Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker (December 2019)

[Darren]

18 hours ago, RubberJohnny said:

 

This stuff was setting up a (ditched) backstory for Snoke and that Palpatine was aware of him (he had all these Observatories set up around the rim of the Galaxy), it's absolutely not setting up what you think it's setting up. The same pieces of media that set this stuff up explicitly say Palpatine is dead because he wants the Empire to destroy itself and not outlive him!

 

 

Yes but there were two parts to the Emperor’s plan that was very explicitly covered in those books. 1. Destroy what’s left of the Empire in a sort of galactic posthumous tantrum, and 2. Send a special contingent including the bloke who specialises in training kids to become stormtroopers off into the unknown in search of this mysterious presence he’s detected. On the face of it those are mutually contradictory, why destroy the Empire except for a crucial part which you gift to someone else? There are several ways to resolve that contradiction and one of them is that Palpatine’s plan was to use the mysterious presence to bring himself back from the dead. And having done so he wanted to have an army behind him, and his old turf weakened and ready for him to take over again.

 

Obviously that’s not the only possibility but it’s absolutely not the case that the plan covered in Aftermath is inconsistent with the Emperor returning. It’s completely consistent and in some ways has been hiding in plain sight, which as we know from those other films we don’t talk about, is his basic modus operandi.

[JPL]

@Uncle Mike Which is all fine if that’s what you’re after, but then I don’t think they should have built the mystery up around him in the first film. It feels like the rug was well and truly pulled from under me in TLJ.

 

It’s all good though. We obviously all see it differently. Some like how it was handled, some of us don’t. Neither group are going to convince the other.

 

All we can do is hope they finish this trilogy on a high now and have a better plan in place for any future films.

[Uncle Mike]

7 minutes ago, JPL said:

@Uncle Mike Which is all fine if that’s what you’re after, but then I don’t think they should have built the mystery up around him in the first film.

 

Did they "build up a mystery" though? That's what I'm trying to ask. He's barely in the film. Does anyone even talk about him?

[Jammy]

2 hours ago, PeteBrant said:

I dont get this obession with wanting to know more about Snoke. It's not his story, he isn't important. His sole purpose was to serve to develop Kylo as a character.

That’s the way I see it now too - I’m sure JJ left it as a set up just in case Johnson wanted to explore it. But he chose to use Snoke as the tipping point for Kylo’s development; kill him as a redemptive act and return to the Light, or kill him and be too tempted by the opportunity of being Supreme Leader and potentially ruling the galaxy, and thus embrace the Dark Side.

[JPL]

3 minutes ago, Uncle Mike said:

 

Did they "build up a mystery" though? That's what I'm trying to ask. He's barely in the film. Does anyone even talk about him?

I can only speak for myself, but I wanted to know more about him. I thought he was a great bad guy with plenty of mystery surrounding him and I was looking forward to finding out what he was all about. Then he was chopped in half.

[kensei]

23 minutes ago, JPL said:

I can only speak for myself, but I wanted to know more about him. I thought he was a great bad guy with plenty of mystery surrounding him and I was looking forward to finding out what he was all about. Then he was chopped in half.

 

With tongue sticking out ridiculously. 

[RubberJohnny]

47 minutes ago, Darren said:

There are several ways to resolve that contradiction and one of them is that Palpatine’s plan was to use the mysterious presence to bring himself back from the dead. And having done so he wanted to have an army behind him, and his old turf weakened and ready for him to take over again. 

 

Er, that doesn't resolve the contradiction. Why do you need "your old turf weakened and ready for him to take over again" when you can just skip the "destroy everything in a post-death tantrum" stage and return to power?

 

Quote

but do we know it wasn't always the plan for Snoke to be ultimately inconsequential?

 

The "Villain goes and visits their mysterious leader to be revisited in more depth in a future movie" scene was like, already done in Guardians of the Galaxy in 2012. I think given how closely Abrams movies cling to the zeitgeist that that was totally what he was going for, yeah, especially when people were talking of Marvel being the model for Disney buying Star Wars.

[Steven]

5 minutes ago, kensei said:

 

With tongue sticking out ridiculously. 

 

With his prior omniscience conveniently switched off for a minute as he plods through some awfully written dialogue that tells you exactly what is going to happen.

