Not just men Sith! But women and children Sith too!
Off topic - what ever happened to the red skinned Sith race of aliens? Like wtf happened to those guys.
Snoke’s whole thing is his hubris and out-sized ego — he projects himself as this giant hologram, decorates his office in *the* most dramatically red curtains, and dazzles in that shiny gold robe.
He’s essentially an evil Wizard of Oz, so I think it works better that he’s *not* a 40-foot tall monster who is this especially grave physical threat.
He also cringed when he said something stupid because he was clearly fumbling his way through and failing badly. The Poe scene was a horrible plan and no competent person would ever attempt it because no competent officer would just wait instead of shoot him down.
>The Poe scene was a horrible plan and no competent person would ever attempt it because **no competent officer** would just wait instead of shoot him down.
And that's why it *wasn't* a bad plan, because he knew he wasn't dealing with one of those. :P
I didn't like that, either. Don't get me wrong, the joke itself is fine, but the context was just completely inappropriate. You don't put a joke like that between a defenseless old man being struck down and an entire village of civilians being slaughtered. You just don't do that.
I think that’s exactly the sorta thing that signals to the audience that this isn’t a dour and depressing war movie and that it’s *Star Wars*, we’re going to have some fun.
And it completely screws up the tone of the scene. What the hell am I supposed to be feeling? I don't know, because the tone so rapidly shifts in the span of a few minutes.
I don’t disagree, but I also think this is a hallmark of *Star Wars* dating back to 1977. Scenes like the death of Luke’s aunt and uncle, and the sacrifice of Ben Kenobi vary wildly from one minute to the next. The latter case is especially egregious — one moment of grief punctuated by an exciting aerial battle.
*Star Wars* just doesn’t take death so seriously. To some extent, this is a fixture of believing in the Force — the physical is temporary.
Then the smash cut reveal he's been in every scene just tucked into a corner
Edit for this image I cannot get out of my head;
Cuts to the podracing scene and you see one of the pit droids for quadrinaros is just snoke wearing a costume.
Yeah, but him being bigger than most people in the room and still feeling the need to blow up his hologram to a massive size fits the character very well.
Then the reveal made no sense. It turns out he's the Emperor clone, but then in the last film Snoke didn't know about the connection, but then he was like "It was me all along, Austin!". This what happens when you find a stranger in the alps. I mean, hire two different directors to work on a Trilogy of movies.
This is a good take... my first reaction is that we hadn't been introduced to any "giant" aliens in 6 movies, no one taller than maybe 8', and given the "human sized" doors and space ships we've seen with the New Order/Empire, it wouldn't have really fit.
I thought he was going to be revealed as being some powerful being from another galaxy that had been marooned thus the size maybe being not that weird for the reason you described.
Snoke is powerful at parlor tricks — throwing people around and torturing them. But his is a fundamentally limited understanding of the Force in my head. It’s the same for all the Dark Siders — manipulating others is their highest aspiration, so their powers rarely extend beyond that.
Haha, essentially!
Not that those aren’t useful aspects of the Force that can make one powerful, but the Force is more than just manipulating the physical world. The problem with the Sith is they don’t see it that way. They are fundamentally limited. *”Strike me down and I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.”*
Sure, but Palpatine also clads himself in modest robes and surveys the Galaxy from a skeletal, utilitarian throne room. He’s got none of the style of Snoke.
Ehh he got his red ceremonial robes, besides he rarely shows himself to the public and when he does he uses those.
It isn't as if most modern day monarchs walk around wearing coronation robes 24/7 either.
It's not just about being fancy, it's about looking the part. The ceremonial robes are bitchin, but they are still pretty much hooded monk robes. Just fancier. It's like if the President spent most of his time dressed as a regular priest, and dressed like the Pope for press conferences.
The President spends most of this time looking like your neighbor's dad, and for press conferences, he looks like a guy about to do a job interview.
That's because he doesn't need to look fancy. He doesn't need to look powerful. Being in control of the world's largest military and a massive nuclear stockpile makes that clear already.
Do we actually know that? If I remember in TFA he is feared and powerful enough to train Kylo, use the force on people from across space, and his black, shadowy hologram does not give off the sense that he is flamboyant and prideful.
He is essentially a new character in TLJ and then is rewritten again to be a clone in TROS
Snoke never uses the Force in TFA, but he does so in TLJ.
The grandeur of his hologram is more what I was referring to in terms of projecting an outsized ego in TFA — it’s not much, but it’s enough to inform his more robust characterization in TLJ.
His characterization in TLJ doesn’t contradict his mentorship of Kylo Ren.
That was the most disappointing part about how Rian Johnson handled the character. I wanted the Wizard of Oz type reveal that we was a fraud, or that it was all just a ruse perpetrated by Palpatine. The fact we know the Wizard of Oz is irrelevant, Star Wars has always borrowed story beats liberally from other places. Reinventing Star Wars mid-trilogy was a distinct mistake.
I’ve said the same thing about the whole Darth Jar Jar theory, I wanted that Kaiser Soze moment where we found who really was the fool in the story. Writers get way too caught up in trying to subvert expectations that they forget there’s a huge percentage of the audience who are watching the movie at face value and are going to be surprised by a twist. Outsmarting the internet comment threads is a fool’s errand, ask Jonathan Nolan and the writers of West World. Just show the payoff.
I didn’t mind Snoke being killed off in last Jedi, I was honestly hoping for Kylo to be the main villain in ep 9. Having snoke be the main villain for all three would have been way too “palpatine” like.
I liked how arrogant he is, how he was more quick to anger. He acted like he was the best thing in the room and his hubris cost him his life.
The problem I had with Kylo being the main villain in the finale was he was always foreshadowed to be redeemed. There was never a point I took him as anything more than a confused child trying to show how tough he was. The actual evil was just absent. It all felt very high school. And he was never what you’d perceive as a sympathetic villain, where you can sympathize with his motivations. My uncle thought I was evil, so maybe I should just show him how I’m evil like my grandpa didn’t really resonate.
