Star Wars

Show kind of got off to a slow start with some odd choices.

But I am loving where it's going.

Great to see Yoda and a lightsaber whip, Mae (or was it Osha?) picking up a lightsaber.

Interested to see who Darth Helmet ends up being. But also imagine there is still yet a master to be unleashed (much like in the prequels it took three movies for the jedi to understand)

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/13458510

It seems some Star Wars fans are accidentally review bombing the 2008 Australian horror film Acolytes instead of The Acolyte Disney+ series. The Acolyte is the latest live-action Star Wars series to air on Disney+, premiering its first two episodes on June 4, with new episodes airing weekly until the finale on July 16. The show has earned mostly positive reviews from critics so far, but it has been incredibly divisive among Star Wars fans, to say the least.

At the time of this writing, the Rotten Tomatoes critic score for The Acolyte is a respectable 84%, while its audience score is an abysmal 16%. Without delving into spoilers, there are Star Wars fans who are not happy about some of the creative choices in the show, feeling as though it doesn't fit with the rest of the Star Wars canon. Others are not impressed with the show's quality, and are unhappy at the direction the Star Wars franchise has been going in general. There are also some people who are upset that the show focuses on female characters and has a diverse cast.

Those unhappy with The Acolyte, whether it's due to legitimate criticism about the show's quality or anger over its "woke" content, have taken to Rotten Tomatoes to let their displeasure be known, spamming the series with low ratings to bring down its audience score. However, some individuals seem to have gotten lost, instead review bombing the 2008 Australian horror film Acolytes, which has nothing to do with the Star Wars franchise in any capacity. Now, the Acolytes film was never popular with audiences anyway; from what we can see using the Way Back Machine, it's gone from about a 42% audience score to a 33% audience score. Still, it does seem as though its score has been impacted by Star Wars fans who actually want to review bomb The Acolyte instead.

It's been ages since I last saw ep 1 and, while looking for the despecialized original trilogy, I came across the prequel fan edits. "Eh, why not?"

Gotta say, I was expecting the pacing or the story to kinda fall flat, but this was a very enjoyable watch. There's a lot that was cut, nearly all the "whimsy" was removed, also the whole underwater trip when the jedis first land on Naboo. This leads to the Gungan alliance being a "jar jar ex machina", but it worked well enough in my opinion. Other than that, I think the movie works really well in every aspect.

The torrent I got also comes with a .docx that lists the whole movie script with all the stuff that was cut in red, and new additions (very few) in blue. A smaller list of changes can be read here - Besides removing a lot of jar jar's antics and any references to midichlorians (I personally never cared about that), one notable change near the end was making Anakin blow up the command ship before Padme and her group capture the Viceroy, so it makes it seem that the droids being deactivated is what allowed them to complete their objective.

One thing that I noticed during the final battle was that the Trade Federation pretty much dropped the blockade, as they only left one command ship in orbit, compared to the dozens at the beginning of the movie. I guess that was because the land invasion worked, so there was no further need to keep the orbital blockade.

PS: I couldn't stop laughing when Obi Wan fell because of that fucking meme

PPS: I always liked how Naboo looks, but this time I really paused to look a bit better at the architecture, and it has such a nice mix of mediterranean marble of yellowish tones and cyan roofs. With the current image quality and all, it was much easier to pick out "ancient CG" and in many places it looked like a "old last gen game", but it had that late 90s charm that warms my hearth with nostalgia.

PPPS: The worst part about watching SW as an older person is seeing all those damn walkways without a single guardrail anywhere. Coruscant is even worse, that transport vehicle full of VIP heading to the senate is fully open without so much as seatbelts.

Episode 4 did Obi-Wan Kenobi completely dirty. In the first three movies and The Clone Wars, we see that he's an honourable, compassionate, brave person. He killed Darth Vader and left him for dead. By all rights, he should have continued to fight for the rebellion instead of moving to a desert and being alone for 20 years.

