Seto Kaiba
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Posts posted by Seto Kaiba
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12 minutes ago, Raikkonen said:
The turning point was Force Awakens, at the moment of the "a bigger death star" that just sucks energy out of a star, then shoots a beam that precisely splits into different directions to pinpoint a variety of planets, and it's all visible from the ground of another planet. Right there, at the cinema, I leaned forward and quietly said "What ******* am I watching?"
As a casual Star Wars enjoyer, breaking points like this are a bit beyond what I can properly understand.
I've never been invested in the deep lore of the Expanded Universe so most of what gets the fandom upset goes right over my head. I'm rather happy to just take these stories as they come and weigh them on their individual merits. (I'll spare everyone the engineer's rant about diverging vs. collimating beams.)
Most of what I see when I look at the flaws in Disney-era Star Wars is the new heads at LucasFilm struggling to get to grips with what their audience wants from Star Wars. They're still at the point of building stories around existing characters and set pieces they know (or think) the fans already like instead of considering what makes a Star Wars story fun and engaging. The Acolyte is hardcore pandering to fans of the Jedi, but it's kind of dull because the Jedi themselves aren't relatable or interesting characters.
12 minutes ago, Raikkonen said:Since then, I'm relieved I'm no longer under it's spell, and saved myself a lot money and space. 😁
As long as everyone's doing what's right for them as an individual, it's all good. 👍
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18 hours ago, Big s said:
Doom was bad, but nothing beats that house of the dead movie.
True, Uwe Boll's gleeful incompetence in the director's seat made him the undisputed king of awful adaptations. His schlock's usually unwatchable because it's bad on every level.
Andzrej Bartkowiak's Doom was undeniably a bad movie, but it was a fun bad movie because it was still competently produced despite every single creative decision that went into it being wrong.
Borderlands looks like it's shaping up to be another one of those competently produced, but creatively tone-deaf, adaptations that could best be described as "entertainingly wrong".
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18 minutes ago, Raikkonen said:
Star Wars brand entered religious status quite some time ago. Either don't believe in it anymore or you feel obligated to somehow defend it.
Man, they weren't kidding... the prequels really DO have a meme for everything!
Seriously though, there seem to be plenty of Star Wars fans willing to find and acknowledge both the good and the bad in pre- and post-Disney material.
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9 hours ago, Beltane70 said:
Are you a masochist or something, Seto? I dropped High Speed Etoile after the third episode and this is coming from someone who rarely drops a series.
No, I'm more of a sadist. 😅
As to why I haven't dropped HIGHSPEED Etoile... well, I'm something of a completionist by nature and dropping a series partway through has never really felt right to me. Those rare occasions where I have dropped a title partway were because the story did something so heinous, offensive, or stupid that I couldn't bear to look at it anymore. Some of my favorite titles are shows that had a rough start but later hit their stride and became something amazing, the most recent example being Star Wars's Andor, so there's also an element of me hoping one of these scrubs will surprise me. Even a badly written title can sometimes be so gloriously insane that it becomes entertaining in an entirely inappropriate way, like what happened to Birdie Wing.
The few anime titles I've dropped partway were mostly because they took their fanservice to genuinely creepy and questionable places (e.g. Strike Witches, Stratos4) or because the story became such a dumpster fire I simply couldn't pick it up without cringing.
The only title I've dropped this year so far is Tadaima, Okaeri... which I dropped mainly because the show's story comes off as an excuse plot wrapped around the author's fetish and because the series fumbles its own premise so hard chasing that fetish that it's actually kind of offensive and laughable at the same time. I'm on the fence about Mushoku Tensei, since its otherwise capably-written isekai fantasy story has several truly revolting moments of sex offender behavior by its protagonist that've left me seriously thinking someone ought to call the cops on the light novel's author.
HIGHSPEED Etoile is unmistakably bad, for sure. It's not So Bad It's Good or So Bad It's Awful... it's just kind of there doing a bad enough job to be bland and insipid and boring while not actually being offensive. If I had to pick a word for it, it's misguided. It could've been an interesting racing anime if the writers had any idea how to make racing interesting, but instead it's a story where racing happens and the protagonist isn't really engaged with it. I'm watching a disaster unfold in slow motion, and the suspense is killing me... especially since the studio animating it is the same one that did the 3D animation for Initial D and Initial D Second Stage. It's Studio A-CAT's first ever original work, and probably their last if this keeps up.
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Each version of the story has its virtues and its flaws... I'm just glad that we're finally going to start seeing global releases that are on par with what the Japanese domestic market gets in terms of feature content.
