Star Wars Griefing Thread (SPOILERS) - Safety off

[XYZpdq Jr.]

It haS always annoyed me the falcon model is upside down in that photo.

iirc a lot of more serious business miniature work is filmed upside down to better hide the support wires because people look up, might be a long-term support logistics thing like the Y-Wings in the back going full Alderaan Snackbar

 

[Fartificial Insmelligence]

Saw Phantom Menace in the theater yesterday, goddamn was that fun. Yeah it wasn't high cinema by any means, but Jar-Jar is much less rage inducing than he's made out to be, the podrace scene is great, and, while I've gushed about it before, the stylistic choices were perfect! The look of the podracers, all of the Queen's outfits, the Naboo guards, the Gungan weapons and armor, if George can be commended for one thing it would be that he knows how to pick the best designs his concept artists offer him!

 

[Ghostse]

but Jar-Jar is much less rage inducing than he's made out to be

I said it before, and will say it again:
Jar-Jar in TYooL 1999 was every bit as bad as he is pilloried to be. Jar-Jar in TYOL 2024 is complete background noise and practically quaint especially considering that there is zero social issue preaching coming from him.

You cannot recreate the mindset of nearly two decades of no Star Wars, then the prequels being announced instead of sequels/Shadows of the Empire:The Film Series so it has to be better than all that, and then two fucking years of 24/7 hype, only to get....The Phantom Menace.
Its not that TPM is a bad film, its just nothing could have lived up what they hyped up, and TPM really fell short of the bar.

 

[Michael Wade]

In the year of 1999, The Phantom Menace ruled the world. This was before the negative critiques of the movie became mainstream; people loved it and kids re-watched the movie again and again. Lucas made the movie for children, and he hit his target audience quite well.

It was a good fucking movie.

The young adult novels were pretty cool too. Better then Disney shit now. They actually made a decent obi wan Padawan origin story

I remember thinking "Man, that expansion pack looks cool, I hope I get to play it one day"

I thought it was hilariously non-canon. You can blow up the millieum falcon and curb stomp everything to death.

Ironically, I think the Inquisitor was the worst story, but their Alderaan was actually pretty good since you finally get to act like the Palpatine-esc schemer the class is built up to be.

The Warrior had to be low-key pissed when the Emperor then turned around and went "Now, Jadus, that's a Chad Sith! You could learn a thing or two from him, Pussy."

Oh I loved Inquisitor from the get go. It's a hard struggle to get respect and build up your power base but once you get on the dark council you are the hot shit. Your basically co ruling the empire by the time of eternal throne. It gets undone but there's still a lot of opportunities for wheeling and dealing

Hell i can rant about SWTOR all day. Imperial Agent is a good story, but it loses points because it's not nearly as connected or far reaching as people make it out to be. Like how Darth Jadus and his whole never actually goes anywhere because it's time for the stupid galactic conspiracy theory. Inquistor is one of my favorites but I feel like the whole "being a slave" thing in the backstory really doesn't factor into your character.

It's subtle but it gets referenced quite a bit, especially if you go light side.
"My chains are broken"


There's fucking nothing out of the rat that's going to be interesting aside from kingdom hearts 4. And you know the only reason it will be good is because of the OG trilogy.

 

[LORD IMPERATOR]

Jar-Jar in TYooL 1999 was every bit as bad as he is pilloried to be.

No he isn't. At the end of the day, he's just a cartoon bunny made so that the CGI guys can flex their muscles. He became the ''key to everything'' because in the next movie, he gives Palpatine emergency powers, thereby kickstarting the rise of the Empire, but in TPM, he was ignorable; a plot device made so that the heroes go from one place to another; a CGI puppet for Liam Neeson to smack around.

I saw Jar-Jar back in 1999, and that was a long while after seeing the OT originals. He didn't bother me in the least. People who were bothered by him are autistic and need to see a doctor. If you can't even tolerate the presence of a cartoon rabbit in a silly movie about space wars, there's something wrong with you.

