Posted on 04/17/2017 12:57:00 PM PDT by EveningStar
As I recall, Luke went to the Dark Side last November.
When I was younger I thought the ‘clone wars’ were completely different, in my kid brain it was going to be like replacing politicians and important republic people with clones or something. But no, it was an actual war with clones grown in vats, programmed to want to fight.
So when the droid army and the clone army fought, it was basically two slave armies going at it, and one of them were actual humans. Yoda expressed some doubts if I recall, but I didn’t get the impression it was over the question of free will for clones.
FReegards
I had high hopes for Disney’s star wars series and hoped they would abandon the past characters but just retain the Star Wars universe. Start from scratch and just make good Space Opera.
Disappointed so far and I am not looking forward to any future Disney Star Wars films. They could have at least tried to get some of the magic of the first trilogy.
The casts have had no chemistry whatsoever.
may the schwartz be with you
Rey is the worst. It was embarrassing seeing her fly better than Lando first time out, holding her own the first time she held a lightsaber. I thought the movie sucked wampa balls. It was the first one I didn’t see in the theater and I don’t plan on watching the rest of the trilogy at all.
The chest tattoo alone is a deal-breaker. Ugh.
And I’ll take Princess Vespa over Princess Leia any day.
No kidding
I thought it hokey in 77 and still do
It’s just more fake adventure for couch taters
Like super hero fandom or video game snowflakes
Get out and live your own adventure..
While you can..I’m nearing 60 and don’t breath worth a crap
I’m glad I took full advantage when I was young
Women world and life
I didn’t say she’s not a Mary Sue, I said whining about it shows you simply don’t understand SW. Really let’s look at them:
Grew up in the desert suburbs
played with fast vehicles
didn’t want to follow in the family business
wanted to escape to a life of adventure
That’s the thumbnail bio for BOTH Lucas and Luke S. He is the very definition of a Marty Stu. Hell even Woody Allen doesn’t name his character after himself.
Only time Luke got his ass kicked was fighting Vader. And he didn’t just have quick reflexes, he was the best X-Wing pilot in the Death Star fight, and won the day. Rey hasn’t shown any direct Force skills. And Rey goes through plenty of character struggle, or have you conveniently forgotten that she was starving. Luke shot womprat, Rey flew whatever random crap she found.
Whining about Mary Sue character in SW is an abomination. It’s a hobby of the kind of pathetic whiners that inspired the Simpsons Comicbook guy, the pathetic douches that must complain about everything in order to feel important. Out here in reality that’s what SW is, was and always will be, it’s a director wish fulfillment series built around stand-in characters. Because while it starts with Luke it sure as hell didn’t end there. Obi-Wan is the father figure Lucas always wanted, Han the cool friend, and Leia started as the girlfriend he always wanted and turned into the sister (which should creep everybody the hell out). Suddenly not liking that 40 years later is just silly.
Yeah it sounded so much more exciting. But that’s really on Lucas, he just didn’t put the cool parts in the movies. I really don’t think anyone tied to SW has really contemplated the nature of droids, or if they have George and Kathleen have carefully kept them from putting it on the page.
I used to be a SW fan as a kid. Now, between the films becoming tedious “teachable moments” and the endless Disney-style marketing...not so much.
Originally 'A New Hope' was a farce from since the beginning. Watch the interviews after the movie “blew up”. The creators had no idea how to continue the story, so when you use this “father figure”/metaphoric stuff its just hilarious in light of the inconsistency in the next films.
VII was a money grab written by people who just C/P parts of the OT then added an agenda. Heck Kathleen Kennedy boasted (During production) about pushing the strong (Poorly written) female character meme as some sort of triumph in modern day civilization. The development is forced with a lot of short-cuts. Just blatant agenda pushing and cringe writing considering what Abrams said about “white males”. BTW, not a Star Wars geek at all, just criticize forced agendas, the whitewashing of the OT, terrible character development, and bad writing. Enjoy the movie, for me it was awful worthy of a Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode.
No it didn’t. She went through a lot more trials and tribulations than Luke did before he blew up the Death Star. She was homeless, abandoned and starving. Luke had a home, parental figures and grub. Rey didn’t go to Jedi anything, that’s just a stupid complaint the whiners made up. She’s shown no more Force ability than Luke did in the first movie.