Hopefully this and the Macross II Kickstarter run by Animeigo set the tone, and we see a similar effort made for the releases of Macross 7, Macross Zero, Macross Frontier, and Macross Delta. 😀
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Spring '24 is limping into the home stretch...
I have to admit, I'm kind of upset with Bartender: Glass of God. Its final story arc predictably decided to delve into the faux-philosophical advice-giving bartender's own trauma, and it decided to do so by trivializing depression and suicide.
SpoilerRyu's hidden trauma is that one of his customers committed suicide a long time ago, and he believes it's his fault... with the implication being, and the rest of the cast stating outright, that he believes if he'd served a different drink he could have prevented that suicide.
Kinda wondering how many of the characters in this show are alcoholics... most people don't have a list of dozens of cocktails they want to try, or go bar-hopping multiple nights a week.
Oddly, The Irregular at Magic High School seems to have become one of the more interesting titles this season thanks to the latest story arc having a very different focus from the previous two. Instead of focusing on Tatsuya being the most broken MFer around and curbstomping literally everyone who looks at him funny, they're focusing on worldbuilding and the larger setting. There's some actually pretty good stuff coming out of it now related to the international balance of power based on strategic magic, the implications that magic's importance to the military has for education, the pitfalls of relying on conventional/standardized measures of academic/athletic ability to measure a person's worth and how those can miss exceptional talents, and even the ethical and practical concerns of autonomous unmanned weapons as a substitute for living soldiers. Seasons one and two did not thrill me, but this has me about ready to start looking up the light novel.
At the very least, HIGHSPEED Etoile remains a completely irredeemable turd... there's something to be said for its consistency, if nothing else.
This latest episode confirms explicitly that Rin's useless and that they would actually do better to take her out of the car and let the car's AI drive. After she gets in an accident and passes out during a qualifying round, the car's AI driving autonomously without her sets new lap records. 🤣
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Called it... this is going to be Doom movie levels of bad. 🤣
That kind of makes me want to see it, just to be behold a beautiful disaster unfolding.
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3 minutes ago, grogall said:
Sorry only ever watched S.D.F. Macross, is Macross Plus the second part of the series and was there a box relies for S.D.F. Macross?
Macross Plus is the fifth title overall, but the second title chronologically in the main Macross timeline... the other three are a movie of the original series, an epilogue OVA, and an alternate universe story. There are quite a lot of titles set after Macross Plus though.
There's not, AFAIK, a mdoern box set for the original series available outside Japan due to it having a different licensee.
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25 minutes ago, Cowboy17v2 said:
Accusing me of "performative" anger and basing it on "False" information, and proceed to imply I am at worst lying, or at best ignorant, of how VAT works - and then you cite an example that is COMPLETELY wrong itself. The Price on All the Anime's site IS with VAT included, so its not "228.95" as you say it is. How do I know?
In your haste to post more of your performative outrage, you misread my post at several different points, but rather than getting into that let's just dig into the meat of this.
AllTheAnime's UK storefront does appear to have updated the list price to be inclusive of VAT earlier today. It previously showed a price of 99.99 GBP which was not inclusive of VAT, and others here based complaints about "unfair" pricing based on that. If you'd read the thread, you'd know I did exactly the same check you did just yesterday and got that different result. 🙄
Even if the 149.99 GBP price listed as MSRP on the corrected page is now inclusive of VAT, the price point difference between US and UK sales is still negligible at a mere $10.59 US. 149.99 GBP is equivalent to $190.80 at current exchange rates, and the US full retail price would be $201.39 with average sales tax. With the Crunchyroll store discount, that trivial advantage reverses itself into the US edition being about $9.55 cheaper at $181.25 excl. any other discounts or coupons. Effectively, we're still at price parity here across regions, so your outrage still rings false.
25 minutes ago, Cowboy17v2 said:I can't believe this company has so many people willing to white knight it. What have they done to earn this tenacious defense?
Have you considered that it might be that your argument has some gaping, Zentradi mothership-sized holes in it instead?
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7 minutes ago, Cowboy17v2 said:
the anger is that the msrp is ALREADY high AND like 50 bucks more than what UK customers are paying, and please dont tell me about membership discounts and coupon codes, especially since they won't always be applicable. Also the ova edition will NOT be available later, so buy it now at our absurd high price!
Sorry, but no. This "anger" is motsly just disingenuous performative outrage from people who were too lazy to read or stubbornly determined to ignore reality.
Yes, MSRP is high. It's a Limited Edition set. That's normal... you might not like it, but it's normal for that kind of product.
