Do you have the same issue with the Marvel Movies? Those are just books transformed into movies too. Just like the comics the vast majority of the world has never read the Zahn novels and to them it would be completely novel.
I love the OG Thrawn books. But that version of the New Republic has next to nothing in common with the clusterfuck that was portrayed in the ST. So the only way those stories could be adapted is by decanonizing the ST entirely.
If they choose to bring in the Thrawn character (I haven’t watched Rebels) they’ll basically be reimagining him entirely. At which point I’m not sure it really matters if the next big bad is Thrawn or some other Empire baddy. What made the Thrawn Trilogy great wasn’t that character specifically, it was the whole story. He was a good character but not a singular one.
As was mentioned upthread, he was name checked in The Mandalorian so any story he’s in could overlap with this series just fine. Mando is just a gunslinger on the outskirts of the civilized world. Any number of machinations could be happening with the New Republic and Thrawn and his remnants and Mando and Boba probably wouldn’t take much notice.
On a separate topic, it was mentioned that the Holdo Maneuver was one of the coolest SW scenes ever. I agree that it was a brilliant bit of spectacle and the theater gasped. Amazing cinematography and sound design. BUT the biggest issue is that the underlying premise was so fucking stupid and it breaks one of the most important “rules” of the SW universe. First, the entire situation relied on the starship running out of gas. I mean, never once was fuel a topic in a previous film or series, and it’s also so freaking mundane. Worse was the magic tracking of a ship through hyperspace. This is one of the core ideas laid out in the OT, that you can escape if you can get to hyoerspace. It’s a rule that shouldn’t have been broken. And narratively it will make future story telling so much harder since it’s not realistic that this is some kind of one-off device. So yeah, that spoils that entire scene.
Plus, why has that never been done before? It’s already been established that hyperdrives are cheap enough to install even on one-man fighters like X-wings. If you can really wreck a ship that dramatically just by hyperjumping into it, why not make a missile with a hyperdrive on it? A missile that costs as much as an X-wing is an excellent trade for an entire Star Destroyer.
Heck, we already had one scene where a damaged X-wing deliberately crashed into a Star Destroyer, in an attempt to damage it. The best that pilot was able to do was to aim for some windows. Even allowing for the fact that an X-wing is smaller than Holdo’s flagship, you’d think that the pilot would have thought of increasing the damage he did that way.
I like the way the webcomic Darths and Droids (visuals are screencaps from the movies, but the premise is that the story was actually the result of an RPG campaign) is handling it: They’ve already established that something like the Holdo Maneuver is impossible. Try to hyperjump when your path is obstructed by a solid object, and the jump just doesn’t work, and nothing happens. At least, for an ordinary hyperdrive… but the heroes have found an experimental advanced hyperdrive, which apparently does allow for things like that. They’re still only on Episode VII, but when they get to that, it’s clear that it’s going to be that experimental drive in action. It’s probably also going to be used for the Falcon jumping inside of the Starkiller’sPeace Moon’s shields.
Well, in The Rise of Skywalker, they do kinda explain that in a couple of lines of throwaway dialogue.
Friend of J.J. Abrams/Random Pilot #23 asks something like, “Why don’t we just use the Holdo maneuver?” And (I think) Poe replies something like, “That was a million-to-one shot”.
It kind of makes sense if that’s literally true - that you’d have to launch a million hyperdrive rams to have a realistic shot of replicating the Holdo Maneuver, so no one ever tries it. But then it doesn’t make any sense why Holdo tried it. Her whole plan hinges on that maneuver working. And this is right after Our Heroes’ thousand-to-one shot to disable the pursuing fleet doesn’t work.
It’s completely inconsistent with established canon for that maneuver to be practical, and if it’s that easy, all space battles going forward should be over in a few seconds after exchanging hyperdrive rams. But if it’s a million-to-one shot, it’s completely inconsistent with Holdo’s character and the overall narrative structure of the movie.
I actually liked a lot of the things The Last Jedi did, but while I agree the scene was cinematically brilliant, story-wise I thought it was one of the single biggest missteps in the history of the franchise. And then it just gets handwaved away in a couple of lines of dialogue in the next movie.
The whole sequel “trilogy” was a mess, is what I’m saying (and of course, I’m far from the first to do so). I put “trilogy” in scare quotes because each movie seemed to go out of its way to ignore or undo plot and character developments that occurred in the previous movie, so it wasn’t even really a trilogy.
I read the Thrawn trilogy years ago, and I think he’s one of the most overrated characters in any fandom ever.
