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Author Topic: I'm a Star Wars  (Read 40936 times)

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Niku

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Re: I'm a Star Wars
« Reply #180 on: February 28, 2012, 09:05:39 PM »

HEY KABBAGE DID YOU KNOW THAT CANONICALLY, DARTH MAUL FORCE PUSHED HIMSELF INTO A SIDE SHAFT AS HE FELL DOWN THAT BIG SHAFT

AND THEN HE BUILT HIMSELF ROBOT SPIDER LEGS
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Mothra

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Re: I'm a Star Wars
« Reply #181 on: February 28, 2012, 09:10:28 PM »

Oh no WAY:

Quote
However, Maul survived through his hate and will to live, and hatred against Kenobi, he reached out with the Force and grabbed an air vent. He somehow escaped from Naboo and arrived to Lotho Minor in order to escape his master's anger for Maul's failure. Maul acquired a six-legged cybernetic apparatus to replace his lost lower body, and stayed in the caves of the planet...

yessssssssssssss
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Brentai

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Re: I'm a Star Wars
« Reply #182 on: February 28, 2012, 09:15:13 PM »

Word of God outright says that any Sith anywhere is an imbalance.  Light = Balance, Dark = Imbalance.  The usual negative aspects of "law" - overzealousness, rigidity, the eradication of personal freedoms - fall under the Dark Side scope just as much as the negative aspects of "chaos".  The Light/Dark spectrum in Star Wars tends to throw people off because they're used to the concepts being tied to either the Moral or Legal axes of the D&D alignment chart, rather than a measure of control versus obsession (losing oneself to hate, anger, greed, lust, power, etc).

In D&D terms, Yoda's Order is lawful neutral at best most of the time, often siding with the "good of the Republic" over common sense, and edging dangerously close to lawful evil on account of the fact that they're mostly inflexible violent jerkfucks.  The Jedi who do lose that precarious grasp on reason - Maul to bloodthirst, Dooku to hate, Anakin to fear*, Palpatine to greed, and whoever the hell Plagius was to his passion for knowledge - go full-on Lawful Evil and "dark".  The prophecy is basically saying that Anakin is going to get rid of the festering madness of the Jedi.

...which of course means it is foretelling their doom, but not the way it keeps getting misinterpreted.  What the Jedi don't realize is that they're all imbalanced, very dangerously so.  It takes a ground-up eradication of their entire order, the especial teaching of one new prophet, and a complete reboot based on his instruction to flush out all the Dark Side crap infesting the whole system.


* Mostly of losing control, ironically.
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Thad

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Re: I'm a Star Wars
« Reply #183 on: February 28, 2012, 09:22:47 PM »

One more before bed:

Anti-Life is not chaos; it is perfect order.

And yeah Jack Kirby sure did have some opinions about where George Lucas got his ideas.
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Re: I'm a Star Wars
« Reply #184 on: February 28, 2012, 09:28:41 PM »

Oh no WAY:

Quote
However, Maul survived through his hate and will to live, and hatred against Kenobi, he reached out with the Force and grabbed an air vent. He somehow escaped from Naboo and arrived to Lotho Minor in order to escape his master's anger for Maul's failure. Maul acquired a six-legged cybernetic apparatus to replace his lost lower body, and stayed in the caves of the planet...

yessssssssssssss

Read that article further.

Maulrachnoid is why Owen & Beru tell Obi-Wan to get bent and don't want Luke seeing him, canonically. :hurr:

And yes, balance to the force means eradicating dark side feelings. Which 99% of the light jedi were also bathing in and scrubbing their scrotums with. The whole "Bring balance to the force," most Light-Jedi interpreted it as getting rid of all dark side feelings, like obsession, pettiness, and all that. And so they sought out through extreme zealotry to eliminate extreme zealotry :hurr: :hurr: :hurr:
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Classic

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Re: I'm a Star Wars
« Reply #185 on: February 28, 2012, 09:36:55 PM »

Because of the fanboys, I don't think the Jedi Order is quite that much of a sausage-fest.

...
I was originally going to just snark, but now that I think about it, in the prequels and their attendant actually-pretty good side productions how many identified as female Jedi do we actually see?
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Brentai

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Re: I'm a Star Wars
« Reply #186 on: February 28, 2012, 09:39:17 PM »

Supposedly the Spider-Maul thing is brand new.

Because he will be showing up very shortly in the Clone Wars cartoon.