Yes, MSRP is more than the special limited-time discounted "early bird" price... but that's true in all of the regions. The pricing is effectively the same in all regions both at MSRP and after the limited time "early bird" discounts. The UK MSRP listed on AllTheAnime's site is 149.99 GBP, or approximately $191 US... but that doesn't include VAT, which bumps that price to $228.95 compared to the US average price with tax being approximately $201.39. The discounted pricing is effectively at parity too, with US consumers paying just about $160 in that limited time pricing while UK and French customers are paying about $154. The US customers actually have a slight advantage in that discounted pricing for members at Crunchyroll's store is an all-the-time discount rather than a temporary one.
It's true that there won't be an independent release of the OVA version immediately, but the distributor's going to want to milk this license for all they can so it's a fairly safe bet we will indeed see a separate Blu-ray set with the OVAs later at a more agreeable price point.
7 minutes ago, Cowboy17v2 said:This is some predatory bullshit, and I'm shocked that there's this many people leaping to its defense simply because we waited a long time for Macross in the states.
It's Limited Edition merch... it is inherently predatory bullshit driven by FOMO.
That said, there are a lot of complaints like yours that are seemingly based on false or incomplete information or seem designed to be disingenuous... like complaining that the US discounts are "limited time" when the same is true for the other regions too and transparently stated directly on AllTheAnime's website. 🙄
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1 hour ago, Mommar said:
We don't have VAT here, why would I take that into account of the base price?
Because it's functionally equivalent to the sales tax that would factor into the price of the goods if you purchased them in the US. It's a non-negotiable part of the final cost of the item paid by the consumer.
French law requires that applicable taxes be included in the advertised price of goods and services, so AllTheAnime's French online store includes the VAT in the advertised price. UK law does not require that, which is why the UK price looks lower than it actually is on checkout similar to how US prices don't include tax.
1 hour ago, Mommar said:Crunchyroll just decided to fleece us.
No, they didn't. 🤣
Crunchyroll's store has the Macross Plus box set listed at MSRP, but then has discounts that are applied automatically at checkout AND coupon codes advertised directly on their own website to further reduce the price to approximate parity with what European consumers are paying.
If they're trying to fleece us by doing that, they're not doing a very good job of it.
Seriously, this accusation is just silly on the face of it and people need to stop making it.
It's OK if you got sticker shock over the bullsh*t prices of Limited Edition merch. Limited Edition pricing is inherently exploitative because it's amortizing production costs across smaller production runs and trying to cash in on FOMO. Nobody is forcing you to buy it, and it'll be available later (or at the same time in select markets) without the extras at a much more agreedable price. There's nothing about this price is that is at all unusual for a limited-edition anime box set with these kind of extra features. Those prices have ALWAYS been steep, especially in the Japanese domestic market.
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As a casual Star Wars viewer, I definitely don't feel like the trailers for The Acolyte warned me to lower my expectations for the series.
IMO, both the trailers and the extended preview for The Acolyte made the series look far more action-focused and exciting than what we actually got. They also made it look a LOT more professional-feeling and polished than the finished product by showcasing the action rather than the writing and omitting the truly cringeworthy aspects of the scenes they'd used for the promotional materials like Mae's unintentionally hilarious tendency to pose dramatically and challenge Jedi to "attack [her] with all [their] strength".
SpoilerCan we take a moment and appreciate how truly imbecilic the writing behind our antagonist is?
Mae's entire MO is to walk up to a Jedi Master - a highly-disciplined warrior-monk raised by a monastic order with a philosophy of nonaggression and technical pacifism - and pose dramatically before challenging them to attack her for no reason.
The showrunners expect us to be able to take Mae seriously while she does this, despite also showing that even the characters in the story find this behavior either laughable or completely absurd.
4 minutes ago, Duke Togo said:Not to cross franchises, but the Jedi come off as almost Vulcan in this show. There's an air of superiority and righteousness about them that is not flattering, which I think is very intentional. I don't think we're supposed to like them very much. Though, I do like Sol a lot.
I had the same thought.
Specifically, the Jedi in The Acolyte remind me a lot of the Vulcans from Star Trek: Enterprise. They exhude that same arrogant belief in their own superiority, they show the same unwillingness to consider evidence that contradicts their own conclusions until hard evidence leaves their view in tatters, and they show similar cracks in their emotional reserve where irritation leaks out into snide and snippy responses when one of their perceived inferiors isn't toeing the line. Master Sol is no exception to most of this too. Look at how readily he dismisses Yord's views out of hand except when they align to his own desires.
