I think it would have been better if Fett’s fight choreography made him more of a lunging brick than a spinning, twirling martial artist type. Yeah, he might be outmaneuvered by a fighter who is quicker on his toes but when Fett starts landing the blows, you know the other guy’s now in trouble. He got the Beskar too, he’s going to be protected against attacks.
Now I am envisioning Master Luke’s construction crew as weird morphing cows.
Well, I just finished last night and I liked it, but not as much as the Mandalorian. I think the biggest problem with the show however, is that they essentially already made a Boba Fett show with The Mandalorian. Mando at the start of the show is basically the same character as Boba from ESB. So when they wanted to make an actual Boba Fett show they had to change up the character so as not to do the same thing.
Didn’t the Jawas steal his armor off him after he crawled out of the Sarlacc? And he didn’t just blaster his way out - he used his flamethrower.
I agree with the rest of the shit slung, though.
And I’m a bit bummed that they blew up Jennifer Beals. She was potentially more interesting than the main characters.
And their vespas didn’t go fast. I guess it was just bad special effect work, but in scenes when they were supposed to be going fast, they appeared to be moving about as fast as a brisk jog.
I thought Episode 7 was horrifyingly bad, WAY below the standard set by the preceding ones, which weren’t good but they weren’t terrible. This was terrible, just amateurish. The “I Am Now Performing Exposition” speech by Ming-Na Wen explaining how their defenses were set up was some of the worst dialogue in SW history and a classic example of telling not showing. The final battle was 20 minutes long and amazingly boring and not well directed at all.
Spot on. Ep .7 was so, so bad. Even Mando couldn’t fix it. It was the encapsulation of everything that was wrong with this show. Honestly, I’m shocked that Favreau and Filoni were EPs on this junk, they should have higher standards. Maybe they thought they were being good bosses by leaving Rodriguez alone on the assumption that he was competent.
“We’re pinned down by blaster fire! Wait, look - re-enforcements! Quick, get over here so you can be pinned down by blaster fire with us!”
Repeat x5 times.
I keep The Brothers Brick in my RSS feed - they’re a LEGO blog and feature lots of custom builds from people with much more creativity than me. They’ve had quite a few cool builds from this show. I particularly like the “jet pack jumps” build from today.
There were a lot of situations where people were doing basically nothing; spending screen time on Amy Sedaris standing in a doorway looking concerned, but not giving Amy Sedaris anything to DO, is just dreadful writing, editing, direction or both.
A really good multi-character action sequence has multiple things going on in parallel, moving back and forth in a way that explains to the viewer how these simultaneous activities relate together now or will very soon. (The greatest example of all time is Fury Road.) In this long sequence, generally speaking only one thing is happening at once. Rarely are Boba Fett or Mando apart doing different things. The Vespa kids don’t really accomplish anything (and aren’t really characters at all. I have no idea what Sophie Thatcher’s job in the show was except to be the attractive young woman.)
Everyone has a dog, and boy for Jon Favreau this was it. It felt like they gave him one afternoon to plan the show out.
The Star Wars universe is so bloated with content that the mission brief isn’t to tell a new story anymore but rather just make something happen. At least they didn’t just blow up another Death Star.
I mentioned upthread that it seemed to me like Favreau had that really cool iconic visual of Boba Fett taking Jabba’s throne, pitched that to D+, and then…just really didn’t have any idea where to go from there. But by that point, he was already committed to delivering something, so we got…this. I very seriously wonder if that’s actually what happened.
As a completely amateur micro-scale content creator, I know that’s happened to me any number of times. I love running tabletop RPGs, and I love coming up with campaigns and world-building. A number of times, I’ve come up with what seemed to me like a super-cool campaign/setting premise with a ton of potential adventures, and sold the other players on it, and got them excited and invested in their new characters and the possibilities of this amazing new world. And I’ve actually delivered enough times that they trusted that I knew what I was doing, and I genuinely thought I did. And then, once we actually started playing, I belatedly realized I was spinning my wheels and just trying to fill up time while I figured something out, and not really coming up with anything. And the whole thing wound up being kind of a disappointing mess for everyone.
This really seemed to me like the cinematic equivalent of that.
Do one job and do it well.
Aka, how George wrote the prequel trilogy.
It almost seems like the original pitch was something like this:
“Boba Fett has taken over as the crime lord of Mos Espa. Tired of his long years as a hired thug, he decides to rule through respect rather than fear. Unfortunately, he doesn’t know how to be anything but a bounty hunter and Fennec Shand doesn’t know how to be anything but an assassin. We watch as Boba and Fennec repeatedly overplay their hands, underestimate their foes, and eventually lose everything. I call it The Fall of Boba Fett. It ends with Boba Fett escaping Mos Espa to become a sometimes friend and sometimes foe of Din Djarin.”
To which Disney replied, “Cool, cool. Go ahead and write that but right before you start filming we’re going to change our mind about the “fall” part and just have you make him super cool all the time.”
Part of the problem might be that they didn’t want to have a series from the point of view of a villain.
Good villains have always been a big part of what makes the best parts of Star Wars work. Imagine the original film, if it only had Tarkin, and not Vader.
Boba Fett is supposed to be a bad guy. He works for criminals and the Empire. He should never have been made into a good guy. This show should have been about Boba Fett kicking ass and taking over the underworld of Tatooine. This should have been the Star Wars equivalent of the seasons of The Wire when Marlow decided to take over the drug trade in Baltimore.
I mean, Han Solo worked for Jabba as well. And Mando took jobs for the Imperial Remanent.
And their redemption arcs were essential to the story, and well done. Fett’s redemption was poorly done, and kind of contradicts the whole “become a crime lord” story.
I’m not sure Boba Fett intended to be a crime lord, instead of simply a feudal lord. The boundary is blurry and Jabba, being a Hutt, was definitely on the criminal side of the line. But Fett maybe wanted to be daimyo for the power and not the money.
How criminal was Boba Fett? Bounty hunters are a regulated profession in Star Wars. In the original trilogy, his target Han Solo is a criminal wanted for smuggling, insurrection, and nerf herding. Do we see Fett do anything criminal in canonical sources?
“War criminal” might be a better descriptor, since he worked for a legitimate but objectively evil government.
I doubt very much Disney+ would have tolerated that. More’s the pity.