Mine is they shouldn’t have made the sequel series without George as a consultant.
I love the idea Kylo Ren. Unhinged man child who worships Vader for all the wrong reasons. His soldiers are afraid of him and work around him and pity him. I love having such a broken villain.
I loved when Rey’s parents were nobodies.
I loved that Luke was a scared and broken. Should have felt crippling pity for that guard he force choked in a Jabba’s palace. Still. I loved it.
And while I’m at it. Frozen. I wanted so desperately for Hans to be entirely sympathetic and just not in love will Anna. Movie is mostly the same until Anna gets back and needs the kiss to fix her and he tries and… Nothing. Then. I dunno. Finish the movie some other way.
“disney trilogy bad” is a cold take. its not a hot take if every nerd on the planet agrees.
anyways the last jedi is the only good movie in the sequel trilogy. the people who didnt like it would rather watch a correct movie than a good one.
They shouldn’t have made the prequels. They were terrible and George fucked the legacy of Star Wars forever
It wasn’t very good and then got way worse. We could be forgiven for not knowing better when we were kids but that was 40 years ago.
I loved everything about the force awakens, but I will never forget the emptiness and depression I felt leaving theater after seeing the last Jedi. I know its from a place of privilege that I can feel this way, but I never had another piece of fiction hurt me so badly. I grew up deep into the EU and games and it was my way to escape the existentialism of my daily life, and I was looking forward to see my fictional hero at as a full power Jedi master on the big screen. Now all I feel is apathy when It comes to start wars.
What does ‘a place of privilege’ mean in their capacity?
Empire has never been beaten as a high point in the franchise and it can’t be because SW is taken way too seriously now
Remove Kathleen kennedy
In hindsight the only good Star Wars movie is TESB.
Before I begin - lightsabers are an awesome fantasy weapon and I would love to have one.
Lightsabers are a big reason that Star Wars is garbage.
Hardly any lightsaber fights in the OT, used by all of three people (4 if you count Han, which I don’t). Once the prequel trilogy was made and special effects were cheaper and easier, lightsabers everywhere, and instead of a lightsaber fight being an old fashioned samurai duel where the story and the fight are enhancing each other, now it’s just a spectacle. Has it been more than fifteen minutes since we saw a lightsaber? FSSH, vwoom.
Andor is regarded as one of the better pieces of Star Wars media - no lightsabers, no Jedi, just people versus the machine of the Empire.
Mandalorian S1 was straight fire. Then they introduced the Darksaber. Now nobody likes Mando anymore.
I’m not out to yuck anyone’s yum. You can like bad movies, or movies that are big tentpole spectacles but aren’t ever going to engage with you mentally. I went and saw Episode IX in theaters opening night and it was as entertaining as Hobbs and Shaw. My brain didn’t get anything out of it and it was good to see Palpatine again because he was the only one in the movie that felt like a real person with, you know, motivation and stuff. But I left the theater and I don’t really think about it (except for times like now) because it didn’t engage with me mentally. There was nothing there.
Just lightsabers.
Endless lightsabers.
I’m not crazy about all the callbacks and remember-mes either (looking at you Rogue One, Boba Fett, Solo, etc), but that’s a different rant.
I agree. It also kind of ruins how special and awe-inspiring that lightsaber seemed in the OT. It was like a sacred relic Obi-Wan had taken care of all these years. And then Darth Vader had one! Wow! It also showed his devotion to this “ancient religion” that the generals made fun of him for.
Continuing this take. From a storytelling point of view, they should’ve made it so that having a lightsaber was extremely difficult, the defining feat of a master Jedi knight. Something that padawans trained to use eventually but was an actually really hard, life threatening even, object to create. Crystals should’ve been an statistical impossibility, involve a pilgrimage and ceremony, you’d have to be a keen user of the force, train your sensibility to it, master the skill of manipulating life and matter through the force to construct it. Sabers had to be relics, with names, history and mythology. Handed from master to padawan when they became knights through the ages. Further symbolizing the master-apprentice relationship. Thus there can’t be any more apprentices than there are masters. Sith would have to kill Jedis and steal them, corrupting the sabers.
But Lucas was a meh world builder anyways, so whatever.
They should have had a trilogy story arc planned out before making the new movies made the directors play within that.
How do you know “somehow Palpatine returned” wasn’t the plan from the beginning?
Because JJ Abrams never knows how he wants to end anything at the beginning.
I want to explore the universe that has been created; I am so sick of space wizards and good vs evil
Well… Skeleton Crew apparently does that so I’ve heard
Will check out, thanks fellow Lemmy friend
To tell any other story in the Star Wars universe, you must first retcon the Original Trilogy.
See, the Original Trilogy established that the “dark side” was a temptation for every Jedi. Like cocaine or meth for modern humans: addictive poison that gives a temporary rush of power.
That’s great for the whole spiritual, mystic, two-wolves-within-you conflict Luke went through. His victory was overcoming his shortcomings in the form of fear and anger.