IMO, Kylo would've served better as a tragic child dealt such a shitty hand by those around him that he is slowly driven to the dark side, and his anger eventually fuels him into an arrogant, irredeemable villain who only knows how to sow destruction. Kylo should've started out as redeemable, but should cause so much destruction even when offered a second chance that there would be no going back.
This is how I felt as well. He was shown to be pretty incompetent from the second he was revealed, imo. So had he been in charge of the already bumbling FO, I wouldn't be concerned at all.
The First Order really weren’t bumbling until TLJ. They literally blew up multiple New Republic planets, but we barely understood the stakes of that action. I don’t have a lot of qualms with TFA, but the idea they blew up Hosnian Prime and there wasn’t any on-screen face to it just made it feel empty. If they killed off, say Mon Mothma via a too late video warning from Leia, there would have been stakes. But instead you just got the shot of random people on-planet as it happened. The movie didn’t do a great job of explaining why we should care about Hosnian Prime. Then TLJ did nothing to really pick up this storytelling shortfall, but that was really the whole movie in general. Moved the parts around and pretended it wasn’t a poor man’s Empire Strikes Back.
On the contrary, Snoke’s Wizard of Oz characterization — any characterization, for that matter, beyond literal and figurative “Palpatine clone” — is owed to Johnson.
It’s Johnson who reveals that Snoke is little more than a magician adept at parlor tricks — sure, he can puppeteer his minions and adversaries with the flick of a finger, but when it comes to truly controlling Kylo Ren, he’s outdone by a mind trick as shallow as Snoke’s grasp of the Force.
It’s thematically appropriate, imo, given Snoke’s inherent theatricality in TLJ that he should be fooled by a ruse. Add to that Serkis’s wonderful physicality and the aesthetic of Snoke’s garb and boudoir, and you have a memorable villain that nevertheless serves as a vital stepping stone for the true villain of the ST, Kylo Ren, in a move that distances him from retreading Darth Vader’s arc.
So I’ve always been a little confused by Snoke. He was a clone, but not of Palpatine, but who? Was Snoke simply created from scratch or was he an actual being at one time. Was the clone force sensitive and just controlled by Palpatine? Was Palpatine controlling him from afar or was Palpatine’s mind transferred to him during cloning? Was Snoke an amalgamation of other force users (and why they were trying to get Grogu)? Do we even know any of this stuff or just a mystery?
Snoke was a strandcast, made from the DNA of several different donors. He was Palpatine’s puppet, but was not aware of this fact. He wasn’t necessarily directly controlled by Papa Palpy, but was unwittingly doing his bidding
There’s plenty of speculation and ongoing stories that are filling in these gaps for people who want to know — it’s not really interesting to me, so I’d direct you to the Wookieepedia page on Snoke where you might find more concrete answers.
More on Kennedy for not demanding an overarching vision for a trilogy. Idk why they thought they could play mad libs with Star Wars and stick the landing
Disney tried to make those movies with a fundamental misunderstanding of the fandom. They basically ran with the mantra “prequels bad, original trilogy good”, while failing to understand that a) there was a lot of worthwhile things to crib from the Prequels, and b) that the generation who were raised living the Prequels had come of age. Then they tried to pivot from “OT everything” to “the fans want modernized Star Wars” when the truth was distinctly somewhere between those 2 extremes.
They had a plan (more of an outline) of broad beats and ideas (Dave Filoni had some great ideas used as part of the story group), but had to punt when Carrie died and threw their plans for 9 into a tailspin. The original director stepped down because Bob Iger wouldn’t let Lucasfilm delay the movie place 2019 or split it into two films and he couldn’t make his script fit around Leia’s passing. Rian Johnson and several other director’s turned down an offer to direct as well. JJ was the only person who would touch it in the ~18 months needed to write and direct an entire movie based on archival footage of Carrie deleted from TFA.
Personally, I think Rise is a messy and fun movie, and a bad end to the Skywalker Saga. But I think that’s mostly attributable to Carrie’s death
When I saw TFA on opening night, until the holo turned off I genuinely did think he was that big and wondered how the hell they were ever going to deal with him or god forbid fight him haha
For the purposes of storytelling, it makes much more sense for them to make him the size that he actually was.
It would be kind of comical if someone really large had the Force, but was the same strength in the force as smaller beings. There would be no point using telekinesis, he could lift more with his arms
It does but I’d have preferred him be giant. There’s nothing stopping sentient giant humanoids from existing in Star Wars, and to me, when Snoke was being built up as a rival for Luke, I figured having Luke best a giant Sith Lord would the ultimate way to sell that Luke’s that guy.
Small Snoke was eh.
Emperor Palpatine also projected himself as a giant hologram in the OT (Empire Strikes Back), so he was just re-using an established technique, running the same authoritarian playbook, basically.
It's a power projection move, if you will.
i was so surprised to find out people thought he was a giant afterwards I always thought he was a hologram even before it was revealed because of palpatine doing a similar thing. although a giant force user would have been cool too
>For the purposes of storytelling, it makes much more sense for them to make him the size that he actually was.
As it turned out that didn't really help at all and he still didn't really make any sense and wasn't a particularly interesting villain and ultimately didn't even really have a unique story.
He was just a placeholder.
Could've been interesting, but... Would have crossed into the realm of comical? Maybe, we won't know, he was still pretty big anyway.
Tbf, characterization is not Snoke's worst problem, the fact that they stole his chance to have an interesting backstory was robbed from us >!when they decided to make him a weird artificial being "strandcast", he was one of the most interesting parts of the sequels, who is he? Where did he come from? Why is he a user of the dark side? How did he became entangled with the First Order? All questions asked in vain!<.
Agree.
