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Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (Rian Johnson 2017)


Dixon Hill

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Me too, expertly paced as well. Wish Abrams had come up with a better shot for Han falling, though, something sorta underwhelming about that to me. I'm not totally in love with how the Starkiller elegy goes with it either tbh, though it's beautiful for the cheek stroke.

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I think Harrison Ford's performance completely sold the "surrogate father/daughter" relationship that was beginning to blossom between he and Rey.  I also agree that the death scene was played wonderfully by Ford and Driver.

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Yes the performances were fine, but the entire setting, idea, and execution of it all was stupid. It was obviously going to happen from a mile off, and I was never convinced that Kylo was going to give up his Saber. Plus the rail-less walkway, the CGI body falling into the abyss. All so cliche and lazy.

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3 hours ago, Disco Stu said:

 

Yep.  The prime example of what I'm getting at.  Fight choreography as a physical extension of the characters emotional confrontation.  Gosh, Empire Strikes Back sure is good, huh? :P 

 

Based on that criteria, or any other, I think Obi Wan/Darth Maul is the best duel we've seen.  It feels like a real confrontation between two people using this arcane form of physical and mental combat.  There's a certain brutality to it, but it still seems like a refined, almost elegant thing without going into overly florid choreography.  

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Quote

Yes the performances were fine, but the entire setting, idea, and execution of it all was stupid. It was obviously going to happen from a mile off, and I was never convinced that Kylo was going to give up his Saber. Plus the rail-less walkway, the CGI body falling into the abyss. All so cliche and lazy.

 

Star Wars has always been all about dem cliches.

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Just now, Muad'Dib said:

 

Star Wars has always been all about dem cliches.

 

 

Just now, Stefancos said:

 

That's a Star Wars tradition of sorts actually.

 

 

Exactly my point. Tired, overused and lazy.

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22 minutes ago, TheGreyPilgrim said:

 

Based on that criteria, or any other, I think Obi Wan/Darth Maul is the best duel we've seen.  It feels like a real confrontation between two people using this arcane form of physical and mental combat.  There's a certain brutality to it, but it still seems like a refined, almost elegant thing without going into overly florid choreography.  

 

From a purely aesthetic view it's probably the most impressive, and it does express the millennia-old conflict between Jedi and Sith more effectively than any of Lucas's writing. But on an emotional confrontation it's purely one-sided and subsequently limited. Maul as a character is little more than a cipher with Halloween face-paint and a cool lightsaber. There's nothing going on there beyond a menacing stare. Obi-Wan could be fighting anyone.

 

21 minutes ago, Stefancos said:

 

That's a Star Wars tradition of sorts actually.

 

It's like poetry...

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37 minutes ago, leeallen01 said:

Plus the rail-less walkway, the CGI body falling into the abyss. All so cliche and lazy.

 

About that, what does the SW universe have against rails and barriers to keep people from falling from great heights? Are people in those movies so unconcerned about health and safety?

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In every Star Wars movie, there is a scene where a body (dead or alive) falls from a great height, usually due to a lack of safety rails, though that is not always the case. It's a tradition that is carried out in every film in the series.

 

 

 

TPM: Darth Maul's supposed death by a fall down a reactor shaft on Naboo (no rails)

AOTC: Anakin's reckless dive through the streets of Coruscant, Obi-wan's near fall into Coruscant while clinging onto an assassin droid

ROTS: Windu's death (no rails), Anakin and Obi-wan both fall repeatedly during their duel on Mustafar

R1: Jyn pulls a stormtrooper off a landing pad on the Imperial facility on Eadu and falls into a canyon; Jyn almost falls off the pad herself (no rails), Cassian and a deathtrooper both fall within the data vault on Scarif (no rails)

ANH: Multiple stormtroopers fall into an abyss within the Death Star (no rails)

ESB: Luke, after his duel with Vader, falls down an air shaft within Cloud City, and almost falls through the bottom of the city (no rails)

ROTJ: An officer falls over a railing within the Imperial bunker on Endor, Palpatine is thrown over a railing into a core shaft within his tower on the Death Star

TFA: Han Solo's body falls off a narrow catwalk and disappears into an abyss on Starkiller Base (no rails)

 

 

 

 

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I think the problem with Han's death scene was more meta-movie based.  We all knew the moment Ford was announced to be in VII he was going to die.  To make things more irritating, he, JJ, Kennedy, etc. acted as if it was a big mystery.  By the time you got to that point in the movie three years later, you were somewhat glad to see him die. 

