Star Wars: Movies and Shows on Disney+ and More (Page 5 of 5)

Another thought on OBI-WAN. Or rather, an expansion on previous thoughts.

People have criticized OBI-WAN, not unreasonably, for having characters running on obvious courses to obvious destinations. Obviously, Darth Vader can't kill Obi-Wan Kenobi in OBI-WAN KENOBI when it's set 10 years before A NEW HOPE.

But that scene in Episode II really hits hard when Ben is horrified to discover that Anakin Skywalker is still alive. That he really screwed up back in REVENGE OF THE SITH. And Episode III really impacted me, specifically the sequence where Darth Vader storms the village and Ben cowers behind a window grate. Then Ben flees if only to draw Vader away, Vader catches up to him, ignites his red lightsaber... and General Obi-Wan Kenobi, the master-warrior-defender of Naboo invasion, the hero of the Clone Wars... he runs away in terror.

Vader catches up to him, red lightsaber ready -- and Ben triggers his own lightsaber but holds it with all the swordsmanship that a child might have when brandishing an overly heavy flashlight. Ben is so obviously not even holding the lightsaber with the intention of putting up an actual fight; he's pretty certain this his his last moment of existence and he's just trying to illuminate the darkness to see what in holy hell Anakin Skywalker has become.

The name Obi-Wan Kenobi is a name of myth and legend. It summons to mind the resolute, determined Padawan of THE PHANTOM MENACE, the forceful and measured warrior of ATTACK OF THE CLONES and REVENGE OF THE SITH, the wise sage of A NEW HOPE who faced Darth Vader and death with humour, dignity and resolve. But Obi-Wan Kenobi is nowhere to be found in Episode III of his own show; instead, we get Ben and when Ben faces Darth Vader, Ben looks like he's about to wet himself.

Ewan McGregor's acting is really very good here.

This scene really speaks to me. Nobody feels like an adult. Nobody really thinks they have their act totally together. Even Obi-Wan Kenobi has had really bad periods in his life. It was not a straight line from hypercompetent police officer to semi-retired old man who still knows how to handle a laser sword.

Nothing wrong with disliking OBI-WAN. The reviews, as I said, were average to poor. However. It's unfair to mock OBI-WAN for Ben not changing his last name. That is a plothole created by A NEW HOPE and REVENGE OF THE SITH, neither of which were OBI-WAN or produced by OBI-WAN's team.

Bringing up a 2005 complaint about a 2005 movie but turning it to a 2022 production is an odd choice in delayed targeting.

Also, A NEW HOPE was written in the pre-internet era when personal records and social media data weren't so readily available; you couldn't imagine Googling Kenobi in 1977. The internet still doesn't appear to be a thing even by the time of RISE OF SKYWALKER.

As for Darth Vader, he is is Palpatine's slave, forever plotting Palpatine's overthrow, seething with hatred. In A NEW HOPE, Vader tried to choke a subordinate to death and was constantly lashing out at the Rebel soldiers. And rather than command some fighter pilots, he got into a TIE Fighter himself to be hands on.  In EMPIRE, Vader wanted Luke to help him kill the emperor; Vader is a deeply disgruntled employee. And in EMPIRE, Vader repeatedly executes personnel in fits of rage.

Darth Vader is the antithesis of self-control. Any indication of 'control' is the suit keeping him alive, not the burn patient trapped inside it. Darth Vader is the poster child for anger management issues and is ridiculously theatrical.
Watch EMPIRE and ask yourself how much advance planning and rehearsal Vader had to do to plan the scene where Han walks into a dining room to find Vader waiting for him.

Again, there are legitimate and fair criticisms to be made of this show. I am certainly not the final arbiter of taste. I am seeing a lot of my own neuroses and insecurities in OBI-WAN, so it speaks to me. It may not speak to others.

If you think OBI-WAN looks cheap, that's not an unreasonable remark in light of Episodes 4 - 6 which use a simpler approach to Stagecraft settings (LED background, foreground 'exterior' dressing, blurriness and fog and darkness to merge the dividing lines). It's low-spectacle and low-drama and to some, it comes off as vacant, empty and dull and that's absolutely fair, just as it was absolutely fair for Slider_Quinn21 to dislike the Rey character (and I apologize for being so obnoxious about that).

But if you have a problem with Ben's alias, that's really not OBI-WAN KENOBI's fault; that problem was there long before a single page of OBI-WAN was typed and will remain long after we're all gone.

I understand why Grizzlor would note all the absurdities of the STAR WARS universe. We all have different thresholds for suspension of disbelief. However, I have to point out: STAR WARS is a fictional universe created in 1971 and released in 1977. OBI-WAN is set in this 1971-1977 derived world.