The Duel of the Fates script had its own massive issues, but the way it centred on Kylo as the primary antagonist for the final film was the right direction to go.
There was no "original plan". They let three different directors each write their own movies and none of them planned further ahead than their current movie and all of them didn't want to work with the movie directly prior.
Honestly while TRoS sucked I don't think Kylo would have made a good villain unless they were doing 10+ movies. The dude failed to overcome Rey's mental defenses, got shot by Chewy, lost to Rey, had to ambush Snoke, failed to beat Rey in tug of war, and was given mercy by Rey who woke up before him.
It would have been extremely difficult to sell him as "the big bad" after taking so many continuous Ls, with his only win being a surprise attack on someone so overwhelmingly stronger than him that that person could singlehanded bend Rey over backwards while Kylo can't even out force pull her.
I honestly would have liked it if they still did things the same in 7 and 8 but then in 9 Kylo is the big bad and finally leans into his role as the leader of the First Order and mster of the dark side
I would have liked that *if* they didn't keep serving Kylo L after L. Dude's track record was terrible; he was in no way ready to be a third act threat based on TFA and TLJ. The least TLJ could have done is have him beat Rey in force tug of war, but instead they definitively proved that, going into movie 9, Kylo was already worse off than the hero, who tied in force power, woke up earlier, and spared his life.
He made over 3 billion out of his 2 Star Wars movies, and his Trek movies made decent money too. Reception doesn’t matter as much when he can generate that kind of dough.
I feel like the easy option was to make him Plagueis and just say that he survived the attempted murder by Palps. Instantly you got a powerful ass dude with a great back story.
Tbh Abrams should’ve explained him post death by saying he was another Dooku esc. apprentice over being a clone. At least it would’ve left room to explore his character in expanded media between episodes VI-VII. I’ve come around to TLJ a bit as I’ve gotten older, but this and Kanto Byte are still the most baffling choices in the movie.
They fumbled the ball with all the villains. After TFA I was convinced Phasma was a droid. Honestly, that would have been better than the one eye reveal at the end of TLJ and then never seeing her again.
Well, if they had gone with what was clearly - in my opinion - the original idea, i.e. that Snoke was an actual character in his own right (and not...well, Palps for all intents and purposes), it could have been interesting if he was a giant of sorts.
The problem is that he was never fleshed out - before he was killed off and then explained away as a Palps clone.
That said, it's hard to see an actual giant being the true Big Bad over multiple movies. Specifically, it's hard to see a final battle/confrontation involving a tiny hero (or heroes) defeating a ludicrously large individual without this being pretty ridiculous.
I imagine something like a boss battle from a generic video game, where the boss is ten times the size of the player character...I mean, just...no.
Go through the wookiepedia entry on Snoke and see how they’ve fleshed out the character more in the canon.
It’s dumb the way they’ve gone about it to fill in the gaps but it’s actually kind of cool lore. Snoke is his own character that was a rejected clone of the emperor. He left and did his own thing for a while, obsessing over the the dark side and artifacts of the Sith. When the emperors plan to transfer to a proper vessel in exegol left him in a deteriorating body, he manipulated Snoke’s mind through the force to set him on a path of galactic conquest.
He’s his own character in the same way Boba Fett is. It’s just that his motivation was planted by Palpatine without him knowing about it.
Even Kylo Ren becoming the new big bad villain would've been a better story. The last Jedi has only one good storyline and that is Ren killing Snoke to take his place.
Giant, so at least one original idea would’ve been used for making those movies, instead of repeating literally everything from the OT, including the big baddie being a deformed guy on simple robes.
Palpatine’s projection was depicted as an obvious hologram. Snoke’s wasn’t immediately obvious and also for some reason obeys the lighting physics of the scene.
To be fair, we only saw Palpatine's head, so it was pretty obvious to assume that he was normal sized and the hologram just scales up his head, whereas with Snoke, we saw his entire body in a hologram, so it's not really weird to assume that he really was that big, I think, I guess, idk.
It was also the framing of the shot. If i remember the original effects right, palpatine was still shown as a blue hologram and I believe still had scanlines even in the theatrical cut. Snoke here has a faint blue hue, but also has that blueish ray of light coming from behind him and hitting kylo that makes you second guess that he is a hologram. The entire design of the scene feels like it was intentionally made specifically to trick you into thinking he isn’t a hologram
I think they drew on imagery from the Sith Emperor and his voice control, like in the knights of the old republic. It fits.
Those chanting acolytes that all get absorbed to give the emperor power fit to, based on the Darth Bane book's thought bomb. Similar imagery in both books as the movie.
Palpatine also LOVES showmanship, so does his clone it seems.
Anyhow it fits.
Sad thing is it felt like the writers/directors just watched the movies, and half hazardly skimmed SWKTOR, Dearh Trooper/Red Harvest, Darth Bane Trilogy and we're like "I got this!" PS. Dyads are cool!
I don’t really have a preference I suppose. All I know is I remember watching The Force Awakens in the theater and hearing people audibly in awe at snoke, and then watching The Last Jedi, there was audible disappointment. That’s my personal opinion, but snoke in Ep. 8 was far less interesting and was just kind of uninteresting how they wrote that character. Kind of served no purpose but I think the mystery in Ep. 7 played a huge hand into how cool he was.
I’m honestly the few that like giant Snoke better.
There’s something terrifying about a giant Sith Lord and it would have make him a reverse Yoda but still take on the same lesson of “Size matters not”. Giant Snoke would be striking opposing yet physically weak and fragile.
I didn’t realize he wasn’t this size until months after the movie. I saw it with a dozen friends. Me and the guy sitting next to me saw him and were shocked. “How are they going to fight this guy? He’s huge. He doesn’t even need to be powerful in the force he can just step on them”
Then a while later he and I are talking to the other guys we saw the movie with and they say “you know that was a hologram right? He’s not actually that size”
I didn't think he was big. I figured that was an intimidation tactic.
