Star Wars 8 shit talk

At this point I have to assume that Hux takes Kylo out after the latter attempts to redeem himself towards the end of episode 9 or something like that.

bit I did love: after Hux sees the carnage, and seeing a temporarily incapacitated Kylo lying on the ground, he briefly opens his coat to go for his weapon until Kylo wakes up.

yeah that was hux's best moment for sure. i still don't think the character is very interesting but the concept is fantastic, a weasely little alt-right empire fascist wannabe, forever seething with a sense of denied glory because whatever position he rises to in his imitation Empire he's still playing second fiddle to the same "imperial in name only" force wizards who screwed it all up the first time.

I wonder how hard it was for Driver to resist saying "blow that piece of junk THE FUCK OUT OF THE SKY"....he pauses before 'out of the sky' which made me think he was tempted

I do enjoy that SW universe uses our swear words but has a shit ton of their own too

i still don't think the character is very interesting but the concept is fantastic

I mean, the character is exactly what he should be. We don't need more backstory or anything on him, and Gleeson just takes it and runs with it.

the alt-right description is totally otm though

he's kind of a throwback to the OG trilogy, as he's one of the few who speaks in the stilted, over the top manner that most of the non-Vader Empire did in that series.

oh agreed. maybe i just mean he's better in TLJ than he was in TFA but is still running to overcome TFA where he had the most boring business to do, preening and shouting about starkiller base and the first order. starkiller base was the most annoying aspect of the movie generally, and the first order was the least convincing and well-explained, so that's screen time that could have gone into anything else in the movie. or just him having other kinds of interactions with the people around him that would have given a little more texture to his seething resentment, and/or made the first order/republic/resistance thing less confusing.

like maybe a scene of him in a teleconference with the Republic civilian leadership where he's mewling about restoring greatness to the galaxy or something... we'd have a clearer sense of what he's actually hoping to accomplish, and that along the way the audience could get a more natural sense of the current status quo and how endangered it actually is, the same way the very economical "we've eliminated the senate" talk does in the first film.

he's kind of a throwback to the OG trilogy, as he's one of the few who speaks in the stilted, over the top manner that most of the non-Vader Empire did in that series.

― fuck you, your hat is horrible (Neanderthal),

Piett was admirably terse.

Admiral Piett was played by Kenneth Colley in both Star Wars: Episode V The Empire Strikes Back and Star Wars: Episode VI Return of the Jedi. Piett is the only Imperial officer to survive more than one film and be portrayed by the same actor.[9]

Colley recalled that when he auditioned for the role, Irvin Kershner said to him, "'I'm looking for someone that would frighten Adolf Hitler!' And he sized me up and down and continued, 'Yes, I think you’re it.

lol damn

like i'm not saying we need a flashback to his pampered Imperial childhood, all undone when vader killed the emperor, years spent in his parents' space-basement writing increasingly agitated missives back and forth with other space-fascists on the galactic hypernet. but it could be alluded to in an effective way i think. "this SO-CALLED 'republic' is riddled top to bottom with the traitorous REBEL LEADERSHIP who murdered the LEGITIMATELY ELECTED emperor and plunged a stable galaxy into CHAOS! my BROTHERS IN ARMS are far from the only proud defenders of the Empire our parents built to keep the galaxy prosperous, secure, and unified! and in their names we WILL prevail!!!"

i dunno....... might just be me that wants this angle made less subtextual but i feel it would solve a lot of the "what's the actual status of this galaxy again?" problems in TFA. and i think the first order makes enormously more sense as a faction of the old imperial army that was never entirely put down, now reinvigorated with neofascist resentment ideology to appeal to the aging officer cohort, than as an entirely new entity that managed to put together a planet-sized death machine out of nowhere while the republic did nothing. hell i'd even love it if the first order's leadership included, alongside kylo and hux, an aging imperial commander with a tarkin kind of vibe for them to play off of. he could go down with the ship in TFA, setting the stage for the more contentious and unstable leadership rivalry in TLJ. but tbf i guess we needed all that screentime for poe and some nobodies to do a stakes-free bombing run on the death planet.

also man the piett subplot cracks me up every time. what a great addition to the movie that is.

I feel like TFA was taking a weirdly downplayed approach to what happened to the Hosnian system that TLJ corrected a bit. It's played like a tide-turning victory and didn't really focus more than 2 seconds on "shit, now we have no government".

