The last part of the original trilogy has been completed! For those unaware, the 4K## project from Team Negative 1 is a full remastering of the original trilogy from 35mm negatives. Around September of 2018 4K77 (A New Hope) was released. Under a year later, 4K83 (Return of the Jedi) was released.

A few years later and the first release of 4K80 (The Empire Strikes Back) is out! Its pretty grainy and does need some work, but this is definitely a project worth keeping an eye on if you're into the OT.

If you want a copy, you can join the forum and use Resilio Sync to get them. 77 and 83 are available on most file sharing platforms, too.

• 4K77 (A New Hope)
• 4K80 (The Empire Strikes Back)
• 4K83 (Return of the Jedi)

Once 4K80 is a few versions deep, it'll completely unseat the Despecialized version as the purest OT experience, at least in my opinion :)

Spoilers for Solo follow - you have been warned.

So a year after it's release and months after it went up on netflix, I finally got around to watching Solo.

For context: for most of my childhood, I was a huge Star Wars buff. I played Star Wars: Galaxies growing up, I was in the massive crowd that saw The Force Awakens opening night, I spent the better part of 2 years as part of a prerelease community for Star Wars: The Old Republic. There was a time where I could name nearly every planet of consequence in the canon and knew most of the expanded universe's timeline.

But the new trilogy has been... well, nothing. I found it to be a mediocre, hole-filled mess most of the time, too busy being Disney's Star Wars^tm politically correct safe-kid to actually be good movies on their own. Rogue One was an enjoyable exception, but still not particularly amazing... but the point I'm driving at is, the last couple of years, I've pretty thoroughly come down from the Star Wars high.

When Solo came out, I assumed it would be more of the same - panned by critics, it was presumably going to be another politically correct, lackluster, rehashed or nonsense story, this time using Han Solo's name as a marketing tactic. No desire to see a childhood hero Anakin Skywalker'd, I skipped it, and didn't even care to watch it when it popped up on Netflix.

Tonight, out of pure boredom, I decided to give it a watch and was surprised to learn that I couldn't have been more wrong. Which is to say, I enjoyed the crap out of it!

It had romance! Snappy writing! Memorable, enjoyable, non-trope characters (mostly!) Although it had some of the same flaws as Rogue One (namely that it started to drag on), it also had something that Star Wars hasn't truly seen since the original trilogy: heart and soul.

More importantly, it did something that no movie in the franchise has done since the original trilogy, and actually engaged me with the story. And this is where the spoilers come in.

First, credit where it's due: although the story tended to go on and on, at no point did I feel like any of it was unnecessary - it just felt like it was too constrained by being a single movie.

I was invested in seeing an actual romance in the story (since apparently ONLY Han Solo can do that), which saw a satisfying, and rather complex resolution. The dirty, street-level setting and story was an awesome break from the epic, world-shaking conflicts that the movies have clung to until this point (or whatever the hell The Last Jedi was). It was powered by characters, and I appreciated that.

To top it off, the reveal of Maul at the end of the movie was totally intriguing, and (IMO) beats any other reveal in the series hands-down. I was a fan of his appearances in the cartoons, and seeing him on the villain's throne in a movie, I think, would've made for a much spicier and more intriguing story than whatever/wherever/whoever Snoke was. From getting his ass kicked by the Emperor for the plot, to getting beat down by ol' Ben (for the plot), the guy's a damn competent villain that still hasn't had a real shot.

Don't get me wrong, it had its flaws: as mentioned, it was REALLY long, and I don't mean to imply that every character was perfect, or that the plot wasn't totally ridiculous in places. But the story was good enough, and the movie enjoyable enough, that I could overlook it, and that's more than I could say about the movies that caused me to not see it in the first place...

Which, to my final point, is the greatest disappointment: with the cancellation of all the non-trilogy entries in the series, it's safe to assume that Disney's learned all the wrong lessons from Solo.

Rather than attributing it's A- performance to the point that people just haven't much enjoyed their epics, remembered what happened the last time someone tried to do an origin story in the series, or were feeling Star Wars fatigue, and didn't go to see it as a result, they'll blame the format, the story, the stakes, the setting, the characters - all the things that made the movie worth watching at all.

So, with Episode 9 coming out sometime this year and us presumably going to see a mediocre conclusion to what has at this point been a completely mediocre and forgettable trilogy (with lightsabers!), all I can say is, Solo sadly will stand out in my mind as the only movie in this era that carries on the legacy of the originals. I'm disappointed, more by circumstance than anything. I think, had Solo come out 5 years ago, it would've been hailed as the proper return to the franchise that it deserved to be, far more than any of the other franchise entries have succeeded in doing since.

What'd you think of Solo, Tildes? Am I stark raving mad?

while its not the best star wars movie, it isn't the abomination that people make it out to be. its legitimately fun to watch and comfy with all its bad CGI.

Favorite star wars movies in order: IV, V, Solo, VII, I, VIII, VI, Rogue One, III, II

Do Jedi study warfare and tactics? I know they study dueling, but do they also look at more large-scale battles? I was thinking about the Clone Wars revival today and I was kinda wondering why the Republic entrusted their military power to what were essentially warrior monks. Was it just a case of “there’s literally no one else”?

