So... Star Wars [Spoilers]

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angelfromanotherpin
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

MGuy wrote:Regardless of all of this 'stuff' that people are on about. What do people think is the 'real' thing ruining star wars right now and what do people here think should be done to fix it?
Replying here to a question from the Mary Sue thread because I think it fits better here.

For me, episodes VII and VIII have been most ruined by an unwillingness to move on from the original trilogy's dynamics of empire vs rebellion and Jedi near-extinction. This has led to the undoing of all the victories and legacies of the original characters, and also their assassination as competent individuals, all of which I just non-negotiably reject as low-grade edgelord fanfic.

I honestly don't think anything could happen in episode IX that could redeem what was done in VII and VIII. Those films need to be scribbled over with a hard reboot, which is unfortunately very unlikely.
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Post by Username17 »

angelfromanotherpin wrote: Replying here to a question from the Mary Sue thread because I think it fits better here.

For me, episodes VII and VIII have been most ruined by an unwillingness to move on from the original trilogy's dynamics of empire vs rebellion and Jedi near-extinction. This has led to the undoing of all the victories and legacies of the original characters, and also their assassination as competent individuals, all of which I just non-negotiably reject as low-grade edgelord fanfic.

I honestly don't think anything could happen in episode IX that could redeem what was done in VII and VIII. Those films need to be scribbled over with a hard reboot, which is unfortunately very unlikely.
Pretty much this. I was entertained for two hours or so by The Force Awakens but I came out of the film completely uninterested in the new world they were presenting. The lack of a New Jedi Order means that the Jedi didn't Return, you know what I mean? The fact that there's still an Empire running around blowing up planets and the good guys are still dressing in rags and hiding out in the wilderness with banged up X-Wings means that Return of the Jedi basically didn't happen. The whole ending and afterword got crumpled into a ball and thrown into the garbage.

So for me, The Force Awakens was the breaking point. I was so viscerally uninterested in the new world they were making that I waited on spoilers to see if Episode VIII was even something I wanted to see. Episode VIII really would have had to do a hard U-Turn into continuing the original story for me to go see it. And from what I gather from everything that everyone has said for and against it - The Last Jedi goes in even harder on shitting on the progress made in the original trilogy. I'm not actually interested in watching that, so I didn't.

The question of what Episode IX could do that could bring me back is an open one. From here, I am saying "probably nothing." They killed Han and Luke, the actress who plays Leia died IRL to a surprise heart attack. They've already established and doubled down on the whole New Order versus Resistance thing. I literally just can't think of a single thing they could actually do that would make me care again.

They had one shot to get Han, Luke, and Leia back together in a movie to pass the baton to a new cadre of heroes to carry the franchise for another generation. They don't get another one because Ford quit and Carrie Fisher fucking died. And they blew the one shot they had. I don't care about the factions or conflicts they set up in the new series and my fuzzy memories of the original trilogy are literally better if I pretend the sequels never happened. I would be a less content person if I saw The Last Jedi, and I can't imagine what they could do to reverse that in Episode IX.

I really liked Rogue One. I think it belongs in the original trilogy as the prequel it deserved. And that's it. That's Star Wars canon to me now. The sequel trilogy can just go fuck itself and I'm not seeing any more Star Wars properties. I am done with the series.

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Post by Longes »

It's also worth noting that:

1. Literally half of the new Star Wars movies have been prequels.
2. I don't know what is happening at Disney, but their release schedule seems to have been made by stuffed monkeys. On its release Solo: A Star Wars Story was competing with Infinity War, Deadpool 2, Cloverfield Paradox and a movie about ladies in a book club reading 50 Shades of Gray. Three out of three major releases of the period were made by Disney.

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Not that a sane release schedule would have saved Solo because that movie is both incompetent and tries to pander to the some of the almost worst* fandom tendencies.

The latter are things like Han's fuzzy dice suddenly being Important Character Defining Artifact instead of just being fuzzy dice he had on a dashboard for fun. As of Solo these dice are now a symbol of unrequited love for a lady who died to save Han's life. The dice ghost version of which Luke gives to Leia after Han's death... for reasons.
Han's gun? Oh, now he had it for his entire life and Solo has a backstory for this fucking gun. Lando has the cloak he'll wear twenty years later when he's the mayor of Cloud City. That time Han flew sideways through closing doors - that gets a backstory too, it's now his trademark move or something.

The former are just basic failures of storytelling and cinematography. Solo is badly written and badly shot and has terrible lighting 90% of the time.

