Star Wars: The Complete Saga (1977-2005)

[octagon]

Originally Posted by Geoff D

It'd be a terrific twist though: the scion of Palpatine ends up being good whilst Han and Leia's son is the bad guy, and both will have to battle their latent urges to pull to one side or the other - they may even switch places by the end of the trilogy (though I don't think Disney would have the balls to turn Rey to the dark side). And the thing about her vision when she touches Luke's lightsaber is that this 'saber has been used for great evil (having been Anakin's when he became Vader) as well as good, so it could speak to her from either perspective.

We've almost got you, don't we?

Pick up the light saber, Luke. You know you want to...

Emperor: Good.... - YouTube

[Geoff D]

Like I said, if Ep VIII fills in some of them gaps then I'll be back on board. I just don't want it to be like the prequels again, where you either have to do mental gymnastics to have it make sense or rely on loads of ancillary sources to piece it all together. Don't get me wrongo, I LOVE the Clone Wars show but some of that stuff in the last season should really, REALLY have been part of the prequels proper. Still, there are the spin-off movies too this time around.

[Indiana Jonezzz...]

Originally Posted by Geoff D

It'd be a terrific twist though: the scion of Palpatine ends up being good whilst Han and Leia's son is the bad guy, and both will have to battle their latent urges to pull to one side or the other - they may even switch places by the end of the trilogy (though I don't think Disney would have the balls to turn Rey to the dark side). And the thing about her vision when she touches Luke's lightsaber is that this 'saber has been used for great evil (having been Anakin's when he became Vader) as well as good, so it could speak to her from either perspective.

I think it would be a great twist and would really give this trilogy its own identity. Imagine if Rey finds out she comes from an evil lineage and that ends up pushing her towards the darkside. Maybe Kylo ends up going good (is it possible for the audience to be ok with that though after he killed Han?). Maybe Luke knows who she is and was involved in hiding her, he could have killed her parents to protect her which would potentially turn her against him! Lots of possibilities, hope they do something a bit out of the box which is what the word is about Rian Johnson's script.

[Martoto]

I predict that if VIII does do something out of the box that blows minds and puts things from VII and before into a new perspective, people will still lament VII not explaining this or giving the background to that. Essentially, wanting to have been in the loop for whatever surprises VIII hits us with.

[StingingVelvet]

I really don't think Disney have the balls to make Rey a villain. It would be super cool to flip stuff like said above, I can picture the scenes of Kylo suffering from guilt over his father and letting it bring him back to Leia, but I just don't see them having Rey follow in the opposite direction. Would love to be proven wrong.

I remember a bunch of talk about Disney being happy with how much people loved Rey/Finn/Poe/Kylo and focusing more on them in the sequel script as a result. That same happiness and focus likely will make it hard for them to "ruin" them with large paradigm shifts.

[Geoff D]

^ I just hope that doesn't mean those characters are now set in stone, but that's big studios for you: they feel they've got a formula that works so they're damned well going to stick to it. Got to get the cash, got to get the mutha-****in' dough.

[JohnCarpenterFan]

The Force Awakens killed all optimism I had for upcoming Star Wars sequels. It made me realize that Star Wars has went the way of the MCU. These films are just going to get pimped out by the numbers every year, they're all going to be pretty much the same (derivative, flashy action films) and Disney knows that if they just make them "good enough" then people will be content.

All I care about at this point is the unaltered Original Trilogy and I'm hoping that we'll get it next year for the 40th anniversary. Then I'll have all the Star Wars I'll ever need.

[spanky87]

Originally Posted by StingingVelvet

I really don't think Disney have the balls to make Rey a villain. It would be super cool to flip stuff like said above, I can picture the scenes of Kylo suffering from guilt over his father and letting it bring him back to Leia, but I just don't see them having Rey follow in the opposite direction. Would love to be proven wrong.

I remember a bunch of talk about Disney being happy with how much people loved Rey/Finn/Poe/Kylo and focusing more on them in the sequel script as a result. That same happiness and focus likely will make it hard for them to "ruin" them with large paradigm shifts.

Um what? How is this a bad or unexpected thing. Those are the main characters of the new trilogy so of course they're going to focus more on them and further develop their characters. And I'm pretty sure that report was actually about Poe and his friendship with Finn. Of course people want to see an extension of their budding bromance from TFA.

Rey becoming evil is such a silly concept, especially after how her character is protrayed in TFA. There were no seeds planted for that to make sense, and they shouldnt just do it to appease your personal jaded and cynical view on Star Wars and modern Hollywood moviemaking in general. The Star Wars saga has always been a simple good vs. evil fairytale. You need to judge it on its own merits, not what you want it to be.

What I would like to see though is Rey having to tap into the dark side (but not fully turning) to defeat Kylo Ren in Episode IX and having her emotional conflicted as a result.

[Geoff D]

But Ren himself is bad yet struggles with his good side, and then of course there's what his granddaddy did before him. Sometimes it's not as "simple" as one might think...

