Mine is they shouldn’t have made the sequel series without George as a consultant.
“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.
You want a HOT take on Star Wars?
I love it. All of it. Games, movies, shows. All. Of. It. Sure, I’ve got some critiques, but even the prequels/sequels are a thrill ride. I love Star Wars and I don’t care about some dork on the internet’s opinion on it.
This is the only hot take in this whole thread lol
My lukewarm take is that Star Wars has varied so greatly in quality from product-to-product, that any take that categorizes some of it as bad and some of it as good is a lukewarm, standard take.
Yes, most of these are standard takes.
A true hot take, one that I don’t share but take my upvote for your candor
Ah, the negotiator!
Mine is they shouldn’t have made the sequel series without
George as a consultanta planMy hot take on the sequels is that the first one was a decent start, and they screwed up the whole plot from there. It had some issues mainly in dropping subplots, probably because what was intended to be followed up wasn’t thanks to different plots and directors.
That’s not a hot take at all.
It really did seem like they were just making stuff up as they went 😂
And plan = “Thrawn Trilogy”.
Or Rogue Squadron. Or hell, basically anything from the extended lore that isn’t about the Vong or the corellia trilogy.
They couldn’t, they already established that Space Whales hard counter Thrawn.
Beat me to it.
Honestly, saw the first one, and that was enough to not see the rest.
It’s the stereotypical “tell the rest of the story” lame crap today.
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.
Bro did a 360 degree Ollie backflip with the Frozen commentary LMAO 🤣
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.
My hot take is based on this idea.
The franchise should say to hell with canon and redo the prequels.
Anakin’s fall into the dark side should have mirrored Luke’s journey. Instead of a maudlin love story causing his fall, he is slowly corrupted by greed and power. Do it well, and it becomes an allegory for modern class struggle and the greed of the few as they gain power. The clone wars are between ordinary people about the legality of cloning as a technology. The Jedi are not generals and there are like 20, not 1,000s. Part way through Anakin’s training, Obi-Wan and him leave to enlist as pilots - Obi-Wan offering to continue his teaching in the space Navy against the Jedi’s wishes. Every time Anakin wins a battle, he’s ashamed of how good it feels to kill. Every time Anakin gets promoted on the space Navy for winning, he is ashamed of the feel of power. Obi-Wan isn’t blind to Anakin’s slide to darkness, but has too much pride himself to ask for help - failing as a teacher because he can’t tattle on his friend.
Ep 2 should be about Anakin coming to grips with his non-jedi like desires and accepting his fate as something not-jedi. Escaping from the Jedi order and running away ashamed and afraid like a fugitive. The Jedi hunting him down across the galaxy. A whole movie about this acceptance, instead of a 1 minute scene in Palp’s office. It would be an allegory for the tyranny of the majority, and accepting ones flaws. Ep 2 ends with Anakin finding Sideous stuck in hiding and starting his dark training (a la Yoda in Ep5)
Ep 3 opens to a reluctant Anakin and Palps nearly killing each other while doing dark side training (embracing death and power). They are interrupted by a Jedi on a mission to kill Anakin. The Jedi is killed off by Anakin at great physical cost to Anakin (starting his Darth Vader injuries). Anakin gets mad that the Jedi won’t leave him alone and finally commits to being a sith. This starts Anakin’s long quest to hunt down each Jedi individually. Each battle with the Jedi injures him further, requiring cybernetic replacements from each painful injury. The hunt consumes him and he is finally Darth Vader.
I’ve had this bouncing in my head for 25 years.
My idea for the prequels is this.
Expand the clone wars into an actual thing. Not that they were fighting with Clone armies. That’s sort of stupid.
No, the clones were of actual people, and the Jedi were the main way to tell if someone was a clone or not. I’m talking full on pod people situation here.
So, Episode 1 can be the initial discovery of the clones, and Jedi starting to hunt them. Introduce Obiwan who is a newly minted Jedi master. He finds Anakin who is a slave, but not a child. A young adult.
Obiwan then starts training Anakin.
Episode 2 would find that Anakin had been cloned. Obiwan or Padame or someone convinces people to accept the clone, and Obiwan ends up training them both. The original and the clone. Maybe the surviving clones are somewhat accepted into society, after the factory and controllers are destroyed.
Episode 3 is Anakin’s fall. He grows resentful that of his clone. The Jedi masters sense this and pass him over for some honor or advancement and Anakin starts to think that it’s because he was a slave which fuels the resentment. Padame and the clone grow close, which makes Anakin even more resentful.
At the height of the movie, the surviving clones are ordered to kill anyone near them in a mass suicide attack. Anakin’s clone, who has connected with the Force, does not kill.
