Watched ep1 via EFAP...
I didn't even pay attention to the commentary, there was no need as I had the exact same reactions.
Bwahahahahaha this is soooooo freaklng baaad. I'm with RIchard (and Drinker) on this. WTF were they thinking???
Filoni takes full credits for this episode. Well, this is where his streak ends.
This is garbage. Bland, the pacing is dumb because it's not setting up any stakes, the action is dumber because there are no stakes for the good guys.
Their "quest" is meaningless. We are not shown anything that would change this. They tell me it's important, bad guys show up to stop them, but literally that's it. Unless you watched the shows and or read the books, this carries no weight.
And even then.
Thrawn is NOT A VILLAIN. At least according to how he was written originally. He is a reasonable man with great intellect and driven by flawless logic. He is NOT evil by default. He is only cruel when necessary, but that's kinda rare. Basically Sherlock Holmes without any of the addictions or social issues.
Yes he is a traditionalist, has his own (his alien native) very strict views on ethics and morality, but he is not your avarage "kill them for my amusement cos I gotz the powaaah" type of villain like the Emperor. He is kinda sorta authoritarian, but with very good reason. He never cared for the empire's petty squabbles, he wanted to unite everything to prepare for something far worse then the known galaxy has ever seen. His methods were, a bit over the top sometimes, but by his peoples code, ultimately kinda fair. You betrayed him, and your tribe eats Star Destroyer lazers for dinner as you watch on from orbit. You were told there would be consequences so, what did you expect?
At this point after what Disney had done to the SW universe, he would be a much better leader for the anarchistic shitshow that is the New Republic then whatever they have going on. The rebels have proven to be just that, a bunch of terrorists, who can't establish a better system than what was already in place.
The characters may be accurate to a cartoon level (I wouldn't really know for sure) but there is no rime or reason to their actions on a grown-up level. In the cartoons which I have seen very little of, it always made more sense than this.
The xposition and writing is on the level of filmschool rejects. They clearly couldn't afford to show, not tell, and I'm being very generous here, because most likely they just talentless shits.
Basically every action scene looks like the "we have x at home" meme, or a wish dot com cheap copy of the original.
There's are almost full on sequences "borrowed" from previous movies and games. The fighting is stiff, slow, I've seen much better coreo from 400 pound kids on youtube with broomsticks than what they do here, and the quick cheap cuts don't help it either. The end-of-first episode fight should always be epic, memorable, something to pull you in and make you watch the next episode! Well, they just made it bland and boring and pointless.
The sets look cheap, the CG looks outright laughable by todays standards, to a level where I can totally seriously say "I could do better" and I wouldn't be lying (remember, this my daily job). Most scenes are just flooded with light and bloom and DoF, so you can't see shit apart from the actor and a couple of things they actually made in the prop department, or so dark that you can't see more than 5 pixels in the middle of the screen.
Combined with the ledwall-background, which is so aweful that it makes Skyrim's graphics look futuristic... It's clear that instead of spending more and refining this tech for quality, they spent less and "refined" for cost. Everything is shot in a way to require as little post as possible, making the cheapness even more obvious because the camera angles just feel wrong. Mando and later shows suffered from this led wall crap, but this is by far the worst offender.
The reused props from unrelated movies like The 5th Element and the winged (wingless here) gold ball from Harry Potter??? makes me want to turn it off and watch those greats instead of this mess.
And you know, no one would bat an eyelid at the terrible cheapness of this whole thing if the writing was any good. But it just isn't. It's like 20 seconds from a cartoon meant for 5 year olds made into an hour long bland nothing. No wonder the already small viewership has fallen off a cliff more than on any previous show.
I can give it one point up over the previous SW shows. At least the girls are cute, and the villain looks the part!
I'm not going to rate the acting too harshly just yet. It's stiff, every character conveys a single emotion all the time (cheerful, rebellious, stoic...) but that's expected. Every single show ever needed at least a good 2-5 eps for the actors to find their groove, I'll give them time. I know I shouldn't cos they won't improve. Mr.NotDarth (RIP) is already the top character and actor in this and will remain so throughout. I'd watch a show about him, but as he has passed away, we will never get that spinoff... Not that I'd trust anyone in Hollywood to do it justice anyways.
@Shadow Reaper TLDR.: Sorry mate, I don't think this is what you were looking for.
And now for some fan ficktion.
You need to establish stakes. The show could've opened with something that does, like the following I came up with in 2 minutes while on bottle duty.