"it's" meaning the Starkiller destruction. I have this bad habit where I write posts, remove sentences, and forget to update orphan references

the severity was also undercut by half the audience cheering enthusiastically at what they though was the destruction of Coruscant

*thought

It’s kind of funny, given all of the things people criticize the prequels for, that your suggestion for fleshing out the story of the follow-movies is to add in more political backstory.

maybe this will be one of Rian's side-trilogy films

"Hux: We Hardly Knew Ye"

hahahaahhaa

not STORY as such, just a few lines here and there. i mean the TFA crawl lays out a political backstory - it's just distractingly unclear wtf that story is and what's going on. having both a republic and a resistance is goofy. are our heroes the scrappy underdogs or are they the actual government that's in the process of being overthrown? are the villains an insurgent evil movement or an unstoppable force that has eyes and ears everywhere? did the heroes of the original trilogy accomplish anything by bringing down the empire or has everything just been completely shitty for decades on end? you can get this information across to the audience without it actually being the content of the plot itself.

well, part of how TFA opens was why I was initially disappointed with it. I was hoping we would get a different start point for the new trilogy than the OG trilogy, maybe the opening moments of the FO uprising after years of peace.

I got the impression of the FO as a fledgling terrorist uprising and then they sort of just became the New Empire rather abruptly w/ Starkiller Base.

surprised they didn't go the Thrawn angle

coming soon to PBS:

“Frontline: Empire & Rebellion - did the heroes of the original trilogy accomplish anything by bringing down the empire or has everything just been completely shitty for decades on end?”

Leia Organa was quoted today as saying "Being the resistance party was easy. Governing is hard"

Hux works because he is easily guessable. He is an angry young white man who have joined a faction where white men always were in charge. The whole First Order should have been people like him, it would make a lot of sense, especially in these alt-right times. It's Snoke I hate. Wtf was he about, why was he there, what was the point? I put all of that on Abrams, that was a typically bad Abrams 'wait for the sequel!' stupidity.

Another thing that doesn't work was the story about Rose and Paige coming from a planet mined and destroyed by the First Order. For how long has the republic allowed these idiots to build up their forces? It makes no sense.

really enjoying doc casino’s posts bc the uncertainty of what is going on with the new republic/why the first order even exists is extremely annoying in both of these movies to me. i mean, not that it really matters, but it grates extremely in tfa

xpost idk we currently have a Federal government here where a certain party is being allowed to do things w/ impunity and everybody shrugs

there's actually more backstory on the Senate's reluctance to get involved/underestimation of the rising power of the FO on Wookiepedia I think

Do not read Wookiepedia though.

xxp i guess it really grates in tfa bc that movie is 100 percent “STUFF! IS! HAPPENING! CONSTANTLY! for like no reason”

I do kind of enjoy though, the Empire/Palpatine actually went through appropriate channels to dissolve the Senate, First Order just said fuck it and blew them all up

honestly "stuff happening constantly for no reason" is kind of a thing that could describe the entire franchise. I came to embrace TFA as a character rather than a narrative piece and it was more satisfying (I didn't come around until my third viewing or so).

the whole reason the Death Star is destroyed is cos the Empire decides not to fire on what they think is an unmanned escape craft.

(did enjoy Family Guy's parody of the logic behind that)

lol as i was typing that i was like “i’m describing the entire franchise”

but a friend of mine characterized tfa in particular as a movie where every scene feels like the start of the second act, and i agree with her

I don’t want more political backstory, I just want the existing one to make more sense. Like the resistance was running the whole galaxy and in the span of a few weeks they’re reduced to 15 people hiding out on the Falcon?

I liked this for the most part with the usual complaints. Lost my shit at Poe’s “what the hell?” as his foot broke through the crappy spaceship. Liked Leia’s brief use of the force with no further explanation.

I also liked this take on it: https://bittergertrude.com/2017/12/20/this-is-not-going-to-go-the-way-you-think-the-last-jedi-is-subversive-af-and-i-am-here-for-it/

rose's backstory was a good idea and v welcome i thought, just undermined by adding to confusion abt the universe, and the fact that we just did "empire mines planet, and then blows it up" in rogue one. it would have been enough to just say that the evil rich space mining syndicates, who back the first order, continue to exploit and degrade her world. idk if they were afraid that would sound too much like the Trade Federation or if, as I first assumed, they backed off from this plot and switched to talking about arms dealers because of studio notes dictated by some corporate overlap with fossil fuel/mining money.

