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Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015)


DollEyes
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Yes, I suppose they could have erased her wrinkles digitally but that sounds like a waste of money. It's just weird that they're being praised for showing her...face.

 

 

If they did ask her to drop weight though, that's super douchey (though horribly predictable), she's a senior citizen, if the lady wants to eat cocoa nibs to hearts content let her. 

 

There's a quote in the article that was linked, she says “They didn’t hire me, they hired me minus 35 pounds.”. I'm pretty sure they made Mark Hamill lose weight too for what it's worth.

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It appears Disney has confirmed all that female VO (save the obviously Rey part) is spoilering JIK

Lupita's Maz Kanata

. I'm glad it means she's mostly likely a Jedi leaning figure and will work with Finn/Rey.

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Except he did go over briefly in the EU due to the effects of clone of the Emperor.  

Saying it happened in the EU doesn't mean it wasn't a mistake there.

 

Plus.... a mistake that doesn't even count.

 

It's wrong. If they've gone that way again, it's dead wrong. Luke's more than allowed to be flawed. Even defeated. Definitely tempted. But the bedrock of the Star Wars story is that he didn't succumb.  

I'm not particularly fussy about how the new films affect the legacy of the original films (I do think the prequel films affected it and I don't think RotJ was all that great in the first place) but I don't think they can go down the "Luke's gone to the dark side" route. If only because after the fact, it can only be told to us, not shown to us, and just telling us something we spent 3 films watching a character overcoming was all for nought is bad form. Since we know the Empire was not totally defeated, Luke redeeming Vader and not turning is the biggest triumph of the original trilogy. They can't just blithely undo that in an opening title scrawl.

Bingo.

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Since we already know I will check the plot before seeing the movie, if Luke is even the tiniest bit evil I will skip this reboot completely. That more than anything will destroy all the good feelings I have about the original trilogy.

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1 day = 25 million Youtube hits on the trailer, and still quickly climbing.


also 60K comments on the video.


316K thumbs up (in theory each thumb up has to be a unique AND registered user.

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Another thing I've noticed from the trailer is how emotional it is. Everyone seems quite somber and distressed... several people are in tears. That's a bit of a change from any of the previous films, excluding perhaps Empire, but even in that movie most of the emotion was relatively subdued. There were emotional scenes in Revenge of the Sith but those ended up feeling somewhat out of place because the rest of the prequel trilogy was so wooden.

 

I've also been noticing how the music in the teasers and trailers seems to be harkening back to Empire more than any of the other films. One of the early teasers had the opening and closing notes from the music to the great "Yoda and the Force" scene when Yoda lifts the X-Wing out of the swamp, and the new trailer sees the return of the "Han Solo and Leia" love theme which was most prominently featured in Empire (it made some appearances in RotJ but wasn't quite as prominent as it was in Empire).

 

Hopefully Empire is where the bar is set with the new movies. On thing that has me tempering expectations is the rotating director approach... will this feel like a single unified vision or three separate relatively isolated films? I love the choice of Rian Johnson to follow this one up but Colin Trevorrow doesn't strike me as more than a Hollywood technician. That may have been one wrong lesson that's been learned moving away from the prequel trilogy... Lucas had total control over those films and he made films that many didn't care for. But that is not a reason IMO to move away from that approach... Lucas had become out of touch and the solution is trusting someone who is in touch, not making films by committee.

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I'd put more stock in writing consistency over directing. It makes me wish Larry Kasdan was involved with all of the scripts, but.... he's not. Rian Johnson is the only writer on record (so far) for Episode 8, with no co-writers shown (whereas Kasdan has been sidelined to write the Han Solo Anthology film).

 

To be fair, Johnson is ALSO the supposed writer of Episode 9 as well. So it's a crapshoot that starts with the choice of Johnson over all and continues through both movies.  It may be odd that Johnson is writing both movies but only directing one... but that's the acknowledged credits so far.

 

Gotta say that's a TON of faith to place in him based just on "Looper" and a few Breaking Bad episodes (which unlike Looper he didn't even write).


