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211: ‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi’ Holiday Spectacular With Special Guests Guy English and John Siracusa

 

00:00:00   All right, The Last Jedi. I don't think we ever talked, I don't think I ever had an episode about Rogue One.

00:00:05   So I guess we could, we should focus on The Last Jedi, I think.

00:00:09   But if we sneak in some Rogue One, I think that's all right.

00:00:15   Yeah, I'm all for that.

00:00:16   Rogue One came out when the world exploded.

00:00:19   So I don't think anybody was in the mood to talk about it.

00:00:22   So at the highest level, what do you guys think of The Last Jedi?

00:00:25   And I'll just say this, by the way, for the listeners of the show,

00:00:27   If you haven't picked up already, this is going to be totally spoiler-ific.

00:00:31   This is an assumption that anybody who really cares about this right now,

00:00:34   at the end of December 2017, you've already seen The Last Jedi, you want to hear about it.

00:00:38   If not, and you don't care about spoilers, keep listening if you want to. But if you really want

00:00:44   to see the movie without having listened to three nerds really get into nitty-gritty details and

00:00:48   spoil anything and everything that we want to, hit the pause button right now and save this podcast

00:00:53   in your podcast player of choice until you see the movie. But shame on you for not having seen

00:00:57   this movie already, honestly. All right, a disclaimer out of the way. What did you guys

00:01:03   think of the movie overall? I loved it. And I have reasons twice. I was trying to go see it again

00:01:12   yesterday and today, but you know, life gets in the way. I have problems with it. I have structural

00:01:20   problems with it, but there's a reason I love it, and I think we'll get into that after.

00:01:26   But all in all, like, such a positive feeling about this movie. It's not even funny.

00:01:31   Some kind of middle of the road on this one. I've seen it twice. The reason I feel like I'm kind of

00:01:38   on the outside here is the things I dislike about it are not the things that I hear other people

00:01:43   dislike about it. Like, there's a lot of noise from the people who don't like this movie, but

00:01:47   whatever they're mad about is not what's causing me to be middle of the road. So,

00:01:51   I enjoyed watching it and it was definitely interesting and it is one of the more interesting

00:01:56   Star Wars movies in a long time to talk about. But I think, I'm not entirely sure it gels as a

00:02:04   movie and as a narrative for a bunch of reasons. Most of which are minor and have nothing to do

00:02:12   with Star Wars and everything to do with just basic movie making stuff. That's the thing,

00:02:16   like a lot of people are mad about this movie for Star Wars related reasons and the things that

00:02:21   that made it not connect to me or not work with me in certain ways don't really have

00:02:26   much to do with Star Wars. So I'm kind of middle of the road on it. I mean, I also know

00:02:31   all those movies that I'm interested to see what it will be like when I see it again,

00:02:34   like when it comes to video or whatever, because I found with Rogue One, speaking of that movie,

00:02:37   that I saw that, I think I saw it once in the theater, but I was surprised at how it

00:02:40   changed when it came out in video and I watched it again. So I think it does help to get some

00:02:44   distance from these movies, and to be clear, I liked Rogue One a little bit better when

00:02:48   I saw it on video. So we'll see how Last Jedi turns out. But it's definitely a change of

00:02:53   pace. And so it's, you know, it's intriguing.

00:02:56   I had the same reaction to Rogue One where I kind of came out of Rogue One thinking,

00:03:00   "Pretty good. You know, good enough that it's over the 50-yard line. I feel like it's a

00:03:04   good movie and a good Star Wars movie, but a little, eh, a little, you know, not even

00:03:10   sure why they made the movie." And then watching it on home video, I was like, "You know what?

00:03:15   is pretty damn good. This is better than I remember from the theater and I don't know

00:03:19   why that is. And it's always to me a good sign. It's a good sign for most movies. There's

00:03:24   a very few movies that shouldn't be rewatchable. But I think it's essential for a Star Wars

00:03:29   movie. It's part of the entire idea of a Star Wars movie is that you should be able to watch

00:03:34   this over and over, like lose track of how many times you've seen it over the years and

00:03:38   still get into it.

00:03:40   Yeah, and I think all these movies for people of our age, the problem with the first watch,

00:03:46   maybe even on the second watch if it's closely followed by that, is there's a whole Star

00:03:49   Wars part of our brain, like those whole brain diagrams to show what people's brains are

00:03:54   divided up into, and they would show like the men's brains, the huge section of sports

00:03:58   or whatever, which is probably true of John's brain. But in all of our brains, I think there

00:04:03   is a big quadrant sectioned off for Star Wars, because it informs so many things about our

00:04:08   So it's very difficult when watching a movie that is a Star Wars movie to disengage that

00:04:14   part and take the movie on its own merits because, at least on initial viewing, the

00:04:18   Star Wars part is fully engaged.

00:04:20   And especially it's like PTSD from the prequels, right?

00:04:25   So it's like fight or flight response is constantly there.

00:04:28   Like what's gonna happen?

00:04:29   Do we have to flee?

00:04:31   Is it gonna be, you know?

00:04:32   And so it helps to relax.

00:04:35   I think I think the force awaken helped my brain to relax a little bit because that was

00:04:39   That was a real important one to get me out of like the dark times

00:04:42   Right and I was able to be more relaxed with the last Jedi

00:04:46   But I still feel even on two viewings that I want to see one more time in video just to see if I can you

00:04:50   know take it in and it's fullness without

00:04:52   that preconceived notions I

00:04:55   almost I almost hesitate to

00:04:59   Presuppose and say what JJ Abrams was trying to do with the force awakens

00:05:04   but I feel in my gut that that what you just said was part of his goals for the the force awakens was to sort of

00:05:12   Here's two hours of this is gonna be okay

00:05:15   This trilogy is gonna be okay

00:05:17   And I say this as perhaps in our gang of Star Wars nerds

00:05:22   The one who's the least critical of the prequel trilogy like I've certainly you know

00:05:27   We've talked about it on past Star Wars holiday spectaculars

00:05:31   There's obviously a lot of problems with it and I I feel though that amongst people of my generation

00:05:36   I'm one of the least critical of that trilogy of the people I know well

00:05:40   Before us far be it for me to fight you for that dubious honor

00:05:44   But I was trying to get Snell to do the prequels cover the prequels on the incomparable

00:05:49   But only have people say nice things about them

00:05:52   hmm, I would

00:05:55   I like you, there's some things that are cool about them. And

00:06:00   importantly, and this will come up later as we talk about why,

00:06:04   while I agree with Syracuse about everything that he's about

00:06:07   to say about moviemaking, I love this as a piece of art. I think

00:06:13   it's great. But the prequels informed a lot of people, like

00:06:18   John was saying that, you know, we have a section of our brain

00:06:21   lot of people like John was saying that, you know, we have a section of our brain

00:06:25   carved out for Star Wars. Like it or not, there's a bunch of people who had the

00:06:29   prequels carve out a similar section for them, right? And this movie sort of tries

00:06:37   to bring that together a little bit. And I appreciate it.

00:06:40   Yeah, I think so. I for Mike, I, John, it's got to be true for your kids. But for

00:06:47   Jonas, Jonas saw no distinction. But I've said this before, it's one of the things

00:06:51   that Jonas really, he loved Star Wars, he still loves Star Wars, but kids, my son is

00:06:57   about to turn 14, eighth grade, and his generation of friends all seem to like Star Wars, they

00:07:04   had lots of toy lightsabers and they all knew him, but the two trilogies, the first two

00:07:09   trilogies just all blur together for them and they don't, there's no, they get it, you

00:07:15   know, but they don't really see them as like two distinct entities, which is crazy to me

00:07:19   because they're so different in style, but the kids just don't. And to me the best exemplification

00:07:29   of this is the Star Wars ride at Disney World where you're like the gimmick of the ride

00:07:37   is that you're going on some kind of consumer flight and all of a sudden you're taken away

00:07:43   into part of the, you know, something bad happens and your consumer little shuttle is

00:07:51   wrapped up in adventures and you, they randomize it so you go through, it's like a flight

00:07:57   simulator like in a big bus type thing. And they have scenes from a whole bunch of movies

00:08:03   and you get like a random like first act and second act each time you go on. So the next

00:08:07   time you go on, you probably will get two entirely different things, but they mix and

00:08:12   match the first half in the second half but what the way they do it drives me

00:08:17   nuts as a Star Wars fan because it's like the first half might be like on the

00:08:21   the Wookie planet what is it Kashyyyk and you're you're in the Clone Wars in a

00:08:26   Clone War battle and then in the next one you're in you know Endor in the

00:08:34   other trilogy it's like just by flying through our aha or something like that

00:08:38   You're in Empire Strikes Back. It's crazy. How can you suddenly you're just jumped 30 years?

00:08:43   It doesn't make any sense, but it makes sense to the kids

00:08:47   You should know it's not the same for my son because I didn't show my son the prequels so he's

00:08:52   Free household here. Oh my that's right. I totally forgot about how could I forget that? You're a terrible no

00:09:00   I'm a great father and he does watch

00:09:03   Clone Wars TV series and Star Wars Rebels both of which are better than the prequel so he does

00:09:08   Understand that that timeline more or less. He still hasn't seen him. He still hasn't seen

00:09:14   I think he saw revenge of the Sith at a sleepover party many years ago

00:09:17   Then I yanked him out of that and no no he saw I mean who knows he might have fallen asleep during part of it

00:09:23   But that was that was several years ago

00:09:25   And I think he's seen bits and pieces of the other ones like in YouTube clips and stuff. That's about it. I

00:09:30   Do love it. I love it where it's like in our family the

00:09:33   The debate was like how old does he have to be before he can see the shining?

00:09:38   I mean the important part for me was to show my kids the real Star Wars movies over and over and over and over again before

00:09:55   They ever knew the prequels existed

00:09:56   So I imprinted them on real Star Wars.

00:09:59   And everything else is properly filed in their mind

00:10:02   as expansion material.

00:10:05   I love that your training technique for your kids

00:10:08   is identical to the clones as we see in Attack of the Clones.

00:10:12   They asked to see Star Wars.

00:10:15   They would ask me, Daddy put in Return of the Jedi.

00:10:18   It's not like I was forcing them to watch it with the Ludovigo

00:10:21   technique to bring up more of Jon's favorite movies.

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00:12:23   to mention this podcast in our one question survey. And I'm pretty sure that one question

00:12:27   is where did you hear about fracture? That's that's what it is. Alright, so my thoughts

00:12:31   I like this movie a lot. I think I liked it better than The Force Awakens, but I'm not

00:12:35   sure I honestly feel like I almost have to. I walked out of the theater on the first viewing

00:12:40   thinking I like this movie better than The Force Awakens. Now I'm thinking, I don't know,

00:12:45   I need to do the Syracuse the thing and wait seven months for it to come out on home video

00:12:49   No, I don't think it'll be on the whole. I don't think it'll be seven months. I like for the record

00:12:53   I like force awakens much better than this. I've always been sure about it. I continue to be sure we'll see

00:12:57   Maybe it'll change my see in video, but very solidly force awakens is head and shoulders above this for me. I

00:13:02   Really like I love the force awakens, too

00:13:05   But all of this talk after this one came out about sort of like stack ranking these things. I don't care

00:13:12   I just gave up. It's tough to stack rack them

00:13:15   I tried to do them too and I start to get fuzzy, you know in the the once you go below Empire Strikes Back

00:13:20   It's hard but but you know, like just two movies forget about all the other movies

00:13:24   Just these two movies Force Awakens and The Last Jedi

00:13:27   They tied I mean you can pick a tie if you feel like you can't pick one or the other but like are they close?

00:13:32   It's the thing and we will get into it. But as a movie, I believe the Force Awakens is a tighter more concise and a better

00:13:39   movie as a sequel or as part of mythology, which I think we'll get into, I think that

00:13:47   this serves a tremendous role that does a little bit of damage to it in terms of being

00:13:52   a coherent movie, but serves the greater whole.

00:13:56   I don't know. I know what you're saying, but I don't think those two things need to be

00:14:00   connected, right? Like, I don't think it's necessary to, like, if you're gonna, you know,

00:14:04   because this last I just changed things up and I get where you're coming from that you

00:14:07   like that, but it doesn't mean that you have to sacrifice being a career narrative to do

00:14:11   that. You don't have to. Maybe it's a higher degree of difficulty, but honestly I think

00:14:15   the degree of difficulty of The Force Awakens coming off the prequels and trying to balance

00:14:19   all these different factors and introduce new characters while, you know, like, it was

00:14:22   a huge, like, the degree of difficulty of The Force Awakens was tremendous. This movie

00:14:27   was perhaps more ambitious, but I think the degree of difficulty at best is a tie between

00:14:33   them. That's so I agree. And there's flaws with it. To be

00:14:39   honest, I walked out being happy that we had Star Wars worth

00:14:43   talking about again. meant a lot to me in a, you know, in a

00:14:48   real, childish way. And, you know, it tickled that section of

00:14:53   my brain that came up on this stuff.

00:14:55   Here's, here's, here's my question. And it's why I

00:14:58   started by including a question of how you like to compare it to

00:15:01   The Force Awakens is is to me the more important question is does this feel like the second part of a trilogy?

00:15:07   Which I think is important to Star Wars

00:15:10   and I do feel that one of the strengths of the

00:15:15   Prequel trilogy is that those three movies all feel like they are of a piece whether you like them or don't like them or feel met

00:15:23   About them those three movies feel like three parts of one long story that is meant to be told three

00:15:30   In three movies and the first trilogy the beloved original trilogy. I think does a great job of it with the

00:15:36   exception of the fact the

00:15:39   Totally excusable exception of the fact that the first movie originally Star Wars then retitled a new hope

00:15:45   But I'll call it Star Wars till I die

00:15:47   Was made in a way that if he never got to make another movie

00:15:51   You know he in the back of his George Lucas's mind was I would love to make a trilogy out of this

00:15:56   I'd love to make a nine-part thing out of this

00:15:58   but who knows if they'll ever let me near a budget like this again.

00:16:01   So it has to stand on its own as a this is the only movie that's ever made in this thing.

00:16:07   And I think even given that, which is reasonable and I thought very smart on his part,

00:16:13   it still works as the first part of what feels like a three part movie.

00:16:16   We have this movie is weird.

00:16:18   I think it's like I get what you're saying.

00:16:20   Like, does it does this feel like

00:16:22   I guess I know what I'm saying is this is feel like a natural follow up to The Force Awakens.

00:16:27   And I think a lot has been made of the director change and like, you know, JJ set up all this

00:16:33   stuff like the mysterious Snoke and wondering about who Ray's parents are and the dramatic

00:16:38   handing of lightsaber between Ray and Luke.

00:16:40   Right.

00:16:41   And it seemed like at every turn that Rian Johnson undercut that you were worried about

00:16:46   lightsaber thing undercut with a gag.

00:16:49   You're worried about Ray parents.

00:16:51   We're going to tell you that that's not important.

00:16:52   You're worried about Snoke?

00:16:53   Sliced in half.

00:16:54   Right.

00:16:55   Like, it seemed like you could say there's disagreement about how this new trilogy is

00:17:00   going to go.

00:17:02   Maybe there is some of that, but I think that doesn't mean that it doesn't feel like it

00:17:06   is a natural follow up.

00:17:08   Part of what a sequel has to do, I think, is to subvert your expectations to some degree.

00:17:13   And all the original Star Wars had different directors, right?

00:17:15   It was Lucas Di the first one, then Kirchner, then the French guy for Jedi.

00:17:21   Richard Marquand.

00:17:25   Can't remember any of the new character names. I can't remember any of the new character names. I remember

00:17:29   Neen Nam. I mean you named the obscure character. I remember Richard Mark when Richard Mark when we could go into that

00:17:37   It is sort of you look at like his IMDB or like you've never heard of any of his movies like Ervin kirchner

00:17:42   You wouldn't think from his body of work that he'd direct a Star Wars movie

00:17:46   but he did direct some interesting movies like the one that hits closest home for me is never say never again the the

00:17:52   One and only non-eon production James Bond movie where Sean Connery came back to the world

00:17:57   Which is actually kind of a terrible movie, but I don't think was Irvin Kirchner's fault, but

00:18:01   You kind of thing

00:18:05   No, it was 80. It was close. It was like 85. Okay, so

00:18:10   Okay. Yeah. No, yes. Yes

00:18:14   Yeah, and you know who knows it is it shows it does show though that the three movies have different

00:18:21   But what I'm getting at is like so the original Star Wars had three different directors and

00:18:24   very different movies, but they still feel like a trilogy. So here's two movies we've

00:18:28   got so far with different directors and potentially one director having philosophical disagreements

00:18:33   about how this trilogy should go and saying all those things, all those pins that you

00:18:36   set up for me, I'm not just going to knock them down. I'm going to undercut them so that

00:18:41   they appear comical or become unimportant or just essentially neutralized. But I think

00:18:47   that's part of the tradition of sequels right down to one of my favorite sequel moments

00:18:52   as a kid was realizing how clever it was to have The Empire Strikes Back open on a snow

00:18:59   planet. This was in years before video games made this trope like hammered into our brains

00:19:06   where you got the lava world, the water world, the snow world, so on and so forth. But like,

00:19:10   you know, the whole thing of Star Wars was this desert planet, right? And then they're

00:19:12   in space and right and the second movie you're like, I wonder what's gonna be happening with

00:19:16   Luke and his speeder and his X-wing and Death Star and space and the desert and it's like snow,

00:19:20   just snow, snow everywhere, right? Maybe that wasn't undercutting, you know, sand and deserts

00:19:27   wasn't set up as like the theme of Star Wars, but that's all we had. So I'm willing to give

00:19:32   wide latitude to contrast with the movie that comes before in potentially surprising ways.

00:19:40   But I do feel like there was so much undercutting that I'm wondering if the narrative is taking a

00:19:48   turn. And this is made more interesting in this trilogy because JJ is coming back for the third

00:19:51   one. So he only gets to have the last word. So this could be a swerve or JJ could take this ball

00:19:57   and run with it wherever they think this ball is going. But this is getting out with this being an

00:20:02   interesting movie. If it didn't have that interest, if it just followed straight through from where

00:20:09   the last where force awakens was headed you could still make a great movie out of it but we'd kind

00:20:15   of start to see where it's going whereas the last jedi threw everything into chaos and it makes us

00:20:20   you know have really no idea what's gonna happen in the next movie but didn't the empire do that

00:20:25   in the in the first trilogy yeah kind of i mean yeah they have the big the big dramatic revelation

00:20:31   there which is like i didn't you know i didn't see that coming even though his name means father

00:20:34   in German like it's not well it's not just that I mean we start with the

00:20:38   rebels in a desolate cold after an immediate victory yeah but they were

00:20:45   getting medals at the end of the last movie you can't go like and now they

00:20:48   polished their medals for the next movie you got to put them back in into peril

00:20:51   so look I can I with you but this subversion of expectations is what a

00:20:56   good sequel does and I think yeah when we see Luke toss the lightsaber over his

00:21:01   shoulder. What do you think you would do if he was presented

00:21:05   with the lightsaber he fought Palpatine with? He would not

00:21:09   make some soup. He'd turn it into a cooking element. Yeah,

00:21:14   that's probably what he would do.

00:21:14   Turn it into a hot burner. I do think that's true. And in

00:21:20   general, it's just as a general idea, people who care about

00:21:24   movies tend to say, I mean, this has been true since they've made

00:21:28   the, I don't know what the first sequel was ever made to a

00:21:30   Hollywood movie. But the general idea is sequels suck, right?

00:21:33   That's, that's just, you know, put a number two after a movie,

00:21:37   and everybody says, Ah, it sucks. It's nowhere near as good

00:21:39   as the original. And many sequels do suck. But that's

00:21:42   only, you know, a that's only true because most movies suck.

00:21:45   It's hard to make a good movie, and it's a lot easier to make a

00:21:48   bad movie. And and but there's also one pattern that most bad

00:21:53   sequels fall into, which is trying to recapture whatever it

00:21:56   was that made the first movie great, but with more whatever it

00:21:59   There was battles in the right there's battles in the second movie

00:22:02   But they're bigger and if you you know

00:22:03   You had this character that people like in the first movie put that character even more in the second movie like not bring anything new

00:22:09   But just taking everything was in the first movie

00:22:11   Bring it over to the new one and turn all the dials up and that always makes for a bad sequel

00:22:15   Well, but wait, I don't think Empire nor this movie did that really yeah, and that's what John is getting at right?

00:22:22   No, I think yeah, that's it. Yeah, I'm not I'm not saying that I think that's why Empire is stands up as one of its

00:22:28   Seriously, I've said this before I will say it till the day I die probably unless unless some really fantastic movies come out in the next

00:22:35   ten years

00:22:37   Forty years and I'm sitting here

00:22:44   We're getting up there but no then 10th for anybody oh by the way it dibs on

00:22:52   org

00:22:55   You got I want the

00:22:58   I you know, I think that's part of what made and you know, my other one of my other beloved franchises the James Bond series effectively

00:23:05   Does exactly what I'm saying a good sequel doesn't do it's just you know, here's a bad guy. He's got a lair

00:23:10   He's got an evil plot to take over the world James Bond falls in, you know falls in love with a beautiful woman and

00:23:17   Gets the bad guy in the end and has a nice car at some point that he smashes into a million pieces

00:23:23   Halfway through the movie. I'm not sure it's really John to be honest

00:23:27   You know the James Bond series, but that you know it's not like it's James Bond 1 James Bond 2

00:23:34   It's like it's almost like the James to me the James Bond series has sort of defined a genre of movie

00:23:40   And they just keep making movies in that genre, so it's not so much sequel itis as

00:23:44   You know there's just a

00:23:47   Like the Daniel Craig ones are you know there's a timeline a little bit right and and you know arguably

00:23:54   sequels they tried to do what was good about Casino Royale but more and not

00:24:00   right you know to me and like yeah they'll hit the reset button and then

00:24:02   they'll get to do it again right whereas the old the older ones with Connery and

00:24:09   Bond you really it doesn't matter what order you watch them in it does there's

00:24:13   no there's really no rhyme or reason to it you know there's no there's the one

00:24:18   stupid scene in the George Lazenby one where he's quitting the Secret Service

00:24:22   and he opens his desk drawer. And there's like mementos from all of the Sean Connery

00:24:28   movies, but you know, that that the movie sucked. No, I think that Empire was part of

00:24:34   what makes Empire my favorite Star Wars movie, one of my favorite movies of all time period.

