The Ultimate Superheroines Forum

What does everyone think about this retelling of Lawrence of Arabia?
I've seen the first two episodes.

We get some nice Tusken Raider lore, but this has left me asking: we see *one* younger Tusken (is he a teen?)
and no other kids. And I don't think we see any females at all (unless they look exactly the same as the males).
Are the Tuskens hermaphroditic? Or do the warriors simply live apart from their families while on a warlike footing?

I'm also wondering about the train. What kind of incredible anti-grav energy does it take to suspend a long train of about a dozen
metal cars above the sand? Why would it even exist as a connected train if there are no tracks? Wouldn't it make more sense for
each car to be a separate hauler of its own, so that if one gets attacked and destroyed, all the others don't crash with it?

Temuera Morrison's acting is serviceable but rather wooden - I think it damages the likeability of the character to some extent
because he's always so serious with not enough of a sense of levity or humor (I could be wrong, of course). The inclusion of
a Maori 'haka' dance in the Tusken Raider campfire ritual is rather hokey because it's such an obvious kowtow to the actor's background - why not have them ululate instead, like Arabs do? Or a more original 'alien' form of dancing and grunting?

How does Boba Fett come to have a specifically Japanese title like "daimyo" on a planet like Tatooine where nobody speaks
Japanese? Wouldn't a more generic term like "warlord" make more sense in this context, or is this just a direct reference to
the influence of Kurosawa?

Pittsburgh's own Ming-Na Wen doesn't have much to do in Episode 2, although we do see her quite a bit in the first episode
with the battle against the assassins. I think she looks as fine as she can, given the circumstances (she's nearly 60!).
Love to see Fennec (not to be confused with our own Fenneca, the Silver Fox) take a bigger role in the action.
Jennifer Beals looks gorgeous as a Twi'lek. What a feeling!
What did you think of Boba Fett so far? Action sequences were fun, but it's decompressed to be kind of meh.

The movie industry still loves an old fashion Western train robbery. The did it in "Solo" and the first aired episode of "Firefly" on Fox among the many science fiction versions.

It's technically cheaper to have a lead vehicle in control and providing the power with interchangeable cars following behind, After al almost every trip isn't under attack.

Star Wars is science fantasy. It has never attempted to portray physics realistically. And I don't just mean the stuff they "add" like the force or whatever; like, all the starfighters fly like aircraft in space and so on; the tactics aren't realistic, lightsabres don't make any kind of sense, etc.

So the "boy what kind of anti-grav" complaints... ehh they fall in a sort of grey area. I don't mean that Star Wars doesn't have to have any internal logic at all, but it seems perfectly within the realm of fun science-fantasy that Star Wars is.

As for the series itself, I'm quite enjoying it. Boba's a little underbaked so far, and Fennec is about as interesting as dry bread, but I'm interested enough to stick with it. As for female Tuskens - I'm pretty sure the Tusken that was training Boba was a woman. Hard to tell, obviously, but the actor under the clothes looked like they had a feminine build. Ultimately it doesn't matter. I mean fuck, who even knows if Tuskens are sexually dimorphic?

Damselbinder wrote: ↑

2 years ago

Star Wars is science fantasy. It has never attempted to portray physics realistically. And I don't just mean the stuff they "add" like the force or whatever; like, all the starfighters fly like aircraft in space and so on; the tactics aren't realistic, lightsabres don't make any kind of sense, etc.

So the "boy what kind of anti-grav" complaints... ehh they fall in a sort of grey area. I don't mean that Star Wars doesn't have to have any internal logic at all, but it seems perfectly within the realm of fun science-fantasy that Star Wars is.

As for the series itself, I'm quite enjoying it. Boba's a little underbaked so far, and Fennec is about as interesting as dry bread, but I'm interested enough to stick with it. As for female Tuskens - I'm pretty sure the Tusken that was training Boba was a woman. Hard to tell, obviously, but the actor under the clothes looked like they had a feminine build. Ultimately it doesn't matter. I mean fuck, who even knows if Tuskens are sexually dimorphic?

