Just like Finn!
I hate that the possibility of a complicated story/moral question died on the vine in the first ten minutes of TFA when a smiling Finn gunned down his former child soldier friends.
Yeah, I thought the bloody hand on his helmet scene was a great way to show trauma of the stormtroopers.
Then Poe had the "do I talk?" line and I was like oh.. that just got all the tension of what really should be a tense scene to establish Ren as the big bad. I'm thinking, maybe he's the funny guy? Then Finn escapes with him and they're "wow, this is happening!"ing and he murders the people he was just mourning watching die and everyone's the funny guy.
Finn was an abducted child soldier, and that plays approximately zero role in his characterization ever again
But that would be empathetic storytelling. It could've been so good...
But instead we got quips and one-liners.
Whedonism
it's a shame that Whedon was so successful because Buffy and Dr Horrible were genuinely refreshing when they were made quip based media is only suitable for a garnish not a staple food though
Buffy is a stereotyped Valley Girl from LA. That's just how the media pretended teenagers from LA talked. It actually worked diegeticly for that show.
People on this website try to stan the Last Jedi, but they literally opened with a "your mama" joke.
Oh it's bad, but at least there were some promising ideas among the shit, like Rey being a commoner, using FTL tavern in creative ways, or critiquing the Jedi order.
It just shit the bed in so many other ways.
Then Poe had the “do I talk?”
I was sitting in a theater in December 2015. I had been waiting for months with bated breath to see my slop. I had driven some distance from where I live to see the film in IMAX for some reason. And it was at this moment, no more than five minutes into the film, that I realized the entire Disney Star Wars project was going to be a complete wash.
I read most of the shit books they put out leading up to the movie. I read most of the shit comics.
But Rogue One was decent. Kinda.
Then, December 2017. I had been waiting for months with bated breath to see my slop. I had driven some distance from where I live to see the film in IMAX for some reason. The visionary auteur Rion Johnson was going to single-handedly save Star Wars from the hacks and the fools who made TFA. The movie opens with a 'yo momma' joke and I realize at this moment, one minute into the film, that the entire Disney Star Wars project was going to be a complete wash.
In a somewhat disappointing epilogue to this story I saw Solo under duress when a friend asked me to go. It was a bad movie, but I didn't care.
everyone’s the funny guy
Marvel capeshit and it's consequences have been a disaster for popular cinema
Having a black stormtrooper who wasn't an ideological Nazi was a mistake. "Actually the Empire are just normal people who are misguided!" No you liberal fucks, they're space Nazis and they're ontologically evil in a straightfoward morality play where good and evil are literally existing magic forces that let you throw rocks with your mind.
Fuck Dave whatever his nuts couldn't even stick it with the Clone Troopers. No, they're not psychologically conditioned from birth to follow the orders of their commanders. No, they're not slave soldiers who were deprived of any chance of experiencing a life that would allow them to develop mature ethics and independent thought. No, they have a brain chip that makes them evil.
I mean fuck me.
Apparently the old stuff had lots of clone troopers refuse to follow order 66 and there was actually a small civil war between Republican loyalists and Imperial loyalists, but Disney is like "Nah, let's side-step the whole issue and just say they used mind control".
For a setting that flips out over good and evil, they don't really have conversations about what good and evil are, or where they come from.
They never really needed to. It was all very straightforward in the OT; The bad guys genocide planets and shoot innocent farmers and torture the nice princess. The good guys try to stop or subvert them.
But they tried to massively expand the scope in the prequels, while still making it a goofy kid's adventure movie. You can't do "The fall of the Weimar Empire and the Rise of Nazi Germany" at the same time you're doing "Laser sword wizards go on a space adventure" and also shove "space world war I" in there, it's too many things at once in too many directions. And the sequesl are a mess. The first one is empty masturbatory nostalgia bait that only replicated the first movie on a purely aesthetic level. The second one actually did have some character and plot, and a little bit of reflection on the how the universe was going through a cycle of violence driven by more than just the space wizard battle, which at least made things a little complicated. And then the third one was just fuck awful.
idk, I was a big star wars fan at one point and it's been very disapointing. At least with the prequels they tried to do something cool and big concept. They did it pretty badly, but they tried, and kids liked it. But the sequels are just awful, and a lot of the TV stuff is just nostalgia garbage that makes the universe smaller and smaller instead of trying to tell new stories.
I'll always have a soft spot for The Clone Wars Multimedia Project. None of it's great literature or anything, obviously, but most of it is so much more interesting than The Clone Wars which would retcon almost everything in TCWMP. Though I especially love Matthew Stover's two novels: Shatterpoint and the Revenge of the Sith novelization.