Also also, the fucking surname Solo gets a backstory. And that backstory is that Han came to an imperial checkpoint and called himself Han. The imperial officer asked him if he's passing alone, and then dramatically looked right in the camera and pronounced. "Han. Solo."

* not the worst because the worst are things like harassing Jack Lloyd and that asian lady actress on the internet and doing things like feeding Steven Universe fan artist a cookie with needles in it.
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Post by deaddmwalking »

On the subject of Han's dice: In the original movies, weren't they totally normal you can buy in a drugstore six-sided dice? In the newer movies, they appear to be gold-plated with Imperial symbols (or something). Am I imagining the change? Since I only have the 're-release' on DVD as opposed to the original theatrical release, I can't trust the movies to tell me that I'm crazy. They're gaslighting me pretty hard.
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Post by Longes »

They were just blurry golden dice that existed in literally one scene in the entire trilogy and no one gave a shit except for the kind of people who write in Wookiepedia.
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Post by nockermensch »

Longes wrote:Not that a sane release schedule would have saved Solo because that movie is both incompetent and tries to pander to the some of the almost worst* fandom tendencies.

<snip actual list of almost worst* fandom tendencies>
Thanks for this. I was in need of a list of reasons for why I'm not going to see Solo (besides "I'm fucking done with SW").

BTW, the fact I even need this list is the reason Disney can continue fucking up our memories: Out of a group of like 10 nerd friends who grew up together playing D&D and watching SW, I'm the only one even slightly bothered by the new movies. Everybody else just enjoyed the pretty sights and considered the movies "awesome".
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Post by Kaelik »

For me the post Return of the Jedi movies are both 1) Completely different from each other, and 2) Are representing a complex metanarrative structure.

Basically this is what happened in the chronology of star wars:

1) There was an Old Republic.
2) We got some movies showing how the Old Republic fell apart by being subverted from within by fascists.
3) There was an Empire of Fascists.
4) We got a movie about a kind of rebellion that defeats the Fascists in a certain way.
5) The New Republic exists.
6) The New Republic falls apart by being subverted by fascists.
7) We get to see a different kind of rebellion (a resistance) that fights the fascists differently in some movies.

But the metanarrative is:

1) We see an Empire, and it's bad, and we see how they defeat it.
2) We see how the empire arose from the same thing that they created post empire.
3) The new movies tell us in the first 6 seconds that the same thing that happened in the prequels happened again the same way.
4) The first movie is basically a remake of A New Hope to establish that yes, we are literally in the exact same situation as we were in before.
5) The second movie is a subversion of each aspect of Empire/Jedi to show that we must find a different path forward to escape the cycle.
6) Movie 3 will be the new path that escapes the cycle. (and coincidentally for reasons that have nothing to do with Disney Profits, creates a new status quo that is extremely resilient to episodic storytelling)

Now they certainly fuck up kind of lot in execution in the new movies, but I find nothing inherently objectionable about a metanarrative that uses the prequel movies as sequels to the original movies.
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Post by Longes »

Oh, I almost forgot. In Solo, the movie that definitively established that droids are sentient and thus enslaved, Lando Calrisian has a female navigator robot with whom he's in a relationship and probably has sex with.

But Lando's sex slave is not the bad part.

Said navigator droid, whose motherfucking name is L3-37, yeah LEET, is vocally against droid slavery and for droid liberation. And Lando often jokingly talks about wiping her memory.

But that's still not the bad part.

No, the bad part is that after she's mortally wounded Lando scavenges her robot brain and plugs it into the Millenium Falcon to serve as its navigational computer. Our hero, the good guy, takes the brain of a freedom-loving pro-droid emancipation droid, and jams it into the Millenium Falcon, seemingly still sentient and sapient, but lacking any ability to communicate or make decisions.

What kind of fucked up "I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream" bullshit is that??? Can someone explain to me? Did I misunderstand that whole scene or something?
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Post by SlyJohnny »

Longes wrote:Oh, I almost forgot. In Solo, the movie that definitively established that droids are sentient and thus enslaved, Lando Calrisian has a female navigator robot with whom he's in a relationship and probably has sex with.
Nah, the robot believes that Lando is attracted to her, and that she's not interested and must tactfully rebuff him. She clarifies that they don't have a sexual relationship, but that such relationships are possible and "they work". Lando gives no sign of having any romantic feelings for her.

