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Star Wars: Episode VII Cast Officially Announced
eldavojohn writes: "Word was leaking this week of some familiar faces in London hanging out together. Finally today an official cast listing for Star Wars Episode VII was handed down from on high to us mere mortals (Google Cache and Onion AV recap available). From the short release, 'Actors John Boyega, Daisy Ridley, Adam Driver, Oscar Isaac, Andy Serkis, Domhnall Gleeson, and Max von Sydow will join the original stars of the saga, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill, Anthony Daniels, Peter Mayhew, and Kenny Baker in the new film.' Let's not bicker and argue about who shot first but instead come to an agreement on expected levels of almost certain disappointment. No, this will not feature the Expanded Universe (EU) — you can now refer to those tales as 'Legends' which are not part of Star Wars canon. Instead prepare yourself for what will likely be the mother of all retcon films."
No?
I am disappointed that they are even making another Star Wars "film."
Multiple Autoplay ads while unattended and minimized?
I come back into office and my computer is yacking away.
Good bye dickheads
aka it was reddited and twitter...'ed? The internet is a lot larger than slashdot these days, it appeared en masse elsewhere first.
C'mon, they have Gollum in this one. How can they go wrong?
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
The most heart-wrenching part of the polygon article was finding out that Amy Hennig was going to be working on a new Star Wars game, but it'll be published by those bastards at EA.
After her work on LOK, I would have loved to see what came of that...
Episode VII is the movie they should have made years ago. Instead, we got the godawful prequels and now all the original cast is a hundred years old and will be lucky to get through filming without needing paramedics standing by at all times.
Most fandoms would be furious at literally the entire storyline beyond six films being tossed aside, and new sequels commissioned using only a handful of the original actors and one original writer.
*Most* fandoms didn't have to go through the prequel trilogy and a series of bad retconny rereleases being made by the original creator himself.
Add the fact that the SWEU is remarkably uneven in quality - while some parts are downright brilliant, there's wide swaths of crap that were still canon because the movies didn't contradict it - and I can completely understand why the general fan reaction to this is "cautious optimism" or "reserved pessimism" rather than nerd rage (there's *some* nerd rage, but not much). My own response is "interested apathy" - it might be good, but I really just can't force myself to care anymore, not the way I used to.
Has live humans? Did you not read Harrison Ford will be in it?
At this point they could animate it and it would still be awesome.
In fact, they could redo the whole thing with animation.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
He already tried turning Star Trek into Star Wars, now they are giving him that franchise to ruin too... Star Wars, now with 5000% more lens flare!
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
OTOH it's a thread about something you claim not to care about, and yet you post here.
BTW +1 for the Fireside reference. :)
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
A long time ago in a galaxy... (unreadable due to lens flare) ....
STAR (unreadable due to lens flare)
Princess Leia (unreadable due to lens flare)....
Spaceship... (unwatchable due to lens flare)
Monster/special effects, jiggly camerawork. Things happen in film for no logical reason and plot holes you could fly the death star through....
This *is* a JJ Abhrams movie after all....
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Han shooting first means there was a shot fired second. There wasn't. Therefore Han didn't shoot first, he just shot.
Thank god they got Kenny Baker. I would hate to see someone else we can't see inside a metal can that makes beeping noises.
I wonder if they got the same key grip?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The narrative is the entire point. It's a movie.
If you want me to become emotionally invested in your story, you can't just suddenly say "Ignore everything I've been telling you for the past 30 years"
... Also, Andy Serkis is a motion capture actor and so there will probably be a Jar Jar-like digital character in the film.
Aaarrrggghhhhh!!!!!
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
Maybe it was just me who was hoping that it wasn't a thing of the past.
Hey, the cartoons by Genndy Tartakovsky were good.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Who do think is doing the motion capture for Jar Jar?
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Why all the snark and angst? The story submission dripped with unwarranted sarcasm ("cast list... handed down to us mere mortals?" What, you wanted them to consult you first?) and negativity ("mother of all retcon films" - the stupid EU stuff was never really canon to be retconned).
I know everyone was disappointed by Episodes 1-3, but let's get over it and give the new movies a chance. Oh, and for the record, yes Episode 1 was utter trash except for about 15 minutes, but Episode 2 was at least marginal and Episode 3 was a decent movie. Attribute all this to George Lucas being a changed person/storyteller and having nobody looking over his shoulder to say "George, that's a stupid idea." (Who elects a queen? And who elects a 14-year-old girl to anything? Oh, and why do you want to prevent Jedis from having kids when using the Force is apparently an inherited trait?) We can all go on about what was wrong with the first three movies, but they were not collectively the unmitigated disaster people love to claim.
I don't think that anyone can deny that George Lucas, in recent years, was an absolutely terrible steward of his own creations - basically "nothing going on" with Star Wars except for an awful animated TV show and EU novels that were a perpetual crapshoot in terms of quality. Star Wars was stagnant and heading downhill in terms of ever building on its legacy. Besides, the EU had run its course - the last novel I read had Han, Luke and Leia running around blowing things up while they practically needed scooters to get around, and the series failed to deliver a really compelling new generation of characters to care about (maybe except Jagged Fel and Ben Skywalker's Sith pseudo-girlfriend).
