6 minutes ago, Ghostofman said:

Because my old butt immediately thought of the "Chewie didn't get a medal" thing.

Oh sure, I agree it is mega fan servicey.
But it is somewhat less bad that he didn’t finally get “his” medal.

15 minutes ago, DanteRotterdam said:

Kennedy made more money with the franchise than anyone ever did and had to put up with a lot of crap for it. I am so tired of everybody constantly being dismissive of her and to be frank I am absolutely certain that such extreme scrutiny would not have been applied had she been a man.

I haven't been dismissive of her, in fact this is the first serious criticism I've made of her. And I don't feel that anything is "her fault" as there's lots of players involved. That's why I wanted to know how the dynamic between her, Abrams, Johnson, and Iger works.

I don't doubt that she can run the company.

What got me thinking is the WSJ ran an article about the state of the company and star wars a week or so ago, and in that it outlined that in addition to being the head of the company, she's also trying to show-run the Star Wars franchise.

She seems to have a decent grasp of what makes Star Wars Star Wars, as evening from TFA to Rebels and Resistance, The Mando, and so on works as Star Wars. Good there. Any Star Wars GM that's been around long enough knows that you can hit a point in your game design and concept that it stops being Star Wars if you take it too far.

But now I look back I'm skeptical of her strategic planning abilities (which is something that trips up a lot of people as it's very hard to transition to).

When they decided to go with do 7-9 there should have been a show Bible, an overall outline of a full plot, and extensive review of where it would all end to ensure there was time to get there, and a key part of vetting directors should have been along sure they were on board with that progression.

Now... I don't see that. Abrams and Johnson were each allowed their own thing. This seems like the right move, as you want to give your creatives the room to operate. But in this case they didn't agree on where things were going and what was required, as if often the case with such people. And bringing Abrams back just resulted in some obvious strategic conflicts of story.

Iger on the other end wants to push the franchise in a new direction. He felt that making Star Wars land based on the original trilogy would make it dated and leave the franchise stuck in the past. A tough call, as he's not wrong, but at the same time the original trilogy does represent something of an Anchor for the brand. The visual distinction of the new trilogy does that, but the Abrams recycling of baseline plots, and EU-style klinging to the heroes of Yavin is directly opposed to that concept.

So I'm not being dismissive of Kennedy, and I couldn't care less about her gender. I'm looking at how the person who took on running a series is doing it, and that relationship with the senior executive levels as well as the people on the ground.

As probably just about all of you know by now, I hated TLJ. I loved this one though, and there are many reasons for that:

I really enjoyed it just on its own merits. It was a fun movie, I enjoyed the story, and it didn't stumble into (m)any of the pitfalls that plagued TLJ. I don't really take issue too much with macguffins, so I didn't mind that. Overall, I'd give it an 8.5/10, which seems to be the general consensus. When I look at it in the larger scheme of things, I don't like the story of the Sequel Trilogy as much as that of the Original Trilogy or Prequel Trilogy, but I enjoyed the movie immensely anyway.

One of my biggest metrics for measuring enjoyment of a movie is how I feel while watching it. For TFA, I was having fun pretty much the entire time, with only a couple things that pulled me out of it, and they were all very minor. With TLJ, I was pretty disgusted early on, and it never got better. Even the flashy lights had problems: turbolaser shots arcing through space, hyperspace ramming... With TRoS, I enjoyed it all the way through. I only had a few quibbles, the biggest one of which was the "They fly now!?" joke, which fell pretty flat. No one in the theater laughed, and a couple people groaned (and that being my biggest issue just goes to show how little I disliked from this one).

I loved that it overrode so many of the things I didn't like about TLJ, or at least made them relatively irrelevant. I don't know if any of this is actually something that crossed JJ and RJ's minds, but it felt like a tug-of-war with the movies, going back and forth over how it should be done and where they wanted to go with the story (I could go on for a while with this, but I won't). I thoroughly enjoyed TFA, it was vying for top 3 favorite Star Wars movies in a very close field, but TLJ lowered it in my estimation considerably. With TRoS, I can now have a duology+little bit of headcanon and don't need to complain about TLJ much anymore.