The Marty Ste/ Mary Sue wish fulfillment in the first movie is obvious for anybody that bothers to pay attention to George’s life up to making that movie. Inconsistency in the next movie doesn’t change the simple fact that all the main hero characters were wish fulfillment for George starting with his stand-in character that shares his name.
ALL movies are money grabs. You don’t think Disney paid 4 billion dollars for the franchise just for fun do you.
It is actually a triumph to be able to get decent female characters on the screen again. A weird cycle happened with SF in the 2000s, we went from getting solid female characters all over the genre (Ripley, Sarah Connor, Buffy) to basically none. Time to get them back. And Rey’s no worse written than any other SW character.
And now we see indeed you are just the Comicbook Guy. Worst whiner ever. If you don’t like SW stop watching the movies, save yourself and the people around you from your BS.
“No it didn’t. She went through a lot more trials and tribulations than Luke did before he blew up the Death Star. She was homeless, abandoned and starving. Luke had a home, parental figures and grub. Rey didn’t go to Jedi anything, that’s just a stupid complaint the whiners made up. She’s shown no more Force ability than Luke did in the first movie.”
Yeah, correct me if I’m mistaken, but I don’t recall Luke dueling and effortlessly handing Vader his butt in their first encounter, or him managing to use a Jedi Mind Trick on a Stormtrooper despite not even knowing about the ability in A New Hope, both of which are what REY demonstrated in The Force Awakens.
Also, Luke at least had been shown training with the Force beforehand under Obi-Wan’s guidance (remember the time he got shot by that remote on the way to Alderaan?), and even his skills with flying an X-Wing was at least justified fairly early on by his being able to fly a Skyhopper in incidental dialogue, while with Rey, other than flying that cart, she demonstrated absolutely NO prior knowledge of flying craft at all (and certainly not flying something like The Millennium Falcon), and made clear that she never even HEARD of the Force yet STILL managed to pull off those stunts.
I will give you one thing, though: She most certainly had a lot more tribulations than even Anakin Skywalker, let alone Luke. And if I must be honest, I personally found her plight in the beginning of the film to be a LOT more sympathetic than Belle from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. I won’t say she had more trials, though. Trials would imply actual training, which Luke clearly had her beat in.
“The Marty Ste/ Mary Sue wish fulfillment in the first movie is obvious for anybody that bothers to pay attention to George’s life up to making that movie. Inconsistency in the next movie doesn’t change the simple fact that all the main hero characters were wish fulfillment for George starting with his stand-in character that shares his name.”
I’ll give you the bit about Luke sharing Lucas’s name. However, he still wasn’t a marty stu (an actual marty stu in his position would have OHKOed the Sand People or actually passed on the first try that whole remote thing rather than being shot in the leg or outright cream Vader in a fight. Even in the original film, he definitely struggled. Heck, Luke wasn’t even the one to beat Vader, Han did if anyone, and even there, Vader only lost because his surviving wingman panicked and accidentally knocked him out of the trench).
“ALL movies are money grabs. You don’t think Disney paid 4 billion dollars for the franchise just for fun do you.”
Technically, ANYTHING ever made is a cash grab under the definition that money is a factor into things being made. But I’m pretty sure that wasn’t what the posters meant by a “cash grab” (and Lucas made the films specifically to push Vietcong and left-wing propaganda, which if you ask me is FAR worse than just making it for money’s sake).
“It is actually a triumph to be able to get decent female characters on the screen again. A weird cycle happened with SF in the 2000s, we went from getting solid female characters all over the genre (Ripley, Sarah Connor, Buffy) to basically none. Time to get them back. And Rey’s no worse written than any other SW character.”
Ah, actually, she was, largely because unlike Luke in even the first Star Wars movie, she literally had NOTHING shown or even mentioned about her superb feats at all. Maybe if they had incidental dialogue mentioning she had flown the Millennium Falcon a few times before to justify her flying abilities, or mentioned she had some sense of her having powers due to some incidents but couldn’t explain them, I could buy her going all superpowered.
And this is speaking as someone who agrees that the way women are depicted as supermen in an obvious attempt at pandering to feminists was just stupid (like Alice from Resident Evil, for example). I do have little problem with Honoka from Dead or Alive 5 Last Round, though (and the problems I do have with the character don’t even have anything to do with her skills so much as her loving onsens), and in fact, I actually could make sense of her being as good as she is (since it’s heavily implied that she often trained in secret so she could satisfy her desire to fight and also test out her powers, and that she also trained via watching and matching various martial arts actions to form her admittedly self-taught Honoka Fu moves).
