• Frank [he/him, he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    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.

    • Coca_Cola_but_Commie [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      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.