Scene:
COLD OPEN
Bg dark and out of focus for the rest of this scene
Extreme close up of the SW equivalent of an ipad screen, it's filling the view fully, edges not visible yet
Camera slowly pulls out (zoom out) as this plays out
Slowly a military style map grid becomes recognizable, with easily readable simple icons for planets (systems) with recognizable name tags like Coruscant and Bespin shown in green or blue, while icons of imperial ships (ISDs, TIEs) in red, at first turning one planet red, than more appear from that planet icon. They spread from planet to planet like a virus, turning everything red (you can jazz this up with allied fighter icons and such blinking out of existence along with some imperials to signify the process of battles happening)
Once far enough zoomed out, near the top edge of the screen it reads "Tactical Simulation"
When everything turns red, the screen changes to a large text centered on screen blinking "Success chance: 93%" or "Simulation Successful" , something along those lines.
As we continued to zoom out, the hands holding the tablet come into view.
Blue skin, with white sleeves!!
Cam stops.
Focus shifts, revealing the reflection on the tablet: two red eyes and a blue face with a faint smile, barely visible.
CUT TO BLACK, MAIN TITLE
There. I've just written a scene that would make 55% of the audience cum like the Luke reveal did, and would make the rest interested enough to stay.
Because now we have stakes! We know WHY it's important to find the guy. A 20-30 second scene at most. No talking, no forced exposition or VO neccessary. You are SHOWN what's at stake.
Even if you can't read, the red overwhelming the blue and then the red eyes will tell you everything you need to know.
If you really really need to make sure that even the avarage american recognizes that this is The Thrawn the rest of the show goes on about, you can throw his name on the tablet screen somewhere on the sides with text like "authorization code: Thrawn" or something dumb like that, revealed in english at the end as the focus shifts. It really shouldn't be neccessary.
As for the texts on the ipad, all in Aurebesh ofc, with fancy subtitles that switch from aur to english, or you can do the letters flipping to English on the ipad screen itself, that's just a design choice. (cos fan service, but you gotta make it clear for everyone)
BTW running sims is in line with Thrawn's obsession of pre-planning everything, in the books there is a scene where his CO witnesses him running a sim like this. Small fan service for the book nerds, and it makes perfect sense for his character.
I didn't even pay attention to the commentary, there was no need as I had the exact same reactions.
Bwahahahahaha this is soooooo freaklng baaad. I'm with RIchard (and Drinker) on this. WTF were they thinking???
Filoni takes full credits for this episode. Well, this is where his streak ends.
This is garbage. Bland, the pacing is dumb because it's not setting up any stakes, the action is dumber because there are no stakes for the good guys.
Their "quest" is meaningless. We are not shown anything that would change this. They tell me it's important, bad guys show up to stop them, but literally that's it. Unless you watched the shows and or read the books, this carries no weight.
And even then.
Thrawn is NOT A VILLAIN. At least according to how he was written originally. He is a reasonable man with great intellect and driven by flawless logic. He is NOT evil by default. He is only cruel when necessary, but that's kinda rare. Basically Sherlock Holmes without any of the addictions or social issues.
Yes he is a traditionalist, has his own (his alien native) very strict views on ethics and morality, but he is not your avarage "kill them for my amusement cos I gotz the powaaah" type of villain like the Emperor. He is kinda sorta authoritarian, but with very good reason. He never cared for the empire's petty squabbles, he wanted to unite everything to prepare for something far worse then the known galaxy has ever seen. His methods were, a bit over the top sometimes, but by his peoples code, ultimately kinda fair. You betrayed him, and your tribe eats Star Destroyer lazers for dinner as you watch on from orbit. You were told there would be consequences so, what did you expect?
At this point after what Disney had done to the SW universe, he would be a much better leader for the anarchistic shitshow that is the New Republic then whatever they have going on. The rebels have proven to be just that, a bunch of terrorists, who can't establish a better system than what was already in place.
The characters may be accurate to a cartoon level (I wouldn't really know for sure) but there is no rime or reason to their actions on a grown-up level. In the cartoons which I have seen very little of, it always made more sense than this.
The xposition and writing is on the level of filmschool rejects. They clearly couldn't afford to show, not tell, and I'm being very generous here, because most likely they just talentless shits.
Basically every action scene looks like the "we have x at home" meme, or a wish dot com cheap copy of the original.