Star Wars: Clone Wars - Darth Maul Returns Trailer
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Re: I'm a Star Wars
« Reply #187 on: February 28, 2012, 09:39:27 PM »

My understanding is that incorporating even just the good EU, we get only slightly more male Jedi than female Jedi. It's usually pretty good about the whole diversity thing.

Fuck, we even have Hutt Jedi.
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Ted Belmont

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Re: I'm a Star Wars
« Reply #188 on: February 28, 2012, 09:45:01 PM »

Okay yeah, that's pretty badass.

Also, kudos to Brentai for actually making the prequels seem well thought-out.
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Mongrel

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Re: I'm a Star Wars
« Reply #189 on: February 28, 2012, 09:46:53 PM »

The Grevious battle was beyond farce. I say that yes, as a man who fucking adored Tartakovsky's take on Grevious, but also just, as a man who can enjoy even the stupidest things if they are entertaining. It was easily the most expensive Stupidest Fucking Thing I have ever seen in a movie (I have seen Transformers 2). The final riding-robots-over-lava clash between Obi-Wan and Anikan was doing okay when they were inside that control room thing in close-quarters fighting, then very very quickly gets very very hard to take seriously as they're dangling from the ladder, slashing at each other over a lava waterfall. I don't think I need to go into the space battle in Episode 1. The Gungan battle was just brutally retarded, obviously. The gladiator battle was tedious and cartoonish and by then I still did not give a quarter-shit about any of the characters involved, or their bug and frogmen antagonists. The space battle at the start of Episode III was a joyless, aimless shitshow with no way to discern the stakes or who was winning or losing or what we were seeing or if we were supposed to care about the deaths of the republic troops (it was never revealed in the movies if the clones were thinking individuals or mindless obedient drones fresh out of the oven). If there were others, I cannot for the life of me remember them.

Thank god I'm not the only one who noticed that.
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Ziiro

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Re: I'm a Star Wars
« Reply #190 on: February 29, 2012, 12:06:40 AM »

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Brentai

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Re: I'm a Star Wars
« Reply #191 on: February 29, 2012, 07:29:20 AM »

Also, kudos to Brentai for actually making the prequels seem well thought-out.

Any emerging themes here are probably unintended.
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Thad

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Re: I'm a Star Wars
« Reply #192 on: February 29, 2012, 07:44:19 AM »

Thad, it kills me to see you stand up for these movies.

I'm standing up for ELEMENTS of them.  There's a difference.

My point, more than anything, is that Lucas is driven by visuals.  He knows what he wants to see up on screen.  And where he stumbles, hard, is in creating the emotional connection with his characters.  (Below, you complain, over and over, that the problem with the action scenes is that you just don't give a fuck about the characters.  That's much the same point I'm making.)

He even knows, theoretically, how that's supposed to work.  Quiet scenes with Padme and Anakin at the lakehouse.  It is not coincidental that I have described the single worst sequence in the entire series.

Part of it is that Lucas is absolutely terrible at natural dialogue, and part of it is that he should fire his casting director.

I can understand the likes of Thundercats, because there's some genuine creativity going on there, but jesus

I think that's an interesting insight too -- the biggest problem with the prequels is the total lack of creativity.

The original trilogy was derivative as hell, but there's just so much fucking excitement there.  The creativity may not be there in the storytelling, but it's there in every costume, every set, every prop.  Star Wars is goddamn wonderful because the attack on the Death Star is actually a camera zooming across ping-pong tables, and because the Falcon is so lovingly constructed out of spare parts.

That's where Lucas lost the plot, I think.  It's trite to say "He got rich and out-of-touch", but it's got some truth to it too.  We don't love Star Wars for the plot or the mythology -- at least, not JUST for those -- we love it because all that shit looks like it was built in somebody's garage.  And because the breakout star was the goddamn janitor.

I was going to leave all this for my big finish, but fuck it, this isn't an essay, we're just having a conversation.  I think the point of all this should be, as intriguing as the mooted idea of actually-good prequels is, if there's a team out there that can do right by the Star Wars name, I'd rather see them make something new.  Do what Lucas and his team did: cobble some shit together out of spare parts on a bare budget, and operate as much outside the studio system as you can get away with.  Yes, for every Star Wars there are a million sad MST3K-bait wannabes, but I KNOW there are people out there who can make something really, genuinely great AND make it out of household parts.

