Movie Discussion Thread

I posted a bit of my own fan fiction on another forum back when last Jedi came out. My biggest disappointment was in the way Finn was handled. A storm trooper turned hero was an amazing setup, and they basically did nothing with it.

In my rewrite of Last Jedi, Finn takes an escape pod to Snoke's ship after he wakes up. The resistance thinks he's turned traitor. Finn is allowed passage to the ship after he identifies himself as FN2187. He is taken before General Hux and berated. Finn asks that before he is executed he would like an audience before Snoke and Kylo Ren to personally apologize. Hux grants his wish.

In Snoke's throne room, Finn begs for the Supreme Leader's forgiveness. Ren is livid. This lowly stormtrooper wounded him in battle and he wants his revenge. Ren is about to strike Finn down with his saber, but Finn says that if he dies, valuable intel about the Resistance dies with him. Snoke force pulls the weapon out of Ren's hand and orders him to stand down. Finn thanks the Supreme Leader and is sent to reprogramming.

Finn is able to resist the reprogramming without them knowing, because it turns out he is force sensitive. This is why he "awakened" in the first movie and was able to go toe to toe with Ren without instantly being killed. Snoke also sensed it, which is part of the reason he didn't allow Ren to kill him. We see this play out in the throne room as Snoke tells Ren that the boy has the force buried deep inside him, and he can be used for dark side purposes.

(Basically this is all one big gambit on Finn's part to try and destroy the First Order from within, to protect Rey and save the Resistance... in my version he is the ultimate fearless hero and not the bumbling dumbass the movie portrayed him as)

Most of the movie continues as normal. Rey goes to Luke's island. But instead of the stupid freeway chase through space, the Resistance hyper jump to a system with valuable resources they need to refuel, but the planet is hostile and contains all kinds of obstacles for them. Finn gives the First Order a bunch of bullshit coordinates as to where the Resistance is hiding. It is far, so they spend most of the movie traveling to this spot.

Throughout the rest of the film, Finn slowly infiltrates the stormtrooper ranks and tries to talk some of them out of their programming. Because of Finn's force sensitivity, he is able to convince a few of them by way of suggestion.

Snoke reveals to Finn that he is force sensitive, and that he could have powers he couldn't even imagine. Snoke charges Ren with training Finn in the dark side ways. Ren gives Finn his old saber he used as Luke's student to train with (which he's kept, and which becomes important to Ben's eventual turn) Their relationship is antagonistic and Ren belittles him at every turn. But as Ren trains Finn, he begins to see himself in Finn, and how Snoke belittled him when he was being trained by the Supreme Leader... in a roundabout way, Ren starts to see the light and this is what starts to turn him. It doesn't just stupidly come out of nowhere like in the movie.

Once we're in the throne room confrontation at the end, Finn is also there to witness everything. Ren kills Snoke, the massive fight happens with the guards, but this time Finn participates, and dismantles some of the guards. But now, when the guards are defeated, Ren convinces Rey to join him, to leave everything behind and start fresh. After being let down by Luke, and realizing the Jedi are a fraud, Rey is much more cynical in this version. Finn tries to convince her, but she sides with Ren and they escape in a pod together. Finn manages to escape himself and it ends here as a cliffhanger. There is none of this shit with the battle on the salt planet and Luke dying from exertion over meditating (LOL WTF?) It is a love triangle, like it was supposed to be from the beginning.

THE END

In Ep. 9, basically it becomes more about the grey jedi... not dark or light, but Ren and Rey take ideals from both sides, because they realize that the Jedi and Sith were destroyed because of becoming too dogmatic... they became polarized and blinded because of stubbornly resisting one side or the other. They think the answer lies in being open to possibilities.

Luke has sided with Ren and Rey and realize they are right. Luke can keep his ideology from the previous film and get more screen time. Leia trains Finn in order to keep the Jedi order going. Basically it is Kylo Ren, Rey and Luke vs Finn, who doesn't stand a chance. It is an underdog story. Once Leia dies, Finn truly is the last jedi. I haven't worked out much of any plot for this, but if I were to make it, it would go something like that as a barebones idea, along with the seeds Finn planted in the stormtrooper ranks in the last movie blossoming into a full blown rebellion among the First Order ranks.

