On David Lynch's Revenge of the Jedi (2018)
benningtonreview.org
benningtonreview.org
Cronenberg made The Fly in Hollywood, and I think it's it's great, but he wasn't able to get much more than that on the go, even though he came close to landing several high profile gigs.
In some alternate history timeline Cronenberg's name would have been attached to several big time Hollywood properties, and the world would be mostly the same just a little bit grosser. Of course, I'm happy with Cronenberg's mostly Canadian produced oeuvre the way it is, I just like to wonder.
I also used to wonder what the world would look like if Lynch has directed ROTJ, but I came to realize it was a ridiculous premise, Lynch needed far more creative elbow room than what the 3rd instalment of an established franchise could possibly afford, and there was no chance Lynch would ever agree to such a thing. So we got Dune instead and I'm happy with that too.
This is so true. The recent films and the spinoff series all look like his Dune.
But that’s probably because I’ve been watching sci fi films for fifty years.
Asimov didn’t write EVERYTHING.
He didn’t write about gender and politics like LeGuin
He didn’t write about drug addicted Mars settlers like PKD.
He didnt write about dimensional fragments and gravitation wave communication and laws of existence like Liu.
Even the grandfather of it all HG Wells didn’t ….
You trolled me and I fell for it. Damn.
You've read ONE out of HUNDREDS!
Wow you're so cultured and intellectual!
> He didn’t write about drug addicted Mars settlers like PKD.
Read the first stories on mars colonization, long before philip k dick.
It's not a moral fault to not have read something. But perhaps don't go lecturing people who have?
You don't see me going to china to lecture about chinese literature while I don't even speak chinese. Don't do that. It's sad.
A lot of that is due to the nature of studios milking franchise properties like the MCU or SW. Directors of big budget films are now often selected to be a caretaker of one franchise episode. They inherit a pre-existing style from the franchise while also having a bunch more 'input' (aka supervision) from an army of executive producers who work across more than one film and are focused on "don't fuck up the franchise."
Another part of the modern decline in the diversity of cinematic looks is from the economics of streaming. Streamers like Netflix, Apple and Prime are focused on risk reduction by funding either "big name star" properties where the stars make more by being their own executive producers or "big name IP" properties with built-in audiences from books, games, etc. In neither instance is the director usually a central element in packaging the deal. The role of these directors is to be more of a journeymen shepherd like Marquand than a visionary like Lynch, Kubrick or Coppola.
It's a worrying trend because many "bankable name" directors like Lynch whose name at the top of the movie poster could guarantee an audience are dying and not being replaced by new directors that have broad name recognition.
Were they asleep while filming the more recent star wars films?
For me at least, there's also a certain fatigue factor. While I like The Mandalorian and Rogue One, I'm pretty much done with the franchise. See also Star Trek and MCU. That said, I know that there are a lot of fans who will take pretty much anything you throw out even if they like to belly-ache about it.
That's good. Most kids are menaces to your face /s
Contrary to all of George's talk of a "grand plan", Star Wars was always an adventure serial where winging it was the plan. (Also, George's "grand plan" itself still cracks me up as a kid who guessed to much of it reading the weird novelization, especially since Ars Technica got him to admit to it. Have you heard about the Whills?)
Special Effects houses working on those sorts of movies are probably using heavier, slower renderers than Unreal Engine today, but given the average life span of an effects house is still appallingly close to 2 years and scenes scattered across 1.5 movies, those renderers are still generally off-the-shelf or borrowed from other companies. Industrial Light and Magic is about the only effects house that no one wants to kill, so also becomes something of a homogenizing factor in whatever tools it white labels for sale/rents to other effects houses. Disney owning ILM seems to be like an obvious factor that almost everyone working on an MCU film is trying to rent or ape the ILM house style at all times.
It's also interesting that right now TV can't afford as much time with the motion tracking/motion capture tools and studio spaces of wall-to-wall green screen, so in the effects heavy shows we're seeing a lot more experimentation, some of which I'd argue look better than the movies currently. For big instances, right now ILM's TV efforts with The Volume (and CBS Paramount's copycat AR Wall and other studios have copycats now too) are fast changing the look of TV. Because these LED walls are their own light source which dynamically reflects what the background should be doing it seems like there's a ton more options for lighting scenes in these rooms/volumes/spaces or doing shots that would be tricky or expensive even with how great motion tracking and motion capture have gotten. Of course the trade-off there is that the real-time background rendering requires a rendering engine more in the vein of Unreal Engine, and allegedly in most cases is definitely Unreal Engine, so "default unreal engine look" starts to apply literally to background elements in TV shows.
