Star Wars: The Disney+ Empire Strikes Again and Again and...

lol how was I thinking “hey, I recognize that guy!“ the whole time and not recognizing Flea

That was me too

and yes my teen son knows the prequels much better than he knows eps 4-6 and is super stoked for this, for him mcgregor is the real obiwan

is this Hong Kong planet the place OW was buzzing around with Anakin at the start of episode 2?

if i goes on Wookiepedia I'll be up all night

ep 1 a mixed bag for me, the lead bad guy was menacing enough, the kid made it pretty hard to watch, obi-wan actually a pretty boring character? probably a nil-all draw i guess, will invest in ep 2 (who am i kidding, if I watched the boba fett show i will watch anything with the SW logo)

also was bracing for vader’s “noooooo” in the recap- disappointed it was omitted- is this revisionism?

obi-wan actually a pretty boring character?

well he’s being played by ewan mcgregor so

recognised Flea Immediately. Have his memoir around somewhere, not read it yet.

Was trying to think how long ago the prequels were since this was set 10 years after. & how things tie in with other SW spinoffs timeline.
So this is handy
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/timeline/36i8r0q3ewr5zkj4359q8robq1shgpz.png

well would be if that was one image like I thought it was.
THis bit helps too
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/timeline/0ayy0y5cyjxha21r87de535covb3jui.png

gonna keep watching obvs, but this show is pretty bad imo

Think the kid is doing the best she could, but in true SW tradition, her lines feel like they were written by people who have never met an actual child before.

Kumail Nanjaini v distracting and not in a good way - he's one of those actors where I can't really see him as any other character but himself. took me right out. and it's never quite explained why his character suddenly decided to help obi-wan? i mean he says why, but they never gave us an actual reason to trust him so it was like... huh??

also if the inquisitors can just read minds, why even bother threatening people to give up the location of jedis?

and yeah the chase sequences were hilarious - again, I have a feeling no one on the set has ever worked with children before, because those scenes where Leia's being chased by an adult that's pretending very hard they can't catch up with her just looked soooo goofy lol

the good: McGregor (pretty much carrying this whole thing) and Flea (RIP). Jimmy Smits/Bail Organa = only good dad in the galaxy.

Reva and the other Inquisitors are also being saddled with bad dialogue but overall, ok. I'm assuming the Grand Inquisitor isn't actually dead - seems like a waste to cast Rupert Friend and not utilise his action skills

oooh the one actor I didn’t recognise: Benny Safdie as the other Jedi o_O

great, now I’m wishing the Safdies had their own Star Wars show lol

and it's never quite explained why his character suddenly decided to help obi-wan?

this worked for me, seemed clear nanjaini's character is not a garden-variety hive-of-scum-and-villainy criminal but a weirdo jedi stan who never thought he'd encounter the real mccoy/gregor

>also if the inquisitors can just read minds, why even bother threatening people to give up the location of jedis?

To terrorize the non-knowers, probably. Same reason copspeak exists

Meantime from Celebration

This one is my favorite pic.twitter.com/OcS1QRruoW

— dodge🧡 (@dodgerroo) May 27, 2022

lol thats p good

There’s nothing quite as sad and hilarious as middle aged men complaining about dialog and logic in a Star Wars movie. Like, did you even see the first trilogy? The dialog is corny af and forced and riddled with terrible acting. The worst thing about Star Wars is easily Star Wars fans. I saw both episodes. There was pew pew and space ships. It was entertaining.

Like, did you even see the first trilogy? The dialog is corny af and forced and riddled with terrible acting.

This is absolutely true but that doesn't make it unreasonable to want something made in 2022 to be better! Sitcoms in 1977 sucked too and if they launched a new half-hour show set in the Extended WKRP Universe I would expect the acting and writing to be held to a higher standard than the original.