So the EU was done, George Lucas had run the Star Wars empire into the ground, and it was time to start fresh. There's a new sheriff in town, and I'm OK with that. I know this is heresy here, but I actually liked what J.J. Abrams did with the Star Trek reboot. I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt with the new Star Wars movies. Yes, I will go into the theater in December 2015 with managed expectations but I don't understand everyone piling on and assuming they will be terrible.
"95% of all Slashdot
These aren't the memories you're looking for.
rewriting history since 2109
If there is one thing Disney is good at it's their ability to take someone else's work and run with it.
The Star Wars Extended Universe was considered canon to a large degree. To quote from the Wikipedia article:
That degree of coordination and the involvement of studio figures really set Star Wars publications apart from Star Trek. For the latter, Paramount and the TV and film writers were pretty upfront about the fact that Pocket Books' Star Trek novels, while authorized, had bugger-all to do with the canon.
So, after many years of tie-in products being seen as a part of a whole, it is understandable that the decision of Disney to junk all that disappoints longtime fans.
You know how you can retain your good memories of Star Wars? Don't watch the movies. As for the rest of us who never read the books and thought the original movies were a range of merely okay to pretty dismal, let us watch these new movies in equally okay to dismal peace.
Opening scenes of Star Wars Episode VII: An older Jar-Jar Binks walks through Mos Eisley and says "Meesa so glad me made it past all that craziness unharmed."
Out of nowhere, Gollum jumps on top of Jar-Jar and dismembers him shouting "You ruined my Precious!!!"
The Cantina band stops playing for a bit to watch the spectacle but soon starts up again. Wipe over to the main story after audience applause.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
I thought he had to be in everything these days
If you want me to become emotionally invested in your story, you can't just suddenly say "Ignore everything I've been telling you for the past 30 years"
This isn't a change of existing policy. All along has been the understanding that only the movies are considered part of Lucasfilm canon.
Other people can write as many stories as they want, but that doesn't mean "it happened" in the official universe.
The EU has always been subject to being tossed out for the films. I mean, I still have a copy of the 1994 "A Guide to the Star Wars Universe". On pages xviii-xx, it has a timeline that establishes the following:
1) C-3PO is 57 years older than Anakin Skywalker.
2) Obi-Wan Kenobi is only five years older than Anakin Skywalker.
3) The Clone Wars ended 17 years before Anakin became Darth Vader and Palpatine became Emperor.
4) Anakin was in his mid-thirties when he fathered Luke & Leia.
How could anybody have anything like a reasonable expectation that things would be different this time?
C'mon people - they have Ming the MFing Merciless in this. In a just world, Brian Blessed would have a place in this movie.
"OLD BEN'S ALIVE!?" "Wookiees, DIIIIVE!"
Aping Flash Gordon for a Star Wars sequel is one of the less grievous mistakes they could make.
The original movies have always been kids movies. For us old timers we were teens or less when we saw them and loved them for the action, adventures, swashbuckling laser space fights. As we grew older our glass became rosier and rosier. We then started making Jedi a religion on the census and other squirrel crap nutty stuff like that. The prequels came out and we hated them because they "ruined" our star wars. We all failed to notice that our kids loved them though. Try getting your 6-8 year old to sit through star wars then pop in Phantom Menace and see how long they sit. Star Wars movies were always made for kids to love, we just stopped being kids. Go back and watch other shows that we loved. All out young nerd loves were just that. Let me know how well the original Transformers or GI Joe cartoon holds up. Go find the high school head cheerleader while your at it. She may have a little grey in her hair too.
I saw an interesting fantheory on this subject. To summarize, his theory was that the secret origin of the Jedi order is that force sensitives were growing in number across the galaxy due to the force sensitivity being a heritable trait. The power of the force easily lent itself to megalomaniacal personality development (essentially random people discovering themselves to be akin to gods among men). In order to resolve this growing issue. The Jedi Order was formed as a means of controlling the growth of the force sensitive population, by indoctrinating them with celibacy to cut down on the volume and potency of Force Sensitives in the galaxy, and avoid a need for mass genocide from the fearful majority of non-force sensitives, as well as avoiding too many power-mad force users. Over time, the overarching reason for the formation of the Jedi Order was lost over time, and all that they remember is the specific teachings of celibacy and self-discipline. Force users who simply embraced the gift of the force and welcomed the power it brought were labeled as the enemies of the Jedi Order, and called "Sith" by the Jedi.
At the neighbourhood kids running around on his lawn.
I stole this Sig
Jesus H. Christ on a tauntaun - every movie in the series from Empire onwards has been nothing but a money grab. Hell, for that matter Star Wars itself was made for the sole and singular of generating a profit.
Am I the only one who finds a lot of the big action CGI stuff really boring? I mean a lot of the Marvel stuff has been good, Gravity was amazing, and there's other stuff that really makes good use of special effects. But it seems like there's a lot of movies that seem to live on long drawn out action sequences, 300, the new Star Trek films, the Star Wars prequels, the Hobbit. I just end up disinterested because I don't actually care about the characters.
I maintain that it isn't the ignorance of youth, the original Star Wars is good, maybe it was the melodrama or the simple story but I actually did care about the characters, that's why those simple action sequences are still riveting. I don't see a basic difference between the new Star Trek and the old new old Star Wars, sure the Star Wars had some cringe-worthy writing but a lot of good things do as well, the problem was they used spectacle to distract from the fact the story and characters weren't that interesting. They need less spectacle and bigger story, I'm just not sure Abrams is the one to save the franchise.
I stole this Sig