#regen ridley

[insidegravityjobs]

[sepublic]

Project Metamorphosis was the Space Pirates' way of preserving their commanders, keeping them alive through technology, and most importantly, keeping them operational; With cybernetics, any leader would be able to continue leading the Space Pirates in both tactics and even battle, no matter how damaged their organic bodies were.

Those submitted to the process were Space Pirate commanders injured by Samus Aran during her first assault on Zebes; Ridley, Kraid, and Weavel. Kraid was given a cybernetic dome over his face in order to protect his recovering eyes and see for them, but otherwise his adjustments were minimal. Ridley replaced a good portion of his body, and Weavel? He ended up replacing everything except his brain and spinal cord, much to his chagrin; His injuries were much more extensive, and unlike Ridley, he lacked any regenerative abilities.

But Project Metamorphosis was not just about giving Space Pirates cybernetic prosthetics; It went further than this. Hence, Mecha Ridley; At first glance, it seems to just be a robotic doppelganger of Ridley. And indeed, one of its functions was to act as a complete set of cybernetic prosthetics for the Space Pirate, meant to represent any possible limb or organ he might lose. This is quite common as a medical practice, although the full set of prostheses being programmed to attack intruders on their own isn't...

If Ridley were to lose an arm, an arm would be taken from the mecha and applied to Ridley's injured stump. If his face was burnt off, the skull chassis would act as a mask. Fire-breathing organs could be substituted with an internal flamethrower. The modular nature of Mecha Ridley meant that if Ridley replaced his hand, only to lose the rest of the arm it was connected to, the arm taken from his Mecha counterpart could still reconnect with the robotic hand he was currently using. In essence, Mecha Ridley was the precursor to the Meta and Proteus frames, hence the missile-launching booster as less a replacement and more an enhancement.

But Mecha Ridley had another function as well; Acting as a machine with which Ridley could project his own thoughts into, and control from afar. For in order to move the body, the brain sends signals through the nervous system, which the limbs and organs receive, and then interpret to move accordingly.

These signals are electric in nature; And so are wireless signals in technology. Through Project Metamorphosis, a neural interface could be applied to Ridley's head, and receive the signals he'd attempt to send to the rest of his body, replicating and redirecting them to his robotic doppelganger. Mecha Ridley would receive his brain's signals instead, and as a result its mimicry of Ridley's limbs would move, while his actual arms -if they were even present- would not do anything.

Mecha Ridley would also absorb visual and auditory input, directing it to Ridley, who would receive it via a VR headset. It's like a simulation, except your ‘avatar’ is in fact a tangible replica acting elsewhere. This feature is useful if Ridley or any other commander is so damaged that they can't even function on the field as a cyborg. In Ridley's particular case, it's to give his true body room to regenerate without having to worry about cybernetics restricting cellular repair, while also allowing him to fight 'on the field'. It's the best of both worlds.

...The problem with this form of cybernetic projection/possession is something every gamer fears; A bad connection. The Space Pirates worked to perfect the bandwidth of Ridley's neural headset and his mecha. But if Samus were to find herself unable to destroy a fully-completed Mecha Ridley, she could get around the problem entirely by interfering with the signals, causing the mecha to move one step behind Ridley, while Ridley received its input too late.

In case of this scenario, the Space Pirates programmed Mecha Ridley with its own independent AI to control itself with, should it stop receiving reliable input from Ridley in the heat of battle. So when Samus encountered it aboard the mothership, despite not being complete, Mecha Ridley still had a functioning AI to attack Samus with. Because this encounter happened so quickly after Ridley's defeat in Norfair, he hadn’t yet been resuscitated and hooked up to the neural interface. But in a future scenario, where Mecha Ridley was rebuilt and actually completed, it might've been something Ridley begrudgingly used while recovering from Phazon withdrawal and atrophy after the destruction of Phaaze.

Otherwise, he would avoid it if he could, and even subject himself to painful cybernetics as necessary; Ridley did not appreciate having a machine clumsily interpret his own moves for him. It was a distant, out of body experience, when Ridley preferred to fight in-person and experience death and destruction through his actual senses. Nevertheless, he kept the mecha on his personal ship; In Ridley’s off-time, he would put on the headset and test controlling the machine, so science team could see how to sync the mecha to his brain signals.

Since Project Metamorphosis could help Space Pirate commanders 'transcend the body', this same principle was applied to Meta Weavel. Despite Weavel being a Zebesian, his mechanical frame ended up having a noticeably different form, more upright and humanoid. The idea was to build off of Mecha Ridley by seeing how a brain could acclimate to a body very different to the one it was programmed to control. Hence the project’s name invoking the natural process of transformation and rebirth into something radically different; After a vulnerable workshopping period, of course.

Despite Weavel's frustrations over the differences, he did eventually adapt, and his Meta frame proved to be of sufficient quality. Thus, Meta Weavel would be deemed a success; It showed potential for brains to adapt to a wider variety of foreign shapes. So for example, a humanoid brain could be made to operate an arachnid body. Or a serpentine brain could now handle a body with several limbs, when such a brain wouldn’t even have neural pathways for this.

But the cybernetics could be made to interpret and ‘translate’ the brain’s signals, meant for a different body, into movements corresponding to limbs not alike. There have already been implants that translate the pheromones of species that communicate via smell into sound, and vice-versa, to aid in cross-species interaction; All of this is the natural extension, the natural evolution, of such technology. The Space Pirates would have to test more extreme examples like these, intensifying the disparity with each success.

And the goal was to combine these results with that of Mecha Ridley, to create technology in which a Space Pirate could telepathically control and 'possess' a mechanical body wildly different than their own. Project Metamorphosis would be taken even further from there; Perhaps being used to upload minds into machinery, allowing them to interface with data and become it, etc.