I mean....the difference between asking someone and extracting info = one is easy and one is work. doesn't seem that much of a stretch.

having to extract info from someone while there's a Jedi in the same room also gives the Jedi an advantage because you're distracted

My kid pointed out that when Third Sister was interrogating Owen, the other Inquisitors were right nearby, which meant she couldn't get away with Jedi-prying stuff out of his mind.

mind-extracting seems to be a new Force skill because the Force has just been code for "LOL MAGIC" since 1977

Talk about a forced confession har har

I skipped Boba Fett because I heard it was awful. Was it? This looks more promising.

would take a vision quest to know for sure, but we're out of nose lizards.

The Batch: still Bad

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JX5OW8cOec

Sitcoms in 1977 sucked too and if they launched a new half-hour show set in the Extended WKRP Universe I would expect the acting and writing to be held to a higher standard than the original.

Network sitcoms today are many times worse than WKRP though.

Roz otm

i'll probably keep watching this because the Ewan stuff is JUST compelling enough. and because i like the Star Wars world and find many of its accoutrements aesthetically satisfying as well as comfortingly familiar. but a lot of it doesn't really grab me. and a lot of the story choices aren't grabbing me either, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and watch the rest before i start ranting. let it suffice to say that I think Mandalorian (which wasn't trying to closely slot into spaces between other stories) had it easier.

a big thing me is that the oomph and magic and grandeur of Star Wars just doesn't translate down to TV scale, for me, even though the costumes and lightsaber effects do. some shots of the seedy space town looked ok, but a lot of them really showed the signs of being a big green screen room with a few extras scrolling about to populate the scene. the forest chase felt very Hercules/Xena I'm sure everyone involved worked really hard and did many clever things to make possible what they have, but for whatever irrational reason i didn't embrace it. the Tattooine stuff worked better I thought.

i used to love Ewan McGregor pre Star Wars so i am enjoying watching him in particular

the kid bothers me not gonna lie
how is she even leia with no fire or stubbornness or attitude

No attitude? Seems like she has a lot of it!

the bar is too low for kid actors imo

she's fine, but the role needs "special," and it's really hard to find that, or draw it out on set (especially with a huge complicated production with a ton of other moving parts). more rehearsal time, super valuable for actors generally, could easily deaden a child's performance. and meanwhile she has to make sure she's hitting all the marks for the digital effects stuff. so we're back in prequel land in several ways.

Some good things:

* I did find the Inquisitors convincingly menacing and weird, even if their methods don't really make much sense. Main Baddie Sister is fine as a TV show villain but if this devolves into weekly "I'll get you next time, Kenobi!!" scenes, we're in trouble.

* I liked the approach to showing Kenobi's workaday grind in the desert, and what his priorities are at this point.

* I bet Smits was thrilled to finally get to play Bail in a complete, character-driven scene after all these years, and it worked well onscreen.

* Happy to have Edgerton back as Owen! He feels very natural and lived-in.

* Basically the first ep, apart from the forest bit, worked pretty well for me -- edit it down a little and it's a great first act for a lovely 95-minute Star Wars TV special.

-force mind reading had an established precedent in ROTJ, i thought ("sister... so... you have a twin sister..."), maybe this is just like an aggressive version of that.

-i enjoyed the T-16 skyhopper model that obi-wan bought for luke, nice callout ("i used to bullseye womp rats in my T-16 back home")

-sung kang has a nice sansho the bailiff vibe going with that hat

-kumail was not bad for what he was given, his character has this watto vibe going on. i assume he's formerly jedi academy adjacent, maybe even flunked out? hence the motivation to help obi wan.

-when is obi wan going to get confronted about meat-stealing, we keep on getting shots of him wrapping chekhov's hunk of krayt-ribeye in butcher paper. (ok, i know that's not a krayt dragon but i don't know any other tatooine megafauna it could be, maybe a franchise-crossover molduga from zelda?)