[wev]

45 minutes ago, JPL said:

I can only speak for myself, but I wanted to know more about him. I thought he was a great bad guy with plenty of mystery surrounding him and I was looking forward to finding out what he was all about. Then he was chopped in half.

How was he a great bad guy? He didn't do anything 

[Steven]

He was great at spelling things out like " Your father, Han Solo, is flying around on his ship, the Millennium Falcon.

[JPL]

11 minutes ago, wev said:

How was he a great bad guy? He didn't do anything 

The bits that we saw of him made him into this ominous, fear-inducing leader. He must have been powerful to become supreme leader and he was obviously very adept with the force. From that it was great to imagine what he might become and what his role would be through the movies.

 

But, as @kensei says, he was reduced to a pathetic bit of throwaway juvenile comedy, lying there in two halves with his tongue sticking out.

 

No disrespect, but I honestly feel like I’m repeating myself now, so I’ll leave it there. It’s only one part of the multitude of things Johnson fucked up on TLJ, so it seems a bit daft to keep going over it.

[Pob]

2 hours ago, Darren said:

 

Yes but there were two parts to the Emperor’s plan that was very explicitly covered in those books. 1. Destroy what’s left of the Empire in a sort of galactic posthumous tantrum, and 2. Send a special contingent including the bloke who specialises in training kids to become stormtroopers off into the unknown in search of this mysterious presence he’s detected. On the face of it those are mutually contradictory, why destroy the Empire except for a crucial part which you gift to someone else? There are several ways to resolve that contradiction and one of them is that Palpatine’s plan was to use the mysterious presence to bring himself back from the dead. And having done so he wanted to have an army behind him, and his old turf weakened and ready for him to take over again.

 

Obviously that’s not the only possibility but it’s absolutely not the case that the plan covered in Aftermath is inconsistent with the Emperor returning. It’s completely consistent and in some ways has been hiding in plain sight, which as we know from those other films we don’t talk about, is his basic modus operandi.

Can you explain Palpatine's plan in more detail? Sounds interesting. So was the First Order tooling itself up in secret before the Emperor died?

[Uncle Mike]

3 minutes of Snoke.

 

 

[Darren]

2 hours ago, RubberJohnny said:

 

Er, that doesn't resolve the contradiction. Why do you need "your old turf weakened and ready for him to take over again" when you can just skip the "destroy everything in a post-death tantrum" stage and return to power?

 

Because he didn’t trust or frankly even like any of the people under him. He ruled by fear and didn't want to be resurrected only to have a power struggle with whoever filled the power vacuum he left behind.

 

47 minutes ago, Pob said:

Can you explain Palpatine's plan in more detail? Sounds interesting. So was the First Order tooling itself up in secret before the Emperor died?

 

It’s not that interesting, and it was quite a bizarre thing for the TFA tie-in novels to focus on as it seemed so unconnected to that film, although now it makes more sense as it ties in with the trilogy as a whole.

 

Basically he had one guy lined up to bypass the inevitable power struggle, gather all of the imperial fleet together apparently to make a final stand against the rebels, but in reality to destroy them all. It was the ultimate tantrum, a kind of “this is mine, I made it just for me, and if I can’t have it then nobody can.”

 

But at the same time he had arranged for a couple of ships to head out into the uncharted region outside the known galaxy to where the Emperor had detected a powerful presence in the Force. (Up to now we have assumed that presence was Snoke but it could well have been something else, and Snoke could have been a puppet under the Emperor’s control or even possessed by him.) This mini fleet included Hux senior who specialised in brainwashing children into becoming Sormtroopers via some technique he developed and which (as we find out in the Phasma novel) he passed on to his son who is the Hux in the films.

 

So what’s not been explained so far is why the Emperor would send this “gift” to this mysterious entity in the great unknown. I suspect (but of course, this is just supposition) that it also contained the means by which Palestine could be brought back from the dead by this powerful being. It might be from relics, a vial of his blood, who knows, but it seems to fit.

 

On the other hand it could just be that he went down a side tube like Luke in Empire, and got picked up by a passing Tie Fighter, but none of that requires him to set up this elaborate and apparently pointless posthumous plan, nor for the actual people guiding Star Wars these days to make that plan a central feature of the main tie ins to their first film.

 

So the First Order didn’t exist before the Emperor died, but grew out of the tiny Imperial remnant he sent out into the great beyond, possibly (we now find) under his own direction after he was brought back in whatever form.