Gotta agree that Clone troopers as fascist troops and a critique of modern military training is just a far, far more interesting idea than behavioral chips. But Filoni wasn't interested in those sorts of ideas and instead made the clones plucky heroes fighting for republican ideals alongside their friends the Jedi, who are mostly very warm and personable with their troops, and so then behavioral chips become necessary to explain how Order 66 happened.
Nonetheless, I'll give him a ton of credit for writing the most realistic sword fight in the entire franchise to date. (Rebels Season 3 finale spoilers, I guess)
spoiler
Maul opens up with some dumb bullshit movie acrobatics nonsense, and Kenobi just slices his dick off in literally 2.5 seconds. Maul takes more time than that coming to terms with how he just got fucking owned.
Never once did he refer to the stuff that was indoctrinated in him since birth. He already knew something was wrong with what the empire was doing. He just had the wakeup call when a dead dude smeared characterization onto his helmet.
Instead of a journey anyone could've had, dismantling the real evil of the sith with hard work and introspection, he was just special. Once he got permission, he killed his former bunkmates like they weren't special. Because they and all of the other victims of imperialism were nothing to the writers.
These are the people who tell themselves that they'd refuse to applaud at Hitler's speech and say 'how dare you, sir' as they no scoped the entire SS.
People who know nothing about imperialism and fascism wrote Finn's character arc.
Why wasn't Finn distrustful of the Republic and the rebels? Why did they trust him so quickly? To fast track the retelling of episode 4?
A more interesting arc was in season one of the new She-ra.
I haven't finished She-ra but what I saw was pretty good. And refreshingly gay.
Later seasons are hard for me to remember, but I was satisfied with a lot of it. And it definitely has more nuanced conversations about good and evil than this slop.
When I heard about Rey, I assumed her character would be something like this: an orphan girl who has grown up on a cutthroat world becomes a hardened and jaded loner. Bitter. Emotionally closed off.
I assumed that fate would throw her together with Finn, who would be in a similar place vis-à-vis fascist deprogramming. They'd have to learn to trust each other and yadda yadda yadda.
Instead, we don't really get a story. Maybe my idea was a little trite, but at least it was something.
Good writing and characterization: :geordi-no:
Nonsensical lore and worldbuilding: :geordi-yes:
This doesn't rate as world building because it wasn't mentioned in the movie. It's wattpad tier fanfiction.
It's worldbuilding after the fact, which is worse. It's like jkr patching up the plot holes in Harry Potter by undoing time travel only to reintroduce it again.
Bazinga brain sci-if/fantasy writers love heaping on the esoteric lore by the olympic swimming pool without a single drop of subtext :thonk:
"sith values"
i know these are movies for little babies, but i think it's interesting how the moral conflict between good and evil is presented so vaguely. like obviously the empire is bad because they casually commit genocide and call themselves "the empire," but how do they actually function? what is their ideological superstructure like? do they see their project as one to unite the galaxy under one banner to create a pax imperium? are they somehow nationalist, despite not being clearly founded in any national project? we can project the same imperialist racism onto them that historical empires have displayed, but this isn't actually ever shown onscreen, and it's not explicitly stated in the movies that they're human-supremacist or something.
Part of it was supposed to be more blatant human supremacy, with no aliens at the upper levels of the imperial hierarchy. Then other writers came along and reintroduced aliens and the metaphor was lost.
pretty sure you're supposed to plug in exaggerated notions of liberalism for the rebels and cartoon fascism for the empire. The books are the only thing I know that actually describes what the empire thinks and I could get into that but then I'd have to admit as a child I read Star Wars novels.
Alright, in short, the Empire is just fascist. Although it's different in a lot of ways than in real life, because magic exists. Their overarching ideology is almost a copy and paste of what Nazis said about themselves, except with Jedi instead of communists. The Empire blames every problem it has on non-human species or Jedi provocateurs. Their ideology is built around managing a huge central state and expansionist military operations. All organized religion is illegal too, but that's a sweeping measure to stamp out any potential Jedi. You gotta remember this is a fictional universe where one religion has absolute proof it's correct and being a follower gives you superpowers.
I think I remember one book slyly talking about the empire's need for child rearing, so I'm pretty sure they were heteronormative.
All the aspects of Imperial ideology are about channeling power up to the Emperor, but power I mean actual magical powers. The more people who live in fear, the more the Emperor gains mastery over the dark side.