It could even lead to a telepathic possession and control of technology, with Mother Brain already being this; In fact, she helped form the inspiration for Mecha Ridley (so in a way, Zero Mission’s final boss is a culmination of Mother Brain, Ridley, and Weavel’s command). During her stint as Space Pirate leader, she permitted some study of her schematics by Project Metamorphosis scientists.

They analyzed Mother’s power to telepathically control both machines and even living organisms, in the hopes of replicating this with headsets and corresponding receivers; Science team hoped in particular to implant receivers into anyone or anything, without needing permission. Imagine hijacking a body by cutting off the signals from its host brain, so it would instead receive signals from another remote brain entirely.

Imagine bypassing the need to implant physical receivers entirely, and just using brainwaves and telepathy to disrupt a body’s natural signals and replace them at will! Imagine replacing them selectively to brainwash someone, letting them handle the rest as they obey and interpret on their own a basic command, freeing up brainpower to use in other processes or thralls!

All of this is how Mother Brain’s telepathic control works; It enabled her to control the Metroids, especially since she possessed Chozo DNA that the larvae were still programmed to obey. And it helped Mother Brain take command of technology as she saw fit, even sometimes controlling her Chozo charges for them so they could just let their minds and wills rest.

It allowed Mother to influence Zebes’ ecosystem and make it hostile to all outsiders. Her job has always been to do the thinking for people, after all; She is their new brain. Mecha Ridley is just the natural evolution of cybernetics interpreting for regular body parts the brain’s signals; Mother Brain’s conquest is just the natural evolution of her own programming, which she hijacked for herself to no longer be made to control, but to control under her own volition.

[titipounamu]

2 & 11 for the book asks!

2. top 5 books of all time

oh my god the hardest one first let's go

gideon the ninth by tamsyn muir ofc

girl meets boy by ali smith

greta and valdin by rebecca reilly

the priory of the orange tree by samantha shannon

the lord of the rings by j r r tolkein

11. what nonfiction books do you like?

love books about fungi (predictably) although i keep ridley's nz fungi guide around purely for entertainment value at this point :) apart from that i think my favourite nonfiction book is drawdown! it introduced me to regenerative agriculture and it's the best thing to read any time you're feeling overwhelmed and full of despair about the climate crisis

[eways-roleplays]

[Ridley dodges, grabs her, slams her against the wall and drags her at high speeds before throwing her to the ground]

[Coral jumps and tries to hit Ridley, but he skewers her with his tail before throwing her to the ground. As she regens, he approaches]

Quite brave for a child. Perhaps you may be useful. We've been researching sanitization

[Coral panicks]

[Lucas uses PK Love and Red's Dragonite uses hyperbeam. Ridley sets his sights on Red]

Wow! I can't believe I'm on a mission! I'm like a Squidbeak Splatoon Agent!

Don't get carried away! This place is dangerous!

[Tracy]

It'll be fiiine.~

*She's using some kind of PSI... or... trying to.

[beevean]

I remembered your "Ridley can regenerate from even a few cells", and then I thought "Hey, Ridley regenerates very easily, like Cell from DBZ... and Samus is an absurdly OP, walking Petri dish, like Cell from DBZ... Hmmm, I wonder if there's something going on here..." (On the other hand, that theory still doesn't explain how Kraid survived Super Metroid events and came back in Dread, sadly)

Sonic 🤝 Metroid

Being DBZ references

Well, I've never said anything about Kraid and his regenerative powers :P either the Kraid in Dread is a clone (Ridley got cloned and his clone cloned so why not), or the guy quitely snuck away from Zebes before the planet was destroyed :P

[smashy-headcanons]

Ridley while using male pronouns for convenience (a translation thing since the fact the space pirates lack gendered pronouns in their language), sometimes changes-sex after regenerating from heavy enough damage.

This is a completely normal trait for his species, due to a combination of their regenerative power and how like many reptiles sex-determination isn't genetic but based on environment.

(This is based entirely on the one instruction manual that referred to Ridley as female.)

(submitted by virovac)

[meinlebenistblauweiss]

Blade Runner

[jokerfan99]

Fighter 65A: Meta Ridley by VGAfanatic

Metroid by Nintendo First Appearance: Metroid (NES 1986)

The leader of the Space Pirates, and the being responsible for the deaths of Samus' parents. Ridley has been destroyed by Samus in many a harsh battle, and each time is rebuilt with cybernetic enhancements from Space Pirate technology, as well as his own regenerative abilities. As long as he is able to consume biomatter from his fallen adversaries, Ridley will always return, never resting until he can see Samus' life ended by his claws.

Super Smash Bros. Special Moves ------------------------------------------- Standard: Plasma Breath Side: Space Pirate Rush Up: Wing Blitz Down: Skewer

Final Smash: Plasma Scream

Deviantart: https://www.deviantart.com/vgafanatic/

[chozopriimed]

drops ridley's tail in front of her. honks.

Blinks. Blinks again, a third time even, to make sure she can tell what she’s looking at here. Yeah, no mistaking it, she knew exactly whose oversized tail this undersized bird had dragged in.

“ … Thank you? ” Who would’ve thought that even Samus could be so thoroughly surprised, but this one had caught her off-guard.

… She has a lot of questions, but more than any of them she can’t help but hope that that bastard’s species doesn’t have regenerative tails.

[xenodile]

The great thing about Ridley is that no matter how fucking busted and dead Samus gets him, his crazy regenerative abilities means that so long as enough of him remains that the Pirates can hook an IV drip into, he WILL be back to be a bastard once again.

