Already posted on the previous page.
Star Wars: Obi-Wan Kenobi (Disney+)

 

I wish they had stuck to the original plan. A Kenobi trilogy would have been a great next long-term project after the Sequel trilogy. Although I feel like it could have just been a single movie. I don't know that Obi-Wan needs to have too many adventures between ROTS and ANH.

I really think Obi-Wan suffered from being a show. It had some legit bad backgrounds and effects, and even the better stuff felt like it was cutting corners. I don't know how The Mandalorian looked so great and cinematic, but this looks kind of mediocre. They really needed a movie budget. Or a smaller-scale story that didn't call for as many grand locations and effects.

 

If they never did another thing set in the OT that would be better. It’s all too backward looking and navel gazing. SW needs to move forward by any means necessary. Lucas understood this.

 

Forward, during, or backwards (KOTR etc) Lucas film needs to stop rushing projects and spend more time on the scripts. Some of the plans have been good, but the final product with the exception of a couple movies/ shows have been lackluster for the most part for the last few years.
Make sure it works well on paper as a narrative before you start filming,and don't wildly change the script mid production. It's easier to change words on paper than it is to reshoot scenes.

 

Although I do agree with you to a certain point, I don't have issue with the rock throwing in Kenobi.

We know Jedi can do this. Yoda and Dooku did quite a bit of throwing and blocking, Darth Vader did it during the ESB fight (not with rocks, but the same idea) and when Luke was in training he could lift a few rocks with some effort. So it's not unprecedented.

At this point, Kenobi is a Master, possibly at the height of his power and control of the Force. And he's doing it at a moment they're not actively fighting so he has the time to concentrate on this. Him at this moment in his life in this context lifting a bunch of rocks as an offensive strike, makes sense to me and I can fully accept it. It fits.

In contrast, Rey doing it in TLJ without any real training...

 

Good point. The other thing, of course, is that Luke doesn't know what that red glowy sword thing is called anyway, and nobody tells him. He also doesn't see another one for a decade, and when he does it's a very different looking gadget.

Even if he did recognise it as a different version of a weapon he might have half-glimpsed in the dead of night when he was ten years old, there's absolutely no reason why he'd say so. It might be neater if he did, but it's not wrong because he doesn't.

It's the same kind of "error" as Leia not directly referencing Kenobi's Adventure Babysitting remake when she's sending a message appealing for his help: there's no good reason why she'd bring it up, except that fans are completists and want everything to directly reference everything else. "Years ago, you served my father in the clone wars" is far more of a continuity issue for the way it's directly contradicted by the prequels than for Leia not talking about her kidnapping. Again, there's no reason she should: she's not talking to him about that, she's talking to him about something much more important.

We're weird when it comes to continuity: the older a piece of the jigsaw is, the happier we are to ignore the way it doesn't fit. So Luke seeing Reva from a distance of 40 feet away in the dead of night is more of an issue for us than the Empire failing to find a high profile fugitive who not only kept his last name but is still wearing the same outfit - an outfit that everyone would know as being a symbol of the old regime.

Also, did the term "shaky camera" get redefined at some point to mean "camera that moves while filming"? Because I'm having a hard time figuring out what people are complaining about. The camera moves, and moves quickly, but it's no Cloverfield.

 

Rich's face in the thumbnail tells all you need to know about his and Mike's opinion of the end of the show...
And to think they were quite positive about it in the episode 1-4 reviews (though as they said often, it is because by now their expectations are so low).

Agreed. Unfortunately, the sequels irreparably messed up things, and Disney will not want to touch that time period with a 10-foot pole.

(OK, he probably did not mean THAT  )

 

Let me clarify my point. I don’t have an issue with the Obi-Wan rock throwing, I have an issue with the overall turn in that direction. The problem with this bullshit is it places the franchise on a path of more an more dramatic force power displays. It’s why Force Unleashed is such a pile of shit. How powerful are Jedi going to get? Now that Obi-Wan can hurl rocks and Vader can rip a ship out if the sky and literally rip the fuselage to pieces what’s next? What is the next Jedi power we’ll see. This is exactly the same problem comics have. Bad writers use power-level jumps to make stories compelling in the worst way.

