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@FWC

I’m glad you brought up Han’s skepticism. The general “attitude” about the Force is a very important theme in ANH. There’s not only Han’s conversation with Ob-Wan, but also Admiral Motti’s conversation with Vader, and later on another conversation that Vader has with Tarkin. Note also that Rebels tell each other, May the Force be with you! What’s important is, the characters are generally talking about this as a belief system (like a religion) rather than a kind of discrete phenomenon (like gravity). The point I think the film wants to make is, the belief system of the Jedi is an older, more authentic way of understanding reality than the “modern” (Imperial) point of view, which emphasizes technology (for Han, a good blaster; for Motti, the Death Star). This is also what makes Vader so fascinating; he clearly doesn’t fit in with the rest of his team.

It can be difficult but when you think about the essence of SW you have to “throw out” the junk that was appended onto the OT, most notably the prequels, with their mindnumbing notions of midichlorians and Buddhist Jedi and Chewbacca being friends with Yoda, etc, etc.

@HBMC

Yep, I’m fully aware of the conscious decision on the TPM production to contrast the “used future”/utilitarian feel of the OT with a rounder, more organic Art Nouveau-inspired sense of luxury and artisanship. It’s definitely “an idea” (which as you say, is more than Disney could manage) and I think it’s even an interesting idea that contributes, as you point out, to a sense of this setting having its own history. The trouble I have with it, is it’s at the service of/packaged with a change in focus away from pulp adventure (the setting as “seen from below”) to high politics (“seen from above”). And that made what once felt like an enormous world full of adventure feel much smaller.

The only issue I find with A New Hope is that when you consider that hardly a generation ago there was the Republic it feels like not enough time was left really for the Republic to die and new ways to move in.

I'd have preferred if perhaps the Jedi had already fallen by then and Anakin rose within their withered ranks (its sort of hinted that they are getting weaker, but not really that they are falling so far from grace as to be lost; they are still well known come the stat). A sort of prolonged "dark age" at the end of the Republic out of which the Imperium was birthed and through which the idea of Vader hunting down the last really rises up; rather than the idea that Jedi are all slaughtered pretty much on one night/day by their own troops (incidentally who just puts into use a whole army comissioned by someone in secret that no one realised was being made)

That’s a good idea, probably because you gave it some thought. Unlike how Lucas approached the prequels.

 Future War Cultist wrote:

Lance845 wrote:Also do you have any friends that are hindu or bhuddist or any other religion thats not yours? How often do they talk about it? How much do you believe their religion as fact?

Just because in SW the force is fact doesn't mean it is taken as such by people who haven't witnessed it first hand.

I know what you mean, but the Jedi were once a branch of the Galactic government, from not that long ago. And not a secret branch either. So unless that Imperial indoctrenation is really good, I just find it hard for anyone to dismiss the Jedi within living memory when they were so open.

The pope is on tv all the time if you go looking for it. So are cardinals and all the other catholic power structure. Part of a government that runs the city state Rome. Do you think they have god powers because they are part of a government and you can see them on tv?

Again, what actual impact does a few thousand people on the captiol have on entire solar systems across the galaxy? We know they have a religion. We know they act as a peace keeping force. That in no way means their religion is real.

 Overread wrote:
The only issue I find with A New Hope is that when you consider that hardly a generation ago there was the Republic it feels like not enough time was left really for the Republic to die and new ways to move in.

I'd have preferred if perhaps the Jedi had already fallen by then and Anakin rose within their withered ranks (its sort of hinted that they are getting weaker, but not really that they are falling so far from grace as to be lost; they are still well known come the stat). A sort of prolonged "dark age" at the end of the Republic out of which the Imperium was birthed and through which the idea of Vader hunting down the last really rises up; rather than the idea that Jedi are all slaughtered pretty much on one night/day by their own troops (incidentally who just puts into use a whole army comissioned by someone in secret that no one realised was being made)

It honestly requires a bit of suspension of disbelief more than usual. But as is the way of prequels.

Look at Germany 20 years after WWII.

Its not impossible for that to happen. Especially if you don't have to wait for a new government to form, but instead have a fully functioning one just step in and take over.

Yeah but people never forgot Nazis existed, or that they where ever real. and people certainly dont believe the holocaust wasnt real........
Nevermind, you are right.....

 Lance845 wrote:
Look at Germany 20 years after WWII.

Its not impossible for that to happen. Especially if you don't have to wait for a new government to form, but instead have a fully functioning one just step in and take over.

