On your first
reply to me, you brought up Trevorrow's rejected DotF script where Palpatine only appeared as a hologram cameo to disprove
Kathleen Kennedy and
Chris Terrio's claim that Palpatine or a similar Palpatine-like big bad was planned/one of the narrative marks for Episode IX . . . . which is a weird thing to say because the fact that that script did not pass mustard and was REJECTED is actually doing the opposite of what you are arguing for and leads credence to what KK and CT's is saying.
Turns out the leaked DotF script is just the
1st version of the script and there was a
3rd version where they are using an under-developed, female Knight of Ren to carry the big bad/final villain/Palpatine role.
So Kathleen Kennedy and Chris Terrio's claim that Palpatine or a similar Palpatine-like big bad was planned/one of the narrative marks for Episode IX is strengthened further.
Like i said before, it was a selfish creative move for Rian to kill the Palpatine-expy, the one setup to be the final villain, Snoke, in TLJ as it put Trevorrow/Connolly and Abrams/Terrio in a difficult creative position forcing them to ass-pull solutions to the trilogy's missing final villain problem.
First of all: relax. There is no need to get riled up (and it's not my intention to make you angry). And maybe I shouldn't reply anymore, but I feel that in how heated it became I need to clear up what I meant.
Anyway, about what I quoted here: you keep repeating this. So let me clearly state what I said and ment:
1. I reacted to a quote of Kennedy that specifically talked about including Palpatine, where she gives a vague 'long time in the books, didn't know how' answer. She didn't talk about a 'similar' character; That quote is specifically about having Palps return. And it's a marketing red-carpet fluff code. For all we know she could be referencing some concepts they tried out while developping TFA before there even was a script. The death star wreck was one of those concepts they threw at the wall trying to find inspiration for the story as early as 2013.
2.The fact Trevorrow got 3 drafts in without Palpatine in the big evil capacity points towards that not being in the books from day one to repeat the OT beat for beat like you claimed. That's what I reacted to
3. We don't know why Trevorrow's script got rejected at all. We can only speculate. I pointed out that you cherrypick quotes and force them into a narrative that doesn't have a solid basis. (Not only the red-carpet thing, also the 'didn't go where we wanted before draft 1', where you assume she means the inclusion of Palpatine without any basis for that.) It feels like you have a narrative in your head (Rian = diva indie director who fucked everyone over) and then try to find the proof, in stead of the other way around.
4. If Palpatine or Ersatz-Palpatine was so important and if RJ messed that up so hard, why would Kennedy aprove his script? Why wouldn't she have pulled the breaks and said: hey Rian, this is not the direction we want to go! (And why would she then offer him a full trilogy, if he fucked them over so much?)
Kathleen Kennedy, JJ Abrams and Colin Trevorrow needed a threatening, larger-than-life, Palpatine-like final villain to carry the 3rd movie of what suppose to be a crowd-pleasing, kid-friendly, tentpole, blockbuster Star Wars trilogy. But freakin' Rian decided to:
- kill the Palpatine-expy, Snoke, that was originally setup to be the final viallin
- kill Phasma, another gets-killed-with-no-development character like Snoke
- refuse to develop the Knights of Ren
- turn Hux into a punchline
- turn Kylo into a "humanized", pathetic loser
. . . . in Episode 8. He really seems intent to make sure Episode 9 creatives don't have properly setup villains to use and make their job more difficult.
You don't like Kylo. That's fine. That doesn't mean he can't carry the final film as the bad guy, and that doesn't mean you can't have a redemption plot. The idea you absolutely need Palpatine or a ersatz for him just isn't true at all.
And I don't know why you keep claiming Johnson was 'intent' on making the jobs of others more difficult. I believe his only intent was writing a compelling story within a second act structure (I believe in one of your interview links he literally says something in this vein)
Sketchy set of credentials there, anonymous forum poster, but nice typing skills. If you wanna go all the way, maybe you should add a verifiable name, social media profile and picture not dissimilar to the
authors of the
articles i
linked before to make your claims just as believable and authoritative as them! Maybe if you could also avoid touting your surface-level '
analysis' of story structure which amounts to nothing more than "b-b-but Act 2 is where da heroes are suppose to be challenged, TLJ did its job" completely glossing over its canon problems with the IP and it's failure to properly pick-up and develop the plot threads coming from TFA like a proper sequel should especially the villains as superior, people here might actually entertain the notion that you have screenwriting chops.
Yeah, I kind of like my internet privacy so I don't like sharing my real name or picture on a board like this (maybe I should look into getting a verified tag, but I belief that's only for gaming related stuff?). But why would I lie to you about my job or credentials? I have nothing to win with it, and I don't need it to point out that relying on random articles with people who happen to agree with you isn't really a solid counter-argument (especially not as they don't even go into what I'm talking about).
