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

Well, The Acolyte was canceled.  This has set off a wave of social media criticism from its defenders, who accuse Disney of silencing "people of color, women, LBGTQ, etc." from the body of Star Wars.  Yet again, what those folks fail to comprehend is that diversity and equity does not by itself mean success.  The actors and production staff on the series, who I felt were all top notch, were failed by the horrendous writing.  That comes directly from the top, where showrunner/creator Leslye Headland deserves full blame for producing such a disjointed pile of dung.  Frankly, I think the cancelation proves that good intentions cannot overcome bad results, especially when you spend $180 million to lay such a critical egg.  This comes on the tail of a string of really terrible story telling, and direction from Disney + on this franchise.  Obi-Wan, Mandalorian/Boba-Fett, and Ahsoka all featured tremendous characters that were muddied by increasingly slow-moving, vapid, and boring episodes, painfully stretched out to meet an artificial episode count.

Yeah, I struggle with trying to figure out the right metaphor for the Jedi.  One I come up with is the police.  I think individual policemen can be good, but the police as a whole can be bogged down by systemic problems, bad apples, too much power, etc.

In the Acolyte, the Jedi decide to investigate these murders.  A podcaster I like thought it might be fun if he partnered up with a "space detective" and figured out what happened.  A sort of private eye who specializes in seeing things that no one else sees.  Instead, the Jedi just do it themselves.  Why would they rely on an expert when the Jedi are experts at everything.  Need a peacekeeper?  Jedi.  Detective?  Jedi.  Scholar?  Philosopher?  General?  Monk?  Leader?  Jedi.

And it's sorta like the police.  If you need a soldier or a protector or a social worker or just an adult, people call the police.  They're good at some things, but they're not good at everything.  And when we ask them to be everything, that's when things get out of hand.

But that's a fairly new metaphor so it can't be what Lucas intended.  I wonder if Lucas just accidentally wrote the Jedi as inept.  Or if he just thought of it as destiny and the Jedi's ineptness made the story easier.  Maybe he thinks even if the Jedi were on top of things, Palpatine still would've won.

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I do wonder if there was a better way to tell the story of the Jedi that fits better with the Original Trilogy.  I wonder if the Jedi should've faded away on their own.  Like if less and less children displayed abilities in the Force.  Or if the Jedi just slowly went away because they weren't needed.  I'm picturing a scenario where the Jedi were mythical figures even when Obi-Wan was young.  What if they'd mostly already died out by the time Anakin showed up, and maybe the plan was for him to bring the Jedi back.  Maybe there were just a handful of Jedi acting in secret, and then the betrayal makes more sense.  And Han saying he didn't believe in the Force makes sense because it'd mostly died out by then.

Yeah, I think it's an important question to ask since I feel like that's the most important question for Star Wars to answer.  It seems like Rey is going to start a new Jedi, but I don't see how her new approach would be any more or less successful.  What did she learn in the sequels?  That Jedi should be able to love?  Would Jedi being able to love have done anything?  If Anakin and Padme were openly married in the prequels, I think Palpatine would've manipulated Anakin the exact same way.  She wouldn't be any less of a pull on him, and he wouldn't be any less worried that she would die.

To me, the Jedi thought they were the best person for every job, but that wasn't really the reason they fell.  I think the reason they fell was that they underestimated Sidious.  They knew about him in the Phantom Menace and, unless I'm missing something, never really looked for him.  They would go after him if there was an opportunity, but I would think finding Sidious would've been their top priority.  Mace Windu and a group of Jedi Knights should've been out in the galaxy looking for him.

I get that he's hiding and it would be difficult to find him.  But it doesn't seem like the Jedi even tried.  Sidious had a great plan, and he executed it.  I don't know if any of the issues that Luke or Rey or even Dooku had with the Jedi would've fixed that.

I'm sorry it wasn't good for Grizzlor. I'd be curious to know what Slider_Quinn21 thought and if he feels the series is incomplete now cancelled.

I've sometimes wondered if STAR WARS will pull a bit of a retcon on the prequel-Jedi the way ENTERPRISE featured Vulcans as unpleasant, dour, miserable, unsupportive, and kind of useless, declaring the superiority and supremacy of their logic and increasingly isolationist attitudes-- only for a new showrunner in the fourth season to reveal that the Vulcans of Seasons 1 - 3 had been dealing with generational trauma and a pandemic with a mentally transmitted disease.

The situational, cultural and political strife had been worsened by how the original teachings of Surak, the Vulcan philosopher whose teachings of logic over emotion became the driving force of Vulcan society, had been distorted and misunderstood due to the loss of his guiding principle of infinite diversity in infinite combinations, a key tenet that balances logic with compassion and respect for all living things and cultures even if they do not devote themselves to logic.