[Donl1282]

Sorry this is off topic but does anyone know when Han Solo was born? Was he born before Episode 1 or sometime before Episode 1-4? He refers to Luke as kid so I think he must already been born by Episode 3.

[Geoff D]

Originally Posted by Donl1282

Sorry this is off topic but does anyone know when Han Solo was born? Was he born before Episode 1 or sometime before Episode 1-4? He refers to Luke as kid so I think he must already been born by Episode 3.

No idea but Lucas wanted to have a young Han Hanging With Mr Wookiee in Episode III before someone talked him out of it, thank God.

[Nailwraps]

29 years Before the Battle of Yavin (or in Canon terms, a decade before the proclamation of The New Order).

[Donl1282]

Originally Posted by Nailwraps

29 years Before the Battle of Yavin (or in Canon terms, a decade before the proclamation of The New Order).

Thanks!

[Donl1282]

Originally Posted by Geoff D

No idea but Lucas wanted to have a young Han Hanging With Mr Wookiee in Episode III before someone talked him out of it, thank God.

I did hear about that, I actually thought Chewbacca appearing among the Wookies is weird. Just too much of a coincidence that the wookie Yoda talks to happens to be the Chewbacca.

[Indiana Jonezzz...]

Originally Posted by spanky87

Um what? How is this a bad or unexpected thing. Those are the main characters of the new trilogy so of course they're going to focus more on them and further develop their characters. And I'm pretty sure that report was actually about Poe and his friendship with Finn. Of course people want to see an extension of their budding bromance from TFA.

Rey becoming evil is such a silly concept, especially after how her character is protrayed in TFA. There were no seeds planted for that to make sense, and they shouldnt just do it to appease your personal jaded and cynical view on Star Wars and modern Hollywood moviemaking in general. The Star Wars saga has always been a simple good vs. evil fairytale. You need to judge it on its own merits, not what you want it to be.

What I would like to see though is Rey having to tap into the dark side (but not fully turning) to defeat Kylo Ren in Episode IX and having her emotional conflicted as a result.

Rey becoming evil is not a silly concept. There were no concrete seeds planted in TPM that Anakin would become evil, it was mainly because of our knowledge of the story that we knew that. I think Rey's flashback with the saber and aggressively fighting Kylo could be used as an indicator IF that's where they choose to go with it.

I really don't think they will go this route, but maybe they want to do a version of the Anakin story where this time, the audience doesn't know the outcome, so Rey going bad would be a shock. They might want this trilogy to end on a dark note with Episodes 10, 11 and 12 fixing what happened in 7, 8 and 9 just like the original 6. I really have no idea why it's a silly concept, unlikely yes, but not silly.

[octagon]

Originally Posted by kidglov3s

You know the movie's super derivative when you need to differentiate it at such a level.

If Marvel is anything to go by we should expect more of the same. Hope everyone liked TFA because we're gonna get a dozen of it one after another.

Cool. We've been getting more or less the same Bond every other year or so for half a century now and that's worked out pretty well.

Originally Posted by Geoff D

Like I said, if Ep VIII fills in some of them gaps then I'll be back on board. I just don't want it to be like the prequels again, where you either have to do mental gymnastics to have it make sense or rely on loads of ancillary sources to piece it all together. Don't get me wrongo, I LOVE the Clone Wars show but some of that stuff in the last season should really, REALLY have been part of the prequels proper. Still, there are the spin-off movies too this time around.

I agree that at the end of the day there should be a coherent narrative without too many glaring gaps but I hope they resist the urge to cross every T and dot every I. I really liked the Sifo Diyas storyline in AotC and one of the things I liked most about it was that that thread was more or less left hanging.

We don't have to know how everything works or came to be or exactly how it all fits together. In fact, some things are better left unexplored. The biological underpinnings of the inheritability of force sensitivity and Darth Vader's attitudes toward sand come to mind.

And yeah, without rehashing the prequels I'll just say something along the lines of AotC could have been a decent Ep I and a lot of the stuff in The Clone Wars could have made a great Ep II.

Originally Posted by spanky87

There were no seeds planted for that to make sense, and they shouldnt just do it to appease your personal jaded and cynical view on Star Wars and modern Hollywood moviemaking in general. The Star Wars saga has always been a simple good vs. evil fairytale. You need to judge it on its own merits, not what you want it to be.

Pretty much agreed.

I mean, I see the appeal of sitting around musing that a dark, R-rated Star Wars movie or a Star Wars that 'shakes things up' could be really cool but what would we as fans really get out of that?

To go back to the Bond analogy, having Bond join Spectre and become the Bond villain in the next Bond movie might sound cool when fans are just shooting the shit but would we really want the franchise to go down that road?

Aside from a reveal/plot development (that could be cool but could just as easily come off as gimmicky and manipulative) what would we really get out an Evil Bond?

[Blu-21]

Originally Posted by Geoff D

No idea but Lucas wanted to have a young Han Hanging With Mr Wookiee in Episode III before someone talked him out of it, thank God.