You expect me to believe after being a general in the Clone Wars and defeating multiple Sith, Obi Wan proceeded to do absolutely nothing while the emperor oppressed everyone? As soon as he heard Darth Vader was still alive, he should have hopped on his ship and gone to kill Anakin! The version we see in A New Hope is an old loser hiding from his own mistakes in the desert.

Obi Wan is supposed to be determined, a warrior, someone who always accomplishes what he sets out to do. Not a coward! I grew up with the original trilogy, and these new movies completely ruined my childhood. Why did George Lucas feel the need to crap all over us Obi-Wan fans who loved his original three Star Wars movies? And all in the name of sUbVeRtInG eXpEcTaTiOnS

This is a joke about The Last Jedi.

Watch the new Game Overview trailer, featuring exciting new locations you can explore, and the high-risk jobs you can take on in Star Wars Outlaws. Coming Au...

This new gameplay walkthrough video follows Kay Vess on a mission to Mos Eisley to track down an expert gunslinger. Kay takes on a mission to uncover a myste...

Jenny Nicholson’s granular critique of Disney’s Galactic Starcruiser experience reflects the fraught relationship between studios and fans right now.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/12883240

Three years in the making, Star Wars: Hunters has seen multiple delays that set it back from a 2021 release date to 2022 and finally 2024. Star Wars fans have had some hands-on experience with the title in the interim - playing in soft launch in select regions so that Zynga subsidiary NaturalMotion could collect data and improve the game.

But today, June 4th, 2024, marks the first time everyone on the planet is able to play, whether on Android, iOS, or Nintendo Switch and it’s a landmark moment for Zynga and for Star Wars.

Hunters was Zynga’s first game in development for Nintendo Switch, broadening the company’s horizons; meanwhile, for Star Wars, Hunters was the brand's second game revealed after EA’s exclusivity deal came to an end.

Hunters is also canon to the wider Star Wars universe and further broadens the series’ transmedia reach, with NaturalMotion having worked with Lucasfilm to ensure the game stays true to the films and other media. The game iteself is set after Episode Six taking place in a location where characters from across the galaxy pay a visit for entertainment and combat.

As for its gameplay, Star Wars: Hunters offers chaotic 4v4 multiplayer battles in iconic series locales, with plenty of characters to choose from and roles like Support, Tank, and Damage classes.

There are multiple game modes with different objectives like taking and maintaining control over certain areas, or capture-the-flag type challenges. Trophy Chase tasks squads with holding the TR0-F33 droid, while Squad Brawl challenges teams to make 20 eliminations.

during a surprise appearance at Star Wars Celebration in 2017, he reiterated that the very first "Star Wars" installment, which would go on to be titled "A New Hope," was a "a film for 12-year-olds." Of course, that doesn't mean adults can't still find value in these sci-fi stories of heroism. But it also means that the franchise, from its inception, has always been molded to be appealing to children.

Therefore, it should come as no surprise that when Lucas got around to making "The Phantom Menace," kicking off an entire prequel trilogy about how Anakin Skywalker became Darth Vader, the filmmaker entrusted the approval of one of the most pivotal parts of the movie to a five-year-old kid. When the iconic "Duel of the Fates" lightsaber battle between Qui-Gon Jinn, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Darth Maul was being developed by stunt coordinator Nick Gillard, it needed the seal of approval from one very specific child. 

As Gillard recalled in a deep-dive into the making of "The Phantom Menace" lightsaber battle at Vulture, "George has never been in a fight in his life. So he didn't bother, really, writing it. It would say something like, 'A vicious lightsaber battle ensues — seven minutes,' and you could fill in the gap there. But that's much better for me."

Up until this point, the lightsaber fights in "Star Wars" hadn't exactly delivered fast-paced sword combat. Instead, much of the original lightsaber duels were inspired by elegant fencing techniques. Though Luke Skywalker's style in "Return of the Jedi" is a little more energetic and chaotic, fueled by his anger as he faces his father, Darth Vader, the rest of the battles are patient, calculated, and slow. That's why Gillard completely ignored those lightsaber battles when it come to creating the two-on-one fight in "Phantom Menace." As Lucas recalled in a behind-the-scenes documentary, "I thought I wanted a faster version of what the other movies were; a more energetic version; and that's basically what he gave me."

