The Star Wars Thread

[Yeahright]

For me the biggest problem with the midichlorians is that they are lifeforms that live within cells of everything living. Now I'm not the expert in biology and I don't know if it is actually possible for something to live within cells, but I've always thought that cells are the basic unit of life and it just sounds stupid that there are beings living within them. Besides if midichlorians live inside the cells of everything living, are there midichlorians living in the cells of the midichlorians? If I'm wrong please someone correct me. It always bugs me.

[LL!]

Yeah right.

[METALMAN]

I watched the Star Wars films over the holidays. I hadn't seen them before. I didn't really notice much of a difference in terms of quality between the sequels and prequels. They had good bits, silly bits, bad bits and consistently awful dialogue in equal measure.

I liked Episode III best. But that's mainly because I love bureaucracy and I love bureaucratic procedures making it too difficult for the heroes to actually do anything.

And I liked the naff CGI. It reminded me of Halo for the original Xbox.

[Maxx]

1 hour ago, Yeahright said:

For me the biggest problem with the midichlorians is that they are lifeforms that live within cells of everything living. Now I'm not the expert in biology and I don't know if it is actually possible for something to live within cells, but I've always thought that cells are the basic unit of life and it just sounds stupid that there are beings living within them. Besides if midichlorians live inside the cells of everything living, are there midichlorians living in the cells of the midichlorians? If I'm wrong please someone correct me. It always bugs me.

Real sorry the fantasy space opera set millions of years in the past in a different universe featuring hundreds of different kinds of alien life forms and magic isn't biologically accurate enough for you.

[METALMAN]

1 hour ago, Yeahright said:

For me the biggest problem with the midichlorians is that they are lifeforms that live within cells of everything living. Now I'm not the expert in biology and I don't know if it is actually possible for something to live within cells, but I've always thought that cells are the basic unit of life and it just sounds stupid that there are beings living within them. Besides if midichlorians live inside the cells of everything living, are there midichlorians living in the cells of the midichlorians? If I'm wrong please someone correct me. It always bugs me.

Things can live in human cells. Hence the term "host cell".

[Benjamin]

5 hours ago, Quom said:

As standalone things you are probably correct (fight scenes aren't really my thing, so none of them really excite me), but go watch any of the duels from the original Star Wars and then tell me it's not impressive in comparison. Also the start of A New Hope is easily the most boring thing in ANY of the movies. 

My issue with Midicholrians and especially them being in measurable amounts is that it makes the force less special. It's like if on the first day at Hogwarts the sorting hat said "this one is super powerful and is clearly going to make a better wizard than all the others". It changes it from something some people are better at being attuned to due to their personality or work harder to achieve and instead is just something you have in varying amounts depending on your genetics.  

Oh I totally agree, none of the fight scenes in Star Wars are impressive, I just remember being amazed by the one in TPM when I first warched it.

[gunnar hendershow]

4 hours ago, TheSqauredCircleMessiah said:

So the two people who ended up taking down the evil Empire being the secret twin children (who were literally separated at birth and had never met) of the most feared person in the galaxy isn't a small universe? George Lucas made a point that makes sense...from the beginning the saga was always a soap opera in space. In soap operas, everyone always knows everyone. Everything is always interconnected. You may not like it, but he followed that storytelling structure.

There's a stark difference between a space opera and then shoehorning in names and places without any real purpose. Boba Fett is the prime example of that. He and the story benefitted not one bit from being in Attack of the Clones. However the story can't really be told without Luke and Leia.

[Quom]

I kind of thought Bobba did benefit massively. Like I get that he was super cool for a sub-set of fans who had kind of picked him out of the background and decided he was the coolest thing ever. But I think actually giving him a backstory made him more interesting (or at all interesting) for 'normal' viewers.  

[DFF]

With my only exposure to him being the films, I must say that I do not understand the Boba Fett love at all. He has a slightly cool looking suit, and is shown to be somewhat intelligent in his tracking but... that's it. His lines in the films are minimal and non-descript and he's actually barely in the story at all.  

 

 

[Benji]

30 minutes ago, DFF said:

With my only exposure to him being the films, I must say that I do not understand the Boba Fett love at all. He has a slightly cool looking suit, and is shown to be somewhat intelligent in his tracking but... that's it. His lines in the films are minimal and non-descript and he's actually barely in the story at all.  

I seem to recall that his character was released as an action figure along with a lot of more major characters around the time of the movie release, and because of that a sort of cult-like appreciation of him developed (because in kids eyes, he had an action figure just like the major heroes and villains, so why wouldn't he be cool?). Somebody can probably clarify this better than me. EDIT: First mail away figure for "Empire".

Of course it does help that Darth Vader, the guy who can blow up planets with a Death Star and force chokes people without second thought, hires this one bounty hunter and seems to respect him, maybe even fear him, and has to explicitly remind him not to disintegrate his foes. So basically you know from the offset - this is one dangerous mother fucker. Boba is a character whose lack of character, and additionally the potential imagination of what he was capable of, was actually an important point. Like Skummy said, the joy of Star Wars is that it feels like there's an entire universe you never get to see, and Boba was a big part of that in the original trilogy.

Also, he looks baller as fuck.