-otherwise roz and doctor casino otm, the action sequences feel so lifeless and clunky. it feels as wooden as the pre-mandalorian episodes of boba fett, i wonder if there's some edict from on high at disney to make everything slow and bad. i'm betting these episodes would be a lot better as a director's cut? also annoying how video game-y these episodes feel (go talk to character A to collect plot device B in order to take the offworld transport at location C)? amazing how much better the andor trailer looks, i assume everything is just a lot better when you get to white sheet the story/characters and not feel confined by trying to fit something in on a timeline between the prequels and the original trilogy.

i assumed the meat was a permitted daily ration. it's not really presented that way, but since Obi-Wan's entire status quo is "keep a low profile, don't attract attention, the boy is the only purpose remaining," i couldn't imagine him taking the risk of stealing stuff at work every day. also he's a single man, living way the hell out in the boonies with apparently few expenses - if anybody can possibly survive on the crappy pay of a short-term carcass-slicer, it'd be him.

hmm i thought it was to show how he can't keep his jedi instincts under warps even in exile since he feeds the meat to his tatooine camel - is star wars the franchise where being kind to animals marks you as a good guy or am i thinking of some other franchise?

the Andor trailer does look quite good

i think the relative cheapness of the production is simple economics stemming from the subscription model. really great-looking action takes time and money. not that you need infinite dollars to make a fight scene exciting, but it does take time to put the camera/lights in interesting places, rehearse exciting fights, etc. and maybe they just want a few good-enough Star Wars shows a year, to keep on board the people who only signed up for Mandalorian in the first place. if you've already got McGregor in the title role and are promising fans an exciting and untold chapter in several major chatacters' stories, maybe there's not as much support from above when the creators want to push all these elements to be their best.

-nice touch of bringing in temeura to play the homeless clone trooper

some shots of the seedy space town looked ok, but a lot of them really showed the signs of being a big green screen room with a few extras scrolling about to populate the scene.

yeah this was really bad, feels like there are directorial touches you can do to make a place seem a lot bigger and more lived in than it really is, using tight telephotos and zooms to provide a sense of depth - i suppose you can't do that with a greenscreen, everything is a big wide angle because you don't have a real set to work off of (the obvious call out is blade runner, look how much is done with just panning past the neon sign with a tight telephoto, some real depth to it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcwOApqmJMQ)

-is this our first time on alderaan outside of episode 3? i like how cheesy and 70s all the costumes and buildings were, also how much of a verdant paradise it's supposed to be, something very "inner light" about it, they're going overboard to make sure we understand how much of a loss it was for it to get blown up!

-force mind reading had an established precedent in ROTJ, i thought ("sister... so... you have a twin sister...")

ahh, yes, you are right! completely forgot about that

2 scenes of Vect slappin' the big console button. The child acting is bad. There are fun real life parallels involving child Jedi/actors and revisiting past mistakes going on. Slow start, but I'm into it now!

Ben (Ewan) must protect these force-gifted children (child actors) and get it right this time.

Pleading and persecuted young jedi vs pleading and persecuted young prequel loving fanbase

i'll tell you what, there's a reason most series don't open with a very long "previously on" scene, followed by an action scene, immediately followed by a "10 years later" intertitle and that reason is that you're like.. is the actual story going to start soon? and then you get the actual story and it's got something to do with some extremely boring invigilators or whatever pushing open the imaginary swinging doors of a tavern and expounding ludicrously on jedis while they clomp around like fools

this didn't feel that diff from an episode of Rebels tbh

Like Ewan but this was a bit boring imo

Boba Fett was also boring but I preferred that kind of boring?

NB I always have a nice twenty-minute nap during Star Wars movies so boringness is not a bug

Perhaps -- because I'm not really that into Star Wars -- I'm having the same "there's too much continuity and they all look the same!!!!" reaction people have to Marvel movies.

Baby Leia asks Ben to "make her float", begging Ewan to make this series a success like the one with a floating baby yoda.

I spent the couple episodes thinking how hard Obi-Wan was working at being extremely offline. So many bits where logging on for a moment were so tempting. Almost made it, until finally he had to use the force to catch Leia.

Picturing Anakin meditating in his bacta tube getting the "Obi-Wan is online" ping when that happened

is it possible to use the force to 'make out' remotely

lmao mh

xp

didn't that happen in The Last Jedi?

Seems Ben would have sensed the still living Anakin at some point before logging off.