Hacker Cinema
The Book of Boba Fett
2021 · TV series · 1 season
Created by Jon Favreau
ActionAdventureScience FictionFantasy
Legendary bounty hunter Boba Fett and mercenary Fennec Shand must navigate the galaxy’s underworld when they return to the sands of Tatooine to stake their claim on the territory once ruled by Jabba the Hutt and his crime syndicate.
2 positive5 negative5 neutralfrom 12 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
12 comments on Hacker News
It depends on the objective.
If you're trying to cultivate a chill workplace with colleagues you enjoy having coffee with, that's a different objective from building software which works correctly.
Right now I'm trying to watch Book of Boba Fett on Disney Plus. When I cast Disney to my TV and hit play, it shows the animated Disney logo and sound for about a second, pauses/buffers for a couple of seconds, and then skips to the start of the next episode (and so on, until it runs out of episodes). I can temporarily fix it by turning everything off and on again, and starting the episode on my tablet before hitting the cast button.
Maybe they have a really strong team, I dunno.
> Andor succeeded despite the bureaucracy porn.
I am not sure what specifically you're referring to, but take this scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKl0F640914
A master class in gripping tension, moreover one that--like Breaking Bad--puts you in the awkward position of rooting for the bad guy. Because, as you say, we care about the protagonists, and in a way she is one.
And then in Season 2 when Krennic is talking to Meero? (towards the end - I am deliberately keeping it vague for those who haven't watched yet)
Meanwhile I thought the beginning of Season 2 was by far the weakest.
But yeah. Book of Boba Fett was bottom of the barrel. It feels like in an alternate universe he would have been the main character of The Mandalorian, and BoBF would not have existed.
I'm not sure just why it was so bad, maybe like late Game of Thrones it's obviously lazy, but contrasting with the scene above, at some level you have to care about the character and start to identify with them, insomuch as you become invested in them succeeding in their task: their goals become your surrogate goals. What was Boba Fett's goal and why should we care?
Contrast with Meero the spy hunter. Meanwhile Boba Fett was a crime lord who didn't do crime and constantly changed his mind to whatever the other person suggested instead of his original thoughts and plans.
Andor succeeded despite the bureaucracy porn. Good stories are universal. You need to care about the protagonists.
The exposition is important, but doesn’t drive success. The best example of that is the original Star Wars. Contrast Star Wars to Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress — which inspired many aspects of Star Wars. Essentially the same story with different framing. Both are still excellent films.
Shitty sequels or in-universe works focus on the exposition. The Book of Boba Fett is probably the best example of this. Watching some dude slow walk through the desert to waste my time and engage in some inane plot that made no sense made me actively not give a fuck and turn it off. Cool universe. Bad TV.
Hahaha the only specific example you have is a single prop? Kathleen hasn’t even directed any Star Wars movies, she’s a producer. She was one of, what, 14 producers on Boba Fett? Whatever creative credit you’re giving her credit for, if it’s even true, was executed, directed, acted, filmed, and approved by many other people. This feels like some kind of bogus internet meme talking point. (Edit: aha! I see that it really is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_The_Force_Awakens#Fan_backlash)
George Lucas did many orders of magnitude more damage with the Phantom Menace and stretched out and trashed Star Wars with the prequel trilogy 15 years before Kathleen was even hired.
Hollywood productions have already begun shifting back toward using extras instead of CGI actors.
It turns out it's a lot cheaper to just tell a real person to do something different in real time a bunch of times over the course of a day then it is to tell animators to animate a bunch of CGI people differently a bunch of times.
Extras don't get paid that much to begin with (a fixed, flat rate which varies depending on the type of production i.e., commercial vs TV vs movie). Digital artists don't get paid all that much either, but the disparity is large enough that you actually lose money (compared to hiring a real-person extra) if you need to re-animate a CGI extra more than once. And quite frankly, given the limited VFX budgets most productions have to work with, it's better to spend the VFX budget on actual visual effects than on background filler. Otherwise, you end up with Dr Strange 2, Secret Invasion, and the Book of Boba Fett...
VFX Walls and virtual sets like the ones in use @ Narwhal Studios [1] are pretty common now thanks to Unreal Engine 5. Used in productions of The Mandalorian, Book of Boba Fett, Obi-Wan Kenobi, etc. I think this, combined with outdoor sets like the OP posted about, are the future of movies. Instead of high CGI compositing, do the CGI compositing pre-production and film like you would a normal set.