(mild spoilers for decade-old-books coming:)
So he can look at a piece of art made by someone from some planet, and by studying that one piece of art, deduce that any general from that planet would automatically fall into a particular kind of military trap, and then he commits his entire fleet to that, and it works?
(a) that’s not how planets work
(b) that’s not how art works
(c) that’s not how militaries work
(d) having an adversary who’s just so ridiculously smart that he is ALWAYS, by definition, as a foundational part of his character; one step ahead of you isn’t good storytelling. It’s just tedious and frustrating.
I remember that scene even today, and could never figure whether the author meant that literally (which would be atomically insane) or if Thrawn was meant to be making stuff up to tease Pellaeon*. [I think it was Pellaeon he was talking to, at the time, but that part I don’t recall.]
I read it a long time ago, so I might well be forgetting key details… but at the time it didn’t read to me as anything other than sincere. And as I recall, he did in fact do the battle the way he said he was going to do the battle, and it worked out for him, so… not sure what the point of “I got an extensive psychological profile of the opposing general and used it to suss out a weakness, but I’m going to impress someone who I really have no need to impress by pretending it was some mumbo jumbo about art instead” would be.
I’ve never read them, but maybe he got information about the opposition from many different sources, and the art is just what he uses as a “for example”, because it’s an easy thing to point out?
What if, without the track-them-through-hyperspace bit in effect, the Holdo maneuver is wildly unlikely to connect; but if it is in effect, why, then, it’s like the ships are tied together by a string?
Maybe. Except that it’s an explicit plot point that drives much of the movie that no one in the Rebel fleet thinks that sort of technology is even possible. How would Admiral Holdo know that the “tether” would work that way?
Of course, we don’t really know anything about Admiral Holdo. Maybe before joining the Resistance, she was a hyperspace engineer/physicist? And the theory of such tracking technology is fairly well understood, but it was always considered a practical impossibility? So she knows if such a “tether” actually exists, it must be usable to enable a hyperspace ram?
That’s a lot of fanwanking and handwaving that isn’t even vaguely hinted at in the movie itself…
I tell you what. That is the cleverest, least ridiculous, least likely to break the canon and the future of space battles explanation I have yet heard. If they were going to have someone fix the Holdo maneuver with a couple lines of dialogue, it should have been along those lines: that the unique situation of the way the tracking beacon works creates some kind of hyperspace canyon between them, and so precisely links the tracker to the vessels being tracked in an otherwise impossible way. A line of dialogue acknowledging the tracker (which they may well have had—I don’t recall how the characters other than Finn responded to the realization they had been tracked through hyperspace), a line of dialogue later from C3PO translating for R2D2 as R2 explains he’s discovered how the tracker works and that there is no escape, and then an “ah ha!” moment for Admiral Holdo.
Would that Rian had thought of that. Or cared to think an explanation was necessary.
ETA: As an added bonus, it could make it so they (writers) never have to worry about the tracker technology again, either. New technology opens up new, unexpected and catastrophic vulnerability (like an exhaust port on the Death Start-style vulnerability), and it is exploited such that they don’t dare try to use that technology again for at least a little while, till they can sort through that vulnerability.
I’m still confused why the first order ship couldn’t catch them yet the Resistance could send a ship to a planet, hang out for a while, and come back. Seems like it would have made more sense to just bring back the fuel that they needed.
A recent story arc in Doctor Aphra (taking place during ESB) is about…an experimental advanced hyperdrive.
The problems with The Last Jedi are the problems with The Force Awakens. Now, I don’t like defending J. J. Abrams, because I really dislike his style. Very flashy but empty. However, I do have to give him credit for the following: he gets hired to do a job and he does that job.
Disney hired him to make a return-to-form Star Wars movie, and he picked up pieces from the older films and merged them into The Force Awakens. I don’t think he ever had a plan for what happens after that, because Disney didn’t either, and they weren’t paying him to do that. If they were, he would have produced. But there’s not the slightest shred of evidence I’ve ever been able to find that indicates that anyone at Disney thought about the “and then what?” question.
I’ve seen many people suggest that Abrams was being whiny and petulant with reversing a bunch of the stuff Rian Johnson did, which I don’t buy for a moment. [Full disclosure: I haven’t seen, and don’t intend to see, Rise of Skywalker. Doesn’t mean I don’t know what goes on in it.] He did RoS because Disney was paying for a movie and wanted some things to happen, so he made the movie they were paying for. Unfortunately, Disney still didn’t have a clue and now Abrams had to pull some kind of resolution out of the mystery box he created. I don’t sympathize, because Abrams sure as heck got paid for it*. Still, he wasn’t ever going to be able to come up with anything good from trying to sort out Rian Johnson’s response to his own film. The two just have completely different sensibilities.
