Star Wars: Episode VIII (The Last Jedi) - SPOILERS POSSIBLE*

Several directors have already been fired reportedly due to creative differences.

 

This...So much this.

They fail to take into account that we are taking about senior citizens here with Mark, Carrie and Harrison. Many of the people yelling that Disney and Rian Johnson cheated them out of seeing Luke as an army decimating, Walker crushing powerhouse and Lightsaber "badass" don't take into account that the only way to make something like that work was pull a Christopher Lee in Attack of the Clones and put Mark's head on a younger stuntman's body and use a ton of other CGI tricks, which I thought fans didn't want after the Prequels! Also, see " Leia Poppins" for a taste of what a CGI enhanced Uber powerful Luke could have possibly turned out.


Mark may have been the best shape he had been since 1983...But he was still a 65 year old man at the time they filmed. So either you do a bunch of CGI acrobatics and trickery that looks fake and ridiculous as hell, or you craft something that makes sense for the actor you have and his physical limitations...And ultimately the conclusion is new characters have to drive the action.



Or...If you want Han, Luke and Leia to be the forever leads of Star Wars, well, you are gonna have to recast. And we all know how well THAT would have gone with the rabid hardcore types.

In other words there is NOTHING short of finding a way to teleport ourselves back to 1983 and put 30 year old Mark, 25 year old Carrie and 40 year old Harrison in Episodes VII ,VIII and IX that will please those people. It sucks we didn't get to see a whole trilogy of Luke being a Jedi God in the 80s and 90s, but it is what it is. Star Wars in no longer about just those three leads anymore. You either accept it or you don't and do the sensible thing, wish the new generation well and let Star Wars go instead of insisting it conform to what you at 40-50+ years old want it to be.

As someone who works in retail at a store level. I'd say they are selling pretty decently. Probably not like they were 40 years ago, but things change. Action Figures and Dolls in general don't sell as well as they used to because of everything else out there .That's mostly a collector's market now of adults. That being said,Rey is pretty popular with little girls. Kids genuinely like BB8, and Porgs are popular.

 

One thing I do agree is that they probably shouldn't have thrown out the EU stuff set prior to the Prequels. Although to be fair, Lucasfilm started to toss away elements of the EU whilst making the Prequels and likely would have done the same with all of the post ROTJ set EU had they made the sequels without Disney, but from a business standpoint, I understood why a clean slate looks more attractive.

What they should do though is let people who want to continue the old EU in book form via Star Wars legends be allowed to. It can co-exist with the Canon stuff.

 

Yes, but I wonder what those differences really are. With the guys doing the Solo movie, my understanding is that they were canned for trying to make the movie too slapstick. You make a good point, though.

 

Because I think that the next trilogy is already in development. What do you think happened? Days before the official announcement, Kathleen Kennedy handled him a $750m and told him, "Here's some money, go and make three Star Wars"?
It's obvious that he had pitched Kennedy and Disney a whole project rather than just being rewarded a trilogy for delivering a single film as promised. He was already starting to work on it when Trevorrow left Episode IX. And he preferred to focus on this project, as JJ Abrams was willing to return anyway.

 

Someone mentioned earlier how tight the schedule is for these movies - this seems to make it impractical/impossible for one director to handle back-t0-back movies.

I would think that even if The Suits felt Rian Johnson would do well with E9, it was too late in the game to take him onto that film. They wanted to get the process for E9 moving while Johnson still had loads of work to finish E8.

If they'd stayed with the "traditional" every 3 years schedule, they could've pivoted to Johnson after they fired Trevorrow, but not with only 2 years between films...

 

Well, I don't think they had total freedom to do whatever they wanted. While no one may have dictated specific story points to Johnson, clearly there were some elements he needed to follow.

He needed to pick up with Luke and Rey, and he had to develop issues with other established characters.

If reports are accurate, he did have a surprising amount of leeway, but it's not like he could just run roughshod over what Abrams did with "TFA"...

 

So my wife and I finally got the chance to see it. I went to see it without reading any reviews or bias opinions. Overall, the movie as a whole was good. There were however a few confusing scenes and the some of the dialogue with the characters seemed out of place, it felt forced. Like the "I'll see you around kid" line and unfortunately, I got a little confused as to what Yoda was trying to say. Initially I thought that it wasn't really Yoda. I thought that it was a "force ghost impostor" by Snoke trying to get inside Luke's head. Even Yoda laughing and stamping his feet seemed out of character. Even though I was delighted to see Yoda, the scene itself left wondering what the hell that was about. There were a few unanswered questions such as how was Luke's blue lightsaber retrieved after TESB. Wasn't a fan on how Luke just takes it and throws it over his shoulder. Was not a fan of the computer hacker character (I actually thought Lando would be that computer hacker, seeing as he likes to gamble). But for most of the movie, good. Looking forward to the last installment of the trilogy.