[1] https://www.narwhalstudios.com
I've ranted at length about Netflix and how insanely useless their data analytics are. I quit Netflix earlier this year. It was obvious to me Netflix would falter when they started using that "Top 10" leaderboard as their primary recommendation engine. It was a tacit admission that they, having all the money, talent, and 20+ years of detailed subscriber data (that every studio would kill for) couldn't figure out how to use that data. I would not be surprised if Netflix pops the data analytics/ML bubble. The curtain has been pulled back and the wizard has been revealed to be nothing more than a simple list of the most watched shows.
> you need the right people involved
Even then it's tough. The Mandalorian was great. Then The Book of Boba Fett came out and was not only a disaster, but also made the entire two seasons of The Mandalorian pointless. Similar to season 8 of Game of Thrones killing the entire show, because who can recommend a show that sets up the central expectation in season one that is so horribly resolved in the very last season. It's now a show I'd recommend to my enemy rather than my friend. TV is tough. And I don't think streaming is kind to shows that don't nail every season. This is content that is part of a catalog. It's not something on NBC on a Thursday night. Syndication isn't just a nice windfall. It's the entire point now.
I enjoyed the later seasons, although I'm the type that would prefer a relationship to gradually decay until you don't have any interest rather than cut your losses while it's still good.
If we took this same approach to star wars and killed the franchise during episodes 7-9, we would have never gotten The Book of Boba Fett.
A common and worthwhile counterpoint to that is that people only notice bad or rushed CGI. Properly good CGI is never criticized because nobody can tell its CGI. The digital artists have the same problem as IT staff. People only notice you when something goes wrong. When everything is going right, you might as well not exist.
A timely example is Disney's Book of Boba Fett. The show is almost entirely CGI except for the actors. There have been some criticisms about particular assets like the biker gang's speeder bikes. But I've yet to hear anyone complain about the environments looking fake. Mos Espa is almost 100% CGI and it looks like a real set.
When it works your brain just accepts it. CGI is incredibly good at environments. I'd go as far to say that it has been indistinguishable from reality for the better part of a decade now. Where its gets noticed is in places where it doesn't do so well or when there were time or budget limitations. Fully CGI humans are still not believable and will probably be the last thing to get right. CGI non-human creatures have varying success. Compositing can still be difficult. Often its better to replace an actors entire body, save for the face, and create a CGI version in a fully CGI environment. Compositing a real person in a CGI scene is prone to floating body syndrome and lighting issues.
The real answer isn't necessarily that one is better than the other. But these are tools which should be used together to make a better product. And I think you'll find that modern films with the best overall effects do blend the two. Mad Max Fury Road is a good example, the vehicles are real with real stuntmen climbing on them but the environment is artificial. Shooting a film in the middle of a desert with nothing in sight is not practical. But shooting the scene on a sandy path and compositing in the CGI desert is.
The Volume is an impressive feat of cinema technology, but once you notice how the camera never goes long, everything is clearly shot within a small soundstage area. The new Star Wars series The Book of Boba Fett suffers from this limitation more than its predecessor.
Ignoring the lack of faith to the source material:
It's bad.. the dialogue, conflict, etc., are far below the levels we've come to expect in sci-fi shows like Expanse.
This is a complete waste of Jared Harris' talents. In the last episode, the resolution of his incomplete download was dramatized by a bit more screaming, then he was all good.
It doesn't feel elevated or sophisticated at all... it does look very pretty.
But it's not even representative of itself -- they keep talking about "trillions" of people here and there, and the new Book of Boba Fett does a better job of selling large population centers than Foundation ever does.
Also, my son made a point about the "unfilmable" books, which are a lot of dialogue: aren't most cop and lawyer shows mostly a lot of talk, usually in just a few common settings?
The thing that makes me sad is that IMO the best Star Wars film that came out since the Disney acquisition was Rogue One (even though it trampled all over the expanded universe novel Rebel Dawn, which I loved). Likely Disney views that movie as their second-worst Star Wars outing (after Solo), while I enjoyed it far more than episodes 7, 8, or 9.
On the optimistic side, I absolutely love The Mandalorian (which I didn't expect, and resisted watching until after season 2 was complete), and I'm looking forward to The Book of Boba Fett as well.
But I absolutely agree with you on the failure of "corporate written-by-committee". I think The Mandalorian is so great in no small part because it's run by a small number of people who really love Star Wars and have been fortunate enough to be granted near-complete creative control.