“And now we see indeed you are just the Comicbook Guy. Worst whiner ever. If you don’t like SW stop watching the movies, save yourself and the people around you from your BS.”
I know you’re talking to that other person, but I felt I must mention this: just because I have some pretty justified criticisms of the films right now doesn’t mean I dislike Star Wars. Ultimately, I grew up on Star Wars, so I don’t have the heart to get away from it, and I do retain some fondness for the franchise. Even when I learned that it was meant to push Vietcong propaganda, I didn’t leave the franchise, instead I ended up rooting for the Empire who was supposed to be America if Lucas is to be believed (and bear in mind, I don’t root for villains as a rule, THAT’S how bad Lucas’s revelation shook me). May not like it that I have to root for villains in that case, but it’s either that or continuing to root for Rebels after learning they were in fact a bunch of communist insurgents.
You don’t actually have a point to miss. All of that was on screen. And she did NOT go to Jedi Master, that’s just you being full of crap.
Whining about those that are paying your bills is way worse than being Comicbook Guy.
It’s been pretty well established that, at least within the Skywalker line, males are more drawn to the Dark Side than women.
All movies are money grabs, because the only way anybody ever funds them is to make a profit.
Luke had been training for hours when he guided that bomb down the shoot. Remember what the Force really is: wish fulfillment. People strong in the Force can make ANYTHING they want happen. Most of Force training consists of 2 things: learning you can do anything you want, and learning to not do anything you want (at least on the Jedi side). And Luke’s piloting skills are NOT justified. He winds up the one of the best pilots in the Death Star assault even though he’s never been in an X-Wing before.
Rey had discussed flying previously also, so if Luke’s skill was justified so was hers. And it’s not like she was really that good, she bounced the Falcon off a lot of stuff. And she had heard of the Force before, Luke hadn’t. And Rey wasn’t good in the fight either. She “won” that because Kylo Ren was injured, and he was fighting to subdue her with big long slow attacks that are specifically designed to be blockable.
Sorry but Luke IS a Marty Stu, he is a complete stand-in for Lucas, they have the same thumbnail bio. Losing to the Sand Person doesn’t change that, nor does Han taking care of Vader. Those were all necessary step for him to form the “party”, that’s just part of movie story telling where every loss is necessary for the win. If the Sand Person doesn’t pop him he doesn’t meet Obi Wan, Han popping Vader is really about Han fully joining the group that Luke brought him into.
There was plenty of incidental dialog setting up everything. We knew she knew how to fly stuff (it is the SW universe EVERYBODY knows how to fly stuff, it’s like driving a car in a modern placed movie), she knew the Falcon was a piece of junk, and she didn’t really fly it very well.
People make too much out of the Viet Cong thing. Here’s the punchline on that: if that was his message he did a lousy job of it because literally NOBODY sees it until they see him explaining it. One of the interesting things about SW is it’s a very “blank” universe, you can see in it what you want to see. Lucas can look at the Rebellion and see the Viet Cong, liberals can look at the Rebellion and see diversity made manifest, conservatives can look at the Rebellion and see a well armed militia. If you want to see a Mary Sue being all feminist you can. What I see are fun B movies with an A budget, they’re a good ride, but don’t look at them too closely because there’s some serious cracks in that makeup.
And I just don’t understand people who go to movies just to not like them, especially not those who dislike them for hours at a time. I don’t like King Kong, never interested me, saw a couple of the movies when I was young because I was “supposed to” (you know education of the nerd and all) but I didn’t enjoy them. So when Skull Island got announced I knew I wouldn’t see it, and I didn’t. Was it a good movie? Don’t know, don’t care, don’t like Kong, didn’t see it. A lot of the people whining about SW hate it way more than I dislike Kong, and I shake my head at why they even went. Some people just don’t seem to feel whole if they ain’t bitching.
I watched The Force Awakens, and I generally have a pretty good knack for observing small details even in stuff I absolutely loathe, and I don’t recall Rey EVER discussing having flown before. In fact, if I remember correctly, she actually was at a loss as to how she could pilot the Millennium Falcon at all when Finn asked her. And I really wouldn’t call her skills with the Millennium Falcon bad, especially considering she managed to pull off a pretty good loop among other ace flying skills. As far as Rey beating Ren, last I recall, he told her to draw out the Force, she did, and literally beat him to a pulp before the ground cracked and forced them to separate.