Lee Jung-jae's delivery as Master Sol reminds me a lot of Gary Graham's performance as Minister Soval later in Enterprise's run after his character's racist views toward Humans had softened.
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30 minutes ago, Cowboy17v2 said:
I am not happy at all about this, having waited around a year since the initial news only to find this extremely expensive and a good 50 dollars more than what the UK is paying for it.
If you use the coupon codes previously mentioned, the price difference is only about $19, not $50.
Way too many people here are blowing this out of proportion.
Limited Edition releases are ALWAYS stupidly expensive, especially for anime, and most of the price difference people are seeing is because the US release is being sold at MSRP if you don't use the discount codes and because the UK price posted doesn't include VAT until you actually put it in your cart.
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17 minutes ago, Mommar said:
No, I actually haven't forgotten VAT. Or the fact they add on other taxes if the item isn't produced inside their borders. Really, it SHOULD be even cheaper. Which means Crunchyroll are fleecing us even more.
You clearly did, considering you forgot to account for it in the final price you converted to US dollars.
As for why it's so expensive, I think the obvious answer is this is a low volume product by dint of being limited edition. They have to amortize the costs for licensing all of that additional material in the purchase price If they want to make a profit.
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43 minutes ago, Mommar said:
LOW for engineering/manufacture of the toys is significantly different. And All-the-anime are selling it for the equivalent of $127 (which is still too high for a few discs and a book). Crunchyroll are fleecing us.
Eh... not s'much. You're forgetting that those European prices aren't all-inclusive either.
You've forgotten the Value Added Tax. The base price might say 99.99 GBP, but that's 119.99 GBP with VAT factored in, or about $153.47 at the current exchange rate. The French are paying 139.99 euro for the same, which is $152.52. (VAT's 20% in the UK and France, if you were wondering... while US sales tax averages 5-7%.) And that's only considering the "early bird special" pricing with limited unit numbers in smaller markets... the suggested retail price that they list is actually almost exactly we'd be paying without discounts (~$190).
Crunchyroll is basically charging non-subscribers a premium to order it through their store... but if you actually use the discount codes the price delta between what we're paying and what our friends in Europe are paying is only about $19 US. That's hardly extortionate. (Esp. when you consider how much more they likely had to pay for the legacy English audio tracks.)
(For anyone wondering, I did go in and set up dummy orders to check the actual prices... I used 10 Downing Street and 57 Rue de Varenne as addresses to check if there'd be shipping costs, it seems we all get free shipping out of this extravagant price tag.)
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4 minutes ago, Mommar said:
How to convince a fan to not buy something... make it $100 too expensive.
Considering how many folks here cheerfully plonk down comparable (and larger) sums for the latest DX Chogokin and Arcadia offerings, I'm not sure this could be called "$100 too expensive" for most.
And there's going to be a regular edition coming out a bit after the "Ultimate" one at a far more reasonable price point anyway.
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1 hour ago, jvmacross said:
She may re-appear in flashbacks when the show is ready to reveal the terrible deeds the 4 Jedi did to Mae or whatever those people are...
Even if she does, there's no payoff.
Master Indara's less a character than she is a plot device, and it's pretty clear they only cast Carrie-Anne Moss to play her for the sake of the trailers to convince prospective xennial viewers this'd be a spectacular martial arts feature like The Matrix. (Which is a REALLY dated reference if you think about it. They were leaning on borrowed gloss from a TWENTY-FIVE YEAR OLD movie to sell this series to us.)
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10 minutes ago, Chronocidal said:
Funny, with the current exchange rate.. that's about the same price as the new release.
... so it is.
$179.66 at the current rate of 1:155.85, so if you get all the discounts the US release is slightly cheaper than the Japanese one... and you won't have to pay another $40 or so on top in shipping.
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10 minutes ago, Chewie said:
Did it stack and give you 30% off or just the 15?
It's 15 off the discounted price if you stack it with the Crunchyroll member discount, as far as I can tell.
Crunchyroll's member discount shaves $19 off the top, bringing it to $170.99 plus tax and with free shipping.
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Well, I placed my order... the Crunchyroll member discount and coupon code took a neat little chunk off the top and the shipping's free.
The asking price didn't seem that outrageous to me. Then again, my standards have probably been skewed pretty badly by years and years of paying the already hefty prices fans in Japan are shelling out for "limited edition" media PLUS international shipping. 😅
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By sheer coincidence, I noticed a minor call forward in The Acolyte's first episode.
The planet that...
Spoiler... Osha ends up marooned on when the Republic prison transport she's on suffers a prison break and crashes...