Solo is not doing so hot in the theaters right now, despite the good reviews. Here's hoping that positive word-of-mouth can save it. But what I've noticed online is a huge amount of people placing most of the blame on the divisiveness of The Last Jedi. While I never claimed that the Last Jedi was a perfect movie and it definitely has some serious flaws, I feel like the hate train for that movie is hugely overblown online compared to what actual people out in the real world think. So I figured I'd check in here and see what the general opinions are on The Last Jedi.

EDIT: shit, anyway I can fix that title?

So, i just rewatched the prequel trilogy and had soem thoughts, far removed from my first watching, and also after the new films, The Clone Wars, Rebels etc.

It comes down to this. If you don't buy the Anakin arc, it doesn't matter how good or bad the rest is, it all fails. And for many of us, we don't buy it, for several reasons.

• There is really NO foreshadowing in The Phantom Menace (TPM) that Anakin will turn bad. He's the blonde, ever helpful, committed to others all American good kid. Missing out on putting something in here was insane. Also, relying on the acting talents of a kid this young is rarely going to work out. I think the only thing they tried to do was show he had 'attachments' to peopel which was incompatible with Jedi-ism, but this wasn't greatly effective. It always seemed to clash with the emphasis on connections between peopel Obi-wan talks about in ANH.

• I don't find the relationship between Padme and Anakin believable. I mean, I don't think anyone does. Remember this is basically THE lever for his shift to the dark side. An awful script and terrible acting aside, I don't see how it was ever going to be believable. He had a boyish crush, she is interested in youngsters? There is no development fo their relationship to speak of, he's sold from minute 1 and she doesn't seem to have any journey to falling for him. Maybe he radiates a midichlorian pheromone? I don't see what we are supposed to think drove the relationship, even had the script, acting and direction been on point. And there were so many better ways to do it. Make them the same (ish) age when they met? Then you'd have a teenage crush as an ember they both carried that reignites later. There are many other ways, but it almost seems like they didn't try any of them.

• Anakin's dark side is tied to teenage against not to character traits. He's as emo as Kylo Ren would be later. The greatest danger to the galaxy is teenage hormones and the rage that comes from intractable acne. Again its exacerbated by the acting/dialogue/direction but still. His darkness is all driven by protecting people, but very selectively some people over others. And the other part is his entitlement, that he deserves more, which is really not compatible with the character in TPM. Also, he is selective what barriers he maintains. He never goes back for his mum but he is happy to get jiggy with Padme. If protection of those he loves is his main driver, why didn't this happen in any way between TPM and AotC.

• Anakin's seduction by Palpatine is silly. Its related to the point above. I guess if you don't buy the internal driver for his change, the external one makes little sense either. He preys on the weaknesses he exhibits, but the shift to him believing patent untruths is too abrupt. We aren't shown enough for it to be believable. Had we seen Palpatine messing with the minds fo others more directly, that might have helped, but we didn't get that. Again there were so many other ways to do this. If he'd fooled Anakin into inadvertently doing soemthign really bad, he coudl have then revealed himself and basically said that if Anakin fessed up then it would also hurt those he loved. But no its 'i have a vague idea of maybe stopping an unknown future threat to your weirdly inappropriate wife, pls go kill soem kids, m'kay?'. All we get is some iffy bad dreams, but again with no previous intriduction of Anakin as prophetic, thats not very convincing. Had that, say, been established earlier, it might have worked better. .

• Anakin's change to Darth Vader (suit and all) is too quick. I think they wanted to show the entombing of Anakin, and i get that, but they jumped right to the last stage. Had they shown essentially the v0.5 beta of the suit it might have been much better. Think the hilarious home made spiderman costume in the Toby Mcguire versions, ot the MNk1 iron man suit. It would have given us Vader but left for a sense of time between RotS and ANH.

• [ Added, forgot this before] - Anakin seems nothing like OT Darth Vader. The mannerisms, tone, style and feeling fo the two are hugely different. If you watch the end of RotS then the start of ANH, you get this right away. Again had you had the feeling the metamorphosis took longer it might have worked, but with the presto chango Vader makeover, its more jarring

So there are a gazillion other issues with the films. Some narrative, some continuity, many script, some racial, mostly all summed up as 'George Lucas made ANH accidentally, and peaked at that'. I will list a few in a comment below that occurred to me on this rewatch, but the core is this. The Original Trilogy is the Story of Luke. The prequels are the Story of Anakin. Had this worked better, i think we'd have been able to overlook the rest muuuuch more easily. There were missed opportunities all over the place. Maybe when they reboot the prequels :-D soem of this can be fixed up.

Have any of you seen Solo? Possible spoilers if not.

Personally, I loved it. After having been dissapointed by The Last Jedi, Solo was refreshing, in my opinion it felt like a classic Star Wars film. I loved all the characters, including Ehrenreich's potrayal of Han which I fully bought.

Also the humour, compared to The Last Jedi, was far better. Whilst there weren't many laugh out loud moments, I was grinning throughout. And I far preferred it to the eye rolling cheesy jokes of TLJ.

And as someone who has watched the Clone Wars and Rebels series, I loved the reveal of that certain character.

Of course there were some cons, but they were relatively minor, in my opinion. The opening was a bit rough, and I got a bit confused at the end with the constant changing sides. And to be honest, I didn't really care for Marauders.

What did you guys think?