Star Wars: Movies and Shows on Disney+ and More (Page 6 of 6)

I haven't really been in the mood to watch STAR WARS on TV, but I'm sorry that any show gets cancelled. The reviews for THE ACOLYTE on Den of Geek, a review site I enjoy, were poor to middling.

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The Jedi being incompetent failures didn't originate in the Disney era, but in the prequel era, and George Lucas is absolutely responsible for that. I'm not sure if Lucas' authorial intent was to present them so, but note that in THE PHANTOM MENACE, Qui-Gon Jinn doesn't think it's his job to free slaves; in ATTACK OF THE CLONES, the Jedi somehow miss the Republic becoming a fascist empire and Anakin didn't bother to free his enslaved mother for at least a decade (and he still left the slave trade intact). In REVENGE OF THE SITH, Anakin becomes evil because... something or other about how he loved his wife and Jedi aren't supposed to have feelings.

If Jedi can't free slaves, they are useless. I don't know if that's the take Lucas intended, but he wrote it and he filmed it.

In THE LAST JEDI, Luke notes: "Now that they're extinct, the Jedi are romanticized, deified. But if your strip away the myth and look at their deeds, the legacy of the Jedi is failure. Hypocrisy, hubris. At the height of their powers, they allowed Darth Sidious to rise, create the Empire, and wipe them out. It was a Jedi Master who was responsible for the training and creation of Darth Vader." He's not wrong.

The entire arc seems subconscious on Lucas' part: the great love of Lucas' life was Marcia Lou Griffin, whom he met in film school and adored and married. She was a film editor and script consultant; Lucas was a good director and awkward screenwriter, and STAR WARS came alive with Marcia (and uncredited screenwriters Gloria and Willard Hyuck) adding life and joy to Lucas' plot and setpieces.

Shortly before THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, Lucas became obsessed with building up his own film studio and business. Lucas' devotion to Skywalker Ranch, Industrial Light and Magic, THX, Skywalker Sound while producing EMPIRE, RETURN OF THE JEDI and the Indiana Jones movies created entire industries -- but his interaction with his wife became near non-existent, and he dismissed her pleas that they spend more time together.

Despite this, Lucas claims he was shocked when Marcia told him she wanted a divorce and that she had fallen in love with someone else... and he responded by asking Marcia to wait until after the release of RETURN before proceeding with the divorce.

After Marcia left him, Lucas went on a long hiatus from filmmaking, obsessing over filmmaking technology over actually making films. THE PHANTOM MENACE is a pretty clear display of how Lucas creates when his ex-wife isn't there as a creative partner. ATTACK OF THE CLONES and REVENGE OF THE SITH show Anakin Skywalker foolishly daring to fall in love and destroyed by having feelings at which point he becomes a technological monster.

Lucas portrays Jedi in the prequels as distant, disengaged, oblivious, defeated by emotions, betrayed by romance, and the most prominent Jedi becomes a destroyed man in a shell of sci-fi armour. That strikes me as an accidental yet incredibly telling self-portrait.

Who would the Jedi be if Lucas had decided to drop THX and ILM from his repertoire and devote that time to his marriage, and if he'd written the prequels with Marcia Lucas as his creative partner and the heart of STAR WARS?

I'm not sure.

One thing that occurred to me: a lot of Lucas' work in the 1990s was trying to make money. Lucasarts. ILM. The re-releases of the trilogy. The Special Editions. The reason Lucas did all that: he was wounded both emotionally and financially by how Marcia Lucas divorced him and took half his money. Lucas did not feel Marcia had done half the work. He was trying to rebuild the half of his fortune that he had lost to his ex-wife.

I would venture to say she did a vital quarter as his creative partner and another quarter as his long-suffering wife. The Jedi falling prey to emotional connections (ugh, right?) and being devastated by someone on the inside who turned against them is also an accidental self-portrait of how Lucas felt betrayed by his wife who left him half of who he was before both financially and creatively. That surprising betrayal (for Lucas) is represented in how he made the Jedi inept.

I'll try not to spoil anything, but the gist of The Acolyte's problems are just simply far worse than what has plagued 2/3 of the live action Disney+ Star Wars offerings.  Ignore the concepts, it's all about the execution.  The Acolyte was maybe the most poorly executed genre series I have ever watched, and goodness I've seen some bad ones.  Having Jedi who lie or stray from the strict teachings, cover things up, and get screwed for it, not a stretch.  Presenting a story for how that plus other factors could lead impressionable "good" people to the dark side, again, not a stretch.  From the outside or the 10000 foot view, seems very acceptable to that franchise.