Michael Arndt (an Oscar winner) is a co-writer on Ep7 along with Kasdan and Abrams, but also only involved in just this one film.

Edited by Kromm
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Yeah, it would be fine if there was a writer as the creative lead for all three films (as was the case with Lucas in the original trilogy... he directed the first but stepped back to a writer/producer role in the second two... but he still had creative control. Hopefully Rian Johnson's involvement in episode 9 will result in some kind of consistency. 

 

BTW according to this article the trailer music WASN'T composed by Williams: http://www.slashfilm.com/star-wars-the-force-awakens-trailer-music/

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Gotta say that's a TON of faith to place in him based just on "Looper" and a few Breaking Bad episodes (which unlike Looper he didn't even write).

.

Hey, one of those Breaking Bad episodes was Ozymandias. If anything in his oeuvre is the reason he got the job it was that.

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BTW according to this article the trailer music WASN'T composed by Williams: http://www.slashfilm.com/star-wars-the-force-awakens-trailer-music/

It doesn't QUITE say that.  Or rather it does, but it's not entirely accurate, IMO.

 

Disney owns the rights to the Williams compositions (and the recordings too I suppose) in whole. This is a remix, with new music woven into it. The MAIN part of the theme is still Williams, and we all know that because we've heard it for the past 38 years.

 

If you remix something and largely keep it intact, you are at best a co-composer.  I don't think it's right to say the original person is no longer the composer at all.

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It doesn't QUITE say that.  Or rather it does, but it's not entirely accurate, IMO.

 

Disney owns the rights to the Williams compositions (and the recordings too I suppose) in whole. This is a remix, with new music woven into it. The MAIN part of the theme is still Williams, and we all know that because we've heard it for the past 38 years.

 

If you remix something and largely keep it intact, you are at best a co-composer.  I don't think it's right to say the original person is no longer the composer at all.

 

Fair enough... I agree with that... and I certainly didn't mean to imply someone else composed the themes for the music... just that Williams himself was not responsible for arranging it.

 

I still find it interesting that there's been a very Empire vibe to the music selections for the trailers.

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Indeed.  As far as I'm concerned this guy can write Star Wars, comic movies, comedies, supernatural dramas, or anything else he wants.  He's more than earned it as that episode was Just. That. Good. 

Okay, but that confirms him as a DIRECTOR, not writer. He didn't write Ozymandias. Moira Walley-Beckett and Vince Gilligan did. 

 

Not saying simply directing it doesn't give him a lot of cred. But at best, it's kind of like saying George Lucas wrote "The Empire Strikes Back".  No.  Leigh Brackett and Larry Kasdan did.

Fair enough... I agree with that... and I certainly didn't mean to imply someone else composed the themes for the music... just that Williams himself was not responsible for arranging it.

 

I still find it interesting that there's been a very Empire vibe to the music selections for the trailers.

Yeah, I suppose someone needs to write the person who wrote that article and tell them the difference between arranging music and composing it! (EDIT - okay to be fair, that writer says he doesn't know WHO arranged it, but I suspect whoever wrote the HEADLINE to the article--probably someone else--perhaps didn't really understand and just went for a glib headline that implies Williams has no part in this)

Edited by Kromm
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Okay, but that confirms him as a DIRECTOR, not writer. He didn't write Ozymandias. Moira Walley-Beckett and Vince Gilligan did. 

 

Not saying simply directing it doesn't give him a lot of cred. But at best, it's kind of like saying George Lucas wrote "The Empire Strikes Back".  No.  Leigh Brackett and Larry Kasdan did.

Yeah, I suppose someone needs to write the person who wrote that article and tell them the difference between arranging music and composing it! (EDIT - okay to be fair, that writer says he doesn't know WHO arranged it, but I suspect whoever wrote the HEADLINE to the article--probably someone else--perhaps didn't really understand and just went for a glib headline that implies Williams has no part in this)

 

George Lucas did write The Empire Strikes Back.  Reading the Making of The Empire Strikes Back book, it established that Leigh Brackett wrote the original draft but virtually nothing from it was retained.  But she sadly passed away and GL decided to allow her to retain writing credit as a tribute and I believe so her family would benefit from it.  GL then wrote the entire second draft of The Empire Strikes Back, which was basically the movie we got except that GL's dialogue was ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE.  Lawrence Kasdan was brought in and wrote the next few versions of the script.  HIs biggest contributon was re-writing Lucas's atrocious dialogue.  Here's a quote from a Huffington Post article by Mike Ryan on the subject...