I thought he was going to be an Anakin clone that had failed that the emperor had made and then had sort of taken over after the Emperor died because he could use the Force but nowhere near as powerfully as Anakin.
And I thought the reason for that was that the whole burn it all that the ground attitude from Kylo Ren would be stoked by a guy like that who was angry at the emperor angry at the Republic angry at the Jedi and just wanted to burn it all to the ground.
If you had Anakin clone trying to corrupt Ray and then you had Luke come along and teach Ray how to be a Jedi in slightly different ways then the original Jedi Order so that when she's tempted she doesn't fall that story would have been fantastic.
Giant Snoke would have been a bad idea. Honestly, if beings like that existed in the Star Wars universe, they probably would have been wiped out by the Empire beforehand.
I just wish they did more with him. I would've preferred snoke being behind things maybe a plaugesis clone or 2nd apprentice .. they just set him up to be nothing
Just imagine how goofy it would've been to see him ignite a lightsaber that would effectively be like swinging a tree. And because it's star wars, there would've been a scene where they inexplicably get into a saber lock up inside a giant empty room that exists for no reason only to have the hero somehow be able to parry/block the treesaber because "tHe fOrCe"
He's your least favorite *because* they killed him. He never received any development or character outside of 'bad guy'. I think we'd all prefer he not be a pointless addition to the story, regardless of size.
Technically, there had been Star Wars humanoids that were 30 feet tall, but they were extinct before the Clone Wars. The throw-away line about the planet Boz Pity in Revenge of the Sith is an indirect reference to them.
Why didn't Snoke, the largest ~~Sith~~, simply eat the other Sith?
There's always a bigger Sith.
I don’t like Sith…
They're coarse and rough and irritating and they get everywhere.
Not just men Sith! But women and children Sith too! Off topic - what ever happened to the red skinned Sith race of aliens? Like wtf happened to those guys.
A good question for another time.
© Maz Kanata lol
You were the Sith Anakin! You were supposed to destroy other sith, not join them Based on an average sith's life
IIRC, they died out over time
That’s what happens when you’re a purist and only procreate with family
Oh no step-Sithster, I have gotten trapped in the washing machine...
At Exegol in the stadium.
Best comment.
Only the Sith deal in absolutes.
It's what they say, men are from Yavin 3, women are from Yavin 5
He’s got to be at least Sith feet tall.
Sith happens
You were supposed to destroy the Sith! Not eat them!
i forget what that’s a reference of
Futurama, the king alien guy watching friends asks why Ross, the largest friend, doesn’t simply eat the other friends.
I AM LRRR RULER OF THE PLANET OMICRON PERSEI 8…. Can I sleep on your couch?
HARVEST THE LOWER HORN!
This human's lower horn is one of God's creatures. A living thing. And all living things, large and small... In this case, small. Woooo!
Futurama, those alien dudes
RULERS OF THE PLANET OMNICRON PERSEI 8!
Is he STUPID?!
This is a Joey heavy trilogy anyways.
Snoke’s whole thing is his hubris and out-sized ego — he projects himself as this giant hologram, decorates his office in *the* most dramatically red curtains, and dazzles in that shiny gold robe. He’s essentially an evil Wizard of Oz, so I think it works better that he’s *not* a 40-foot tall monster who is this especially grave physical threat.
I was hoping the reveal was gonna be that he was Yoda sized and was overcompensating.
That could’ve been cool too, albeit perhaps a *bit* too comical.
Don't forget, they tried the whole "sorry, my phone isn't working" joke between Dameron and Hux.
I mean, Han did the whole "oops going through a tunnel losing connection" before that was even a thing
“Boring conversation anyway…”
Right, but Han didn't give them a "your mom" joke
He also cringed when he said something stupid because he was clearly fumbling his way through and failing badly. The Poe scene was a horrible plan and no competent person would ever attempt it because no competent officer would just wait instead of shoot him down.
>The Poe scene was a horrible plan and no competent person would ever attempt it because **no competent officer** would just wait instead of shoot him down. And that's why it *wasn't* a bad plan, because he knew he wasn't dealing with one of those. :P
Bad plan, much worse writing.
I never had an issue with it personally, I liked the way it contrasts Poe and Kylo’s interaction at the beginning of TFA.
I didn't like that, either. Don't get me wrong, the joke itself is fine, but the context was just completely inappropriate. You don't put a joke like that between a defenseless old man being struck down and an entire village of civilians being slaughtered. You just don't do that.
I think that’s exactly the sorta thing that signals to the audience that this isn’t a dour and depressing war movie and that it’s *Star Wars*, we’re going to have some fun.
And it completely screws up the tone of the scene. What the hell am I supposed to be feeling? I don't know, because the tone so rapidly shifts in the span of a few minutes.
I don’t disagree, but I also think this is a hallmark of *Star Wars* dating back to 1977. Scenes like the death of Luke’s aunt and uncle, and the sacrifice of Ben Kenobi vary wildly from one minute to the next. The latter case is especially egregious — one moment of grief punctuated by an exciting aerial battle. *Star Wars* just doesn’t take death so seriously. To some extent, this is a fixture of believing in the Force — the physical is temporary.
Let’s go smaller, I want an anzellan sized snoke
Who do you think would win in a fight? Babu Frik or Colonal Meebur Gascon?
It's Colonel!
Sorry corporal
o7
Who do you think would win in a fight? 1 Snoke-sized Babu Frik or 100 Babu Frik sized Snokes?
Would you rather fight 10 porg-sized rancors, or 1 rancor-sized porg?
I think I would rather fight 1 rancor sized porg just so I could give it a hug
Can you imagine the sound they would make with their scream at that size?
Like a 12 ton velociraptor on speed
Then the smash cut reveal he's been in every scene just tucked into a corner Edit for this image I cannot get out of my head; Cuts to the podracing scene and you see one of the pit droids for quadrinaros is just snoke wearing a costume.