Another factor is that dramatic lighting tends to dance closer to the edge in terms of quality. Lighting a high contrast scene with inky blacks in one area and your hero elements in moody shadow means that those very dark areas are at risk of slipping into the floor of imager noise. The same is true when there are extremely bright elements near the upper-bound of clipping. While modern imagers and HDR capture give film-makers more latitude than ever to avoid these problems, perversely, the same luxuries seem to be making younger film-makers less skilled, or at least less confident, in their ability to dance close to the edges of too dark or too bright.
Newer post-production color grading tools also enable new degrees of what's possible to "just fix in post." Once again, this is wonderful when we need to fix a mistake or for amateur and hobby productions which don't have the time, budget, gear or even knowledge to do creative lighting. The downside is it creates an ever-present temptation when under time and/or budget pressure to take the shortcut and just bounce a key light off the ceiling and a fill off the wall and call it done. It's sad because modern imager sensitivity and battery-powered, micro-sized lighting instruments now make it easier, cheaper and faster than ever to do intentional lighting at a Vittorio Storaro level. Storaro might spend half a day with a crew of six gaffers lighting one scene that a four person indie crew could largely recreate today in an hour with $1k of lights, clamps and stands from Amazon.
This recent video discusses the problem from a cinematography perspective: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwTUM9cFeSo
They used a football stadium in Mexico, in order to get enough distance. The mind boggles as to what they did without CG.
I believe the film run aground on the special effects for the worms, it just goes to show that critics will feast on the weak points.
I utterly relished the scene with the Emperor meeting the navigator; Mr PlansWithinPlans.
Is there enough film to make the purported mini-series of Lynch’s Dune, I take it there was only the film.
> They used a football stadium in Mexico, in order to get enough distance. The mind boggles as to what they did without CG.
[1] Above Documentary, 1:23: https://youtu.be/pQG_Gt6-xpE?si=KZx9K1l1pZERaJ-R&t=83
[2] Trade Federation Craft Landing, 0:25: https://youtu.be/UD8tounIou4?si=-eCg60AvEr0eo3qa&t=25
I’m thinking about a Carry On version of Dune, of Star Wars, The Matrix, Fight Club.
I guess at some point some AI might generate these just for fun for itself, or maybe it’ll be smart enough not to bother.
Except for Arrival which owes a lot of its humanism to Ted Chiang's source material that's something that I've noticed about Villeneuve's work. Technically well made but there's something inhuman and cold about how he writes characters and scenes, as if they're surgically made. I think it really stands out too if you watch the old and new Blade Runner back to back.
The tempo of the movie is completely off, and no cut has been able to fix that. The characters and scenes just run trough the story.
Lynch wanted Salvador Dali to design the set. Instead he had to reuses the set from the Conan the Destroyer (Richard Fleischer, 1984).
He didn't even get the music he wanted and that's big part of his movies.
My understanding is that Conan reused Dune sets, not the other way round. The Dune sets were extremely intricate and expensive, and are definitely one of the few highlights of the film.
> He didn't even get the music he wanted and that's big part of his movies.
Not sure how Toto ended up doing the music for that film. That film was an absolute mess.
I don't know ... I think it's 'properly rated'. The movie is deeply flawed but it has stayed in public consciousness and is (fondly) remembered. The first half is pretty good. The second half is a total mess and makes the entire plot, characterization and pacing unsalvageable. The visual art style is generally great, but there are some glaring misses.
I recommend everyone interested in Dune to take a look at Jodorowsky's Dune [0], the documentary which explains how they did the preproduction of Dune, and pitched it to the studios. All the deals eventually fell through, but the pitch decks circulated all the studios for years afterwards, and inspired countless other movie makers.
The best things about the new Dune installments imo is the art, but all, or most of it feels like copy pasted ideas from what came before them. CGI is a huge asset to actually get it working though.
I remember finding Metal Hurlant and The Incal at a vide grenier in France as a kid, well before the days of the web, and just being blown away by the visions of this guy - only years later did I realise that I wasn’t alone in that sentiment. He’s the unseen foundation on which so much has been built. A creator’s creator, if you like.