Captain Archer restores Surak's full teachings to Vulcan society, setting the path for the Vulcans to become the open-minded and caring but emotionally aloof friends of the original STAR TREK series. I wonder if the Rey movie can maybe delve into how the failed, useless Jedi of the prequels were operating on a distorted foundation and rediscover the actual origins of the Jedi and the true role they can play in the galaxy.

My personal opinion on why the Jedi failed from an in-universe perspective: the Old Republic era Council and Luke's Jedi school were way too militarized. When you teach people that the Force is all about hacking and slashing away at armies to win wars, it creates a breeding ground for dark side tendencies because combat-first emphasizes power and dominance over compassion and empathy.

Ideally, Jedi training would be about Force sensitivity and applying that Force sensitivity to a profession or passion which does not have to be combat. In AIRBENDER, not every earth/fire/air/earth bender is a soldier: some of them run restaurants or build dams or transport or plumbing. The Jedi Council and Luke's approach to Jedi was to create supersoldiers, never creating any super-therapists or super-construction workers or super-doctors.

I recognize that as the franchise is called STAR WARS, screenwriters and directors will gravitate to combat, but if STAR WARS wants to present the Jedi as competent, then one path may be that the Jedi become less of an army and portrayed as an unintrusive religion where Jedi apply the Force in many areas of life and fighting is just one profession among many for Force users and maybe the term Jedi is broadened so it's not just warriors.

Rian Johnson offered a bit of a path to that in THE LAST JEDI: "The Force does not belong to the Jedi. To say that if the Jedi die, the light dies -- it's vanity, can't you feel that?" I might suggest we say that the Force does not belong to Jedi soldiers.

Oh cool, I have been meaning to get ahold of the TN1 stuff for awhile now.  IMO those are vastly superior to the earlier work (which I have) that sourced Bluray and DVD.  Now that they have found film, each time more complete, the work is better and more authentic.  I cannot describe the disgust the repeated Lucas mutilations have caused me, ha ha ha.  Frankly, of all the re-added scenes in the OT, maybe the only one I felt "added" to any of them was the Biggs/Luke embrace prior to the Battle of Yavin in the first movie.  Every other addition or change was putrid, and should never have been made.

Well, I ran two upscales on the 4K80 THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK for a 1080p output with AI grain refinement, not to remove it, just to get it consistent. And... hmm. My first attempt set the grain reduction to mild, but it left too much of the grain intact and seemed to make no difference.

The second one, I set the DNR more aggressively, and removed so much grain that there was an unpleasant waxy quality to it that the overlaid AI grain couldn't do the job of offsetting the smoothness.  James Cameron would love it since he re-released TRUE LIES looking like this, but I found it untenable.

I'm now running a third attempt where after removing the almost static-like levels of noise, the replacement AI grain will be 50 percent larger than my last effort.

4K80 is very authentic, but the DESPECIALIZED versions of the movies have some advantages. They are 720p files made from integrating upscaled DVD footage back into the blu-ray via recutting and rotoscoping. They looked fine on a 32 inch 720p screen. But they look very bad on on a 55 inch 4K screen: the blu-ray footage looks razor sharp; the upscaled DVD sequences look muddy and blocky.

Before 4K80 (but after STAR WARS and RETURN OF THE JEDI had been restored via theatrical prints), I ran the DESPECIALIZED EMPIRE through Topaz to upscale it to 1080p and created a pretty consistent level of smooth and sharp throughout, and I used this for the second film in my STAR WARS collection.

4K80, however, doesn't look as crisp, obviously because it's a theatrical print and not a blu-ray drawn from the  original master negative. DESPECIALIZED if upscaled from 720p to 1080p, is always going to look a lot sharper for the blu-ray sourced segments and a little smoother for the DVD sections. In comparison, 4K80 will be rough and grainy and my AI scaling will only make it slightly smoother and get the grain consistent so as not to be distracting.

DESPECIALIZED upscaled to 1080p is probably the most 'modern' looking version while the AI-DNRed print scans are more 'authentic', but they are a bit of a step down in terms of basic image quality.

I'm not entirely sure what you are asking.

The DESPECIALIZED versions took the blu-ray version and downscaled it from 1080p to 720p, and upscaled the DVD release of the theatrical versions to 720p. Wherever the blu-ray had a effect, it was replaced with the DVD version rotoscoped out of the DVD version and on top of the blu-ray version. Some of the theatrical material from the DVD version was then further replaced with material from theatrical prints or frames or photographs of matte paintings. The original transitions were recreated, and the fan editor attempted to restore the original lighting and colour. If there were matte lines and such painted out of the blu-ray version, they were added back in the DESPECIALIZED version.

I can't swear that all SPECIAL EDITION additions have been rotoscoped or replaced in DESPECIALIZED, but I'm betting that 99 percent of them are gone.