One thing I liked about it is that it went places with the story that I didn't want it to (Rey is a Palpatine, Rey is the Skywalker, Hux is a pointless buffoon, bringing back Palpatine, etc.), but it did them so well, and with such good reasons, that I ended up really liking them.

In the big space battle, I picked out the Lancer-class pursuit craft pretty early on, which is fun because that is the party's ship in the campaign I'm running right now, but then, oh THEN, what to my wondering eyes should appear? The distinctive silhouette of either a Kom'rk or a Fang fighter! I couldn't quite tell because the silhouette is very similar and it's hard to get a feel for scale, but I know it was one of them. I think it was a Fang fighter. I've always loved the Kom'rk, and it is the (temporary, but current) party-owned ship in the second campaign I'm running.

As for Hux, he was handled about as well as he could have been under the circumstances. I felt that he was dramatically underserved in TLJ, I think that he should have been treated as an actual threat, an actually dangerous villain, perhaps as the big bad if Kylo were to go good guy, or perhaps as one of Rey's first umm... "strategic eliminations" on her path to power within the First Order if she were to turn. In TLJ, with the scene between Hux and Poe, I was simultaneously laughing and groaning. Because while I found it undeniably funny, it didn't feel like Star Wars to me. It felt more like a parody. I enjoyed him in TRoS because it fit the buffoon he'd been morphed into. He had a suitably short end.

This movie did something unprecedented: it nearly moved me to tears (the closest I've ever come before was "Hmm... Perhaps this should move me to tears. Oh well."): It was the scene with Han Solo and Kylo. It was a very well done scene, and I particularly liked how they made it basically a shot for shot remake of the scene in TFA.

One final point: I was talking to someone who isn't a Star Wars fan, hasn't watched the Sequel Trilogy, but has a pretty good understanding of the Star Wars movies and is a writer herself. She knows how I feel about the different movies and understands how I think well enough to predict how I'll feel about certain things with significant accuracy. I gave her the bullet points of the plot and she was disapproving of them, but was impressed with the movie once I explained the circumstances surrounding the individual plot points and how they actually made it work. She said that based on those plot points, she would have expected me to dislike it, so she was very impressed with how it turned out.

3 hours ago, Ghostofman said:

I haven't been dismissive of he

Sorry, I wasn’t trying to make it personal.

18 minutes ago, DanteRotterdam said:

Sorry, I wasn’t trying to make it personal.

Way to misgender KK in the quote you snipped. 😜

24 minutes ago, DanteRotterdam said:

Sorry, I wasn’t trying to make it personal.

It s fine, I did need to quantify that statement. Enough people whining over perceived "SJW" stuff and other garbage, totally not where I'm coming from.

25 minutes ago, Ghostofman said:

Enough people whining over perceived "SJW" stuff and other garbage, totally not where I'm coming from.

That's the problem with today. Legitimate criticism gets lumped in with gender politics. You cant say Ghostbusters 16 was a terrible movie without being painted with the same brush as the idiots who chased Lesily Jones off twitter when in reality, Ghostbusters '16 just plain sucked.

Same thing here. I do not think that Kennedy has done a good job - I mean who goes into a trilogy like this without at least an outline of a story? But if you gave me a time/space visualizer that lets me look into the parallel universe where Joe Kennedy was running Lucasfilm the exact same way with all the same mistakes and accomplishments, I would still think they were unfit for the job. To me, it doesn't matter what is between your legs.

2 minutes ago, Desslok said:

That's the problem with today. Legitimate criticism gets lumped in with gender politics. You cant say Ghostbusters 16 was a terrible movie without being painted with the same brush as the idiots who chased Lesily Jones off twitter when in reality, Ghostbusters '16 just plain sucked.

Same thing here. I do not think that Kennedy has done a good job - I mean who goes into a trilogy like this without at least an outline of a story? But if you gave me a time/space visualizer that lets me look into the parallel universe where Joe Kennedy was running Lucasfilm the exact same way with all the same mistakes and accomplishments, I would still think they were unfit for the job. To me, it doesn't matter what is between your legs.

She’s made Disney billions, she’s not going anywhere, and everyone makes mistakes. We are all looking at this from an outsiders perspective, and with Disney and Lucas being notorious for their secrecy we will never know the extent of the corporate drama.

7 hours ago, Ghostofman said:

I'll have to look again for the signs of repair.