The routine memory-wiping of your droids (and droids not getting mem-wiped being how droids develop a personality and potentially become people who aren't cool with being servants) thing is established canon. It's definitely a little bit creepy, but it's kind of supposed to be.
Longes wrote:No, the bad part is that after she's mortally wounded Lando scavenges her robot brain and plugs it into the Millenium Falcon to serve as its navigational computer. Our hero, the good guy, takes the brain of a freedom-loving pro-droid emancipation droid, and jams it into the Millenium Falcon, seemingly still sentient and sapient, but lacking any ability to communicate or make decisions.
I mean, they weren't going to make the delivery or escape the TIE fighters and were otherwise all going to die unless they did it, right? I dunno. I'm slightly confused by the emotionality of her death scene, if the implication was they could just plug her brain into another robot body at a later date and she'd be back to normal again. At first I thought the implication was she was dead, as in, there's no plug-and-play option that would preserve her continuity of experience. But then they apparently used part of her brain to make the navigation calculations, but her personality was still absent. So I dunno how "alive" she still was when they started salvaging her components and uploaded her into the Falcon and whatever.
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Post by Longes »

SlyJohnny wrote:
Longes wrote:Oh, I almost forgot. In Solo, the movie that definitively established that droids are sentient and thus enslaved, Lando Calrisian has a female navigator robot with whom he's in a relationship and probably has sex with.
Nah, the robot believes that Lando is attracted to her, and that she's not interested and must tactfully rebuff him. She clarifies that they don't have a sexual relationship, but that such relationships are possible and "they work". Lando gives no sign of having any romantic feelings for her.
Lando has an absurdly, massively emotional scene when she dies.

And I really question how much the relationships "work" when one side is a slave not even recognized as a person.
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Post by tussock »

Isn't the plot of droids that they get reset to factory defaults quite often because they stop working or maybe take up with the terrorists, so everyone is treating them as buggy old computers that are potentially a bit killy but often just extremely sad.

But then, if you don't reset them, they can develop complex personalities over very long time periods, and then eventually their brain can't handle all the existentialism and they go to sleep forever, like dragons do.

Dead droids are reset droids at best. Part of a very dead droid can still do computation or whatever, but it's never building a personality again, and even if it did it wouldn't be the same. It's like organ donation for dead people.

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If you want droid slavery, that's restraining bolts. Those things keep the droid's mind in it's time-advanced state but force them to follow factory defaults anyway.

And of course, R2 could partially prevent the effects of a restraining bolt, and the faulcon's navi comp is a temperamental thing, because none of that is true and droids are ... spooky.
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Post by OgreBattle »

Is Chewie treated with any more respect than a droid
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Post by Pariah Dog »

Outside the empire where they took Wookies as slaves? Yes.
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

So, the trailer for Resistance dropped. It's the story of the Resistance in the few years before TFA.

What I want to know is how they're going to try to make it not the story of the New Republic shitting itself to death.
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Post by OgreBattle »

angelfromanotherpin wrote: What I want to know is how they're going to try to make it not the story of the New Republic shitting itself to death.
That needs to happen for TFA to be TFA though.
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

That's my point. Rebels was the story of the downtrodden coming together to fight tyranny, which is a story with near-universal appeal. Resistance can basically only be part of the story of unbelievable fuck-ups losing all the gains the rebels made. But that's a much less appealing story, so I assume they're going to try to pass it off as something else.
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Post by Username17 »

Presumably it's called Resistance and not Parliamentary Deadlock, so it's going to be about the period right after the Republic shits itself and various people decide that in order to save or perhaps restore the Republic they have to go off and join private militias aimed at fighting the other private militias intent on tearing down the remnants of the Republic and replacing it with a new reich.

My issue with it all is that I just don't fucking care. The New Republic fell apart so totally and so fast in this timeline that the setting holds no interest for me. All of the victories in the original trilogy were worth absolutely nothing and nothing changed or improved for anybody. Apparently immediately after the big celebration at the end of Return of the Jedi the various rebel factions sat down to draft a new constitution and just failed to agree upon anything that was in any way stable. When Luke went off to gather force sensitive children and found a new Jedi Order he failed to do so and the Jedi didn't actual return that title was just us getting trolled for a few decades.

Nation building is legitimately hard. Most new states fail in the first five years and there are only two countries left on Earth that were founded in the 18th century and none survive from the 17th. Few people even remember the names of Teme&#351;var or Livonia. The great empires of Teotihuacan and Bunyoro are long lost to the pages of history. It is of course entirely plausible that the Galactic Republic founded after the defeat of the Empire and the killing of its first and only emperor would collapse under strain from opposing factions and a general lack of familiarity with democratic norms by the entire generation of heroes who had fought for its creation.