...since I mention MST3K, that's another great example of low-budget SF made out of supplies from the hardware store.  And need  I mention Doctor Who?

We go to Kashyyyk for all of five minutes, wherein we see an awkward battle sequence with rolling wheel robot cars and Wookies armed only with crossbows sitting in ditches firing at armor. At the very least, I don't get why there are water-wheel assault vehicles when you would probably just have a hovering spaceship of some kind at this point in future warfare, and I don't get why the wookies don't have some kind of anti-armor technology or capability. This would be forgivable if the machines and by extension every shot with them in it did not look completely ridiculous - if the battle had looked or felt particularly cool - but it was just weird and aesthetically absurd and impossible to feel anything for when you know only Yoda, who promptly leaves.

I'll grant I saw the movie once.  I remember enjoying Kashyyyk but I also remember most of the fights being clusterfucks.

If "boring clusterfuck" is your complaint, then fair enough.  But if you're going to start complaining about the logic of weaponry and vehicles in Star Wars then I think that's the wrong direction.  Keep in mind this is a universe where a sword is a better weapon than a gun, said swords are made of lasers that stop after a few feet, fighter jets can only shoot things directly in front of them, and instead of treads tanks have long spindly legs.  Every single thing in the series is designed for how cool it will look in an action scene, not because it makes any kind of logical sense.

So, if your complaint is "The action scene didn't look cool" then fair enough -- like I say, I remember enjoying it but it's been years, and that's subjective.

And I CERTAINLY think that, while the giant spinny-wheel things aren't actually much sillier than Imperial Walkers, they are not nearly as goddamn cool a design.

As a planet, we've already seen Kashyyyk when it was Endor. I would have preferred any kind of planet or location I had not already seen.

That's fair enough.  I'd argue the opposing view that we were supposed to see Kashyyyk instead of Endor the first damn time, and it was nice to finally get it.  But yeah, it's not the same.

I really really wish they had not fucked Yoda up. He would have given some much needed dignity to any scene he was in.

Agree. I never wanted to see Yoda actually fight. I always hoped that anyone short of Sidious or maybe Dooku would just saying something along the lines of "Oh shit! Yoda's coming!" and bail. That his capabilities merely be implied, rather than shown. That maybe even goes for Sidous too, I guess.

As for an actual fight, I thought it would have been much cooler if Yoda either fought entirely with Force energy (i.e. the Emperor tries to fry him with lighting and he just deflects it back), or if he (or both of them) just sat and meditated while their sabres fought each other telekinetically.

Basically that Batman Beyond fight Bal posted earlier today, only instead of an evil fat psychic, it's Yoda. That's really how I envisioned Yoda fighting. I think a lot of people would have assumed that, really.

I'll buy all those criticisms, but I don't think any of those examples make for great visuals.  (There's a Thundercats where Lion-O fights Mumm-Ra-disguised-as-King-Arthur and it devolves into the Sword of Omens and Excalibur duking it out in midair.  It's a perfectly decent episode but the swords-in-the-sky fight scene is silly.  And then it's an "oh shit" moment when Excalibur pokes the Eye of Thundera out, followed by a Jaga Fixes Everything anticlimax.)

I like the idea that Yoda's still spry in a fight when he needs to be, but that he only bothers to set the cane down at greatest need.  I guess the problem, as much as anything, is that he loses both fights -- though Brent's argument that he loses because he chooses to fight in the first place is an interesting one.

The fight with Maul was great, but it is absolutely true that you could have swapped out Maul for any other evil character and it would not have changed anything. We knew nothing and end up knowing nothing about him but that he looks and we assume is genuinely evil.

So what's the problem?

Is there any villain in Star Wars who hasn't become LESS interesting as we've found out more about him?  The entire prequel trilogy devalues one of the greatest villains in cinema history by transforming him into a whiny, petulant child.

Maul looks cool and doesn't say much or overstay his welcome.  He's like the Boba Fett of the prequel trilogy, except he has better fight scenes and his death isn't lame.  He's about the best you can ask for from a Star Wars villain who isn't named Darth Vader.

I liked Qui-Gon, he's Obi-Wan's Obi-Wan. I wish they had made him at all unique from the Obi-Wan we see in A New Hope. There was nothing new to see there.

Sure there was.  OT Obi-Wan had no Jedi Council to bounce off, whereas Qui-Gon is defined largely in terms of his relationship to the Council.  He's really the only example we see (other than Anakin) of a Jedi who thinks the Council is full of shit and is willing to tell them so to their faces.