... first appeared in Star Wars: the Clone Wars as the setting for a brief story arc where the son of an assassinated Separatist senator derailed peace talks on Mandalore and tried to hire the Death Watch to assassinate Count Dooku as revenge.
That episode just happened to be next on my watch-through of Clone Wars after watching The Acolyte.
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Goin' in for number two...
SpoilerSo, this time we're starting out on a planet that unfortunately shares its name with a scam-tier depilatory product.
There's a Jedi temple here in... what appears to be a fairly rundown neighborhood even by the standards of the galaxy that's 90% Wretched Hives™️ by volume. The local street urchins apparently have nothing better to do than bully the unintelligible door droid at the behest of strange women in chainmail. Predictably, there's no security in Jedi-land despite the temple seemingly being in a slum so Mae is able to walk right in without incident and without anyone remarking on her presence.
For all Disney+'s usual polish, I really cannot get past how there's this weird imbalance of production values where set design, wardrobe design, and the writing make this feel a lot lower budget than it is.
Even though I didn't care for Obi-Wan Kenobi or The Book of Boba Fett, both were still very polished-looking, professional-feeling undertakings that felt like their main flaw was just an unnecessary or underdeveloped premise. The Acolyte weirdly feels like it lacks that polish and professional tone... like it's a high-budget fan film.
SpoilerApparently nobody had the heart to tell Ms. Headland that Mae's thing where the dramatically poses and challenges someone to "Attack me with all your strength" both looks and sounds incredibly stupid. Mae seems to be such an edgelord-y fanfic character that I'm waiting for her to teleport behind someone and say "Nothing personal, kid...".
In a minor change from her previous reception where she was laughed at for this intensely cringeworthy public behavior, this new Jedi master just ignores her. Then when she loses her patience and attacks him, he just no-sells all of her attacks through the Force. Kind of feels like Carrie-Anne Moss's character's fight should've gone that way too. If you can just make an invisible wall with the Force, why bother fighting someone hand to hand?
Osha's back on the Jedi ship, and teaches a Padawan the most important technical support technique of all... "turn it off and on again".
There's that idiot plot again, though. Master Sol and Yord have a quick debate over trusting Osha... with neither of them acknowledging the elephant in the room that neither has any kind of proof to support their viewpoint. Yord believes Osha killed a Jedi Master despite an airtight alibi and only anecdotal evidence. Sol unconditionally trusts her despite having no actual proof of her innocence either. His circular reasoning WRT her guilt aside, Yord actually makes some sensible arguments that Master Sol ignores in full. So Master Sol takes a business call with his seaweed-colored colleague who fails to note that Osha has gone from "had a sister, confirmed dead" to "has a sister, missing and formerly presumed dead" without any actual evidence.
Believing whatever you're told without evidence seems to be a bit of a theme with this series.
SpoilerConveniently, a suspect matching the description of Osha - who has been in custody the entire time - has broken into a Jedi temple.
For some reason, the Jedi are perfectly willing to accept this airtight alibi... but the equally airtight alibi they had at the start of the series just didn't count for some reason?
Sol's more senior Jedi Master friend jumps seamlessly from admitting that Osha has an airtight alibi for the attacks to wanting to put this girl they've wrongfully arrested in harm's way because "she might be an asset".
Yeah, Master Sol... don't bother to tell Yord that you have evidence exonerating Osha, just tell him you're not taking the prisoner to Coruscant. That's great communication. Then pull rank and belittle him.
OK, I'll admit it... I asked for non-heroic Jedi and the The Acolyte delivered exactly what I literally asked for.
I was just expecting something more... fun? Personable? Capable of displaying more emotions than "deadpan" and "dull surprise"? These Jedi are non-heroic, but it's mostly just because they're awful judges of character and kind of sh*tty people. Which is realistic, I guess, it's just not very fun or interesting.
SpoilerMae goes to see Qimir, who is apparently sleeping off a night of heavy drinking with the door open in a shop whose owner he either murdered or at least mugged. That's an awfully trusting criminal. Mae drops that she's got three more Jedi to kill, including Mr. No-Sell, and that she has to off one of them without using a weapon in order to make her master happy. She asks Qimir for poison and gets a flask of ominously glowing something or other and a speech about the Jedi's philosophy.
's it just me, or does Osha have a shoshinsha tattoo?
Master Sol asks Osha if she believes that Mae is behind Indara's murder... and somehow absolutely nobody is considering the remote possibility that there could be a totally unrelated person who just happens to look similar to Osha and her believed-to-be-dead sister Mae in the galaxy's 100 quintillion person population. Master Sol apparently feels a bit guilty about Mae's "death", despite claiming he's made peace with it.