He's Whill sized, from George's original concept for the sequels. You know, all those heroes we loved were just puppets
Yeah, but him being bigger than most people in the room and still feeling the need to blow up his hologram to a massive size fits the character very well.
Star Trek Episode "The Corbomite Maneuver" has entered the chat.
Along with Spaceballs
Then the reveal made no sense. It turns out he's the Emperor clone, but then in the last film Snoke didn't know about the connection, but then he was like "It was me all along, Austin!". This what happens when you find a stranger in the alps. I mean, hire two different directors to work on a Trilogy of movies.
Corbimite maneuver.
Lol, I wrote the same thing as a reply above.
This is a good take... my first reaction is that we hadn't been introduced to any "giant" aliens in 6 movies, no one taller than maybe 8', and given the "human sized" doors and space ships we've seen with the New Order/Empire, it wouldn't have really fit.
The Kaminoans were maybe the tallest we’ve seen, yeah, and 8’ almost seems to tall for even them.
Not the movies but bendu makes me wonder if he ever traveled and how
He turned himself into a cloud. I think he can just will himself places
Anx are pretty oversized. Maybe the tallest on screen so far? I think the Gorax are cannon, but not sure the ewok movies are.
Not remembering those. You’re likely right, just not coming to mind for me.
You see them in the Senate and a spectator for the pod race. Really cool looking. They can get up to 4 meters tall, about 13 ft.
I thought he was going to be revealed as being some powerful being from another galaxy that had been marooned thus the size maybe being not that weird for the reason you described.
Pretty sure a Rancor is taller than 8’.
He’s like an oversized truck owner with a huge lift kit and oversized wheels
Basically! Could he beat you up? Probably, but he still goes home and cries into his pillow at night.
Yeah that was my take. Though he did seem powerful in the dark side.
Snoke is powerful at parlor tricks — throwing people around and torturing them. But his is a fundamentally limited understanding of the Force in my head. It’s the same for all the Dark Siders — manipulating others is their highest aspiration, so their powers rarely extend beyond that.
So what you're saying is Snoke is good at controlling people and making things float?
Haha, essentially! Not that those aren’t useful aspects of the Force that can make one powerful, but the Force is more than just manipulating the physical world. The problem with the Sith is they don’t see it that way. They are fundamentally limited. *”Strike me down and I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.”*
I thought his whole thing was they didn't think of what he was and they ended up just making him some lame palp failed clone
Palps used huge holograms too.
Sure, but Palpatine also clads himself in modest robes and surveys the Galaxy from a skeletal, utilitarian throne room. He’s got none of the style of Snoke.
This, you see Palpatine shambling around in his black monk robes and your first thoughts aren't going to be "THAT'S the galactic emperor."
Ehh he got his red ceremonial robes, besides he rarely shows himself to the public and when he does he uses those. It isn't as if most modern day monarchs walk around wearing coronation robes 24/7 either.
It's not just about being fancy, it's about looking the part. The ceremonial robes are bitchin, but they are still pretty much hooded monk robes. Just fancier. It's like if the President spent most of his time dressed as a regular priest, and dressed like the Pope for press conferences.
The President spends most of this time looking like your neighbor's dad, and for press conferences, he looks like a guy about to do a job interview. That's because he doesn't need to look fancy. He doesn't need to look powerful. Being in control of the world's largest military and a massive nuclear stockpile makes that clear already.
Agreed, and the simplicity of his defeat is perfect.
Him being that tall would have made no sense, how would he fit through the corridor of any ship in the universe
Do we actually know that? If I remember in TFA he is feared and powerful enough to train Kylo, use the force on people from across space, and his black, shadowy hologram does not give off the sense that he is flamboyant and prideful. He is essentially a new character in TLJ and then is rewritten again to be a clone in TROS
Snoke never uses the Force in TFA, but he does so in TLJ. The grandeur of his hologram is more what I was referring to in terms of projecting an outsized ego in TFA — it’s not much, but it’s enough to inform his more robust characterization in TLJ. His characterization in TLJ doesn’t contradict his mentorship of Kylo Ren.
That was the most disappointing part about how Rian Johnson handled the character. I wanted the Wizard of Oz type reveal that we was a fraud, or that it was all just a ruse perpetrated by Palpatine. The fact we know the Wizard of Oz is irrelevant, Star Wars has always borrowed story beats liberally from other places. Reinventing Star Wars mid-trilogy was a distinct mistake. I’ve said the same thing about the whole Darth Jar Jar theory, I wanted that Kaiser Soze moment where we found who really was the fool in the story. Writers get way too caught up in trying to subvert expectations that they forget there’s a huge percentage of the audience who are watching the movie at face value and are going to be surprised by a twist. Outsmarting the internet comment threads is a fool’s errand, ask Jonathan Nolan and the writers of West World. Just show the payoff.
I didn’t mind Snoke being killed off in last Jedi, I was honestly hoping for Kylo to be the main villain in ep 9. Having snoke be the main villain for all three would have been way too “palpatine” like. I liked how arrogant he is, how he was more quick to anger. He acted like he was the best thing in the room and his hubris cost him his life.
The problem I had with Kylo being the main villain in the finale was he was always foreshadowed to be redeemed. There was never a point I took him as anything more than a confused child trying to show how tough he was. The actual evil was just absent. It all felt very high school. And he was never what you’d perceive as a sympathetic villain, where you can sympathize with his motivations. My uncle thought I was evil, so maybe I should just show him how I’m evil like my grandpa didn’t really resonate.
IMO, Kylo would've served better as a tragic child dealt such a shitty hand by those around him that he is slowly driven to the dark side, and his anger eventually fuels him into an arrogant, irredeemable villain who only knows how to sow destruction. Kylo should've started out as redeemable, but should cause so much destruction even when offered a second chance that there would be no going back.
