rachel on 30/5/2022 at 14:43
bwahahaha that's brilliant :laff:
henke on 30/11/2022 at 06:48
Did you guys watch Andor?
It was... good! But also so dark as to not really feel like Star Wars. The whole season is kinda built around 2 big EVENTS which the show takes its time building up to, and the pay-offs are satisfying. Skarsgård is great. Overall, second best Star Wars show after Mando. Feels like the Star Wars shows that do best are the ones without BIG NAME lead characters, which likely means there's not a whole bunch of producers who wanna get creative input and put their mark on it, and instead the showrunner is allowed to shape the show into a unified coherent vision.
Cipheron on 30/11/2022 at 08:41
Quote Posted by Jason Moyer
Also, how can anyone continue to ape the Inception trailer music with a straight face.
I know this is a real old quote, however I was reading through the thread and came across this.
The deal is that Don LaFontaine was THE "movie trailer guy". He was that deep voice that did the cliched "In a world ..." stuff. He narrated over 5000 movie trailers from 1962 - 2008. Then he died and they just ... never replaced him, because there really wasn't an industry for movie trailer narrators, there was just Don LaFontaine, and you had to use him, for the sole reason that everyone else was using him.
After that they were clearly out of ideas for how to churn out movie trailers, because they basically didn't have any ideas in the first place, other than getting "the movie trailer guy" in. Inception came out in 2010 so clearly people just copied whatever was working in trailers.
Tomi on 30/11/2022 at 08:49
Quote Posted by henke
Did you guys watch Andor?
Ah, I was gonna post about Andor and the other new(ish) Star Wars shows in the "What have you watched lately?" thread last night, but got distracted. This thread is better though, I had forgotten about it.
So yeah, I've watched some of those Star Wars spin-off shows lately. The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Andor. I found them all surprisingly enjoyable actually!
The Mandalorian is probably the most popular out of those. It's simple and fun, full of action, and you don't really even have to pay much attention or know much about the SW universe to enjoy the ride. The little baby Yoda thing is great for a character that doesn't even speak. I like it how each episode is an adventure of its own, and the main story is just something that mostly happens on the background.
The Book of Boba Fett was my least favourite of the bunch. First of all it breaks the mystery of an iconic character, but I didn't care much about the story either or the other characters. There's this bunch of hip street kids that I found particularly cringeworthy. I did sort of like the background story about what happened to Boba Fett after he got swallowed by the sand monster in Empire Strikes Back, and the way how the show connects to The Mandalorian is also somewhat cool.
I was expecting
Obi-Wan Kenobi to suck after I realised that the plot revolves around a young Princess Leia, but I thought that the kid plays her role very well, and these scenes are more light-hearted than cheesy. I would have expected to see Kenobi in a more mysterious light, but Ewan McGregor is great in the role anyway. I really liked the prequel flashbacks too, they almost make me want to watch those films again. This show is easily the most
starwarsy of the bunch with all the trademark Star Wars stuff.
And then we've got
Andor. It doesn't really feel like Star Wars
at all, like henke pointed out. Is that good or bad? Even after watching all the episodes I can't answer that. It's dark and serious and you won't see a single lightsaber duel or an adorable creature in it. Yeah, there are stormtroopers (or something similar) but even they feel more menacing and evil than the dumb guys that we're used to seeing. The protagonist isn't exactly your typical Star Wars hero either - he's charismatic for sure, but he's a proper anti-hero in fact and not a "good guy" at all. That's refreshing in a way. I wasn't sold on the show after the first two episodes or so, it starts off quite slowly, but in the end I think it becomes one of the most interesting things in the SW universe in a long time.
rachel on 30/11/2022 at 08:58
Quote Posted by henke
Did you guys watch Andor?
It was... good! But also so dark as to not really feel like Star Wars. The whole season is kinda built around 2 big EVENTS which the show takes its time building up to, and the pay-offs are satisfying. Skarsgård is great. Overall, second best Star Wars show after Mando. Feels like the Star Wars shows that do best are the ones without BIG NAME lead characters, which likely means there's not a whole bunch of producers who wanna get creative input and put their mark on it, and instead the showrunner is allowed to shape the show into a unified coherent vision.
I finished a few days ago. I rank it same as you, 2nd after Mando S1. I was kinda let down a bit by Skarsgård though, I felt he was kind of unidimensional. I liked the gallery of returning characters from
Rogue One for continuity, special mention to Mon Mothma who's probably my favourite of the lot.
Another big plus is not just the lack of BIG NAME characters, but also the complete and utter lack of anything Tatooine, that was so refreshing.
I like the bittersweet irony
that they were building components of the Death Star in that prison, meaning Cass eventually meets his end through something he unknowingly helped built. Nice touch.
B2EMO being a past-its-prime droid was also an interesting thing to see. SW media typically presented droids as immutable (with R2 and 3PO going through the three trilogies with just scratches) so it's nice to see one hit by actual wear and tear and pretty much unable to give more than moral support.
Overall I thought the show dealt pretty well with what it's trying to portray: A government that is now a barely concealed dictatorship but with enough left of the accoutrements of democracy that it can still pretend it's not, and how a resistance to this might start to form, with all the trust issues, disparate kinds of characters, and financial difficulties that this entails. Resistance is
expensive. On the other side, it shows how compliance and the right amount of apathy from the population actually helps these totalitarian systems expand, and grow until it's too late to stop them. Very... on topic, considering the political context of 2022, in the US and around the world. It's dark indeed, not very
Star Wars-y perhaps, but the beauty of the SW universe is that it can accomodate all these genres: political, western, adventure... You chose the lens you want to see it through. Credits for that.