starwars.com wrote an article officially explaining how Palpatine returned, somehow.
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I mean see Rocky in Creed, Daniel LaRusso in Cobra Kai.
Luke isn't just a failure. He's a selfish coward and even his re-entry in the 3rd act of TLJ as a "hologram" really doesn't fully undo that.
In a way Luke is worse than Anakin, Anakin got tricked/manipulated into the Dark Side after thinking Padme and their child is presumably dead. Luke knows better, has the example of his father in front of him, knows how Yoda and Obi-Wan suffered to make sure he and his sister were kept safe, has seen far bigger danger than Snoke/Kylo Ren fall (Palpatine), etc. etc.
Yet Luke willingly chooses to abandon his own sister, his friend who risked his life for Luke's multiple times, turn his back on everything Yoda/Obi-Wan taught him, etc. etc.
I just think it was over the top. This dude even KNOWS 100% that there's life after death, he can literally commune with the dead and yet he's still afraid or cynical.
daniel larusso??
you mean the guy that used his influence to try to kick out of the johnny of the dojo by manipulating the landlord??
dont fool yourself, Daniel is a fucking asshole all the first season.
He is petty towards Johnny and Johnny alone because of their past rivalry, but we also see in KK that Daniel is reconnecting with his love of karate and the teachings of Mr. Miyagi and how he badly needed that back in his life.
They didn't totally make the character a 180, this is not a character who would be a jerk to the average person, he's still "nice".
Yeah I disagree with both the read on LaRusso and Luke. They're very different for very different reasons.
LaRusso is a stuck up punk coasting on a minor feat from decades ago. Luke literally saved the galaxy but comes to understand the Jedi order is deeply flawed, arrogant, and stupid. He very clearly explains his actions in TLJ and they make perfect sense.
One tries to cancel young kids based on his pettiness. The other follows the profile of another highly disillusioned Jedi and becomes a hermit.
LaRusso is a stuck up punk coasting on a minor feat from decades ago. Luke literally saved the galaxy but comes to understand the Jedi order is deeply flawed, arrogant, and stupid. He very clearly explains his actions in TLJ and they make perfect sense.
One tries to cancel young kids based on his pettiness. The other follows the profile of another highly disillusioned Jedi and becomes a hermit.
Man....even the force doesn't have this kind of reach.
I think that scene is, above all else, what solidified for me that atleast a significant portion of the SW fandom just...legitimately do not care about story. They just want a live action action figure.
I mean there's nothing shown of LaRusso that implies he's really an "asshole". He's successful as a businessman, he has a loving family, he looks after the people who work for him.
The "Star Wars sequel trilogy" equivalent of LaRusso would be someone who abandoned his family as a dead beat dad, is a homeless drunk, and doesn't want to hear anything about karate. (which is kinda Johnny, lol). But if you push LaRusso's character that far, I don't think the audience, or at least large chunks of it would come along for that ride.
That's simply not a version of the character a lot of people want to see.
It's too simplistic to say Luke just vanished and left his friends. He was an old man before closing off, he was training kids and doing whatever else before then, like decades. Him leaving was perfectly fine in the end and let's be honest, the whole TFA premise and ending didn't leave any wiggle room beyond what TLJ did, new trilogy was just overly disappointing and took the wrong approach, it's not fan service to want to see the band back together, can't believe we didn't get that, you don't need to film garbage to make that happen, it can be good. Mando scene isn't the right one either, I really don't enjoy Mando that much.
If nothing else, he's a successful car salesman.
KK's world is more unrealistic than SW if he has his hands clean in that industry.
Yeah and even that makes sense, Miyagi giving Daniel a car as a birthday gift in the first movie being an important bonding moment, makes sense he would have a love of cars, he's not just randomly a car dealership owner, it's a nice nod to the first movie.
The Daniel LaRusso in Cobra Kai is a fairly natural extension of what the character would be when he grew up. Same with Johnny. That's why the show works. The audience is not suspending disbelief over any of that.
I don't think you know what that term means, unless you think there is a Daniel LaRusso in real life that was a karate champion caught by a mystic martial artist and is now a car salesman
It is using nothing from the ST, expect vague references. In lore there is a 30 year gap between Return and Last Jedi, that is what is going explored in these shows. If Disney actually made a new show with The First Order as villians for example, then I would see it, but so far that is not the case.
Literally the main motivation of both the villains and heroes are directly related to the backstory of the ST. The empire remnant needed Grogu because his blood contributed to the research that eventually led to Snoke and ofc, Mando's main goal was getting Grogu to the Jedi. You know, that thing Luke was up to around this time? It's ST content. And you just deal with that. I don't like the prequels but that doesn't mean that the clone wars isn't prequel content.
I actually have the show on right now ... if anything I'm seeing how well written it is.