And yes, my analysis is pretty simple. Because it is idd hardly rocket science. I can only point out that in the most widely used story structure for Western cinema the second act is where you challenge the wants and beliefs of your protagonist that you set up in the first. At the mid point you generally have a sort of victory (or a failure, but that's more rare), which then becomes apparant to be a false one, with challenges that gets upped more. Just before the third act begins you have your heroes at their lowest points, with the stakes the highest, but through this lowpoint they find the insight they need to be able to tackle those stakes in the third act.
So yeah, you can apply this to TLJ to show that as a second act it does exactly what is expected. By the midpoint you have 'victories'. Poe manages a mutiny to 'save' the Resistance from Holdo's folly, Rey has finally broken free from trying to convince Luke and has finally decided to take matters into her own hands (while previously she has always sought the help in parental figures. She literally ends the first act of the trilogy giving her weapon to someone else), Rey also succeeds in teaming up with Kylo to defeat Snoke and his guards (as this is the main conflict of the trilogy, this is the most impotant one), Finn and crew manage to slip onto the star destroyer and will be able to disable the hyperspace tracking.
But all these victories are false. Finn and crew get immediately betrayed and caught, Poes mutiny gets thwarted and it is revealed he was wrong about Holdo, Kylo hasn't turned at all (and he puts Rey in an even more vulnerable spot), and then when the Resistance escapes they get shot out of the sky. Luke meanwhile is ready to literally burn everything down.
Ultimately this leads to the lowest points for the Resistance. Down on their luck, low on numbers, no one answering their call. Their fight seems to have been lost. But all of them have grown. Poe has completed his arc and has become a leader, Finn has realised he does have something to fight for, Rey is ready to forge her own path. Kylo seemingly lost forever. And then Luke, a as a figure of hope, shows what the Resistance needed as opposed to what they wanted. They didn't need Luke to literally fight for them, but to become the myth that inspires others to resist.
Ergo: perfect end of a second act. The heroes are seriously down and facing a huge odds to overcome (and in terms of Kylo's redemption, which ultimately will be Reys goal, he's furtherst away from that), but they have all found the power to overcome those odds.
Like i said earlier, all these mantra of "story trumps canon" and "enabling creatives to break canon" does not really hold-up in the face of LucasFilm's history and business realities.
Maintaining canon was a recipe for financial success for LucasFilms. And you, an anonymous forum poster, could try doing blanket statements again to convince people that "TLJ did not break canon" but it's not going to work.
The energy-shield piercing Holdo maneuver/hyperspace ramming retroactively breaks the established canon/internal consistency of the WW2-style space battles in Star Wars from episode 1 to 9.
Why not just stockpile old shitty ships (affordable) and have droids (non-suicidal) light-speed them at Star Destroyers and Death Stars? You just need to disable the engines, the power sources or the bridge anyway, not structurally crack them in 2.
As for Flashback Luke, Rian DELIBERATELY CHEAPED OUT and did not provide setup or context on Luke's attempted murder on his nephew because he just wanted a quick scene to provide some harder kick to Rey's turn:
'You didn't tell me this.' He wanted some harder line that was crossed - a more defined thing that the audience could actually see - between Luke and Kylo. I mean who cares if it goes against Luke's last known in-continuity characterization from the climax of RotJ where Luke redeemed his Sith Lord father through love and non-violence, right? Ain't nobody gonna remember that piece of ancient history. Rey's turn needs that extra emotional kick . . . .
Star Wars fans watched Luke's development into the man he became over the course of three full movies, and selling his transition into an angry, fearful hermit needs more than a flashback and a few quick lines of dialogue.
You're making speculations and assumptions again to create your narrative. The vast majority of the audience doesn't care about the finer details of canon. They want a good, compelling story. In a previous post you waved the so called 'financial failure'-argument again to prove you need to adhere to canon strictly, but again with serious conjecture (like, how do you come to the conclusion that it earned 200 milion less than tracked because of canon? Not even taking into account we're literally talking about some of the most succesful movies ever anyways). Star Wars canon has always been a mess. Even in the saga itself. (Episode III contradicting Episode VI in terms of what Leia could remember of her mother for instance. Or the 'Vader killed your father' retcon that was solved with 'well, actually, I was talking figuratively!' And that's fine, because that's what the story needed)
And no, the Holdo maneuver doesn't break canon. Like I said. It's fridge logic. (The article you quote literally explains it is fridge logic in its first paragraphs, by pointing out some only go 'wait a minute' after the fact.). It's such a non-issue that every argument against it was solved with a single line in TROS stating it takes a massive amount of luck to achive (a one-in-a-million shot). It's also the kind of Cinemasins critique you can kill every film with, relying on an unwillingness to suspend disbelief to 'outsmart' a movie.