00:24:39   And I just think a truly great movie, I really think it's so well constructed, but part of

00:24:43   it is that it didn't try to be like the first movie at all. It's just different in so many

00:24:49   And I think that's very true of

00:24:51   The Last Jedi I think that the Last Jedi plays on some things from previous Star Wars movies

00:24:57   But I can't really say that it was like any other story

00:25:00   It was a little handicapped by the fact that the JJ kind of did a lead into the next movie

00:25:05   Which as you noted before Star Wars couldn't do because who knew if there would even be an ex movie

00:25:09   So you can't do that lead in right this up because when Star Wars ends together get all the metals well

00:25:13   But an Empire starts we have no idea that Luke's are gonna go off to see someone named Yoda and be trained as a Jedi

00:25:19   I like. There's nothing in the first movie that mentions Yoda or hints that he's gonna

00:25:24   go on it. It's introduced to us in Empire. You know, Ghost Ben comes and says you must

00:25:30   go to the Dagobah system, right? Whereas in The Force Awakens, we get that part before

00:25:35   the movie ends. It's like, oh, Rey, you're gonna go see Skywalker. Here's the map. You're

00:25:39   gonna go there. And we get to see you go there. And you go there and you see him and we see

00:25:43   what it looks like and you hand him lightsaber. So we kind of know, like in the next movie,

00:25:47   You gotta, there's a thread you have to pick up.

00:25:49   If they never showed that island in the next movie, you know, so this movie was somewhat

00:25:53   undercut and like that thread at least has to go somewhere.

00:25:57   We have to see Luke, we have to see Rey, they have to go somewhere.

00:26:00   Empire got the luxury of saying, you don't even know from Yoda.

00:26:02   You don't know Yoda's a thing.

00:26:03   We haven't even thought of Yoda yet, but this movie is going to be, there's going to be

00:26:05   a ton of Yoda in this movie and it's going to be super important, right?

00:26:08   So that's not the fault of the last shot, but it does show that like when they made

00:26:13   the last, when they made the Force Awakens, they kind of knew there'd be another one.

00:26:16   Pretty much nothing could have happened. They would have prevented another one from being made so it's structured differently

00:26:21   Yeah, so I've got two things about that first going back to the bond thing is a they have a template to make a bond

00:26:27   Movie and they just keep doing it and everyone is sort of a retelling of the story

00:26:31   Ghostly and by gross I mean, I don't mean disgusting. I mean, you know

00:26:38   They're like three degrees into reflection though, it was like again the Daniel Craig bond

00:26:44   It's all about reflecting on the old bonds. Sure. Yeah, exactly and in a lot of ways and this is where I'm bringing back up is

00:26:51   I feel that the force awakens is the same thing for Star Wars. It is a retelling of a modern mythology

00:26:58   That's what I was saying

00:27:00   Now two years ago on the show with Amy who was besides herself because she ever got an overhand dying. Is that is she okay?

00:27:09   So for those of you who don't recall that when the force awakens came out we had the holiday spectacular Amy

00:27:14   my wife Amy joined us on the show and

00:27:16   She really was just bereft over the she had no idea. She went into this, you know successfully

00:27:22   She didn't have to avoid spoilers like her internet doesn't really have Star Wars spoilers

00:27:27   But went into it literally knowing nothing

00:27:30   I don't even know she knew Harrison Ford and Han Solo were in the movie, you know, and it's like hey, there's the old gang

00:27:36   It's 30 years later. There's some stuff and then bing bang boom and the kid kills Han Solo

00:27:42   And she really was upset and she was like nobody told

00:27:46   You tell me

00:27:50   She was like he's the only one in this whole stupid movie

00:27:53   I liked and they killed him and she she still hasn't seen Rogue One

00:27:57   She wouldn't go see it because she said I'm done with it, but she did we drug her to see

00:28:02   This movie and she liked it and doesn't really want to see the then Tom. Yeah, so there's that well

00:28:08   All right, what about this before we before it escapes my mind this is to me at a basic narrative level the most

00:28:17   one of the maybe the most exceptional and I mean exceptional in the way that it's an

00:28:22   An exception like in programming terms would raise an error. It's like outside the rules of Star Wars movies in the trilogy

00:28:31   thing where there's no gap between The Force Awakens and

00:28:36   This movie. I mean literally it the the her presenting the lightsaber to Luke when we've rejoined them

00:28:43   It's it's in the moment. It was obviously shot at the same time

00:28:47   No, they did go back because they went there's also making up things they did go back to the island and they'll actually only had

00:28:56   There's a two days of shooting out and everything else was like on the coast where the island is off of

00:29:00   I know they went back, but from a narrative perspective, it is the moment.

00:29:04   Yeah.

00:29:05   I think at the time they filmed it for Force Awakens, I'm not sure that things had been

00:29:10   nailed down to the point where they knew Luke was supposed to chuck it over his shoulder.

00:29:12   Well, no.

00:29:14   I'm sure they didn't, but narratively, as we watched the movie...

00:29:17   Yeah, yeah, no, they pick up that moment. They didn't have to do that. They had to pick up

00:29:21   that thread, as I said before, but they could have let us join the two of them in a hut somewhere,

00:29:26   having a discussion. We didn't have to pick up from that moment.

00:29:29   I find the scene where Luke takes his old lightsaber, his father's lightsaber, and throws

00:29:34   it off a cliff nonchalantly to be one of the most powerful Star Wars moments we have.

00:29:43   Mark Hamill has some problems with the treatment of Luke, and I have to say I kind of agree

00:29:49   with Mark Hamill, but interestingly, I think I said this on The Incomparable, I think Luke

00:29:55   in The Last Jedi, that character seems to me to be informed by the actual person, Mark

00:30:00   Hamill. What little I know of him from seeing him do celebrity interviews as himself and

00:30:04   not as the character Luke. The Luke in this movie seems very much to me like the actual

00:30:11   Mark Hamill in real life. Which is interesting that both I and Mark Hamill think it's not

00:30:16   a great fit for the character, but because the gap is so long between the last time we

00:30:21   saw Luke and now, anything could have happened in there that would explain this transformation.

00:30:25   and they try to explain it in this movie.

00:30:27   And John, John, you, two seconds, John.

00:30:30   The other, too many Johns.

00:30:31   All right.

00:30:32   The one thing that we do have that we disagree about

00:30:36   is that I have a different perspective upon Luke

00:30:39   in Return of the Jedi than you do.

00:30:42   I think he kind of went dark for a bit.

00:30:45   And we have seen Jedi, including the great ones like Yoda

00:30:49   and Kenobi, just run away and hide for 30 years.

00:30:53   and he's kind of following the same pattern.

00:30:56   Yeah, no, it's not the running away and hiding that I disagree with,

00:30:59   and it's not the being tempted by the dark side I disagree with.

00:31:01   Like, the whole movies are all about him being tempted by the dark side.

00:31:03   Empire and Jedi had Luke being tempted by the dark side

00:31:06   and giving in to it to varying degrees at various points.

00:31:08   But, like, I mean, again, the time gap is so big that I'm not faulting the movie for this.

00:31:14   I'm just saying that it was a surprise, which is fine,

00:31:18   but it was also a surprise that it felt like it wasn't really adequately explained

00:31:22   to the movie which I think is one of the things Last Jedi has some problems with. They want

00:31:27   there to be, you know, a bunch of stuff happening and here's where we are. You're like, "Okay,

00:31:32   I can see that happening. It's plausible. It's been 30 years. Like, tons of stuff can happen.

00:31:35   Like, it makes sense." But you have to put something on the screen to give me like the

00:31:40   cliff notes version of that and they do that to greater or lesser degrees. And the character

00:31:44   things that don't fit for me is the Luke. The Luke I know from the original trilogy

00:31:49   was a relentlessly earnest do-gooder who wanted to do the right thing but was also a little bit of

00:31:54   a hothead but in the end mastered his, you know, his hotheadedness, resisted the Dark Side, refused

00:31:59   to fight, and was triumphant in that endeavor, further reinforcing his earnestness and presumably

00:32:05   his hotheadedness would fade with age and so on and so forth. Now he could still have problems

00:32:09   where he'd become, like as they say in this movie, you start believing your own hype, you know, you

00:32:13   start believing in the legend of Luke Skywalker because everyone tells you you're super awesome

00:32:16   and like, "Oh, Luke Skywalker, you're great. I bet you can do anything," right?

00:32:18   That's their explanation in this movie. I just didn't see enough of it on the screen to

00:32:23   really convince me that this... Like, what I would have expected Luke,

00:32:27   "Sure, he's in exile. Sure, he messed stuff up." I expected him to be more sad and less angry,

00:32:32   because he learned through his arc in the first three movies was to chill out a little bit,

00:32:39   to relax, to be more patient, and to understand, "But don't I have to beat Darth Vader? Don't I

00:32:44   have to hit him really hard with my sword and that's how I'll win and to get it through his

00:32:49   thick skull that no that's not how you win you know he chucks his lights ever away it's just I

00:32:53   will not fight you you know I'm a Jedi like my father before like that's his arc right and he

00:32:58   he's such a do-gooder and so earnest that I you know I need just to have an explanation of how

00:33:04   he ends up in this place because I would sad and broken totally see that depressed sad broken hiding

00:33:09   reclusive, it turning inward, even shutting himself off from

00:33:13   the forest. I totally see all of that. But kind of angry at the

00:33:17   world and and bitter and stuff. Seems more in keeping with

00:33:21   cynical jaded Mark Hamill than it does with Luke. But all that

00:33:25   said, I loved his character in this movie, I just have some

00:33:28   difficulty connecting it back with 30 years ago on and again,

00:33:30   there's 30 years worth of movies that we haven't seen there. So

00:33:33   something could fill in those gaps. But

00:33:34   But we'll go let's go with Luke and what they did with Luke

00:33:37   because that was really good segment right there. And it's

00:33:39   It's a big part of the movie and I think it's a huge part of the movie for us who you know grew up with that first

00:33:46   trilogy right and and it's a he it was a huge huge huge

00:33:51   decision and

00:33:53   You know obviously they knew exactly I say missed opportunity

00:33:57   I want to say missed opportunity

00:33:58   but they knew what it meant that by not putting Luke in the force awakens other than the the

00:34:05   Briefest moment at the very end of the movie almost more as a you know, here's what's coming in the next movie

00:34:11   We never got to see a Han and Luke and Leia and Chewie together again, right?

00:34:16   The last time we saw them together

00:34:17   it was 1983 in Return of the Jedi and they're never they're never gonna be together again and they could have and it didn't have

00:34:24   to be and I get I totally get the idea that hey, you're not gonna make a

00:34:28   700 billion dollar

00:34:31   grossing movie starring

00:34:34   year old actors, you know, it's time for a new generation. But there's

00:34:40   obviously a thousand different ways they could have written The Force Awakens

00:34:43   where Luke had some kind of role and when you see, you know, you have that

00:34:47   great scene with Han and Leia and you changed your hair and C-3PO and

00:34:51   you might not recognize me because he's got the red arm. You know, it could have

00:34:56   been some Luke in there too, right? And it was obviously a deliberate choice that

00:35:01   We get the heartache that Luke has of never having seen Han again, right?

00:35:06   I mean, that's the the you know

00:35:08   We don't get to see we don't get the joy of seeing them together again

00:35:12   And but then when he says where's Han in this movie?

00:35:15   It hurts it hurts because he could have seen him in the last movie before he died

00:35:19   Even if they still killed Han, you know, so I get it. I get that choice. It works

00:35:24   There's a part of me that wants to

00:35:26   Wants to be angry at JJ Abrams for that and there's a part of me that says I salute you for having the balls to

00:35:32   Do it because it really made it made Luke saying where's Han in this movie a moment that it to me is as good as any

00:35:38   moment in any Star Wars I totally agree and I

00:35:41   Am really not one of the people that wants to get mad at a filmmaker for making the choices

00:35:47   Yeah, you know when it comes down to it

00:35:49   That's a film and this that moment where he says where's Han and they they cut

00:35:55   We don't get there. Well Han got killed by like none of that. It's just and by the guy you see yeah, and it just

00:36:02   It just hits you and I know oh god, that's awful I

00:36:09   Luke hanging out. That's all yeah, I kind of would have liked to

00:36:16   Screen in this movie though

00:36:18   Like there's a lot of characters in the force awakens because you got to do the transition from old to new and then they add even

00:36:23   more here. And so there's just not enough time for Luke and

00:36:25   Chewie to hang out. You barely got Luke to say two words to see

00:36:27   the repo. Yeah, I think Mark Hamill's, he winks at him.

00:36:31   Yeah, Mark Hamill's comments on this, I think are really

00:36:35   interesting. And he's since walked them back and said he

00:36:38   regrets it because you know, and it's the reason that creative

00:36:41   people just don't talk about the creative process. You could even

00:36:43   say, this is why Apple doesn't explain itself as you start

00:36:46   explaining yourself. And it just opens you up. You don't want to

00:36:49   be too honest. Like people don't want to see how the sausage is

00:36:51   made.

00:36:52   Right.

00:36:53   People don't want to see it.

00:36:54   But in a very honest interview, Mark Hamill said that he said to Rian Johnson, "Jedi

00:37:01   don't give up."

00:37:02   This is criticism of the way Luke was written in this movie.

00:37:04   "Jedi don't give up."

00:37:05   I mean, even if he had a problem, he would maybe take a year to try and regroup, but

00:37:09   if he made a mistake, he would try to right that wrong.

00:37:12   So right there, we had a fundamental difference.

00:37:13   But it's not my story anymore.

00:37:15   It's someone else's story, and Rian needed me to be a certain way to make the ending

00:37:18   effective.

00:37:19   That's the crux of my problem.

00:37:20   would never say that. I'm sorry. Well, in this version, see, I'm talking about the George Lucas

00:37:25   Star Wars. This is the next generation of Star Wars. So I almost had to think of Luke as another

00:37:29   character. Maybe he's Jake Skywalker. He's not my Luke Skywalker. But I had to do what Ryan wanted

00:37:35   me to do because it serves the story well. And he's since like two days ago, he had another thing

00:37:39   where he said, You know what, I regret it. I love this movie. Ryan Johnson made a great Star Wars

00:37:44   movie. And I'm happy to have been a part of it. And you know, because he's it's taken out of

00:37:48   He's been taking a lot of heat and honestly, as anybody who has made anything ever, I used

00:37:56   to work on games.

00:37:57   You know how many weird decisions get made when it's fine?

00:38:03   It's not really weird.

00:38:04   I support the ability of him to say that this is the thing.

00:38:07   I actually think Luke is wrong about the Jedi.

00:38:09   All of the Jedi that we know from the original trilogy, the only trilogy that Sir Akusa knows

00:38:14   is when things were wrong, they cut none.

00:38:17   That's the only thing that Mark Hamill knows, too.

00:38:20   Mark Hamill has the same problem that the audience has, is that the last time he was

00:38:24   Luke was Return of the Jedi.

00:38:26   He didn't film a bunch of movies in the intervening 30 years where he got to play Luke at various

00:38:30   stages.

00:38:31   So the last Luke that he knows is the Return of the Jedi.

00:38:33   And he's saying Jedi don't give up.

00:38:35   But what he really means is Luke, that character I played in those three movies, he was an

00:38:40   Ernest Dooker who was a little hot-headed and a little bit impulsive, but he was a boy

00:38:44   scout.

00:38:45   Luke was not, you know, like, you know, you see him in Empire Strikes Back of like, you

00:38:50   know, what, Laus is nobody cares?

00:38:53   He says, I care.

00:38:54   Like, he's just he's just trying to trying to get the girl trying to do the right thing,

00:38:57   trying to beat the bad guy trying to leave his farm, like, and that's the last Luke that

00:39:02   Mark Hamill knows.

00:39:03   So when he sees how Luke is being played in this movie, he's like, I don't get how that

00:39:07   character the end of Return of the Jedi gets here.

00:39:09   And Ryan Johnson should have said, well, there's 30 years, a lot can happen in 30 years.

00:39:13   And so he should have really sat down with him and said,

00:39:15   here's what we imagine happened in 30 years,

00:39:17   and here how it would explain this transformation

00:39:19   or whatever, but he's got the same problem we do.

00:39:22   Like, how do I connect that Luke to that one?

00:39:23   So maybe you could argue that that's a problem,

00:39:26   like a director talking to the actor

00:39:27   and understanding like, here's what your motivation is.

00:39:29   Let me tell you like your pretend backstory

00:39:31   for the 30 years intervening or whatever,

00:39:33   'cause this is what I want you to be in this movie.

00:39:35   And like I said, I accept that,

00:39:37   but when you have such a well-known character,

00:39:39   it's important to put things in the actual movie

00:39:42   that give you a plausible explanation of how they get to this point. And they tried really

00:39:47   hard to do that with him explaining how he tried to train Kylo, how he started to believe

00:39:51   his own hype, how he started to believe in the legend, how he saw the darkness within

00:39:54   him, but it's like, yeah, but the Luke who saw the darkness, would he take out his lightsaber

00:39:59   and consider killing his sister's son? Like, maybe, maybe the Luke from 30 years, maybe

00:40:06   he would do that, but it's like, what brought him to that point? Because the Luke at the

00:40:09   end of Return of the Jedi, no way in hell would he do that. He wouldn't even fight his

00:40:11   own father who was killing millions of people and gonna blow up all his friends.

00:40:16   And by the way, so in Jedi I do think that he's progressed in his use of the Force, but

00:40:22   in Jedi he's remarkably colder than he is in Empire and certainly in Star Wars.

00:40:26   He's chilling out.

00:40:27   I don't know if he's chilling out because he's strangling people with his brain, so

00:40:31   that's probably not good.

00:40:33   But he's distanced even when he's on the mission.

00:40:36   He's like, "I shouldn't have come on the mission."

00:40:38   But he still has this hot-headed moment where, you know, if you won't join me, maybe

00:40:41   your sister will and he gives in to his anger and fights but that that's what

00:40:44   that that's what convinces him when he finally sees like you know Yoda was

00:40:48   right I got it like you know only what you take with you like the cave you know

00:40:51   remember lesson the cable he figures it out at the end and by figuring it out

00:40:55   that's how he went that's how the good guys win essentially I agree with you

00:40:59   completely but I can see the if you take the transition for Luke from Star Wars

00:41:06   to Empire to the Return of the Jedi and then sort of extrapolate that a long

00:41:10   time you can see him getting more and more disconnected from the world and I

00:41:14   find a little bit believable that he would give up and now here's what I

00:41:24   totally you like the laser sword on your nephew and and depressed and beating

00:41:31   himself up all that but probably like less sarcastic and cynical maybe you

00:41:37   You that is I don't understand that that's a long you guys way to go

00:41:44   You guys I assume might know this John you probably certainly do but you guys know that

00:41:49   Lawrence Kasdan's who co-wrote the screenplay for Empire Strikes Back. I forget if he had a writing

00:41:55   Yeah, yeah

00:41:59   What he had the way he do you guys know the story of how he wanted

00:42:05   Return of the Jedi to end he wanted to die

00:42:08   No had nothing to do with Han dying

00:42:11   It had to do with Luke walking off into the sunset alone like in his is you know

00:42:16   He said like Clint Eastwood in one of the you know

00:42:19   like Western spaghetti westerns that he you know all these things can happen and

00:42:23   He can redeem his father and they can kill the Emperor and the rebels can have this great victory and blow up another Death Star

00:42:29   But that Luke is isolated and he's you know

00:42:32   There's no one else he can relate to and that they're like the last shot of the movie would just be Luke

00:42:36   Walking off on his own, you know how you get from there, you know, but instead of having

00:42:40   Work because the all Jedi is about him connecting with his sister and fighting for his friends

00:42:45   Like the units really really cohesive unit like they're all working together as friends. They plan as friends. They execute as friends

00:42:51   He's worried about his friends out in space

00:42:52   So that would have to be a different script if you want to go in that direction

00:42:54   I've got a little bit of that moment when he's standing in front of the bonfire

00:42:57   He is isolated from everybody

00:43:00   - Well, he can see the four of them.

00:43:01   - I do think-- - Everybody around him, right?

00:43:04   - But he's still, he's smiling.

00:43:04   He sees all his friends and his dead friends.

00:43:07   - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:43:08   - Right, it's like, so they put a bit of that in

00:43:12   with him alone and the bonfire,

00:43:13   but they, you know, it obviously wasn't gonna be

00:43:16   the last moment, the mass emotional cue of the moment,

00:43:19   of the movie and of the trilogy,

00:43:21   but that's what Lawrence Kasdan wanted.

00:43:24   But I think that that Lawrence Kasdan idea

00:43:26   informed this Luke in exile idea, you know,

00:43:30   whether that's where they got it or where they thought of it.

00:43:31   - It's the exile I'm all for.

00:43:32   Like I expected him to be in exile.

00:43:34   I expected him to be kind of like Obi-Wan,

00:43:36   like kind of sad and depressed and sort of mad at yourself

00:43:41   and just kind of like down and like the best I can do

00:43:44   is hide and like that you're hiding yourself

00:43:46   as a dangerous weapon.

00:43:47   Like Obi-Wan definitely had that vibe

00:43:50   where he was just, he was exiling himself

00:43:51   because he had, he had colossally screwed up

00:43:53   and he's like, the best thing I can do is stay away.