In fact, Lucas had instructed Gillard to "come up with a new kind of martial art," which the stunt coordinator described as "an amalgamation of all sword fighting." Kendo, rapier, samurai, and a little bit of tennis and even chopping down trees informed the rapid battle between the two Jedi and the Sith apprentice. All of this combined to give each of the warriors a level of mastery in wielding a lightsaber where everything had to be precise as well as fast. Gillard added, "They can only parry there, they can only attack there. The moves are so natural or so correct, that's the only place they can be."

...

Gillard put together a five-minute demo reel showcasing the new lightsaber fighting style for George Lucas to see. Lucas, again believing that the "Star Wars" movies are for kids, played the test footage for his five-year old son Jett Lucas. As Gillard recalled to Entertainment Weekly, "Effectively, Jett Lucas decided the style of that fight."

StarStar Wars doesn’t really have a future right now. The franchise itself does — it will keep getting new entries forever if Disney has anything to say about — but the story can’t escape the Skywalkers or imagine a future beyond the franchise’s most-featured family. In fact, most of the recent TV spinoffs, like The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Andor, and Ahsoka, have just been filling in the gaps between the main movies. But with Disney Plus’ new show The Acolyte, Lucasfilm is finally venturing outside of the time period of the Skywalker Saga by letting us know that Star Wars’ true future is in the past: in a time known as the High Republic.

To understand why Lucasfilm is once again taking the franchise backward, it’s important to understand exactly what the High Republic is and where it started. The High Republic was first introduced to Star Wars canon in 2020 as a series of books. The books were designed to introduce fans to a new era in Star Wars history that had never been explored before, and to open the franchise up for more inventive stories in a time period that had a little more canonical freedom. Since then, there have been over 50 books, comics, and short stories written about the High Republic era, all tied together and telling different sides of one larger story about the time period. Despite all that, The Acolyte will be the first time the High Republic appears on screen.

...

Lucasfilm’s apprehension toward the future, like so many other Star Wars problems, is tied up in the creative finiteness of Disney’s sequel trilogy. Rather than taking a grand step into the larger future of the Star Wars universe, they were instead tightly stitched to the legacy of the movies that preceded them, sewing longtime stalwarts like Luke and Han into the very fabric of their story. Lucasfilm used its biggest platform in a decade to build a box around on-screen Star Wars stories that was only as big as the Skywalker family — and its members both real and imagined — taking a grand story and making it feel disappointingly small.

On top of that, while financially successful, the cultural memory and fondness for those movies is spotty at absolute best (and downright disastrous at worst). The dubious reception of these movies made moving the story forward after the trilogy feel like a creative risk that wasn’t worth taking. The series, therefore, had to turn in on itself, exploring the little pockets of the Skywalker Saga that the nine-movie saga couldn’t reach during their run time. This creative effort has been led largely by Dave Filoni, who rose to Star Wars fame through his work on the Clone Wars animated series. While Filoni is fiercely loyal to George Lucas’ original works, Clone Wars was a show that was entirely designed around this filling-in-the-gaps style of storytelling, and it’s a mentality he has carried forward into his work on the Disney Plus live-action series as well. All of this leaves the impression of a universe that somehow shrinks with each successive entry. Rather than expanding the galaxy, it just gets more microscopic and interconnected with each episode.

It’s easy to see why this kind of creative conservatism is particularly appealing to Disney at this moment in Star Wars history. The franchise is one of the company’s biggest creative properties, and nearly every big swing or risky move it’s tried so far has been either divisive, like the sequel trilogy, or an outright disaster, like the Star Wars hotel. So rather than put the franchise in jeopardy, Disney has spent the last several years opting to put it in creative stasis instead. Only greenlighting on-screen projects that fit neatly into the universe, showing fans more of the characters they already care about, and changing very little — with the exception of the proposed Rey movie in the distant future.