About Luke (okay, i'll bite) it doesn't go against his arc from ROTJ at all. It is literally said to us, so you can't misinterpret it: it was a fleeting moment. An instinct (and we know Luke is instinctive, he went ham on Vader in ROTJ) he immediately suppressed (because yeah, he learned to do that). But it was to late, because Kylo woke up when his saber was still ignited. The shot of Luke angrily looking down ready to strike, and Kylo who has to defend himself is Kylo's interpretation of events, and misses the context of Luke. Only the final flashback paints the full picture, and that one doesn't show 'killer Luke' at all. It, also provides ample context to why he ran away for it all (it even builds on something that Han already explains in TFA). And above all, Luke's state of mind and why he refuses to come back is the subject of almost every scene to begin with. We get a lot of info on where his state of mind is and how he got there.
(And please, your arguments of authority are a fallacy. There is no need to constantly pull up someone elses opinions as a sort of 'gotcha'. They don't hold more (or less) value than mine)
Ultimately, what I'm saying is: a story and the emotions it ellicits are more important than the finer details and 'facts' of a universe. The Holdo maneuver is an awe inspiring, climactic moment that silenced the whole (full) audience the two times I went to see TLJ theatrically. Who cares that you can apply (easily waved away) fridge logic to it later?
I bring up the shooting script alongside the treatments because by the time Rian started working on his TLJ script,
even if he did ignored the Arndt's treatments, he would have a good idea of where the TFA story is going to go. He was not waiting for it to finish as he was hired in or around the time the TFA shooting script was finished and barring dialogue and scene adjustments, the basic TFA story is not going to be radically changed anymore . . . . but he still made a conscious choice to do his own thing and ignore or did not develop properly the plot threads that was setup in TFA's story. Just because you can does not mean you should.
And basing from the leaked Abrams's
Episode 8 and
Episode 9 draft treatments that are floating out there and what
Daisy could be referring to, well, Rian, totally did ignored them too.
You're moving goalposts. Did he ignore treatments of 8 and 9, which we established were from Arndt in 2012 and probably not even usable anymore (and next to that, we don't even know what was in them to begin with), or did he ignore the shooting draft of TFA, which he just follows up on (it's not because it doesn't go the way you expect that it 'discards' it. TLJ takes every character where they left of and continues their arc, and answers the most glaring mystery box TFA presented. There is no 'one way' to follow up a story)
And those two treatments you linked, I don't know how to break it to you, but I'm quite sure those aren't real ;-). They read as fan fiction (I've skimmed through it, but Ahsoka appears, and they timetravel or something to The Old Republic, which both are huge red flags). They are pretty terribly written too and include way to much (bad) dialogue for a treatment, which usually doesn't have dialogue at all, or only minimal. And the date don't check out either. 8 was supposedly written/redacted in april, a mere month for the principal shoot of TFA, and 9 would've been written a few days before the shoot of TFA begun. JJ would've been busy with quite some different stuff by then.
Who was that that started this specific debate, again? You know, the one who belittled his fellow Star Wars fan feelings of disappointment at the way Ackbar's death was handled in TLJ via a throwaway line of dialogue . . . . Oh, right, it was YOU!:
You know, it's fine not to like TLJ (And I'm not going into how silly it is to be angry about Ackbar or the 'not my Luke!'-stuff. I'll just repeat: don't ever become a screenwriter, please?).
Yes, when you pulled up Ackbar to prove how disrispectfull RJ was or something, I said I found it silly to be angry about a minor, undevelopped character whose basic role is delivering some exposition to be killed. That wasn't ment as an insult. I just can't fathom how somebody can be angry about something like that. I never understood this kind of possessive fandom. Nor do I understand the obsessiveness over canon to the point that people are angry some stories they like aren't canon anymore, as if that story suddenly stops to exist. I believe the only endpoint for that kind of behaviour is killing your love for Star Wars, because their will always be story choices made you might not like.
There is Star Wars stuff I dislike too (I'm not a huge fan of The Mandalorian and its insistence on referencing the hell out of the wider universe and pulling in characters from left and right. I don't like they retconned Boba to be alive or how they use Luke to take away all agancy from the actual protagonist at the end. But I'm not fuming against. I don't agree with it, I accept that and I move on, only maybe engaging in a discussion here and there about it when it pops up and I feel like engaging. I'm not calling Feloni a diva pandering obsessive canon maniac or something)