True big changes happened, but no one (sane) denies the power of the Nazi party or the secret services etc... Whereas in stead when we first meet Han and the general ethos around Jedi we see in Original Trilogy the idea of a Jedi is basically a myth. It's closer to if Merlin were to walk into modern times and say he can do real magic.
Remember Han is very well travelled, he's not from a backwater world.


In contrast we see through the Prequels that the Republic only fell very recently and that the Jedi were evidently in great enough numbers and influence that most of those times wouldn't deny the powers they had. Even Watto - a backwater not even part of the republic - knew about "Jedi Mind Tricks" to the point where he made a point that they don't work on his species.

Its not a question of people never hearing about jedi. Han heard of the jedi and the force. He just doesnt believe in it. People still know the jedi existed. In the same way that we know the samurai existed. And we can sit around and chat about the philosphy of bushido. But knowing the samurai existed and followed bushido is different from believing a man with a katana could cut through solid stone with a single slash of his sword.

Its not like people in sw turn on their tv and watch a documentry with evidence of jedi leaping 3 story buildings. Nobody in sw has a tv. They barely have 2 way radios.

Yeah but I'd figure they'd need more than one generation to forget the powers of a Jedi. Like I said it doesn't have to be hundreds of years; even just shifting things back one generation further helps a lot. It's more that it just seems so sudden that in only 20ish years the entire Galaxy sort of just forgot the Jedi.

I can appreciate the power change over that time from a war torn and failing and corrupt Republic into the Imperial State. That makes good sense, esp since the Imperial forces were never fully an army of pure-evil. Indeed I suspect in many areas people liked them (at least initially) as they brought stability and order. It beign only later when people lost their freedoms (which I think is sort of hinted at but never fully presented to us save in subtle ways such as the heavy policing presences of Stormtroopers on planets). And then using a planet cannon to blow up a world that was a rebel sympathiser.

Yep, Lance hits the nail on the head; we’re not talking about a fact, we’re talking about a religion. There’s no room for that religion in the culture of the New Order.

Maybe I’m just disappointed that the Jedi turned out to be a bunch of blindly arrogant and idiotic dopes. Never how I pictured them.

I know that feel.

“Jedi — their order is a fading light in the dark, corrupt and arrogant. They must be punished.” - Asajj Ventress

If it was just her being an edgelord, that’d one thing. The problem is, she’s correct.

And that is what hurts the most.

Hell, they basically got everything wrong in the end. Everything. To the extent that at times I feel like, you had that coming...

That’s what makes Ahsoka an interesting character.

Over time, she sees that The Jedi aren’t what they’re meant to be. In certain ways, she mirrors Asajj, who was betrayed by both Jedi and Sith.

If only they hadn’t killed off Asajj for mangst :(

The crunched timeline was always in place. It's just that when you're a kid and don't have a good sense of time, the idea that an old man who knew your dad when he was young means it happened FOREVER ago. It doesn't matter that even in ANH Obiwan makes it pretty clear that he was good friends with Anakin before the empire existed. From Luke's perspective (and therefore ours) the Empire has always been, but that's the understanding of someone who can't really understand how the world changes in 20 years.

Part of the problem is just that the Force in ANH is very different from everything that came after. In that film, its WAY more of a guiding hand of destiny. The only undeniable proof it exists is the one time Vader chokes Motti in that film. Likewise, Han doesn't deny that the Jedi exist; he just saw their powers as the same kind of sleight of hand and mentalist tricks that he'd learned to see through dealing with and in scams his whole life.

 LunarSol wrote:
The crunched timeline was always in place. It's just that when you're a kid and don't have a good sense of time, the idea that an old man who knew your dad when he was young means it happened FOREVER ago. It doesn't matter that even in ANH Obiwan makes it pretty clear that he was good friends with Anakin before the empire existed. From Luke's perspective (and therefore ours) the Empire has always been, but that's the understanding of someone who can't really understand how the world changes in 20 years.

Aint this the truth. . . I just watched Rise yesterday and there are some blindingly obvious plot points where timelines get icky.

Officially....



No, it's not in the movie anywhere.

It’s blatantly, even hilariously, obvious that the whole was a hasty patch job to fix I said before, that Rise Of Skywalker is pretty much two hours of JJ Abrams running around with a fire extinguisher trying to put out Rian Johnson’s burning garbage.

Burning garbage is way more interesting than burnt garbage.