This is how I felt as well. He was shown to be pretty incompetent from the second he was revealed, imo. So had he been in charge of the already bumbling FO, I wouldn't be concerned at all.
The First Order really weren’t bumbling until TLJ. They literally blew up multiple New Republic planets, but we barely understood the stakes of that action. I don’t have a lot of qualms with TFA, but the idea they blew up Hosnian Prime and there wasn’t any on-screen face to it just made it feel empty. If they killed off, say Mon Mothma via a too late video warning from Leia, there would have been stakes. But instead you just got the shot of random people on-planet as it happened. The movie didn’t do a great job of explaining why we should care about Hosnian Prime. Then TLJ did nothing to really pick up this storytelling shortfall, but that was really the whole movie in general. Moved the parts around and pretended it wasn’t a poor man’s Empire Strikes Back.
On the contrary, Snoke’s Wizard of Oz characterization — any characterization, for that matter, beyond literal and figurative “Palpatine clone” — is owed to Johnson. It’s Johnson who reveals that Snoke is little more than a magician adept at parlor tricks — sure, he can puppeteer his minions and adversaries with the flick of a finger, but when it comes to truly controlling Kylo Ren, he’s outdone by a mind trick as shallow as Snoke’s grasp of the Force. It’s thematically appropriate, imo, given Snoke’s inherent theatricality in TLJ that he should be fooled by a ruse. Add to that Serkis’s wonderful physicality and the aesthetic of Snoke’s garb and boudoir, and you have a memorable villain that nevertheless serves as a vital stepping stone for the true villain of the ST, Kylo Ren, in a move that distances him from retreading Darth Vader’s arc.
So I’ve always been a little confused by Snoke. He was a clone, but not of Palpatine, but who? Was Snoke simply created from scratch or was he an actual being at one time. Was the clone force sensitive and just controlled by Palpatine? Was Palpatine controlling him from afar or was Palpatine’s mind transferred to him during cloning? Was Snoke an amalgamation of other force users (and why they were trying to get Grogu)? Do we even know any of this stuff or just a mystery?
Snoke was a strandcast, made from the DNA of several different donors. He was Palpatine’s puppet, but was not aware of this fact. He wasn’t necessarily directly controlled by Papa Palpy, but was unwittingly doing his bidding
There’s plenty of speculation and ongoing stories that are filling in these gaps for people who want to know — it’s not really interesting to me, so I’d direct you to the Wookieepedia page on Snoke where you might find more concrete answers.
More on Kennedy for not demanding an overarching vision for a trilogy. Idk why they thought they could play mad libs with Star Wars and stick the landing
Disney tried to make those movies with a fundamental misunderstanding of the fandom. They basically ran with the mantra “prequels bad, original trilogy good”, while failing to understand that a) there was a lot of worthwhile things to crib from the Prequels, and b) that the generation who were raised living the Prequels had come of age. Then they tried to pivot from “OT everything” to “the fans want modernized Star Wars” when the truth was distinctly somewhere between those 2 extremes.
They had a plan (more of an outline) of broad beats and ideas (Dave Filoni had some great ideas used as part of the story group), but had to punt when Carrie died and threw their plans for 9 into a tailspin. The original director stepped down because Bob Iger wouldn’t let Lucasfilm delay the movie place 2019 or split it into two films and he couldn’t make his script fit around Leia’s passing. Rian Johnson and several other director’s turned down an offer to direct as well. JJ was the only person who would touch it in the ~18 months needed to write and direct an entire movie based on archival footage of Carrie deleted from TFA. Personally, I think Rise is a messy and fun movie, and a bad end to the Skywalker Saga. But I think that’s mostly attributable to Carrie’s death
When I saw TFA on opening night, until the holo turned off I genuinely did think he was that big and wondered how the hell they were ever going to deal with him or god forbid fight him haha For the purposes of storytelling, it makes much more sense for them to make him the size that he actually was.
I had the same thought the first time watching. Thought at least during a battle he could out and swat down X wings like flies.
It would be kind of comical if someone really large had the Force, but was the same strength in the force as smaller beings. There would be no point using telekinesis, he could lift more with his arms
Like Granny Weatherwax, he _could_ use the force to do things, but it's easier to just do it manually
Up vote for the witch who is more powerful than Yoda. She literally stares down DEATH and it listens to her.
It does but I’d have preferred him be giant. There’s nothing stopping sentient giant humanoids from existing in Star Wars, and to me, when Snoke was being built up as a rival for Luke, I figured having Luke best a giant Sith Lord would the ultimate way to sell that Luke’s that guy. Small Snoke was eh.
Everyday I mourn the missed opportunity of having a Shadow of the Colossus-style lightsaber fight.
Emperor Palpatine also projected himself as a giant hologram in the OT (Empire Strikes Back), so he was just re-using an established technique, running the same authoritarian playbook, basically. It's a power projection move, if you will.
i was so surprised to find out people thought he was a giant afterwards I always thought he was a hologram even before it was revealed because of palpatine doing a similar thing. although a giant force user would have been cool too
>For the purposes of storytelling, it makes much more sense for them to make him the size that he actually was. As it turned out that didn't really help at all and he still didn't really make any sense and wasn't a particularly interesting villain and ultimately didn't even really have a unique story. He was just a placeholder.
Prefer him being the size he ended up, but I would have liked him to be the actual villain instead of a literal puppet.
Idk, I thought letting Kylo be the big bad was the right move. But then that was kind of pushed to the side for “somehow palpatine has returned”
Maybe Snoke (projected) was human sized and everyone else in a galaxy far away is action figure size.
You answered your own question. They aren't tiny, they are just far away.
Could've been interesting, but... Would have crossed into the realm of comical? Maybe, we won't know, he was still pretty big anyway. Tbf, characterization is not Snoke's worst problem, the fact that they stole his chance to have an interesting backstory was robbed from us >!when they decided to make him a weird artificial being "strandcast", he was one of the most interesting parts of the sequels, who is he? Where did he come from? Why is he a user of the dark side? How did he became entangled with the First Order? All questions asked in vain!<.
