What keeps you coming back if you already know what happens?
Examples of your favorites where prediction is either irrelevant or part of the pleasure of a new viewing?
This is just a form of dramatic irony, which has been a part of literary history since approximately forever. Like all literary devices, it can be deployed effectively or poorly. I wouldn’t say it’s inherently bad.
Mark Hamill reminds us he’s a great actor.
First he does the famous Darth vs Luke speech from Empire Strikes Back…as though Luke is facing Joker from Batman: the Animated Series.
Then he explains his admiration for Heath Ledger’s performance–before briefly offering his version of Heath’s lines from The Dark Knight.
I seem to recall him at some point reading the full “Why so serious?” monologue, but I guess I was wrong and it was always this fantastic voice actor doing an impression.
Just one more from the Skywalker boy.
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He’s great. He doesn’t shy from the role that made him famous and embraces it.
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Speaking with YouTube channel Midnight’s Edge, Foster shared:
“Episode VIII was out, it was a done deal. And, I went and saw it, and I thought it was a terrible film. I thought it was a terrible Star Wars movie, and there’s no need to go into why because every fan already has. I thought, ‘How can this be retconned? How can we fix as much as possible from Episode VIII in a proposed Episode IX?’ And I wrote a partial treatment for that, attempting in that storyline to explain a lot of the really silly things that happened in Episode VIII.”
In his Episode IX treatment, Foster set out to explain why the untrained Rey (Daisy Ridley) “suddenly has more Force powers than anybody”
Foster’s solution? To make Rey “part droid” to account for her ability to pick-up Jedi skills unnaturally quickly.
“That gives her the ability to learn remarkably quickly and also enhances her existing Force powers, and that’s how she can throw boulders around at the end of Episode VIII.
Foster also rewrote Luke Skywalker’s (Mark Hamill) end, noting that he gave "[Luke] a proper send-off at the end of Episode IX.”
“At the end of it [Foster’s version], there’s a big battle on Coruscant with the Emperor’s [Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid)] clones. I also manage to provide proper motivation for the character that they forced Boyega to fall in love with, I give her something proper to do that justifies her character [Rose Tico (Kelly Marie Tran)]. At the end of the film, Luke is dying under a tree, and Rey comes out. And Luke’s last words are ‘Aunt Beru,’ which brings the whole thing full cycle.”
lol amazing that he could somehow come up with a worse retcon than the original movie
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Seriously, “part droid Rey” is at best a lateral move of stupidity compared to grandpa Palpy.
I still can’t quite understand why TFA (eg even for this guy, if you read more of the article) skates by as some successful effort. In many ways it is the biggest failure of the sequels because its creators fundamentally and very deliberately abdicated their responsibility to take the story to a new and interesting place. It was not a question of oh too much fan service. They literally blew up a third death star and in the actual movie mocked it as, “oh this one is even bigger”. That’s as much a subversion as what Johnson did to Luke or anything else in TLJ. But I think I’m in the minority on this one, maybe one day I’ll get over it but a five year grudge is really nothing.
Throw the entire thing in the garbage, the sequels never happened. You’ll be shocked by how much they never happened.
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This makes me want to revise Episode 9 to fit better with The Last Jedi.
I think a lot of it has to do with timing, audiences were totally primed for a star wars movie and TFA was a star wars movie. And it was well put together. I recognized the problems in the theater, but didn’t care. It was exhilarating.
So much of what was wrong with TLJ was tonal. It treated themes and characters that SW fans held dear with contempt. Luke tossing away the light saber was a huge tonal shift, you have to be able to deliver that and walk the tightrope between alienating fans and challenging them.
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TFA got a pass from me on initial watch because a) it did check a lot of the boxes of being “not the prequels”, with more dynamic acting and better directing and b) I liked the characters enough to want to see more. Of course there was a shameful amount of recycled ideas but clearly it was an intentional choice, and they had hooked me enough with the good stuff that I was just like “ok, let’s roll with this, I’m in.”
That said, TFA doesn’t hold up well at all on multiple watches, and certainly everything it tried to build up became useless after TLJ, retroactively making the movie worse.
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Please do. Just an outline would be a delight.
I really enjoyed Colin Trevorrow’s script for his canceled version of Episode IX. There are several fan adaptations and animated short-film versions, but my favorite is the solo performance (with a variety of hats no doubt supplied by @ggoreo) by Jenny Nicholson.
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That’s a fine link and all that, but how is Trevorrow a real last name?
Trevorrow Never Dies
The Day After Trevorrow
Trevorrow and trevorrow and trevorrow
Creeps in this petty pace…
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There’s a dude on OAN named Johnny Tobacco.
There’s a real person named Englebert Humperdink. Of course that wasn’t his original name. No, he CHOSE Englebert.
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This bit still gets me. Darth Vader heads to the Death Star’s cafeteria for a quick snack…
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There’s a real person named Englebert Humperdinck who didn’t choose that name.
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Trevorrow is a last name that is Cornish in origin.
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I get it but I will never get it get it. I think a genuine sense of adventure and novelty is as important to SW as any character, and I think there was intentional contempt shown for that in TFA. The Empire is gone but here’s the utterly the same “New Order”. The Rebels are gone but here’s the utterly the same “Resistance”. What’s the difference between Tatooine and Jakku, oh nothing? The Death Star is gone (again) but here’s the utterly the same “Starkiller Base”. And we’re going to sneak into it and blow it up again, fun.
The only way I can make peace with it is if it was just a cold generational calculation. The kids out there needed their own Star Wars and maybe it means fuck all to them what happened in The New Hope. Still, they could have accommodated most of their fans by being, what’s the phrase, minimally creative? They had infinity time and infinity money.
My revised rankings are:
5>>4>>>>>>6>>3>>>2>>1>>>>>8>7=9
That’s right The Phantom Menace is now miles ahead of the sequels in my view.
(Also the more I revisit The Return of the Jedi the less I like it, I’d rather watch Sith again and I’ve probably seen it more over the years)
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