 

 

Lucas doesn't get near enough credit for turning Empire into the movie we know today. It's become the norm to blame Lucas for writing the sterile prequels (and, yes, he deserves his share of blame for that), but Lucas is mostly responsible for writing Empire as well, even though Lucas did not award himself a writing credit. It was only after Lucas finished his draft that Lawrence Kasdan was brought in to polish up some dialogue. (Kasdan played a much larger role on Return of the Jedi than he did Empire.)

Edited by benteen
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GL then wrote the entire second draft of The Empire Strikes Back, which was basically the movie we got except that GL's dialogue was ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE.  Lawrence Kasdan was brought in and wrote the next few versions of the script.  HIs biggest contributon was re-writing Lucas's atrocious dialogue.

 

Haha makes perfect sense, though I have to admit I kind of LOVE the terrible dialogue in Star Wars, but I was grateful it got better in Empire. 

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Haha makes perfect sense, though I have to admit I kind of LOVE the terrible dialogue in Star Wars, but I was grateful it got better in Empire. 

 

Heheh.  GL's second draft ESB dialogue was BAD.  I mean, it was so bad it made me wonder if he was writing it that badly on purpose.  Kasdan definitely improved the dialogue a great deal.

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Irvin Kershner deserves credit for refining the script and making the scenes even better. The scene where Han is being put into carbon freeze was already good as written. There's a long transcript section in the middle of the Making of Empire book which shows the transcripts of a recorded audio where Kershner, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Billy Dee Williams and David Prowse having discussions and even arguments about what their characters should be doing and saying in the scene(well Prowse was actually busy pushing his new fitness book, LOL).

 

Kershner: [sighs, resumes writing, slowly speaks dialogue out loud] Group comes in, stops near Lando. Four troopers bring them in. “What if he doesn’t survive?” Han looks to Vader. [Ford returns.] Okay, I’ve got something interesting. “We’ll compensate you.” Now we cut back. “What’s up, pal?” or “buddy.”
Ford: “Pal.”
Kershner: “What’s up, pal?” That’s nice and it’s ironic. And he says uh …
Ford: How about “hero”?
Kershner: No, you’ve already done that.
Ford: Why do they have to watch?
Kershner: So that you’ll behave. It’s sadistic. No, you see, the problem here is, I’ve got a two-part harmony going.
Ford: What would be great, I’ll tell you what …
Kershner: Leia: “Why? Why?”
Ford: … if Chewie takes Leia, then turns her against him, puts his arms around her, doesn’t let her watch, you know what I mean?
Kershner: That’s not bad; that’s interesting. But there’s something powerful about her face while she’s watching you disappear.
Ford: Oh no, I don’t mean that she doesn’t watch.
Kershner: If he hugs her at the end …
Ford: I just can’t see that they would stand there and watch. Best friends watching the execution. It doesn’t happen … You don’t watch something like that.
Kershner: I think they have to.
Ford: I think you can’t say to Chewie, “I’ll be back,” or anything like that.
Kershner: No, no, no, no, you can’t.
Ford: How about if I say to him, “Save your strength. I’ll be alright. Look afte her,” you know what I mean?
Kershner: “Look after her.” Right. [A crew member enters the room and delivers some food, and Kershner thanks them.] “Look after her.” Chewie barks dolefully.
Ford: And as I turn, she can say, sotto voce … “I love you.”
Kershner: [continues to speak slowly what he’s writing down] Leia: “I love you.” And Han says, “I know.” Ford: Yeah.
Kershner: “Yeah, I know. I’ll be back.” The kiss. Walks onto platform. [Puts pen down.] Better scene.