[gunnar hendershow]

The scene in Jedi where Han goes "Boba Fett?" is just brilliant because in one line of dialogue they created this massive history to him. He played a significant role in the plot too, following the Falcon and alerting the Empire. Then you have the allusions to his own history with Lando, given that Han has a history with him, and things just snowballed from there. It's really hard to find a lot of characters who benefitted from so little, but Star Wars was able to create that idea for its characters with minimal work.

So, yeah, they really didn't need to neuter that by having him in the prequels. It was just unnecessary, why did he have to be tied to the Skywalker side of the story? He was already innately tied to Solo. 

[apsham]

It doesn't just extend to Boba either. The hunters on that ship were all interesting in their own way, and people were practically begging for expanded universe to expand on their stories.. and what people came up with were pretty damn good in all honesty. When I had to downsize my collection of large scale figures, I only chose to keep IG-88 and Bossk because they are fuckin' amazing. IG-88 landed in the Shadows Of The Empire game, but aside from book and graphic novels - Bossk wasn't touched at all.

[gunnar hendershow]

Going back to the cantina there are even more fascinating characters, and then you get the hodgepodge of people in Jabba's palace.

We joke that Star Wars puts out figures for every single extra in every scene, but for a lot of them it's because the EU really expanded on those stories.

[Benji]

In which John Boyega and Harrison Ford are best friends...

Spoiler

 

[METALMAN]

I watched the new one tonight. It was alright. The female lead was good.

I'd heard here and there that the film was very much an homage to what has gone before, but it seemed like way more than that. Practically everything was a nod to a previous character, plot or setting. I fully get why people would like that - obviously those things meant a lot to people who grew up with Star Wars.

But I didn't, so it didn't really do anything for me. In fact, I thought those were the worst parts. So instead I was left with a straightforward meat and potatoes action movie affair. That's alright, I'm not complaining, but if I was the rating-things-out-of-ten type (and I am; though I shouldn't be) I'd give it 6/10. There was no need to be concerned about spoilers in advance, because everything was just so predictable. It's a shame though. It started off really strongly and then just plummeted. It plummeted when all the old people were reintroduced and the third act became so obvious and ponderous.

I can't help but feel that there should have been a bit more to it though. To use a football analogy (sorry), it's like going to see Man United, but it's Louis van Gaal's Man United. They get the 1-0 win, but it's a tepid, predictable, stodgy affair.

However, I really like the new characters that they've introduced, so I'll definitely watch the next one. Just a bit less old, please.

Spoiler

But if Rey turns out to be someone special's daughter I'll be raging. Star Wars has dined out on that tired old trope long enough. Why can't she just be some kid from the desert that did well for herself instead of being part of some bloody Jedi royal family?

 

[RPS]

I agree with your assessment on the movie metal, but I'm a bit more positive towards it. Part of me wonders if the movie would have been better had they just not brought everyone back and focused on the new characters, who were the strongest part of the movie. I don't think I've heard one person say that seeing the old characters was better than the new stories told, but those people probably exist. 

[MalaCloudy Black]

I wouldn't say it was better, but..

Spoiler

I did mark out super hard when Han and Chewie showed up, and even when C3P0 and Leia showed up. The ages of 12-14 were big Star Wars years for me, so when I saw things like the Millenium Falcon or Han and Chewie's "we're home" scene, I choked up. I was on the verge of tears when Leia first showed up. 

 

[RPS]

We watched Episode 2 last night.

Me and my husband both agreed it was the worst movie of the series. I wrote on here that Episode 1 seemed like a kids movie rather than an action adventure movie. But at the heart of it... it still felt like a Star Wars movie in the Star Wars universe. That movie... I don't even know. It didn't feel like it was in the same universe as the rest of the movies. There was just a lot of visuals and elements that felt so bizarre and just unlike anything from the Star Wars universe.  The opening chase scene on Coruscant that ends in a night club out of the Matrix, Obi Wan visiting the diner, all of the romance scenes, the whole planet of Camino... it just felt all so weird and strange. 

The main problem I had with the entire film was that the Jedi's are the good guys who just get easily duped. Your good guys should never be dumb. You want to cheer somebody who finds themselves in peril because of the mistakes of others, not who narrowly avoids death because of their own actions. 

[SeanDMan]

I think the idea is to make us think of Palpatine as a master manipulator, but the problem is that George Lucas doesn't know how to write well, so to make Palpatine look super smart the Jedi have to be paster eaters.

[RPS]

We just watched the third and that is seriously such a huge problem with these movies. The Jedis seem like complete and utter idiots, because they in no way hinted at Palp being as great at manipulating as he was.

I actually thought 3 was the worst movie of the entire series. The film making was so clumsy through the whole prequels that it just was never believable in my mind that Anakin would pick Palp over Obi Wan and so I just didn't buy the last movie at all. I get that Palp is a great manipulator, but as a viewer I want to see the scenes where Palp is piecing together Ani's weakness. Because he just sort of knows Ani's weakness and we never really see why. It is also unbelievably stupid that Ani turns to the dark side to protect Padme and the kids and ... oh wait... he tried to kill her. Huh. And unbelievably stupid that Obi, knowing how evil Ani is now, doesn't finish him off. At the very least, Episode 1 didn't have these huge errors in the movie and could be justified as a fun kids movie. I can get over bad dialogue and unfortunate acting. I cannot get over these huge plot holes. 

Also, very very minor, but that film had some of the most obnoxious effects when they cut between planets. Drove me nuts.