00:43:55   And he eventually was brought back in

00:43:57   by the promise of redemption.

00:43:59   But Luke is on this island just being pissed off all the time.

00:44:05   I think it's interesting, and Guy and I have talked about this privately, but I think it's

00:44:09   interesting the way that old Luke that we see in this movie is way more Yoda than Obi-Wan.

00:44:18   You say Obi-Wan is depressed.

00:44:19   Obi-Wan was obviously off on his own and he only got back involved when Leia came to get

00:44:26   him.

00:44:28   He wasn't going to join. He had given up. You know, like exactly what

00:44:31   Mark Hamill is saying that Jedi never do. Like Obi-Wan had effectively given up and I guess the only thing he was doing was, you know,

00:44:38   keeping some kind of Force awareness.

00:44:40   My headcanon is that he's using tinder and going down to the

00:44:43   cantina.

00:44:46   He's going to Mos Eisley every Friday night.

00:44:50   He's obviously looking over Luke. Is he an old Ben Kenobi?

00:44:52   Like, Luke even knows that he exists.

00:44:54   But he's not...

00:44:55   Yeah, but but he and Yoda never decide to go after Vader and the Emperor

00:45:00   No, but once you know things come to a head Obi-Wan doesn't have we don't get to see a moment with him saying

00:45:05   I don't know if I'm gonna answer Leia's call. He pretty much is on board immediately with the message, right?

00:45:09   Whereas Yoda, you know is the one who had the you know, I'm not going to trade. I'm not gonna do my Yoda here

00:45:17   Maybe I can maybe if I have a little bit more of this scotch. I will but take it take us away. Let's go

00:45:21   Come on, man

00:45:24   You can do it in the same way that Luke refuses to train Ray is exactly it felt to me like the way Yoda was

00:45:31   Afraid he is too old. Yes too old to begin the training

00:45:34   He was afraid because like you know everyone has to convince him and Yoda's like remember what happened last time

00:45:40   We ended up with Vader. That was a bad scene. That's why I'm on this you know Yoda does a eco retreat

00:45:45   He's like I got it back to nature back to like what the force is really all about and I

00:45:51   And they've both got a dark side.

00:45:53   Yeah, but Luke is stealing himself off from the Force.

00:45:55   But it's like, but just Luke is so kind of disillusioned and angry.

00:45:59   Like, Yoda is not disillusioned with the Force.

00:46:01   He retreats to a place with all this life to get closer to the Force.

00:46:04   He's not disillusioned.

00:46:06   Yoda may be disillusioned with the bureaucracy of the Jedi Council and blah, blah, blah.

00:46:10   And how, and disillusioned with his own decisions and performance and so on and so forth.

00:46:14   Yeah, he's pissed off about the pink slip more than the actual...

00:46:16   But Luke is like, I'm not even going to use the Force.

00:46:18   Use the force and part of that is hiding yourself, which I think is smart

00:46:21   But part of that is also that he's just like F this force business

00:46:25   Like I'm not I'm not down with that anymore

00:46:27   Like I just you know, I'm just gonna be on this island and I'm just gonna close myself off and get it

00:46:33   You know Yoda is a great character and and Luke is

00:46:36   Evolved into a great character and so I'm not saying they're the same but there's clearly way more Yoda in old Luke then

00:46:42   Yeah, then old Ben and and it just like there's like an impishness

00:46:47   You know like when he's first he says all right three lessons

00:46:50   Here's your first lesson reach out and she literally reaches out and he snaps her hand with the big blade of grass

00:46:55   And he goes do you feel it because I feel it I feel it

00:46:59   Like that's Yoda. That's a total

00:47:01   You know part of the training of the traditional sort of like training from the ancient wisdom is like the student looks foolish

00:47:07   I mean Luke is made to look foolish at many times being trained with Yoda to obi-wan never does though obi-wan never

00:47:13   Yeah, Obi-Wan is a dignified British person who teaches you, "You can do it!"

00:47:17   Like, you know, like he's very encouraging and supportive.

00:47:20   And Yoda is, you know, yelling at Luke for you because he's dropping them when he's floating

00:47:24   the rocks and everything.

00:47:25   Yeah. On the other hand, Kenobi's giving him the basics, right?

00:47:29   Like...

00:47:31   But it's just, you just can't see Kenobi ever doing something like that, right?

00:47:35   Kenobi is...

00:47:36   I just like to block them out. And The Last Jedi doesn't do that.

00:47:41   another thing Last Jedi does is it starts to bring in the prequels because to explain

00:47:45   Luke's disillusionment, he has to make oblique reference to how he makes it explicit explicit

00:47:51   to what's the same Darth Sidious, which is a name we never got during the movies. No, they did say

00:48:00   it. Darth Sidious? No, they told you, right? No, yeah. Yeah, like the prequels, they mentioned it.

00:48:10   But that coming out of Luke's mouth? No, we've never had that.

00:48:15   Where did Luke learn all that? He must have been studying up on the Wikipedia pages after he returned the jedi.

00:48:20   Well, I mean, once you blow up the Emperor and you take over the galaxy, I'm going to guess there's a library.

00:48:25   Well, there's a lot of time for reading.

00:48:27   Yeah, you can look this stuff up.

00:48:29   Boy, these jedi were dumb.

00:48:31   I mean, at some place, he also went and found all those jedi texts, right?

00:48:36   No, no, no, they were already on the island. They were in that temple on the island.

00:48:40   Okay, so he went there. He spent time researching this stuff, is what I'm saying.

00:48:45   That's the other weird thing. Another thing that JJ set up is where Luke is hiding is back where the first Jedi were.

00:48:52   Kind of like how Yoda went to this planet with tons of life, because it's a whole force thing, right?

00:49:00   So, but for someone who is super disillusioned with the Jedi, like, you could take it two

00:49:06   ways.

00:49:07   One, that it's a discontinuity and they just had to deal with it because it's on the island

00:49:10   and like it doesn't quite match up.

00:49:12   Or two, that despite all Luke's protestations about being disillusioned with the Jedi, he

00:49:18   did go to the island where the original Jedi were.

00:49:21   So it seems that he can't let go of the idea that the Force is a thing that's worth holding

00:49:26   on to even though he's close himself off.

00:49:27   I'm very comfortable with that.

00:49:28   I mean, if you're uncomfortable with your religion going back to the first texts, it

00:49:35   totally makes sense to me.

00:49:37   Like, where did we go wrong with the bureaucracy is a completely reasonable thing to do.

00:49:41   But in the end, he wants to burn down that tree, and he's like, just, no, in the end,

00:49:46   when he's trying to teach Ray about the Force, he'll say, basically, the Jedi don't own the

00:49:50   Force, right?

00:49:52   That's a human concept.

00:49:53   It's like the church, and the church is made by man, but like, you know, the difference

00:49:58   the Church and actual God. It's like, the Jedi are human construct. They are imperfect because

00:50:02   humans are imperfect, but the Force is fine. And he wants to burn it down, not because he wants to

00:50:09   burn the Force down, but to say this structure that humans have made around the Force, this whole

00:50:13   Jedi Sith, and that is crap. But he can't quite bring himself to do it because, like, the same

00:50:19   reason he went to the island, he kind of believes in the Force. He believes in all the teaching,

00:50:23   like, but Jedi are good, right? Like, I always totally wanted to be a Jedi and I was so excited

00:50:29   to be one and to like, fulfill my destiny to become a Jedi and blah blah blah, and I can't

00:50:34   bring myself to burn down. And Yoda is the one who pops in and says, I don't have a problem with it,

00:50:37   I can burn it down. You're right. Yoda's always been on the same page of like, Yoda does not tell

00:50:43   him, you know, here is what it means to be on the Jedi Council. He is all about the Force and what

00:50:49   what the force means and all his stuff.

00:50:52   I mean, he does mention Jedi a lot

00:50:53   because a Jedi cares not about blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

00:50:56   He uses the word Jedi, but because the prequels didn't exist,

00:50:59   he makes no reference to the stupidity of Jedi bureaucracy

00:51:04   and the hubris of the Jedi

00:51:06   and their little kiddie training schools

00:51:08   and picking slave children and all sorts of other things

00:51:11   that eventually came out of prequels.

00:51:12   And he's free before-- - Before you lift your X-wing,

00:51:14   have you filled out form JDI 882-6?

00:51:19   No. I thought that that was one of my favorite things about this movie is that it acknowledged

00:51:24   something that to me had gone unacknowledged in including in the Force Awakens in the previous

00:51:29   movies, which was that to me, and again, maybe I was just reading too much into it. And I always,

00:51:34   I do believe very strongly, and I know I'm right on certain parts that Lucas didn't have this whole

00:51:40   thing written out, you know, there were vague ideas about what the prequels would be. And a

00:51:44   lot of the stuff that ended up in them weren't really, you know, he didn't have this grand master

00:51:48   plan and all these screenplays pre-written in 1977. But to me in the original trilogy,

00:51:54   especially with what Kenobi says in Star Wars, it made it to me seem like Jedi were sort

00:52:01   of solo individuals around the galaxy.

00:52:07   Like monks.

00:52:08   Yeah, like monks. And somebody who was called into the force, you'd discover another Jedi

00:52:15   eye and they would train you and but the it was decentralized is what I saw a decentralized

00:52:21   network of warrior monks.

00:52:23   I never saw them as being inherently generals or leading battle having a big Council and

00:52:30   sitting around in a big headquarters.

00:52:33   Well I mean when we can be saying that Anakin a fancy skyscraper you know Stark Tower on

00:52:38   Khorasan Yeah, well like when when Kenobi is saying that Anakin was once his pupil and

00:52:43   was the best of other palates. He thought he could train him just as well as Yoda and he was wrong.

00:52:47   That goes into the whole sort of like master apprentice, you know, system of...

00:52:51   I honestly, right, I believed it more to be like a, you know, I don't know, like a...

00:52:57   Like a blacksmithing. Like a cobbler relationship, like I'll show you how to do this.

00:53:01   The fact that they fought in the war together was incidental to the fact that there was a war going

00:53:08   on. Yeah. Right. I happen to think, and I grew up under the assumption

00:53:13   that Kenobi got involved in and she said you know you fought with my father as a general in the

00:53:18   Clone Wars that Kenobi made that choice as an individual in my mind that Kenobi was one of

00:53:23   however many Jedi that were in the galaxy and when the Clone Wars erupted Obi-Wan Kenobi decided I'm

00:53:29   joining this this war as a Jedi and I'll become a general in this it I did not expect that all of

00:53:36   the that there was something like that and it's one of the things that I like about the prequel

00:53:40   trilogy is that, again, it upended my expectations. And it was like, no, they were more like a quasi

00:53:46   government institution, but sort of anti-democratic, you know, like nobody else really had it there.

00:53:52   They were influential in intergalactic politics, but like answerable to no one. And the whole lot

00:53:59   of them joined the war, you know, and in a way that wasn't what I expected. It didn't seem like

00:54:04   what it was set up. And it also made me feel like this is a corrupt organization. And I can see how

00:54:09   their hubris led to their downfall. Yeah, there was something about Alec Guinness's portrayal

00:54:15   of Kenobi that made you believe that he could have been a general in the war.

00:54:20   That bridge over the river Kwai, right? Well, first of all, the bridge over the river Kwai,

00:54:26   he's a British gentleman in 1977. You could totally see him being an officer in World War II,

00:54:34   It was close enough, historically, to cement that this is a prototype of a character that

00:54:41   could have gone and seen some hard times and now he's moved beyond it and is being called

00:54:48   back.

00:54:50   The whole thing with the prequels, it did subvert my expectations.

00:54:54   And I guess I have to tip my hat to that, but I don't know if it subverted them in a

00:55:01   way that made me richer for it.

00:55:03   If you roughly sketch out what the prequels are trying to do,

00:55:07   you can make a semi-coherent story out of it,

00:55:10   like really bold, like three bullet points per movie.

00:55:14   But in execution, they just failed on every possible front.

00:55:17   So I don't disagree with that part,

00:55:19   with the overarching--

00:55:23   The concept.

00:55:24   --broad strokes of the prequels.

00:55:25   But once you get down below the level three bullet

00:55:27   points for movies, everything falls apart.

00:55:30   I really like, though.

00:55:31   And I thought that Luke's, that rant that Luke has in this movie is as close as, I almost

00:55:39   feel like they don't need to do it anymore, but I feel like they've, cinematically,

00:55:43   Rian Johnson took it on himself to bridge, you know, bridge all seven or eight movies,

00:55:50   I guess, so far together.

00:55:53   And I feel like that was very successful.

00:55:55   In a minimal amount of time, Luke's sort of, "Here's why I'm sickened by the Jedi and to

00:56:02   hell with him," it tied them together in a way that hadn't been tried before.

00:56:07   That the prequels were kind of left as a problem and that The Force Awakens just sort of skipped

00:56:12   over.

00:56:13   Yeah, well, because The Force Awakens, like, I mean, it's centering on Rey, who barely

00:56:16   even knows that Luke Skywalker even is a real thing and not just like a story that she's

00:56:20   heard.

00:56:21   No, she flat out thinks he's a mess.

00:56:22   Right.

00:56:23   not that close to it, but by the time we get into this movie it's time to get down to brass

00:56:27   tacks and see what is ever—because the prequels have now happened, so this movie has to be

00:56:31   informed by it. And it does it in a way of setting them aside—it's taking the broad

00:56:36   strokes from that. Like, look, the Jedi were stupid in the prequels, and we all agree the

00:56:40   Jedi were stupid in the prequels. Sometimes, they actually sometimes not be the way, like

00:56:43   they were shown to be an ineffective organization. And this movie's—I like this movie's message

00:56:47   about the Force with Yoda because it's back on message from the Empire Yoda to say it's

00:56:53   about the Force and not so much about the bureaucracy of the Jedi and the Sith and that

00:56:59   thing. It's about the Force and there is a light side and a dark side and there is a

00:57:02   struggle between them and Yoda is all about learning how not to give in to the dark side

00:57:07   is this quicker, easier, more seductive, you know, like, I'm all on board with that. And

00:57:12   I like that Yoda in this one is most able to let go of the trappings of like, because

00:57:16   first of all, the Yoda is long gone, right? Luke is the last one and he needs Yoda to

00:57:20   to give him a kick over the cliff to say, Look, what are you

00:57:22   even holding on to?

00:57:23   You got a bunch of books and you.

00:57:25   That's it.

00:57:25   There's no more Jedi Council.

00:57:27   Yoda is also long gone.

00:57:30   He's been dead for a long time.

00:57:33   Well, yeah, but he has less and less attachment to the physical

00:57:38   world. We don't know how time passes in the magic Force

00:57:42   Ghost realm.

00:57:43   Okay, well, he doesn't give a crap about the Jedi.

00:57:46   He just blows up the tree.

00:57:47   Yeah, I mean, that's a problem with the Force Ghost, because

00:57:50   Like you gotta, I mean this movie does change a bunch of rules about things, but you know,

00:57:55   as many people pointed out, in some ways they kind of potentially break things down the

00:57:58   line. But like, what's the deal with the forest ghosts? Can they come back forever and ever?

00:58:02   Like why don't we see the forest ghosts from like, you know, 20 centuries coming back and

00:58:07   talking about it? It's just the ones that he knows? Did they ever age in the forest

00:58:10   ghost place? Anakin got to be younger.

00:58:11   Well, yeah. Well, there's two things about that. A, well, okay, just brief aside. I mean,

00:58:17   to say that Kenobi's force ghost didn't put those torpedoes down the hole when Luke fired them?

00:58:23   Well, Luke did that himself. He used the force. I mean, I guess, Kenobi didn't do it for him.

00:58:27   I forgot. The second thing is that Qui-Gon is the one who figured out how to be a force ghost.

00:58:33   There's no force ghost before Qui-Gon. Right. Okay. Okay. But he's still talking from beyond the grave.

00:58:38   All right. As far as we know, though, Qui-Gon only figured it out to the part where he could

00:58:42   like communicate not you know and and because Kenobi does it both ways when Luke is going down

00:58:47   the trench he only hears his voice and only in the Empire Strikes Back do we see the Force Ghost

00:58:53   uh for all we know Qui-Gon never got further than being able to communicate with Yoda

00:58:58   very specific set of skills John

00:59:05   Is my it is my take on it is that?

00:59:09   But Yoda has been able to extend it longer than Kenobi because Yoda was more powerful in the force and it helps that Yoda is

00:59:18   a puppet and

00:59:20   Well Frank Frank Oz is not a prank Oz is is still alive and Alec Guinness is dead and

00:59:26   What's his name you and McGregor in makeup isn't really gonna look like old obi-wan

00:59:33   And we've already established that when obi-wan appears as a ghost. He looks like Alec Guinness not like you and your

00:59:38   But I could you know if they could do it maybe it would be interesting I

00:59:44   It's one of the little things I've picked up on I've thought about

00:59:48   We could go on a whole aside on this but I need to do a break soon

00:59:52   But in the force awakens when Rey has the the vision when she first touches the lightsaber

00:59:58   Among the many things she sees there's things that come in this movie like most probably

01:00:04   Iconically is Luke with his robotic hand on our twos

01:00:08   Helmet or head whatever you want to call the top of our to watching his Jedi Temple burn

01:00:13   But one of the things in that sequence is you hear obi-wan say Rey and

01:00:21   There's a great backstory of how they kind of sampled

01:00:25   a line from Alex Guinness where he happens to say the syllable "rae."

01:00:31   He says the word "afraid" and they take "rae" out of "afraid."

01:00:33   Right. And then they took Ewan McGregor, I think, and had him say "rae," and they put him together.

01:00:39   They also used a guy that doesn't mean the Clone Wars. Like, that was a stand-in.

01:00:45   It could be that that vision was the only communication she ever gets from Obi-Wan,

01:00:50   Obi-Wan, but it could also be that maybe Obi-Wan will come and talk to Rey in the next movie.

01:00:56   I don't know how they would pull it off vocally, but I want that.

01:00:59   So we'll talk about her parentage, but I don't know. I'm a Kenobi nerd. I want him in, but I

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01:03:18   All right. I want to go back to this this thing

01:03:22   I was at about 20 to 30 minutes ago

01:03:24   which is that there's no gap between the force awakens and the last Jedi and

01:03:29   That this literally takes place like minutes afterwards

01:03:33   You know that the the resistance is fleeing their base because the Empire after the last movie is like there's no gap between on the island

01:03:40   But there is a gap when the resistance the two timelines are not in sync

01:03:43   I

01:03:44   Don't I don't think that's true. I think that that's immediately after the last movie

01:03:48   No, I think so. I think the the island stuff is obviously immediately after but the only way you could line up is if

01:03:55   At the end of the force awakens, there's a time jump

01:03:57   But I feel like those two things are not in sync because she's hanging out on that island for way longer

01:04:03   We keep cutting back to the resistance stuff

01:04:04   but we have like

01:04:06   seven hours of the resistance and they cut back and forth between the resistance in the island and it's like

01:04:11   At least a week on the island. So those timelines are I was oh, I think that that chase

01:04:15   I think the resistance is fleeing those ships for a week. I really do

01:04:19   So I'd I

01:04:23   You know

01:04:26   In that I do believe how do you explain the way that they sync back up on the salt?

01:04:31   So here's here's how I do it. All right, so

01:04:33   She's on the island and is doing a bunch of stuff on the island

01:04:39   She's on the island for a long time before the rebels start fleeing their base.

01:04:42   So she's just island, island, island, island, island, island, island, island.

01:04:45   And then the rebels flew their base.

01:04:47   And that's like in her last day or two that she's on the island before she bails.

01:04:51   Right. So that's how they sync up.

01:04:52   It's just what we cut back and forth between the two timelines.

01:04:55   But one is happening back in time.

01:04:56   It's fine. Like, I don't think there's any problem with that.

01:04:58   But that's my the movie I feel like was telling me is these two timelines are not actually in sync.

01:05:02   Yeah, it's it suits the narrative pace of the movie.

01:05:05   And John, the other John.

01:05:08   Too many fucking Johns.

01:05:13   - Just use last names.

01:05:14   Only I can use John 'cause it's unambiguous.

01:05:15   - Okay, okay, Gruber.

01:05:17   Here's the thing.

01:05:18   It would have taken the first order some time

01:05:22   to figure out where that base was, right?

01:05:25   Or else they would have just assaulted it

01:05:27   in the previous movie.

01:05:28   If they knew minutes after,

01:05:30   why weren't they there immediately

01:05:32   as they launched their super-

01:05:34   I'm like, I got to regroup.

01:05:34   Like a bunch of their crap just blew up.

01:05:36   Like they have regrouping time.

01:05:38   Yeah, it takes some time to regroup.

01:05:40   It's a lot, you know.

01:05:41   Plus the Kral tells us that they've like militarily dominated the galaxy.

01:05:46   So they blew up the Republic planets.

01:05:48   And, you know, but then the super weapon was destroyed, but they did blow up like

01:05:51   all the Republic capitals or whatever.

01:05:53   And then the Kral tells us and since blowing up all the Republic capitals,

01:05:57   they have been asserting their military force and they've taken over everything.

01:06:00   I'm on months here, which is a lot longer than what Luke got with Yoda.

01:06:07   I mean, that timeline gets you all whack, too.

01:06:10   Well, this was discussed on the incomparable with the title of one of the episodes was

01:06:14   Jedi Weekend of us trying to figure out exactly how long was he on Dagobah.

01:06:19   And those two timelines aren't in sync either, because the Falcon chase with the asteroids

01:06:22   and everything and Lando and all that stuff like that takes some time.

01:06:25   But it seems like Luke is on Dagobah for way longer.

01:06:28   So it's harder to sync those two things up because there is a sync point in Empire where

01:06:32   they're all on Hoth together. So we know that's the thing. But in The Last Jedi,

01:06:37   it's much easier just to say that, oh, a lot of the island stuff happened before the

01:06:41   rubble base was discovered. Here's the funny thing about that asteroid scene is that it is actually

01:06:46   like the physics are in real life. So it takes about a month between asteroids. And so what you

01:06:54   think is being awesome is really just careful plotting.