There's are almost full on sequences "borrowed" from previous movies and games. The fighting is stiff, slow, I've seen much better coreo from 400 pound kids on youtube with broomsticks than what they do here, and the quick cheap cuts don't help it either. The end-of-first episode fight should always be epic, memorable, something to pull you in and make you watch the next episode! Well, they just made it bland and boring and pointless.
The sets look cheap, the CG looks outright laughable by todays standards, to a level where I can totally seriously say "I could do better" and I wouldn't be lying (remember, this my daily job). Most scenes are just flooded with light and bloom and DoF, so you can't see shit apart from the actor and a couple of things they actually made in the prop department, or so dark that you can't see more than 5 pixels in the middle of the screen.
Combined with the ledwall-background, which is so aweful that it makes Skyrim's graphics look futuristic... It's clear that instead of spending more and refining this tech for quality, they spent less and "refined" for cost. Everything is shot in a way to require as little post as possible, making the cheapness even more obvious because the camera angles just feel wrong. Mando and later shows suffered from this led wall crap, but this is by far the worst offender.
The reused props from unrelated movies like The 5th Element and the winged (wingless here) gold ball from Harry Potter??? makes me want to turn it off and watch those greats instead of this mess.
And you know, no one would bat an eyelid at the terrible cheapness of this whole thing if the writing was any good. But it just isn't. It's like 20 seconds from a cartoon meant for 5 year olds made into an hour long bland nothing. No wonder the already small viewership has fallen off a cliff more than on any previous show.
I can give it one point up over the previous SW shows. At least the girls are cute, and the villain looks the part!
I'm not going to rate the acting too harshly just yet. It's stiff, every character conveys a single emotion all the time (cheerful, rebellious, stoic...) but that's expected. Every single show ever needed at least a good 2-5 eps for the actors to find their groove, I'll give them time. I know I shouldn't cos they won't improve. Mr.NotDarth (RIP) is already the top character and actor in this and will remain so throughout. I'd watch a show about him, but as he has passed away, we will never get that spinoff... Not that I'd trust anyone in Hollywood to do it justice anyways.
@Shadow Reaper TLDR.: Sorry mate, I don't think this is what you were looking for.
And now for some fan ficktion.
You need to establish stakes. The show could've opened with something that does, like the following I came up with in 2 minutes while on bottle duty.
Scene:
COLD OPEN
Bg dark and out of focus for the rest of this scene
Extreme close up of the SW equivalent of an ipad screen, it's filling the view fully, edges not visible yet
Camera slowly pulls out (zoom out) as this plays out
Slowly a military style map grid becomes recognizable, with easily readable simple icons for planets (systems) with recognizable name tags like Coruscant and Bespin shown in green or blue, while icons of imperial ships (ISDs, TIEs) in red, at first turning one planet red, than more appear from that planet icon. They spread from planet to planet like a virus, turning everything red (you can jazz this up with allied fighter icons and such blinking out of existence along with some imperials to signify the process of battles happening)
Once far enough zoomed out, near the top edge of the screen it reads "Tactical Simulation"
When everything turns red, the screen changes to a large text centered on screen blinking "Success chance: 93%" or "Simulation Successful" , something along those lines.
As we continued to zoom out, the hands holding the tablet come into view.
Blue skin, with white sleeves!!
Cam stops.
Focus shifts, revealing the reflection on the tablet: two red eyes and a blue face with a faint smile, barely visible.
CUT TO BLACK, MAIN TITLE
There. I've just written a scene that would make 55% of the audience cum like the Luke reveal did, and would make the rest interested enough to stay.
Because now we have stakes! We know WHY it's important to find the guy. A 20-30 second scene at most. No talking, no forced exposition or VO neccessary. You are SHOWN what's at stake.
Even if you can't read, the red overwhelming the blue and then the red eyes will tell you everything you need to know.
If you really really need to make sure that even the avarage american recognizes that this is The Thrawn the rest of the show goes on about, you can throw his name on the tablet screen somewhere on the sides with text like "authorization code: Thrawn" or something dumb like that, revealed in english at the end as the focus shifts. It really shouldn't be neccessary.
As for the texts on the ipad, all in Aurebesh ofc, with fancy subtitles that switch from aur to english, or you can do the letters flipping to English on the ipad screen itself, that's just a design choice. (cos fan service, but you gotta make it clear for everyone)
BTW running sims is in line with Thrawn's obsession of pre-planning everything, in the books there is a scene where his CO witnesses him running a sim like this. Small fan service for the book nerds, and it makes perfect sense for his character.