In this way, The Acolyte, and Star Wars’ future in the High Republic in general, is particularly exciting. It’s, by definition, a breath of fresh air for the series, a step away from the recent run of series whose plots can be succinctly organized into a list of famous character cameos. It’s also hopefully a sign that Star Wars will soon escape the Skywalker legacy and the gravitational pull of Filoni’s method of burrowing deeper into the universe rather than expanding it.

Alternative image

Supposedly, this is the same person as here

Edit:

Thank you @[email protected] for the gif!

Also found a source on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DBK1kuaXds

The failure of Disney’s "Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser" is under the spotlight thanks to a viral video by YouTuber Jenny Nicholson.

On Friday, May 24, Lucas — who celebrated his 80th birthday on May 14 — appeared at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival ahead of his honorary Palme d'Or ceremony on May 25. During a conversation at the festival, the filmmaking icon spoke to how some critics of his massively successful space opera franchise have pointed out a perceived lack of diversity in the first six Star Wars films, which Lucas either directed or produced himself.

“They would say, ‘It’s all white men.' I'd say, it's not. Most of the people are aliens," he said. "And the idea is you’re supposed to accept people for what they are, whether they’re big and furry or whether they’re green and whatever — the idea is all people are equal.”

Lucas pointed out that in his Star Wars movies, the only characters ever shown on the wrong side of discrimination are robots and droids. “And that was a way of saying, people are always discriminating against something, and sooner or later, that’s what’s going to happen,” he added. “I mean, we’re already starting with AI, saying, ‘Well, we can’t trust those robots.' ”

The filmmaker said that he never shied from hiring actors of color for his Star Wars projects, between Billy Dee Williams' role as Lando Calrissian in the original trilogy and Samuel L. Jackson's Jedi character Mace Windu in the 2000s-era prequel movies.

He even pointed out that each trilogy features strong women leads for protagonists, between Carrie Fisher's Princess Leia and Natalie Portman's Padme Amidala. “Who do you think the heroes are in these stories? What do you think Princess Leia was? She’s the head of the rebellion," Lucas said. "She’s the one that’s taking this young kid who doesn’t know anything and this boisterous, I-know-everything guy who can’t do anything and trying to save the rebellion with these clowns."

Lucas reflected on his life in work in a wide-ranging chat in Cannes, where he received and honorary Palm d'Or.

The first reactions are in for The Acolyte, the newest Star Wars show on Disney Plus – and viewers are loving the series' dark, murder mystery vibes and "Force-fu" fight scenes.

"Star Wars: #TheAcolyte is a DREAM for fans of The High Republic era and a fresh experience for everyone else. 4 eps in and it’s taking its time layering in the dark mystery. RIVETING fight choreography and SUPERB performances from Amandla Stenberg and Lee Jung-jae. I’m diggin it," said one fan.

Others also praised the fight scenes, particularly the "Force-fu," which will see characters engage in hand-to-hand martial arts rather than reaching for their lightsabers. "Star Wars: #TheAcolyte is filled with mystery and darkness that delves deep into new and diverse depths of the galaxy. I’ve seen 4 eps and dig the sinister story it’s steadily setting up. BIG potential in this era. Carrie-Anne Moss with a lightsaber doing Force-Fu is PERFECTION," wrote one viewer.

"#TheAcolyte is a blend of murder mystery with Star Wars charm. 4 episodes in, and it’s clear that this new timeline will add to the lore of the galaxy in BIG ways. The Kung Fu force fighting is MAGICAL! JJ as Sol is the COOLEST Jedi since QUI GON! Can’t wait to see where it goes," agreed another.

Audiences have also made comparisons to other titles, from fellow Star Wars series Andor to some more unlikely parallels, which have done nothing but raise our expectations. "THE ACOLYTE Eps 1-4 are superb. A captivating murder mystery that evokes the detective tales of Twin Peaks & Matt Reeves’ The Batman. Mature like Andor while fully embracing & thematically connecting to the prequels. Seeing the High Republic in live-action does not disappoint," a viewer tweeted.

"#TheAcolyte is the force-sensitive version of Andor. The cast is stellar, the writing of each episode is jam packed. Practical sets and amazing costumes, as well as sfx work make every location feel lived in, while having an emotional throughline to keep it focused," wrote another.