01:06:58   He's moving really, really slowly.

01:06:59   Like a complex environment.

01:07:00   Yeah.

01:07:01   And it's played in fast motion.

01:07:03   And they speed it up for the sake of the narrative.

01:07:05   And also some of the asteroids are potatoes.

01:07:08   Yes.

01:07:09   All right.

01:07:11   I do feel, and I feel like you have to compare it to Empire.

01:07:14   I'm open to this.

01:07:15   I'm open to the idea here that you guys are right and I'm wrong and that their discovery

01:07:19   of the Resistance base is weeks or months.

01:07:22   even at the longest period of time that it is is weeks or

01:07:25   months, right? It's not years, whereas in the original trilogy

01:07:30   and the prequel trilogy, there was all it was always very clear

01:07:33   that it had there had been a few years at least as many years as

01:07:37   in the real life release of the movies, but like, you know,

01:07:41   between Episode One and two clearly more because we saw the

01:07:45   Anakin Skywalker is like a six year old and then he's you know,

01:07:48   like a 16 year old. It was like a full decade who

01:07:52   Yeah, right.

01:07:53   And in Empire, they make reference to, like, their past adventures.

01:07:57   Like, oh, that bounty hunter ran into an Ord Mandel, you know, changed my mind.

01:08:01   And everyone was clearly older.

01:08:03   And, you know, they know each other better.

01:08:05   That one line set off my imagination for years.

01:08:09   Right.

01:08:09   Like, that was...

01:08:10   I'm telling you, I can't remember what I had for lunch today.

01:08:13   And I remember that bounty hunter on Ord Mandel.

01:08:16   That guy was great.

01:08:19   Man.

01:08:20   But you can just tell from the way they relate to each other that they had had adventures.

01:08:24   And the Kral also tells you that they blew up the Death Star, but the Empire is making a comeback.

01:08:30   And so the rebels thought they had the upper hand, but actually they've been chased farther and

01:08:34   farther around, and now they're on this base. So it's clear that time has passed. And the Kral

01:08:39   tries to do this as well, because you have to go from big victory to the rebels are on their

01:08:44   heels again. And that's mostly done by the Kral and by the passage of time. And the Kral in The

01:08:49   The Last Jedi doesn't give us a counter of like, how long has it been, but I think it

01:08:52   has been some time.

01:08:55   I almost feel, I wouldn't even say it was a comeback.

01:08:57   I feel like one of the triumphs of The Empire Strikes Back, and the whole movie is great,

01:09:01   but the triumph of the whole Battle of Hoth was the implication.

01:09:06   To me it was obvious right from the first time I watched it, is, "Oh, you think the

01:09:09   Rebels really set the Empire back by blowing up the Death Star?"

01:09:12   I mean, it was a great win.

01:09:14   It was probably the best thing they could have ever done.

01:09:16   But the Empire was so entrenched and the Rebel Alliance so small that the Empire was still

01:09:24   a massive monolith galaxy-wide.

01:09:26   The Death Star was a tool, not the machine.

01:09:28   And the Rebels were hiding.

01:09:30   Their strategy is hide.

01:09:32   So that's not the strategy where you feel like you could do well in a fair fight.

01:09:36   Right.

01:09:37   It was like, "Yo, you thought that they had a huge win.

01:09:40   Yeah, well, guess what?"

01:09:41   I have to say, too, your theory—I'm really liking this theory that it's at least a

01:09:45   couple of weeks after The Force Awakens where they discover the resistance base, because then that

01:09:50   solves a problem I had, which was that, and I still think it's a problem really, honestly,

01:09:56   is that they had the medal ceremony in Star Wars right there on Yavin, the moon on Yavin 4.

01:10:02   After they'd been outed.

01:10:03   Right. It's like, what should we do? Should we quickly evacuate before they send more

01:10:09   Star Destroyers or should we put everybody that we've got in one small space to get blown up?

01:10:15   And have a slow marching metal ceremony.

01:10:18   Until they had time to polish up R2 and 3PO too.

01:10:20   Right. And put like the most blatant speciesism, racism,

01:10:28   omission of the Chewie metal, you know, open them up to the metal.

01:10:32   Come on.

01:10:33   Well, since Wookiee's lived so long, when they're all dead, he just scoops up their

01:10:37   medals one by one. He's got Han's medal right now. Yeah, he was great in the prequels.

01:10:44   All right, I've got to bring this up. It seems like as good a point as any because we're not on

01:10:55   a good roll right now. Have you noticed that we're not actually talking about the movie at all?

01:11:01   I said I was going to talk about things that I disliked about,

01:11:06   We didn't have to do with Star Wars and I haven't been keeping to that either and and I also said that my things I'm

01:11:10   Mad about not the things other people are mad about and I feel like people are gonna think

01:11:13   That I am NOT keeping to that by complaining about Luke

01:11:16   But the biggest complaints I see about Luke is that he should have been more awesome

01:11:19   And I just think he should have been more pathetic. So I think it's a difference there. He's a new eyes. Oh

01:11:24   But I said the guy go ahead John like I didn't mean to deal with that little quips

01:11:31   I remember we were in were we in we were in Ireland a couple years ago for all right

01:11:37   Mm-hmm, and it was me and you and Jonas walking through a park in Dublin

01:11:41   Yeah, and we were they had first announced the name emoji

01:11:44   and yeah, and and my idea for Luke in the new trilogy was to like

01:11:50   just have him like

01:11:53   Just as just make it so that he was the only he was like holding the galaxy and the rebellion together for 30 years as

01:12:00   the one and only Jedi and put scars on his face, make his mechanical hand rusted, scars

01:12:09   on the face and just make him like, "Wow, you thought Mark Hamill would look better

01:12:14   than this after only 30 years." Make him look worse. Just go into it and really have

01:12:18   him like have the weight.

01:12:19   I remember that well and I think they went that direction a little bit, but...

01:12:23   But with more anger and less pain.

01:12:25   More emotionally than physically.

01:12:26   They went emotionally rather than physically, right. And I love his physical condition.

01:12:29   They did give him a crazy beard.

01:12:32   You can see when he changes it up for his force projection, he's got the "just for

01:12:35   men, just for Jedi" on his beard and it's all trimmed and everything.

01:12:39   I noticed that only on the second—I did not notice that the first time, I have to

01:12:43   say.

01:12:44   When Jenga battle?

01:12:45   Yeah.

01:12:46   He's got a haircut.

01:12:47   We'll get to that.

01:12:48   Let's put that aside.

01:12:49   He's got the shattered girdle on there.

01:12:52   Yeah.

01:12:53   Yeah.

01:12:54   That's okay.

01:12:56   So when you saw this Luke compared to the Luke that you sort of sketched out while we

01:13:03   were chatting on that walk, how did you feel about that?

01:13:08   It was in the ballpark, you know, and like, you know, they went more emotionally scarred

01:13:13   than physically scarred, but I'm with it.

01:13:16   It's not, it is not how I would have written 30 years out Luke, you know, but I'm okay

01:13:22   with it.

01:13:23   to write the Star Wars movie. And I feel like at least I do feel like Rian Johnson clearly

01:13:29   cared about and loves Luke and sees Luke. It's not the way he took Luke and what they

01:13:37   or how much was his decision, how much was the whole story group, how much was JJ involved

01:13:43   with this, including omitting him from the first movie. I don't know who to give credit

01:13:47   for. But at the very least, I think it's very clear that they didn't make any of these decisions

01:13:52   Regarding Luke lightly, you know that that they it wasn't just like that. We don't care about him. He's from an old movie

01:13:58   We're gonna concentrate on our new movies and we're just gonna throw this beloved character in the garbage

01:14:03   That's one of my things like lights about these is that I gave the force awakens a pass because that's got to be I

01:14:09   Assume there would be a transition you have transition from the old people to the new people because that's the future of the franchise

01:14:13   And you just can't have these, you know

01:14:15   So does transition mean you have to kill them all off does it mean they just retire in glory like whatever but you got a

01:14:20   transition. So like first movie you kill Han, probably the only way to get

01:14:25   Harris support in the movie was to promise to kill Han, right? Because he

01:14:28   wanted to die in Jedi. And so I give them that, right? But then with the

01:14:33   second movie, with so much Luke in the second movie, and so like zero of them

01:14:37   basically in the first movie, it's like then I started getting the sinking feel.

01:14:41   I was like, "Wait a second, we're two movies into this trilogy." I thought the first one

01:14:45   would be about the transition and the handoff to the new people, and I thought

01:14:48   The second movie would be like 90% Rey with Luke filling maybe a Yoda role.

01:14:53   And if Carrie Fisher was still alive, it'd be like, so they would do like the third one

01:14:57   would be Leia's movie?

01:14:58   And I was like, you just wasted a whole trilogy phasing out the classics.

01:15:01   And as much as I love the classics, I wanted the new movies to be about new characters

01:15:06   because I think Rey deserves a trilogy that is as centered on her as the original was

01:15:13   on Luke because that's what The Force Awakens sets up.

01:15:15   It's like, guess what?

01:15:16   is

01:15:18   As the

01:15:20   Centered on Poe Dameron as the original was on Han Solo

01:15:23   I'll pose most of dying the first movie so you kind of see that and well and but Finn Rey and Poe

01:15:28   but honestly that yeah, but also like

01:15:31   BB-8 like Han Solo Han Solo was only really supposed to be a you know

01:15:36   A bit character in the first movie and turned into such a yeah

01:15:39   And you can introduce like who's gonna be Orlando in the second movie like you can introduce new

01:15:43   But I expect it to be more about them. And it seems clear to me now that this trilogy,

01:15:47   I mean, I don't know what they're going to do with Carrie Fisher, but like, they've already spent two

01:15:52   movies spending a lot of time talking about the old characters. And I guess it's fine. Like,

01:15:56   they're not going to be alive forever, and they're not going to be able to do Star Wars movies very

01:16:00   soon. You might as well use them while you got them. You'll have plenty more Star Wars movies.

01:16:03   And in hindsight, it makes sense. It's just not what I expected.

01:16:07   Right. So while we're on it, how great...

01:16:10   Well, you go first.

01:16:12   Yeah, well, cuz I'm gonna keep talking until you shut up. So

01:16:14   Two things Carrie Fisher, we love you. Thank you for that was everything that was my point

01:16:23   Yeah, how great was she was so yeah as she was so good

01:16:32   I really really loved her in this movie, you know

01:16:36   I liked her in the the the force awakens - and I was so glad to see her and and I

01:16:41   I like the way that-- I mean, a lot of this isn't like makeup or CGI. It's just the way Carrie

01:16:47   Fisher aged, but I like the way she aged, and I love that she's got this sort of tough old broad

01:16:55   voice now. I mean, that's just what Carrie Fisher's voice ended up sounding like.

01:16:59   Yeah, and this is the case when we talked about how Luke seemed like Mark Hamill, the actor,

01:17:03   a lot. Carrie Fisher, the actress, fits exactly like how you would expect Lea at age, because she

01:17:09   was a fire plug in the first movie and she didn't take no guff from nobody and you would

01:17:13   totally see her turning into modern day Carrie Fisher.

01:17:16   I agree. And one of the things you said earlier about Mark Hamill asserting himself to the

01:17:23   character, I think that even as a filmmaker as talented as G.J. Abrams or Rian Johnson,

01:17:31   when the heroes that you grew up with tell you what they think the character should do,

01:17:36   I think there's an inherent amount of difference to it.

01:17:43   Not because you feel that they can strong arm you or not because you feel it can go

01:17:47   against your plot, but because these people have invested their lives in being these characters

01:17:55   in many ways.

01:17:59   I think it would be in sort of going against the tide or going against the flow of things

01:18:04   to sort of argue with them on where they think characters should go.

01:18:08   But Ryan did. Ryan didn't go with what Mark Hamill wanted. Mark Hamill was much more about

01:18:11   the Boy Scout, earnest, deep feeling, do-gooder...

01:18:14   I agree. And hence why I think that what probably should have remained a private creative discussion

01:18:23   is so fascinating to me. I love the fact that we got to hear that. I mean, we've all made

01:18:28   stuff. How many times have you argued with somebody that we should do this instead of

01:18:32   it happens all the time.

01:18:34   I bet no one argued with Harrison Ford about what Han Solo was supposed to do, though.

01:18:38   No, no, Harrison Ford is like, "No, I'm gonna get--"

01:18:42   Well, you know what? Amy might have just murdered him herself.

01:18:45   Well, imagine if Han Solo had turned, like, cowardly, and he was like, you know, like a little weasel.

01:18:51   It can't happen.

01:18:53   No, but I don't think that happened with Luke either.

01:18:57   Yeah, just slightly off. And like I said, I want to reiterate, 30 years, man, a lot

01:19:02   of stuff can happen in 30 years, but it's up to the movie to make me believe it, because

01:19:07   we all know where we last left Luke. And it's true of a lot of things, to finally get into

01:19:11   some more of the structural things about this movie, if you were to give a rough outline

01:19:15   of what this movie's supposed to be doing and its general themes and the plot threads,

01:19:20   I mean, especially the themes, like, we already went over the themes about how the Jedi and

01:19:25   says they're not the force. The force is separate from them. And those are human institutions

01:19:28   or alien or whatever. Those are leverage it. They use it right. That's not right. That's

01:19:33   not that's one theme and burning down the Jedi tree. So whatever that's that's that's

01:19:36   a thread a plot line there. You've got Ray's thread Ray and and Kylo, they have a thread

01:19:41   about we're going to progress those characters. And we're going to, you know, resolve the

01:19:46   Snoke thing, but bring those two closer together and have them to be kind of a proxy for figuring

01:19:49   out what the Force really is in this new age. Then you've got Finn and Rose are going to

01:19:56   learn about, or going to inform sort of the big picture of what's going on in the galaxy

01:20:02   these days. Like, you know, what is the incoming inequality in the galaxy? How does the Republic

01:20:09   and the Resistance and the First Order and the Citizenry fit in with all that? That's

01:20:14   their thread. And then I guess finally you have First Order versus the Resistance, which

01:20:18   which is a thread we kind of pick up on.

01:20:20   That's a lot of threads already to begin with.

01:20:23   But as you zoom in on those threads and say, OK, well,

01:20:27   brass tacks, how are you going to tell me about income

01:20:31   and inequality in the galaxy?

01:20:32   How are you going to--

01:20:33   Well, John, I'm going to give you a leaflet that

01:20:36   identifies each of them.

01:20:39   Because it's a lot of threads for a movie,

01:20:41   and they introduce new characters.

01:20:42   And in broad strokes, I'm mostly on board

01:20:44   with everything they're doing.

01:20:45   But when it comes down to the execution, I feel like some threads are stronger than others.

01:20:51   Let's put it that way. And if push came to shove, I would say, is it really that important for me to learn about arms dealers and stuff?

01:20:58   Or if we cut that thread, can we give more time to what to my mind are the more like the threads that I care more about?

01:21:05   Right. There was there's a little bit too many characters and a little too many threads, which would have been fine if they had pulled it off.

01:21:11   but some of them are demonstrably weaker than others,

01:21:14   just not just in terms of like how good is the writing

01:21:17   and how good is the acting and so on and so forth,

01:21:18   but like mechanically speaking,

01:21:22   is the movie able to keep the audience on the same page

01:21:25   with it about what they're seeing and why

01:21:27   and what it's about?

01:21:28   And I feel like that falls down

01:21:31   with the Rose Fin thread being the weakest, I think,

01:21:34   not because the ideas are bad

01:21:36   or because they shouldn't have had a thread like that,

01:21:38   but just plain old in execution,

01:21:40   Like in terms of does the audience follow along with what's going on?

01:21:43   Are they engaged?

01:21:45   Are the characters doing things that are like just and that's not about Star Wars.

01:21:49   That's just playing about movie making.

01:21:51   Right.

01:21:52   And here's one we disagree with you, but we'll get to that.

01:21:55   So, Gruber, what do you think?

01:21:58   I'm okay with the fact I've seen people complain about the fact

01:22:01   that the Rose Fin adventure to Canto bite didn't even matter.

01:22:08   You know it it didn't matter because it ended up not playing into the rest of me. I'm okay with that

01:22:13   I like that like a sort of red herring that you think oh, this is how

01:22:17   Don't matter if they're engaged with it, and they love what's going on and it's coherent

01:22:22   But if there's anything off about it people will find things to complain about like oh, yeah, and in the end matter I

01:22:28   Just thought that the whole thread was the one thing and honestly and and and I I feel like I can say this because I've said

01:22:35   Already on this show that I liked the prequel trilogy more than most people my age did

01:22:42   But that whole sequence on kento bite was very prequel II to me. I thought that the the way that it looked I thought that the

01:22:49   CGI ness of it the way the camera moved like when you first

01:22:53   Coming on that man when they're and and just and the camera just sort of goes across this and everybody you see is an alien

01:23:00   And I was it was a homage to what was that movie? You know what it was guy?

01:23:05   I think silent film.

01:23:08   I did a shot that was like that.

01:23:09   And that was an homage.

01:23:10   Yeah.

01:23:11   I did before you actually asked me, but now I'm blanking.

01:23:15   But yeah, everyone who is listening to this knows and is yelling at the podcast right

01:23:19   now.

01:23:20   But anyway, it's a movie bus movie shout out, basically.

01:23:25   But I thought that the chase scene through Canto bite with these escaped whatever you

01:23:31   call their version of racehorses smashing up the city streets looked—I thought it

01:23:38   looked terrible. I really did. In a way that I thought a lot of the CGI stuff in the original

01:23:44   prequel trilogy looked bad. It just didn't look good. It just looked fake. It looked

01:23:48   like it was watching a video game, not a movie. I really didn't like it. And I just thought

01:23:52   it just felt prequelly, like the pod racing scene. It just is going on and on with, "Here's

01:23:58   one of these things busting up another bar. Here it is busting up a speeder. Here it is busting,

01:24:03   you know, over and over and over again. And it just didn't seem there's so much,

01:24:08   you know, it's ridiculous to complain about realism in the Star Wars trilogy. It's not

01:24:14   that it wasn't realistic, but the physics of Star Wars are generally pretty realistic.

01:24:23   And the prequels, I feel like, lost that, where it got very cartoony physics-wise.

01:24:29   And I felt like that whole scene on Canto Bight was like that.

01:24:31   And then the other thing that was frequently about it was the sort of political nature of it.

01:24:36   And I'm not—I, you know, personally even agree with the basic premise of the politics of it and,

01:24:42   you know, being opposed to war profiteering and stuff.

01:24:46   But it just sort of—I don't know. It just felt like it was detached from the rest of the story threads.

01:24:52   Yeah, I mean, I thought John's summary of the threads of the movie was perfect.

01:24:58   Oh, yeah.

01:24:58   That was a really, really good.

01:25:00   And I really do think that this one, it just doesn't get braided with the other threads.

01:25:04   Not only does it not get braided, but I think it is clumsily executed.

01:25:07   So we get it.

01:25:08   We get the message that they're trying to say.

01:25:09   But the characters that you have in this thread to convey the message,

01:25:14   they spend a lot of time doing things that are not in support of it.

01:25:17   Remember, they're there to get the code breaker and there's also some

01:25:20   McGuffin stuff to get them there, right?

01:25:22   and then they throw in the horses and the slave children and you got to get the other code breaker

01:25:27   the DJ guy right um they do a lot of things that there's a lot of moving around and moving parts

01:25:34   that aren't in service of the message the the few bits they get are in service of the message are

01:25:38   DJ shows them that on the ship they steal this person sells arms to to the first order but also

01:25:43   sells them to the resistance so you get that one scene which is it's okay it's it's you know it's

01:25:49   It's a little bit on the nose, but it's still fine.

01:25:52   You get the kind of--

01:25:55   the thread of Rose and Finn seeing the slave children

01:25:59   and inspiring them, but freeing the horses.

01:26:02   Do we care about the horses, or do we

01:26:04   care about the slave kids?

01:26:05   And then Finn being like, but even if we die,

01:26:08   it was all worth it to wreck their town,

01:26:10   but you didn't even really wreck it, and why the hell--

01:26:12   you would never say it was all worth it to wreck their town.

01:26:14   You're supposed to be saving your friends.

01:26:16   It's not-- it's clumsily executed.

01:26:18   I know what they're trying to get at, but you haven't put the

01:26:21   characters into positions where they can convey that.

01:26:24   Like, I don't believe that the thread doesn't connect up with

01:26:28   itself. Just basic mechanics.

01:26:29   Who are the characters?

01:26:30   What are they doing and why?

01:26:32   And you haven't delivered lines like that.

01:26:34   It's like it was worth it just to make them heart.

01:26:35   Like, what?

01:26:36   No, it wasn't.

01:26:37   And you didn't hurt them.

01:26:38   And this is stupid.

01:26:38   So they're literally hours away from the destruction of the

01:26:44   entire resistance.

01:26:45   And they decide that the most important priority is vandalizing

01:26:48   some speeders.

01:26:49   You want to vandalize the town and leave, but have him deliver

01:26:52   the line that it was worth it to show that he's super duper

01:26:54   and supportive, helping like the slave kids and being against

01:26:57   the rich people.

01:26:57   And John doesn't like it.

01:26:59   They say people who gamble and go to Vegas are bad.

01:27:01   And John's already honest.

01:27:02   He also saying, I don't agree with that at all.

01:27:04   Like, they have very reasonable prices for rooms and very

01:27:08   good food.

01:27:08   Okay.

01:27:09   Well, let's not drag each other into the ethical mud.

01:27:13   And why, if you built a casino next to a racetrack, yeah, it was definitely Monaco.

01:27:24   If you built a casino, a high-end, premium luxury casino next to a racetrack...

01:27:29   You're gonna play with the horse to shake the drinks?

