40 minutes in and I hate this show.
Not enough dance-fighting?
Stranger
I don’t know what dance-fighting is, but I’m not sure it would help. There’s no story here. It’s like a network drama that should have been cancelled years ago. Absolutely nothing compelling. I can go back right now and watch Star Wars and I absolutely love the character of Leia. I don’t need to see her as a plucky child having adventures like Harriet the Spy. These characters have already had their story arcs told. There’s nothing here.
I can’t say that any of what you relate is surprising. The fundamental problem of prequels is that they are almost always dedicated to mining for nuggets of nostalgia and unless there is a compelling story to be told it just ends up filling out character histories with less-than-salient details like where their names came from and why they “have a bad feeling about this.”
In the case of Star Wars, despite claims that George Lucas outlined nine (sometimes twelve) movies there is really no evidence that the original film was intended to be anything but a standalone story that was a classic “Hero’s Journey” with scenes cribbed from half a dozen films and executed with stylish effects that bolstered the surprisingly good performances from mostly unknown actors. The Empire Strikes Back was almost accidentally a great film, taking Leigh Bracket’s original romance-tinged script and using it as the basis for a surprisingly complex and nuanced story. Return of the Jedi was essentially the first film redone while tying off the family drama of Empire and was already showing the cracks of Star Wars as a larger narrative universe.
Since then, everything else has been more or less superficial. The prequels were at least an attempt to actually make the backstory of the previously alluded to “Clone Wars” into a rich history of politics and betrayal, albeit undermined by Lucas insisting on controlling all aspects of the film resulting in clearly unfinished dialogue, diminishing the actors in fleshing out their characters, and a grotesque overuse of what was even for the day not particularly impressive CGI. The sequel trilogy has become legendary for badly mismanaging an existing franchise, utterly ignoring previous character development in favor of just making the characters do anything the plot needed them to do, handing the middle film to a director that clearly tried to subvert all of the tropes and ideals of the entire franchise, and then clean it up in the final film which was so overstuffed with exposition and ‘surprise’ reveals plus adding more of JJ Abrams ‘mystery boxes’ of its own that it couldn’t actually be bothered to make sense. Solo was essentially a few trivial details that Han Solo was probably lying about to impress a space wizard and a yokel farm boy spun into film length with a plot liberally borrowed from an episode of Firefly, and Rogue One was actually a pretty decent and well-acted espionage story for about 60% of its run time but fundamentally based upon explaining a plot point from the original film that didn’t really need the exposition.
At least we still have The Star Wars Holiday Special; the only part of the franchise where Boba Fett is actually a badass, where we find out what Imperial officers do when they’re off-duty, and in which Chewbacca finally makes it home for Life Day.
Stranger
Did anyone else notice the toy spaceship Obi-Wan tried to give Luke is the same one Luke is playing with during his first conversation with Threepio in ANH?
Yep.
I agree with most of what you say in this post.
The first few scenes of the 1977 movie are almost poetic in their restraint and simplicity. The introductory scenes of Leia, Luke, Ben, and Han are so perfect and emotionally compelling. They tell us absolutely everything we need to know about those characters.
Everything we needed to know about Darth Vader’s backstory was adequately taken care of in two or three lines of dialogue in Ben’s cave.
I understand that much of the credit for their exquisite perfection are due to Marcia Lucas’s editing?
I’ve heard someone say that the fundamental problem with Star Wars is that they keep having to tell the same story with essentially the same characters over and over. There’s no room to expand the world. The Galaxy doesn’t really exist beyond a certain limited set of people and plots.
The result is that Princess Leia eventually spent her entire life leading a failed rebellion.
Ouch! What an epitaph.
Stranger
Yeah it’s grim. Of course IRL the fate of liberal democracy seems grim, so perhaps ironically appropriate.
Aye there’s the challenge. Clone Wars, and more so Rebels, set in an overlapping time period, succeeded. Telling a compelling story can be done even when you know some fixed points of (from show perspective) future time.
Not yet sure if this is going to be that compelling story told.
Well, at least Leia got to reunite with Han…before he was murdered after failing to turn their son back from the Dark Side. Man, I thought Luke got screwed in the sequel trilogy but the more I think about it they really treated Leia as ineffectual and disposable.
I guess…at least Harrison Ford got to see Han killed off after asking for it for forty years.
Stranger
Yes, exactly. This is just Star Wars of the Gaps.
In the Original Star Wars, the hologram message Leia says to Obi-Wan, “you served my father in the Clone Wars”, which feels to me like she never met him. But, now they’ve had this very memorable adventure together.
I was at least hoping for a good lightsaber battle at the end of episode 2.
If he uses his lightsaber, he give himself away for sure as a Jedi.
The Inquisitors know he’s a Jedi.
I would expect Princess Leia to keep a more personal connection private in that communication, and this more as a basis for why she had faith in him.
I also see this as a keeping the focus away from being the story of Luke Skywalker. Even the same events told from a different character perspective can be compelling.
These Disney+ shows are character development stories, not plot development stories. They’re still in experimenting mode of what they can do and where they can take things. I think starting from Mandalorian S3, and Ahsoka, both out next year, there will be a larger plot forming that will have some crossover twists and turns.
Kenobi, and shows like The Acolyte, Andor, or the Lando series (which may not be happening, we haven’t heard anything more about it) are set in different eras and have their own timelines.
Re: The usual bunch of miserable fuck YTers complaining about continuity being broken in ep 2 with the death of a certain person.
Obi-Wan CUT FUCKING DARTH MAUL IN TWO…and then Maul fell some 100+feet…and they brought him back.
ANYONE can be brought back.
Do you think that is good storytelling?
So, more like Wookiepedia entries.
Whats the first occasion of “No body, no death”?..Sherlock Holmes?