A few of the criticisms with ep 1 and ep 2 was that they didn't connect enough with the OT, and yet by ep 3 Lucus went to far in this regard.

[spanky87]

Originally Posted by Geoff D

But Ren himself is bad yet struggles with his good side, and then of course there's what his granddaddy did before him. Sometimes it's not as "simple" as one might think...

Well, "simple" may have been me oversimplifying my argument a bit

There's certainly conflict within the characters, but in the end there's a decisive battle between good vs. evil, and good always triumphs. I mean, I can already imagine people moaning about Disney "playing it safe" when Episode IX ends with Rey, Luke and the Resistance defeating Kylo, Snoke and the First Order (and possibly a glimpse of Rey and Luke beginning to train the next generation of Jedi at Ach-To). That's how these kind of stories are, but it's all about the execution and not doing it the same as ROTJ. And I'm not saying I wouldn't welcome a change to the movie trilogy formula that Star Wars established in the 70s/80s and is still used today (as long as it's good), just saying that its not inherently bad if they do the expected, again, as long as the execution is good. I think the only way the aforementioned result won't happen is if they already have some grand plan for Episodes X-XII that immediately follows IX with Kylo and the First Order still at large. But I'm still hopefully optimistic that Kathleen Kennedy will stand up for the integrity of the Saga and fight against Bob Iger's proposals for another saga trilogy. Three trilogies, three generations is perfect for me.

But my point still remains on the subject of a paradigm shift between Rey and Kylo in this trilogy just to see something different as different isn't always good. I actually pondered this idea before I saw TFA but to me it just wouldn't work after seeing the characters and the events that transpired in that film. Nothing in Rey's character suggests someone who would believably turn evil. She doesn't have to do something as obvious as slaying a village of Tusken Raiders, but there needs to be some level of subtle foreshadowing and a character consistency so it doesn't seem like a plot twist the writers pulled out of their ass. She's one of the purest and most endearing heroes there is, much like Luke, and maybe it's because I'm not too cynical yet, but I like that about her. And you can't just have a mass murderer who killed his own father (and an iconic movie character at that) become the protagonist of a trilogy all of a sudden. Logically he would be apprehended and ultimately executed for his war crimes. Ya, I know about Vader but his redemption came at the end of the trilogy just before he died, and he didn't take over as the protagonist of the trilogy.

I don't understand the desire to see Kylo redeemed after what happened in TFA, especially anybody from the "TFA is a rehash" crowd, as his story arc would be too similar to Vader. I like the fact that he's scared of being seduced by the light side of the force and is desperately trying to eradicate any light that's still in him, and what he did in TFA went a long way to fulfilling that. I want to see more of that without redemption or helping the resistance to achieve victory in the end. I'd like to see him learn from history (emperor/vader) by killing Snoke (or setting up his demise) and overthrowing him as soon as he completes his training. That would be badass. Vader killed his master too, but this would be taking it to a whole other level. In TFA he starts off as a bit of a poser desperately trying to be like Darth Vader, and by the end of Episode IX I want him to have fully transformed into the baddest, most ruthless mother****er in the Saga without hope of redemption that a conflicted Rey has no choice but to kill.

[StingingVelvet]

Originally Posted by spanky87

Rey becoming evil is such a silly concept, especially after how her character is protrayed in TFA. There were no seeds planted for that to make sense, and they shouldnt just do it to appease your personal jaded and cynical view on Star Wars and modern Hollywood moviemaking in general. The Star Wars saga has always been a simple good vs. evil fairytale. You need to judge it on its own merits, not what you want it to be.

Damn man, tell me how you really feel!

Star Wars certainly ain't morally grey or anything, but I think there's enough complexity in Empire and some of the other films to perhaps allow for interesting twists and turns. Hell, Revenge of the Sith had the main character killing little kids. I don't think they've laid any groundwork for Rey to turn evil either, but I do hope the trilogy doesn't just end with her saving Kylo or killing him and then credits. That sounds boring.

[Markgway]

Better late than never...

Star Wars: The Force Awakens **½/4
Enjoyable, long-awaited sequel to The Original Trilogy should bring new fans into the fold, as well as supplying existing fans with the nostalgia they crave. It's not a great movie by any stretch, and good will sure goes a long way, but it's churlish to over-criticise a romp that in the era of dour self-importance tries to be simple fun. Nice to see Harrison Ford back in a familiar leading role, while newcomer Daisy Ridley makes a fine impression. Adam Driver is perhaps miscast, but Domhnall Gleeson gives the hammiest performance. Mark Hamill, despite outrageous second billing, appears for about 30 secs at the end; they should've left him unbilled this time. All the money's on the screen, but CGI will never replace the joy of practical effects in this viewer's mind. John Williams score is adequate, at best revisiting past themes. Oh, and the 12 certificate is harsh; this is easily PG material throughout. When this gets the same rating as Batman V Superman it's no wonder parents are confused.