01:27:30   That's no good.

01:27:31   Why in the world would it be so flimsily constructed that the race going on, which probably happens

01:27:38   every day, would shake the drinks to the point where they spill?

01:27:42   Yeah, and they're like how much I don't those are just regular horse-sized things and they're running on dirt

01:27:46   Like how could it shake anything that was you know?

01:27:48   There's lots of things about it that are just

01:27:50   Mechanically and they just spend a lot of time there and a lot of us in the mccuffin stuff and you need the codebreaker

01:27:55   And they need a reason to get in there

01:27:56   But like the whole thread like look at you if you can make it you don't need the co-op

01:27:59   You can make that thread work with just like a DJ and the arms dealer like not even have them go to a planet

01:28:05   But as I read work you guys I would love to pull that thread and give more time to the other ones

01:28:10   And that's setting aside, I love Rose. I love her plotline. I love her, like, what she gets.

01:28:18   To the credit of this movie, every character in it, both old and new, like newly introduced in

01:28:24   this movie, gets to have a hero moment and an arc, and that is very difficult to do.

01:28:28   But if you could somehow keep Rose and give her something else to do with or without Finn,

01:28:36   like just I'm not against the characters and I'm not even against the message of the thing I'm just

01:28:41   against like because it gets come the execution right yeah like script like who you know if you

01:28:46   decide this is what this is a message we want to get out in this movie how do we do it and you

01:28:50   write this shaggy dog story it's like let's can we find a different way to get that out with less time

01:28:55   um so so here's I think it could have been done I would have done it the way I would have done it

01:29:00   off the top of my head is I would have the same basic plot where you these two Rose and Finn

01:29:05   are going to defy Admiral Holda's, you know, they're going to go on a secret mission with Po

01:29:11   Dameron, you know, sort of plotting. Yeah, and they go get DJ and it doesn't take any time. And

01:29:21   then their whole adventure takes place on the Imperial ship.

01:29:26   I really think you're missing the whole point of this thing.

01:29:29   I don't think we're missing it. We're just complaining about how it was delivered. Like,

01:29:32   Like we're all on board with the message.

01:29:33   - So okay, so the delivery is poor.

01:29:36   It is definitely shoehorned into a movie

01:29:38   where it doesn't need to exist.

01:29:40   On the other hand, for the first time in Star Wars,

01:29:43   we see two people of color going on a little adventure.

01:29:47   Did they screw it up narratively?

01:29:50   Yes.

01:29:51   Could it be cut and the movie could be

01:29:53   probably better for it?

01:29:55   Yeah, probably.

01:29:57   But you know what?

01:29:58   There's a lot of people that are watching that

01:29:59   and being like, now Star Wars is now talking.

01:30:02   I love Rose and I'm even on board with the Rose Finn kiss, which I heard people complain about. It makes perfect sense to me.

01:30:07   Yeah, no, no, no, I'm not even saying that you guys are against it. I'm just saying that, like, despite the fact that this is clearly a break from making it a good movie, it is in service of it being a new mythology reset of beginning that you watch Star Wars over and over and over and over.

01:30:30   People are going to watch this over and over.

01:30:32   And you can't...

01:30:35   I think you can't diminish what people are going to be able to take out of that little weird side adventure.

01:30:43   And hold us to our own.

01:30:46   And for that reason, I admire it.

01:30:49   Do I think it makes it a better movie? A better coherent narrative?

01:30:53   Probably not.

01:30:55   But I like that they put it in there.

01:30:58   Because it's bigger than a movie, right?

01:31:01   At this point, you can have what you're asking for without

01:31:05   all of the bad things.

01:31:06   And when I first saw the bomber pilot die and that Rose had

01:31:11   the same necklace, I totally thought that they were partners,

01:31:14   right?

01:31:14   Yeah.

01:31:15   I think we were magically bosses.

01:31:17   Which would have been a different way to go with that.

01:31:19   But either way, which is weird because you and I both have,

01:31:23   like, you know, broken heart lockets.

01:31:25   Right.

01:31:25   Like I always say, I don't know about the whole Magic Lachas thing.

01:31:28   It just always seems like a romantic thing.

01:31:30   But what do I know?

01:31:30   Either way, it works fine either way.

01:31:32   But like, and I like her character and I like her as a foil for Finn,

01:31:36   especially since Finn has been having had a rough day in The Force Awakens

01:31:41   and is still a little frazzled in this and she's so much more grounded.

01:31:45   I'm not sure they did a great job selling you on the fact that she's

01:31:48   romantically interested in Finn.

01:31:50   You buy it based on circumstance, but...

01:31:52   I don't know.

01:31:53   I mean, a kiss in Star Wars is like, what does it mean now?

01:31:55   So there's something you have to do in a movie to set that up, to say, "I see what she sees

01:32:00   in Finn."

01:32:01   All you need is one look or one line.

01:32:03   Here's the thing with these movies.

01:32:05   Movies with lots of characters—and I said this in the uncomfortable—when you have

01:32:08   lots of characters—and there are lots of characters.

01:32:10   You've got the old characters, right?

01:32:11   You've got the new characters in "Judges and Forest of Wiggins," and then they added

01:32:13   more characters in this movie.

01:32:15   That's a lot of characters.

01:32:16   That's a Marvel movie level of characters.

01:32:18   When you have tons of characters, you can't give that much time to all of them, but if

01:32:23   want them to all have meaningful arcs, the writing is so important. You're gonna get

01:32:26   three sentences, five meaningful glances, and four actions the whole movie. Build arcs

01:32:32   out of that. You have to pack so much into those lines and those looks and those actions

01:32:37   that if you burn one on something stupid, then it's like, "Oh, I didn't really pick

01:32:41   up that Rose was crushing on Finn, but now I kind of see it," right? You know, like,

01:32:46   it's so hard to do. And I think some of the latter-day Marvel movies, whether they be

01:32:50   Avengers movies or Captain America Civil War or whatever who just have tons of

01:32:55   characters in them, some that we know and some that are newly introduced, do a

01:32:59   better job of giving cleverly written, concise, information-dense dialogue and

01:33:07   lines. And they're bad Marvel movies too, but like, that is a really difficult

01:33:11   challenge. One way to avoid that challenge is to not do that, to not bite

01:33:14   off that much, to trim down your characters, to concentrate on, you know,

01:33:18   just the Rey and Kylo story thread or, you know, like cut some threads, condense some things, right?

01:33:23   The other way is to just be really, really good at it. And that's hard to do. And I feel like they

01:33:28   fell short in, they fell short of even the Marvel, the best, the highest Marvel bar is set for this.

01:33:34   They fell short of it. How many characters were added in Empire? Off the top of my head,

01:33:39   you finally get to see the Emperor. Lando has a big role. Yoda has a huge role. The Emperor is

01:33:46   seen in a hologram but it's like 30 seconds of imperial officers who Vader

01:33:52   chokes die off but you got you know them given looks to each other like I don't

01:34:01   know if they count as characters oh as an aside as a bit character who dies

01:34:06   quickly I loved the Imperial officer of the I think they called it a dreadknot

01:34:11   not yeah because I think part of the problem one problem I have with this

01:34:22   both of these movies is that hux is is that he's not a badass right it's like

01:34:30   Jesus is like it is loud but he's no he's no Tarkin right he's not terrifying

01:34:38   Well, you know, well, here's the thing.

01:34:41   Hitler was a great orator, and I think Hux served that role under Snoke.

01:34:51   He's mostly there to be Kylo Ren's annoying coworker.

01:34:55   Yeah.

01:34:56   Yeah, but I mean, the fact that this dreadnought captain was like, "This is an incredibly

01:35:01   bad strategy.

01:35:02   What are we doing?"

01:35:05   I loved it.

01:35:06   he ends up dying for it, which is my favorite kind of bad guy.

01:35:10   The bad guy that's competent enough to know that what he's doing is dumb,

01:35:13   but tells the boss and then dies anyways.

01:35:17   I think we might have been meant to take Hux more seriously in The Force Awakens,

01:35:22   but Rian Johnson correctly, you know, sort of read that the audience is not entirely on board.

01:35:27   Yes.

01:35:28   Seriously.

01:35:29   Right.

01:35:29   Yeah.

01:35:29   So I'll put him in this movie and show him to be as ridiculous as we all think he is.

01:35:32   Yeah.

01:35:34   Yeah.

01:35:34   Same thing with Kylo Ren.

01:35:39   That guy is...

01:35:40   Oh yeah, more undercutting, like the mask and everything.

01:35:42   But I don't even think that was undercutting, because the whole movie doesn't try to pull

01:35:46   off like, "Oh yeah, no, Kylo Ren just likes masks.

01:35:48   No, he's totally doing it because he's a Vader fanboy."

01:35:51   And that bubble needed to be popped.

01:35:52   And even Snow calls him out for it, which I love.

01:35:55   Although I didn't like how they really cranked over the voice to be like, "Oh, isn't this

01:35:59   dumb that he doesn't affect his voice?"

01:36:01   Because I like Kylo Ren's voice in The Force Awakens.

01:36:04   I like that voice effect, it did an awesome job. And then in The

01:36:07   Last Jedi, they totally over crank it and to be like, hey,

01:36:10   don't remember how dumb this voice sounded? Like, oh, no, it

01:36:12   sounded cool in the first movie. So I kind of-

01:36:14   I honestly don't. Well, I mean, maybe it was to sound- So one

01:36:18   thing I do recall is that Gruber, you didn't like when he

01:36:24   took his mask off in the first movie. And I was a big fan

01:36:28   because he was playing it as a power move when he took it off

01:36:31   today. Ray calls him a monster behind a mask, so he takes off the mask to try to...

01:36:37   I guess I'm okay with it now. I think I will rescind my criticism of that. And I see it now

01:36:44   as a, like, you know, exactly what Sir Cusick just said. He had a Vader fanboy complex, and

01:36:51   that can't last three movies long. It was an interesting character trait.

01:36:55   He's always set up to be as an immature thing like that that isn't sustainable and that you would imagine he would be ridiculed about

01:37:03   Yeah, he's got a huggy on his face, and he keeps taking his lightsaber to computer banks. Yeah

01:37:09   He's that's not good

01:37:11   So that that parlays into something that I found interesting about the writing in both of these movies

01:37:17   But especially here is in The Last Jedi is

01:37:20   that

01:37:23   Vader gets mentioned a lot including by Snoke and Snoke seems to have a Vader boner, too

01:37:29   He's you know, he really is talking up Vader and they don't mention

01:37:33   Palpatine once right like Vader is the guy that even Snoke seems obsessed with

01:37:40   from the previous Dark Lords who ruled the galaxy not

01:37:44   The Emperor and I almost feel like that's one of those ways where the characters are speaking

01:37:51   For the fans right like if you think who's the best bad guy in Star Wars it you immediately say with Darth Vader Darth Vader

01:37:58   Is probably the best bad guy in any movie ever made you don't think the Emperor?

01:38:02   Has the things to recommend it, but I don't think it's so much as oh, yeah

01:38:06   Yeah, I think it's speaking for the original trilogy because in my world

01:38:10   Vader hunted down and destroyed the Jedi he is the big bad until the M way creeps into

01:38:18   Yeah, oh yeah, I know Ben says that Ben says that

01:38:21   Didn't say Palpatine hunter the prequels tell us basically the Palpatine is the one who killed all the Jedi

01:38:26   But as far as the if you pretend the prequels don't exist the original trilogy says Vader hunted down and destroyed the Jedi so you

01:38:31   Can imagine if if Snoke has not seen the prequels he would be like Vader

01:38:34   That guy hunted down destroyed the Jedi the Jedi were a big problem for us, and he got rid of them

01:38:39   So that's great and oh yeah

01:38:40   There was Palpatine doing some stuff or whatever the prequels put Palpatine in the driver's seat and Vader is this stupid idiot

01:38:46   And we don't like those movies

01:38:48   I thought that was interesting.

01:38:51   I do think...

01:38:53   So that leads me to me, I think it's problematic.

01:38:57   I think it's problematic that we're now two movies into a three movie trilogy and Snoke

01:39:05   is literally just an emperor-like bad guy with very strong force powers and there's

01:39:12   no hint of a backstory.

01:39:14   I'm not asking them to give me the backstory. I'm asking for just the Ord Mandel

01:39:20   Yeah hint of a backstory that makes me

01:39:23   Wish that I do make a movie about that

01:39:26   like I

01:39:29   to me that is the key difference between the four five six trilogy and the

01:39:33   prequel trilogy is that the four five six trilogy had all of these hints of things that had happened like all dates the

01:39:40   The entire description of the Clone Wars is just you fought with my father in the Clone Wars. That's it

01:39:45   You just hear that there was a thing

01:39:47   20 years earlier called the Clone Wars and you it's up to you to imagine what that meant

01:39:52   I all of these little little touches that hint at this big story and and Vader betrayed your father and

01:40:00   you know

01:40:02   There's none of that about like Snoke none of it

01:40:05   There's no he's just a generic boogeyman force guy and and the thing that makes it stick out to me is I

01:40:12   Mean how old is Snoke in this movie? I mean I

01:40:15   Were 600 years old. I don't know

01:40:18   He certainly looks like he's at least old enough that he was you know, he's not as early as the mileage

01:40:27   Yeah

01:40:31   Yeah, a little bit.

01:40:32   He was a lot, but it seems pretty clear that he was alive 30 years ago when the Emperor and Vader were ruling the galaxy.

01:40:40   Like where was this dark, powerful...

01:40:44   Yeah, I think that's what I was saying before.

01:40:46   It's okay for a sequel to subvert expectations,

01:40:50   but it happens so much in this movie that it's hard not to think that has something to do with some sort of

01:40:57   disagreement about where these things are going between

01:41:01   JJ and Rian Johnson because Rian Johnson doesn't undercut some of them, he undercuts a ton of them and some of them like Snoke are like

01:41:09   undercut in a way that is not only unexpected, but that just drops it on the floor. Literally undercut. Yeah, like

01:41:15   You know so he didn't... And they left him on the floor. And the thing is I like Snoke in this movie

01:41:20   I thought the CG for him was great. Yeah, he's great.

01:41:23   I thought he was a character that was distinct from the Emperor both in style and in

01:41:27   speaking and enforced powers and in many many ways he never seemed like, other than being

01:41:32   like an ugly dude, he didn't seem Palpatine like to me at all. And no we don't know where

01:41:37   he comes from but in the first movie like he's set up to be mysterious and will, you

01:41:44   know, and he'll become more important later and it's kind of like, they do this in the

01:41:47   prequels a ton where like Count Dooku's stupid guy is like he shows up he's gonna be important

01:41:53   no, kill him in the first scene of the next movie it's like whatever like you don't even

01:41:56   care that much. Any one of these things that we're talking about is fine to be changed

01:42:01   in The Last Jedi, but to change all of them and to drop all of them just makes me think

01:42:05   that there was kind of like a hard left turn somewhere in the story plotting for this thing.

01:42:11   And you know, it totally makes it fascinating to see, do we turn back on "on course" to

01:42:16   the JJ course? Or do we continue this hard turn? Or do we like do a spin out and go vertically?

01:42:22   It's gonna be very interesting to see what they do in the next movie. But yeah, in this

01:42:24   movie Snoke gets to be a cool character but John is not going to be satisfied that we

01:42:29   learn anything about him. I mean they can still tell you the next movie stuff about

01:42:31   him but it's like he's dead now so I really hope he's dead now. So whatever we learn it's

01:42:36   like oh that's nice but it's not a factor anymore right?

01:42:40   So I've got a few points about that. First of all, if Snoke had been more compelling

01:42:48   and probably don't have the name Snoke, I would be more interested in hearing his backstory.

01:42:55   More compelling in The Force Awakens, you mean?

01:42:56   Yeah, well, I mean, just, he is just an all powerful thing that we don't-

01:43:01   He's got his thing about being inside your mind and stuff like that.

01:43:05   No, no, I got it.

01:43:06   It's all about projection. But he's not, say, Wolverine. He's not Darth Vader, where-

01:43:15   Yeah, you need to know your name and something about where he came from.

01:43:18   And you don't want it. And as soon as you reveal the backstory, it lessens the character that you actually know and love.

01:43:24   I never got that sense from him. I did not care. I really did. It's like, okay, I don't understand how Luke can light up his lightsaber to kill his nephew without, you know, going out to murder Snoke first.

01:43:44   That none of that makes sense. You're worried about big sources of the dark side, you know, Snoke is manipulating him

01:43:49   Yeah, like maybe maybe go to the source for us yet that that whole that whole

01:43:52   Instead of your nephew. It's it that seems

01:43:56   Pretty straight up to me. Yeah, well and that plays right into my biggest complaint single biggest complaint about the prequels

01:44:03   Which is not doesn't seem to be anybody else's biggest complaint, but my biggest complaint is in

01:44:07   Revenge of the Sith at the end

01:44:09   like I'll go all the way to the end of Revenge of the Sith and like the beginning of the final act and

01:44:14   Why in the world didn't Yoda and obi-wan go to get the Emperor together first and then we'll figure out what never never split the party

01:44:21   maybe

01:44:22   Right, maybe just by killing the Emperor. It'll break the hold he has on Anakin. They won't even have to kill him

01:44:29   You know what?

01:44:29   I mean like but why in the world would they separate there like if they're really worried about how strong the Emperor is and they

01:44:35   Word right to be why in the world wouldn't they go together? It was it's the most ridiculous

01:44:39   Something in the entire ridiculous things that way and you're right. That's not my biggest complaint, but that is a legit complaint

01:44:45   Yeah

01:44:49   I'm at Syracuse. Oh, that's dumb. I like to I'm with you guys. I loved Snoke in this movie

01:44:54   I wish there was a backstory just a hint of it just some sort of

01:44:57   Or like he was a disciple of Palpatine or why did he get that big split right like you don't need you don't need much

01:45:05   You know what? Just call him, uh, uh, oh my God, what was the guy that started cloning

01:45:13   the clones in episode two? The big Q-tip head guys?

01:45:18   No, no, the guy that like when Kenobi shows up and he's like, "Oh yeah, uh, Master blah

01:45:25   blah blah showed up and he wanted…" Just make him mad.

01:45:29   Something, something, Pacificus? Yes, who cares?

01:45:32   -Siphrodias. -Siphrodias. Holy cow, you are a nerd.

01:45:36   -Yeah, that's pretty cool. -Just make him Siphodias. It's fine.

01:45:40   -Yes! Right! Say something like that. -That's fine. You don't...

01:45:43   Then kill him. No problem. I don't care about him.

01:45:46   But at least you've given him a little bit of grounding that he's been being

01:45:50   an asshole for, you know, 50 years, 60 years.

01:45:53   That would be great. That would have been so great. Make him...

01:45:55   He's Siphrodias, he's an old Jedi, and Palpatine sent him into exile as like a plan B.

01:46:02   Decades ago and that's how he also became the head of the first order

01:46:06   You don't have to show any of it just you know, just a hint of it that there was something there

01:46:10   I don't know but in terms of what you actually see on screen I did I have to agree the CGI was terrific

01:46:16   It was a totally bottom totally bottom love the acting from Andy Serkin love the road

01:46:22   I

01:46:23   circus, all right, I love the idea that he's sort of a

01:46:29   Palpatine-like guy who's like, Forte in the Force is sort of mental.

01:46:35   Yeah, he's like a counterintelligence, kind of.

01:46:38   Like, he's in your head.

01:46:38   He's like, his whole move was connecting Rey and Kylo, manipulating

01:46:43   them that way, which is not an inverse style thing to do.

01:46:46   Non-consensual Force time. FaceTime.

01:46:49   Not good.

01:46:50   That's creepiest.

01:46:52   And that his faith and his power, like, his confidence in his power

01:46:56   was his downfall because he saw everything more or less correctly like in the same way that he made

01:47:01   Ray and uh and Kylo both see each other like they saw legit things like oh i see that you're gonna

01:47:07   back me and i see that you're gonna back me all those things did happen momentarily and that's

01:47:11   what made them both believe that they were coming together like that's part of his plan that's

01:47:15   exactly what they use what kyle uses to kill him the only weird thing in the movie though and when

01:47:20   you get ryan johnson on the program we can ask him about that is well we'll get it yeah i'll come out

01:47:25   He'll be coming out of the green room soon.

01:47:27   Well, you know what?

01:47:28   There.

01:47:29   He is in the green room, actually.

01:47:30   Yeah.

01:47:31   So the movie is telling you, I'm pretty sure having seen it twice now, the movie is telling

01:47:34   you with its moving pictures and the language of movies that Kylo Ren comes up with the

01:47:40   plan, this specific plan, not the general idea of like, "I totally got to kill the

01:47:43   Snoke dude," but the specific plan of how I'm going to kill Snoke comes up with it on

01:47:47   the spot because his lightsaber gets shucked on the floor towards him and spins because

01:47:50   the camera focuses on that and he's like oh like watch it the next time you see it that they

01:47:55   show you that shot and the idea is like oh rotating a lightsaber is that's my way out of

01:48:02   doing and then he executes the plan by saying like you know i see what's happening and he's

01:48:06   you know snoke's reading his mind and he's he's just so slightly off right but that he gets the

01:48:11   idea from seeing his own lightsaber by happenstance spin on the floor in front of him which means that

01:48:15   it was very improvised it's not like he went in there with like it wouldn't surprise me the

01:48:20   the cholera doesn't have a concrete plan. He's just kind of got anger and feelings and he's

01:48:24   kind of sick of the Snoke dude and maybe this girl likes him and like, you know, he's making

01:48:28   a connection here. And like, so he knows what he wants to happen in general, but specifically,

01:48:32   like part of the reason his plan was successful is that he hadn't been thinking about it for six

01:48:36   months leading up to this, like that he came up with it on the spot, and that he was able to be

01:48:40   disciplined for like 35 seconds of just thinking in sort of nonspecific generalities about rotating

01:48:45   lightsabers and lighting it up. And I thought that was very

01:48:48   deftly handled in contrast to the canto byte thread of like,

01:48:52   you know, not definitely handled in the finest possible details

01:48:55   of execution.

