How does Rey know her parents are on Ochi’s ship?

Old Jedi, that's exactly where the jet black toupee meets the original brown fringe in back.

The two versions of Rey's abandonment on Jakku just don't track with one another to an even vaguely satisfying degree.

 

That is the main take-away I got from the thread. The Pasaana sequence is entertaining in itself, but the execution on the backstory with Rey and Ochi's ship could have been pulled of a lot smoother.

 

I could come up with a bunch of ways to get around the plot gap off-screen...I mean...we're Star Wars fans. When someone says a movie has a plot gap that can't be answered, we're like, "Hold my beer".

The simplest one is that Rey's parents were taken by Ochi after her parents "sold" her to Unkar just to get him to take Rey away from them because they knew Ochi was imminently approaching, and knew they weren't going to be able to keep Ochi away from catching up to them, and that Unkar is holding Rey back because Rey ran out of the tent she was hiding in and did see her parents go into the ship from a distance, but didn't see the abduction and failed to understand why her parents were leaving her, and why Unkar was pulling her arm and keeping her from her parents.

My personal take, however, is...Star Wars films are like religious texts. There's gaps like swiss cheese holes all through these suckers...because, "Never let the truth ruin a good story." - Jesus Christ.


Cheers,
Jayson

 

Again, what we saw Rey see in TFA wasn't a flashback; it was a vision and was not meant to be interpreted literally.

 

"Forceback".

Cheers,
Jayson

 

Still "no".

A vision is not the same thing as a flashback.

 

What I mean is that "forceback" is what they officially call it.

"Touching the lightsaber triggers what we called the 'Forceback.' ...she was being confronted with truths about the Force, about the past... the past for herself—she realizes that the cries she heard were actually her own cries as a young girl being taken away from her family." - Abrams

Cheers,
Jayson

 

^ JJ and the other people at Lucasfilm using the term "forceback" doesn't mean that it's the correct description of what we see her experience in TFA.

 

I didn't say that. Man, bad mood or something? lol

I didn't go one way or the other with it, but actually said that I don't find much value in discerning the difference because these stories work more like religious texts.

However, the point I was more leaning on, above all, was that even IF we take this sequence series as literal, there's really no problem because it's really easy to give an off screen explanation that matches up with what we DO see (IF it were literal).

So, either: A) it's literal and the explanation is rather easy to handle as off-screen circumstances that are hardly confusing (especially for Star Wars), or B) it's not literal and doesn't require any explanation.

Therefore: Not a problem.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

JJ is the writer of the movie. So, if he calls it a forceback, then it's a forceback. It's that simple.

 

It turned out ok. I am just sad Disney did not give it it’s due diligence and work on it until it was a master piece. Either Kathleen has a bunch of yes men around her or she was in over her head.

The ST deserved to be a master work and we got a decent recycle.

 

Disney sank $4B in investor capital on Lucasfilm in 2012. There was urgency to recapture those funds as soon as possible with new product. After that, they had flags planted on the calendar to meet. That’s not Kennedy’s fault. She doesn’t get to dictate Disney’s release schedule. She had a job to do. She did it and she did it well (except for Solo anyhow ).

 

Any idea of Kennedy should start by looking through her filmography and career before making conclusions that just seem really awkward to anyone who knows her work and has seen her through the decades.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

Actually...the whole Lord and Miller debacle is more a possibility with Kennedy in the same way that Trevorrow was.
Her history is one of encouraging creatives to do their thing their way, but to manage the logistics a lot, while also tossing in a few ideas if she has any along the way. She's also very involved, in her style, with creatives telling her their ideas and bouncing them back at them.

The path she's following is not new. It's primary champion is Alan Ladd Jr.
Kennedy is a Laddiest.

If someone's a Star Wars fan talking about Kennedy and doesn't know who Laddie is, then A) they shouldn't be talking about Kennedy, and B) they should go learn about Laddie.

The problem that they both have in common as a pitfall is letting creatives be creatives. Kurtz also ran into this problem with ESB, for which he was royally chewed out by Lucas and was not brought back for ROTJ (Lucas did not appreciate Kurtz letting production get out of control on timelines, which is ironic really, because Ladd basically did the same thing on ANH for Lucas that Kurtz did for Kershner on ESB, but I digress...).

The point is, with Kennedy it's very likely that you'll be allowed to hang yourself because she doesn't have a background of being a production studio whip. She's a director's producer...actually...quite literally. Spielberg literally picked her and taught her to be a producer after getting to know her while she was working as an assistant for the screenwriter on 1941, and made her his assistant, and then assistant producer by Poltergeist, and full producer credits by E.T., and Spielberg picked her because he liked her ideas on production (which she wasn't originally on 1941 for that purpose - Spielberg just thought she could do the job because he liked her ideas).