Where it went wrong was simply in what the viewer actually had to see and hear, and as the season wore on, painfully struggle through.  These kinds of stories are not unique to Star Wars, they are as old as the Bible after all.  They should not be difficult to write, and interweave into a specific plot.  And yet, the writing and directing team on this show managed to take what should have been a very simple story, and turn it into utter nonsense.  From start to finish, and it does do quite a bit of time shifting, the motivations of the characters seem to shift moment by moment, with little explanation.  Worse, they present a number of new and interesting characters, who unfortunately, don't make it out of the season.  Huge mistakes on their parts.  Plot holes everywhere.  Then you have the intentional retconning and defecating on franchise canon for no reason at all.  It became comical. 

Worse yet, so to film segments featuring well known actors effectively mimicking scenes from their prior work.  Inexcusable to have Carrie Ann Moss, who's incredible talent was wasted, doing a fight scene essentially as Trinity was absurd.  I instantly thought of John Rhys-Davies' annoyance with the shameless rip off of The Last Crusade's invisible bridge during Into the Mystic.  Just brutal.  I will say though that at least The Acolyte, as stupid as it was played out, was not without energy and excitement at times, a far cry from the dreadfully dull and disappointing Ahsoka.

The fan-produced 4K80 release is now out on specialist fan preservation sites. It's a 4K digital scan of the theatrical cut of EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, made from a 35mm print and a 16mm print, cleaned up by fans to assemble the best versions of both prints and address the faded colour and recreate how it looked in cinemas in 1980.  https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/project-4k80/

I've looked at the first version and it looks just like the non-special VHS version I remember in the 90s, authentic but dirty and with grain so high in some scenes it's like static baked into the frame. Other scenes have a natural level of grain. It looks like a medium quality 720p image (because a theatrical film print is several generations removed from the original negative).

While this is a theatrical print scan, the movie did not actually look this grainy in movie theatres in 1980. I wasn't there in 1980, but I know that the movie theatres of the era created a softer film image due to the film protector light being scattered when passing through film and then impacting the screen. This would have added a sheen that diminished the grain. In contrast, modern backlit displays on home HDTVs form a pixel-based image with black borders around each pixel that have the result of sharpening any and all grain.

I think 4K80 would be releasable on Disney+ if the video were downscaled to a sharper 1080p image and then run through AI grain filtering to tone down the grain. Then an AI algorithm could add a modest amount of grain back to each shot. The entire movie would then have a consistent level of AI-overlaid but natural looking film grain. If it's consistent, it's easy to get used to whereas the noise becomes distracting if some scenes look static-coated and others look clear.

Admittedly, for streaming services, grain is the first thing to be removed from digital files and then a grain texture is added back on during playback as an overlay.

I've downscaled the file to 1080p and I'm going to run it through Topaz AI grain refinement just to get the grain consistent. Then I will pass it along to my niece as the version of EMPIRE that her father probably saw in theatres. I had previously passed along to her a version of the DESPECIALIZED EDTION for EMPIRE (a fan-created hybrid of blu-ray footage and upscaled DVDs).

DESPECIALIZED looked okay at 720p, but on modern 4K TVs, it was looking very low-resolution for a lot of the DVD-sourced footage. I ran it through a Topaz AI upscale to boost it to a somewhat sharper 1080p, but 4K80 will look more consistent. Where DESPECIALIZED looks super-sharp in the blu-ray sourced scenes and slightly blurry in the DVD-sourced scenes, 4K80 looks moderately sharp throughout the entire film and the AI cleanup will also make it moderately grainy throughout as well. That said, I'm sure the film editors at Disney could do an even better job by going at it shot by shot.

Eh.  I didn't love the Acolyte.  I certainly didn't hate it as much as so many other people did.  I watch a ton of stuff and most of it isn't great, but I guess I just have a low threshold for something that is enjoyable and entertaining.  I mean I've watched every single episode of everything show the Walking Dead has spit out.  I hate watch stuff, I watch stuff while I'm working, and I occasionally watch stuff with so little of my attention that I have to go find a recap to figure out what I just spent forty minutes "watching." 

But I thought the Acolyte had a good storyline.  I already brought up what felt like a weird thing regarding the Jedi and how they're portrayed, but I thought the story was engaging.  It presented the Jedi as people who are generally trying to do good in the galaxy but some people got in over their heads...and are now facing consequences.  Some of the "twists" were dumb, and it wasn't anything groundbreaking but it was watchable I thought.  But, again, I might have a lower threshold than most.