*Actually, he seems like an artistic Han Solo to me. I can just imagine his sneering at Rian Johnson or Kathleen Kennedy, “I’m not in it for you, Princess. I expect to be well paid!”
As for Rian Johnson, well, the best I can say is that he can craft a good scene but mostly has no sensibility for the larger scope. The problem I have with his work is that he never transports the audience to a dreamlike state, but things just happen according to dream logic. That is, Johnson wants certain things to happen, so… they do. They don’t really have to make sense nor is it intended to necessarily create a example for later or define the internal logic of a story.
This just really doesn’t gel well with Sci-Fi, whether it’s more dramatic (Star Wars) or detail-oriented (Star Trek, Babylon 5) - maybe something like Inception, where logic doesn’t entirely matter. Likewise, Johnson never seems to entirely think through his decisions, i.e., he completely humiliates Hux in the opening scenes but expects the audience to take him seriously later on. Rose is a completely madwoman who is tasering rebels in her introduction, but no guys it’s cool she’s completely a hero later on. (And also she can break the laws of time and space at will, I guess, because she’s “saving what she loves”.) Johnson doesn’t understand or think through many of the subjects he’s discussing or considering and tends to write characters in one way but show them as the complete opposite, and that’s not just from his Star Wars work.
That said, I also have to give Abrams and Johnson a break because, again, Disney had no idea what they wanted, and they didn’t have any kind of coherent plotline, and on top of all that nonsense, hired these guys (Abrams twice) with unrealistically short time frames to script everything. Lucas famously sorted through his ideas for Star Wars over years or refinement. And yet, even by Hollywood standards, Abrams and Johnson had no time to think through everything necessary to a good plot. So they rushed the least industry-driven step in the process so the bloody CGI could look nice.
And that, really, says it all. because the last few Star Wars movies ultimately were not meant to be anything more than some nice CGI and getting into a movie theater to eat popcorn for two hours. That’s the part Disney cared about, and that’s the part that got done. And it showed.
Arguing over the various plot points or character beats is beside the point, because Disney clearly didn’t care, until they realized they’d just wrecked a multi-billion-dollar franchise and had to bring in fresh talent to sort through it all. We’ll see how things go in the long run, but I’m not entirely hopeful. Disney seems only barely willing to tolerate creative risks witth his property and never likes to admit mistakes, and they don’t currently have someone really running the whole show as a unit like Kevin Feige does with Marvel.
This is why Kathleen Kennedy should have been fired during the first screening of RoS. Disney laid out a perfect blueprint for Star Wars in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and she ignored it all in favor of the rule of cool with no plan for the future.
I agree the directors aren’t at fault and there is plenty of room for artistic liscense and interpretation inside of telling a cohesive story. You can look at the variability of the marvel movies to see how that can work. Not every movie has to be a home run (Thor 2) but as long as it advances the larger story and makes you wonder what’s next you can build huge momentum.
I’ve heard that Johnson actually asked what the overall plan was, so he could make sure that he stayed within it, only to be told that there wasn’t one.
Both directors could probably have done better with the messes they found themselves with, but yeah, it wasn’t their fault that they found themselves in messes.
Gee, I heard the ST sucked because of all the SJW pandering, and if they’d had more white men and fewer minorities and girls, it would’ve been better.
Did you hear that anywhere in this thread?
Nope, elsewhere. Usually by those commenting on said opinions negatively. But it does seem like some folks think that some things, like Finn’s (lack of) role in episode 9, might have been influenced by similar internet complaints.
Well see, that’s another reason why fans of the EU/Legends got upset about Kennedy’s comments about SW not being so diverse, or having any strong female characters other than Leia or Padme. That’s so not true, and while I understand that not everyone wants to read the books, to just retcon them all away like that and then declare that “oh, there’s no diversity in SW?” That’s just insane.
It has nothing to do with SJWs here. Some of them could’ve been made canon – even as new characters in the movies, if done right.
(Although in the SW universe I imagine race isn’t so much a thing as species is. Nobody probably blinks an eye at a relationship between a black person and a white person, but a human and a Twilek, or a Bothan and a Gotal? THAT would be a big no-no! The whole theme, I believe, is that the Empire is seriously anti-alien and has a human supremacy bias.
(I believe Aayla Secura, from the prequel trilogy, was originally from the EU, and George Lucas liked her so much he put her in the movies.)