My fanwank was even simpler. Hyper space ramming doesn’t work on shielded ships. It’s like a bug on a windshield. But hyper space tracking doesn’t work if the ship with the tracker has its shields up.
This also explains why the First Order ship was holding back - with its shields down, it can’t risk getting in range of the fleeing Resistance ship, so it hangs back and harries it with fighters.
From there: lose the Canto Bight subplot. Instead, do something like the first episode of the the Battlestar Galactica reboot, with Finn and the other Resistance pilots exhausting themselves holding off wave after wave of enemy fighters, interspersed with scenes in the bunkhouse where tensions rise as suspicions of a traitor on board who’s leaking their position abound. Finn disobeys orders and pursues fleeing fighters back to the flagship, where he’s finally in range to realize that its shields are down, giving Holdo the idea of ramming it.
Intersperse it with Rey and Finn both learning the ways of the Force with Luke Skywalker.
It may be true that the Extended Universe (I assume that is what you mean by EU) is diverse, but that does not really matter because the subset of people who have read it, or in some cases even knows it is exists, is not nearly as large as those who only know about the movies. I only read maybe two of the Extended Universe novels but did not have much interest in reading any further. Although there is an intersection between movie goers and novel readers it is not the majority of movie-goers. Her comments are correct in respect to majority of the people who are familiar with Star Wars.
I could make the same complaint if someone talked about James Bond in the same way. Haven’t they read the books and short stories? There are more than simple bond girls in them! I won’t complain about that, because based on the movies, it is clear that the portrayal of women was sexist in many ways.
Also, in another Bond analogy, the Last Jedi was to me, a bit like Quantum of Solace, that felt more like Jason Bourne movie than a James Bond movie. This was only a feel that I can’t quite explain, but it was missing some elements that made it part of that universe, and the Last Jedi is the same way. The Force Awakens, felt like a Star Wars movie as did the The Rise of Skywalker, flaws and all, while Last Jedi was something different. And I completely agree that they basically suffered from not having a plan, or a Feige.
That was the other annoying thing about ST; you weren’t allowed to not like them. Any reviewers that enjoyed the movies would paint detractors as super geeks complaining about minutia, or sexist bastards.
I don’t know much about star wars, and I didn’t even notice there was a feminist message in one or more of the movies.
I just thought they were bad movies.
The more we discuss the plot of these films the more obvious it is to me that the whole thing was built visually; just a set of cool-looking scenes and then something like a story got penciled in later.
Let alone having a cohesive thread across the trilogy.
They were originally intending to have a plan, when Michael Arndt was hired to write the first movie, and then plan out the rest of the trilogy for the other directors and writers. But Abrams fired him when he didn’t like what he was writing, so took over the script himself, in double-quick time, by cribbing from the original trilogy.
Kathleen Kennedy is a producer, and her job is not to make or approve creative decisions, even as the CEO of Lucasfilm. Her job is to support the creators she chooses, and fire them when they aren’t doing what is wanted (which is a bigger decision than just her own). The tumultuous time at Lucasfilm is not a sign of failure, but a sign of a good producer doing their job well. This sort of thing goes on at every studio, but we usually don’t hear the juicy details; however because they are so high profile and pop culturally significant, we over-analyse on every piece of negative news we hear coming out of Lucasfilm.
It’s not the producer’s job to make creative decisions, but it is her job to hire and fire the folks who make the creative decisions. If Arndt was going to be the guy with the plan, then Kennedy shouldn’t have allowed Abrams to fire him.
@icon, not to speak for @Guinastasia, but I think that her point is that they could, if they chose, have based the movies on any of the myriad options available from the EU, and so imported some of the diversity from there.
Nope, this is crap and the reason the DC universe continues to fall on its face or there have been a million Spiderman reboots. If you want to have multiple movies working together to tell a cohesive story you have to have a plan on what that story is. If Abrams doesn’t like that tell him to fuck off and bring in the director for movie number 2. As a producer her job should have been the overarching story and making sure that worked.
We’ve all read the stories about how in the Marvel universe there are clear rules about what you are allowed to do and not do but inside that box you’re allowed to play. Hell, Marvel has a color code so that types of powers are consistent across movies so the viewers can pick up who’s doing what easily. If Kennedy didn’t want that job her job as CEO was to hire someone to competently plot a story arch instead she shit the bed and rolled in it for 6 years.