 

 

Carrie Fisher: Hi.:

Kershner"Hi. I’ve just changed the scene.
Fisher: I know, Harrison told me.

Kershner: Yeah, I just changed it because I had a million ways to go and nothing was really good because it didn’t answer one important thing: Why you are here to watch it. Why not just get him out of jail and just do it? It doesn’t make sense, does it?
Fisher: No.

Kershner: Well, there’s only one reason, and they do it when they take people to executions in order to keep you from fighting, from

making a mess, from trying to take certain people with you. Vader doesn’t want any problems.
Fisher: Okay.
Kershner: Meanwhile, Han says, “What’s up, pal?” very sarcastically. Lando says, “You’re being put in a carbon freeze,” and he feels miserable about that. He’s beginning to feel powerless. “And why are they here?” And Lando says, “To keep you polite.” And you say, “You know, that could kill him.” See, the whole scene was based on ignorance before and I want it to be based on knowledge.
Fisher: No declaring, no kissing?

Kershner: Oh sure, all that continues, the kissing, everything. This is just the beginning of the scene that changes. I’m just getting everybody their pages.
[The stage continues to be prepped for the rehearsal.]
Fisher: You wrote this other part without me.
Kershner: No, no, no, it’s just the first piece.

Fisher: Okay.
Fisher: You wrote this other part without me.
Kershner: No, no, no, it’s just the first piece.
Fisher: There’s nothing Leia can bargain for. There’s nothing I can do.
Kershner: That’s why you’re all here, to make Han realize that there’s nothing that he can do, that you’re all powerless.
Fisher: Well, it doesn’t keep me from like—I could slap Lando or something, I don’t know. How near is he to me?
Kershner: He’s right next to you.
Fisher: Could I slap him?
Kershner: [pause] Let’s see. “To keep you polite.” “You bastard!” is really what you would say, “You bastard!” but you can’t say that.
Fisher: Do I have to be polite? I could just have the bad manners to slap him.
Kershner: You look up at him and you just haul off and slap him? Now, you could grab Han. You don’t want to let him go.
Fisher: No, I don’t want to let him go.

Carrie was pretty pissed that Ford and Kershner discussed and changed the scene without her and they got into a little argument:

 

Kershner: No, I’m taking it to the moment when Boba Fett walks away. As soon as Boba Fett walks away, you’re all standing back here and that’s when you say, “What are we doing now?”
Tomblin: It’s gone quite well.
Kershner: [to Fisher] Carrie, you’ve never been in this place, it’s something new.
Fisher: Alright.
Kershner: It’s an industrial complex of some sort. But why you’re here, you don’t know.
Fisher: Okay. Harrison and I will probably not be speaking with one another for another couple of hours. I tried to apologize and he just waved me away.
Kershner: That’s why I love him, because he’s sensitive [laughs].
Fisher: So am I.
Kershner: What are we gonna do. [laughs] Did I imply that you’re not?
Fisher: [amused] No.
Kershner: Okay, okay. We’ll work it out, we’ll work it out. [More scene prep.]
David Prowse: If I can just change the subject completely and take your mind off of it: Have I given you a copy of my book?

Kershner: No. What book is that?
David Prowse: I’ve written a book called Fitness Is Fun. I want to give you a copy. I brought one in, so sometime this afternoon.

 

Edited by VCRTracking
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Great stuff. I definitely think Kershner was a huge boon to Empire and the reason it's the best Star Wars film. But Lucas can't be discounted, after all it was his story and he made the decision to bring in other writers and a director. Kershner said he was asked to direct Jedi and declined, and he would have accepted a job directing one of the prequel films. But why ponder what could have been?

BTW I once came across a transcript of a meeting between Lucas, Spielberg and Kasdan during the development of Raiders of the Lost Ark. It was too long to read in full but from what I did see, Lucas by far was the most on point creatively and had the best ideas. He lost it somewhere along the way... maybe computers made things too easy for him and he lost a vital problem solving aspect of his creative process.