Mae shows up at Torbin's just as Sol and co. are rocking up to the front gate, and starts guilt-tripping him over some crime he's supposedly committed and offering him "absolution".
Osha has a vision and takes off in a different direction, and Torbin straight-up chugs the poison before anyone can get to him. That she beats them to Torbin kind of begs the question of why the rest of the Jedi on site took such a roundabout way to Torbin's room. Osha, of course, has to immediately behave in a maximally incriminating manner by entering the room with the fresh corpse and touching evidence. (Naturally, the thing to do with a phial of what you think might be poison is stick that sh*t right under your nose and take a DEEP breath...)
This really is just a full-on f***ing idiot plot.
This story can ONLY occur because everyone in it is behaving like the biggest idiot possible at all times.
SpoilerYord enters the room through the same door as Osha and calmly announces that Osha didn't do it, because he was watching her the entire time. Why he didn't seem to feel compelled to stop her from tampering with evidence at a murder scene is another matter entirely. He was conveniently killed by a poison native to Osha and Mei's home planet, despite this apparently not being it.
Yord proposes a reasonable plan to capture the imposter in the apothecary shop that the poison had to have come from, and the Padawan quite sensibly proposes that it'd be easier to just put the civilian they wrongfully arrested and are holding indefinitely without trial in danger by having her go talk to the potential accomplice-to-murder in an environment full of poisons. Neither Master Sol nor the other Jedi in the group see anything wrong with effectively strongarming this civilian prisoner into assisting with an arrest of a dangerous suspect.
Seriously. What the hell.
If this is how the Jedi protected the peace in the Republic for thousands of years, it's amazing it took another 113 years for them to get Order 66'd.
SpoilerOsha, for her part, goes in wearing a shawl she buys off the street to conceal the fact that the wire she's wearing is a droid's head the size of her fist.
Qimir outs himself to someone he either taks a while to notice isn't Mae or notices right away isn't Mae but feels like monologuing about his having provided a murder weapon to Mae to... and Master Sol shows his sagacity and infinite capacity for logic by... oh wait he doesn't do any of those things. He offers to let Qimir off with just a warning despite Qimir having just confessed to being an accessory to at least one RECENT murder.
There it is... the obligatory "I have a bad feeling about this".
SpoilerSol, buddy, if you don't want her to confront her sister why are you keeping her with you instead of sending her back to the ship?
They have a brief back and forth about grief and revenge which is dialog as flat and lifeless as the pair of wooden planks delivering it, and then Osha drops the bombshell of having figured out Mae's hit list. It's four Jedi stationed on her homeworld 16 years ago: the already dead Master Indara and Master Torbin, the token wookiee, and Master Sol himself.
Mae is two thirds of the way to officially being a serial killer, and our boy Master Sol is telling Osha to have faith in her. His confrontation with her mere seconds of screen time later is a little more lively, with a sense of quiet horror that she's murdered two people. Her oh-so-witty reply is to try an overly elaborate kung-fu move that he stops with one hand without even moving. So we get another meticulously choreographed but surprisingly dull fight scene where Mae is just swinging for the fences 24/7 and the Jedi is seemingly bored and barely moving. This fight does feel slightly more lively than Carrie-Anne Moss's completely phoned in performance, but mainly because Master Sol uses a few throws instead of just blocking. He also stealthily disarmed her. Mae has a breakdown after Sol reveals Osha is alive and Yord confirms it.
Osha actually blunders into Mae mid-chase as she's trying to escape, but misses her shot with the stungun by a country mile. The Jedi decide to just stare at her instead of chasing the violent offender getting away through the city.
Sol talks to his boss, and she wants to set up a council meeting.
Mae, meanwhile, goes right back to Qimir's place and tries to kill him right in front of the Jedi keeping watch. Somehow, they don't notice.
Jump cut to Khofar, a forest planet where the wookiee jedi lives. We get to see him scare off some scavengers trying to loot his home by roaring and using the Force to disarm them before snapping their gun like a twig. As establishing character moments go, that's pretty on-brand for a Wookiee.
On the whole, The Acolyte's second episode was definitely better than the first. It has all the same problems, but the plot feels at least a little more together and flows better from set piece to set piece. It's still an idiot plot, but it's no longer an incoherent one.