[gloriousgwendolinechristie]

Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the Definitive Preview

VANITY FAIR – Star Wars devotees who can’t wait for December need look no further. With exclusive access to writer-director Rian Johnson, plus interviews with Mark Hamill, Daisy Ridley, and others, V.F. presents the ultimate sneak peek at The Last Jedi—and Carrie Fisher’s lasting legacy.

  I. “We’re Going Back?”

  The first trip to Skellig Michael was wondrous: an hour-long boat ride to a craggy, green island off the coast of Ireland’s County Kerry, and then a hike up hundreds of stone steps to a scenic cliff where, a thousand years earlier, medieval Christian monks had paced and prayed. This is where Mark Hamill reprised his role as Luke Skywalker for the first time since 1983, standing opposite Daisy Ridley, whose character, Rey, was the protagonist of The Force Awakens, J. J. Abrams’s resumption of George Lucas’s Star Wars movie saga. The opening sentence of the film’s scrolling-text “crawl,” a hallmark of the series, was “Luke Skywalker has vanished.” Atop Skellig Michael, at the picture’s very end, after an arduous journey by Rey, came the big payoff: a cloaked, solitary figure unhooding himself to reveal an older, bearded Luke, who wordlessly, inscrutably regarded the tremulous Rey as she presented to him the lightsaber he had lost (along with his right hand) in a long-ago duel with Darth Vader, his father turned adversary. It was movie magic: a scene that, though filmed in 2014 and presented in theaters in 2015, is already etched in cinematic history.

  The second trip to Skellig Michael? Maybe less of a thrill for an aging Jedi. Contrary to what one might have reasonably expected, that Abrams would have kept rolling in ’14, recording some dialogue between Luke and Rey in order to get a jump on the saga’s next installment—especially given that Skellig Michael is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, with access limited to the summer months, and only when the weather is cooperative—once Hamill and Ridley had nailed their epic staredown, that was a wrap. It fell to Abrams’s successor, Rian Johnson, the director of The Last Jedi, the eighth movie in the saga, which opens this December, to painstakingly re-stage the clifftop scene, with the two actors retaking their places more than a year later.

  “When I read the script for Episode VIII, I went, ‘Oh my God, we’re going back?’ Because I said I was never going back,” Hamill told me when I sat down with him recently at his home in Malibu. He wondered, in vain, if they could drop him in by chopper this time, “which is so clueless of me, because there’s no landing pad, and it would mar the beauty of it all,” he said. Hamill is a youthful 65 but a sexagenarian nevertheless; whereas the fit young members of the crew were given 45 minutes to get up to the now iconic Rey-Luke meeting spot—carrying heavy equipment—Hamill was allotted an hour and a half, “and I had to stop every 10, 15 minutes to rest.”

  None of this was offered up in the form of complaint. Hamill just happens to be a rambling, expansive talker—in his own way, as endearingly offbeat a character as his friend and on-screen twin sister, Carrie Fisher, who passed away suddenly and tragically last December. Like Fisher, Hamill was put on a diet-and-exercise regimen after he was reconscripted into the Star Wars franchise. (Harrison Ford was under less obligation, having retained his leading-man shape because he never stopped being a leading man.) Over a spartan snack plate of carrot sticks and hummus, the man behind Luke held forth at length on this subject.

  “You just cut out all the things you love,” he said. “Something as basic as bread and butter, which I used to start every meal with. Sugar. No more candy bars. No more stops at In-N-Out. It’s really just a general awareness, because in the old days I’d go, ‘Well, I’m not that hungry, but oh, here’s a box of Wheat Thins,’ and you don’t put the Wheat Thins in the same category as Lay’s potato chips, and yet I would sort of idly, absentmindedly eat these things while watching Turner Classic Movies, and ‘Oh, I ate the whole box!’ ”

  Hamill had been dieting and training for 50 weeks before he learned, via the Episode VII script he finally received from Abrams, that he would not appear in the movie until its last scene, and in a nonspeaking part at that. On this, too, he has a lot of thoughts. Though he grants that the delayed-gratification reveal of Luke was a narrative masterstroke, he’d have done things differently if he’d had his druthers. Han Solo’s death scene, for example. Why couldn’t Luke have made his first appearance around then? In the finished film, the witnesses to Han’s death, at the hands of his own son, the brooding dark-side convert Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), are his longtime Wookiee co-pilot, Chewbacca, and the upstart Resistance fighters Rey and Finn (John Boyega).

“Now, remember, one of the plots in the earlier films was the telepathic communication between my sister and me,” Hamill said. “So I thought, Carrie will sense that Han is in danger and try to contact me. And she won’t succeed, and, in frustration, she’ll go herself. Then we’re in the situation where all three of us are together, which is one of my favorite things in the original film, when we were on the Death Star. It’s just got a fun dynamic to it. So I thought it would have been more effective, and I still feel this way, though it’s just my opinion, that Leia would make it as far as she can, and, right when she is apprehended, maybe even facing death—Ba-boom! I come in and blow the guy away and the two of us go to where Han is facing off with his son, but we’re too late. The reason that’s important is that we witness his death, which carries enormous personal resonance into the next picture. As it is, Chewie’s there, and how much can you get out of [passable Chewbacca wail] ‘Nyaaarghhh!’ and two people who have known Han for, what, 20 minutes?”

  Still, Hamill recognizes that the popular response to The Force Awakens—its stirring ending in particular—was overwhelmingly positive, his misgivings be damned. “As I said to J.J.,” he recalled, “I’ve never been more happy to be wrong.”