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I think Lucas is an amazing storyteller, but I think he gets too caught up in the big picture. I think the beats of the story are all there, he just loses touch with the human emotion behind getting a character from point A to point B. Even the prequel trilogy had some promising story ideas, it was just impossible to connect with the characters. That's what Irvin Kershner excelled at. He took a space adventure and turned it into a character piece.

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The Clone Wars series was proof to me that GL still can deliver when he has the right team helping him out.  Lucas was very involved in the development of that show and the stories but had a talented guy like Dave Filoni and a talented team that were real contributors in developing and producing the series.  That's why I wouldn't have minded if they had used his original story treatments for the new trilogy because someone else would have been writing, directing and guiding them.

 

 

Agreed about Irvin Kershner and ESB.  Reading The Making of The Empire Strikes Back book lets you know how important his contribution is.  He was very good at adding a lot of little human moments to the story as well.

Edited by benteen
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Agreed about Irvin Kershner and ESB.  Reading The Making of The Empire Strikes Back book lets you know how important his contribution is.  He was very good at adding a lot of little human moments to the story as well.

 

Watching Empire of Dreams lets you know as well. And highlights all the contributions made by others throughout the process. This was George Lucas's vision, and his passion drove it, but he had a lot of helping hands along the way.

 

It's been said before that Lucas doesn't get people. A weird thing to admit, but I'm sure he's said it himself as well. He had the mythology and the grand scale, but the humanity got lost in the new trilogy, the warmth of characters that people could care about. He didn't seem to think that mattered, that if the audience was told that Anakin was worth caring about, and that his romance with Padme was worthy, then people would just accept it. And it's long been a part of Star Wars lore that Lucas couldn't write good dialogue to save his life. But in the original movies, he had actors who would force changes to make it work, and other writers and directors who would do the necessary. In the prequels, it was all Lucas, and no one had the power or the balls to tell him that something sucked.

 

People can say what they like about JJ Abrams, but in all the work of his that I've seen, the characters are just as important as the plot. His movies feel like he began with the core character relationships, then built the movie around them, and as a fan of character, I'm grateful for that. The trailers have me more convinced that he's got the tone right, because most of them focus on people, rather than grand vistas and CGI sequences. Sure, there are the iconic spaceship shots, but they're not the focus. Abrams and the producers knew that the knockout blow for the second trailer was a crusty old dude and a walking carpet.

 

Another thing I've noticed from the trailer is how emotional it is. Everyone seems quite somber and distressed... several people are in tears. That's a bit of a change from any of the previous films, excluding perhaps Empire, but even in that movie most of the emotion was relatively subdued. There were emotional scenes in Revenge of the Sith but those ended up feeling somewhat out of place because the rest of the prequel trilogy was so wooden.

 

 

That hits the point I've been getting at as well. You see Rey crying, you see Finn looking terrified and baffled, Leia looking distraught. A far cry from the zen-like Jedi of the prequels, and Anakin's sudden fits of rage and sullen sulks. The emotion looks more organic, just from those clips. Some of that's down to the writing, some to the directing and some to the acting. I've a strong feeling that all three of those will be much better for Episode VII than they were for Episodes I-III.

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It's been said before that Lucas doesn't get people. A weird thing to admit, but I'm sure he's said it himself as well. He had the mythology and the grand scale, but the humanity got lost in the new trilogy, the warmth of characters that people could care about. He didn't seem to think that mattered, that if the audience was told that Anakin was worth caring about, and that his romance with Padme was worthy, then people would just accept it. And it's long been a part of Star Wars lore that Lucas couldn't write good dialogue to save his life. But in the original movies, he had actors who would force changes to make it work, and other writers and directors who would do the necessary. In the prequels, it was all Lucas, and no one had the power or the balls to tell him that something sucked.