The real missed opportunity is Prequel Obi-Wan.  Brent noted the underutilized contrast between Obi-Wan dealing with Qui-Gon's death and his own, and correctly noted that it's the only real growth his character gets.  Prequel Obi-Wan is basically a Jedi stooge; he's as blind as the rest of them.  We never really see the potential of General Kenobi or the Clone Wars -- hell, I guess I really SHOULD watch the show, because the more I think about it the more I think Lucas skipped over the richest mine.

Qui-Gon is the only Jedi we see who's a bit of a rebel, who breaks the rules because they're stupid -- again, aside from Anakin.

Ooh, here's another interesting, totally-underused avenue to explore: Obi-Wan trains Anakin to be like Qui-Gon.

The Maul fight was great, the battle with the space depth charges from the Slave I was quite cool, the fight with the Clone Army right afterwards is entertaining if very unfortunately video gamey (compare this with any action sequence from the original triology, and it just lacks visceral feeling or empathetic connection), and some of the Jengo Fett battle was nice.

Points off for using "video gamey" as a shorthand pejorative, but I know what you mean.  The clones forming up, that whole sequence -- it's impressive after its own fashion, but the tech is so severely limited, and was dated by the time it came out.  (Had we already seen the trailer for The Two Towers by then?)

But yeah, I like those bits.

I even like the pod race -- the damn thing's too long and its narrative reasons for actually being in the movie border on the nonexistent, but it's one of the most coherent action sequences in the prequel trilogy.

The Grevious battle was beyond farce. I say that yes, as a man who fucking adored Tartakovsky's take on Grevious, but also just, as a man who can enjoy even the stupidest things if they are entertaining. It was easily the most expensive Stupidest Fucking Thing I have ever seen in a movie (I have seen Transformers 2).

Again, saw it once; I remember feeling like that scene was dragging though.  I'll agree that Grievous was pretty poorly-realized and in fact came out of fucking nowhere.

The final riding-robots-over-lava clash between Obi-Wan and Anikan was doing okay when they were inside that control room thing in close-quarters fighting, then very very quickly gets very very hard to take seriously as they're dangling from the ladder, slashing at each other over a lava waterfall.

I remember thinking the whole sequence was pretty good, really.  Certainly the "fighting over the gates of Hell" angle was unsubtle but well-presented.

My major gripe is, as everywhere else, the characterization.  They just keep shouting ridiculous dialogue at each other.  And as somebody here pointed out, it doesn't really match the next time they see each other with just the cool "It's been a long time" chit-chat.

Actually, this is another contradiction I've griped about before: all this talk about giving into anger and losing control.  When have you ever seen a Sith Lord who was actually enraged, or less than totally in-control?  OT Vader is totally cold and understated.  He doesn't scream, he doesn't rage, he says things like "I find your lack of faith disturbing."  The Emperor -- okay, he does the Force Lightning thing, but mostly he just talks.  Quietly, coaxingly.  Maul barely says a word, and Saruman keeps pretty cool too.

And then there's goddamn Anakin, all bitchin' and moanin' and wiping out Sand People because they killed his mom.

Someone once said to me that the rage is essentially a gateway drug to the Dark Side, that that's what pulls you in but then you learn to control it.  That's an interesting angle, and yet another one that the movies ignore entirely.

I don't think I need to go into the space battle in Episode 1. The Gungan battle was just brutally retarded, obviously.

It wasn't so bad until Jar-Jar started singlehandedly winning it with a droid stuck to his foot.

The gladiator battle was tedious and cartoonish and by then I still did not give a quarter-shit about any of the characters involved, or their bug and frogmen antagonists.

Fair, but again, that's mostly a criticism of the characterization rather than actual fight choreography.

My biggest gripe with the arena is that it's a fucking cliche at this point.  Find me an SF series that DOESN'T do an arena bit and I'll be interested.

As for the actual fight choreography I thought it was pretty neat.  It was probably Windu's best moment too.

The space battle at the start of Episode III was a joyless, aimless shitshow with no way to discern the stakes or who was winning or losing or what we were seeing or if we were supposed to care about the deaths of the republic troops (it was never revealed in the movies if the clones were thinking individuals or mindless obedient drones fresh out of the oven).

Again, that's a characterization gripe, and I have no argument with those.