  Besides, holding back Luke in VII means that Hamill gets a lot more screen time in VIII. And dialogue. This time, at last, Luke Skywalker talks.

  II. A Long Way from Tosche Station

  Rian Johnson, a sandy-haired, baby-faced 43-year-old Californian heretofore best known among cinéastes for his time-bending 2012 science-fiction film, Looper, is not only the director of Episode VIII but also its sole credited screenwriter. (Episode VII was written by Abrams, Lawrence Kasdan, and Michael Arndt.) Earlier this spring, in a screening room in the Frank G. Wells Building at Walt Disney Studios, in Burbank, California, Johnson described to me the approach he took to writing The Last Jedi, the second film of the Rey-centered trilogy. “J.J. and Larry and Michael set everybody up in a really evocative way in VII and started them on a trajectory. I guess I saw it as the job of this middle chapter to challenge all of those characters—let’s see what happens if we knock the stool out from under them,” he said.

  As it is, none of the main characters in The Force Awakens emerged from that picture in what can be described as a triumphal state. John Boyega’s Finn had been gravely wounded in a lightsaber duel with Kylo Ren. In a telephone interview from China, where he was filming Pacific Rim: Uprising, Boyega told me that, as teased in The Last Jedi’s first trailer, his character, Finn, begins the new movie in a “bacta suit,” a sort of regenerative immersion tank that, in the Star Wars galaxy, heals damaged tissue. Adam Driver, alluding both to Finn’s state and the scar seen on his own face in the trailer, told me, “I feel like almost everyone is in that rehabilitation state. You know, I don’t think that patricide is all that it’s cracked up to be. Maybe that’s where Kylo Ren is starting from. His external scar is probably as much an internal one.”

  Johnson was surprised at how much leeway he was given to cook up the action.

  But Johnson, in drawing up his screenplay, decided to raise the stakes further. “I started by writing the names of each of the characters,” he said, “and thinking, What’s the hardest thing they could be faced with?”

  At the top of Johnson’s list: Luke Skywalker. When he was last glimpsed in Lucas’s original trilogy, at the end of 1983’s Return of the Jedi, Luke was basking in victory and familial warmth, reveling with Princess Leia Organa, Han Solo, and their rebel compatriots at a celebratory Ewok dance party. Turning away for a moment from the festivities, he saw smiling apparitions of his two departed Jedi mentors, Yoda and Obi-Wan Kenobi, along with his late father, Anakin Skywalker, restored to his unscarred, un-Vadered form after redeeming himself in death, sacrificing his own life to save his son’s and slay the evil Emperor Palpatine.

  You’d have expected Luke to have shortly thereafter found a nice girl and settled into a contented existence on a tidy planet with good schools and dual sunsets, no more than a couple of parsecs from the Organa-Solos and their little boy, Ben. But no. Leia and Han’s romance didn’t last, and something heavy went down with twin bro. The result: the cloak, the hood, and monastic isolation of the damaged, Leonard-Cohen-at-Mount-Baldy variety.

  So what happened to Luke? What we know from The Force Awakens is that he had been running some sort of Jedi academy when “one boy, an apprentice, turned against him, destroyed it all.” These are the words that Han Solo, prior to his death scene, offers to Rey and Finn—the inference being that the boy was Han and Leia’s son, and Luke’s nephew, Ben, the future Kylo Ren. “People that knew him best,” Han says of Luke, “think he went looking for the first Jedi temple.”

  That part of Luke’s legend, Johnson confirmed, is accurate. The site of Rey’s Force Awakens encounter with Luke is Ahch-To, the temple’s home planet, which bears a striking resemblance to southwestern coastal Ireland. Though their time on Skellig Michael was brief, the Last Jedi crew returned to the area for additional shooting on the Dingle Peninsula, a ragged spear of land that juts out into the North Atlantic. There, Johnson said, the set builders “duplicated the beehive-shaped huts where the monks lived on Skellig and made a kind of little Jedi village out of them.” Luke, it transpires, has been living in this village among an indigenous race of caretaker creatures whom Johnson is loath to describe in any more detail, except to say that they are “not Ewoks.”

  That Luke is so changed a person presented Johnson with rich narrative opportunities. The Last Jedi is to a large extent about the relationship between Luke and Rey, but Johnson cautions against any “one-to-one correlation” between, say, Yoda’s tutelage of young Luke in The Empire Strikes Back and old Luke’s tutelage of Rey. “There’s a training element to it,” he said, “but it’s not exactly what you would expect.” This being the spoiler-averse world of Lucasfilm, the production company behind the Star Wars movies, that’s about as specific as the director is willing to get. (No, he won’t tell you if Luke is related to Rey, or, for that matter, what species the super-villain Supreme Leader Snoke happens to be, or which character the title The Last Jedi refers to.)

  But Johnson was happy to talk about Hamill’s performance, which, he said, “shows a very different side of the Luke character.” In the original Star Wars trilogy, Luke was the de facto straight man, playing off Ford’s rascally Han and Fisher’s tart, poised Leia, not to mention the droid comedy tandem of C-3PO and R2-D2. Hamill? He was cast for his sincere mien and Bicentennial-era dreamboat looks—part Peter Cetera, part Osmond brother. He still catches grief, he noted, for one particularly clunky line reading in the first movie, when Luke responds to his Uncle Owen’s order to polish up their newly purchased droids by complaining, “But I was going into Tosche Station to pick up some power converters!” Though his approach to the line was, he swears, deliberate—“I distinctly remember thinking, I’ve got to make this as whiny and juvenile as I can,” he said—Hamill admitted that his greenness as an actor left him with “somewhere to go later, where I wouldn’t make those kinds of choices.”