The first scene with LaRusso he offers to fix Johnny's car for free and let him save face by saying he would do this to give his mechanics experience, give him a discount on a new car, and gives him a free bonsai tree. Sure they he kind of ribs Johnny about their past, but he's also complimentary in saying Johnny was the toughest guy in his high school and the fight between them was very close.
We see little nods to the original movies straight away here, Daniel becoming a car deal owner makes sense given we see he has a love for cars and fixing up cars in the first movie. The bonsai tree shows he's still connected to Miyagi and Okinawian tradition.
In the second episode we see he's now part of a country club, a clever reversal from the original movie, but he doesn't really feel at home there. He comes home to find his daughter is having a party with the "cool kids" at school and he doesn't like that she's becoming one of the kids that were bullying him.
There's a scene later where we see him reminisce about training his daughter as a child and he is teaching her the same things Mr. Miyagi taught him, word for word.
Daniel is very much recognizable, I think Ralph Macchio even said when was pitched the idea for Cobra Kai, he didn't want to do a take on the character where it just flipped him as the total villain, he wanted the character to still be recognizable and truthful to the character in the previous movies.
Every one of the first 4 or 5 scenes for Macchio in Cobra Kai has a nice subtle nod to the original movies while also showing the character is now a grown man and not a kid.
If only we had gotten the star wars trilogy the trailers promised
miscrave.com
The Sequel Trilogy We Were Promised for Star Wars Episode VII The Force Awakens » MiscRave
Resouce to the rule of cool whether it's Music, Tech, Games, Animation or Continuity, if it's odd, it's here.
miscrave.com
Ah yes. The "the disconnected set of ideas I'll refer to as a movie in my head based on vague trailers is better than what we got" method of engaging with media. 🙃If only we had gotten the star wars trilogy the trailers promised
The Sequel Trilogy We Were Promised for Star Wars Episode VII The Force Awakens » MiscRave
Resouce to the rule of cool whether it's Music, Tech, Games, Animation or Continuity, if it's odd, it's here.
The Force propelled her into the right spot and made her realize the solution.So is there any explanation for this shit?
Yeah, you don't know.
Okay, so here is how it is: suspension of disbelief has nothing to do with how in-character you think a character is. It's about simply the act of accepting you are watching a fictionalized performance of narration. Every piece of fiction, no matter how 'realistic', like the Wire, never happened and thus, when you sit down and watch it, you are accepting that you are going to pretend that Daniel LaRusso is a real person whose truly interacting with the world he's in. That's suspension of disbelief.
As for what you just wrote, to be honest, I don't really care because I find this whole Daniel LaRusso thing to be a farce, but to throw you a bone and take you seriously, I wouldn't say that anything you're talking about has anything to do with believability.
You keep talking about these 'nods' to the movie the series makes. That makes things less believable, not more, because the vast majority of people end up in careers that have fuck all to do with what they wanted as kids or were doing as kids. If they wanted to be believable about Danny's job, he would be doing something totally unrelated to what he did as a kid. He'd be a chef or financial analyst or a vetrinarian or a travel guide, whatever. Or, btw, there is a significant amount of people that were doing good as kids and yes, their life has fallen apart and now struggle with alcoholism or whatever, so THAT is realistic too, for that matter.
So, what you are talking about, with these nods? It has fuck all to do with believability.
What you want, and what you are describing, is deriving satisfaction from KK series from providing, it's is nostalgia. "Oh my god, Danny is a car sales man, which is connected to the first movie, that I saw when I was a kid! How beautiful!" It's narratively satisfying because that's what you know of Danny's life, his relationship with Miyagi, pays off in Danny's later life, etc. It's the same reason why you have tons of kids/YA stories where the love interest end up together and stay together, even though the vast, vast majority of people that end up married tend to marry someone they never knew in school. But that's not narratively satisfying to the audience of that genre, because it feels random to say "And then Harry Potter married Christine Smaultz, who he met 8 years after the end of the series" as the epilogue because that feels random. Which it is, because life is random. It doesn't do "nods" to the past.
And there's nothing wrong with narrative satisfaction, but it's far from realistic, so stop telling me how much believability to you didn't have to suspend, because you very much did.
Anyway, Luke's character arc in TLJ was one of the best thing SW ever did.
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I mean Mark Hamil himself pretty much literally said he himself had to suspend belief to portray this version of Luke in the sequels trilogy.
There was always going to be a large amount of the audience that wasn't going to go along with this take on the character.
It just is what it is.
Bottom line too is Karate Kid fans when you talk to them or hear their interactions online are over the moon with Cobra Kai almost across the board, so obviously something went very right there. Star Wars fans and this sequel trilogy .... well the end reception kinda speaks for itself.