Basically the good vs. evil motif is tired and outdated. I feel like things need to get more complicated to keep it interesting. What is really good and what is really evil? Are events so massively complex that what seems evil may actually be good in the long run? Isn't this what the Chosen One idea was about? To bring balance to the force the jedi and alot of the galaxy had to be destroyed. This isn't what one would consider a "good" thing, but ultimately it proved necessary as a kind of complex meta idea. They should've leaned further into this idea instead of the tired rehash we got.

 

I did. Solo and Last Jedi were truly terrible movies. RoS will be the first SW movie that I don't see in a theater. No way I'm gonna support what these people have done to this franchise.

 

Disagree. Give me new heroes on new worlds facing off against new threats. Keep the lightsabers and the popcorn, but make it actual Star Wars and I'm good. Rogue One did this.

Intellectualizing Star Wars will f**k it up every time.

 

In my mind, everything after the original three movies is non-canon, fan fiction, outside the core of Star Wars. I have to compartmentalize them into a separate universe to be able to enjoy them. If I don't, they clearly stand out as abominations of a story that was original, well told, imaginative, and enthralling - things the new franchise is not. Every single one has to have a character they can sell on shelves - Jar Jar, BB-8, Porgs, etc. They are cash grabs courtesy of the giant corporate movie machine, Disney.

If any of the stories told by the new franchise were as good as the original, I'd be a lot happier, but corporate greed prohibits this from happening.

 

This is true of every Star Wars movie. People only seem to be surprised by this because they are watching the new films as adults rather than starry eyed kids who like fast ships, lasers, and The Force. The old movies were "bad", too.

My 9 year old daughter and I saw RoS yesterday and loved it. It was...fun. And, I'm thrilled that she has a badass female Jedi to fall in love with and see on the big screen. She's dressed up as her for Halloween three times now.

I can do the intellectual film snob thing, too, but there's no point in reviewing a space opera flick as if it's in the same class as something like Pan's Labyrinth or The Godfather.

It's just a different thing. Shut your snob brain down, bring out your inner 10-year old, and have some fun.

 

As a Star Wars fan for 30+ years, I definitely have "problems" with each of the new post-Disney Star Wars movies. But like Skyline said, sometimes you need to just turn the ol' brain off and enjoy a movie for what it is. The Rise of Skywalker is wild (like 4 different writers tried cramming 6 hours of story into 1 movie. The pace is nuts and it's often illogical, but it was also extremely entertaining and had some truly thrilling moments. Absolutely worth seeing.

 

No.

 

The original trilogy was not "bad" in any sense of the word. They were a modern distillation of mythological tropes, westerns and samurai films in a modern packaging. They were inspired films that appealed to the child in everyone, rather than being childish.

 

Yeah, no... the old movies aren't bad at all (Return of the Jedi comes close though). They're not only extremely well made on a technical level, they're expertly crafted stories.

It's easy to confuse hokeyness with badness. The original movies can be hokey, especially A New Hope, but the actual screenplay is top tier. At that point no Hollywood movies were using the Joseph Campbellian hero's journey arc and Hope successfully merged it with a convincing sci-fi fantasy opera. Beat for beat that screenplay is "good writing 101". Empire Strikes Back is one of the best science fiction movies ever made. It's certainly in the top 5.

The prequels on the other hand....

 

My honest opinion is that Disney bought Lucasfilm with zero understanding of what made those movies successful. They basically bought a built in cash cow, and probably only cared about the merchandising and licensing deals, which are FAR more lucrative than the movies. The movies are basically glorified commercials for the other ventures. It didn't start that way, because Lucas actually cared about the movies. The iconography eventually outpaced the movies, and it became all about lightsaber toys, yoda dolls, t-shirts, hats, cereal, etc, etc.... there's a reason Disney immediately started building a Star Wars theme park.