I remember liking the look of the fleet of ships hovering over the planet, and thinking the actual fight/escape sequence was pretty neat (albeit one of the more glaring examples of Star Wars physics -- why does blowing up a ship cause it to immediately crash into the planet?).

The Light/Dark spectrum in Star Wars tends to throw people off because they're used to the concepts being tied to either the Moral or Legal axes of the D&D alignment chart, rather than a measure of control versus obsession (losing oneself to hate, anger, greed, lust, power, etc).

You and I've both made the D&D comparison, and it's just hit me that this is the problem Lyrai was griping about WRT the "Light Side Sith" in TOR: it's a Star Wars game made by a bunch of D&D devs.

Fuck, we even have Hutt Jedi.

Oh I love this.

This is exactly the sort of thing I was talking about when I said I like doing unexpected things with alien races.

...

...you know what I mean.
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Bal

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Re: I'm a Star Wars
« Reply #193 on: February 29, 2012, 08:10:25 AM »

Quote
This is exactly the sort of thing I was talking about when I said I like doing unexpected things with alien races.


I'm sure they weren't expecting it either.
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Brentai

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Re: I'm a Star Wars
« Reply #194 on: February 29, 2012, 08:24:03 AM »



Also I'd like to clarify that it's just THE Clone Wars - the Tartakovsky miniseries - and not the Clone Wars CG wankfest that people should watch.

Mainly because it fills in most of the missing pieces that everyone's complaining about - Grievous's introduction and the assertion that he actually is supposed to be a credible threat, a few important steps in Anakin's gradual descent towards the Dark Side, Kenobi acting as commander for the ARC troopers, other Jedi taking an active role in the war, Anakin actually doing a few things to earn the respect that Obi-Wan and Yoda later seem to have for him, and most importantly, why C-3PO suddenly changed colors.

I haven't seen much of the CG series but mostly it seems to just strain the continuity with a bunch of unwanted additional crap.


EDIT: Apparently I have it backwards.  CW is the animated one, TCW is the CG one.  Okay.
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Thad

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Re: I'm a Star Wars
« Reply #195 on: February 29, 2012, 08:53:34 AM »

I caught...I think Season 1 of the Tartakovsky series?  There were 3, right?

Anyway, I dunno, I haven't caught but one episode of the CG series but it's pretty well-regarded and I've been meaning to give it another look.  I've heard recommendations from people whose opinions I generally trust on these subjects.
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Friday

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Re: I'm a Star Wars
« Reply #196 on: February 29, 2012, 09:54:46 AM »

Quote
Maul looks cool and doesn't say much or overstay his welcome.  He's like the Boba Fett of the prequel trilogy, except he has better fight scenes and his death isn't lame.

100% with you up till this point. Maul's death is, if anything, even worse than Fett's. Fett's death, while lame, is at least plausible. Stupid shit like someone hitting your jetpack and it activating and slamming you into a wall kills people in real life all the damn time. It's a stupid, lame way for a character so badass to die, but at least he didn't look incompetent like Maul did. I mean shit the only possible thing that could save the Maul death is if someone goes back and edits in Obi yelling "IT'S OVER MAUL! I HAVE THE LOW GROUND!" and then it cuts to Maul making that weird "wtf?" face which gives Obi enough time to do his "jump over your head while you stand perfectly still and then cut you in half" bit.
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Mothra

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Re: I'm a Star Wars
« Reply #197 on: February 29, 2012, 01:24:06 PM »

Thad if you have not seen all of Tartakovsky's Clone Wars you must stop your life and get on that shit IMMEDIATELY

I get chills every time I rewatch that series.
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Re: I'm a Star Wars
« Reply #198 on: February 29, 2012, 02:16:53 PM »

http://www.amazon.com/Star-Wars-Clone-One/dp/B0006Z2LMO/ref=sr_1_11?ie=UTF8&qid=1330554068&sr=8-11
http://www.amazon.com/Star-Wars-Clone-Two/dp/B000BCE8Q4/ref=sr_1_12?ie=UTF8&qid=1330554068&sr=8-12

These are the Clone Wars you want to see.

I have no idea why Volume 2's price is so astronomically high. But this is all of it, and it is good
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Re: I'm a Star Wars
« Reply #199 on: February 29, 2012, 02:19:03 PM »

Also at some point I'm probably goign to buy CG Clone Wars (TV series) on Blu-Ray whenever Amazon does their "Discounting shit selling DVDs & BDs to get rid of them" thing.
Is the CG Movie any good?
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