 

I quite like the idea of Palpatine now being like Torquemada in 2000AD, dead but refusing to go quietly, and clinging on in incorporeal form, using whatever vessels he can to regain his former power.

[SpagMasterSwift]

17 minutes ago, Darren said:

I quite like the idea of Palpatine now being like Torquemada in 2000AD, dead but refusing to go quietly, and clinging on in incorporeal form, using whatever vessels he can to regain his former power.

 

Hmmm

 

[Pob]

19 minutes ago, Darren said:

On the other hand it could just be that he went down a side tube like Luke in Empire

 

The one little bit of backstory we get about Snoke is that Leia knows his name and refers to him in quite an offhand way, like you would an untrustworthy uncle who hangs around trying to get kids into booze and stuff. It feels like he was just some regular New Republic dude who could use the force and went bad. He certainly wasn't built up as some mysterious force from the fringes of the galaxy.

[RubberJohnny]

2 hours ago, Darren said:

Because he didn’t trust or frankly even like any of the people under him. He ruled by fear and didn't want to be resurrected only to have a power struggle with whoever filled the power vacuum he left behind.

 

So it makes perfect sense to destroy a Galactic Civilisation you've spent your entire life building because you've got a shit HR department, even though you won't have to deal with them after you're dead anyway?

 

2 hours ago, Darren said:

It’s not that interesting, and it was quite a bizarre thing for the TFA tie-in novels to focus on as it seemed so unconnected to that film, although now it makes more sense as it ties in with the trilogy as a whole.

 

It's not really a bizarre thing to focus on, is it? Licensed tie-ins would have had little information about the actual new plot or characters, which were in flux at that time anyway, so focusing on the post RotJ period where you can do your own thing without stepping on the toes of the people higher up the chain is like, obvious.

[Darren]

Hey, I didn’t write it...

[SM47]

3 hours ago, Darren said:

So what’s not been explained so far is why the Emperor would send this “gift” to this mysterious entity in the great unknown. I suspect (but of course, this is just supposition) that it also contained the means by which Palestine could be brought back from the dead by this powerful being. It might be from relics, a vial of his blood, who knows, but it seems to fit.

 

 

These SJW snowflakes have gone too far this time 

[Pob]

4 hours ago, Darren said:

Because he didn’t trust or frankly even like any of the people under him. He ruled by fear and didn't want to be resurrected only to have a power struggle with whoever filled the power vacuum he left behind.

I thought Lucas and Kennedy were friends?

[Dirty Harry Potter]

JJ is like The Wolf in Pulp Fiction.

[Dirty Harry Potter]

The reason Snoke’s story is important is that after ROTJ, all the story threads were very deliberated tied up by George Lucas. At that time he didn’t want to make anymore films.

 

Sooo... it was not ok to just launch the next chapter into ... nothing has actually changed, and here is this random mysterious bad guy (who’s very appearance is a story all of its own), that you’ve never heard of, and has appeared out of now where... it breaks the rules the other films have set .

 

JJ deliberately played into the mystery of this idea and who he might be (and likely did this with no idea himself). And then Ryan just ditched that story thread as unimportant. Because I guess to him it wasn’t. But that shows little regard for what has come before. And It’s a fucking narrative mess.

 

Like watching the big budget version of someone’s script notes. 

 

There is a Fast Company interview with JJ where he says that you have two years from saying yes to Star Wars - to conceiving, writing, designing, casting, shooting, editing, GFXing  and finishing your film. You start with a blank canvas and have to fill it in - whilst the production train speeds forward. The most important thing to Disney is the release date, and everything else must follow.

 

So that, combined with no creative show runner  = cluster fuck.

[Kevvy Metal]

The idea that's being sometimes banded about, that Lucasfilm would have no overall plan for the new Star Wars trilogy, at all. That there were never any discussions between the various big players making the films at all is some full on flat-earther style conspiracy type stuff. 

They just would not do that.

So, Rian Johnston had carte blanche to make his film and take the story in whatever direction he wanted to but he didn't convey this vision to everyone every step of the way? ..and the next team weren't immediately taking this into overlapping pre-production?

 

The final shot of TLJ and this move that the new films are push towards - that the old traditions of the Jedi and Sith are a thing of the past - is totally going to tie into new, free force user's called "Skywalkers". You can see it coming a mile away. 