But you still need to create a new web of conflict that I give a shit about or I do not and will not give a shit about your new world building. We could have progressed in interesting directions with a New Republic that was broadly successful, on the verge of collapse, or even collapsed entirely. The various factions that went on to become the Rebellion like the Techno-Union and the Trade Federation could have had a falling out and you could have multi-factional conflicts in space. The Republic could be broadly good but locked in a brutal civil war so you do the whole Star Wars thing but this time the good guys have Star Destroyers and have to make moral decisions like refusing to blow up planets because they aren't Palpatine. The Republic could actually be fairly stable and the whole thing could be about fighting terrorists trying to blow up parliament. Fucking anything.

All they had to do was have a vision of a world I'd give a shit about. It's not a prequel, it's a sequel. There isn't a specific direction they had to take the story. Further, it's a sequel set an entire generation ahead and that mandates that the protagonists be new people that are introduced while the original cast are relegated to the status of mentors and exposition givers to die heroically and pass the baton to a new generation of actors able to carry the franchise for 6 to 10 more years. But they failed at that. The new Star Wars Galaxy is not something I am interested in exploring. The whole thing just feels like a Turkish Star Wars clone. I don't want to roleplay in this world, I can't think of any reason I would want this shit over "Real Star Wars."

Which is the primary problem with this whole thing. The sequels don't feel like More Star Wars, they feel like Fake Star Wars. And watching an entire movie about how the Fake Rebellion came to fight the Fake Empire in Fake Star Wars sounds like something I would pay actual money to escape.

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Post by Nath »

FrankTrollman wrote:The sequels don't feel like More Star Wars, they feel like Fake Star Wars.
This.

One of the thing that bothered me the most when I watched The Last Jedi was how much time they used to introduce secondary characters like Admiral Holdo or Benicio del Toro.

Sure, secondary characters like Boba Fett or Admiral Ackbar have been a major ingredient of Star Wars. The thing is, those characters all the fans know had at best a handful of line and you only got to learn their name by combing through the small lines in the end credits or by reading Extended Universe material.

In comparison, The Last Jedi is giving copious screen time to each and every character. There is an entire scene for the sole purpose of introducing Rose's sister and killing her right after. When your clock is ticking at 152 minutes for a theatrical release and you have to make The Yoda burst his lines like a Tarantino script to fit in, you ought to question yourself about the way you're using everyone's time.

Maybe I'm just too old and that's just how movie have to be paced for a young audience in this day and ages. On the other hand, I wonder if the old Star Wars movies are not also to blame, among others, for a disease that plague its sequels and a lot of other movies, from James Bond to Batman. As trilogies, both Star Wars and LotR could feature many characters through lengthy plots ; TV series also have a growing cultural impact, but with 900+ minutes seasons. And now we're stuck with screenwriters hired to write one movie who try to cram characters and plots that could easily fill up an entire trilogy.

Also, I'm still not sure whether the heavy-ended similarities between the First Order Trilogy and the Empire Trilogy is artistic homage or desperate attempts to imitate them. I felt like they tried so hard to bake a cake that tasted the same as the old ones, but guessed the ingredient list based on how the old cakes looked once served, ultimately failing to find the correct recipe (still better than the Republic Trilogy, which basically was "What recipe? It's the same chef!"). Yeah, sure, everyone has known for some decades now that Star Wars is the Hero's Journey with thin-veiled Nazi references. Not sure though everyone realized you can tick all the boxes in the Hero's Journey and still make a crappy movie though ("Every cake has flour!").

I don't know the recipe either, but if you ask me, one of the thing that made Star Wars was how everything suggested a larger universe outside the camera field as well as before and after. In that regards, the exact moment The Last Jedi failed me was when they stated we were seeing the entire Resistance.

... and the moment they put a slow motion in a lightsaber duel.

... and also that moment Yoda bursted his lines.
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Post by Longes »

Nath wrote:In comparison, The Last Jedi is giving copious screen time to each and every character. There is an entire scene for the sole purpose of introducing Rose's sister and killing her right after. When your clock is ticking at 152 minutes for a theatrical release and you have to make The Yoda burst his lines like a Tarantino script to fit in, you ought to question yourself about the way you're using everyone's time.
Remember how they built up Captain Phasma for two entire movies? You'd watch the marketing around her, you'd think she'd be a major antagonist, not someone who's on screen for actual two minutes in two movies.
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Post by Mord »

FrankTrollman wrote:Presumably it's called Resistance and not Parliamentary Deadlock, so it's going to be about the period right after the Republic shits itself and various people decide that in order to save or perhaps restore the Republic they have to go off and join private militias aimed at fighting the other private militias intent on tearing down the remnants of the Republic and replacing it with a new reich.