Saw Phantom Menace in the theater yesterday, goddamn was that fun. Yeah it wasn't high cinema by any means, but Jar-Jar is much less rage inducing than he's made out to be, the podrace scene is great, and, while I've gushed about it before, the stylistic choices were perfect! The look of the podracers, all of the Queen's outfits, the Naboo guards, the Gungan weapons and armor, if George can be commended for one thing it would be that he knows how to pick the best designs his concept artists offer him!

It wasn't that perfect to me; I saw it back then, and I kept rewinding it because I loved seeing shit blow up, the nice CGI battles, the fun podrace, the Jedi kicking ass, and the general feel of the movie as a whole. I can't believe society was once that optimistic about the world.

It was a good fucking movie.

It was. The critics can go suck a fat one, I enjoyed the movie as a kid, I enjoy it now, and that's all that fucking matters.

 

[ZMOT]

I saw Jar-Jar back in 1999, and that was a long while after seeing the OT originals. He didn't bother me in the least. People who were bothered by him are autistic and need to see a doctor. If you can't even tolerate the presence of a cartoon rabbit in a silly movie about space wars, there's something wrong with you.

the problem he's a sympton, not the cause. the tone of TPM is all over the fucking place, jarjar and his slapstick humor being the most obvious part, thus people focused on it (but people are also dumb, so it shouldn't matter). it worked for what lucas wanted to do, kids at the time liked him enough. but kids don't vent on the internet, so lucas came to the wrong conclusion and quietly phased him out instead of "redeeming" him or showing he's more than a silly cartoon rabbit.

there's a reason people unironically wanted a darth jarjar.

You cannot recreate the mindset of nearly two decades of no Star Wars, then the prequels being announced instead of sequels/Shadows of the Empire:The Film Series so it has to be better than all that, and then two fucking years of 24/7 hype, only to get....The Phantom Menace.
Its not that TPM is a bad film, its just nothing could have lived up what they hyped up, and TPM really fell short of the bar.

I agree the expectations were to high, but the jarjar hate really was overblown. remember who mostly complained about him and why.

 

[Drag-on Knight 91873]

TPM definitely aged better than AotC. When every set looks like the Holodeck, it really dates it.

 

[Ewan McGregor]

TPM definitely aged better than AotC. When every set looks like the Holodeck, it really dates it.

TPM has some damn really good visuals. In restrospect, the movie does feel incomplete as a standalone film and I can understand why, with a lack of sequels, people would be dissatisfied back in the day. Everything pretty much happens by the end of the movie, but not in such an extreme way as in AotC, which is longer and everything happens in the literal last 10 minutes of the film. Now that was a trainwreck the (noticeably less) stunning visuals couldn't save.

 

[Mr. Racewar1488]

Jar-Jar in TYOL 2024 is complete background noise and practically quaint especially considering that there is zero social issue preaching coming from him.

Just wait until Disney gets around to remaking the prequels. "Meesa Jar Jar Binks! Meesa's pronouns are they/them! Meesa was banned from Gungan city cuz Meesa used the bathroom that matched Meesa's true gender!"

 

[Weltraumfürst]

When it comes to the visuals, TPM is peak Star Wars. Not as impressive as the OT because that was all practical effects, but when it comes to the prequels it's the perfect blend of practical and digital effects. Even the Disney films, which did much of the same, look worse. I will die on this hill.

 

[Mr. Racewar1488]

You know that shot of the gas coming out of a vent into the conference room Kenobi and Qui-gon are in? That's the only shot in the entirety of the prequels that had no CGI.

 

[Mississippi Motorboater]

You cannot recreate the mindset of nearly two decades of no Star Wars, then the prequels being announced instead of sequels/Shadows of the Empire:The Film Series so it has to be better than all that, and then two fucking years of 24/7 hype, only to get....The Phantom Menace.
Its not that TPM is a bad film, its just nothing could have lived up what they hyped up, and TPM really fell short of the bar.