Snoke was just Palpatine with no thought or purpose than to put Palpatine back in. He was killed off and replaced with a FAR more interesting villain, who was than squandered by forcing Palpatine back in when at no point did we need anything resembling Palpatine.

Whatever JJ had planned for Snoke, it wasn't going to be any more interesting than what we got. Snoke ends up being the secret master of the Sith from Exegol who has secretly been building the Final Order fleet of Star Destroyers. That's ultimately the issue with JJ's mystery boxes. They're compelling so long as you don't realize that there was never anything in them to begin with.

That was my problem with the movies
They where designed to be a trilogy telling one story, rather than a trilogy of 3 stories with threads of story between them
The best trilogies can be watched/playedin nearly any order, with no real detriment to them, a couple come to mind
1: Indiana Jones
2:Jurassic park( yeah the movies kinda decline in quality, but they are none the less or and enjoyable, and you can watch them in really any order)
3: The Original and Prequel trilogy
4: Uncharted series(You need to know gak for every single series)
5: Spiderman Trilogy.
6: Alot of Trilogy for MCU can be watched with no prior knowledge of the others....kinda

 Future War Cultist wrote:
Well...gak, good point.

Ah! No wait, I got it...Chewie! Chewie meet Jedi before. Christ he helped Yoda himself escape! Why wouldn’t he pipe up about that when Han starts talking gak? Even back before the prequels were made it was established that he’s 100s of years old, so he’s bound to have encountered them at some point?

Because nobody actually understands chewie or the beepy droids, they just respond to them like people respond to cats when they meow and chewbacca gets increasingly pissed about that and jaded throughout the various series.

He actually tries to shoot han at the end of TFA, he ends up shooting kylo because his reflexes are really really really really bad.

 Overread wrote:
Yeah but I'd figure they'd need more than one generation to forget the powers of a Jedi. Like I said it doesn't have to be hundreds of years; even just shifting things back one generation further helps a lot. It's more that it just seems so sudden that in only 20ish years the entire Galaxy sort of just forgot the Jedi.

I can appreciate the power change over that time from a war torn and failing and corrupt Republic into the Imperial State. That makes good sense, esp since the Imperial forces were never fully an army of pure-evil. Indeed I suspect in many areas people liked them (at least initially) as they brought stability and order. It beign only later when people lost their freedoms (which I think is sort of hinted at but never fully presented to us save in subtle ways such as the heavy policing presences of Stormtroopers on planets). And then using a planet cannon to blow up a world that was a rebel sympathiser.

You have to consider the rarity of Jedi and users of the force. This is a galaxy of trillions you would assume and there were according to most canon sources, 10,000 Jedi. It's easy to stop believing within such a short time frame as there were probably planets the had never had a Jedi on them within a lifetime, let alone everyone seeing them.

Also, you must consider that before the clone wars, Jedi were relative peace keepers. Battles involving them were very very very rare, and if so would probably be on a very small scale. They were effectively diplomats. The idea that scepticism wouldn't grow without the presence is surely a bit misguided, what Jedi were seen, they would almost certainly not demonstrate their power in a tangible way (offensive/big force powers, or using lightsabers), many people might consider the whole thing a myth that "didn't really happen".

I can totally get that people in universe would already forget or be sceptical of the power of the force within such a short space of time unless they actually witnessed it.

I'll say one reason the series works better as a show is the movies pretty much exclusively deal with Jedi stuff, which the franchise as a whole hasn't found a great way to deal with outside of Luke's original story of "gets powers, is tempted by evil, overcomes evil and becomes hero". I think a big part of that is just an issue with how the series doesn't really know what to do with the Dark Side.

Part of it is just the reduction of the Force to a set of superpowers while still trying to keep it ethereal gibberish. You end up with it being a skill tree you slot karma points into rather than something to emotionally connect with. The way its written the Force is the Force and the Light and Dark are just labels applied to how people use it. I think that really tarnishes its original appeal as a corrupting influence. I think if we're going to get a truly great movie from the franchise again; it has to be one in which we get to see a character truly explore the Dark Side rather than "something something" it.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
That was my problem with the movies
They where designed to be a trilogy telling one story, rather than a trilogy of 3 stories with threads of story between them

My biggest criticism of TLJ is that it starts 5 seconds after the end of TFA. A skip like the one we saw in ESB would have given the story quite a bit more room to breathe. If, for example, the resistance was literally just on the run in space looking for a new base, you change nothing but give some wiggle room for things in the background to fall into place.

endlesswaltz123 wrote:

 Overread wrote:
Yeah but I'd figure they'd need more than one generation to forget the powers of a Jedi. Like I said it doesn't have to be hundreds of years; even just shifting things back one generation further helps a lot. It's more that it just seems so sudden that in only 20ish years the entire Galaxy sort of just forgot the Jedi.

