Plus Liam Nesson has made a career of playing father figures in the years since 1999.
Well, he has that very particular set of skills.
Fence-climbing?:
Stranger
Neeson’s career arc has been weird. Back in 2005 or so, when Batman Begins came out, I thought he’d become the next Anthony Hopkins. Instead, he became the next Charles Bronson.
I keep hearing that James Earl Jones is not really doing the Vader voice, but that they used A.I. to use previous recordings of his to make new dialogue.
Is this true? The credits keep crediting him in the episodes.
Heard an interview with JEJ where he stated he’s doing the Vader voice this time around. He’s the one getting credit. If so, he sounds great for someone 91.
And yet they are being kind of vague about it themselves.
Binged the 5 episodes up until now and… it’s a pretty seriously mixed bag.
The good:
-all the acting, particularly Ewan and the young Leia actress
-lots of individual scenes and moments have been striking and memorable, both visually and emotionally
The bad:
-The plot doesn’t really hold together. Things just happen because the plot needs them to happen
-Lots of plot armor and/or badly edited sequences. Like, Obi-Wan is in the middle of a tense shootout on the rooftops with a bunch of bounty hunters, and third sister is closing in on him, then he turns around and force-catches Leia before she hits the ground, and is spends a ton of time lying at the edge of the roof face-down yelling at her. And… then he’s just fine. And the rebels keep getting away just by being in a spaceship and flying away
-Certainly pushing the boundaries of how everything fits in with pre-existing canon, although I’m mostly OK with that
Some open questions:
-What was so dramatic about third sister seeing the message at the end of episode 5? It’s not like Vader or any of the other inquisitors saw it. Hard to imagine there can be a big showdown next episode protecting young Luke given that we know his location is still unknown to the empire at the beginning of ANH
-So are we meant to believe that Vader knew she was a surviving youngling from the beginning? That can’t possibly make sense… he just allows a traitor who wants to assassinate him into his personally loyal gang of jedi-hunters, just on the off chance that she comes up with a plan to catch Obi-Wan that he can leverage?
It’s a Sith thing. You literally assume that everyone you work with is eyeing your back with a crosshair in mind. That’s the entire promotion system.
Everyone is out to kill you. Everyone. So a known traitor with a hankering for vengeance is actually an easy case, since (A) you know where that’s coming from, and (B) the long-nursed grudge and rage just under the surface tends to make this opponent weaker and less capable than a subtle, insidious manipulator.
That actually threw me for a minute. I started thinking this was some kind of Jedi Dream Fight, with Vader looking like what he’d look like if he never became Vader, in some kind of symbolism-thingy.
Yes. This. A lot. Its my biggest criticism. “You two take ObiWan in there…” “He’s secured…in there…by two guys.”
Christensen is an interesting case. He can play his Revenge of the Sith self fairly easily, he has aged well. But he aged noticeably between EpII and EpIII, in the former, he still has his baby fat. Maybe originally the flashback was going to be from the ROTS only and the AOTC era flashback idea came later and too late to de-age him fully. If you look at the Jedi Temple scenes, he looks basically the same as he did in 2004 or so when it was shot.
He was used in R1 and in Star Wars Rebels and in both his voice sounded off.
Here I believe they have used AI to make him sound closer to what he did in 1977.
How?
Lots of plot armor and/or badly edited sequences. Like, Obi-Wan is in the middle of a tense shootout on the rooftops with a bunch of bounty hunters, and third sister is closing in on him, then he turns around and force-catches Leia before she hits the ground, and is spends a ton of time lying at the edge of the roof face-down yelling at her. And… then he’s just fine.
He is fine because he gets Kumail Nanjani’s help to escape after that,
And the rebels keep getting away just by being in a spaceship and flying away
Like in the original trilogy at Tataoonie and at Hoth and at Bespin
-Certainly pushing the boundaries of how everything fits in with pre-existing canon, although I’m mostly OK with that
They haven’t contradicted anything
I’m watching Star Wars (the original from 1977), and Ben Kenobi says to Luke, “I haven’t gone by the name Obi-Wan since before you were born.”
Which is patently untrue. I’ve only heard him called Ben a couple of times.
Let’s say old Ben liked hyperbole.
Sure; but that was already untrue. Remember what Padmé said to Obi-Wan right after Luke was born?
“Hey, I found a way out of these shitty prequels?”
Sometimes exact accuracy isn’t what you’re going for.
“I haven’t gone by the name Obi-Wan since 10 years, 3 months, 5 days, and 17 hours after you were born” just doesn’t have the same zing.
He goes by Ben, everyone else still knows him as Obi Wan.
Jedi have a complicated relationship with truthfulness. At times they have been estranged …