the Resistance wasn't really "running the Galaxy" - the Senate was. the way its generally explained is that there was a First Order uprising that the Senate considered nothing more than a few rogue terror cells and not worthy of consternation, so the Senate didn't really want to intervene much. So Leia and company formed the Resistance and Senate endorsement for it, but Leia was trying to lean on them to provide increased support, like supplying troops, funding equipment, etc....and right as she's doing that, the entire Senate is blown up so now they basically are on their own with who they have.

even in TFA their numbers seem tiny compared to like the Rebel Alliance.

xpost

I'm sorry for sharing what I told you not to read, but here goes: http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Galactic_Senate_(New_Republic)

put another way it's just cartoonishly cart-before-the-horse abt the political economy of space fascism. like Cobra on GI Joe the military government seems to exist to make weapons and fight battles and therefore directs other enterprises, like space mining, solely to build more weapons. far more plausible would be a galaxy where the 1%, who own stock in the mines, demand a giant repressive military state to put down uprisings against the mining. this is a level of marxist consciousness i don't really expect or demand from star wars, but since TLJ started making gestures towards grasping this universe in a more believable way (and has gotten praise for it) i think it's fair to wish it followed through just a step further instead of veering into nonsense halfway through a line of dialogue. so it goes.

the prob with the resistance narrative is that it's impossible to square with the way the First Order is presented in TFA, where no one in the galaxy is safe from them and they have a planet-sized weapon more powerful than anything the empire ever had in the first place.

yeah and that still kind of bothers me, not to mention all of the stuff I just mentioned is nowhere in TFA (probably comic tie-ins are where all that comes from)

and to be clear again i think this can all be solved without prequel-style content-free political maneuvering. hux gives a big speech in TFA hyping up his troops - just swap in some stuff there that implicitly suggests their goals and the current status quo! tho i still like the idea of him sneering at mon mothma over the monitor - "your vaunted DEMOCRACY has only made the galaxy vulnerable! even today i've received word that the miners on planet boondock are refusing to work, disrupting critical supplies of essential materials! while your "senate" debates, WE are taking action to maintain ORDER and PROSPERITY!" (fires death laser on miners)!

The other problem with Rose's backstory is that it puts the First Order as quite powerful at least ten years ago. It just doesn't make sense. And yeah, they seem not that strong in TFA, but then TLJ takes place a few days later, and all of a sudden it's a giant army with new tech and ship after ship after ship.

xpost to self iow basically what the basic outline of the prequel political story COULD have been, if turned into dramatic high-stakes star wars terms, and if george lucas had visited planet earth sometime in the preceding twenty years. it was just so abstract and meaningless. irl an evil alliance between the chamber of commerce and the representatives of heavy industry etc to overthrow democracy should be pretty scary. they're already repeating/fixing those movies anyway (down to the republic lacking a standing army to fight off this threat) so it's not like any of this would derail the movie from what it's doing.

the tfa/tlj gap you could bandaid by saying that the bulk of the first order's forces were far away somewhere else in the last film, smashing the bulk of the resistance (though you imagine that'd be important enough to go in the movie) and drawing attention away from starkiller, which after all is supposed to be a new sneak attack weapon. it's the TFA first order that just doesn't work. not ruinous to the movie obv, since its charms are in the character stuff and a couple of the action scenes. but still dumb and easily fixable at the outline stage.

they didn’t flesh it out well, but the implication was that the republic exists again, has a stable government, but they’re once again ineffective and ignoring the remnants of the empire, who are hiding out in the middle of nowhere — they don’t even have a real base, just a giant weapon planet and a huge-ass snoke ship

the resistance is meant to be the faction that’s working outside the authorization of the government because they believe you need a military to fight an actual growing threat. you have the same plot thread as Rogue One where the politicians don’t want to act so a handful of people go rogue to spurn them into action

Leila’s there because she was always a better General than politician

I don’t think the Resistance was ever meant to be very big — they’re the people who think the Republic needs a military, and the Republic thinks a galaxy-wide army leads to corruption and a consolidation of power

again, could have been better spelled out

they "just" have an entire planet that they've converted into a superweapon, and dozens of capital ships, and supposedly agents or sympathizers on every planet everywhere, such that no one has any chance of outrunning or escaping them. i get that finn, raised as a stormtrooper, may not be objectively evaluating the odds but no one seems to contradict his evaluation of the first order as an inescapable panoptic sovereign. i think the occam's razor answer is that it was not well-thought-out, with the brainstorm session stopping at "they're like the new empire!"

lol, otm