VII was able to skate by by keeping the character of Luke ambiguous, since he's really not in the movie, it's left to the audience to decide what the character is at that point. Once the movies themselves had to define him, the biggest Star Wars shit storm since Jar Jar erupted.
It is that it is what it is but what I am trying to communicate is that you should probably know what the "it" is in the saying of it is what it is is because if you don't then you'll be saying it is what it is, but it actually isn't.
Anyway, I've always found this notion strange. I enjoy Kobra Kai too, but I don't get any special joy knowing other fans enjoy it too. Like, good for them, but what is it to me? And if it were different and everyone but me hated KK, I wouldn't mind that either. So, It bothers me none that minority of fans don't like TLJ for bad reasons.
And you'd appear to be more intellectually honest if you didn't conflate dislike of TLJ with dislike of the sequel trilogy. Most people who don't like the ST is because TRoS crashed any meaning TLJ had into the ground. Which sucks, but it doesn't support the notion that TLJ's Luke had anything wrong with him.
That's after four decades of co-signing EU material and then being shocked that it wasn't gonna be a derivative of that in TLJ because the movie had something to say other than Luke being a badass MF who did everything perfectly and loved happily ever after in between deflecting at-at bolts with his lightsaber.
he then went on to co-sign what they did with Luke Skywalker after seeing the final product. But people ignore that part.
I mean, it's absolutely fair here. The reason shit like Palpatine returning is a direct consequence of JJ not being able to creatively work from TLJ's ending.
You can't talk about TRoS without acknowledging how it failed to be a legacy to TLJ.
Sometimes it's not wrong to just give the audience what they want. This is a 7th/8th/9th Star Wars film, if they wanted to do a trilogy that was going in a very different direction and doing different things, then that should have been established firmly in not only TFA, but like the first 15 minutes of TFA.
Sequel trilogy was all over the place, you can't be knee deep into your second film still trying to figure out what the trilogy is about.
And I don't think the idea of "crazy Luke" is all on RJ, it's Lucas' idea, and I just think it probably was a bad idea. It wasn't all that compelling, it's not very believable that Yoda or Anakin wouldn't have reached out to him before that point where he (predictably) decides to finally do the right thing after a 5-minute Yoda pep talk anyway.
It's not even he was a broken version of himself, he's just a full on coward. To ditch your sister and friends in that situation when they've gone to bat for you multiple times and leave them to deal with the situation is profoundly cowardly and selfish. A more jaded, disillusioned version of the character, OK, but that was waaaaaay over the top.
Then again we're still talking about The Last Jedi several years after the fact, and not…the thematic importance of the Luke Skywalker scene or the Vader hallway scene. 🤔 Sometimes. It's ok to not just write movies as if they were written by redditors. Audiences are never in anyway shape or form obligated to get a specific outcome or narrative direction. High key the most praised SW novel atm is being praised mostly for that very reason because of how it so expertly subverts any expectation the audience may have had going in.
That's being generous. We're pounding red chunks into the mud by now...
You can do either/or, there is a skill (high degree actually) of being able to what a film like Creed does which is to reinvent the Rocky story in a fresh way but also stay faithful to the tenants of the characters and story themes. Cobra Kai also.
It's actually probably harder to do that, doing something "new" you can just write a new slate and do whatever you want.
I do think though when even the actor playing the character says they don't believe this version of the character, I think you are writing from a point of plot convenience, not from a place that fosters satisfying drama.
Luke needs to be on a island really because .... well they couldn't really ever figure out where to put him in Episode VII (confirmed even by the script's original writer).
That's the thing is that Luke in the last Jedi is way more faithful to what that character was than the idea of perfect Jedi master Luke who's basically Yoda but Luke. Luke was always in over his head when it came to the real shit. And his reactions and lack of perfection are what make him much more compelling than his old EU self.
To be fair, the Vader hallway scene is arguably one of the most iconic moments of the whole Disney SW era. No one's writing essays about it (at least, not favorable essays about it lol) but it's undoubtedly one of the most memorable and buzzed about things to come out of this run of movies.
I don't think so, even Mark Hamill has said he disagrees with it, so it is what it is.
Even just plausibly, why doesn't Yoda show up like 2-3 years earlier to give Luke the same freaking speech that causes Luke to "snap out of it"? Did Anakin not even bother to try?
It stretches believability knowing what we know of the universe and the character by that point. He's that depressed over death? Yet he also knows with 100% certainty that death is nothing but a transitionary phase to being one with the Force?
He needs to be stuck on that island because the writers couldn't figure out what to do with him in Episode VII, not because it's truthful to the character. If he was in VII he would overshadow Rey, direct from Michael Arndt himself. RJ was just kinda handed the grenade and had to make sense out of a silly plot device.
What about when actors playing the characters then come out in support of the interpretation, stating they didn't see what the director was going for at the time of filming but now sees that's the best thing they could have done with teh character?