 

 

You can say no to him but if he thinks he's right he's not going change his mind. In the "Dinner of Five" episode from 10 years ago with JJ Abrams and Mark Hamill, Hamill said when he was making "Return of the Jedi" that he and the stunt coordinator came up with these fancy new lightsaber moves for the fight with Vader that included holding one the lightsaber with one handed but Lucas nixed it because he said that lightsabers should be held with two hands like broadswords. They begged him because it would be much more choreography but Hamill said he was "adamant". When they were editing JEDI some at ILM thought Boba Fett like many people was too cool just to kill off and they tried to talk Lucas into letting him live but for whatever reason gotten sick of the character and just was done with him. Spielberg and Ford were against having aliens in the fourth Indiana Jones movie but Lucas wouldn't budge on it so he held out for years until finally they relented.

Edited by VCRTracking
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People can say what they like about JJ Abrams, but in all the work of his that I've seen, the characters are just as important as the plot. His movies feel like he began with the core character relationships, then built the movie around them, and as a fan of character, I'm grateful for that.

Have you seen the new Star Trek movies? Because they really are not character-focused. I'd say they're scene focused (plot would be an improvement) - like someone came up with three cool action sequences and then thought about how to get characters from A to B to C. Logic and character motivation be damned.

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I just want to ask is there any confirmation that Han and Leia are to be parents in this movie (like they are in the books) or was that washed away by Disney when they said that the AU is not any more canon?

I don't think there's confirmation of much anything that we haven't seen with our own two eyes (each) in a teaser or trailer.

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I don't think there's confirmation of much anything that we haven't seen with our own two eyes (each) in a teaser or trailer.

 

Okay, thank you for answering my question. First, I am really excited to see this movie (yeah I know that I was like this for the Prequels, back in 1999) and since the days of the Prequels, I have lowered my expectations to these two things:

 

1. This movie has to be better than the Prequels (and the only way I can see this happening is if JJ really drops the ball on this one). 

 

2.  I prefer if they gave Han and Leia the two kids that were from the books. That way I would feel that the books did mean something, but Disney totally threw everything out of the door when the announced that the AU isn't canon. 

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I'm curious if anything has been leaked about what role Billie Lourd (aka "Carrie Fisher's Daughter" aka "Chanel #3 from Scream Queens") is playing.

 

The only thing confirmed (by her herself) is that she's NOT "Princess Leia's daughter". 

 

The one speculation I've read is her somehow playing Leia herself, in flashback. Now I'm not familiar enough with her voice or work (I haven't been watching Scream Queens) to know if she could pull that off or not.  But also doing flashbacks seems kinda lame... so I'm doubting it anyway.

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Have you seen the new Star Trek movies? Because they really are not character-focused. I'd say they're scene focused (plot would be an improvement) - like someone came up with three cool action sequences and then thought about how to get characters from A to B to C. Logic and character motivation be damned.

 

 

I think they are focused on Spock and Kirk, but they are different from any previous versions.

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Ha! That's great!

 

I've been watching some comparison videos of the changes Lucas made to the re-releases and as someone who wouldn't classify themselves as a Star Wars fan (I've seen each of the movies once as a kid but have plans to watch the first 3 at least before TFA comes out) I still feel gutted by the changes he made.

 

My god, all this terrible, unnecessary CGI! All the weird new characters making "funny" noises in the background. It's just so bizarre. Now I totally get why fans have been complaining about this for years.

 

It's like...Michelangelo resculpting David to give him a cartoonishly large dick.

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The AMC note said to simply keep the lightsaber turned off. No guns (toy or otherwise) or masks.

 

Which is fair enough. Lightsabers emit noise and light (I assume the toys do, anyway). When I'm watching a movie in the cinema, I do not want noise and light other than from the movie. I don't want some douche not turning off his phone, answering texts and using the flashlight to peer into his disgusting nachos, like I had at the cinema the other week. I would not want some idiot waving a lightsaber around either.

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Heads up, Magicdog! I just saw notices from other cinema chains that did ban toy lightsabers completely. Just wanted to let you know that I recognize that your news was correct for many theater chains, even if the AMC notice said differently.

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Seriously, where's Luke?! We know he's in the movie....unless he only shows up as a Jedi spirit?

{Pssst... they're keeping him out of promotional material for the exact reason you are freaking out. I mean to MAKE people freak out.}

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