Chen G.

Sure, I do too. At least its a good looking movie.

I suppose its fun on the rudimentary level of "well, there's explosions and chases and shootouts and loud noises and stuff." That's not nothing.

The film takes a verynon-commital approach to this idea of setting her up as the next Bond. It starts off like that, but then it kinda gets swept away as the storytelling gets busier. Anyway, if that happens, Twitter's gonna have an aneurysm.

Yes, that's exactly what he's been saying, for well over a year. He's somehow under the impression that once we have the context of this alledged Episode X, somehow we'll see the genius of Episode IX in retrospect...

Well, you should have.

Oh good! https://collider.com/dune-international-box-office-100-million/

Star Wars isn't mythology. Its fairytale.

See, as far as Mattris is concerned, as long as Episode X isn’t released his argument isn’t disproved…

Yes, and (per Mattris) had been completed for a very long time by now. Its...yeah... Pfff, "Knowledge of Star Wars..." Obviously John Williams takes great pride in his work on the Star Wars films and is the consummate professional at scoring them. But that's not the same as saying he's knowledgable about Star Wars: he basically watches a cut of the film, scores it and goes his separate ways until next time. I bet if you had a chance to talk to him about Star Wars, he'd fail to remember anything beyond the main characters and the general beats of the story.

Oh, the one with Hermann Becht and Donald McIntyre?

Its not so much critics that changes: its movies. Yes, movies now are just as ridiculous as ever. But they're intentionally ridiculous, and so that "makes it okay." You'll note I used air-quotes around it, because I don't think that just because a choice is intentional means that it works. I've had it up to here with films ridiculing themselves.

Well, in early drafts of the script, Gimli was going to use bad language all the time. His original line to Aragorn at Helm's Deep was "You are the luckiest, the canniest and the most reckless wench I ever knew!"

Well, in the case of Marvel killing-off characters is more about cutting the actors' loose... "Well, we need to cut Robert Downey-Junior loose, but we can't just have his character disappear or sit out the next film, so lets just kill him off..." which is probably one of the reasons I don't like the (few) deaths in the MCU. Here, it was more letting Bond go off with a bang.

This; all of this. I have no idea what's the motivation for all of this, and in that way the entire film after the death of Bloefeld is anticlimactic. Funny that we now think of this as being a Marvel thing. In the 90s through to the early 2000s, it was very popular to give the hero a martyric death, and some of those films are my all time favourites. I don't think Marvel did it well, and I don't think this does it particularly well. Game of Thrones is different: its not martyric, its tragic; or is supposed to be.

You sounded the horn that woke-up Fafner...

You misunderstood me, so I'll explain myself a bit differently. Here's the equivalent of @SilverTrumpet and you:

Someone was going to do this at some point anyway... Like I said, its that time of year again.

The sort of film I need to rewatch to make a fair assesment of, but which I don't really want to rewatch. I had always appreciated the solemn atmosphere of the Craig Bonds, and it persists here, so that's a plus. But the storytelling is very cluttered: it starts out as a continuation of Bond's run-in with Spectre from, errr, Spectre, and over halfway through it morphs into something completely different. The main antagonist doesn't appear out of the blue, but lacks sufficient build-up and I for one couldn't follow along as to what his motivations were. He's fairly creepy, but the personal dimension to his rivalry with Bond isn't as pronounced as it had been in Skyfall or even in Spectre.

It works for punctuations of confusions in action setpieces where you want to emphasize the mayham.

Someday I'll understand what kind of movie exactly do people think can actually have pathos without being accused of "self importance"...

Ah, I see. But then, the sequel trilogy had spawned two films which are better than three out of the four Lucas-helmed Star Wars entries. Its all fine and well talking about "vision", but ultimately the test of any movie is how much you liked it, "vision" or no "vision". I can only speak for myself, but I like The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi more than all of the Lucas-helmed prequels. Do you really think Mattris can top the lunacy that is my signature? I doubt it.

Lucas was as much the businessman as any executive in Hollywood history, so I’m not sure as to the point you’re making here.

I also think its important to understand that people in the industry working on a film don't view it from the same perspective as a member of the audience: its their job and they develop the capability to not "judge" the material in the way that a member of the audience might. That's how, for instance, Williams could write a love theme of remarkable pathos for one of the most pathetic love stories ever committed to the screen in Episode II. So composers and people from the post-production process in general, are not very good judges of their own projects. At least, not while they are working on it.

And yet the classic trilogy is the only Star Wars trilogy that was completely reconcieved between its first two entries: the whole concept had changed. The transition from Star Wars to The Empire Strikes is at once a transition between two directors with a very different styles, a major leap in budget, a transition from an unpresumptous B-movie for kids to something much more serious-feeling, from an episodic narrative to a cyclical one, as well as introducing more continuity hiccups than anyone could ever count.