George Lucas wrote STAR WARS in 1971 when communication across distances was done by postal lettermail. Long distance phonecalls. Teletype machines. STAR WARS presents a spacefaring, AI-producing, laser blaster firing society that has no galaxy-wide internet, just as 1971 had no planet-wide internet.

In the STAR WARS universe, long distance communication is only in terms of wireless voice transmission and fuzzy video. This limited infrastructure doesn't allow bulk data transfer, hence Death Star plans being sent by datatape and droid. R2D2 can't wirelessly connect to computers, he has to physically plug in. This is 1971 - 1977 technical limitations scaled to a space opera scale, but the limitations still stand even if the distance covered is interstellar rather than global.

In 1971 - 1977 America, General Obi-Wan Kenobi could complete his discharge papers, leave his home town of Chicago, move to Madrid, New Mexico, change his first name to Ben, and never be found again. There'd be no decentralized, accessible-from-anywhere computer network of government ID or credit history or social media or facial recognition databases to track him. And in this 1971-conceived interstellar society, Darth Vader can send all the Obi-Wan Kenobi wanted posters he can print, but the Imperial postal service doesn't get to Tatooine. This galaxy is still operating on the galaxy equivalent of snail mail.

STAR WARS is always going to ask you to pretend that it is 1971-1984 while you watch it. And period pieces aren't for everyone.

Star Wars isn't set in our future (or any future) so it's just a matter of technology progressing differently in that distant galaxy.

It's easy to forgive Roddenberry for undershooting.  The best minds of the 60's envisioned a computer powerful enough to manage the moon landing that could fit in a single room.  The notion that the average person would be carrying one that powerful around in their pocket every day would have seemed ludicrous to even the most optimistic futurist.

In 1971, George Lucas couldn't imagine what steps would exist after the telephone, civilian band radio, and fax machines that would take us to spaceships and laser blasters. In 2022, it's hard to imagine that an interstellar civilization could have built a spacefaring, galaxy-wide Republic or Empire without wireless data transmission to coordinate construction, resources, supplies, transportation, etc.. But STAR WARS is using space opera equivalents of landlines, radio and fax.

If one had to rationalize it based on the Original Trilogy alone, the explanation might be that there was once a STAR TREK-level of technological achievement that was society wide, but then some devastating, apocalyptic war reduced everyone to using only what scraps remained of the previous generation. Perhaps that series of Clone Wars that Luke refers to. But the prequels dismissed that notion.

STAR WARS was imagined as a legally-dissimilar FLASH GORDON. It was meant to be a science fiction technological universe. But the Force, in addition to making STAR WARS safe from copyright infringement by disassociating from FLASH GORDON, repositioned STAR WARS as a mystical fantasy universe.

George Lucas was not faithful to STAR WARS as (techo)mystical fantasy, introducing midichlorians as a pseudoscientific explanation for the Force, emphasizing machines over magic. He didn't really think through the mythology of his universe; he just focused on the cool visual moment and then the next one after that. The cool visual moment was generally driven by machines (pod races, hoverboards).

But I think a lot of the oddities of STAR WARS from inconsistent technological development to droids would make a lot more sense if it were technomystical like, say, the videogame FINAL FANTASY VII.

In FF7, all the technology of FF7 draws on the "Lifestream", a river of spiritual and metaphysical energy that is the Lifeforce of the planet which people with the right talent can tap into to perform superhuman feats. The Lifestream can also be exploited by technology with FF7's machines, weapons, power plants drawing on Lifestream.

It might make sense to someday reveal that STAR WARS technology is powered by the Force. It would explain a lot. For example: why do the droids have personalities? What computer programmer would create a machine to do a task, but then give that machine fear, reluctance, hesitation and all the emotions that prevent C3PO from doing his job?

Why would a computer programmer take the time to create an artificial intelligence that can experience fear; wouldn't the task of programming a droid to translate or hack computers or fight intruders be enough work?

It could be explained that all machines in STAR WARS draw on Force energy, a living, collective entity and each droid is a unique expression of the life of the Force; droids are lifeforce in a mechanical body. The specific 'magic' of the Force could then be tailored to whatever limitations are needed to maintain a recognizable version of the STAR WARS universe.

Why isn't there galaxy-wide data transmission? Because communications tech that uses Force energy generates electromagnetic interference with engineers being blind to the Force as a psychic and telepathic power. Do people in the STAR WARS universe recognize that all their fuel and power is actually different forms of the Force and that their use of it strictly in terms of physical fuel is self-limiting?

My guess is there's an underlying zero point energy technology in STAR WARS that few understand, all of it copied or replicated from an original source blueprint, the origins of which are lost and long forgotten, and because all power sources in the STAR WARS universe are copies of copies of copies, the technology that makes it to remote places like Tatooine and Jakku is the bottom of the barrel.

