George Lucas on Star Wars old and new

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The Washington Post has a new profile of George Lucas, where he talks about Lucasfilm, the old movies, the new movie (he hasn’t seen it yet,) and his reasoning for Han shooting second:

“Han Solo was going to marry Leia, and you look back and say, ‘Should he be a cold-blooded killer?’ ” Lucas asks. “Because I was thinking mythologically — should he be a cowboy, should he be John Wayne? And I said, ‘Yeah, he should be John Wayne.’ And when you’re John Wayne, you don’t shoot people [first] — you let them have the first shot. It’s a mythological reality that we hope our society pays attention to.”

There’s no doubt in my mind he’s said something like that many times, but even I can’t spare any more brainspace for these things. They are what they are, and sometimes being healthy about Star Wars means you just have to shrug.

On “the divorce” with Star Wars and Lucasfilm:

“There is no such thing as working over someone’s shoulder,” he says. “You’re either the dictator or you’re not. And to do that would never work, so I said ‘I’m going to get divorced.’ . . . I knew that I couldn’t be involved. All I’d do is make them miserable. I’d make myself miserable. It would probably ruin a vision — J.J. has a vision, and it’s his vision.”

Later, he compares it to a grown child getting married, and admits “it is what it is and it’s a conscious decision that I made.”

In any case, it’s a nice profile that doesn’t avoid the unavoidable, but does the job of catching us up with George.

The Force Awakens roundup: Speculating on the Rey-Kylo connection

kylo-finn-reyI don’t generally link to speculation, but ComicBook’s Lucas Siegel has an interesting theory on Rey and Kylo Ren. I buy them as siblings, but I don’t like the theory that the two are actual twins. Just look at the actors – the age difference between Daisy Ridley and Adam Driver is far too obvious. But Siegel’s theory is more about the idea of their roles mirroring each other. (Look at the costuming if nothing else.) Even if he does bring up The Clone Wars’ bizarro Mortis arc.

Empire is out in the U.K. (I’m not sure about the U.S., given that I’m avoiding retailers like the plague at the moment) and there are a few new bits bits of information that didn’t (shocker) make Empire’s own perfunctory online coverage, including that Snoke was “was critical in the seduction of [Kylo?] Ren to the dark side.” Fair warning that this is via Star Wars News Net, aka the former Star Wars 7 News, but it’s almost all quotes with little interpretation. (Avoid the comments, though.)

→ A new Disney Channel featurette that focuses on Rey, as well as giving us a few glimpses of new scenes.

→ Afraid of spoilers? There’s a Chrome extension that can help you. Good luck with that. (Here’s the closest thing I have to a spoiler policy.)

The Force Awakens soundtrack track names revealed

tfa-soundtrackThe track listing for The Force Awakens soundtrack was up on French Amazon last night. It’s no longer there this morning, but I did see it there… It had some weird capitalization choices, so I am a bit wary of it, but there are no real red flags of fakeness in it, and we’re close enough to release that chances are Amazon was actually accurate.

I’ve black-barred the Making Star Wars version (they fixed the capitalization issues – ComicBook has the original) below. There are possible spoilers here, though nothing on the level of ‘Qui-Gon’s Noble End.’

Continue reading “The Force Awakens soundtrack track names revealed”

Today in The Force Awakens: Meet the planets

tfa-c1-01-falcon-castleEmpire today revealed the names of three planets from The Force Awakens. Takodana looks to be the jungle world where Maz Kanata’s castle is. D’Qar may be the home of the Resistance Base. The third, Hosnian Prime, is a mystery, though a Hosnian system was mentioned in Lost Stars.

As for a fourth location, copies of Empire are out in the wild, and there is a map which contains a Starkiller Base Origin Point. (It moves! Shit.) There’s some speculation floating around about the Base’s origin perhaps being Ilum. But why is Rakata Prime, a planet that apparently originates in Knights of the Old Republic, on the map? Could it be TFA’s Dantooine, a planet that gets mentioned but never seen, or will it meet a more sinister fate?

(For what it’s worth, Pablo says the map was created for The Force Awakens Visual Dictionary, one of the December 18th releases.)

→ Mike Cooper at Eleven-ThirtyEight figures out just how much of The Force Awakens we’ve seen. Today’s spot brings it up to 5:43 minutes, so please calm down about being ‘spoiled’ by officially released footage.

→ Entertainment Weekly’s Anthony Breznican talks about BB-8 in the first of four videos. (Nothing here really struck me as anything we don’t already know, but if you’re not glued to the internet, there may be something here for you.)

John Boyega hasn’t seen The Force Awakens yet, while Gwendoline Christie would like to go dancing as Captain Phasma.

→ Google will now translate Aurebesh, because why not.

Today in The Force Awakens: It’s officially PG-13

A new Poe Dameron image from Empire. This looks to be part of the scene we saw filmed in SDCC's behind-the-scenes reel.
A new Poe Dameron image from Empire. This looks to be part of the scene we saw being filmed in the behind-the-scenes reel from SDCC.
The Force Awakens is rated PG-13 for “sci-fi action violence,” per filmratings.com. It’s only the second Star Wars to be rated above a PG, after Revenge of the Sith – although to be fair, the PG-13 rating didn’t even exist until 1984. (And I personally doubt this one will have anything to match extra crispy Anakin.)

→ Box office tracking estimates for the film came out today, and they are, as you might expect, pretty nuts. Oh, and it’s selling a lot of stuff.

→ If you really love hyperbole, Entertainment Weekly wants you to start thinking about The Force Awakens’ Oscar chances. Uhh, okay guys.

→ Yet another featurette, this time on BB-8, is coming to the Disney Channel on Sunday. Looking a bit further ahead, Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill will be among the guests on Graham Norton’s Christmas show.