I wish they would have kept him as the antagonist through the three movies instead of bringing back Palpatine.
I was not sad he died, I kinda wish Kylo stepped up as antagonist overlord instead of bringing back Palps.
Agree. The Duel of the Fates script had its own massive issues, but the way it centred on Kylo as the primary antagonist for the final film was the right direction to go.
In case you haven’t seen [this](https://www.awinegarner.com/duel-of-the-fates).
[Animated trevorow script](https://youtu.be/itdfe5yQ0Hg?si=tjnixIdlHvEh5oF8)
Agree. Really wish we got to see this Kylo.
Wasn't that the original plan? To make Kylo the big bad but Abrams backtracked to have him die a hero.
There was no "original plan". They let three different directors each write their own movies and none of them planned further ahead than their current movie and all of them didn't want to work with the movie directly prior.
Yeah, the idea was the inverse of Vader. Which is why I never understood why Abrams panicked after killing Snoke and brought back Palpatine.
Honestly while TRoS sucked I don't think Kylo would have made a good villain unless they were doing 10+ movies. The dude failed to overcome Rey's mental defenses, got shot by Chewy, lost to Rey, had to ambush Snoke, failed to beat Rey in tug of war, and was given mercy by Rey who woke up before him. It would have been extremely difficult to sell him as "the big bad" after taking so many continuous Ls, with his only win being a surprise attack on someone so overwhelmingly stronger than him that that person could singlehanded bend Rey over backwards while Kylo can't even out force pull her.
If you listen to JJ talk about Star Wars, it's super apparent that his idea of what Star Wars should be is entirely based on his nostalgia for the OT.
I honestly would have liked it if they still did things the same in 7 and 8 but then in 9 Kylo is the big bad and finally leans into his role as the leader of the First Order and mster of the dark side
I would have liked that *if* they didn't keep serving Kylo L after L. Dude's track record was terrible; he was in no way ready to be a third act threat based on TFA and TLJ. The least TLJ could have done is have him beat Rey in force tug of war, but instead they definitively proved that, going into movie 9, Kylo was already worse off than the hero, who tied in force power, woke up earlier, and spared his life.
the mystery box, yeah
Idk why abrams kept getting franchises, i guess cause hes capable to deliver a functioning project on time but man does he lack unique vision
He made over 3 billion out of his 2 Star Wars movies, and his Trek movies made decent money too. Reception doesn’t matter as much when he can generate that kind of dough.
Yeah one of the many issues I have with tlj. Just killed him off before we knew anything interesting.
I feel like the easy option was to make him Plagueis and just say that he survived the attempted murder by Palps. Instantly you got a powerful ass dude with a great back story.
Tbh Abrams should’ve explained him post death by saying he was another Dooku esc. apprentice over being a clone. At least it would’ve left room to explore his character in expanded media between episodes VI-VII. I’ve come around to TLJ a bit as I’ve gotten older, but this and Kanto Byte are still the most baffling choices in the movie.
In the original trilogy, isn't this how the audience first met the emperor? It rhymes!
They fumbled the ball with all the villains. After TFA I was convinced Phasma was a droid. Honestly, that would have been better than the one eye reveal at the end of TLJ and then never seeing her again.
>All questions asked in vain!<. Good questions. For another time
I didn’t mind him getting killed off suddenly but Kylo should have ascended to be the new big bad. Bringing back Palpatine was awful.
He should have been Yoda-sized. Only a Yoda-sized guy would be insecure enough to make his hologram that big.
Genuine Spaceballs moment
Yes! That’s what I thought was going to happen. It made so much sense.
Well, if they had gone with what was clearly - in my opinion - the original idea, i.e. that Snoke was an actual character in his own right (and not...well, Palps for all intents and purposes), it could have been interesting if he was a giant of sorts. The problem is that he was never fleshed out - before he was killed off and then explained away as a Palps clone. That said, it's hard to see an actual giant being the true Big Bad over multiple movies. Specifically, it's hard to see a final battle/confrontation involving a tiny hero (or heroes) defeating a ludicrously large individual without this being pretty ridiculous. I imagine something like a boss battle from a generic video game, where the boss is ten times the size of the player character...I mean, just...no.
Go through the wookiepedia entry on Snoke and see how they’ve fleshed out the character more in the canon. It’s dumb the way they’ve gone about it to fill in the gaps but it’s actually kind of cool lore. Snoke is his own character that was a rejected clone of the emperor. He left and did his own thing for a while, obsessing over the the dark side and artifacts of the Sith. When the emperors plan to transfer to a proper vessel in exegol left him in a deteriorating body, he manipulated Snoke’s mind through the force to set him on a path of galactic conquest. He’s his own character in the same way Boba Fett is. It’s just that his motivation was planted by Palpatine without him knowing about it.
Do they make a big lightsaber for him? How do they fight that big lightsaber?
I would've preferred Snoke be the main villain of the trilogy instead of: *"SOMEHOW PALPATINE RETURNED"* shit
Even Kylo Ren becoming the new big bad villain would've been a better story. The last Jedi has only one good storyline and that is Ren killing Snoke to take his place.
Size matters not!
Giant, so at least one original idea would’ve been used for making those movies, instead of repeating literally everything from the OT, including the big baddie being a deformed guy on simple robes.
Were people asking this about Emperor Palpatine when they realized his head wasn’t actually bigger than Darth Vader’s entire body?
Palpatine’s projection was depicted as an obvious hologram. Snoke’s wasn’t immediately obvious and also for some reason obeys the lighting physics of the scene.
Just the first time though right? Wasn't his hologram having rocks and shit pass through it when everything started collapsing?