Anecdotes like these are why I'm happy that I was able to experience the Star Wars Saga as a complete 6-film watch through back in 2005 (finishing with ROTS in theaters), instead of having to wait 16 years between films, engendering expectations and hype.

Going in blind and watching them all together as a singular piece really relieved me of any inherent bias towards one trilogy over the other. I still like certain films more than others, but I also didn't have a decade plus hiatus coloring my perception of the films, either.

The young adult novels were pretty cool too. Better then Disney shit now. They actually made a decent obi wan Padawan origin story

The Jedi Apprentice novels were the shit. They were so popular back in the day, in fact, that author Jude Watson would get infinitely more fan letters from adult readers than kids, and the series was extended not once, not twice, but three times, writing the last few books on the literal eve of AOTC in 2002, and that was only because Scholastic and LFL Marketing told her to drop the Qui-Gon/Obi-Wan series to start on an Obi-Wan/Anakin series for brand synergy.

TPM definitely aged better than AotC. When every set looks like the Holodeck, it really dates it.

You may be shocked to learn that the vast majority of AOTC's sets were practical--most of them models, in fact:

Spoiler

That last one was literally built just to accommodate a landing shot of Padme's ship on Tatooine that's on-screen for, like, four seconds. You can even see the landing ring in the previous picture below to confirm that they're the same model.

I think the reason why people assume that AOTC was all-digital was because the film was largely shot with digital cameras, which are of a lower resolution than actual film. Moreover, the early digital cameras used on Clones aren't the more robust digital cameras used on modern SFX-happy films like Marvel movies or whatever, so the amount of digital noise and overly-glossy look of a circa-2001 digital camera is so overbearing that it makes people think that everything filtered through those lens--even real models and sets like the ones above--were created purely through CG instead of through practical means.

It's a tremendous shame, because whenever I show people these pictures, they're legitimately shocked.

Just wait until Disney gets around to remaking the prequels. "Meesa Jar Jar Binks! Meesa's pronouns are they/them! Meesa was banned from Gungan city cuz Meesa used the bathroom that matched Meesa's true gender!"

You joke, but this has technically already played out under Disney in the novel Solo: Last Shot, in which Han Solo attempts to be friendly to a Gungan by using words like "meesa and yousa", only for the Gungan to turn around and raceplain to Han that "not all Gungans talk like that" for an entire page.

You know that shot of the gas coming out of a vent into the conference room Kenobi and Qui-gon are in? That's the only shot in the entirety of the prequels that had no CGI.

I mean, that's not even remotely true close to being true, lol. There are hundreds of shots on practical backdrops like Tatooine and Naboo, between non-CG performers like Qui-Gon or Padme or Shmi or young Anakin, that are literally just actors against a desert or a Venetian Palace.

Fuck, even the "I hate sand" scene is completely devoid of CG, and is a Renaissance-style balcony that people can (and have) visited. Most of the Naboo sets are.

​

This is of course barring the possibility that George Lucas releases a Special Edition of AOTC that adds CG aquatic life or birds in the background of these shots or something...but seeing as he passed up on the opportunity to tweak AOTC to any significant degree in both 2011 and 2019 when the Blu-Ray and 4K releases came out, I'd say it's unlikely at this point.

 

[Ewan McGregor]

Damn, was I pissed at Lucas there...

 

[TheAmbiguousLurker]

SWTOR could have been a great KOTOR game if it didn't have to kowtow to the mmo genre. As it stands it’s an alright game, but the monetization scheme they went with just sucks the fun out of it. (I paid for the game at launch and had 90% of the features I paid for taken from me when the game went f2p)

On one hand, I agree, but on the other hand I think that the highlight of SWTOR's base game, the different class storylines, just wouldn't happen in any other genre.