01:48:56   Okay, but let's not contrast those. I agree. That's not

01:49:01   contrast so much. That scene was one of my favorite scenes in

01:49:06   All the Strong Wars for a lot of the reasons that you've laid

01:49:09   out. I really, really dislike Calloran. He's a bad guy. To me,

01:49:18   he reeks of this men's rights advocacy. I think it's got to be

01:49:24   intentional. He's awful. He's a bad guy.

01:49:27   I mean, he's nagging her. He's doing the typical abuser abuser

01:49:30   thing of saying, nobody cares about you, but me. You're a

01:49:33   nobody. I'm literally the only person in the galaxy who thinks

01:49:37   you're not a nobody, so you have to stay with me.

01:49:39   That's exactly what that.

01:49:41   Yeah.

01:49:41   But I think he's painted in a more sympathetic light because I feel in this movie very strongly that what Kylo Ren wants ultimately is a connection with somebody because he doesn't like he's looking for that connection.

01:49:54   And he like he failed like once the falling out with Luke and everything, he failed to have with his idol, Luke.

01:50:00   His parents like sent him off to board Jedi boarding school.

01:50:03   And so he's getting a little distance from them.

01:50:04   Plus he's a solid teenager, right?

01:50:06   his boss and his co-workers are mean to him, right? He just wants a connection. He just wants

01:50:11   a friend. That's the whole hand touching thing, which I think was very effective of like,

01:50:14   he's tolerant and just looking for a connection. And every time he can't get them, then he resorts

01:50:19   to the pick up artist strategy of just being terrible and negative and Ray's having none of

01:50:26   that. So that's not going to work. The finger touch thing was one of my favorite shots in the

01:50:30   movie. It's like I could practically feel it. It was like, I don't know. And Ray's looking for

01:50:36   connection too. She's got a bunch of friends and stuff as well, but she's looking for this

01:50:39   connection to this wider world of the Force, right? And Luke is not really given to her because he's

01:50:43   kind of like yelling at her about the Jedi and everything, and she's like, "But I gotta, we gotta

01:50:47   win this thing, I gotta help my friends." She's better off than Kylo, which is why she's able to

01:50:51   resist them. And when he goes like, "Nobody cares about you but me," he's like, "No, that's not true,

01:50:55   I've got friends. Screw you, Kylo." And so she's out of there. One thing I think we should bring

01:51:02   about this movie is how visually daring it is for a Star Wars movie.

01:51:08   Oh God, it's brilliant.

01:51:10   It's usually daring in ways that make sense if you think about the huge influence of

01:51:15   Kurosawa movies on the original trilogy and westerns, right? And this movie also references

01:51:22   a lot of Kurosawa movies again, but also Japanese animation. I'm amazed at how many

01:51:29   articles I see talking about the light speed thing that don't mention the word anime because that

01:51:33   that whole shot is straight out of anime like yeah how how many times have you guys done like that

01:51:38   exact silent uh low contrast inverted black and white thing with the boom it's still beautiful

01:51:45   have you seen this thing that AMC theaters are putting up a thing before the movie to tell people

01:51:52   the sound isn't broken I mean that they're the sound is not broken there's a scene in this movie

01:51:57   I don't even know what it says exactly, but it's like the sound is not broken no matter what you think because apparently there's so

01:52:02   Many people who are so cinematically ignorant that they don't get that the silence of that

01:52:08   Yeah, I mean you don't expect most people to have this reference because only if you're an anime nerd

01:52:12   Have you seen this a million times and I've been to be no no in the prequels. They did this they did

01:52:17   Yeah, no no

01:52:20   Bob a fat or what? Jenga Jenga?

01:52:23   No, that was just the travel time distance of light and sound difference. They did do that, but that's not the same.

01:52:28   No, no, no. I was sitting in the cinema, the sound cuts out.

01:52:32   The poster you mean? I thought you meant the actual...

01:52:34   No, not the poster. Like, Jagger Fett drops a bomb.

01:52:38   There is about two seconds.

01:52:42   It's less...

01:52:43   That's just the travel time distance between light and sound, like the same way you hear the thunder.

01:52:46   The same sound place.

01:52:49   It is it's cinematically it though it has the same effect exactly

01:52:54   The anime effect is a very specific thing like

01:52:57   Compilations on YouTube like look at this exact scene in anime a million times. It's always about some large

01:53:03   something nice about deep prequels, but

01:53:07   It's a different. It's a different slightly different reference all right and

01:53:10   To be clear this is exactly what great movies

01:53:14   Do is they are inspired by other great movies and they incorporate the right and the reason the last shot is interesting

01:53:19   is it incorporates some new influences in terms of filmmaking and shots? I mean,

01:53:23   the scenes where they cut away from Ray and they have like time lapse,

01:53:28   photography of plants growing. You've never seen that in a Star Wars movie. That is a,

01:53:32   you know, you've seen in other movies, but it's a cinematic language that has not

01:53:36   previously been brought into Star Wars bring into it. So it's broadening the horizon of

01:53:40   the kinds of shots you can expect to see in a Star Wars movie.

01:53:43   I can't agree with you more, and one of my favorite things about the Bond franchise is

01:53:48   that the opening sort of credits are non-literal filmmaking. You can do whatever the hell you

01:53:58   want in those credits.

01:54:00   As long as there's silhouettes of women.

01:54:02   Well, okay, sure, that's the trope. But it is, I mean, at least to me, like, it's like,

01:54:12   this is a visual thing that we can sort of divorce ourselves from trying to tell the

01:54:20   narrative, even though they kind of tell them. But it's divorced from like the actual characters

01:54:27   doing something in a scene.

01:54:29   It's non-literal.

01:54:29   Non-literal, yeah. And I really, really admire them for doing that. And they've stuck to

01:54:35   that for, I don't know, 30 years more?

01:54:38   I thought that the footage of the foliage growing, the grass growing in time lapse,

01:54:44   and it was beautiful too, it's key, but it immediately made me think that it was of

01:54:50   Terrence Malick. Yeah, he does a lot of that stuff. And I mean, his movies have kind of devolved into

01:54:56   nothing but that stuff and I still love it. I should someday do a whole show about his movies

01:55:04   And I love the whole like talk about a guy who went into exile for 30 years, you know

01:55:08   disappeared made some of the most beautiful powerful movies in the late 70s ever made and then

01:55:13   Just disappeared for 30 years and it came back and started making a movie every couple of years

01:55:19   But his movies are kind of devolved into nothing but that stuff

01:55:22   But if you've never seen like, you know, probably the most approachable of his recent movies would be the Thin Red Line

01:55:26   Oh, yeah, it's this war movie

01:55:28   There's just in the midst of this tense

01:55:32   Pacific World War two drama there's just beautiful shots of birds and trees

01:55:37   Very few helicopters flying over rice paddies with like Rolling Stones

01:55:45   But anyway, I thought that was cool and and and it's both beautiful

01:55:50   I thought it was did cinematically daring as you said and it felt like

01:55:55   This is what they're saying the force is about

01:56:02   Here's a, you mentioned the plants growing slowly thing and I kind of want to call that

01:56:09   out.

01:56:10   They're growing faster, yeah.

01:56:12   Yeah, no.

01:56:13   And I, do you have the name of the movie on your mind?

01:56:17   Oh, that's been in a million movies.

01:56:18   I mean, that shot is a trope in itself.

01:56:20   I mean, I'm sure it's been in Terrence's mouth.

01:56:23   It's a tree of life probably had like seven times.

01:56:25   I don't know.

01:56:26   Yeah.

01:56:27   Yeah.

01:56:28   I'll look it up.

01:56:29   There's a specific movie about that very slow motion kind of stuff happening.

01:56:35   Kianis Kazi?

01:56:36   Yes, that's exactly what I was looking for.

01:56:38   That's a whole movie about that type of stuff.

01:56:40   Yes, that's exactly what I was looking for.

01:56:42   I thought you mentioned that and I wanted to call it out because I think people should watch that.

01:56:46   Yeah, that's a weird one.

01:56:48   Some of the other references like "The Throne Room", "The Look of the Throne Room".

01:56:51   I wasn't totally on board with "The Look of the Throne Room".

01:56:53   Some people don't, but in the end it's an aesthetic choice and they went with it.

01:56:56   with it. My main complaint with the throne room is unfortunately, I think they do things

01:57:01   a little bit, not in the wrong order, but mechanically speaking, once you kill Snoke,

01:57:06   I don't feel like there's any reason for the red guys to fight anybody. I know they want

01:57:09   to have a fight scene and the fight scene is cool and I appreciate that, but I lose

01:57:13   the plot thread of like, "Why these red guys fighting again? They should be bailing." Because

01:57:16   once Snoke's dead, they're out of there, right? I don't see that they would have any loyalty.

01:57:21   Once the Emperor's dead, Luke didn't have to deal with the Royal Guard. And I didn't

01:57:25   care about this red guys they have no characters they literally have no faces I don't care

01:57:28   about them at all they're disposable I know you want to see Kylo and Ray fight you can

01:57:34   get that in a different way I think they needed to structure that a little bit differently

01:57:37   so I'm I'm not as engaged in that fight as as as I thought that the fight the fight clearly

01:57:43   only served to get Ray and Kylo into conflict without having them fight because they just

01:57:51   They needed to have each other's back. You needed the moment when they joined forces against a common enemy.

01:57:55   It just so happens that the common enemy they joined forces against is kind of nonsensical.

01:57:59   Like, it doesn't work in the movie. First of all, I don't care about the red guys.

01:58:03   And second of all, as much as I do care about them and I understand them, I don't believe that they

01:58:07   have a particular motivation to fight these guys. Nor do I think they would be a match for these

01:58:11   guys, right? So I don't know what you do to fix that, but I understand them wanting those moments,

01:58:15   but I feel like the red guys were... Other people disagree. Other people love it, but like,

01:58:20   Nobody cares about this damn red guy.

01:58:21   I don't even know what they're called.

01:58:22   I enjoyed watching the fight, and I do think that, like, I don't even know what, like,

01:58:27   eight red guys versus two...

01:58:29   Yeah, maybe.

01:58:31   They would have ripped into shreds.

01:58:32   Could have happened.

01:58:33   But in terms of motivation, it leaves me wanting a little bit more explanation as to why they

01:58:45   would do that.

01:58:46   Yeah, but the choreography and the lighting in that fight scene was also the departure.

01:58:50   and it's part of the things I don't like. It kind of looked like a 60s Hollywood musical.

01:58:54   Oh, it's beautiful.

01:58:54   It's very, very well lit.

01:58:56   Yes, yes.

01:58:57   The big backdrop. I like the fact that they burned the backdrop, which is a cool look.

01:59:01   But it was very strange for a Star Wars movie.

01:59:04   I loved it.

01:59:05   Yes!

01:59:06   And I like... Here's the thing. I know that as a movie this falls short in any number of ways, but

01:59:17   The chances it takes, given the strictures it could have been under, amaze me.

01:59:25   And this throne room being all red and like the visuals of this, it blows my

01:59:32   mind.

01:59:33   I'm incredibly impressed with this.

01:59:36   What if they made the musical number that would be even more daring?

01:59:38   Just in the middle of Star Wars is a musical number where our Kylo and

01:59:41   Rey sing during this whole fight.

01:59:42   Yeah.

01:59:43   Well, I'll send you this Star Wars.

01:59:46   Star Wars, Star Wars musical.

01:59:48   Go through some more references the the Luke, the Phantom Luke

01:59:53   Kylo battle, straight references to anime tropes of heels sliding

01:59:58   in the dirt and the exact shots choices of people running

02:00:03   towards each other. I know I know it's like, you know, yeah,

02:00:06   it's Kurosawa but but but anime Kurosawa's shots during those

02:00:11   battles are not the same anime shots of choosing the two people

02:00:14   running at each other and choosing which shots you show,

02:00:17   show the foot show the person show the eyes show that like,

02:00:19   it's straight up anime trope. And yes, I love it for that.

02:00:22   Right. And I love the fact that a lot of people are seeing it

02:00:25   who have no idea it's an anime trope, but just think it's cool

02:00:27   because it is cool. Like this is movies that he brings all his

02:00:31   influences into his movie making, even if it's not the same

02:00:34   genre. So I want more of this. I want more directors who are

02:00:37   enthusiastic about other genres and other ways of visual

02:00:40   storytelling to bring all that into Star Wars because I think

02:00:42   you can support it.

02:00:43   So you mentioned earlier, in Syracuse, that you mentioned earlier that it's a Star Wars

02:00:52   tradition to have like, you know, and elsewhere in science fiction as well. But you know,

02:00:56   Hoth is the ice planet and Endor is the forest moon. And Crait is the salt planet. Like,

02:01:03   I love that's such a clever way to get another, you know, like you're running out of climates,

02:01:10   Like there's art they've had an ocean planet. They've had this they've had that the salt planet is a pretty cool idea and the the red

02:01:17   Ground underneath the white salt is the planet design director

02:01:22   Mm-hmm. I give a pass on it because but I feel kind of bad for them because the

02:01:27   2000-dj-j

02:01:29   2009 reboot of Star Trek already kind of did the red planet and I feel bad because like they kind of stole some remember that

02:01:34   one like the opening scene was like

02:01:36   Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:01:37   But that was all red.

02:01:38   This was red.

02:01:39   This was covered with the white.

02:01:41   Yeah.

02:01:42   But anyway, the red stuff, I thought the red planet was cool.

02:01:45   I totally give them that.

02:01:46   I'm like, oh, the only reason they made it red is because it would be cool.

02:01:48   Yeah, that's why they made it red, and it is cool.

02:01:49   So accept it.

02:01:50   It's an alien world.

02:01:51   They can make up any money they want.

02:01:54   I have one last sponsor to thank, then we'll talk a little bit more, and then we'll see

02:01:57   if we have time to get Rian Johnson out of the green room.

02:01:59   But I wanted to thank you.

02:02:00   I want to thank you.

02:02:01   That green room is pretty packed back there, I got to tell you.

02:02:04   Well, the problem might be that it's an open bar.

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02:04:23   My thanks to Backblaze for sponsoring this Star Wars holiday spectacular.

02:04:29   Just to save you from a little known fact.

02:04:31   I want to mention that we did look up while during one of these ad reads that the movie

02:04:35   we were trying to get the reference for that big zoom shot in canto byte is the 1927 silent

02:04:40   movie wings.

02:04:41   Okay, we have it in the show notes and you're responsible for that.

02:04:45   I just want people to feel bad when after they tweet you after the movie is wings and

02:04:50   they keep listening to this podcast.

02:04:52   they're gonna hear me say this go oh I should have kept listening that's right

02:04:55   yeah yeah this is like a battleship attempt component where yeah yeah you

02:05:00   might call it that little known fact our TD - was actually built by backblaze

02:05:08   does it make sense that our - that Luke didn't take our - with him - what's the

02:05:13   name of that planet the Iock - who cares which sounds it's Luke's world that's

02:05:19   That's that's fine.

02:05:20   I don't think it's mentioned in the movie.

02:05:22   So who cares?

02:05:23   I thought that you needed an astromech droid to do the hyperspace stuff with like an X

02:05:27   Wing.

02:05:28   Yeah, maybe maybe keep the out on there and gave him a shuttle back.

02:05:32   I don't know.

02:05:33   Yeah, like our two is one of those characters that gets cut a little bit and out and honestly,

02:05:37   I'm fine to see three p.o. and our to fade off into the sunset with the rest of the old

02:05:43   characters.

02:05:44   You can give them cameos and stuff, but they're they're not the stars of the show.

02:05:47   Yeah.

02:05:48   Do you think BB-8 has a little bit too much of a role though?

02:05:50   Like BB-8?

02:05:51   Yeah, they give the people what they want.

02:05:53   An AT-ST?

02:05:54   Yeah, I give it mostly a pat.

02:05:55   I know some people are bothered by that.

02:05:56   Honestly, it did not occur to me to be bothered by that at all because I feel like that BB-8's

02:06:02   character from the, unlike R2, and 3PO for that matter, BB-8 has always been a little

02:06:07   bit of an action hero.

02:06:08   Like he's more dynamic because he's not limited by the special effects.

02:06:11   So maybe it's a little bit silly and speaking of more stuff that could get cut like Phasma

02:06:16   and Finn's arc of getting vengeance on Phasma for being mean to him.

02:06:21   I'm okay with that, but why the hell is BB-8 writing an ATSD?

02:06:26   Why is Phasma coming back to fight?

02:06:28   Phasma is kind of like the Boba Fett, but it's like as if Boba Fett, but they knew how

02:06:36   popular Boba Fett would be.

02:06:38   I think the media cycle was too slow in the original trilogy, that fans were all hyped

02:06:43   about Bubble Fett, but the movies treated him like, not badly, but he didn't have that

02:06:49   much screen time. Whereas nowadays, people know, like, how we're going to make a new

02:06:54   Bubble Fett. And we know how cool Fazm is, we know how much people love BB-8, because

02:06:57   in this information economy, we know exactly how much toys they're buying from it. Like,

02:07:01   and so I felt like they felt like they needed to put that in the movie. And you can make

02:07:06   that work. But this is a busy movie. There's a lot of people doing things and you just

02:07:09   don't honestly you don't have time to establish why anyone should care about Phasma and you know

02:07:15   remembering back to Finn's deal with him and then BB-8 doing a weird heroic thing. BB-8 got enough

02:07:19   hero moments he's shooting coins at people he's shoving his head against a panel which I think was

02:07:24   again you want to make BB-8 do a funny thing to help the X-wing I'm all on board with that.

02:07:29   Once you get down to brass tacks and tell me like how are you gonna do it I was on board with the

02:07:32   little fingers in the dike too but when he shoves his head against it yeah I did too I like that I

02:07:36   I like that whole thing. I like that whole sequence.

02:07:38   I don't like it. It's like, I know what you're going for.

02:07:40   Give a better punchline. A lot of the things in this movie felt like,

02:07:43   you know, get Joss Whedon in here to punch it up a little bit.

02:07:46   Because like, I'm totally on board with your joke.

02:07:48   It's a good droid joke.

02:07:50   Just the punchline was just a little bit off, right?

02:07:53   So yeah, but at ST, going around, I didn't mind that.

02:07:58   I didn't think that's ridiculous because I believe BB-8 could totally do that.

02:08:01   But is it a scene that advanced the plot or expanded on the new one's character?

02:08:05   They know it's characters or did you just need some way to get those guys out of a jam?

02:08:08   well, I

02:08:11   Thought and I you know it complaining about the whole rose

02:08:15   fin

02:08:17   Thread I felt like having one more thing come back to climax at that exact moment of

02:08:25   Admiral hold a hold a you know light speeding into the cruiser to have their

02:08:32   execution be seconds away at the same moment was just

02:08:34   Their kiss was simultaneous with the door being breached on the base like in the background when Rose kisses Finn

02:08:43   I thought this was good filmmaking like Brian Johnson has some good good hero moments like that

02:08:47   They when when she kisses Finn in the background out of focus is the door being breached by the big gun that Finn was trying

02:08:54   To fly into oh, I think that's now that I don't have a complaint with that

02:08:57   I'm saying when they were on the ship and they were ready to be executed

02:09:01   this movie making coincidence time. And then you know and then but then it didn't make any sense

02:09:07   afterwards where they were laying where they were laying and nobody else who was around them was

02:09:11   around. Everyone who's standing up was killed like it's a lot of like is like you give you give a

02:09:15   movie a lot of these things like you're like I give you that I give you that but eventually you

02:09:18   feel like I don't you've used your budget of how much how much how much movie coincidence I'm

02:09:23   willing to give you how much plot flab I'm willing to allow um that's another thing like the with so

02:09:30   Finn, this is another arc of the movie of like people and their resistance learning lessons

02:09:35   and perhaps those lessons being taught on the job in a way that is not appropriately respectful of

02:09:40   the lives of the people who are part of the training program. Like let's teach Poe to be

02:09:44   a good leader by having a bunch of people be killed. But anyway, Finn is flying towards the

02:09:48   big gun. He's like, "I'm going to sacrifice myself." Lots of nerd complaints about details

02:09:53   of the movie like, "Why is the steel melting on his guns but his face isn't melting?" Like,

02:09:58   It's fine. The pot is off to the left, the guns are in the path of the beam, the pot isn't, like, whatever.

02:10:03   I don't have any problem. I do not have nerd problems.

02:10:06   You can get nerd problems with anything anyway, but once you're picking on nerd problems,

02:10:09   there's obviously something bigger going on that's the problem.

02:10:11   So I'm not concentrating on those, but the main thrust of that is,

02:10:15   was Rose right to knock Finn off course?

02:10:19   Like, clearly the movie wants you to think that she is right, because it says

02:10:22   they give her, let her have a speech and say, "This is the way we win,"

02:10:26   not by, you know, destroying things we hate, but by saving things that we love and I love you and

02:10:31   that's why I saved you. My read on the movie is that the movie is trying to communicate, and I

02:10:36   believe, that if Finn flew into that big gun it would have done nothing because he's a little

02:10:40   shit and he's flying into a big hot thing that's probably pretty sturdy and even if it hadn't

02:10:44   fired, even if he flew into it before it fired, he's not going to stop that damn gun. And even

02:10:49   if he did stop the gun they would just bring another one down. Like, that it would have

02:10:53   have actually been a useless gesture and that Finn was just trying to be like no

02:10:56   we've got to win we got to beat him and his his arc as silly as it might be was

02:10:59   like to learn not to be all like you got to beat everybody he'd already beaten

02:11:03   Phasma so it's tough to have him doing something pig-headed again but really

02:11:07   it's part of Rose's arc to showing her being more level-headed and say don't be

02:11:12   an idiot Finn like we need you and the resistance and what you're doing now is

02:11:17   dumb and Poe has figured it out he learned his little arc after millions of

02:11:20   people died to be like let's not do the suicide mission to be the hero let's

02:11:24   preserve what we have left again I think pose arc is also very ham-fisted and

02:11:28   maybe not as sort of mature and believable as it could be but I'm

02:11:32   mostly on board with Rose being right the fin was being stupid and the Rose is

02:11:37   being smart and that that is Rose's hero moment of her saving Finn from himself

02:11:42   and get in the smooch before she passes out. I agree completely.