If you like that, you’ll like the more recent show (Scavengers Reign, the parent comment’s recommendation).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scavengers_Reign
Be warned it wasn’t renewed for a second season, it didn’t have enough people talking about and watching. The creators do have something new going on, called “Common Side Effects”.
>the first season has a 100% approval score with an average rating of 8.7/10, based on 22 critic reviews.
>Andrew Webster of The Verge deemed it to be "equal parts beautiful and brutal, and it might be the most original piece of science fiction of the year"
>In May 2024, the series was canceled by Max
This is so confusing. Making good art must not be profitable.
The problem is the schism of media. If I already have 3 streaming service providers but the greatest show on earth is only watchable on "kufuzu neon plus", I'm just not going to watch it.
Consumers care more about convenience. What they should have done is to integrate into Netflix, stop worrying about exclusive premiere content, and instead focus on outcompeting the others in a common marketplace.
Instead they all conspired to fall on netflix like a pack of hyenas, rip off whatever chunks they could get and then retreat to their dens to enjoy the spoils.
So yeah, screw them. If you're a creative, don't sell your original valuable ideas to companies that are not built on original valuable ideas.
Example here, down a bit: https://www.vulture.com/2015/05/geof-darrow-shaolin-cowboy-z...
I hope some day Moebius and Jodorowsky's storyboards are published in the public domain
I'm not claiming that this will necessarily be a good thing from an artistic or legal perspective. But there are enough Dune fans out there with access to AI video tools that someone will eventually do it.
> not claiming that this will necessarily be a good thing
I think a History of Violence (2005) and Eastern Promises (2007) are really great, even if it's a different Cronenberg from "The Fly".
SOMEHOW MY FATHER CONVINCED MY mother to squander a date night and watch David Lynch’s Dune when it was in the theaters in 1984. I was seven; my sister, five. When we asked about the movie, my mother or my father or both—they may’ve coordinated their anecdote—told me they knew they were in trouble when the theater manager handed out to everyone in the audience a one-sheet that attempted to explain the intricacies of the film’s logic.
Now I am the theater manager. What’s worse, the production I hope to untangle is my own.
So:
In 1977, George Lucas released Star Wars. In 1980, he released a sequel, The Empire Strikes Back, and, in 1983, another sequel, Return of the Jedi. During Jedi’s production, and even after its release, Jedi was often referred to as Star Wars III. This is not to be confused with Star Wars Episode Three: Revenge of the Sith, a Star Wars prequel released in 2005. Also, until the end of 1982, Return of the Jedi was titled Revenge of the Jedi. This is not to be confused with Star Wars Episode Three: Revenge of the Sith.
And:
I write about two directors named David. David Lynch, who wrote and directed Blue Velvet and co-created/directed Twin Peaks, and David Cronenberg, who wrote and directed Videodrome and the 1986 remake of The Fly. I don’t mean for this to be confusing.
And:
Two excerpts from the screenplay for David Lynch’s Revenge of the Jedi appear in this essay. The first begins, “INTERIOR: DEATH STAR—MAIN DOCKING BAY”; the second begins, “INTERIOR: JABBA’S PALACE—HALLWAY.”
Okay. Let’s begin.
There are far too many attention sinks in the world, and unfortunately we're only alive for a geologically infinitesimal instant.
I love words and language and reading, but rarely is expository writing the correct place for word orgies.
Semi-kidding aside, I /did/ enjoy the script-style format, the scene switches (though some didn't seem to matter), and the scene descriptions from "Revenge" that were so overtly different than "Return".
It ended rather weakly though. Feels like it needs to have been wrapped up at the end not "Anyway, one of the many guys we talked about died a while ago. Bye!"
As a kid, I thought Revenge of the Jedi was so much better of a title. As an adult, of course I get how it doesn't fit well with the idea of a Jedi. But I still have to say, Revenge of the Jedi was a kick ass title and Return of the Jedi was very milquetoast.
It's not long before we can feed that script to one of the AI engines and tell it to make a Lynch movie out of it. For other directors I don't know, but for Lynch that would be quite something.
I don't think anyone would deny Lynch had his own, distinct Lynch-ian stye. A lot of people probably can't describe it clearly in words but they'll recognize when they see it. So I think it's plausible LLMs "getting the gist" of the style and asking them to generate something "Lynch-ian" might just work.