It's a hard struggle to get respect and build up your power base

That's part of the problem; it really isn't. Like, even for an RPG Protagonist, the inquisitor is carried through the plot on a silver platter and forced to be an absolute dumbass ("Wine Mommy Zash would never betray me!" "That Thanaton fella is such a helpful guy, I'm sure he's suddenly inviting me to the unmarked tomb with no witnesses for good reason." "Letting a bunch of Sith Spirits attach themselves to my body? I can't see this going wrong.") while everyone around them jumps to gift wrap the solution. Like, I remember someone made a counter of how many times the plot of an Inquisitor quests was the player walking into an obvious trap and having to be saved by someone else.

I don't think your slave origins are even mentioned after Korriban outside of your great grandpa. They almost literally stumble into respect and power, like when they get handed Zash's entire powerbase by dumb luck or a Moff just immediately willing to throw his entire career behind a Sith Lord with little backing up against a member of the Dark Council. And their big bad is Thanaton, and there ain't much satisfaction in beating a guy who spends 90% of his screentime being a whiny little bitch.

It's why Alderann is the best planet for the Inquisitor, it's the one time the player character feels like they're a sith lord pulling strings and getting shit done. For a class advertised as the slave who manipulates and schemes their way to the top, almost none of it is in the actual storyline.

Ironically, the warrior who comes from a distinguished family comes across as more of a struggling underdog where many NPCs see him as just Baras' attack dog, or just a privileged git who skipped their education, to the point some of them will be taken by surprise whenever the warrior shows some intelligence. The warrior gets more opportunities to manipulate, more opportunities to show to illusion of agency and more opportunities to actually build up a power-base.

 

[J0hnyApplesneed]

Saw Phantom Menace in the theater yesterday, goddamn was that fun. Yeah it wasn't high cinema by any means, but Jar-Jar is much less rage inducing than he's made out to be, the podrace scene is great, and, while I've gushed about it before, the stylistic choices were perfect! The look of the podracers, all of the Queen's outfits, the Naboo guards, the Gungan weapons and armor, if George can be commended for one thing it would be that he knows how to pick the best designs his concept artists offer him!

Personally I think the best way to think of the prequels are as decent and fun but flawed flicks, maybe with some strong elements that could have been built better on to have made them genuinely great. Understandably, being part of the popular Star Wars series negatively affected them. I imagine had Lucas released his vision of the sequels, most people would have disliked them. They are definitely not terrible movies on their own, unlike the actual sequel trilogy.

 

[Mississippi Motorboater]

Personally I think the best way to think of the prequels are as decent and fun but flawed flicks, maybe with some strong elements that could have been built better on to have made them genuinely great. Understandably, being part of the popular Star Wars series negatively affected them.

I'd say that regardless of what anyone thinks of the PT Films themselves--from their moment-to-moment instances of direction, shot composition, line delivery, reliance of exposition, etc--one cannot deny that the movies created an excellent foundation for an entire narrative corner of the Star Wars universe. The world, setting and conflict explored in the Prequel Trilogy are fascinating, and make for a great narrative playground for other writers and artists to explore--either to embellish events of the films, or to create entirely individual or satisfying stories of their own in that world.

It's for this reason that stories like Maul: Shadow Hunter, the Quinlan Vos comics, the wider Clone Wars Multimedia Project efforts like Shatterpoint, Republic Commando, Genndy Clone Wars, the various Jango Fett comics, and sublime character-focused introspective works like Yoda: Dark Rendezvous and the MedStar books can exist in that same world, unfettered by any shortcomings of the films or anyone's dislike of them. The Clone Wars, the corrupt bowls of the politically-compromised Republic, and the monastic/space police nature of the Jedi Order and Council are all fascinating ideas, and lend themselves to stories that can and have been told in that setting.