Even in the trailers, there's footage of the hilt showing a new metal band right about where it cracked in TLJ., so there are signs that it had to be repaired, with the some of the best shots being just before Rey draws when Kylo's custom TIE is bearing down on her, and when it's being handed off between Rey and Leia just after running the training course and just prior to Rey leaving for the mission.

It's typical Abrams that the details of the repairs were glossed over in favor of cramming in more action sequences. And in this instance, I agree with that cal as the movie's plot doesn't center around how that lightsaber was repaired, so wasting screen time on it is just that, a waste of screen time what is already a pretty dense movie.

9 hours ago, StriderZessei said:

The crafting PCs in my games are gonna love this. Having a canon depiction of repairing a crystal could have huge ramifications for failed modding checks.

Also, maybe JJ didn't think it was important to cover Rey repairing it, since we didn't see Luke build his green one.

Just my take, but on the first bit, I wouldn't allow a PC to undo the results of a failed modification check, and restrict such 'repairs' to crystals that have been out and out destroyed, and even that shouldn't be a trivial thing. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if most Jedi aren't even aware that such a thing is even possible, given that Rey only learned about it from an ancient text that was tucked away on a remote planet.

On the second one, fully agree. What mattered was that Rey had a working lightsaber (saving the reveal of her crafting her own for the end), and as you said, Lucas never bothered to ever go into detail as to how Luke got a green one (apart from there being deleted footage of his constructing it).

9 hours ago, Nytwyng said:

One thing’s for sure, it definitely isn’t fodder for a GM who runs a campaign set about 200 years down the line and centered on a group finding Jedi locations and artifacts. Nope...it definitely isn’t.... 🤓

I don't recall where I saw it (probably Facebook), but I did see an image of Anakin, Luke, and Rey each holding that lightsaber, and the weapon being likened to Excalibur in that it lies dormant, waiting for a new "chosen one" to begin their adventure and thus once again play a role in galactic events.

So I could certainly see a campaign that's set years/decades/centuries after TRoS where a young and inexperienced Force user PC unearths this historic relic of "a more civilized era" just as they're in the early stages of embarking on their grand adventure into a much larger galaxy.

4 hours ago, Donovan Morningfire said:

Just my take, but on the first bit, I wouldn't allow a PC to undo the results of a failed modification check, and restrict such 'repairs' to crystals that have been out and out destroyed, and even that shouldn't be a trivial thing. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if most Jedi aren't even aware that such a thing is even possible, given that Rey only learned about it from an ancient text that was tucked away on a remote planet.

On the second one, fully agree. What mattered was that Rey had a working lightsaber (saving the reveal of her crafting her own for the end), and as you said, Lucas never bothered to ever go into detail as to how Luke got a green one (apart from there being deleted footage of his constructing it).

Eh, I think the crafting rules are a bit too harsh on failed mod checks, especially with how rare crystals are.

Being able to say, "You failed the check, and the crystal cracked. You can't attempt any more mods this session if you want it to heal, but you can try again next week," is just forgiving enough to encourage players to keep trying to mod their sabers instead of gaming the system with stacking bonuses.

12 hours ago, Desslok said:

who goes into a trilogy like this without at least an outline of a story?

Zemeckis?

Cameron?

Lucas?

Yeah. There’s a reason why training and repairing is rarely shown on screen. It’s usually fairly dull stuff that someone can really get into, or it’s like watching paint dry without much in between. Same with westerns, there’s usually a lot of waiting involved with those preceding any action (or even a de-escalation) to build tension before a scene of intense action. I noticed the latter tool wasn’t used but that’s fine; I find the tools that add tension can make for difficult re-watches.

also, merry Christmas ya nerds!

19 minutes ago, LordBritish said:

Yeah. There’s a reason why training and repairing is rarely shown on screen. It’s usually fairly dull stuff that someone can really get into, or it’s like watching paint dry without much in between. Same with westerns, there’s usually a lot of waiting involved with those preceding any action (or even a de-escalation) to build tension before a scene of intense action. I noticed the latter tool wasn’t used but that’s fine; I find the tools that add tension can make for difficult re-watches.

also, merry Christmas ya nerds!

Yet there are entire programs showing people making meals or restoring houses.

5 minutes ago, HappyDaze said:

Yet there are entire programs showing people making meals or restoring houses.