If it were handled differently - like having civilian law enforcement trying to solve these murders instead of the Jedi - The Acolyte could be an interesting story about hunting a killer out for revenge across the stars. Its main narrative flaw is that most of its cast are Jedi. They've got some good actors here but their performances come across as wooden and boring because they're playing characters for whom displays of emotion are fundamentally out of character. By the same token, the antagonist's performance comes across just as bland and insipid despite a capable actress the character is limited to the extremes of just a few emotions like anger and sorrow. So it leaves just two people in the story thus far who actually behave like relatable people, so the performances don't really shine because they're sharing every scene with flat characters.
The Jedi just aren't relatable as characters. Audiences can relate to Din Djarin's desire to protect the Child, to Boba Fett's desire for a better life, to Obi-Wan's lingering guilt over Anakin, or to Cassian Andor's smoldering discontent with the injustices he suffers. There's nothing to relate to in Sol, Indara, Yord, etc. thus far. Even Osha's participation in the story seems little more than incidental.
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All right... wading into this one while the fine folks from animal control de-bat my attic. (No, that isn't a euphemism for anything.)🤣
SpoilerSpoilerA hundred years before the rise of the Empire, it is a time of peace.
The Jedi Order and the Galactic Republic have
prospered for centuries without war.
Then, in what sense is this Star Wars? Star Wars without wars is just stars... and that's either astronomy or zombie bait.
SpoilerBut in the dark corners of the galaxy, a powerful few
learn to use the Force in secret.
So... the Jedi? As noted, they make up one ten-trillionth of the galactic population at most.
SpoilerOne of them, a lone assassin,
risks discovery to seek revenge....
*loud snoring noises*
You guys didn't even get the text fade right! It fades out twice as fast as the transition to the planetary atmosphere.
... we're in Japan? Did someone tell the Star Wars guys Ueda's a real place in Nagano? It doesn't look like the Urban Economic Development Association... too rural.
And we open with the titular character staring dramatically into the middle distance while dressed like they robbed a renaissance fair while in ninja cosplay. She's wearing a cloth mask, some kind of chest plate that looks like a single gargantuan lamellar scale, and ring mail... with what appears to be a purple bath towel on her head that's really the hood of an unwise purple knit robe. What the hell is the ring mail in aid of? She's fighting people with laser guns and laser swords that melt metal on contact.
Wow... we're right into it. 1:30 into the first episode and we're already at the fight scene that was featured in the teaser at The Phantom Menace's re-release. She walks right up to Carrie-Anne Moss's character in this dingy space pub, announces she has unfinished business with her, does a dramatic kung-fu pose, and says "Attack me with all your strength".
Well, the first casualty of this roaring rampage of revenge is my immersion. RIP, you were with us for only two minutes and just three lines of (intelligible) spoken dialog, but forever in our hearts.💀
Who wrote this crap? Oh... Leslye Headland, the executive producer, wrote this. Delightful. That bodes SO WELL for this show.
SpoilerThe only thing saving this scene is that literally everyone else present seems to think this is incredibly stupid and bust out laughing.
This leads directly to the fight from the teaser.
Seeing it now in full, the trailer's cut was far more exciting than the genuine article. One of the main things bringing it down is Carrie-Anne Moss's performance. She's totally phoning it in, in a very obvious way. There's pulling your punches, and there's making it painfully obvious you're pulling your punches. It's like watching a solo martial arts demonstration by Amandla Stenberg that just happens to be taking place in the same space as Carrie-Anne Moss unenthusiastically doing a warmup before a jog. Moss comes across not as tranquil or calm and collected, but as bored until she's blindsided by being killed by a single throwing knife that appears to have no edge and to have only penetrated about a quarter of an inch. That has to be poison, otherwise this is in barely in "does it need stitches?" territory.
After all that fuss and being so prominent in the advertising, Carrie-Anne Moss...
Spoiler... is only in this series for six minutes and fifty-two seconds.
She doesn't even make it to the title card!
That first scene on the ship after the title card? The droid in the hallway looks like a prop nicked from an episode of Red Dwarf or a fan film! Actually, the same could be said for the whole scene.
Shield generator repairs on the outside of the ship... don't they have droids for this? They had droids for this in the prequel trilogy. I do appreciate the attempt to tone down the incredibly racist asian caricature the Trade Federation was in the prequels though.
Oh no, a small fire provokes a dramatic flashback that causes our lead character to stare vacantly into the abyss for a while while remembered sound effects happen.
Can we briefly stop to appreciate that we have a character who is a repair technician on a ship whose owners don't care about workplace safety who is named Osha?
As in, Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
Naming wise, this is up there with the likes of Cad Bane, Moralo Eval, or Darth Sideous.
