Star Wars: The Force Awakens

New Force Awakens TV spots...with like 1.5 seconds of new footage.

Why does snowball Earth have to be slushball Earth? Even if it had subterranean water, it could've just been frozen for millions of years without snow.

True, but Europa doesn't have snow either, and it has liquid underneath. And how would a plant covered in ice stay warm enough for surface water to flow?

(genuine curiosity, not arbitrary skepticism)

Which day did you buy it for?

December 16th over here. Midnight premiere.

I was actually thinking specific to Earth—there were a couple of global glacial periods in the Neoproterozoic—one a little over two billion years ago, another a little under one billion years ago. These are typically termed “Snowball Earth” periods and some people model them as total glaciations, However, in my view they were more “slushball” periods—the evidence of glaciation comes specifically from stuff that we get from when glaciers flow into oceans (like ice-rafted debris), there are ripples consistent with open shorelines, and in general it doesn’t look like the hydrological cycle shut down (which is where your now comment jogged my memory), and there’s stuff with ocean circulation that’s basically un-model-able because we don’t know how to start modeling ocean circulation in the Precambrian. I think the idea of a totally iced-over Earth remains popular because it’s such a striking idea, but I think it’s pretty unlikely.

Hoth seems to me like an Earth-like world that entered a sort of Snowball or Slushball phase after big animals evolved (and again we don’t see the whole planet, IIRC). Europa’s a totally different thing—it doesn’t have an atmosphere, and if it were large enough to have an atmosphere it would be way too cold for what we see in The Empire Strikes Back.

If Hoth is just an icy world, it’s in good company with Arrakis,Tattooine’s inspiration from Dune. It has no oceans, but people get moisture from the atmosphere; this moisture, of course, would have to come from an ocean.

Ehh, that mechanism still sounds kind of bullshit to me. And yes, @supernintendochalmer, I am definitely more of Trekkie—is it showing?

Something to keep in mind with Lucas was that his first, and perhaps biggest, mistake was deciding to make the prequels in the first place. Prequels are just a bad storytelling device in general. The only ways that it ever works are the flashback-style "past informs the present" i.e. Godfather II-style prequels, or the kind where there is so little direct continuity in terms of characters and story that it functions as a separate story whose status as a chronological "prequel" is merely a matter of detail (Star Wars has the Knights of the Old Republic, which would have made a much better prequel trilogy).

The nature of prequels is such that he was automatically, to some extent, rewriting the original work, something he was already in trouble with because of the stupid Special Edition changes, and even if it was directed, written and acted competently it was very difficult to care about anything that was happening because of all the foregone conclusions involved.

As for "forgetting the lessons learned from the originals", I don't think Lucas was ever a good writer. Storywise, most of his good ideas were borrowed from other sources and his bad ideas were censored by sane people before the movies were filmed. (The early draft of Jedi I recently read was as bad as any prequel [Proof: grab.by/LL5o ]).

One of his main storytelling strategies was just throwing ideas at the audience, seeing what people liked, not understanding why people liked it, and trying to repeat it (sort of like when a little kid gets adults to laugh but isn't sure why what he said was funny so he just keeps repeats whatever he said to diminishing returns). People liked that Vader was Luke's father...what if Leia was his sister? People liked blowing up the Death Star...how about ending with them blowing up a BIGGER Death Star? For some reason, this didn't get him in trouble until the prequels (People like Boba Fett...An army of Boba Fetts! People liked the double-sided lightsaber...A guy with FOUR lightsabers!)

That's part of what makes people like me feel justified raking him over the coals for denying us re-releases of the originals without the stupid changes: George Lucas didn't make Star Wars. Star Wars was made by teams of competent writers, actors, producers, editors and others, often *in spite* of them having to work around the bad ideas of an overgrown infant with a limited skillset.

I'm gonna post this cause 1. feel the need to defend Grievous and 2. its awesome

Didn't they make a comic series out of the original draft of the script?  Is that still available somewhere?  Did I just imagine it?

In case you weren't aware, the original Clone Wars cartoon also explains this (in an episode later than this one), and it's awesome.

Grievous is an unmitigated badass until Mace Windu nearly kills him by FORCE-CHOKING HIM Force-Crushing his chest in a duel before he gets away. Hence the hacking cough in the film.

But again, you have to pay attention to non-film media to get the most out of the film, which most people probably wouldn't do, and then wonder why the fuck an asthmatic robot is so scary.

That's what I said! Your quote is wrong somehow.