Statistically speaking... it's going to suck.
this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2024
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Sure. Why wait and decide for ourselves? Let's hate it now.
Getting flashbacks to the Acolyte reviewbombs dropping before the episodes even aired.
I'm just doing the math.
"Never tell me the odds!"
I'm doing this new thing where I try to like things. Movies, TV shows, games, etc. I don't always succeed and some things are very hard to like. But the alternative just leads to poisoned expectations and the death of joy.
Nah I've made my peace with it, I don't let it bother me (mostly). I only posted here because I'm super bored at work. I used to be mad about the ongoing death of quality media but I now I mostly don't even pay attention.
Urkel as Hondo confirmed
If we're ever gonna get Hondo, this is probably it. Knowing Lucasfilm, it'll probably be as a five-second end-of-season stinger though.
Good to see some OG aliens in there, Disney kept adding almost exclusively new aliens and then only use those for a lot of their stuff.
One of the true unforced errors of the Disney era, particularly the ST itself. I get that they didn't want to be "MCU, Space Opera Division," so they wanted to get a little auteur thing going on and let JJ et al do their own thing, but Lucas et al created literally dozens of aliens and for the most part none of them were in the ST, even in background roles. It made it feel disconnected. "The universe is too small" has also been a fair criticism, but (1) you don't fix that all at once, and (2) they didn't really do that anyway, just made all the aliens into pufferfish or catfish.
I've fallen out of star wars as the recent stuff has been mediocre (or Andor which was "quality television" but felt, to me out of place in a galaxy ruled by space wizards with laser swords) but damn, seeing that wolfman dude and the notion of Urkel... Well, I'm tempted!
The real problem is they are making too much stuff. I stopped getting the comics because they were horrible. I don’t know if I’m going to watch this show or not. It would be better to have one good show tell a story for two or three seasons and then move to the next one.
That would be ideal for fans but I guess Disney doesn't view that as profit maximizing?
That's neat, I hadn't heard about this show. The trailer looks fun. Is it just me, or does Jaleel look rendered in this shot?
I agree the trailer looks fun. Goonies in space, plus a Jedi.
There's just been a certain cheap and rushed quality to recent Star Wars outings, both in writing and actual production values, that has made them a lot less enjoyable than they could be. I actually kinda liked the Acolyte and hope in particular that we see Manny Jacinto again, but I can't deny it was mostly just "kinda okay" and definitely seemed to squander its budget on cheap fake beards and fat toy lightsabers.
A breezy, fun story could handle that campy vibe a little better than ponderous end-of-galaxy stories, though. We need an infusion of charisma, too. I dunno. As always, I'm cautiously optimistic.
I'm an editor by trade, and weirdly, I think Acolyte's main problem is editing. When I later heard that the story was supposed to be all about the Sith and was reworked by producers, it clicked. It's cut like someone doing their best to make a story make sense after cornerstones of that story are removed. I've been in that position. It sucks.
I didn't have any real problems with the actual story of the Acolyte, but what did put me off most was the insane pacing and strange edits in that show, there was rarely a moment of rest to give viewers time to let stuff sink in. Some episodes also cut-off very suddenly to a credit roll, it was just jarring. And a lot of scenes felt like they were supposed to be a lot longer and could've benefitted from a lot more dialogue.
I'm unsure why they did so, because most episode could've easily been like 20-30 minutes longer to make at least 1 hour episodes. I think they might've cut a lot and saved it for either flashbacks in a potential second season (especially the Qimir stuff) or decided they wanted to change it later.
The whole editing and pacing reminds me a lot of Rise of Skywalker, the entire movie felt like they crammed 2 or even 3 movies into one.
The whole editing and pacing reminds me a lot of Rise of Skywalker, the entire movie felt like they crammed 2 or even 3 movies into one.
I'm an unapologetic The Last Jedi fan, so fair warning, but this is a huge part of the issue with The Rise of Skywalker. It was such a knee-jerk, panicky reaction to the mixed reception of TLJ that it materially made TROS worse than it needed to be. You can walk back some of the more divisive stuff in TLJ in a way that's much more graceful and isn't lampshading it with stupid shit like, "Come with us Rose! I can't because Leia gave me homework!" or having Force Ghost Luke literally catch and return the Youngling-Slayer lightsaber. Even if you want to go a different direction, it needed to be "Yes, and..." rather than simply undoing TLJ. It left no one satisfied and wasted run-time.
Beyond that, I agree, there was just too much, with the redemption of Kylo Ren (assuming you needed to go that direction... I don't agree) being enough to fill out an entire movie if done with care, and then the rebuilding the resistance and invading Exegol being plenty for another.
Oh my god I almost believed I was the only one on earth that thought this about the sequels and TLJ and TROS specifically. To the point I couldn't even mention it in any SW discussions because people would just dogpile on how much they hated people actually enjoying TLJ, or for just thinking TLJ is the best of the three movies.
It felt a lot like JJ Abrams gave Rian Johnson such a hard time by ending TFA on a cliffhanger (quite literally lol). Which basically gave Rian no wiggle room to do anything like a time jump or whatsoever at the start of the movie. It looks so much like Rian tried to salvage what JJ had started and then JJ came back to just backspace everything Rian had set up.
I had always kind of hoped that the Skywalker saga would be 9 movies of 3 trilogies and a 10th finale movie to wrap up the entire saga to an epic conclusion, probably would've been better, but I'm unsure if Disney would've been able to pull it off anyway.
The overall idea of the sequels seemed alright, despite characters being shoehorned in for the sake of fan-service unnecessarily. Like the force dyad, knights of Ren and Palpatine having a post-death scenario using the clones. But all of that felt like quite unsatisfactory executions and never really wrapped up, like "yeah Snoke was a clone experiment, we have many of them", as if that was sufficient information and then proceed to never ever mention it again lol
Over the years, I've come to understand a lot about what people didn't like about The Last Jedi. There are pacing issues and some of the setups strain credulity even within the gossamer veneer of Sci-Fi that's wrapped around Star Wars. A lot of it is sort of nitpicking that would be forgiven if Luke had stormed down a hallway slicing people up in Act 3, but I get it. Ultimately, they just couldn't buy what Rian was selling, but I did.
If you can roll with Luke being capable of backsliding just a bit and being flawed (and FFS, this is a fan base that rolled with letting him freakin' join the Empire multiple times in their precious EU), then I think TLJ was actually trying to do something thematically and narratively interesting with a franchise that was stuck in the past. I thought it set up a really solid final chapter, though I too thought that with the lack of a time jump, maybe we could do 9 movies plus a capper. Critical to all of it is accepting that Snoke was a red herring, and that poor Ben Solo, conflicted and prescient as he was, was a tragic figure too deeply broken to be saved.
Also, sort of tangential here but just because I want to talk about it, the "tone poem" of Rose's sister in the bomber is some straight up beautiful filmmaking that channeled George Lucas at his best, and while I didn't grok it all until a few minutes later, it's intentionally juxtaposed against Poe's your-mom joke before the battle and lame excuses after. Now, the joke was still a bit too broad and Marvel-y for my taste, but I think it was a smaller miss than the haters declare.
It's got hot werewolf man. I'm in.
“Can’t let you do that, Star Fox!”