I can appreciate the power change over that time from a war torn and failing and corrupt Republic into the Imperial State. That makes good sense, esp since the Imperial forces were never fully an army of pure-evil. Indeed I suspect in many areas people liked them (at least initially) as they brought stability and order. It beign only later when people lost their freedoms (which I think is sort of hinted at but never fully presented to us save in subtle ways such as the heavy policing presences of Stormtroopers on planets). And then using a planet cannon to blow up a world that was a rebel sympathiser.

You have to consider the rarity of Jedi and users of the force. This is a galaxy of trillions you would assume and there were according to most canon sources, 10,000 Jedi. It's easy to stop believing within such a short time frame as there were probably planets the had never had a Jedi on them within a lifetime, let alone everyone seeing them.

Also, you must consider that before the clone wars, Jedi were relative peace keepers. Battles involving them were very very very rare, and if so would probably be on a very small scale. They were effectively diplomats. The idea that scepticism wouldn't grow without the presence is surely a bit misguided, what Jedi were seen, they would almost certainly not demonstrate their power in a tangible way (offensive/big force powers, or using lightsabers), many people might consider the whole thing a myth that "didn't really happen".

I can totally get that people in universe would already forget or be sceptical of the power of the force within such a short space of time unless they actually witnessed it.

I find it hard to believe to be honest. We see in the films, including the original, that the jedi are culturally embedded. Luke is on a planet that he deems the furthest from the 'bright center of the universe,' and he knows who the Jedi Knights are. A generation earlier, a slave boy outside the Republic can identify them solely by the glimpse of an unused lightsaber attached to a belt, and a lot of SW characters have a variety of random gear and utility pouches on belts. A generation-and-a-bit after Luke, slave kids are telling his story and faking force powers in their playtime. (And then having force powers and knowing about his death maybe a day later, which...). Heck, Rey is an abandoned child who grew up as a scavenger- yet she knows what Jedi are, who Luke is and so on.

Its hard to accept that the galaxy at large would stop believing when we keep seeing people who do believe.

You might get rare people like Han and Captain Gets-Force-Choked who dismiss the Force, but the 'no idea what it is' makes zero sense even if you only consider what we've seen on screen. (And even less if you add cartoons, comics, novels and games). But Jedi are common knowledge, as are their 'sorcerer's ways,' even for non-believers.

There are lots of rare people and roles in the world that most people will never in person meet, but could recognise some signs of office/position or equipment if seen.

If anything given a few more generations people like Han would make more sense because he'd be heavily travelled and wouldn't have seen any evidence of Jedi at all, compared to homely stories told around the fireside of the "ancient warrior monks with the power of the Force".

Luke was also a very powerful Force Sensitive. So it’s possible that was why he felt an affinity for tales of a Jedi derring do?

When he left for his adventures he was already aiming to head to be a pilot. He already had an adventuring streak in him. Plus he wasn't totally thrown in with the whole Jedi thing until his family was killed. That one act pushed him on the path more than anything at that stage.

If they'd not been killed he might well have pulled out and backed away. Remember the message R2D2 sent wasn't for him, it was Obiwan.

 Jadenim wrote:
Great, now I’ve got this image in my mind of every time Han starts dismissing force stuff Chewie’s there in the back ground rolling his eyes and
growling to himself “idiot”.

Well, there's the whole "Laugh it up, fuzzball" in ESB, and in TFA "Same thing I always do, talk my way out of it" "Woo wuf" "Yes I do! Every time!"

Chewie, I suspect, takes the mickey out of Han more or less constantly. We just don't generally understand what he's saying.

Luke also knew of Ben in advance. Obi Wan definitely has a role to play in the continued myth of the Jedi on Tatooine, so it's totally plausible Luke would be aware of them.

For planets that do not have such a presence, it's easy to understand that people would be skeptical. Remember in Rogue one, there was skepticism of the force in that film also, especially on Jeda.

It's an agnostic outlook, personally I'm willing to keep a very partial open mind about the possibility of their being a 'higher power' for us, but if you think someone dressed up and telling stories about it are enough then you are mistaken, I need to see that with my own eyes, the evidence needs to be tangible.