I propose a Turing test for it. Show a bunch of people unfamiliar with most of his work some of his works mixed in with some generated, and see if they could tell which is which. It will fail today, but I think in 10 years we'll get there, even if not sooner.
I'd say it is, although I can understand it is anti-thetical to what his fans get out of his films. Objectively though, I think you can certainly make a list of defining traits and show a pattern.
> David Lynch didn't pull out a notepad and go, "Okay, time to write a Lynch film." He just decided to make a film and made it the way that made the most sense to him.
I'm well aware, but it doesn't mean there isn't consistency or a pattern in his results. Plenty of filmmakers have a particular style and have elements that show up in anything they make allowing people to recognize their influence.
> At best (and this is seriously stretching the definition of "not just wild speculation") I think it's more likely you get something that exhibits formal qualities that remind someone of some of David Lynch's works, probably a fairly incoherent and incongruous mash of tropes, like a particularly bad episode of Family Guy.
So to discuss this further in detail, I think you'd need to at least try and define the ineffable qualities you think an AI wouldn't be able to recognize (keeping in mind eventually AI will be able to take things like your comment history into account to help it 'understand') to help it create something that could have been made by the man himself.
The "excerpts" here are snippets of the Dune and Return of the Jedi screenplays, with the bulk of the material, including the part you quoted, being the author's own work.
And after that, the future of film,as they figure out how to work around various rights.
I am here for it. Season 1 of Futurama, but live action with the cast and production values of the '77 Star Wars? It's coming. You wait and see.
But - if I was tempted to answer: The trend recently has been to invest in IP's which previously have performed well financially.
Me, what I want most is new stuff I haven't seen before. Mostly, they don't make movies and TV for people like me.
This is both, I suspect, literally true and substantively false: it will not ne long until you can ask for that and get something recognizable as audiovisual output. It will, OTOH, be long before you can do that and get anything that would satisfy anyone as a movie worth watching, and even longer if you want something satisfying to anyone with a reason for including Lynch in the prompt other than that he was a specific filmmaker who the model might recognize and do something with.
I think soonish we'll get to clips that look Lynchian so that an average person might recognize it as such. Kind of like DALL-E can emulate styles and people might say "aha, looks like it was painted by such and such". But with a full movie, not sure, will the true fans accept it as anything connected to Lynch? Probably never, and will even hate it with a passion...
But then there are fan edits of Dune, for instance: https://fanedit.org/dune-1984-the-alternative-edition-redux-.... Ok what if the edits were made by the AI? I can see accepting that. Next step is what if it's not a pure cut, but maybe it corrected a few scenes which looked odd, or the character wasn't fitting it gets spliced out of the move altogether, I really don't know, I might like that I suppose.
Oh yeah, or RoboCop!
It would be very easy: add some randomness to the prompts and keep the visual hallucinations.
I now use this a few times a month, thanks to this anecdote
There are several explanations for why Lynch turned down Lucas’ offer. Kazanjian implied—in either an interview [..] that Lynch turned down the offer because Dino De Laurentiis offered him Dune, an offer Lynch accepted. More recently, Kazanjian said, at a Star Wars Celebration convention in Anaheim, that Lynch wasn’t hired because, “Ah, he didn’t want Johnny Williams to do the music and he didn’t want Ben Burtt—Academy Award winner like three times—to do the sound.” [..] Incredible, yes—as in hard to believe. Kazanjian’s original claim, that Lynch weighed the pros and cons of Lucas’s offer and chose Dune instead, is more credible.
Sound was incredibly important to Lynch. He produced his own music and partnered with other artists on many of his projects, to get the exact sound he wanted. Lynch having to work with Williams and Burtt would be like Aphex Twin having to work with Walt Disney.
I stopped reading as they keep trying to probe what Lynch's Return would be like. It's like asking what David Cronenberg's Toy Story 2 would be like (though obviously that would end up like MAD GOD). Why speculate about something clearly unsuitable, other than for a grim chuckle?
https://www.bennington.edu/news-and-features/bennington-revi...
The issues are frustratingly undated, except the first. It strives to publish twice a year.
Three and a half stars...
I knew that that was how it was released, even at the time, but I had thought that by the time it was released on VHS that it would have adopted the new branding. I told my dad about it when I got home, and he was comparably surprised.
I didn't (and don't) have a VCR, so I didn't pick it up, but a small part of me wishes I had just as an interesting thing to put on my shelf.