Such a rich and detailed foundation does not exist for the Sequel Trilogy, and cannot exist. Even if someone wanted to tell a story in that setting, completely divorced from the hijinks involving Rey and Kylo...what worthwhile story could you tell in the margins of that conflict? The ongoings of the inept and bufoonish First Order, which lacks a single original concept or idea not cribbed from the original Empire? The boiler-plate and forgettable Resistance? The non-existent surrounding factions? Boring-ass locales and cultures featured on the likes of Canto Bight or Ach-To? Is anyone desperate to see any exciting stories told about the Casino Planet denizens, or the Frog Nuns on Luke's Island, or the hundreds of Jedi Students that never made it to screen? The world-building and intrigue just isn't there. It's barren, narratively flaccid, infertile ground for any decent or engaging stories. It's why the Sequel Trilogy is the ultimate, inevitable blight on Disney's continuity regardless of how much damage they tried to mitigate with streaming shows about Armored Babysitters or whatever the fuck....no amount of fanservice or nostalgia-milking earlier parts of the Star Wars timeline is going to alleviate the inescapable problem that it all leads to the single most vacuous and patently-uninteresting SW setting and conflict ever conceived. The ST Era is a narrative crater for continuity; the scorched Earth from which no good stories can emerge, and all preceding stories are tainted with the burden of having to respect and adhere to it as the inevitable narrative endpoint.

The best writers of the old Expanded Universe couldn't swoop in and save the ST setting--either through the embellishment of tie-in stories, or completely independent stories set in that world...because the setting itself was created by vapid, uncreative filmmakers who didn't put a lick of thought into the setting or conflict....

....thought that Lucas, for better or worse, obsessively put into the conflict and setting of the Prequel Trilogy. The world he made for those films have endured because he gave a shit, autistically and passionately so. The brain trust of creatively bankrupt monkeys that made the Sequels didn't give a shit about anything other than empty 80s nostalgia, which is why the Dollar Store OT Setting they put zero thought into is doomed to rot for all time.

 

[The Un-Clit]

Very well said, @Mississippi Motorboater .

The creative nadir that is the Sequel Trilogy in all it's worthlessness can be summed up in a single sentence by a single character:

"Somehow, Palpatine came back."

Fuck's sake, a 3rd grade teacher doing a creative writing excercise for her class wouldn't let a kid get away with a non-explanation like that! And yet it's the focus that the entire ST pulls from. "Somehow" the old Emperor came back and repeated all his same shit except bigger this time, and in a fraction of the original time too! That little kid would get a C- for this shit, but a billion dollars+ were spent on it.

The single iconic scene in the entire sequel trilogy was that bitch lightspeed-ramming the First Order flagship. Other then that, every memory of the entire trilogy is negative. What a fucking wasted legacy.

 

[Chilson]

@TheAmbiguousLurker

That's part of the problem; it really isn't. Like, even for an RPG Protagonist, the inquisitor is carried through the plot on a silver platter and forced to be an absolute dumbass ("Wine Mommy Zash would never betray me!" "That Thanaton fella is such a helpful guy, I'm sure he's suddenly inviting me to the unmarked tomb with no witnesses for good reason." "Letting a bunch of Sith Spirits attach themselves to my body? I can't see this going wrong.") while everyone around them jumps to gift wrap the solution. Like, I remember someone made a counter of how many times the plot of an Inquisitor quests was the player walking into an obvious trap and having to be saved by someone else.

The real problem was, at least when I played it way back when, was that you HAD to make an inquisitor character if you wanted to actually competently do raids.

They were by and large the best class the Sith had for raiding. Easily the best DPS class that as a bonus had access to healing and in fight revives. Hell, they could even shield themselves to tank for a period of time as well as the tank classes.

But you had to grind through the god awful inquisitor storyline to max out the class. I could say that about every class though, the insistence of trying to be KOTOR with its individual class stories doesn't fucking work for an MMO. It didn't work for WOW, and it sure as hell didn't work for SWOTOR. Say what you will about FF14, but fuck was it nice to be able to level other classes on one character instead of having to restart the story from the beginning.

 

[Rick The Stick]

You know that shot of the gas coming out of a vent into the conference room Kenobi and Qui-gon are in? That's the only shot in the entirety of the prequels that had no CGI.

Congrats on coming out as retarded. Very brave.

 

[#lurker]

Is the TPM release in theaters a new master?