  In his years out of the spotlight, Hamill has flourished as a voice actor, most notably playing the Joker in a series of animated Batman TV shows, films, and video games. He performs the part with a demented brio and an arsenal of evil laughs ranging from Richard Widmark manic to Vincent Price broad—a far cry from the gee-whiz wholesomeness for which he is best remembered.

  Oscar Isaac, at 38 the senior member of the core cast’s “new kids” (Driver is 33, and Ridley and Boyega are in their mid-20s), is old enough to remember as a child revering Luke Skywalker. “So to be there, and to watch Mark revisit Luke, particularly in these scenes we were shooting towards the end of the film, was bizarre and jaw-dropping,” he told me. “It’s like when you see an old band re-unite and go on the road, and they don’t quite hit those high notes anymore—though in this situation it’s completely the opposite. It’s the fulfillment of where your imagination would take you when you imagine where Luke would go, or what he’s become.”

  III. Significant New Figures

  On the Disney campus, I sat in on a postproduction meeting in which Johnson was reviewing some scenes from The Last Jedi. Teams from Industrial Light & Magic, Lucasfilm’s visual-effects division, were videoconferencing in from London, San Francisco, and Vancouver. On a big screen, Poe Dameron, Isaac’s heroic X-wing fighter pilot, was back in action, coaching a gunner named Paige, a new character played by a Vietnamese actress named Veronica Ngo. Another scene featured General Hux, the nefarious First Order commander played with spittle-flecked relish by Domhnall Gleeson.

  Johnson loved what he was seeing but noted the presence of some “schmutz”—smudges around the edges—on the starcraft window that Hux was looking out of. “I don’t know, does the First Order not keep its windows clean?” he asked. “Did you guys play it that way before?”

  He raised the question more deferentially than critically (and Ben Morris, the movie’s London-based VFX supervisor, said it would be no problem to de-schmutzify the pane). Until The Last Jedi, Johnson had never overseen a picture with a budget above $30 million. But the director betrayed no sign of being overwhelmed. He is a gifted filmmaker whose previous movies, especially Brick (his 2005 debut) and Looper, are visually distinctive and intricately plotted, the assured work of a cinema-drunk U.S.C. film-school grad who, in preparation for Episode VIII, steeped himself in World War II movies like Henry King’s Twelve O’Clock High and “funky 60s samurai stuff” like Kihachi Okamoto’s Kill! and Hideo Gosha’s Three Outlaw Samurai.

  The anointment of Johnson as Episode VIII’s overseer is emblematic of the direction in which Kathleen Kennedy has taken Lucasfilm since she assumed the presidency of the company, in 2012, the same year that George Lucas, who had personally recruited her to take his place, sold the company to Disney. Though she reached out to Abrams, a proven wrangler of blockbuster series (Mission: Impossible, Star Trek), to initiate the current Star Wars trilogy, Kennedy has since picked filmmakers whose résumés are less important than whether or not she is a fan of their work.

  Kennedy cut her teeth as a Steven Spielberg protégée—in the early 80s, when she was not yet out of her 20s, he entrusted her with producing E.T.—and now she, too, is keen on giving relative unknowns their big chance. Johnson was someone she’d had her eye on for years, she told me, admiring “how deliberate he is in his storytelling and the way he moves the camera.” The final film of the trilogy, due in 2019 and for the moment assigned the simple working title Episode IX, will be directed by Colin Trevorrow, who did not yet have the big-budget feature Jurassic World under his belt when he crossed Kennedy’s radar; he came to her attention via his first feature, the 2012 indie comedy Safety Not Guaranteed, and a recommendation from her friend Brad Bird, the Pixar auteur.

  Part of what makes Lucasfilm’s new system work is that Kennedy has set up a formidable support structure for her filmmakers. Upon her arrival, she put together a story department at Lucasfilm’s San Francisco headquarters, overseen by Kiri Hart, a development executive and former screenwriter she has long worked with. The story group, which numbers 11 people, maintains the narrative continuity and integrity of all the Star Wars properties that exist across various platforms: animation, video games, novels, comic books, and, most important, movies. “The whole team reads each draft of the screenplay as it evolves,” Hart explained to me, “and we try, as much as we can, to smooth out anything that isn’t connecting.”

  What the story group does not do, Hart said, is impose plot-point mandates on the filmmakers. Johnson told me he was surprised at how much leeway he was given to cook up the action of Episode VIII from scratch. “The pre-set was Episode VII, and that was kind of it,” he said. If anything, Johnson wanted more give-and-take with the Lucasfilm team, so he moved up to San Francisco for about six weeks during his writing process, taking an office two doors down from Hart’s and meeting with the full group twice a week.

  Among Johnson’s inventions for The Last Jedi are three significant new figures: a “shady character” of unclear allegiances, played by Benicio Del Toro, who goes unnamed in the film but is called DJ by the filmmakers (“You’ll see—there’s a reason why we call him DJ,” Johnson said); a prominent officer in the Resistance named Vice Admiral Holdo, played by Laura Dern; and a maintenance worker for the Resistance named Rose Tico, who is played by a young actress named Kelly Marie Tran (and who is the sister of Paige, the character I witnessed in the scene with Poe Dameron). Tran’s is the largest new part, and her plotline involves a mission behind enemy lines with Boyega’s Finn, the stormtrooper turned Resistance warrior.