02:11:48   Poesarc is, I mean, we should probably talk about that but that's not good.

02:11:58   It's on the job training, like a different time. A little bit on the job training.

02:12:01   But for Finn, let's stick to Finn. His character has always been about running

02:12:07   away, right? And this was the one time that he thought, like, I'm going to die in service

02:12:14   of these people. And it was dumb. He picked a dumb time to do it.

02:12:21   He's still not just running away. He's always like, he always seems like a man at a place,

02:12:26   like that he, he's obviously not, his place was in the first order, but he's not down with that.

02:12:30   And he wants to be part of the resistance. But in The Force Awakens, he's like,

02:12:35   he's play acting to being part of this since he would like to be but he's not really now he's

02:12:38   really part of the resistance but he doesn't quite know how to do that because he's still

02:12:41   like the first order is going to get us and you know he's he's kind of a bit of a confused

02:12:47   character that they haven't nailed down which is fine like he can be kind of shot but i think the

02:12:51   movie doesn't quite know what to do with him like they they know he's got charisma and he's got

02:12:55   chemistry and he's really into ray this movie they derail him to say you're not really into ray she's

02:13:00   just like your first friend. Ray's not into you. So when Ray sees Finn

02:13:04   with Rose, Ray is like, Oh, that's good. Those two should get together

02:13:07   because I'm totally not into Finn.

02:13:08   Well, yeah. Okay, so forget about that. But the point I'm trying to

02:13:13   make is that previously when confronted with a problem, Finn has

02:13:18   tried to escape it. And yet this was the first one where he could put

02:13:26   his life on the line and try to take down that adat. It's like he overcompensated.

02:13:32   He fought off Kylo Ren. It's like he overcompensated in a really dumb way.

02:13:36   But in The Force Awakens, he defends Rey from Kylo Ren. He's willing to attack. It's his hatred.

02:13:42   I mean, the message in there is that he's totally like, we can't let them win. The First Order is

02:13:46   evil. We got to beat them. Poe is ready to peel off. And he's like, no, no, we got to beat them.

02:13:50   He really hates the First Order from his traumatic experience with them.

02:13:53   But in the in the force awakens, he did it for Ray. And in this

02:13:57   movie, he did it for people he didn't even know. Or at least he

02:14:01   tried to do it. But I think that that's a bit of his arc going

02:14:05   from the one he I think he did arguably do some good that

02:14:09   because he did soften up a little bit.

02:14:12   Yeah.

02:14:14   All right. I liked the Luke Skywalker climax. And I will

02:14:21   to admit and I think I think I am a pretty astute watcher of films and notice or of things and

02:14:28   detector of oh I see where they're going and I have to admit I was completely I was completely

02:14:34   full too and I think part of the reason we were both cool I believed it I believed every moment

02:14:40   of it even after he would have to do and run some through with a lightsaber I was like man he's

02:14:46   really good yeah you're still trying to figure it out of like what he's like yeah I really thought

02:14:50   I honestly did.

02:14:52   Here's the thing.

02:14:53   I think part of the reason, at least for me, I'll just speak for myself, but maybe possibly

02:14:56   this is true for Jon as well.

02:14:58   The reason I was so easily fooled, A, I think it's done pretty well.

02:15:02   Like it's done well enough that a lot of people are going to be fooled.

02:15:05   But B, I was 100% engaged in watching what was going to happen with Luke.

02:15:10   Because I have a vested interest in Luke.

02:15:12   Luke is important in my life.

02:15:13   And so when he finally shows up for his climactic battle, like, and especially, and here's the

02:15:18   thing when when they're like pick up a laser sword and take

02:15:21   them take on the whole Empire. I thought it was comical and it

02:15:25   was ridiculous. But already my brain was like, but how can this

02:15:29   be explained? Well, he could maybe like make a force shield

02:15:32   around them and he we don't know how strong he really spent

02:15:34   30 years. I wasn't even willing to accept the data my brain was

02:15:38   giving me about Luke to say this is right.

02:15:41   And I continued to buy it after the onslaught of blaster fire

02:15:46   because they didn't show it.

02:15:48   And I thought, that's brilliant.

02:15:49   Don't show me him.

02:15:50   Yeah, he's not deflecting.

02:15:52   He's deflecting all the beams out of the cloud.

02:15:54   Right.

02:15:55   Or show me that he dug a hole or whatever.

02:15:58   Just have it be a cloud and have him come out and dust

02:16:01   his shoulder.

02:16:02   And it's like, I'm so--

02:16:05   Because we're all so invested in Luke,

02:16:07   and we're willing to go with literally almost anything.

02:16:09   And I thought it was great, because this

02:16:11   is another great pull the rug out of, like,

02:16:13   it perfectly explains the ridiculousness instantly.

02:16:16   And it's an amazing win for Luke.

02:16:17   When they showed him floating over that thing, it was like,

02:16:20   yes, because that's what people wanted from Yoda and the prequels.

02:16:23   They didn't want him fighting with lightsaber, the one I'm

02:16:25   using as being smart, work smarter, not harder.

02:16:28   Like, it was an amazing triumph by not fighting, which is totally

02:16:33   on brand for Luke.

02:16:33   Yes.

02:16:34   And that's what I wanted to say at the beginning is that Luke wins

02:16:39   Again, a massive victory without lifting his lightsaber even once.

02:16:47   Right. And the crazy part, there were so many clues.

02:16:50   Yeah, he's got his lightsaber, he just like, break in half like 10 minutes ago.

02:16:53   Yeah, and nothing makes sense, but I was just like...

02:16:56   He's got the wrong lightsaber. Now, I don't blame myself for missing this,

02:17:02   but he doesn't leave footprints in the solve.

02:17:03   Yeah, I don't blame myself for missing that either, but it's nice.

02:17:05   Yeah, that's cool. But the lightsaber...

02:17:06   It's part of the anime thing that Shirokis were saying.

02:17:10   He's got the just for men covering up the gray in his beard.

02:17:13   He got a haircut. He lost some weight. He looks better.

02:17:16   I didn't notice any of that at first.

02:17:19   And the reason you don't notice is, remember the scene that precedes this is him with Leia.

02:17:22   And that is an emotionally charged scene because Carrie Fisher is dead now.

02:17:25   And because like every line in that scene could also be read as Mark Hamill talking to Carrie

02:17:28   Fisher as well as Luke talking to Leia. And it's an incredibly emotional scene.

02:17:33   here's me chiming in with if they had hired me and they said, John Gruber, here's, here's the

02:17:38   screenplay to the last Jedi. We're only going to take one note from you. And I could give one note.

02:17:45   My if I could only give one note on the whole movie, my note would have been that play that,

02:17:50   that that scene where Luke comes out of the shadow, Leia senses his presence and is aware of it before

02:17:56   anybody else's. And there he is, and they make eye contact. And there's a moment. And then the first

02:18:02   Words of their interaction I would have said that Luke says the Leia. I'm Luke Skywalker. I'm here to rescue you

02:18:08   Good I

02:18:12   Think it would have brought the house down and and you know I'm not an actor

02:18:15   I can't do it the right way Hamill could have done it just do it the right way

02:18:18   Where he knows and she knows and he knows that she knows

02:18:22   Because they did that so many times in the force awakens and really all sorts of sly references that they would have worked

02:18:30   They went for the if I had to have a note on that scene

02:18:32   I would have been like the dice is touched on for Han works because the dice were there in Star Wars and everything

02:18:37   But they were never featured prominently in the movie and I don't think anybody except for super fans even knows they were there and so

02:18:43   Maybe find a different touchstone for Han other than the dice

02:18:46   But I guess they basically establish the dice in this movie because he pulls them off the lightning Falcon and we believe it there

02:18:51   But it wasn't something that resonated back through the original trilogy again, even though those dice were there in the original trilogy

02:18:57   They were like blurry on a standard of VHS copy that you know, we never really saw them. So

02:19:02   Not sure that landed that well and the rules about force projection and

02:19:08   You can give Leia a kiss and put a physical object in her hand

02:19:13   That's not really there, but he doesn't leave footprints because that's the clever hint

02:19:16   It's like what are the rules about force projection? Do you interact with the physical world when you're there?

02:19:20   Do you not is entirely inside people's heads then if it's in people's heads, then why did the droids see them?

02:19:26   Force projection is too new for us to know exactly how it works, but that's another thing about this movie mechanically speaking

02:19:32   They tried to establish

02:19:34   Both that force projection is a thing and that it's really hard and it might kill you

02:19:38   they tried to establish that earlier in the movie with dialogue between Kylo and and

02:19:42   Ray and I felt that was slightly clumsily done like they did the right thing to try to establish

02:19:49   But it wasn't exact even on two viewings. I feel like it wasn't

02:19:54   clearly established enough. I get what they were going for. But the the lines and the context and everything was a little clumsy. So you kind of had to back like, Oh, what are you talking about before?

02:20:34   your shirt and like they do establish that someone else is connecting them.

02:20:37   Well my theory is that that guy was hanging out with his shirt off all day just waiting

02:20:41   for the call.

02:20:42   Yeah, well you know when you look like that you gotta find it.

02:20:46   One of my favorite and most often quoted Stanley Kubrick quotes is that sometimes the truth

02:20:52   of a thing isn't in the think of it but in the feel of it.

02:20:56   And I feel like that is the definition of any of the science in Star Wars, right?

02:21:02   Of course, like though the worst possible thing in the explaining things that shouldn't be explained

02:21:07   was the whole midichlorians thing in the prequels where it's like, "Stop, stop, stop, stop trying to

02:21:12   tell me that this makes sense." It always felt like it made sense before. Leave it at that. Don't

02:21:18   try to make it logical sense. And to me, Luke's force projection at the end, I don't care what

02:21:25   the rules are. It works for me because I'm saying like another slight inconsistency. But yeah,

02:21:31   it totally works for the feel. I'm just saying like mechanically speaking it would be better if

02:21:35   the movie had more firmly established that force projection is a thing and what the costs are. And

02:21:39   they did try to establish it but it was it went by fast enough that you wouldn't and they had plenty

02:21:43   of time in those four scenes. And by the way this is something I haven't heard anyone talk about but

02:21:47   I think it's one of the best I don't it's not like a scene one of the best decisions one of the best

02:21:52   and most interesting things to me in this movie that I haven't heard anyone talk about is during

02:21:56   the various force time conversations between uh uh ray and kylo ren at one point um ray ray is

02:22:05   narrating her own descent into the big blowhole thing right like i went down there and i saw this

02:22:11   thing and i thought you know like she's doing a voiceover for herself she's obviously describing

02:22:15   something after the fact right and it's long like she narrates it she's talking about so on and so

02:22:22   forth and the reveal which apparently was much more impactful to me than it

02:22:29   was to anyone in the audience or anyone who's seen this movie is the reveal is

02:22:33   this long drawn-out heart-to-heart conversation about what it was like in

02:22:37   the big dark side blowhole thing is to Kylo Ren and it seemed like she would be

02:22:42   pouring her heart out to Luke that's the big reveal is like I thought this is

02:22:46   what you're seeing it's like and she's she's telling this to Kylo Ren and that

02:22:49   is the big turn in their relationship. Do you realize that she's not just an unwilling

02:22:52   forced-time victim, because they go on for like, you know, for three minutes in a very

02:22:57   long scene with multiple shots and you're embroiled in what's in the cave, but the big

02:23:01   reveal is she's pouring her hot—she's on the phone with Kylo Ren talking about this

02:23:04   stuff, and I thought that was a great turn, great movie-making, and apparently no one

02:23:09   else cared about it, because in the two showings, no one gasped at it other than me. I thought

02:23:16   That was great a great way to communicate very strongly that the relationship between these two has changed

02:23:21   Yeah, all right on that point. I think it's an important point

02:23:27   Do you think that what kylo Ren said to Ray about her parentage was the truth or not?

02:23:34   The truth from a certain point first. I I think it will I think it was the truth. I think that in their shared

02:23:41   Force time his insight into her background and I also feel like it's backed up on second viewing of

02:23:49   Him saying you know, it's true

02:23:51   You've known it all along and you've just hidden it your parents were just losers on Chico and they sold you for drinking money

02:23:57   And I honest to God think that that's just the truth

02:24:01   I think the people who are holding on to the idea that she's a

02:24:04   Skywalker or a Kenobi or whatever or you're missing the point and I and I also feel like that's part of the way this trilogy

02:24:11   is trying to break forward which is that anyone can be a Jedi.

02:24:17   Right and might be not just a Jedi but like a a key Jedi, a master Jedi for lack

02:24:24   of a better term. I don't think anything about the the the entirety of Star Wars is against

02:24:29   that. Maybe you could say the original trilogy was because of the whole Skywalker lineage thing,

02:24:32   but the prequels are all about hey kids are born all the time that have force powers and we seek

02:24:37   them out and bring them to our Jedi boarding school and so that's that's pretty firmly established

02:24:41   established that it can come from anywhere, it's just the original trilogy is so obsessed

02:24:44   with the Clintons and the Bushes or whatever that we can't get out of our own way on the

02:24:49   family's things.

02:24:50   Right, because there's only been, and part of the, you know, to not fault the original

02:24:53   trilogy, part of it is that there's only like three or four force powerful people left in

02:24:58   the galaxy, and two of them happen to be twins and their father is one of the other survivors.

02:25:04   So everyone ends up being related.

02:25:05   So on, I think, well here's the thing. There's the meta level where there's the danger of

02:25:11   like, yeah, but maybe the next director will just decide, oh, actually he was totally lying

02:25:15   and I want to make her like a Kenobi or something, right? Because given how these first two movies

02:25:19   have gone and how it seems like making, you know, sharp turns, who knows what could happen?

02:25:23   But just saying in this movie as it is without worrying about what the next, what JJ is going

02:25:28   to decide to do in the next one and what maybe JJ had in his head from the beginning when

02:25:32   he has like Kenobi say Rey or whatever. I think what Kylo Ren is saying is true from

02:25:38   a certain point of view in the same way that everything that they both believe in this

02:25:42   movie comes true, but isn't really the truth of it. So he's saying it to be hurtful, right?

02:25:46   I believe that her parents, my headcanon is that he's trying to make her feel bad. Her

02:25:53   parents weren't anybody important, but they didn't throw her away like garbage, right?

02:25:58   That's the middle ground I think going back. So I'm on board with the idea that the kernel

02:26:02   truth is that you're not a Skywalker, you're not a Kenobi, you're just a person. But my impression

02:26:07   from seeing the Force Awakens is that her parents left her with this person and flew away, but that

02:26:16   she did come from a loving family. Her hair was nicely braided, she looked like she was pretty

02:26:20   clean, that her parents were either forced to give her up or she was kidnapped or whatever. And maybe

02:26:25   her parents are dead in a pauper's grave and never could get her back or whatever, but that she

02:26:29   actually like the whole reason she's waiting for her parents to come back is because she

02:26:33   has good memories of having parents. She wasn't that young. She was like three or four. She

02:26:36   misses her mom. She's her parents. She's calling to them as they fly away. So I believe her

02:26:41   parents weren't just piece of crap drunks who sold her for money. That's Kylo adding

02:26:45   stuff to twist the knife. But I'm willing to believe if the next director agrees with

02:26:49   me that it's okay and that it's reasonable for her not to be one of the you know, the

02:26:54   important families that we know about.

02:26:56   So I agree. And I mean, I can't help but put Kalo in the men's rights activist

02:27:06   pick-up artist kind of category. He's nagging her the whole time. And, you know,

02:27:13   when he says your parents are nothing, you're nothing, you are meaningless except

02:27:18   to me, that is a play that I fundamentally don't believe.

02:27:24   I can't read that as being true.

02:27:26   He is a villain, and what he is saying is villainous.

02:27:34   Now does that tell us who our parents are?

02:27:38   No.

02:27:39   And that's fine.

02:27:40   I mean, could it be nobody's, maybe, as you said, probably, you know, could be people

02:27:48   that were good people that had to leave.

02:27:51   I'm a Kenobi fan.

02:27:54   I would be happy if there was some relationship there.

02:27:58   But I, in, you know, my personal well-being, I would be happier if they did turn out not

02:28:08   to be from some sort of noble lineage, but was in fact a new Jedi. And I think that would be great.

02:28:17   John: And started her own family. Give her her last name. On the subject of midichlorians,

02:28:23   I always find myself as the odd man out as being a weird defender of midichlorians as

02:28:28   things that make sense because the original trilogy firmly establishes that the Force is

02:28:33   strong in your family. It's hereditary. The Force is 100% hereditary. The original trilogy

02:28:38   makes no bones about that. How can you have something that's hereditary that's not biological?

02:28:43   Midi-chlorians are still stupid. You didn't need to put them in the movie. You don't need to

02:28:46   explain them. But it does make some vague logical sense that if you're going to make some sort of

02:28:52   thing that you can measure about someone with the strong of the force, that it would be some kind of

02:28:55   biological test. And it actually also makes sense that the only people who would know about this

02:28:58   biological test was back when the Jedi were at their full strength and they were in the heart

02:29:04   of their knowledge. And it wasn't just like people don't even believe a Jedi are real or whatever.

02:29:08   Anyway, very clarinet dumb. I don't like them doesn't even make like the job

02:29:11   It doesn't make any sense because the the idea is that in it take the prequels is that Anakin didn't even have a father so

02:29:18   The proof that the but the proof that the force is strong in his family is just that he had one set of

02:29:30   Twins and they were both strong

02:29:33   stuff like you got one set of professional baseball players,

02:29:37   and that's all like...

02:29:38   Steffi Graf and Andre Agassi's kids are going to be good tennis.

02:29:40   I'm going to go out on a limb and say that.

02:29:42   You should have gone for the Williams.

02:29:46   Come on, man.

02:29:47   Lucas while still setting it up.

02:29:49   After setting it up as Hereditary, Lucas then goes and in the prequels sets up the Jedi Order

02:29:56   as a bunch of celibate monks.

02:29:57   Like, if it's Hereditary, why aren't they having kids?

02:30:02   I'm just saying like the original trilogy, The Force is Strong in my family, and that's the other thing. The Force Awakens, speaking of Rey's parentage,

02:30:09   The Force Awakens trailers lean heavily on,

02:30:12   you know, my father has it, my sister has it, like they lean so heavily on the idea that Rey's related to somebody, which again

02:30:19   makes me have the fear that JJ really wanted Rey to be related to somebody, Ryan didn't, but JJ gets to have the last word.

02:30:24   I think it's a red herring. I think it's a red herring and I have faith that there's no conflict between JJ and

02:30:31   That's what Vadar said too. We know that turned out.

02:30:34   Oh, come on. So my understanding is that Ryan already wrote the Ryan. I call him Ryan. We call each other Fe Thursday night. It's cool.

02:30:44   But my understanding is that he already laid out the plot for episode nine.

02:30:48   Yeah, and I know I've made this joke before, but JJ's mystery boxes hold like Schrodinger's cats.

02:30:57   I don't think he's married to the idea of setting up a mystery that, when revealed

02:31:06   or when built upon, he rejects because that was not his original idea.

02:31:12   Yeah, I'm sure he'll do what's needed, but I don't know. We'll see. You could

02:31:16   make yet more turns, but I think we're kind of tired of being yanked around with the Rey

02:31:20   thing. I think it should just go with what they established.

02:31:22   Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:31:22   Yeah, they should go.

02:31:23   No, but I think there's got to be salt.

02:31:25   Yeah, I as

02:31:27   You know what Luke was the original trilogy Rey clearly is to this trilogy

02:31:31   She is if you you know in a cast of dozens and like you said if anything they they're struggling with too many characters

02:31:38   To fit in a two and a half hour movie

02:31:41   she's clearly though the the protagonist and I

02:31:45   Think she's just I think she's well written and I think Daisy Ridley was room. I

02:31:53   It's the definition of good casting is I can't imagine any other actress in the role

02:31:57   She carried force awakens was like like put someone else in that role. She has to be amazing that movie

02:32:03   There's a lot of weight on her shoulders and she carries it. She is amazing. Yep

02:32:07   Ever from that front and in both movies, you know, I love and and to me I compare it to

02:32:12   the first act of Wall-e where it's all nonverbal

02:32:19   her working as a junker on Jakku.

02:32:23   But that's not easy.

02:32:25   I don't think that's easy for her.

02:32:27   I mean, I can't act to save my life,

02:32:30   but I think that of all the forms of acting,

02:32:34   being the only character on screen,

02:32:36   not communicating or talking to anybody

02:32:39   and trying to convey interest and intent

02:32:42   and her scratching days off the wall and everything.

02:32:45   And I don't know,

02:32:47   I just I really do feel like it's a it's it's she's the best thing going in the whole the whole trilogy

02:32:53   And it's really really well done on the writers parts the casting part the directors parts and certainly Daisy Ridley's part. I

02:33:00   Expect her to go on to great things. I think you know, she's obviously, you know

02:33:04   You know the schedule of these movies is gonna I don't think I've seen her in any I don't think she's been in anything else

02:33:10   Yet, but I I'm sure on the orange express. Oh, I haven't seen that yet. I haven't seen it

02:33:16   So that's great that she's in something like that.

02:33:17   But I foresee if I could buy stock in an actor's career,

02:33:20   I would buy a lot of stock in Daisy Ridley.

02:33:23   - Yeah.

02:33:24   - Anything else that you guys want to talk about

02:33:27   before we wrap this up?