 

Loved the Yoda scene. That's fan service done right imo

 

Hell, just the post-ROTJ stuff could go. Keep KOTOR, Dark Forces, Shadows of the Empire, Splinter of the Mind's Eye, etc etc. Still a blow to those of us who wholly consumed the story from Truce at Bakura onwards, but not quite just dumping it all off somewhere.

 

Was Splinter of the Mind’s Eye ever considered canon? I thought it was basically a plan b option for a film sequel should the first film not do well at the box office.

 

I'm not sure about that... They have to make at least two more episodes as bad as episode 8 in order to lose a considerable part of the audience. I personally think that TLJ is very weak, both in the context of the saga and as a standalone film, but as everyone else I'll eventually watch the next episode at least twice.

 

I have to agree with this. So many times when I hear or read the ideas fans have it’s just so awful and abysmally stupid.

 

Well, i can only speak for myself but i can assure you that i won't pay to watch ep.9. I was genuinely intrigued by what they were going to do with this new trilogy and after 2 entries, i must admit that i could not care less about what is going to happen now. I don't like the story, i don't like the characters, so what's left to enjoy?

 

Well, if you can resist the curiosity, then good for you! I'm not that strong with the force..

 

Ill watch the next one, but it goes against what I said I would do. This one failed on too many levels for me. And amazingly they figured out how to fail in ways I hadnt even considered they could.

 

I'd really like an explanation on how Maz got the "laser sword". I think that at least should be explained, and I don't think they'll do it.

 

It was as canon as any of the other books, at least. Lucasfilm used to have an unofficially tiered canon, somewhat codified in 2000 until the 2014 dismissal into "Legends" status.

However, as George put it:

 

Me too.
However both of these were really taken from JJ Abrams correct? So maybe he will answer these questions on the next episode. Remember when Maz said to Rey...(your parents) there never coming back....Maz knows a lot of information, how was she privy to this, how does she know about Rey's parents and how did she get Luke's saber? I felt cheated in TLJ when we saw Maz for 15 seconds on a video screen and none of this was resolved.

 

It's almost like Maz and Kylo are the only ones who truly know about Rey's parents. We don't know for sure if Kylo is privy to any info or if he's just bluffing to Rey trying to get her to come to his side but Maz I firmly believe she knows more but we never got that more in this episode. Maz even said that's for another time (because she was in a rush) so will JJ give us this or explain it away that it's not important anymore? I can't see how JJ will use that card it's not important to the story anymore when THAT was the whole story at least about her parents, the light saber is still important to answer for the fans who still want to know. Is Maz someone that doesn't age or ages like Yoda? Or was the saber given to her by someone else? Too many questions and no answers.

 

The question of Rey’s parentage was answered, and the answer was very important for her development and for the theme of this trilogy and the saga as a whole. Your bloodline does not determine your importance. It is a very strong message, far more powerful than would have resulted from the revelation that Rey inherited her importance.

The saber ending up in Maz’s possession is an issue that can still be resolved. Nobody was cheated out of an answer. It’s not as if the trilogy has ended. We still have one more film to go. I believe that it was intended to be explained at some point in some way. As we can see in the artwork, the saber was initially intended to be Luke’s green saber which was to be retrieved by the character that came to be Rey from the wreckage of the second Death Star submerged in the waters of Endor. The artwork, Maz’s comment in The Force Awakens, the fact that we have one film to go and the fact that J.J. Abrams is directing that film leads one to believe that that question will be answered in Episode IX.

Ben Solo had a blue saber in The Last Jedi flashbacks. Could this be Luke’s saber, retrieved from the surface of Bespin, either by Ben or Luke himself and given to Ben and lost at some point? In The Force Awakens, Ben tells Finn, “That lightsaber belongs to me.” Could he have meant it literally?

 

It just seems like from a writing perspective they took the easy way out. They hyped up the public with TFA about who are her parents and where did she come from...she was dropped off on Jakku. Then we find out in TFA that her parents were no bodies? Now the storyline is somehow not important. Just seems like the easy way out...let us wonder all year long to say she comes from no bodies. I guess I was looking for more something more...

 

I’d love to know how. It fell into a gas giant. If something falls into a gas giant, there’s nowhere for it to go. It just falls and falls. There is nowhere to retrieve it from. You couldn’t just drop something into Jupiter and then go down and get it.

 

Now that's more like it.

R.I.P. Ackbar.

 

It’s fantasy. There’s no sound in space, but we hear plenty is sound in space in science fiction films and television shows, and Star Wars isn’t even science fiction.