I’m not saying that Luke isn’t a stand-in for George Lucas or a self-insert character (as you yourself pointed out, his first name had obvious similarities with “Lucas.”). However, generally, Mary Sues, or their male equivalent Marty Stus, generally aren’t allowed to have ANY flaws or get beaten, often having it all and being written as perfect, everyone being ants by comparison, and often being the hero characters. For a good example, try Alice from the Resident Evil movies where she made everyone look utterly incompetent, even those who were actually from the games (and it’s also one of the reasons why she was utterly HATED by most of the viewers). Luke had none of that. If he needed help getting out of a lam, and actually GOT that help, he by definition is NOT a marty stu, period.
As far as Luke’s piloting, it was mentioned in incidental dialogue that he piloted a Skyhopper and often raced Biggs at Beggar’s Canyon, and that the Skyhopper had similar controls. THAT’S the justification. What WASN’T justified was her completely handing Kylo Ren his butt despite having literally NO training in lightsaber techniques at all (Luke, for the record, ended up losing his hand when he tried to confront Darth Vader. And bear in mind, like Ren, Vader ALSO was trying to subdue Luke with big long slow attacks that were specifically designed to be blockable, not to mention actually DID get injured at one point during the fight when Luke managed to leave a cut on Vader’s upper arm.).
Lucas repeatedly made it clear that the Rebels were the Vietcong, and the Empire was supposed to be America and left absolutely NO room for ambiguity as to his intentions there. He even made such clear in the actual development notes for the actual movie, AND Walter Murch, one of his associates at the time, confirmed as much. It’s one of the few consistent things he’s said about the movie that can actually be backed up. I haven’t gotten the book yet, but I’ll probably get The Making of Star Wars just to get the full notes and post them. I will tell you this much though, the few stuff posted here and there on the internet definitely didn’t indicate Lucas was settling for a blank universe at all when making the film and that, if anything, he was very agenda driven:
“I [George Lucas] started to work on Star Wars rather than continue on Apocalypse Now. I had worked on Apocalypse Now for about four years and I had very strong feelings about it. I wanted to do it, but could not get it off the ground... A lot of my interest in Apocalypse Now was carried over into Star Wars. I figured I couldn’t make that film because it was about the Vietnam War, so I would essentially deal with some of the same interesting concepts that I was going to use and convert them into space fantasy, so you’d have essentially a large technological empire going after a small group of freedom fighters or human beings... a small independent country like North Vietnam threatened by a neighbor or provincial rebellion, instigated by gangsters aided by empire. [...] The empire is like America ten years from now, after Nixonian gangsters assassinated the Emperor and were elevated to power in a rigged election; created civil disorder by instigating race riots aiding rebel groups and allowing the crime rate to rise to the point where a ‘total control’ police state was welcomed by the people. Then the people were exploited with high taxes, utility and transport costs.”
This was on Pages 7-8 to 17 of The Making of Star Wars. On that note, he also wrote the following of Page 26 of the same book:
“Theme: Aquilae is a small independent country like North Vietnam threatened by a neighbor or provincial rebellion, instigated by gangsters aided by empire. Fight to get rightful planet back. Half of system has been lost to gangsters[…]The Empire is like America ten years from now[…]We are at a turning point: fascism or revolution.”
So no, back then, it was most certainly meant to be Vietcong propaganda. And he clearly didn’t give up on that theme considering he tried to push it AGAIN in Return of the Jedi, even going as far as to not only compare Palpatine to Nixon, but also telling Ian McDiarmid, Palpatine’s actor, that he deliberately modeled the throne room after the Oval Office in terms of shape because of it.
And he kept on saying this up to Revenge of the Sith’s release at Cannes film festival. If he was aiming for a blank slate universe, he would have essentially wrote that the story was “a movie about nothing besides what the viewers take of it.” And he most certainly wouldn’t try to keep on hammering from development notes right up to the release of his final Star Wars movie in the saga that the Empire was Nixon’s America and the Rebels were Vietcong expies.
And for the record, I’m not even planning to see The Last Jedi at this point, so don’t think I’m like those other people. At least I’m actually practicing what I preach and most likely sitting this one out, and probably the next three movies including the anthology series. And for the record, I was considering sitting out even BEFORE the messup with Beauty and the Beast happened [while Rogue One was definitely pretty good, I’m still not optimistic about The Last Jedi.].).
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