02:33:28   I have one thing I'll say,

02:33:30   and it ties in to the same scene.

02:33:32   Syracuse's observation that the lightsaber,

02:33:36   Kylo Ren's lightsaber spins before,

02:33:39   and that gives him the idea to spin the other lightsaber.

02:33:41   Totally Hitchcockian filmmaker.

02:33:44   - Right.

02:33:45   Right. He lets the audience he doesn't try to surprise the audience with that lightsaber going through

02:33:51   Snoke he's like, oh, you know

02:33:54   We get like a full 30 seconds of knowing that that's his plan and we get to worry about whether Snoke is going to notice

02:34:00   It and foil it that is

02:34:02   cinematic suspense and

02:34:04   Hitchcocking thing is that if you put a bomb under a seat in a movie theater

02:34:11   Right the suspense show the audience the bomb show the audience like show the people watching the movie the bomb

02:34:18   But you don't show the people filing in the bomb

02:34:21   Because now you know something that they don't know and you are horrified about it

02:34:27   this works the opposite way in that, you know something that

02:34:31   Snoke doesn't know and

02:34:34   It works amazingly well

02:34:37   The other Hitchcockian element to Snoke in that same scene is

02:34:40   The I would analogize it to Janet Lee in Psycho where Janet Lee was this huge movie star and her name was above the title

02:34:49   In psycho and she gets killed 20 minutes into the movie

02:34:53   Which is unheard of before or since really you could count on one hand how many times the biggest name?

02:35:00   executive decision

02:35:03   (laughing)

02:35:04   - It's right up there with Janet Lee, right?

02:35:06   - Right.

02:35:07   I have to admit the first time watching this,

02:35:11   I was under the assumption that Snoke was going to foil it.

02:35:14   You know, it'd be like,

02:35:15   "Oh, you thought that was going to work?

02:35:16   "No."

02:35:17   You know, so him actually dying in the second movie,

02:35:21   not the third movie, was a total Hitchcockian.

02:35:25   "Yeah, you thought you know where this was going

02:35:27   "and we were setting up a big, you're gonna kill somebody,

02:35:30   "you know, Ray's gonna kill Snoke in the third movie?

02:35:32   "Forget it."

02:35:33   This is not going to end the way you think it will.

02:35:35   Right.

02:35:36   And I really, really thought that was pretty clever and really well done and satisfying

02:35:40   and exciting and, you know, satisfied that part of my brain that wants this movie to

02:35:46   show me things that I'm not expecting.

02:35:49   You know, don't make me feel like I'm five seconds ahead of the movie.

02:35:52   Make me feel like I'm catching up to the movie.

02:35:55   The only thing I want to add is I think that it will serve this trilogy well to have a

02:36:00   significant time jump before the third movie.

02:36:02   Yes, I totally agree.

02:36:05   They don't need to have one, but they should have one because it opens – look, where

02:36:09   we have – we have the entire Resistance fitting on the Falcon, and they've sparked

02:36:14   something off, and they've got the ending of this one with the little boy with the broom.

02:36:17   I'm not sure it lands because I don't really care about that boy, but I get what they're

02:36:20   trying to say.

02:36:21   But you need time to pass.

02:36:22   You need time – now you need time for the Rebellion to come back to something.

02:36:26   You need that spark to something that happens.

02:36:28   So as far as I'm concerned, they could start the next movie where the rebellion has the

02:36:33   first order on its heels and they feel like they're close to victory.

02:36:36   And that, you know, the conflict could be about like, but how are we going to resolve

02:36:39   the Rey-Kylo thing?

02:36:40   Like they have many, many possibilities, but I feel like now it's time for a time jump.

02:36:45   And I think it needs to get to the point where Rey as the new Luke needs to be like Luke

02:36:49   at the beginning of Return of the Jedi, where she's at the beginning of the next movie,

02:36:54   she already considers herself a Jedi Knight.

02:36:56   done that much work and training.

02:36:57   Yeah, she's got a new outfit. She maybe constructed a new lightsaber.

02:37:01   Well, I mean, she took the books, right?

02:37:03   So she needs a hood. She's got to get a hood.

02:37:07   She needs a hood. A hood would be great. I mean, the other thing is that, I mean, the

02:37:14   time jump just makes sense. We can't just follow this on one from another.

02:37:21   Right.

02:37:22   If we don't get a time jump, we get, I mean, the fundamental thing, and, you know, may

02:37:31   she rest in peace, is that Carrie Fisher has passed.

02:37:37   And I would be surprised if the next movie didn't address that in some way as putting

02:37:44   some time between the movies and during that time General Leia had established some kind

02:37:55   of system or general rule set.

02:37:59   They can explain her in the crawl. They can say blah blah blah, General Leia has died

02:38:05   in the battle or whatever, died from old age, or the resistance inspired by their late general.

02:38:11   You could do that in the crawl.

02:38:11   You could have the opening scene.

02:38:12   Right.

02:38:13   But yeah.

02:38:13   I mean, you don't need to have a time gap.

02:38:15   But what I mean is we need some time, right?

02:38:17   Like, we need to have time between this one and the next one in order to sort

02:38:22   of, like, you know, pull the reset button a little bit.

02:38:26   And we can't do what we did last time, which was like, hey,

02:38:30   I'm giving you a lightsaber and, you know.

02:38:32   And as for Ryan Johnson having the script to the third one,

02:38:36   I think the script was written when Carrie Fisher was still alive.

02:38:38   So there's already a couple of monkey wrenches thrown in there.

02:38:40   No, they're yeah, yeah, they've and in fact Disney has even acknowledged or somebody acknowledged on the record that that's you know

02:38:48   Carrie Fisher had a major role in the

02:38:50   original first draft of the next movie like it's you know, the problem is you should be a lot for it

02:38:55   Right. Well, I mean also and they have said that they will not recreate or digitally

02:39:02   They want I mean, that's a good call

02:39:05   Peace is gone and

02:39:09   It is one of those human corporate moments where, you know, they won't do it.

02:39:18   They just...

02:39:20   Yeah, I think they could do it if they wanted to.

02:39:22   I think they'll probably kill her.

02:39:24   Well, I think they'll probably kill her in the crawl.

02:39:27   Like Sir Cuso said, I think if they wanted to explain it in the opening scene of the movie

02:39:32   and have some kind of battle going on where Leia's on a doomed ship and is about to be killed

02:39:39   And we only see her from another ship where she's doing one of the fuzzy blue staticky

02:39:43   Holograms that they could that I don't I guess some people would be offended even by that

02:39:48   They didn't even let so

02:39:51   Luke didn't die in a violent. Yeah, I don't think Luke is a pacifist, right? Right, right. He died. I

02:39:58   Don't think they'll use it

02:40:01   That was it and he died in peace if they're gonna show Leia dying

02:40:05   I think the only way they could do it would be like by hologram or something like they can't they can't try to CGI the

02:40:09   Actual Carrie Fisher in like they did in Rogue One, you know, it's funny though because they it's so funny

02:40:15   Do you think it's it's such a weird question, but they're not gonna put Carrie Fisher in as a

02:40:20   CGI 60 year old woman in episode 9

02:40:23   But if Carrie Fisher had happened to die before Rogue One

02:40:27   Would they still have CGI'd in young 19 year old Carrie Fisher at the end of that?

02:40:34   So the second time I saw go ahead John I say like you think is a corporate, you know

02:40:39   Respecting her wishes and being her spell but I'm sure lawyers are involved and I'm pretty sure that

02:40:44   Carrie Fisher was savvy enough to say is there something I can do involving lawyers and contracts to make sure that this thing

02:40:50   I don't want to happen actually doesn't happen

02:40:52   So I bet she's actually tied some hands and she was on board obviously with the the Rogue One one

02:40:56   And I think she was explicitly not on board with

02:40:59   CGI her into future movies. So well, no, I don't know that she would have had any thought

02:41:04   I mean who the hell thinks they're gonna die

02:41:06   You were the person who was prominently CG'd into another movie and they got your approval for it

02:41:11   You'd be you being her head to be thinking about do you want them to do that with you?

02:41:14   What I what I saw from a Kathleen Kennedy was just that we just you know

02:41:19   We just loved her so much and we just don't think it'd be right. We know it wouldn't play

02:41:22   Well, and we're just not gonna do

02:41:26   Yeah, I'm going with Cooper's human interpretation of this where, guess what?

02:41:32   Could be some lawyers, but even if they have a document...

02:41:34   She's a family member, we're not going to do that.

02:41:36   I think Carrie Fisher is savvy enough to know that yeah, Kathleen Kennedy is your friend and you're all on board on the same page,

02:41:40   but Star Wars is now a franchise that's going to outlive all these people, including Kathleen Kennedy.

02:41:45   Like, you know, it's forward thinking enough to say this franchise could go on and on and on,

02:41:50   and if you don't want to be CG'd into every movie, do what you can to try to make that not happen.

02:41:54   So, I mean, this was, well, last year. Second time I saw the movie, I took my friend Adrian,

02:42:06   and it happened to be the day that Carrie Fisher died. And we didn't know that. So

02:42:14   we were, you know, we bought tickets to vote one, we got up to the popcorn desk, and the

02:42:20   guy is literally in tears. I'm like, "Are you okay? What's going on?" And he's like,

02:42:27   "Oh, Carrie Fisher died. And Adrian hadn't seen the movie yet." I'm like, "Okay. Well,

02:42:35   that sucks." And he gave us our popcorn and our sodas for free because he was like, "Screw

02:42:45   Carrie Fisher's dead. I literally don't care.

02:42:49   So we went to see the movie and right at the last minute, Carrie Fisher in CGI pops up

02:42:58   and I couldn't help but cry, even though I knew it was coming. I definitely teared up.

02:43:04   And after the movie, I had to explain this, like, "Yeah, look, she died today and that was touching."

02:43:14   And when I sat down for this new movie, I don't know.

02:43:21   I mean, the first time Kevin Fisher came on screen, it stung a little bit.

02:43:27   Right?

02:43:27   Yeah, it did.

02:43:28   Yeah, it really did.

02:43:29   Yeah.

02:43:29   It's so great that she was so good in a movie and had such a good role, you

02:43:35   know, but it really, there was such a, it played so differently than it would

02:43:40   even if the who knows it may not have changed one single edit of her scenes, but it played so differently in my

02:43:47   Chest, you know and in my tear ducts then it then it would if Carrie Fisher were alive

02:43:52   With her and Luke that scene looks for all the world like it was written after she was already dead

02:43:58   But I obviously could not have been true because she's in it

02:44:00   Right, right it but it really does play that way, right?

02:44:06   Anything else I feel like it's almost criminal not to at least mention Laura Dern and oh yeah

02:44:11   There's a little bit of follow-up from the previous episode and the incomparable

02:44:15   I was talking about how there was a dialogue scene between Laura Dern and Poe that looked like it was edited crazily

02:44:20   And I couldn't understand why everyone else in the theater wasn't turning their head to look at me and going you're all seeing this right

02:44:24   Like this is not something is wrong with the editing of this very simple over-the-shoulder back and forth dialogue scene and since doing that podcast

02:44:31   I have learned that in that scene apparently kind of like Woody in Toy Story that

02:44:37   Holdo, Lord Dern's character, was originally much more mean to Poe and

02:44:43   Dismissive and cranky at him and they changed their mind and wanted her to be

02:44:47   Not so mean to him not so dismissive and belittling but to be you know more of like not telling him

02:44:55   What's up, but not being mean to him, but they had they didn't have reshoots for that so they had to

02:45:01   Slice together the footage they had

02:45:03   With the the dubbed in dialogue of the lines

02:45:06   They wanted her to say in the way that they wanted her to say them

02:45:09   So it's like watch it when it comes in video

02:45:11   I don't know if they actually do reshoots

02:45:13   But it's cut

02:45:14   crazily like in the middle of people's sentences you go back and forth to the other person because they can't show the lips because the

02:45:19   Lips don't match the words right and that is a that's one of those things

02:45:22   It's like well, it's movie-making, you know, it doesn't always come out the way you want

02:45:25   It just it's strange to me that they didn't bother to do a reshoot for that because that that part of the movie

02:45:30   Looks like the movie is broken and I'm glad there's an explanation for it, but it's like do the research

02:45:35   It was an interior on the spaceship. It's an over-the-shoulder dialogue shot like just do it

02:45:39   did you ever see that the different notes that in in Rogue One the scene between Jin Erso and

02:45:45   Che Guererra, what's his name? Whatever Forest Whitaker's

02:45:49   Erases name for my head by saying that

02:45:53   something Guerrero

02:45:56   Yeah

02:45:59   that scene was

02:46:01   rewritten and they didn't have footage for and

02:46:04   The first time I saw it I was like this scene is there's this is so weird

02:46:09   There's like no two shots of the two of them in the room today. It it's it's

02:46:14   Emotional bond to make everything else work and it didn't happen right, right?

02:46:21   It's like the original scene was shot where he was playing the video from her father

02:46:26   Explaining is you know secret trap in the Death Star and and it must have been with like an entirely different character and they're like

02:46:32   Well, this should be gin instead of somebody else and they they didn't bother to get them together to reshoot it

02:46:37   And so they just shot it

02:46:39   That it works as well as it does shows how good there they are at film editing

02:46:45   But if you're looking at it, it's the fact that there's no two shots of showing the two people together in the room

02:46:50   It's like it really sticks out. Anyway, that's interesting and a movie with a budget like this

02:46:55   And the amount of money it's making that they yeah

02:46:58   Every movie has free money like you know they still like yeah, that's that's the hard part of a movie making

02:47:03   I'm and as for holdo like

02:47:05   Her trying to teach Poe lessons in this environment is not great

02:47:09   Both Luke and holdo two times in the same movie you have someone not telling other people their plan

02:47:14   Either as a way to teach them or just as a way to add tension like Luke should have told them hey

02:47:20   I'm gonna stall them you guys escape

02:47:21   But he didn't because we because they wanted us to have the moment of Poe figuring it out and the audience figure out

02:47:26   But that's a bad idea like Luke tell everybody my plan is to go out there and stall you guys escape

02:47:30   Don't let Poe figure it out during his thing because it's stupid hold Oh tell Paul your plan

02:47:36   Oh, I shouldn't tell him he was just demoted blah blah blah look if you know Poe is a hothead

02:47:40   And you're afraid he's gonna go do something crazy the smart thing to do is to tamp him down

02:47:45   You don't have to tell him the plan you just have to

02:47:47   Tell him that you have a plan as Anthony Johnston was on a different couple episode like good leadership is realizing

02:47:54   You've got a problem with his hothead

02:47:56   Neutralize him don't have to bring him in on the details of the plan because you're afraid he'll leak it or mess it up or

02:48:00   Whatever, but just don't do what you did which is essentially

02:48:03   Not say anything and let him spin off into oblivion with his like well if you're not gonna do anything

02:48:09   I'm gonna save him like you see that happening you got to stop it so that was

02:48:13   some silliness from Holdo, and I don't like those kind of sitcom plot lines where like,

02:48:17   you just talk to her for two seconds, this whole plot thread would be like, you get,

02:48:21   I give you an allowance for those. I think they're just a little bit over budget.

02:48:23   So I would follow Laura Dern into the mouth of hell. That character was great. I loved what she

02:48:34   ended up doing. The fact that she didn't want to inform Poe made a little bit of sense in that

02:48:42   He just got a bunch of people killed.

02:48:44   I know, but you know he's exactly the type of person who's going to come up with a hair-brain

02:48:48   scheme on his own.

02:48:50   So here's where I agree with you is that her failure to be a great leader was that she

02:48:57   didn't sort of recognize that.

02:48:59   And at least say, as Anthony Johnson says, at least tell us that there is a plan.

02:49:07   And not just Poe.

02:49:08   everybody on that ship part of being a leader is to let people

02:49:11   know that you're in good hands like you don't mind what I'm

02:49:14   doing but we have a plan we're executing everybody on that ship

02:49:18   seemed like I mean and this is not just our character but the

02:49:20   problem of filmmaking I think the film wanted you to believe

02:49:23   that's it that everybody on the ship was okay with it except for

02:49:25   Poe but it just seemed like she was being kind of non

02:49:28   communicative well no because I mean Leia's daughter was on

02:49:31   that's right that's what undercuts it like all of the

02:49:34   people that we thought were the good guys were right yeah she's

02:49:38   The bridge so it's if there's anything going if you think if you're supposed to believe that the entire bridge crew understands that there's a plan

02:49:43   That's not put in the movie because the one helping flow out is so so while I agree with you. Um

02:49:49   Laura Dern

02:49:51   Holdout does not know how they were being tracked to hyperspace. I know but they didn't that's the thing

02:49:58   They didn't play that up either. That's they didn't play that our head came right? I'm like, maybe there's a traitor

02:50:02   You need like one line or a look to establish that again do it

02:50:06   Like if maybe you got cut or whatever, like there's, you know, a lot of things can be done slightly differently in that thread.

02:50:12   I think that thread is...

02:50:13   You know what you need? You need one line between Leia and her, where Leia is like, "We're being tracked, I don't know how."

02:50:20   Maybe there's a traitor, let's keep that hush hush.

02:50:22   Should we tell Poe? Like, have a debate whether they should tell Poe.

02:50:25   Should we tell Poe? If we don't tell him, he might do something crazy, but if we do tell him, how do we know he's not... I don't know.

02:50:30   You don't even need to be so explicit. You just need to be like, "Look, we're being tracked by two hyperspace."

02:50:36   And hold it and hold it was like, alright, I'm gonna shut everything down again

02:50:41   I'm not I'm not expecting scientific rigor on faster than light travel

02:50:46   But I do feel I do feel that that as a general rule in in sci-fi action movies

02:50:54   I don't like

02:50:56   trackers and I don't like cloaking devices because they often just seem like lazy writing and I just wish like I feel like the

02:51:04   Star Wars idea of it no matter what if you can hyperspace away you're free and I feel like I'm

02:51:09   okay with saying that something happened that allowed them to track them this time but I think

02:51:14   it had to be like a traitor or something. That's what I really wanted. I want the traitor. In Star Wars

02:51:20   space battles work like car chases or airplane fights. They don't work like Star Trek things

02:51:26   where there's cloaking and nebulas and stuff like that and so they brought a lot of that stuff in

02:51:30   just fine i just i mean the light speed ramming is a real problem if you think about it for more

02:51:34   than three seconds uh but i i mostly give it to them you can head cannon it away it's a dramatic

02:51:40   scene it works like that's the thing with with this particular thread i'm willing to give it

02:51:45   like 60 of what it takes but it go it takes a little bit too much and and fumbles a few things

02:51:49   so this is it's not as weak as the cantabite thread but it's not as strong as the ray kylo thread

02:51:55   Yeah, but I really dug Laura. I don't again. There's some problems with the writing in terms of what she does especially early

02:52:02   But I really dug the gravitas of her character. I bought it gravitas

02:52:08   gravitas, whatever

02:52:11   Whatever the word is. Yeah, I I I

02:52:14   Bought it that she was a leader and I thought that the scene with her and Leia saying goodbye was exactly what I

02:52:22   Wanted a little more of that in the movie, which is a hint of hey

02:52:26   These two have known each other for like the last year and they've been holding this resistance together like they're old-school

02:52:32   the rebellion

02:52:34   Right it I don't know how long that scene was was it 90 seconds

02:52:38   I don't know

02:52:38   But not a whole bunch of lines of dialogue and some of it is sort of like just so

02:52:43   Superstar Wars II where they both say, you know, may the force be with you at the same time and Leia says hey

02:52:47   You you know, I've said it enough you said

02:52:49   Yeah, a bunch of that, by the way, was punched up by Carrie Fisher.

02:52:53   I know, yeah. Apparently that idea was Carrie Fisher's. Not surprising. But it works. And

02:52:59   it's the way they deliver it that it just feels like these are two women who've been,

02:53:05   like John just said, just holding this together with the strength of their personalities and

02:53:10   resolve and their, you know, knowing that they're on the right side of this. And just

02:53:16   felt it. And again, that's, to me, that Star Wars is that hint

02:53:20   of you, we get to see the tip of the iceberg, and you just sense

02:53:24   that there's this other stuff underneath that they don't have

02:53:27   time to put in. And it's there. And I really thought that she

02:53:30   helped add to that

02:53:30   that conversation was the Ord Mandel of this movie for me,

02:53:35   which is like, Oh, man, these two have been through a lot

02:53:39   together. And in some ways, it diminishes Poe in it like, okay,

02:53:46   "Fine, you're a hotshot pilot under some command and whatever." These people are

02:53:52   holding it together. They're on the, you know, not even just the next

02:53:59   level, they're two levels up, holding the resistance and forming it

02:54:05   into an actionable thing. I don't have anything else. That's a wrap

02:54:12   For me, unfortunately, I don't think we have time to bring Ryan out of the green room.

02:54:16   We'll have to have him on the next time.

02:54:18   Do you guys have anything else you want to add as a final comment?

02:54:21   Well, so what you don't know is that we always have a cavalcade of special guests.

02:54:26   And this year, and I'm not joking, and Syracuse knows this,

02:54:32   we actually have a crew with a microphone back there.

02:54:37   And we've been recording them.

02:54:41   Yeah, so I'll send you the link to that.

02:54:43   Like, right after the show.

02:54:45   Yeah.

02:54:46   Anything else, John Sirkusa?

02:54:49   Uh, actually, there's probably more stuff, but you know, we can't go on for the while.

02:54:53   We can't do more.

02:54:54   I'll see you all in a year or two for the next one, and we'll, like in this podcast,

02:54:59   we talk a ton about Star Wars movies that are not The Last Jedi.

02:55:02   Next year, we'll talk about whatever the new movie is, but also maybe talk more about The

02:55:05   Last Jedi.

02:55:06   Yeah.

02:55:07   All right, thank you guys.

02:55:09   Happy New Year, Happy Holidays, and I really thank you for your time.

02:55:12   This was a blast.

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