[JPL]

So you’re saying that there was a plan, but Rian Johnson could do whatever he liked as long as he told Kathleen Kennedy that’s what he was doing? So not really a plan then. Sounds like they’re making it up as they go along to be honest.

 

It’s clear as day there was no master plan for this trilogy. Not only the jarring shift in tone, but also a huge shift in direction for the second film, where pretty much everything that JJ setup was oh so cleverly subverted (or just plain thrown away) shows that.

 

But yeah, let’s just leave it at you insulting anyone that doesn’t like what they’ve done with it, as flat earther style conspiracy theorists.

[Girth Certificate]

The problem is after the Happy Christmas Time ending of ROTJ it makes Luke, Leia and Han seem like complete arseholes that they managed to fuck it all up so badly. But at the same time you've got the whole Star Wars marketing machine who are all like 'loooook it's Han Solo, he's the greatest hero in cinema history (except for when he was such a shit dad that his son committed megagenocide) buy these underpants patterned after his waistcoat'. But I kinda like it at the same time. It’s meta as fuck.

[c-cat114]

On 17/04/2019 at 12:25, Uncle Mike said:

 

Did they "build up a mystery" though? That's what I'm trying to ask. He's barely in the film. Does anyone even talk about him?

 

I don't remember the film building up the mystery as much as the audience doing so.... And tbh sometimes the answers to a mystery aren't very successful (Dr Who and the Time War for example or Palps in the prequels IMO - although he was one of the better things about the prequels). 

 

My problem with TLJ is that I found the answers to the questions posed all entirely unsatisfying, a bit dull and, apart from the customary visual flair, a poorly constructed story. It looked better than TFA (Krait looked lovely) but it was a riff On ESB without any of the charm or character. 

 

TFA was serviceable, story wise, hardly ground breaking in terms of narrative, but crowd pleasing at times and hit the right notes in terms of a three act structure. It's kind of what I'm expecting from the next one - which will be a relief after TLJ imo. If Johnson was still connected with ep 9 I'd have waited for reviews and even then still possibly wait for the dvd. 

 

Still find Rey a bit dull, mind. 

 

'Subvert Expectations' has become a euphemism for 'crap twist' that said so at least TLJ gave us something. 

[Kevvy Metal]

2 hours ago, JPL said:

But yeah, let’s just leave it at you insulting anyone that doesn’t like what they’ve done with it, as flat earther style conspiracy theorists.

 

It’s not even remotely a direct insult to anyone, especially here. One look at YouTube shows a litany of videos made by people trying to push this narrative. 

Stop being deliberately antagonistic. 

[JPL]

1 minute ago, Kevvy Metal said:

 

It’s not even remotely a direct insult to anyone, especially here. One look at YouTube shows a litany of videos made by people trying to push this narrative. 

Stop being deliberately antagonistic. 

Eh? Me being antagonistic? You were the one who called people who don’t think they had a plan flat earther style theorists, and last time I looked there were plenty of people on here who think they’re making it up as they go.

 

Why don’t you stop trying to shit on anyone who doesn’t agree with you over TLJ. They’re only opinions and there are plenty of valid comments from both sides. Yours isn’t the definitive vision you know? People are allowed to dislike it as much as you love it and they’re allowed to theorise about what they feel has gone wrong.

[Kevvy Metal]

11 minutes ago, JPL said:

Eh? Me being antagonistic? You were the one who called people who don’t think they had a plan flat earther style theorists, and last time I looked there were plenty of people on here who think they’re making it up as they go.

 

Why don’t you stop trying to shit on anyone who doesn’t agree with you over TLJ. They’re only opinions and there are plenty of valid comments from both sides. Yours isn’t the definitive vision you know? People are allowed to dislike it as much as you love it and they’re allowed to theorise about what they feel has gone wrong.

 

Yeah, I’ve repeatedly said that people are entitled to their own opinion. I’ve never refuted that. 

And yeah, the idea that they had no plan whatsoever is totally clutching at straws in my opinion, it’s pretty ridiculous in my opinion, but people are entitled to think that if they like.

 

The flat earther thing was a wee joke. I guess some people are a little sensitive. 

 

Do you wish for for me to go away so all those who dislike TLJ can express their dislike in peace? 

 

Also, it’s you being aggressive here.  

[Darren]

23 hours ago, SM47 said:

 

These SJW snowflakes have gone too far this time 

 

Bloody autocorrear windu.