At the time, with 720p televisions, DESPECIALIZED looked pretty good, and the upscaled DVD footage seemed to blend well with the blu-ray content. Today, the 720p versions of DESPECIALIZED films look very odd on modern 4K screens: the upscaled DVD content is severely mismatched to the blu-ray. I replaced the DESPECIALIZED versions of STAR WARS and RETURN OF THE JEDI with the 4K77 and 4K83 versions, which are not as blu-ray sharp as DESPECIALIZED, but are more consistent throughout in video quality.

Before the 4K80 version of EMPIRE was finished, I upscaled the DEPSPECIALIZED version of EMPIRE from 720p to 1080p. This smoothed out the mismatches in DVD and blu-ray by adding a slight AI smooth-sharpening while adding AI grain to be consistent. This upscaled version of the DESPECIALIZED 720p EMPIRE is actually a bit clearer and sharper than the 4K80 version, which is a digital scan of a theatrical print.

However, the theatrical print scan is, despite being less sharp and heavily grainy, still very adequate for 4K display, and more authentic. And I just want to run some AI digital noise reduction on it -- not to remove the grain entirely, just to make it consistent across the whole film so I can get used to it, not noticing it intensifying or diminishing, and focus on the story.

If you don't want DESPECIALIZED to use rotoscoping, I'm not sure how you expect DESPECIALIZED to even exist.

Rotoscoping: a technique usually used by animators use to trace over live action footage, creating an outline around a visual element. Used in animation, the outline can be used for an illustration. Used in film compositing, the visual element within the outline can be copied, and then placed on a different piece of footage.

Rotoscoping effects in the DESPECIALIZED editions: This refers to drawing an outline around a special effect from the theatrical version of a film (from DVD or a theatrical film print). The effect is copied. The effect is then placed over the blu-ray version of the footage to cover the SPECIAL EDITION effect with the theatrical version of the effect.

Rotoscoping is the means by which the DESPECIALIZED editions were created. If you don't want the blu-ray SPECIAL EDITIONS and you don't want DESPECIAIZED using rotoscoping to put the original effects back in place, what do you want DESPECIALIZED to do and why were you interested in it at all?

That said, I'm shifting away from DESPECIALIZED. It was great when first released, but I think I'm happier with digital scans of theatrical prints. Those scans were years away from being released when DESPECIALIZED first hit the internet.

DESPECIALIZED, because it starts with the blu-rays, may be as sharper in most scenes, but the sourced-from-DVD or print material doesn't match the rest of it. You sometimes get an HD Luke against an SD matte painting, or HD interiors of X-Wing fighter pilots intercut with SD exteriors of the X-Wings themselves.

Digital scans of film prints, while a little softer, are consistent throughout. Of course, a lot of people may prefer DESPECIALIZED because they find the hyper grainy look of the digital scans more distracting than DESPECIALIZED being a bit schizophrenic in sharpness. I personally decided to run the digital scans through an AI grain normalization process -- not to remove the grain, just to make it the same in one scene as it is in all others.

My suspicion is that 80 - 90 percent of viewers would choose DESPECIALIZED over the digital print scans because DESPECIALIZED is mostly sharp and looks mostly modern while the scans are grainy, noisy, and also not as sharp. I'm basing this on how RussianCabbie prefers the hypersaturated version of BACK TO THE FUTURE over the more authentic desaturated version because RussianCabbie, in my view, has extremely normal, mainstream preferences for video quality.

I personally am not a DESPECIALIZED person, but I think I'm in the minority.

A better print could emerge at some point.  I would definitely agree that most consumers would want the most technologically assisted/aided version.

Two notes:

1. As I mentioned, I went to Disney World which means I got to go to Galaxy's Edge.  It was a pretty cool experience.  I got to ride Smuggler's Run a couple of times (as a pilot and an engineer), and I rode Rise of the Resistance.  As I've said, I'm not a huge fan of the sequels (and how I feel they sorta mess with the legacy of the original movies) but that's a really cool ride.  Of all the rides I did (including the new Guardians roller coaster), that one was easily the best.  Very immersive.  I would really like for Disney to someday retheme Galaxy's Edge to take place during the original movies (which would take very little effort) or at least move them to a trilogy I like (maybe episodes 10-12 when those happen) but I really liked that.

2. I started Skeleton Crew, and the Disney+ shows are so bittersweet to me.  I'm so interested in this era of Star Wars and how things are going with the Original Trilogy era heroes running things.  But it bothers me so much that essentially everything that is happening is meaningless.  It's really fun to see how the New Republic is trying to work through things, and they're wiped out so quickly and easily.  Maybe Rise of Skywalker fixed everything and now the galaxy can have a minute to breathe, but narratively, that whole thing is super frustrating.