This is incorrect. That is a creative decision, and not her department. I’m not defending the lack of plan as a good thing, it was a monumental cock up, I’m just pointing out your ire is aimed at the wrong person. I blame JJ Abrams’s refusal to take what The Last Jedi presented him with and run with it gloriously over a field of golden wheat. Instead he basically trashed it with a rusted tractor and a stampede of diarrhetic cows.
You seem to be comparing her to Kevin Feige. He is unique. There has never been a producer like him before, and though he is an excellent example of what to do, he is also atypical and it’s unrealistic to expect anyone else to mirror his success. In the words of William Goldman in reference to if a movie will be a hit, “nobody knows anything.”
Exactly. Mara Jade, for example, would’ve fit in perfectly. If they could bring Thrawn in, they could’ve fit her in.
And as I said, some of the movie plots WERE adapted from the EU. Darth Maul were basically adapted from the EU. (Isn’t Clone Wars now considered canon)?
And even if they didn’t, she could’ve at least acknowledged the fact that SW is a lot more diverse than they were making it out to be. At least give someone credit.
I agree that Mara Jade could have been a great protagonist; however, I think one problem with drawing from the Extended Universe is the desire of many people to see their old favorite characters played by the original actors and that necessarily limits some of the stories that could be told.
I don’t understand why she should. Should we give credit to the DCU movies simply because DC Comics have diverse heroes in the comics they publish? The same is true of Marvel, though they did have diversity from the beginning, but we could easily be saying the same thing, shouldn’t they get credit because Black Panther is published by Marvel? Of course not, unless those character are brought front in center into the movies, they might as well not exist.
I think the biggest problem with drawing from the EU is that most of it just wasn’t very good.
But after three movies over the course of three years, Luke, Leia, and Han’s stories were completed in 1983. Even back then it was time to move on to new characters with different stories. It was great to see the old gang back (at first) in supporting roles, but it was just so disappointing that they ultimately failed. I’d almost rather the Emperor had won.
I saw an old clip with Carl Sagan poking fun at Star Wars on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and he mentions the lack of diversity among the human population. I’m with you, you don’t get credit for diversity in Star Wars for what’s in the books you get it for what’s in the movies. While I’m not going to pillory George Lucas for making movies to the standards of the 70s and 80s, the lack of diversity in Star Wars was a running joke for years. How come there’s only one brother in the galaxy?
Oh, sure, Sturgeon’s Law, and all. But there’s an awful lot of EU. Even after you allow for the 90% that’s crap, there’s still plenty of material there in the 10% to draw from.
It’s the same thing with superhero comics. 90% of those are crap, too. But they don’t have a hard time finding the good stories, to adapt into movies.
I did forget about him. We laughed at the absurdity of saving an ice cream maker when facing destruction at the hands of the Empire. But he taught us that there’s no point to fighting if we don’t have something to live for. Ice cream gave us a reason to continue fighting.
I never had the feeling that I wasn’t supposed to root for the Jedi, but rather that they were more or less victims of their own success, in that the Jedi Council was indecisive and prone to introspection, and the Old Republic was similar; they’d enjoyed such a long stretch of peace and prosperity alongside the Jedi, that neither institution was able to even effectively perceive the Sith threat, much less pivot and deal with it.
I mean, you want Obi-Wan, Mace Windu, etc… to win, but you know they’re not going to. It’s tragic, and the whole bit about Anakin and the silly rules restricting him only intensify it- they point up how unprepared/complacent the Jedi Order and Council are, and how that’s going to be their downfall. I mean, we KNOW why Anakin does what he does, and how Palpatine gets his hooks into him, and it’s definitely tragic.
The prequels are basically the “Tragedy of Anakin” and as such, show the downfall of a good character to evil. It’s hard to do that sort of thing with unambiguously good and bad guys.
The big problem with the third series is that it’s not the story of Luke’s rise to being a Jedi Master, and nor is it the tragedy of Anakin, and doesn’t much tie into the previous stories either. It’s a half-assed retelling of Luke’s story, but grafted ONTO that story, and without all the continuity it had built up.
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