The problems Solo had that are Kennedy's are basically that she let Lord and Miller run their ship their way with little interference, but the problem that you can run into with something like that is that if you are a major franchise of Disney, brand is a major part of decision making. Say whatever you want about not liking Disney, but one thing they do know very well is branding and centralizing a voice (something Star Wars historically through the late 80's and especially the 90's was terrible at doing - we're still playing catch up from the schism between EU and the Films).
That means that eventually, no matter how much rope Kennedy may give a creative to do what they want, at some point their ideas have to show up and toe the line with Disney's ideas regarding the brand voice.

That's where things go off the rails. Lord and Miller were experimenting by going far off script, and by all accounts in the production, the experimentation was on full blast in all manners across the production, which was horribly slowing production down, and taking the on-brand voice ...well...off brand. Or, rather, perceived as off-brand because brand voice hadn't been worked out yet quite exactly for non-saga films, and Solo was where we see this struggle really emerge - R1 already had the issue, and they didn't really get a brand voice out of R1. It's ... well ... all over the place in stylistic brand voice. It's hard to turn R1 into a business card or McDonald's box design. Solo is easier, and Mando is bloody well streamlined.

For the science history buffs out there (crickets chirping), Solo was the Ultraviolet Crises of Star Wars.
More specifically, non-saga films were the ultraviolet crises of Star Wars, and Solo was the photoelectric effect, and Howard was Einstein bringing sense to the mess from which a way forward could be seen finally.

Back on point...at some point, Kennedy's going to have to step in and push back a decision from one of the two directions: Push back against Disney, or push back against Lord and Miller.
Considering she's looking at a right production mess of a sandbox on one side, and an interest on forming a concise brand voice on the other...it's not going to be a shocking decision.

The issue with the timeline, however, is Iger's. He came out and fully accepted responsibility for the timing and marketing of Solo and said that the choice to not move the release was his and that it turned out to be a bad decision.

So Kennedy is a mixed bag of candy and razor blades. If you're a sharp person with massive skill and a solid head for production, Kennedy is a jewel. Ergo why folks like Spielberg, Abrams, Johnson, Howard, and Lucas all love working with her.

If you're a sharp person with massive skill and don't have a head for production at the triple A level (e.g. blowing deadlines right and left)...well...things could get bumpy.

I think Kennedy will get more refined in her role between LFL and Disney, however, as before this she's not had to attempt to correlate the creative free-form world to a brand voice requirement like this.
Very few have. It's a weird balance beam.

But after the struggles of R1 and Solo, and then again the successes of Solo and Mando (yes, even as an office failure, Solo was a business success internally for pulling the nose in the right direction and showing the way forward - like an impressive crash landing), I think she's getting it on point.

If I could do any one thing going forward, production wise, it would be to join at the hip, Kennedy, Filoni, and Favreau.
This mixture just seems to really click in all the right ways. Both sides of the table understand the other and are working in lock-step with each other much better.

I don't know if that will happen, but yeah.

Anyway...Kennedy's flaw is basically in letting people do their thing, which can end up with her turning around and telling them that their "thing" isn't working....which can be frustrating and confusing.

At the end of the day, I think the best thing to summarize Kennedy is said by one man.

"My favorite producer, really, is Kathy Kennedy. ... Kathy has good taste and she's rational. And she understands what it takes to make a movie. She's a very good sounding board."
- Steven Spielberg (Steven Spielberg: interviews, revised and updated)​

Cheers,
Jayson

 

The term is a complete misnomer regardless of JJ officially coining it to describe what we see Rey see in TFA... especially when you examine it in conjunction with TLJ and TRoS.

 

You're argument is odd.
It helps your claim to call it a Forceback because it implies it's a mixture of fact and vision swirling around without clear context.

...which...would support your argument that we're not looking at literal history via a traditional flashback (I'll park my neuropsychological pedantry that memories aren't literal history and most are horribly innacurate, warped by years of emotional overwriting and impression, because movies trend to treat flashback memory as some historical log).

Cheers,
Jayson

 

Solo had an initial budget of around $125M and the production was allowed to balloon up to about $275M. Worldwide, it grossed about $400M. For a major motion picture of this caliber, it has to earn about twice its budget before it can be considered profitable. Solo is the only Star Wars movie to have lost money. Whatever the extenuating circumstances, that happened under her watch. Kathleen Kennedy is such a consummate professional though, I’d be willing to bet just about anything that she’d be the first one to acknowledge this.

My point wasn’t to disparage her, but the opposite. She was handpicked by George Lucas to run his company while it was being devoured by the Disney monolith. Her job was to keep its culture and identity intact while proving Lucasfilm was up to the task of delivering on whatever was asked of it. And, with one notable exception, she did. That’s an absurdly difficult undertaking and she managed it.

She wasn’t hired to be George’s creationist successor. She was hired to ensure one of his proudest creations would endure and survive in his absence. She’s done that and deserves to be recognized for it.

 

Calling what we see Rey see a "forceback" implies that said things - including the glimpse of her child self with Unkar and Ochi's ship flying away - fit the narrative and psychological definitions of the term "flashback" and are triggered by the Force, but they don't in fact fit into said definitions in any way.... hence the term "forceback" being a misnomer.