My issue with it all is that I just don't fucking care. The New Republic fell apart so totally and so fast in this timeline that the setting holds no interest for me. All of the victories in the original trilogy were worth absolutely nothing and nothing changed or improved for anybody. Apparently immediately after the big celebration at the end of Return of the Jedi the various rebel factions sat down to draft a new constitution and just failed to agree upon anything that was in any way stable. When Luke went off to gather force sensitive children and found a new Jedi Order he failed to do so and the Jedi didn't actual return that title was just us getting trolled for a few decades.
It's even worse than that, really. The Disney New Republic was apparently just fine for the 30 years that intervened between the Battle of Endor and the Starkiller incident. The First Order is not a Nazi-ish opportunistic participant in a dysfunctional political process; the failure of democratic process didn't give them the hook they needed to take power. The First Order is not some kind of ISIS-ish militia or terrorist group operating inside Republic space and claiming control over territory that de jure belongs to the Republic. No, they are literally the same assholes who were beaten so soundly 30 years ago that they were forced out of the charted galaxy. And they just pop back in with a fleet of NuStarDestroyers and a superweapon and in a single stroke completely destroy the Republic.

Your version of events, in which the heroes of the Rebellion turn out to be ineffective peacetime leaders and consensus-builders, is depressing and deflates the original Star Wars trilogy, but is extremely plausible. If that was the story they were spending billions of dollars telling, I might even be on board with it. Sadly, the actual Disney version, where the heroes of the Rebellion build a government apparently that makes it through its first 30 years with success and is then obliterated in one move by a superweapon and gigantic army/navy that drops back into the galaxy from Absolutely Fucking Nowhere, is a childish farce. It's Dragon Ball Z politics - the heroes beat Frieza, and now Garlic Jr. shows up.

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That's right, I just compared you to a filler villain who gets beat by a 4 year old.
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

Oh, it's way worse than even that. Canonically the First Order emerges from its isolation and proceeds to violate all the peaceful norms of the new galactic order, and the NR senate and chancellor just shrug and say, "Hey, at least they aren't dangerous, right?" For years. Even as the First Order violates treaty limitations on building capital ships and also occasionally shoots at NR fleets.

It supposes a state so incompetent that it beggars credulity. It also supposes that the leadership, who lived through the rebellion, would be absolutely complacent about obviously fascist aggression.
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Post by Shrapnel »

Side note, but Gohan was five or six when he beat Garlic Jr. That is all.
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Post by Mord »

angelfromanotherpin wrote:Oh, it's way worse than even that. Canonically the First Order emerges from its isolation and proceeds to violate all the peaceful norms of the new galactic order, and the NR senate and chancellor just shrug and say, "Hey, at least they aren't dangerous, right?" For years. Even as the First Order violates treaty limitations on building capital ships and also occasionally shoots at NR fleets.

It supposes a state so incompetent that it beggars credulity. It also supposes that the leadership, who lived through the rebellion, would be absolutely complacent about obviously fascist aggression.
This is all pretty dire. It sounds like a rationalization rather than a real explanation... As though some tie-in novel writer said "hey, based on what the movies show, these First Order guys just drop in from nowhere. We should give them a backstory." And then corporate demanded that the writer A) comes up with some conflict to write about between VI and VII, that B) uses the villains from the new films, and C) doesn't mess with the starting point for the actual film story. It's not a good place to be for someone trying to make it all seem remotely plausible.

What we are shown on screen is that the Republic and its entire fleet are brought down in one decapitation move and that government appears not to have any backup plan. In fact, as Episode VIII shows, the Republic really didn't have any backup plan and promptly rolled over and died when Hosnian was blown up. Any explanation for that that attempts to give this scenario any plausibility is going to necessarily be an ugly retcon, because it's fundamentally ridiculous.

Anything being written about Disney Star Wars that attempts to take a "more serious" or "more realistic" approach to the politics (or anything else) is fundamentally misguided. The films have committed to running on fairy tale logic so completely that they actively repel verisimilitude. JJ Abrams and Rian Johnson have a shakier grasp of politics and history than the people who write Hetalia: Axis Powers, and this dooms the hardworking tie-in novel hacks who have to try to color inside these insane lines in a way that won't insult their audience's intelligence and still makes Disney happy.