Take Superman he went from being a guy who was bulletproof and could jump over buildings to a literal fucking god who can fly through space and his powers do whatever they need to do. And why does he suck as a character now? Who cares, he can’t die, there is nothing he can’t do. Every bit of drama is sucked out of a Superman story because every writer made him more powerful with every subsequent iteration of the character to entertain an unsatisfiable audience. Superman is invincible therefore there is no drama. Unfortunately that is the path Jedi have been set on. The next SW stories will look to more and more, greater and greater force-powers to differentiate the importance of the new character but more importantly entertain the audience with something they haven’t seen before.

 

Yep, that's the part I agreed with.

Although I definitely wanted to see more Jedi powers in the PT (in the EU at the time we had jedi powers like battle meditation or illusions, i.e. sith making people think they saw something), the level to which Disney have taken Jedi Powers has become ridiculous.

Kenobi doing it here I think is fine: it fits with previous established abilities, he's a Master and he's doing it while completely focused. But at the same time I cannot help but think they put it in here because Rey did a similar thing in TLJ and people hated it there (as do I).

 

Right it’s a slippery slop. Battle meditation, illusions those sort of things make sense. Ripping spaceships out of the sky or electrocuting entire Fleets is ridiculous. Subtly wins with Force Powers.

Healing was perfect though

 

But why did this moment exist, at all? Because honestly, it does not make much sense.
Vader is still Anakin despite all the changes he went through. We already saw his descent into evil in Clone Wars - in the movie and both cartoon show versions - that he can be merciless and downright evil to his enemies. This culminates in the beheading of an utterly helpless Dooku and then the backstabbing of Windu, in both cases at the (to Anakin) logical reasoning of Palpatine. He has been proven to be someone who has no solid moral center and is easily swayed both ways by arguments, as we saw when he interacts with Padme, Palpatine or Tarkin during Clone Wars.
Anakin turned evil throughout the shows and the movies, but he did not get replaced by a new personality. Vader shares a lot of the traits Anakin had, such as his lack of patience and how he does not suffer fools and incompetence well.
The moment was to me more like something out of an anime, and not a very good one where the antagonist will explain in great detail later how being abandoned to die and having his limbs cut off made him snap and kill his old personality.
Vader is not the Lizard, or Two-Face, or Green Goblin. He does not have two separate personalities where he just one day submerged his "good" one. His turn into evil was a long process and yeah, Obi-Wan was kinda responsible when he saw the signs but did not do much - due to his adherence to Jedi rules of no personal attachments. If he tried to be less of a mentor after Anakin became a knight and more of a friend, who knows...

As it is, this moment gave Obi-Wan a great excuse to lie to Luke later about Vader having killed his father, but to me, having seen all the shows and movies Vader and Anakin were in, it just did not make sense.

Isn't that why the remastered edition exists?
My half-brother grew up with the prequels - he is 15 years younger than me, those were his Star Wars. But my dad showed him the originals too and today, he likes those more.
And I myself am watching a lot of shows and movies today that came out before I was even alive, and enjoying them.

This "looks too old" sentiment might be true about silent films (that worked with a medium that was not yet perfected), or ancient monster movies that have not too great special effects, but Star Wars stands up in that regard rather well even today.
And this sentiment also leads to nonsense remakes like the new CGI Lion King, or live action Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella, etc. When those old movies are animated and visually stand the test of time even today.

 

It does make sense on a bunch of levels.

First of all Anakin doesn’t want to feel pitied, for obvious reasons.

Second of all you have to go somewhere dark to be a child killer, especially your children not Tusken Raiders

Third of all it’s representative of who he has become. He killed the goodness within him, he killed Anakin to fully cross that threshold, not regret it and become a Sith Lord

Fourth - It’s the rules, he is a Sith he takes the name and is born into that identity. It’s not just a title.

 

This is Anakin's mistake that is visual in storytelling rather than in what he actually says. Vader THINKS he killed Obi-Wan by burying him. But Obi-Wan is able to gain strength from the Light Side of the Force through caring for Anakin's children and is able to unbury himself. This is a metaphor for Vader's journey in RotJ - Vader THINKS he's buried and killed Anakin. But his caring for his children allows him to unbury himself and do the thing he should have back in RotS. The whole lightsaber battle is one big, beautiful homage and metaphor and is the main reason there are fans hungry for more (and shouldn't get anymore because I don't think this level of visual storytelling can be replicated in a season 2).

No. They exist because George Lucas wanted to enhance his movies for pretty much his own benefit. The added scenes don't add anything and the new CGI looks dated.

A remake would bring new elements, modernize the effects and add some changes to the story beats that would make it line up better with the newer material, along with using the newer actors.