*disagreed
Past tense.
Then he actually played the part and saw the movie. He mentions this in the same interview where he said he disagreed with Rian initially.
The problem I think arises from "it's the best the writer could do given the situation" is that it's a situation borne out of narrative laziness. Three different writers couldn't figure out how to put Luke into the story, and turned him into a plot Maguffin instead ... VIII was always going to have it's hands tied by that game of hot potato. It was never going to end up well in all likelihood and whataya know.
VII got a decent amount of praise, but it's largely because it also ducked taking a stance on several key character and story points and then left VIII to have to do all the heavy lifting.
Well, I think that's worth considering what it says about the fandom. IMO, it says the fandom isn't one of the story but of the action figures they have in their head.
So, Mark Hamill's opinion is valuable when it conforms to your own, but when it doesn't, he is just "it's the best the writer could do *shrug*"
Interesting.
The writers struggling with what to do with Luke and him being used as a plot Maguffin are not really opinions. That's pretty well documented at this point from what we know about the development of this trilogy.
Arndt didn't know how to incorporate Luke into the story, Abrams/Kasdan were rushed at gun point to finish a script in 6 weeks, evident from the final product they basically had no answer to this either and just repositioned Luke as a cameo Maguffin.
The foundation laid eventually fell apart. To me this is not that shocking, maybe it is to you. This project had serious story and character problems from the onset that they tried to fix on the fly which rarely works when you throw in an extreme lack of time and no central plan to work from.
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It's not shocking, it's just that you keep asserting that I accepted your opinion that Luke is being used for plot contrivance, and you keep slimely trying to word things and then pretend you addressed points you haven't.
You use Mark Hammill as if to say "Look, even the actor agrees it's not really luke" but when it's point out that he says he came around and does agree with the interpretation, you ignore it and keep pretending that we are in agreement that Luke's characterization problems began with TLJ, or that TFA and TLJ are fundamentally unworkable together when it's really TRoS alone that shit the bed.
So I'll be clear as possible - I think you're wrong, about everything. You can say it's your opinion but every time you provide an actual argument for what you're saying, it's just incorrect or insane, like counting mark hamill as in your group of those against the writing when we all know he vocally supports TLJ's interpretation of Luke, or trying to draw false parallels of believability with fucking Daniel LaRusso, like that story is in any way similar to whats going on here. And then you speak "Well, it's quite obvious this wasn't workable" as if we've agreed when we haven't. I think you're wrong about everything you've said thus far.
The Sequel Trilogy fell apart at the end specifically because of TRoS because Abrams had no idea what to do with the material he was given. And that's not the fault of the material, it's the fault of Abrams. I lay the blame (almost) entirely at his feet. TLJ is not the perfect movie by any stretch, but people rarely talk about it's real problems, and it's depiction of Luke is certainly not one of them.
I always think about how in 5 or 10 years people will be watching the new trilogy for the first time and have no fucking clue why Palpatine now exists in TROS, because they won't be watching the trailers or playing Fortnite (the actual reveal) and reading all these random pages to explain it.
I really enjoyed the sequels -- especially The Last Jedi -- until The Rise of Skywalker. It's hard to go back and watch Episodes VII and VIII now knowing how they ended the trilogy. I was very disappointed. I think the way I feel about the Disney trilogy is the same way many feel about Game of Thrones now.
This story beat sure seems mighty familiar.
haha
So is there any explanation for this shit?
haha
If Mark Hamill felt that way upon initial reaction to the script ... why do you find it so unbelievable that a lot of the audience would feel the same way?
The audience is not an actor being paid 1+ million dollars to work on a movie, they're not getting to know the director over the course of 6 months to "come around", they're not there to do a press tour.
You got two hours with those people and they don't care what your special take is or why they should like it, they have no attachment to "come around on the idea" as it were.
I think a lot of problems the trilogy eventually fell apart from did stem even from its earliest development point even before Abrams was hired. It's like a beer doesn't kill anyone, but 15 of them before getting into a car certainly can eventually lead to driving into a lamp post. You can say it wasn't the beer that did the driver in, it was swerving left instead of right, but you shouldn't have been swerving like that in the first place.
Shouldn't Palpatine returning been stripped from the movie as it was incredibly stupid and pathetic writing?
Well it would have been funnier if no one addressed it at all and he's just back and no one remarks anything about it being unusual.
I would have been all in for making everything a joke or really extremely stupid
So close to true genius
I don't find it unbelievable, I'm just saying you can't use weaponize Mark Hamill's disagreement to validate your argument and then ignore it when he clarifies he endorsed and supported the characterization afterwards.
You can't pick and choose "oh, when he agrees with me, that's his actual opinion and he stands with the critics, but when he disagrees with me, that's him just being paid as an actor, ignore that"
You are amazingly terrible with analogies.