Anakin murders his clone, thinking that Padame is dead, and then goes on to kill the jedi, thinking they’re to blame. Obiwan finds Anakin’s lightsaber, (he and the clone switched mid fight) and assumes the clone was activated and that Anakin is dead.
And then stuff wraps up so that Luke is born and placed on Tatoine.
I like it. You got the birth of Luke and Leia in a way I didn’t. I think in my head retcon, Padme doesn’t exist and Anakin sleeps around while killing and conquering (how he doesn’t know about Luke/Leia). That’s not great.
Wanna combine them and pitch Star Wars What If? to Disney?
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.
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.
Mine was going to be a step further. Too many Jedi and Sith. If you want to keep the force, sure, but do something new. The Witches of Dathomir are the only real new thing with the force since the first movie. You can count Bendu and the Mortis Gods, but they were very minimal. It seems like only Filoni wants to expand the universe.
Hell, I think Season 1 of Star Wars Visions had every episode about the Jedi/Sith, it wasn’t until season 2 that they started breaking out of it.
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.
For episode 7 it looked like they had a plan and the made a huge turn and all the beats from the first movie just fizzled
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.
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.
At this point, Star Wars is just a setting. The reason Star Wars shows/movies continue to be so divisive is because people expect the tone/genre of their favorite piece of Star Wars content.
For example, expecting to like Acolyte because you liked Rogue One is ridiculous. They have almost nothing in common. You wouldn’t expect to like Dr Strange because you liked Dunkirk.
Just because it has a Star Wars brand on it doesn’t mean it will be anything like other things with the Star Wars brand. Expecting that will lead to disappointment.
Just because it has a Star Wars brand on it doesn’t mean it will be anything like other things with the Star Wars brand.
I’m sorry, that’s insane.
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
They shouldn’t have made the prequels. They were terrible and George fucked the legacy of Star Wars forever
I mean, dangling the concept of a moisture farming teen in front of us, and then dropping that entire cinematic arc in favour of some space wizard bullshit? Like, hello? Know your audience?
Hey snot
I know it’s not a hot take but I’ll rant.
who the hell had to make Rey a Palpatine and Palpatine not die. that wasn’t epic, that was dumb af.
Darth jar jar would have been wayyy more compelling, funny, etc.
sometimes dead is bettah.
they could have gone a different route with snoke. he was the only compelling new guy and they made him the old guy. bahhh
I think they fucked up by wanting to give every movie to different directors, so in the second one the new director killed off Snoke. Then JJ Abrams somehow returned and probably had a story that required Snoke, but he was dead, so now Palpatine needs to be back.
Could have just made Snoke be the guy cloning himself instead of Palpatine. 🤷 It would have made just as much sense.
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 this capacity?
I have a PhD in biochemistry, a good job, a wife and a loving family. I have enough free time to contemplate my own place in the world and worry about if my work will have a positive or negative impact on society, because my grandfather who’s grandparents were slaves, started a real estate company by house hacking in the 1970s. That allowed my parents and me to live comfortable lives. Having this safety net allowed us to take risks and persue careers that we enjoyed.
Remarkably cogent response
And this affects your criticism of a movie about space wizards?
dude, this is powerful trolling - congrats
Star Wars is just a formulaic fantasy story with a sci-fi coat of paint on it. The original trilogy was groundbreaking because of the special effects, and the story was entertaining enough to not distract from that. The other six films in the main storyline bring nothing new to the table, and are thus boring cashgrabs.
Thank you. I would even argue that Return of the Jedi wasn’t great either. I mean sure, it was beautiful and the Moon of Endor with its giant trees looked amazing, but the plot was mostly a rehash of the original (another Death Star? Really?) plus silly Ewok shenanigans that made the empire into a total joke.
Good point, that was the beginning of the decline already.
Those speeder bike scenes, though. >chef’s kiss< The rest of the film could’ve been Han Solo throwing up into his helmet and I still would’ve watched it.
The speeder scenes rocked, the few times I got to play the game on that in an arcade it was definitely closer to actually riding at death defying speeds in a semi open forest area, and it wasn’t a quarter game either if I recall.
The score with the final lightsaber scene makes it great as well though in my books. Without the same music it wouldn’t have worked nearly as well…though that’s probably the same for a lot of the scenes. As great as the movie is I can still just listen to the music on its own, used to even on vinyl back in the day, Dad’s soundtrack and my fisher price record player lol.
Should have been Wookiee ragings instead of Ewok shenanigans.
Selling to Disnep was a huge mistake. Putting all the fabulous work of the expanded universe in the back for “creative freedom” and labeling it “fan fiction” basically killed Star Wars for me. Why make movies about Yuuzhan Vong, a novel and incredibly fascinating and creatively written species as the new menace, not detectable by the force, if you can just recycle the old movies?