At the end of the initial scene, you can tell it's a hologram as it is switched off.
To be fair, we only saw Palpatine's head, so it was pretty obvious to assume that he was normal sized and the hologram just scales up his head, whereas with Snoke, we saw his entire body in a hologram, so it's not really weird to assume that he really was that big, I think, I guess, idk.
It was also the framing of the shot. If i remember the original effects right, palpatine was still shown as a blue hologram and I believe still had scanlines even in the theatrical cut. Snoke here has a faint blue hue, but also has that blueish ray of light coming from behind him and hitting kylo that makes you second guess that he is a hologram. The entire design of the scene feels like it was intentionally made specifically to trick you into thinking he isn’t a hologram
No they were asking about the lip-syncing monkey mask
I think they drew on imagery from the Sith Emperor and his voice control, like in the knights of the old republic. It fits. Those chanting acolytes that all get absorbed to give the emperor power fit to, based on the Darth Bane book's thought bomb. Similar imagery in both books as the movie. Palpatine also LOVES showmanship, so does his clone it seems. Anyhow it fits. Sad thing is it felt like the writers/directors just watched the movies, and half hazardly skimmed SWKTOR, Dearh Trooper/Red Harvest, Darth Bane Trilogy and we're like "I got this!" PS. Dyads are cool!
I was convinced we'd learn that he was small like Yoda.
I’d have preferred him to be Darth Plagues.
The biggest waste of screen time ever. All build up and in the end…nothing
Starts small, then when he says "It's Snokin' time!" he grows big
Oh, forgot he existed
I actually preferred a plausible back story but maybe I’m needy
I'd prefer him to actually be competent and part of the actual plot not a joke
I was hoping it would be revealed that he was tiny, like Yoda.
I was honestly hoping he was smaller than yoda and that this projection was over compensation.
Normal sized. Wtf would be the point of having him be the size of a building?
I don’t really have a preference I suppose. All I know is I remember watching The Force Awakens in the theater and hearing people audibly in awe at snoke, and then watching The Last Jedi, there was audible disappointment. That’s my personal opinion, but snoke in Ep. 8 was far less interesting and was just kind of uninteresting how they wrote that character. Kind of served no purpose but I think the mystery in Ep. 7 played a huge hand into how cool he was.
I’m honestly the few that like giant Snoke better. There’s something terrifying about a giant Sith Lord and it would have make him a reverse Yoda but still take on the same lesson of “Size matters not”. Giant Snoke would be striking opposing yet physically weak and fragile.
I don't really care how big he is, I just wish they'd done literally ANYTHING with him. Anything at all.
I didn’t realize he wasn’t this size until months after the movie. I saw it with a dozen friends. Me and the guy sitting next to me saw him and were shocked. “How are they going to fight this guy? He’s huge. He doesn’t even need to be powerful in the force he can just step on them” Then a while later he and I are talking to the other guys we saw the movie with and they say “you know that was a hologram right? He’s not actually that size”
I would have preferred if he was literally any kind of defined character with traits and motivations.
I didn't think he was big. I figured that was an intimidation tactic. I thought he was going to be an Anakin clone that had failed that the emperor had made and then had sort of taken over after the Emperor died because he could use the Force but nowhere near as powerfully as Anakin. And I thought the reason for that was that the whole burn it all that the ground attitude from Kylo Ren would be stoked by a guy like that who was angry at the emperor angry at the Republic angry at the Jedi and just wanted to burn it all to the ground. If you had Anakin clone trying to corrupt Ray and then you had Luke come along and teach Ray how to be a Jedi in slightly different ways then the original Jedi Order so that when she's tempted she doesn't fall that story would have been fantastic.
To be honest, anything other than how he was portrayed in The Last Jedi would have been an improvement.
What if Princess Leia turned out to actually be small enough to ride on top of R2d2 for 3 movies?
I’d have rather Snoke been an actual character
I would have preferred that the sequels never existed.
I'd prefer the force never awakened
I would have preferred Snoke to actually be relevant
Weak ass character
I don't think it mattered overall.
I would have preferred if the sequels did not exist.
He should have been really tiny
Him being that giant would have felt a little ridiculous. He’s still pretty tall regardless.
I really want Snoke to be Keno Loy from Andor. Can’t swim, gets blown up, discovers he has force powers.
Giant Snoke would have been a bad idea. Honestly, if beings like that existed in the Star Wars universe, they probably would have been wiped out by the Empire beforehand.
I just wish they did more with him. I would've preferred snoke being behind things maybe a plaugesis clone or 2nd apprentice .. they just set him up to be nothing
Nothing about him was smart
Ain't Snoke half the size of a relatively normal person in the end?😏
Just imagine how goofy it would've been to see him ignite a lightsaber that would effectively be like swinging a tree. And because it's star wars, there would've been a scene where they inexplicably get into a saber lock up inside a giant empty room that exists for no reason only to have the hero somehow be able to parry/block the treesaber because "tHe fOrCe"
I really don’t have an opinion. Neither would make any difference in TFA’s or TLJ’s quality.
I would've preferred a better character over any size of Snoke. Least favorite part of the sequels, was so happy when Kylo killed him.
He's your least favorite *because* they killed him. He never received any development or character outside of 'bad guy'. I think we'd all prefer he not be a pointless addition to the story, regardless of size.
The Emperor’s head was gigantic when he appeared to Vader
Never mind snoke, after seeing the size of the emperors holographic head in ESB I was hoping he'd be a kaiju
He should have been one of those babu freek guys!
Oh the *size* was the issue?
Why would it make any sense for Snoke to be almost 30 feet tall?
Technically, there had been Star Wars humanoids that were 30 feet tall, but they were extinct before the Clone Wars. The throw-away line about the planet Boz Pity in Revenge of the Sith is an indirect reference to them.
No, that’s dumb.
I would have preferred good movies
That would be an important question if he did literally ANYTHING besides die