I’d have to admit as a child I read Star Wars novels.
Me and the other
nerdscool guys in the Goosebumps corner be laughing and pointing.Nah bro, I read everything as a child. The most embarrassing thing was the Mary Kate and Ashley Detective novels, there's like 50+ of them and I read every single one. The star wars books were all over the place in terms of quality but I wouldn't be embarrassed about reading them.
It didn't need much explaining in the original trilogy because everyone more or less remembered the Nazis, and the Empire was heavily coded as space Nazis. it's just gotten muddier over time because liberals are doing liberal shit.
we can project the same imperialist racism onto them that historical empires have displayed, but this isn’t actually ever shown onscreen, and it’s not explicitly stated in the movies that they’re human-supremacist or something.
It's implied. In the OT you never see any imperials that aren't white men. And they're dressed like Nazis. So the audience could pretty much just figure that part out.
And they’re dressed like Nazis. So the audience could pretty much just figure that part out.
Also their troops are called stormtroopers
Their helmets look like skulls and their boss is a literal Dark Knight. Whereas the good guy wizard is a nice old man who tells people to believe in themselves.
Okay, but the think of all the merchandising opportunities around the space nazis.
Its almost as if trying to put 9000 pages of ideas into 2 hours doesn't work
what stands out as "are you shittin' me?" with 7-9 is that it's all the same story as the original trilogy.
- uh oh, the "remnants" of the empire have rebuilt an omnipresent armada (somehow) and...
- are developing A GAME CHANGING SUPERWEAPON!
- it's another a GIANT LASER BEAM that kills MULTIPLE planets instead of just one at a time.
- oh, well at least the big bad is new. NOPE, same guy. literally a clone. the new big bad you saw and were curious about? just a ruse! GOTCHA!
- complex character motivation: yeah, it's father-son shit. are ya winnin' son? stab
- main arc: are we force friends or force frenemies? credits
i wasn't expecting much, because we're not talking dostoevsky here. i can watch a big budget action movie with little else going on. hell, i'll watch the shit out of that. but they lured me in with Boyega's dude being interesting and teasing out the lore of the First Order and some new big bad. slave army decays into fanatical terrorist paramilitaries, warlordism, and some revolutionary insurrection? that's a cool stew to pull a story out of.
and then they spent the rest of the movies ignoring that and clumsily shoehorning in the old hits. honestly, felt like the story arcs were developed by a committee of algorithms.
I was so excited when I heard that the two protagonists of the new Star Wars trilogy were going to be a storm trooper defector and a hermit woman who had grown up in an apocalyptic wasteland. To me, that's a story that writes itself. I mean, those must be some interesting people, right?
But the end result was exactly the bland corporate pap I worried Disney would start churning out when I heard they bought Lucasfilm.
It was unreal and Ill never stop being mad. I still kind of cant believe giganto corp Disney actually winced because Star Wars fans are so racist, I guess thats a point for the chuds.
Disney doing :both-sides: so they always come out on top
god I was so interested after Kylo killed the big bad in The Last Jedi, because we had the obvious set up for redemption character reject that redemption and grab the ultimate evil power. How cool! Surely this will lead to some kind of interesting and new scenario as we enter the third act, right? And then you get the worst movie Ive ever seen in a theatre.
That RLM video where Mike reads the Star Wars extended universe Wikipedia page about Darth Vader's suit to Rich Evans
I still occasionally think about the fact that "The Emperor Palpatine Surgical Reconstruction Center" is a canonical place in the SW universe.
I thought they did the warhammer 40K Thousand Sons style thing where they just had a shit load of ghosts and magic enchanted armor piloting everything, lol. Same deal with Palpatine essentially 3d printing star destroyers out of the crust of the planet just using the force.
They should have done the 40K Thousand Sons thing where they have canon confirmed space wizard twink femboys instead
The Sith are an allegory for Neoliberals.
No, I will not explain.
"There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families." could totally be a Sith creed
The Sith are evil martial arts wizards from campy samurai movies from the sixties, and the further they've gotten away from that the less sense they've made.
The most prominent Sith in the films is an old white politician who manipulates a deeply flawed democracy into going to war for his own benefit. As much as I hate Ancaps, I don't think even they're up for that.
It wouldn't have been hard. People would have liked it. Mara Jade is better than anything they came up with. I liked the noghri.
I thought those were all robot ships that just came out of nowhere.
Somehow.
Wait, is that actually Elijah Wood?
Lol, what the fuck. It's real. Cool.