  Rose and Finn’s adventure takes them to, among other places, another Johnson innovation: a glittering casino city called Canto Bight, “a Star Wars Monte Carlo–type environment, a little James Bond–ish, a little To Catch a Thief,” the director said. “It was an interesting challenge, portraying luxury and wealth in this universe.” So much of the Star Wars aesthetic is rooted in sandy desolation and scrapyard blight; it appealed to Johnson to carve out a corner of the galaxy that is the complete opposite. “I was thinking, O.K., let’s go ultra-glamour. Let’s create a playground, basically, for rich assholes,” he said.

  Canto Bight is also where viewers will get their multi-species fix of gnarled aliens and other grotesque creatures, a comic-relief staple of Star Wars movies since Luke Skywalker first met Han Solo amid the cankerous and snouty inhabitants of the Mos Eisley cantina. The Last Jedi is dark enough as it is, so Johnson has made a point of infusing the movie with levity. “I didn’t want this to be a dirge, a heavy-osity movie,” he said. “So one thing I’ve tried really hard to do is keep the humor in there, to maintain the feeling, amid all the heavy operatic moments, that you’re on a fun ride.”

  IV. Sister Carrie

  Daisy Ridley has her own tale to tell of Skellig Michael. Part of the reason she looks so convincingly weary at the conclusion of Episode VII is, she said, “that I had just vomited. I had adrenal exhaustion, and I was very, very sick.”

  The second time up the cliff, she was in good health and pleased to be re-united with Hamill. But the overall making of Episode VIII proved more psychologically fraught. “When I was doing Episode VII, I was kind of being washed along in a torrent of excitement and unexpectedness,” she said. “When we came around to do the next one, it was a bit more scary, because I knew the expectations, and I understood more what Star Wars means to people. It felt like more of a responsibility.”

  The conflation of real-life and character narratives is not lost on Hamill.

  Fortunately for Ridley, she had become acquainted with a woman who knew a thing or two about such issues. There was no human being on earth better equipped to shepherd Ridley through what she was experiencing, as both the star of a movie franchise and a feminist model to young girls, than Carrie Fisher. “Carrie lived her life the way she wanted to, never apologizing for anything, which is something I’m still learning,” Ridley said. “ ‘Embarrassed’ is the wrong word, but there were times through it all when I felt like I was … shrinking. And she told me never to shrink away from it—that it should be enjoyed.”

  This is a common refrain among the new generation of Star Wars actors: that Fisher was the one who taught them how to deal. Boyega recalled that when there was a backlash against his appearance in the first Force Awakens teaser trailer, released in November 2014—the sight of a black man in stormtrooper armor drew ire from racists and doctrinaire Star Wars traditionalists—Fisher counseled him not to take it to heart. “I remember—and forgive me, I’m going to drop the f-bomb, but that’s just Carrie—she said, ‘Ah, boohoo, who fuckin’ cares? You just do you,’ ” he said. “Words like that give you strength. I bore witness in a million ways to her sharing her wisdom with Daisy too.”

  Fisher had a bigger role to play in The Last Jedi—General Leia Organa logs significantly more screen time in Episode VIII than she did in VII. Isaac, who filmed several scenes with Fisher, said that, like Hamill, she delivered a rich performance, giving her all as an actor, rather than treating Leia’s part as an exercise in feel-good sentimentalism. “We did this scene where Carrie has to slap me,” he said. “I think we did 27 takes in all, and Carrie leaned into it every time, man. She loved hitting me. Rian found such a wonderful way of working with her, and I think she really relished it.”

  For his part, Johnson quickly formed a deep bond with Fisher as a fellow writer, spending long hours with her at the eccentric compound she shared with her mother, Debbie Reynolds, in the Coldwater Canyon section of Beverly Hills. “After I had a draft, I would sit down with her when I was working on re-writing,” he said. “Sitting with her on her bed, in her insane bedroom with all this crazy modern art around us, TCM on the TV, a constant stream of Coca-Cola, and Gary the dog slobbering at her feet.” (For visuals on this characteristic state of affairs chez Fisher, I highly recommend Alexis Bloom and Fisher Stevens’s HBO documentary, Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds.)

  Fisher completed her part in Episode VIII late last summer, when principal photography on the film wrapped. “She was having a blast,” said Kennedy. “The minute she finished, she grabbed me and said, ‘I’d better be at the forefront of IX!’ Because Harrison was front and center on VII, and Mark is front and center on VIII. She thought IX would be her movie. And it would have been.”

  When I was conducting the interviews for this story, the Star Wars family was still mourning Fisher’s unexpected death, which occurred on December 27, 2016, four days after she suffered a heart attack on a flight home to Los Angeles from London, and just a day before Reynolds suffered a fatal stroke. (The Star Wars “family” includes family in the literal sense: Fisher’s daughter, the actress Billie Lourd, appears as a Resistance lieutenant in both The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi.) Fisher had celebrated her 60th birthday just two months earlier.

  “Out of everyone, Carrie was the one I really became friends with and expected to have in my life for years and years,” said Johnson. “I last saw her in November, at the birthday party that she threw at her house. In a way, it was the perfect final, encapsulating image of Carrie—receiving all her friends in the bedroom, with Debbie holding court in the living room.”

  Fisher’s death doesn’t change anything about The Last Jedi except make it more poignant: the film farewell of both the actress and the character. But it does change Episode IX, for which, as Fisher hoped, a central role for Leia had been planned. Kennedy, Trevorrow, and the Lucasfilm team have been compelled to swing from grieving into pragmatic mode, working out how to reconceive the next film in the saga, which is scheduled to start shooting in January.

  One option that is not on the table is to reanimate Fisher’s Leia via C.G.I., as was briefly done in Rogue One, last year’s stand-alone, non-trilogy Star Wars film, created when she was alive. More extensively in that film, Grand Moff Tarkin, a character played by the late Peter Cushing in the first Star Wars movie, was brought back to life using C.G.I. jiggery-pokery and motion-capture technology that involved the use of an actor who physically resembles Cushing. Plus, Lucasfilm had the Cushing family’s consent. However, said Kennedy, “we don’t have any intention of beginning a trend of re-creating actors who are gone.”

