I agree with pretty much everything you said there.

I mean I’m only 6 books in but the YA nonsense is actually toned down as far as I’m concerned. The brooding is strong in the books and many times incredibly dumb.

I mean, maybe if you didn’t watch the movie. If you did, you might notice the lack of snowfall, the lack of any indication of cold, and the striking red soil revealed as the vehicles broke through the salt crust.

Jar Jar is maybe the greatest argument for creative friction that I can think of. When I was a teenager reading film magazines in the ‘80s and ‘90s I’d always read about directors like Welles or Gilliam, who stuck to their personal visions and didn’t take any guff from the studios. Well, Lucas as good as bought his…

...so basically it’s Las Vegas?

He’d learned from Lucas doing likewise that if you make the baddies cool, people just think they’re awesome and want them to win (c.f. all sorts of demented Empire-worship on the internet, and never forget David Brin’s truly insane essay on why the Empire were akshully the good guys).

The way characters run into each other I’d say the Star Wars universe is about the size of my university

have you watch the Guardian’s of the Galaxy movies lately? Thor 2&3?

So, “people who murder their relatives for easy cash that they spend on pointless impulse purchases, including some for their half-baked criminal schemes” is the answer to “who the hell owns a franking machine”.

I find them to be rewatchable in a way the ST isn’t, because there’s always some weird or cool thing I missed going on in the background.

I love this idea, even though it’s dark as hell.

So much of the ST was panic induced over correction. It’s no wonder it spun out on the final lap.

I remember how confused and then slightly irritated I was back when the Force Awakens trailers first came out and they were on ANOTHER desert planet that sure looked like Tatooine but we were told it was definitely NOT Tatooine. I also harken back to the prequel era when they would cut from Anakin on Tatooine to Obi…

Oh, 100% agreed. Lucas having a larger plan is a myth, I’m convinced he barely (if at all) looked beyond the film he happened to be making at the time. It’s clear that he was still winging it on a film-by-film basis during the prequels even though he knew going in that they were supposed to join up at some point.

You would want some out of the way place, yes, but maybe not with his only other living family in his father’s birthplace and retaining his father’s name, all on the assumption that said father might have bad enough memories that he “overlooks” it. It was just as likely that Vader would make an annual pilgrimage to…

Filming in a real-world location, as opposed to a computer-created landscape like Camino or Felucia, is cheaper and carries less risk of looking fake.

I’M TIRED OF MY SPACE WESTERN BEING SET IN A DESERT!

I understand the author’s weariness of Tatooine, though I think it makes sense for The Book of Boba Fett — Tatooine is where Jabba’s crime syndicate was located, and Boba Fett himself obviously has a troubled history there.

An alternate take:

It’s so unrealistic. It would be like if most of the international political positions of the two largest superpowers for the last four decades were entirely wrapped up in, to choose a completely random country, Afghanistan. That would never happen!