Movies
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I think I've just found my Christmas card for next year. And on the back, it will need to say, "Now I have a machine gun. Ho ho ho."
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Life: 7/10
overall it was decent. It moved a little slow at first but once Calvin started killing everyone it became more interesting. Kinda saw the twist ending coming too. Thought it was cool that the guys who wrote the script for Zombieland and Deadpool are the same guys who wrote the script for Life.
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Sorry true believers, I enjoyed the new Star Wars.
Looking forward to watching Bright on Netflix later too
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I agree about the rabid fans. I'm always really amused when they attack a director, whilst they have no experience in that line.
I've seen a few fan theories about how The Last Jedi might play out. Largely, I think that Rian Johnson's choices were better than any of the speculation I saw.
It's not just Star Wars, though. All the franchises have the same online communities, who hate it when their expectations aren't met.
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The flaw in the Star Wars license is that they seem to be giving too much license to each movie's writer / director. So the cannon keeps getting more and more self contradictory. Eventually (in fact pretty much now) the movies will be more and more loosely connected.
I would argue that this can be a good thing. Even though Lucas started the films with the Skywalker family, it seems unrealistic to use them in every film just to suit the narrative. That was one of the reasons I liked Rogue One – it was a Star Wars movie, yet it wasn't.
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I hated Rogue One, didn’t get the love in at all.
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I suspect that there's more plan to the ever-expanding Star Wars universe than the claims about each director having complete autonomy would have you believe.
Lucasfilm / Disney are working to have a unified canon across the movies, books, games, and comics. So what happens in one could affect another. For example, I heard a comment about Luke Skywalker finding a compass in one of the games (Battlefront II), which explained how he got a prop that appeared in The Last Jedi. I don't recall it serving any plot point, but apparently it's mentioned in a tie-in novel, and it'll probably have a pay-off somewhere down the line.
On the one hand, it's a really interesting experiment in franchise building and storytelling. There's a comment that Marvel Studios have juggled eighteen films to get to Avengers 3 next year, but that's far less ambitious than what Lucasfilm are attempting.
The downside is that I can foresee Lucasfilm tying themselves in knots over time, and seriously restricting where they can go. It'll also get in the way of future filmmakers, and given they fired Lord and Miller over creative differences, and severely reworked Gareth Edwards's Rogue One, things aren't looking entirely promising.
The other problem I have is that a lot of the exposition is in the tie-in books, and not the films themselves. The Force Awakens never really explained who the First Order are, where the Resistance came from, what their relationship with the New Republic was, and which star system got blown up. That strikes me as a real failure.
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comic book folks,
any word on what is going to happen to the x-men now that most of the marvel universe is under one umbrella?
got to admit at this point the novelty of comic book movies is mostly over for me but they got to do what pays the bills
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Lucasfilm / Disney are working to have a unified canon across the movies, books, games, and comics.
They already did this for YEARS, with all of the post-Marvel comics (Dark Horse titles), all the novels, including YA and children's fiction, and video games. When Disney took over, they re-branded all that old material as "Legends", and took it outside the canon. It worked pretty well for the most part. I read absolutely everything I could get my hands on from the mid-nineties through the early 2000s, and although there were a lot of stories, the continuity was pretty believable if you're already the kind of sci-fi reader who can be like, "Oh, so they didn't die after all…"
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Another point i'll make regarding Star Wars, or any film that relies on the creative vision of 1 man, is that viewers get fatigued when it seems like the ideas have run out. Take Ridley Scott for example. He paved the way for the sci-fi and horror genres but lately his output has been horrible. The Alien prequels were duds and if there's anyone to blame for that it's Ridley. I think the Alien franchise should've stuck with the way they originally did the sequels and that was to bring in outside directors that brought their own creative ideas into the Alien universe. Of course, Alien 3 and 4 were failures when compared to 1 and 2 but then Ridley stepped back into the fold and made an even bigger mess with Prometheus and Covenant. Now, Fox has decided to cancel the sequel that was to follow Covenant.
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@sabergirl I'm not generally into tie-ins, so I never read any of the Star Wars expanded universe fiction. I don't think that George Lucas felt entirely bound by it either, as there were different levels of canon.
I suspect that Disney didn't want to be dictated by what had come before, and tie-in novels generally have a reputation for varying levels of quality, so they wanted to do their own thing. But it does sound like they're riffing on a lot of what was created, and non-canon characters are being incorporated into the new stuff.
@gaseousclay the trouble with the Alien series is that the tropes were pretty much exhausted after Aliens. As Ridley Scott put it, "The beast is cooked."
I could see two or three ways to take the series forward:
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Move the storyline onto something else in the universe. That's what Scott was trying with Prometheus (the Engineers) and Alien Covenant and Awakening (the AIs).
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Scale up the threat. Rather than one or two aliens on a spaceship, do a World War Z scenario where they take over the Earth.
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Expand on the themes in the original, doing the equivalent of Blade Runner 2049 to the original film.
There were some intriguing ideas in the concept art for what became Alien Covenant. Shame they didn't go that way. It would have been a more interesting movie.
@madmonday nothing has been announced as to whether the X-Men will join the MCU. Though it could be fun if they folded Wolverine and Deadpool into the next Avengers film.
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