  V. A Disturbance in the Force

  Mark Hamill, for all of his agreeable loquaciousness, winced when I brought up Fisher’s death.

  “I can’t say that phrase, what you just said: Carrie’s name and then the d-word,” he said. “Because I think of her in the present tense. Maybe it’s a form of denial, but she’s so vibrant in my mind, and so vital a part of the family, that I can’t imagine it without her. It’s just so untimely, and I’m so angry.”

  Their 40-year relationship truly was sibling-like, Hamill said, rife with affection and squabbles, though their earliest time together mirrored, to some degree, Luke and Leia’s uncertain early dynamic in the movies. In The Empire Strikes Back, the film before the film in which they learn that they are twins, Leia plants a big smackeroo squarely on Luke’s lips—not far off, Hamill said, from their reality as young co-stars. Working on the first Star Wars movie, “we were really attracted to each other. We got to the point where we were having our make-out sessions—and then we pulled back,” Hamill said. “A great way to cool any amorous feelings is laughter, and Carrie had this sort of Auntie Mame desire to find humor in everything. We also realized that, if we did this, everything would fundamentally change. It’s the When Harry Met Sally plot—can we still be friends after intimacy? Wisely, we avoided that.” (Hamill has been married to his wife, Marilou, since 1978.)

  Ridley says, “Carrie lived her life the way she wanted to, never apologizing.”

  Working together on the new trilogy gave Hamill and Fisher a chance to rekindle their benignly rancorous brother-sister dynamic. Both were staying in London, commuting distance from Pinewood Studios, where most of the non-location scenes of Star Wars movies are filmed. They held a competition to see who could get to a million Twitter followers first. (Hamill won; “I told Carrie, ‘Part of your problem is you write in these impenetrable emojis.’ Her tweets looked like rebus puzzles.”)

  And, being the ages they were, they discussed mortality. “We got to talking about one of our favorite scenes in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which is when Tom and Huck go to their own funeral, and they’re up in the balcony, hearing their own eulogies,” Hamill said. “So then I said, ‘Look, if I go first, just promise me you’ll heckle my funeral.’ And she went, ‘Absolutely, if you’ll do the same for me.’ ”

  The constant conflation of the Star Wars cast’s real-life and character narratives is not lost on Hamill, who inadvertently caused a kerfuffle last year during an appearance at the Oxford Union Society, when he described Daisy Ridley as “roughly my daughter’s age, and that’s how I relate to her.” As he knows from experience, sometimes the conflation is quite valid. Losing Fisher really has been like losing a sister.

  Which speaks to the emotional resonance that has powered the saga from the start. “When you look at the stories themselves, they’re about personal tragedies and losses and triumphs,” Hamill said. “It’s all part and parcel of the same thing.”

  Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the Definitive Preview was originally published on Glorious Gwendoline

[sepublic]

Kraid!

KKKKKRRRRAAAAAIIIIIIDDDDD

I was trying to avoid as much of Metroid Dread as possible to be surprised... But then I learned KRAID is back, in glorious HD as part of a mainline game and...

Oh, he’s beautiful!

Seriously, I’ve always wanted to see more of Kraid! Dude was one of the OG Space Pirates alongside Mother Brain and Ridley, who are present throughout the series; And as someone who is apparently Ridley’s Brother-in-Arms, I’m just really curious on what he could be like?

I doubt we’ll get much if anything in terms of personality, but that’s how Metroid games work anyway! Hopefully we get more lore on Kraid, how is he still alive? Does he have regenerative abilities, is he just really incredibly durable? An X-parasite imitation? Fake Kraid has grown up and this is Sclayd? Did the Chozo clone him, maybe even somehow resurrect him from a dead body, or even the afterlife considering their borderline mystical abilities???

Either way, that’s clever of the designers to have Kraid be restrained, as a meta explanation as to why he doesn’t just charge forward- Thus allowing the developers to start off with a traditional take on the Kraid fight... But since he manages to break an arm free in the trailer, the fight might progress and get more deadly, as Kraid becomes more free.

His neck brace will probably be the last to go, to show a sort of natural transition from the traditional style of Kraid fights, to a more modernized take and I am all FOR it! Everyone’s wondering if Ridley will return, but Kraid alone would MORE than make up for his absence, especially since Ridley is already so prevalent while Kraid has only gotten bread crumbs and the Brinstar Depths stage in recent years!

This is like a dream come true... And obviously Kraid is set up to fight Samus, but it’d be kind of neat to see an arc where him and Samus recognize a mutual enemy in the Chozo, and work with each other over it? Probably not, but I feel this would be more plausible than Samus and Ridley working together; A fun thought exercise I’d always entertained, but there really isn’t that personal vitriol between Samus and Kraid.

...I mean, there COULD be if Kraid takes Ridley’s death personally, but who knows, he might hold off on revenge just long enough for a practical escape! Regardless, I utterly adore just how gnarly and twisted this guy looks, it reminds me of Ridley’s Smash Ultimate renders that really modernize his look, breathe a new and alien life to it while still being the same! And the added, slimy body horror, borderline insectoid, like Smash Ridley!

But yes, I appreciate Metroid Dread taking the opportunity to be new, instead of trying to cater to the mainstream audience as an official return to pull them back, especially since we already had Samus Returns do that, especially with Proteus Ridley being thrown in! And with how Proteus was by far the best Ridley fight in the series, I can’t WAIT to see how Mercury Steam gives a new action to a Kraid boss battle!