SpoilerThe ship is boarded by Jedi... who look goofy. Maybe it's the mustard colored tabard over the cream robe with the white cape, but the two of them honestly look like they wandered onto the wrong set from either a Lord of the Rings fan film or a revival of The Chronicles of Narnia.
Hey...that pointed I mentioned before gets raised. Only droids are supposed to be doing repairs on the outside of the hull in space. Apparently "Osha" is defying OSHA.
The Jedi starts to do a thing with his hand, and the crew immediately tell where her quarters are. Osha returns to her room to find the Jedi awkwardly squatting on her bunk it's clearly not a space he can vertically fit into to sit normally. I feel like this scene should've been rethought a bit so it doesn't look like this guy was waiting not more than 5 seconds between retakes to stand up?
Nobody's delivery here is believable. The whole interrogation scene is really stilted... and there's a throwaway line that's clearly meant to get the politically-motivated crowd involved.
We're doing the old "the suspect matches your description, even though it's literaly impossible for it to have been you" schtick. They even brought the bar owner, and arrest her even though they can't actually link her to the crime. (It's only possible for one person in a galaxy of 100 quintillion to look like her?)
Good lord, that droid looks like a Red Dwarf prop too... honestly, it's like a low-rent version of Kryten with an immobile face.
Wait... the ship that's leaving isn't the one that pulled up! What the hell.
So we get to see Master Sol at the Jedi temple... I can't help but feel that using the Force to open the door is a bit extra considering it's an automatic door AND there's a manual button.
Apparently the Jedi consider a single person's identification of the perpetrator by face alone to be "strong" evidence. It seems they don't actually care about justice, just about making an example of someone. How... heroic.
So apparently droid pilots are just built into the chairs... and can be turned off by talking to them? Nothing about this sequence of events makes sense... and this has to be the least secure prison ship imaginable. One has to wonder why the droid pilots haven't turned back on with the ship clearly out of control and crashing.
... so the Jedi went and picked up the escape pods from the prison ship, but didn't look into the actual crashed ship itself?
This seems to be an authentic idiot plot so far.
The story is only able to proceed because everyone involved (most of them Jedi) behaves in the stupidest manner possible.
SpoilerSo we've got Osha wandering around in the desert chasing herself... but she's hallucinating, and it's all very dramatic in a forced and uninteresting way.
We're even doing The Shining-style creepy twin rhyming.
The Republic had the time go go all the way to Carlac and pick up the escape pods and go all the way back to Coruscant with the prisoners and imprison them... why is this second trip necessary?
Blech, the wardrobe choices here... Master Sol is wearing a brown undershirt, a sage green shirt over that, then his mustard tabard, and a brown robe. The Padawan in the awful makeup is wearing salmon pink, cream, and mustard. It's like the wardrobe department's marching orders for Jedi were "dress this man like a mid-90's ad for a Taco Bell." The interior decoration is no better. We've got seafoam green walls, with white and red trim to match the white and red floors. Who picked these colors? I want to know who looked at this and said "Yes, that's exactly the look I am going for." This is like a spot for Ugliest Homes in America.
It really is remarkable how remarkably unlikeable all of these characters are.
SpoilerI'm calling it now, Osha is going to die. We're gonna see a Dahj and Soji Asha type situation.
"The Jedi live in a dream."
With the reverb on that voice, it sounds like the speaker lives in a plastic bucket.
It's somewhat satisfying to learn that speaker is, in fact, wearing a big plastic bucket... er... a helmet... on his head and THAT'S why he sounds like someone doing a bad Duke Nukem impression from the inside of a bucket. I'd call him Lord Buckethead, but that name is already taken by someone much saner.
Also... he talks about how the Acolyte kills without a weapon. Does... does he not count all the throwing knives as weapons? Who is he narrating this for? I know the Sith are edgelords supreme, but is he just standing on this cliff talking to himself or what? Does he have fourth wall awareness? Is he talking to the audience?
All in all... ugh. One episode down and I am already ready to call this one the worst of the Disney Star Wars shows so far.
It's not a slow start. There's a LOT going on here and a lot to unpack. It's just that all of it is nonsensical and it's packaged with some of the worst acting and writing I've seen since the prequel trilogy.
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Well, I'm game. This looks like it'll be a good set.👍
Super Macross Mecha Fun Time Discussion Thread!
in Movies and TV Series
Posted
That topic has come up a few times, usually in connection with Circle FANKY's Battleships of the Galaxy doujinshi and its questionable assessment of the ship's interior layout as a fanmade work.
I'm afraid I don't remember offhand who it was who posted it... but it was at least a year ago.