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Quote "tradition" all you like, it's still bizarre for an advanced space civilisation to keep overlooking and ignoring basic safety precautions like hand rails. They obviously lack common sense! I'd love for a character to point this out in a future movie, but of course SW characters take themselves way too seriously.

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The lack of rails in Star Wars films add to the tension in scenes where it would be logical to have them. You'd never know when someone might take a tumble into an infinite abyss.

 

 

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My headcanon is that there was probably some network of maintenance tunnels and hallways connecting the bunker to the main shield generator and to various other Imperial emplacements across the moon.

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Gotta be a pretty big device to power a shield around a whole moon.  That doesn't bother me.

 

Although, tbh, if you make it past the sound of a spaceship and lasers in the vacuum of space in the first minute of Star Wars, you've already signed a contract that you won't necessarily be able to make sense of the movie's science below the surface.

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Or when Phasma lowers the shields protecting the Starkiller in TFA. So no one on the entire planet got a notification that the base's only method of defense from attack was suspiciously deactivated?

 

 

 

I also don't understand how it took three seconds for the entire planetwide shield to be lowered. Wouldn't it take a few hours, at least?

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1 hour ago, Stefancos said:

Why? It's an energy shield. So probably has the same speed as electricity.

 

 

Yes, but wouldn't it take some time for the electricity powering the energy shield to power down across the entire planet? As evident in the scene in which Phasma disables the shield, the screen behind her indicates that it took only a matter of seconds for it to deactivate.

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Guys, obi wan disables the tractor beam assigned to the hangar bay of the falcon. One in a million...it's feasible that nobody noticed.

 

BTW...the death stars do not have a surrounding enery shield. If not the starfghters could not attack it (and that's it why there is a shield generator in endor to protect the unfinished DSII). As stupid as it is...

 

Maybe there are portions of it with shields, for example the throne room spire....

 

 

 

 

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7 minutes ago, Luke Skywalker said:

BTW...the death stars do not have a surrounding enery shield. If not the starfghters could not attack it (and that's it why there is a shield generator in endor to protect the unfinished DSII). As stupid as it is...

 

The first Death Star had smaller energy shields scattered across the station's surface that could be detracted at will. The second Death Star also had multiple energy shields like its predecessor, but as it was being constructed and subsequently vulnerable to attack, it also needed a larger shield generator housed on the nearby forest moon to completely eclipse and protect the station during its construction. Starkiller Base used a fractional refresh rate shield, which kept anything moving slowing than lightspeed from penetrating the planet's atmosphere.

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11 hours ago, JohnSolo said:

 

 

Yes, but wouldn't it take some time for the electricity powering the energy shield to power down across the entire planet? As evident in the scene in which Phasma disables the shield, the screen behind her indicates that it took only a matter of seconds for it to deactivate.

 

Why would it take hours?

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It all depends on how stable the field is when you turn off the power.

 

Imagine a city at night when you turn off the electric grid. The lights do not go out all at once, but there isn't enough residual energy in the wires to keep the lights on for hours. A second or two and the city's dark. 

 

In a vacuum, an electromagnetic wave moves as fast as light. 299,792,458 m/s. In air, just a tad slower.  It's not going to take hours for a gap of no new energy to grow and collapse the field on the other side of the planet. 

 

Unless your story's bad science says that it does. 

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Perhaps JohnSolo is referring to the fact that the phase discriminators on the shield generators would have to be powered down one at a time, because an immediate shutdown of the energy grid could cause a plasma feedback loop enabled by latent tachyons that have attached itself to the energy shield. But we don't know enough about First Order technology to guess if they had the ability to generate an inverse polaron pulse during the shutdown, which would have nullified the tachyon effect.

 

You don't need tachyons on your shield during switch off, thats for sure!

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They look amazing! We should expect a cute Porg motif from Williams, at the very least. 

 

Rey and Kylo's TLJ costumes revealed:

Spoiler

 

tumblr11.jpg

 

tumblr12.jpg

 

 

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