But it’s actually terrible for any story made afterwards.
On the one hand, you can’t now make a story where, “maybe the Jedi were excessively stoic.” without also inadvertently making the argument that Luke was maybe… wrong?.. to conquer his emotions? It undermines Luke’s conflict.
On the other hand, you also can’t make the Dark Side totally evil without flattening Vader’s character. When Luke loses himself to fear in Episode 5 and to anger in Episode 6, he proves that the Dark Side doesn’t sink its teeth into you and control you permanently after a single moment of weakness. Even after losing yourself to the Dark Side, you can still observe how it is hurting your loved ones and then choose to pull yourself out of it, conquering your fear and anger in order to protect them. Exactly as Luke does for Vader, and exactly as Vader does immediately after for Luke.
Which means Anakin was just… one-dimensional up until that point. Weak. Too simple to be a protagonist. He wakes up to find he’s killed Padme, and yet still doesn’t turn his life around and learn to fight the temptation of the Dark Side? He hunts down and kills Jedi who had nothing to do with his fall, and yet never looks into their eyes to realize he’s fallen?
No matter how you look at it, it just… doesn’t work.
That’s why the prequels retconned the Jedi into something morally ambiguous. And why the sequels retconned them into a past that needed killing. It’s why the Clone Wars animated series turned the Jedi into a bureaucratically anti-emotion order. And why a lot of video games added lore where the Jedi actually committed genocide against the Sith. It’s also why pretty much none of these other media talk about the Dark Side in the same tone as the OT.
The second the OT ended, the Dark Side could no be longer a “temptation”. It had to became a faction. An unjustly vilified piece of humanity. An ethnic group.
Because you can’t have a “dark side” and have complicated, nuanced characters and extensive world-building: either A) the world will fall apart, B) the characters will be woefully inconsistent, or C) all of the above.
So every, single time you want to make new Star Wars media, you have to retcon the “Dark Side” essentially out of existence.
The main issue with the Force is that no one ever defined how it and the Dark Side work.
Not that midichlorian bullshit, but an explanation of why the Dark Side is powerful.
There are sort of fan theories as to how it works, but as you pointed out, those are undercut by the lack of consistency.
The original trilogy sort of hints at a workable mechanism.
First is the Light Side. You are borrowing power from the universe to do things. It’s not fast, but it is powerful.
Then the Dark Side, you are not asking. You’re demanding. You’re pulling more power faster than the universe can support. This is why hatred and fear lead to the Dark, because if your emotions are heightened you’re less likely to ask.
The Dark Side should also be corrosive to your own body.
Vader’s line that he was more machine than man. It should not have been a single injury on a lava planet, but a slow decay as he literally pulled the life out of his own body to fuel his power.
Palpatine should have been slowly decaying. Not one fight with reflected lightning.
But that’s the prequel problem. People can’t leave shit alone and have to explain every little detail, even if years are meant to go by between the prequel and the original.
Star Wars has been constantly retconning itself, from the beginning.
The first film was not really produced as “Episode IV”, it was “Star Wars”, a standalone film. It was a movie about a farmer orphan who goes on a swashbuckling space adventure with laser swords and space wizards. The good guys are unambiguously good, the bad guys are just bad guys. Everything is pretty much just as it seems, no secretly alive people, no secretly related people. Lucas may have had nebulous plans/hopes for follow ons, but they weren’t baked and the overall concept is standalone.
Then ESB came along and retconned the Skywalker family, and produced cliffhangers knowing there’d be a third film. However, I’m pretty certain that “there is another Skywalker” didn’t specifically have Leia in mind at the time, mainly because of how it’s handled in the follow up.
Then ROTJ came along, and that little tease about ‘there is another Skywalker?’ just a kind of casual “oh yeah, that’s Leia, and she’s your sister, and we are going to do absolutely nothing serious with that, just consider the matter closed even though they were clearly setting up for… something with that”.
A lot of things in the franchise have this feel. Like “Rei’s provenance is mysterious and significant” swinging in the next film to “the parents are nobody, parents don’t matter” and then swinging again in the last of that set of three to “just kidding, her provenance is very significant”.
There’s a massive amount of content created between the OT and the prequels. Most of it was pretty consistent.
The whole turning off the lightsaber in combat being seen as dishonorable by the sith. The sith lie, cheat, steal, torture, and murder people to get what they want but somehow this is where they draw the line?
Star Wars is a story about toxic masculinity ending up galactically consequential
Ah yes, if only the jedi were more woke and effeminate.
Dude committed several genocides because he had mommy issues and killed the first woman he had sex with because she sided with his adoptive dad on whether being strong or being reasonable was more important and then decided to join the literal fascists. It doesn’t get any more masculinity troubles than that.
Wasn’t that the plot of the Acolyte?
The Obi Wan show should’ve had more seasons and every single finale should’ve been him beating the shit out of Darth Vader every single time.