 

Also, I don't know where people get the idea that Vader has some kind of Jekyll and Hyde thing going on, because everything we saw in this series, and particularly the last two episodes, indicates the exact opposite. No, there's no "Anakin Skywalker" trapped inside Darth Vader fighting to get out. They've always been the same person, and his portrayal here is completely consistent with that. The guy in the armour telling Obi Wan he's not his failure is the same guy who duelled him on Mustafar ten years ago, lost an arm to Count Dooku thirteen years ago, and was happily building protocol droids while living with his mother twenty years ago.

And that's what, for me, made that final scene with Kenobi and Vader so much more tragic. In Episode 3 Kenobi first encounters Vader and is utterly horrified by the prospect of who is under that mask. In Episode 5, he uses his knowledge of Anakin's flaws to successfully outmanoeuvre Vader. In Episode 6, that knowledge goes from the abstract to the frighteningly real: Ben is confronted with the physical truth that it absolutely is his old Padawan. He sees the boy he more or less adopted, tutored, confided in, and eventually fought alongside.

And that boy hates him.

With the mask broken, so is the illusion that Darth Vader is a separate entity. Underneath, there's the face, voice and mind of Anakin Skywalker - shrivelled, scarred, "twisted, and evil," but undeniably Anakin.

In the end it's easier for both of them to say that Anakin is dead than to face up to the fact that he became Darth Vader. It's easier for Kenobi because he gets to finally mourn that loss and move on after being haunted by it for ten years. (And check out his performance in those early episodes: Ewan McGregor is definitely playing Kenobi as having long-term PTSD that doesn't ease until after he's forced to relive some of that trauma. Not a recommended treatment, but mental health professionals are probably few and far between on Tattooine.)

For Vader, going from "I am what you made me," to "I killed Anakin Skywalker" means he can see himself as something more than just the victim of his old Master's failures or his new Master's manipulations. (And btw can we take a minute to appreciate just how good Hayden Christensen's performance is here? Giving us just enough of the old Anakin. The pauses in his speech where Vader's machine breathing would normally be, because Vader would be so accustomed to that rythm by now that he'd keep it up even when the apparatus was broken. The misery giving way to that bitter, mad smirk. All the pathos and horror of this character delivered in the space of about two minutes. I didn't think much of him in the prequels, but now? Hayden gets it. Maybe he always did?)

If you didn't notice, this series made a believer out of me. I had low expectations going in, but I genuinely think it's some of the best live action Star Wars I've ever seen. Chiefly because of the performances, but there's bloody good writing in there too.

 

Well said. I think at this point Anakin hates himself as much as he hates Obi-Wan. There has to be some level of self-hatred there. All that’s left is the power.

 

This really stood out for me. The guy isn't just trying to be covert so he can keep an eye on Luke, he's suffering from trauma. It's why he looks a little disoriented and appeared to be semi-dissociating at times. He looked blankly in the distance or wasn't even shocked when things happen in front of him. It's pretty bad and understandable. He went from having a full, complete life to completely isolating from everyone and becoming a hermit because his life and Luke's life were in serious danger. It felt good seeing him get a bit of life back inside him during the course of the series (obviously, trauma like this takes years to recover from but eh).

Absolutely. Ewan and Hayden took this series really seriously and it showed.

 

if it were a movie trilogy I think it would not have enough to make each film satisfying honestly...

just based on what turned up in the tv series, there was not a lot of meat to sustain three movies...

 

Part 1: Direct follow-up to Revenge of the Sith, Obi-Wan in hiding trying to adjust to his new life after the war, dealing with bounty hunters.
Part 2: Adapt the kidnapping of Leia plot minus the Inquisitors.
Part 3: Obi-Wan focuses on Luke trying to get closer to him against Owen's wishes, introduce the Empire and Inquisitors in this plot.

 

Eh...sounds like New Line forcing The Hobbit into three movies rather than the planned two.

I could almost get behind Obi-Wan's story being told in two movies...but three is stretching the premise pretty thin. I'm actually against a season 2.

At this point, I'd rather see the franchise pivot towards Darth Vader and let him Force bludgeon his way through a plot where the viewer is both rooting for and against him. In Darth's mind, I'd argue he still sees himself as a hero of the Republic by preserving the Empire, even if he's using the old moniker of "you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet". It'd be interesting to follow that lead and reveal some of the conflict within him.