible at writing dialog, but hell man, you're a bizzilionare, hire some writers and listen to them), padding, and exposition. A lot of exposition.

In the OrigTrig we didn't need to know the motivations of the heart that drew Leia and Han together in detail. We're told point blank. "You want a scoundrel. There are too many 'nice men' in your life, Princess." BAM! Got it. Rogue gets the Princess (literally).

From that scene on it's clear they're an item. They didn't have to go back to it or show any more tension.

Plus the technology kind of overwhelmed the production. Why have such a long pod race scene? Because we can, dammit. Let's show them going from place to place in the air speeder on Coresant. Let's establish the hell out of Dex's diner. Or travelling as "refugees" to Naboo, which was f*cking laughable. Why, nobody would recognize the former queen that liberated the planet from the Trade Federation, was re-elected, and then, after her term was over, served as Senator as she just walks boldly through the terminal on Naboo! Covert Infiltration Achievement Awarded.

Skip ahead and we have the next sets of films. Disney, not Lucas, and they are nervous. We get a replay of Star Wars to play it safe, then a bit of a divergence with a crap ton of nostalgia, and then an effort to purge all the old characters to make room for the new.

Gonna be some hit and miss.

I seriously disagree. Star Wars was intended as a general audience movie, maybe a "family" movie in the modern cinematic dialect. We have become so used to "serious" movies being cynical and ugly, and to movies being "targeted," that we have forgotten movies can and (at least through the 80s, were) made to appeal to broad audiences.

In point of fact, Star Wars does not tell an "OId Bad/Young Good" story, or at least not very effectively. While one of the only two evil characters named in dialogue - Tarkin - is definitely older you have his Rebel counterpart in Obi-Wan. Darth Vader is implied to be middle aged, but so are several of the background officers on both sides, as well as several of the Rebel pilots. Rather Star Wars simply tells an old-fashioned evil vs good story, something that, if you switched out the Tie Fighters and X-Wings for Bf-109s and P-51s, would not look that much different from a stereotypical 1950s WWII movie. That is why the first movie was so successful; it told a good (war/western-type) story (and was helped by being released at a time when actual war and western movies were so full of anti-heroic, anti-war, and anti-American sentiment that they were not much fun anymore).

I was recently watching through the entire Star Wars series (including Rogue One and, in the theater, Solo), and when I got to the end of Return of the Jedi, I just could not bring myself to revisit The Force Awakens. While Return of the Jedi may arguably be the weakest of the OT movies, it is still a good film in itself, and tells an enjoyable story with a satisfying conclusion. To then fast forward to TFA, where all the characters are reset and the story rewound to basically the beginning of Episode IV (and knowing the characters and story again essentially reboot for Episode VIII) sort of ruins the emotional enjoyment one receives from the films, at least when watching them consecutively.

Up until I actually finished Episode VI, I had not completely decided, and I will caveat that my mind is still open to being changed if Episode IX somehow redeems the sequel trilogy. Howver, rven though I tend to be a completist - for example, owning and watching the quite sub-par Hobbit trilogy in conjunction with the stellar Lord of the Rings - at this point, for me Star Wars ends with Luke and Han embracing each other while the force Ghosts of Anakin, Yoda, and Obi-wan look on.

"....it is still more believable (relative to the Star War universe) than Rey spontaneously learning everything she needs to be a Jedi while sitting in a FO interrogation room."
It's been theorized (by fans) that Rey, being Force sensitive is actually reading Kylo's mind without realizing it she is absorbing his skills. Her movements in training mirror Kylo's fight with Force Luke.

Or maybe it was just choreographed by the same team, so it looks similar. People can come up with all kinds of theories, but unless it was referenced in the movies somehow, I wouldn't consider it a definite part of the story.

To the extent thought went into any of this things such as the Daisey Ridley interview where says her character does not have any weaknesses, suggest that Rey was intentionally supposed to be essentially a perfect character that did not need the help of anyone (at least any man) to learn anything. Explanations that she is learning by telepathic osmosis (along with not previously being part of the SW universe) are merely post facto explanations to rationalize clumsy story telling.

Anakin, Luke, Rey, possibly Poe Dameron?...all great pilots innately due to the Force even before they knew about it or certainly before they were really trained in it. Swordplay isn't a stretch from that IMO.
Ultimately, it's a MOVIE. LOL
It's the way it is because that's how the story is meant to go.

When it comes to the Star Wars movies, I’ve really enjoyed them all to varying degrees.

One aspect that I think many people fail to consider is that the original SW film was truly groundbreaking in so many ways that it made perfect sense that it would leave an indelible mark on people. The Disney SW films have been entertaining but have they been groundbreaking in any way? Nope. There was nothing groundbreaking about the prequels from Lucas either.

The point I’m trying to make is that we’ve now had several decades of action sci-fi movies so really, what is there left to try that is unique?

Plenty. But I'm saving those ideas for the novels I write. = )

The hero's journey has been around since the Odyssey, yet we don't call each movie and novel that uses it same old same old and boring. Plenty of ideas can be woven into the journey, especially in science fiction when you start abusing the laws of physic and theoretical theories in interesting ways, sprinkled with great characters and plenty of plot twists.

Star Wars' big mistake was making almost anything possible, and completely defying the laws of physics. I think interesting plots are possible if the writers consider abandoning popular tropes, or at the very least, relying upon them as central plot devices. I love how Solo twisted a few Star Wars tropes and turned them into satire.

Since they're into replaying stories and stuff from earlier films, perhaps Rey is so capable in the force because she was created by it.

Shmie - "Anakin had no father."
Rey's parents, when found - "There was blue glow, a soft yet compelling orchestral score, and there she was. It freaked us out so bad we ditched her on that planet as quickly as we got the credits."