I was expecting one of the Tuskans to take it's mask off, and show they're human!
As for the daimyo title, I guess he didn't like to be called a crime lord or mob boss. Honestly, his "crew" is too tiny. Should've brought that tribe of Tuskans with him.
And he wonders why he's not getting any respect!

Episodes 5 and 6 took things in a very different direction, and were pretty damn amazing. No spoilers, just watch them.

Lurkndog wrote: ↑

2 years ago

Episodes 5 and 6 took things in a very different direction, and were pretty damn amazing. No spoilers, just watch them.

No kidding. Wow, the feels. The memberberries. The face-melting levels of cuteness. The 'splosions.

I have begun to be really rather irritated with this show.

Spoiler

The last two episodes have had so much more effort put into them than the ones preceding them that it's begun to seem like they were never going to give Boba Fett himself a chance. He has had no really memorable sequences, and basically none of his plots went anywhere beyond the most utterly basic. We don't even really have a VILLAIN - sure we have the Pyke Syndicate, but no-one personal. It's nice having Cad Bane - he's great, got loads of menace - but he should have been introduced way earlier. Boba's show has just been used to kickstart other shows. I'm not all that attached to his character, but Mando season 2 made me give a shit about him for maybe the first time ever. They took all that goodwill and mercilessly squandered it.

Boo.

I admire the audacity of phoning in the entire first half of a season.

So it's over. And... Meh.

Yeah. A big ol' wet turd with two episodes of Mandalorian season 2.5 squished into the middle.

Think about it. Boba Fett wasn't even in an entire third of his own show.

He shoulda stayed dead.

Just watched the last episode of the show(?)/season
Well, for the most part, it was an entertaining season and the last episode delivered some great action finale!
(by the way: there is a mid-credit scene)
Yeah, Boba didn't have that much screentime in total, but I don't care... I enjoyed the first two Mando seasons and this one was interesting as well.

You had one of the most bog standard by the numbers plots imaginable. There is virtually nothing easier to write than the "crime boss establishing themselves" story.

And they barely managed to pull that off. You can throw in all the fanservice you want: it doesn't help you get around a poorly planned, dreary, meaningless season of television. What a waste.

Definitely feels like at some point in the near future Disney are going to unveil that their Star Wars content is all created by an AI.

Also dispiriting is how crappy the final action scenes were. Big stompy robots who can't shoot people in plain sight in front of them, and then can't kill them when they hide behind a wall. Mooks whose guns can't put down a Wookie. Meh I say.

And also, the final poop on top of the mound, is what did they do to Luke? Not the CGI stuff, but the weird, "You must abandon your friends to be a Jedi" stuff. It sounds super weird and culty. Obi Wan never taught him that. Yoda only tried to tell him that because he was walking into a trap. His dad turned against the Dark Side purely because of his attachment to him. And he's been rescued more than once by his friends, who have attachments to him, and when he rescued Han he was honouring such an attachment.

"You have to leave your old friends behind," he says. Turned it into some Kool-Aid slurping weirdos.

This is the legacy of the prequels, the rot was established. It's probably not possible to save it from this, and it's definitely not worth it for the sake of whatever The Mouse has in store for it.

I'm amazed the "assassin" did some assassiny stuff! She was rather straight forward otherwise!
And yeah, those battle droids were all over the place, and that was just with their shooting!

I thought the last episode was okay, it was the ending they spent almost the whole season setting up. Everybody got to show up and do their bit. It wasn't as good as the end of either season of Mando. The heroes spent too much time on the defensive, waiting for the bad guys to act AGAIN after the bad guys had already triggered the conflict in the previous episode.

At least at the end of it, Mando and Grogu have someplace safe to stay.

And I absolutely LOVED Episode 6. I'd been waiting since the end of Jedi to see Jedi Master Luke, and the Sequel Trilogy doesn't count. It's a pity Luke overplayed his hand with the Lone Wolf and Cub choice scene, but if he's going to have a story arc as a Jedi Master then he needed to make mistakes and learn from them.