That's my fan theory. But as for why the Jedi are government appointees known to the public in THE PHANTOM MENACE but urban legends dismissed by Han Solo in A NEW HOPE... well, I like Slider_Quinn21's theory that the Jedi were not well-known outside of the galactic capital.

I'm looking at a 4K scan of a 1977 theatrical print of STAR WARS. This was done by the fan restorationist team called team negative 1.

The print has been cleaned and run through a variety of filters to reduce the flicker and lines and flashes. Some scenes look incredibly sharp and crisp.

Some are so muddy and grainy that it goes beyond normal film grain. This looks like it's because many shots had multiple layers of film to add in special effects and composite shots which would either double or triple the amount of grain.

There's definitely a bit of work for Disney to do after scanning a theatrical print if the original negative has been destroyed, but STAR WARS from theatrical prints is a viable path to a 4K release of the unaltered versions.

Likely, an AI process can run through all this grain to render it into proper 4K detail. This 35mm image was meant to be cast through a projector, a form of theatrical presentation that softens the look of grain. On backlit displays, that grain looks like static.

I wonder if the endless cleanup of STAR WARS for blu-ray, polishing every single image to a low brightness, high contrast sheen is not helpful in this instance. STAR WARS on 4K looks too crisp for a 1977 movie, it has too many shots that look like it was filmed in 2007 and then when the limitations of 1977 arise, it's awkward.

I wonder how it'd have looked to Slider_Quinn21 if the image on Disney+ weren't so pristine but truer to the original presentation, looking like this:

The light levels aren't relentlessly refined; the grain patterns are present. It looks fine on a 4K TV, but it also looks like a product of 1977 and it doesn't raise expectations that can't be met.

My cleanup isn't going to remove the grain, just remove the sense of static being baked into the picture and make it so that the grain level is consistent throughout instead of going back and forth from thick to thin.

There's another fan reconstruction of the original trilogy: the D+77, D+80 and D+83 series. The D+ fan editor took the Disney 4K versions of the movies and also acquired 4K scans of the 35mm film (a theatrical print) with the special effects sequences. This editor removed the special edition additions and put the original footage back in place.

I didn't watch the RETURN version because the 4K83 project found such a great print of the film that it doesn't really need any more reconstruction projects. I did check out the STAR WARS and EMPIRE D+ reconstructions.

The D+ reconstruction uses the 2020 4K blu-ray so the picture quality is extremely crisp and sharp with excellent saturation throughout (but relit to be closer to the original theatrical presentation). RussianCabbieLotteryFan would approve of the colour and lighting.

But then we have the 4K scans of the 35mm film for the special effects sequences and it does not look 4K. It looks like 720p stretched to 4K because the 4K scan is made from a semi-degraded theatrical print whereas the blu-ray is a 4K scan of the master negatives. The 35mm film sequences have a muddy, flickery quality. Even if you ran this reconstruction through Topaz to get the grain consistent, the sharpness wouldn't be consistent. The grain would be normalized, but the image would persist in going from razor sharp 4K blu-ray footage to muddy or smeared 35mm print material.

When Ben and Luke speed into Mos Eisley, D+77 retains the blu-ray landspeeder footage so the shot is sharp and the original Vaseline smeared on the lens to create the hovercraft effect is absent. But we get into Mos Eisley and suddenly, the shots are fuzzier. The Millennium Falcon descends towards Cloud City looking crisp, but D+80 replaces the CG Cloud City shots with the 35mm matte paintings and practical Falcon model, and suddenly, the movie becomes flickery with large grains.

I think it is preferable to go with the 4K77 scan of a 35mm film print of the 1977 STAR WARS where. Even after AI grain-to-pixel conversion, it isn't as sharp as the D+ reconstruction, but it's consistent and you get used to it. I haven't seen the full rescan of 4K80 yet (the fan editors are still cleaning and colour correcting it), but I would expect it to, like 4K77, be consistent in its flaws where a reconstruction will always have a quality gap between the baseline footage and the footage being stitched back in.

Curiously, another path to consistency for EMPIRE is to run the 720p Despecialized version through Topaz and bring it to 1080p. The AI upscale will smooth out mismatches between the 720p and 480p-approximate footage (the scans of 35mm film with an older, lower-res scanning process). There isn't as much of a gap between mildly fuzzy 720p video and fuzzy 480p video. Topaz can make the inconsistency consistent and the Despecialized EMPIRE after Topaz AI cleanup will look... actually a lot like the 35mm print of STAR WARS after a Topaz AI cleanup.

Hahah, that's funny.

I do wonder if we'll see more adaptations of dialogue in A New Hope to match what we know of Rogue One, Obi-Wan, and the prequels.  It probably wouldn't take much to alter Leia's message or Vader's dialogue.

I don't know if they should, but I don't know if it would be any more of a change than any of the other things George has changed.