Oh aye, not saying those kind of things aren’t valuable, just it’s an acquired taste that people either have or don’t.

I’m trying to teach myself how to paint so I’m watching a lot of painting tutorials; I would understand why someone would get annoyed if a 5 minute segment was presented in a movie. TLJ already had a training montage of sorts, so I wasn’t expecting another; just a demonstration of full Jediness

1 hour ago, LordBritish said:

merry Christmas ya nerds!

21 hours ago, DanteRotterdam said:

Kennedy made more money with the franchise than anyone ever did and had to put up with a lot of crap for it. I am so tired of everybody constantly being dismissive of her and to be frank I am absolutely certain that such extreme scrutiny would not have been applied had she been a man.

I guess the extreme vitriol Lucas received over his constant revisionism and the prequels, which ultimately led him to quit, doesn't count.

3 hours ago, LordBritish said:

Oh aye, not saying those kind of things aren’t valuable, just it’s an acquired taste that people either have or don’t.

I’m trying to teach myself how to paint so I’m watching a lot of painting tutorials; I would understand why someone would get annoyed if a 5 minute segment was presented in a movie. TLJ already had a training montage of sorts, so I wasn’t expecting another; just a demonstration of full Jediness

I don't paint, but I sometimes go down the Bob Ross rabbit hole and watch The Joy of Painting .

The dude is a total Jedi with a paintbrush.

Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response.

Weird.

7 minutes ago, Vondy said:

I don't paint, but I sometimes go down the Bob Ross rabbit hole and watch The Joy of Painting .

The dude is a total Jedi with a paintbrush.

Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response.

Weird.

Not weird at all, even though I don't paint with oil's (it would obscure detail on a mini.) I have started regularly watching the same shows on youtube. I find it amazing what he can do with a little preparation, a handful of colours on his pallet. Honestly makes me wish I could employ his wet painting techniques on my own, but my paint has a much shorter drying time, even with the application of retarder.

I also help it finds me sleep. The fact that he talks so calmly about nice little things just seems to do that for me.

4 hours ago, Vondy said:

I guess the extreme vitriol Lucas received over his constant revisionism and the prequels, which ultimately led him to quit, doesn't count.

You mean the director? Or the one taking control of the other directors’ product? There is a difference here.

7 hours ago, Vondy said:

I guess the extreme vitriol Lucas received over his constant revisionism and the prequels, which ultimately led him to quit, doesn't count.

I completely agree with your point, and indeed I think the Disney-produced content has been much better received on the whole than the prequels were, and rightly so. There's been plenty of nasty criticism, but still the atmosphere is completely different from the widespread depression and disgust everyone felt in the early 2000s (which was somewhat alleviated by Revenge of the Sith's better showing). There are plenty of people defending the sequel trilogy, and they aren't being laughed out of the room like defenders of Phantom Menace were. Everything is controversial and mean in the age of social media. If Phantom Menace had been released in an environment like the present day, the backlash against Lucas would've been even more extreme.

That said, all of the turnover with directors being hired and fired, and reshoots that rebuild the movies from the ground up, does not inspire confidence in the way the brand has been managed. The results have been pretty good--I love most of the new movies and don't hate any of them like I hate TMP and AOTC--but clearly something needs fixing at the top. Whether the problem is Kennedy herself, I don't think anyone other than a real insider is in a position to know.

On 12/24/2019 at 9:19 AM, DanteRotterdam said:

It was Han’s medal that Leia left him. I only saw that the second time around.

So, I got the first time around that it was the medal from BBY but did you see something that specifies it as Han's medal and not the medal thew Chewie never got? I don't have the latest visual dictionary so am not sure if it was cleared up in there.

On 12/24/2019 at 9:33 AM, Ghostofman said:

Oh, I got that.

I don't get why. Because my old butt immediately thought of the "Chewie didn't get a medal" thing. So that scene felt less like a memento thing, and more like a "Chewie finally got the medal." Since George corrected that in the redo, giving Chewie the medal felt like it was both servicing fans as well as throwing shade at special edition updates.

That was pretty much exactly my take on it.

So I finally watched this movie, and I have to say the Trilogie was realy terrible, but one short question: did they mess up the colors of the lightsabers at the end?