Am I torn up that there's not more?  I don't think so.  I thought the story concluded pretty well.  I don't necessarily think the story was over, but I don't think there was a huge need for it to keep going.  I'm not torn up that it's not coming back.  Just like I'm cool with Obi-Wan being done or something like Moon Knight not getting a season two.

I do feel bad for all the people involved who were seemingly ruined before they even got the chance.  Star Wars fans have gotten so toxic.

But doesn't despecialized still use footage which was digitally enhanced?  I want something that has been cleaned up but I do NOT want even minimal stuff like painting glowing engines on X-wings.

What I am getting at is that even this rotoscoping you're mentioning, I don't want that either.  I want the original cuts, as they were printed for theaters.  Yes, you want to clean them up solely to restore the image, nothing more.  There was a time when I kinda went, yeah, lets spruce those up with new tech and effects, because ILM was lacking or behind schedule.  However, I've gotten to the point now, well awhile ago in fact, that is actually what I do NOT want.  Adding stuff in that wasn't there, especially stuff that wasn't shot, is a bridge too far.  You are welcome to do that, as a director, but at least give us the originals!

Yes, that's entirely my point!  Despecialized was fine when there was nothing else.  Now that actual prints can be made presentable, there's no need for it.  Star Wars had to be one of the few if only films which were rebuilt in that way, as a result of Lucas's hacking up the originals.  With other films, you find an original and just restore it.

After some review... I'm forced to conclude that an upscaled from 720p to 1080p DESPECIALIZED EMPIRE is preferable to 4K80 EMPIRE, at least for me.

The 4K project was very fortunate in finding some solid theatrical prints of STAR WARS and a fantastic one of RETURN. What they found for EMPIRE, however, is really dirty, flickery and grainy and has an uncomfortably faded, slightly fuzzy quality even under the graininess and even after all the cleanup.

DESPECIALIZED, being based on the blu-ray, doesn't have that issue. The DEPSECIALIZED EMPIRE, as reconstructions go, doesn't really have that much to DESPECIALIZE. The majority of the new special effects were in the new shots of the Hoth monster (which the fan editor simply cut) and the new effects in Cloud City which the editor restored. That and other small restorations (getting the lightsabers to be the right colour, adding back matte lines) were all that was really needed since the SPECIAL EDITION added so little to EMPIRE.

I would probably stick with DESPECIALIZED for EMPIRE. Since it was a 720p file upscaled to 1080p for consistency with me, it doesn't even look that different from the soft but clear versions of 4K77 STAR WARS and 4K83 RETURN OF THE JEDI, as the AI upscale softened the DESPECIALIZED EMPIRE.

After looking at the material, I do not think that finding and scanning theatrical prints of THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK is a good use of anyone's time or effort.

The only reason to locate and scan a print of this nature is to restore the 1980 theatrical cut. But unlike STAR WARS and RETURN OF THE JEDI, the blu-ray version of EMPIRE is very easily returned to its original version. EMPIRE had very few changes made.

The very few non-HD shots and effects that need to be reinstated to the blu-ray version, even if sourced from low-resolution DVD, are easily matched to the blu-ray footage because those effects were mostly in motion, looked more painterly than photorealistic, and the upscaling blur isn't going to make them seem out of place.

The changes made to STAR WARS and RETURN OF THE JEDI were harder to undo: restoring the original versions of Tatooine, Mos Eisley, the Death Star and the final battle required a lot of cross-sourcing to rebuild it. RETURN, while having more isolated changes, had so many key shots altered or replaced in Jabba's palace and the Ewok celebration that a DESPECIALIZED version has to use a lot of mismatched SD and HD material and fade back and forth between them, sometimes in the same shot.

But EMPIRE doesn't have that mismatch problem. Most of the missing HD material is meant to be blurred by motion or due to being a matte painting. A high quality theatrical print of EMPIRE would not look very different from the DESPECIALIZED version.

The only real issue with the DESPECIALIZED version of EMPIRE is that it was made in 720p, largely because the upscaled DVD footage didn't scale well to 1080p, and even modern AI upscaling has addressed that gap; a 1080p upscale of EMPIRE looks as good as the denoised theatrical print scan of STAR WARS.

I don't think EMPIRE will benefit from finding any more prints to scan.