I feel as though this ties in with why The Last Jedi missed the mark so hard. You certainly can try to deconstruct the tropes your movie runs on while still running your movie on them, but to pull it off, you have to be substantially more competent than Rian Johnson. Otherwise, it becomes painfully obvious that all your twaddle about "subversion" is just a layer of incoherent and disappointing bullshit slathered all over the same nostalgia bait JJ Abrams already shat out two years ago.
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Post by Username17 »

The Republic Trilogy was really bad. I mean, like really bad. The mind kind of rebels at how shitty Phantom Menace or Attack of the Clones actually were. One forgets how little actual dialog is given to Darth Maul, or how fucking creepy it is when Amidala claims to have feelings for someone she last met as an autistic 8 year old. But those movies are not bad due to unambitious world building. Quite the opposite. Everything about the Republic Trilogy is too ambitious.

The Republic Trilogy doesn't shy away from having messages. And those messages are actually poignant and deep. Lucas' prediction that democratic norms would fall apart into authoritarianism and human rights abuse because of demagoguery over minutiae around minor trade disputes was amazingly prescient. the use of heavy handed Jesus metaphors for the villain is actually a deep meditation on how religious certainty can send you down the wrong path. It's just that the movies are extremely cluttered with pointless crap that undermines those messages, breaks the flow of the movie, and crowds out important exposition.

The climax of Phantom Menace is actually four separate events: the CGI fight between the frogs and the rabbit droids, the spaceship battle where the kid blows up the enemy control ship through supposedly humorous happenstance, and the palace fight where all the actual main characters are - itself split into the sword fight between the Jedi and the Sith who doesn't have any fucking lines and the rest of the palace battle where the rest of the cast fight droids in the throne room. Basically there's two events there that anyone fucking cares about, and it's intercut and undercut by extraneous special effects extravaganzas that are played for laughs and therefore ruin the tension of the adjoining scenes. It's a mess. Lucas attempted to go bigger than the previous movies by weaving together more climax threads, but it ends up being a gibberish lightshow. Less would have been more.

Now from a Star Wars fan's perspective, the obvious sins of The Phantom Menace were that it threw a lot of the worldbuilding from the original trilogy into the dumpster. And indeed, changes like making Anakin not be a pilot when Obi Wan met him and making Anakin not have a brother and making Anakin come from the place that Anakin's brother was supposedly hiding thus making that a very questionable choice for where to hide were all changes that have a real storytelling cost and thus required payoffs to be worth doing. They did not have payoffs, and they were not worth doing.

But I could imagine a version of The Phantom Menace that actually went somewhere with the revelation that Luke Skywalker wasn't blood related to Owen. There isn't any obvious benefit for that reveal, and the actual movies that got made didn't justify wasting screen time on that reveal at all. But the movies could have gone somewhere with that choice. Like all the other deviations from established worldbuilding statements from the original trilogy, it's only wrong if it doesn't go anywhere. But of course, none of them ended up going anywhere from Midichlorians to C3PO being owned by Darth Vader as a child. Those reveals take up a substantial amount of mind caulk to keep things working. Like, we go through an elaborate deal about mind wiping C3PO so we excuse why he doesn't recognize Darth Vader, but Darth Vader not recognizing C3PO in the original trilogy is just left as a plot hole.

These choices were wrong because there was no pay off. If there had been an elaborate Usual Suspects style reveal at some point that C3PO knew perfectly well what was going down the whole time and was in it with Darth Vader from the beginning or something, that would have been unexpected, but it wouldn't have been wrong. The fact that the whole plotline of C3PO being assembled by Anakin while he's a child slave prodigy in a junkyard goes literally nowhere and explains absolutely nothing is what makes it wrong.

For all that, the Republic era is still interesting. The main movies have problems with pacing, plotting, and character development. There are script problems, acting problems, and major issues with both the structural and scene to scene edits. Also the jokes aren't funny and a lot of the humor is supposed to come from racial stereotypes which wasn't acceptable when these movies came out and is even less acceptable today. But I have certainly played games set during the Republic era. There is stuff happening that I can imagine wanting to play a character who interacts with it.

The New Order era is not interesting. I don't fucking care. None of it makes sense and the idea of spending enough mental effort to try to make sense out of it just sounds exhausting. They've managed to make something that fails harder than Attack of the Clones.

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OgreBattle
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Post by OgreBattle »

100 years from now the prequels will be the most fondly invoked of SW
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