Abrams was likely hired because he's good at copying and packaging familiar iconography from other brands, and they figured they could just put tracing paper over the original movies and make billions. They were right, sort of... I think the iconography of Star Wars kind of sells itself at this point no matter how shitty the result. Johnson is an anomaly and I'm still baffled as to why Disney, a company that is extremely strict about its brand would allow such experimentation and subversion with their cash cow. The fallout from fandom was swift and I'm sure he was silently given the boot afterward (which is probably why he wont talk about his supposed new trilogy anymore).

Look at what Nolan did with the Batman movies... if Disney was smart they'd bring in a genius and just let him go to town without straying too far outside the sandbox like Johnson did. I mean Lucas is really the only person who truly understands Star Wars (I mean the guy basically wrote Empire Strikes Back), and in lieu of bringing him back in the fold (they tossed his outlines for the sequel trilogy), they're better off hiring a genius and wiping the slate clean.

 

GL came up with the story, but Lawrence Kasdan was the masterful writer of the script.

 

This is not true actually. It's a myth that's been repeated endlessly. Kasdan got the screenplay credit because Lucas intentionally didn't want it.

What happened was that Leigh Brackett wrote the original draft. It had little to do with the Star Wars Lucas created, so Lucas tossed it and started over from scratch and did several drafts himself, realizing that he was the only one who understood Star Wars. He gave Brackett credit after she died, because he felt bad about dumping her, even though nothing she wrote made it into the film... this is the kind of guy he is.

They had set a start date for shooting and were already building sets to make the release date. Lucas was running out of time and using his own money for the budget, and was too busy to lock down the script (he was in London overseeing alot of the construction and Yoda puppet, etc) so he had Kasdan come in for a six week "polish", working from the most recent draft he'd written, which was already basically the Empire Strikes Back that everyone saw. What Kasdan essentially did was a dialogue and character polish... he tightened things up and refined alot of the character interactions, but 90% of Empire was written solely by Lucas. The guy is a f'ing genius. Kasdan couldn't possibly have made any major changes, because the sets were already being built... the story was done.

Kasdan had much more to do with Raiders of the Lost Ark than he did Empire. Basically Kasdan was originally hired to do Raiders, but Lucas needed someone to polish up Empire, so he used Kasdan for that too. For Raiders, Kasdan, Lucas and Spielberg sat in a room for days and came up with the story, and Kasdan went away and wrote it. Empire was different.

The whole "Lucas had little to do with Empire and Kasdan was the real genius of that movie" narrative was created later, when certain circles wanted to discredit Lucas, and started spreading these rumors.

Another popular lie is that Marcia Lucas saved A New Hope in the editing room, and that Lucas wrote and shot a bad movie... which is bullshit. Basically Lucas, his wife, Richard Chew and Paul Hirsch all worked on the editing of A New Hope (Lucas refused a credit) and nothing about that movie needed "saving". Lucas was the mastermind behind it all and led the direction of how that movie was put together... doing the same thing on Empire Strikes Back... since he refused to take credit in alot of these areas, he opened himself up to being criticized.

Hollywood hated Lucas. He was an independent beating them at their own game, and refused to deal with the studios, who took his first movies away from him, which angered him. So I think Hollywood started alot of these rumors.

 

I've always been aware of his independent streak and dislike of the various Hollywood director and producers guilds. Thanks for the info on the writing of ESB.

 

purr1n's right, Star Wars is schlock at the end of the day. As much as I think they are trash, there is a little mythic fun in there.

The Star Wars films are nothing more than toy commercials that last too long and attract plenty of many middle-aged men.

Disney has zero idea what made Star Wars successful? Their wheelhouse is commercializing the shit out of anything: toys, clothing, happy meals, cereals, etc. You can't possibly out-commercialize it.

You have parents now buying not only loads of Star Wars stuff for their kids and but also themselves when their parents wouldn't buy them shit when they were little.

Star Wars is the epitome of all that's wrong with "geeks" today. They overconsume their pop culture. Target even sells Chewbacca adult onsies.

As "art", there's not much difference between Star Wars movies and Joel Schumacher's Batman and Robin.