And it looks like there might be a passageway behind Kraid that he’s guarding... Kind of like his previous appearances, I love Kraid being a giant guard dog- His girth and weight alone makes him an impenetrable wall! Plus he gives immovable object vibes, VS Ridley as an Unstoppable Force.

Ridley moves fast and aggressively leads the charge, while Kraid is less mobile, can’t even fit through most passageways; But holds down the fort and line of defense, tanking damage and shrugging it off compared to someone who heals from it!

Seriously, this is great seeing this under appreciated Space Pirate represented! I’ve always been salty about Meta Kraid being left out of Metroid Prime... And Kraid’s got a distinct identity of his own as one of the biggest bosses in the entire series by a long shot!

His big, colossal, green and chunky frame, that brutishness to Kraid, the size and brawn- It’s a nice contrast and foil to Ridley’ who is memetically huge in general, but from a relative standpoint averagely-sized as a boss, and MUCH scrawnier than the Awakened Behemoth; But he makes up for it wit speed and agility, flight, etc.!

Plus the concept of taking on a full-on Kaiju of the series, Metroid’s Godzilla... I always felt like there was a wasted potential to Kraid and how he stood out as a counterpart to Ridley’ more of the lumbering mountain to scale compared to the acrobatic Cunning God of Death! His Kaiju size, the way the ground could easily tremble from each footstep like Jurassic Park...

If Ridley is a Xenomorph, make Kraid into Godzilla and Rexy and every giant monster whose sheer scale inspires a horror based in awe, one that is huge and grandiose and demands attention and seizes all of it, gloriously basking in full view, in contrast to the more stealthy and subtle Ridley!

They’re both reptilian Space Pirates who debuted with the franchise, serve Mother Brain alongside one another as the two guardians to Tourian. And just like Ridley taking one of the recurring boss themes from Super Metroid and adopting it as HIS theme, Kraid seems to have done the same by Zero Mission!

Plus, Brinstar Depths, AKA Kraid’s Lair, is SUCH a metal soundtrack! It doesn’t necessarily apply to Kraid himself, but I feel like there’s an enigmatic personality hinted with the eerie, melodic tune of this theme... So as someone who’s tried to write him, mostly in my head;

What kind of person is Kraid? What archetypes and roles would he fit? As a more casual type of arch-nemesis, compared to the personal intensity of Ridley? A dumb brute, or smart in his own way? What personality and vibes would make Kraid’s Lair fit as a theme for him?

At the very least, I wonder if we’ll get Space Pirate lore, maybe even origins as to Kraid and Ridley’s species? They’re both huge dragons who took over Zebes... Could there be a connection between Ridley’s species and the Chozo? Will we get a bit of sympathy for Kraid, seeing him captured like an animal by the Chozo, perhaps to test experiments upon and clone?

Will Dread encapsulate the realization of just how much of a bigger scope villain the True Chozo are, experimenting on Kraid the way the Galactic Federation did with Ridley’s clone, another parallel between them? Will we explore the dark past of the Chozo, and a potential tragic look into Kraid’s species- So Samus has a better understanding of how her people have been terrible in many ways, even if that doesn’t at all justify Kraid the person’s actions?

Just... Imagine a storyline where Samus realizes that Kraid was made by the Chozo, or his species was, or they were genetically augmented or massacred, or something like that. Just a twisted moment of realization that explains but doesn’t justify. Which could lead to Samus and Kraid teaming up for a prison breakout at a pivotal moment, Kraid’s girth would make him a helpful ally.

Perhaps Samus could weaponize Kraid in the background to take the brunt of the True Chozo’s attacks, while she takes on the leader? Could he help with environmental terrain, blind to the background as a colossal feature of the environment, a kaiju briefly on your side?

Could we get a Kraid fight where he attacks from the background, instead of to the right? Will he ultimately die helping Samus- More for his own gain and revenge, but still? Maybe even leading to a reluctant salute from Samus as she recognizes them both as people captured, as experimented upon by the Chozo? Apologies for all of the fanon conjecture, my mind is racing...!

I think there’s SO much potential with Kraid and seeing him full, unadulterated HD glory... It’s glorious. It’s magnificent! This is a dream come true, and I hope Kraid finally starts to get the recognition he deserves! Even if he’s just A boss fight, I’m already sated and content here- And I can only imagine the new wave of fan content that will spawn for Kraid, as he’s recognized a defining moment of Dread!

Plus, I’d love to see people characterize and give lore to Kraid... All in all I am LIVING and in triumph here!!! I know I keep using this meme but

Literally this alone, just these shots... Are ALL I really want and need, in the end! Bless you Mercury Steam for this food, for breathing new life into this franchise while renovating what really needs it! I don’t even care if Kraid’s return is never really explained, I’m incredibly happy here!

This new design... It just FITS and works as a new, evergreen design for Kraid honestly! Compared to Ridley who is a lot more varied and arguably inconsistent, even with his Smash render... THIS is the new and definitive Kraid for me, now! I am having the time of my LIFE here!

Ridley the Cunning God has cheated death... is Kraid the Behemoth has reawakened!

(With the idea of Prime Kraid being reused for Metroid Prime 4... I’m wondering if we’ll begin to see an all new Kraid renaissance? 👀 More frequent content as Nintendo starts giving him and more appearances and attention, including in other media and advertising, alongside Ridley???)

[meinlebenistblauweiss]

All diese Momente werden verloren sein, in der Zeit, so wie Tränen im Regen.

Roy Batty - Blade Runner - Ridley Scott - 1982