Let's just talk about Star Wars forever (Part 1)

if snoke turns out to be rey’s dad i’m probably going to throw something at the screen

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I’m back at work so I don’t have time to blaze through the rest of the Star Worlds series. But I did watch ESB a while back and I have to say: That is a good movie, everyone.

Everything about it is good, and it is probably the main reason why Star Wars still has life in it to this day. It’s the Wrath of Khan of the Star Warps Franchise, and you have to give LucasFilm credit for being able to do something other than just try in vain to replicate that lightning in a bottle experience over and over and over again. I mean, I want more Lando as much as the next guy, but you have to admit in this Cinematic Era if we did get extra Lando he would probably be played by Benedict Cumberbatch or some shit. I’m stoked for Solo: A Lando’s Story though, I guess, because Donald Glover is such a wild choice for that role.

Anyway, because ESB is such a great thing on its own, I feel like it doesn’t really gain or lose much by being considered in the context of the rest of the series. A few things I noticed about it though:

-Compared to, basically, every other Star War, ESB is relatively light on zany background aliens. I actually really like this: Every new creature that is introduced is actually directly relevant to the plot. There are a few oddball things in Cloud City (Lobot, the weird grunge oompa loompas), but it’s cool to me that ESB is a world where crazy aliens actually DO things (clobber luke and trap him in an ice cave, die and allow their guts to be used for warmth, crust up the Falcon’s exhaust ports or w/e and also uh, live inside an asteroid like an eel [this whole sequence fucking rules, I don’t care what you think], live on a swamp planet and dispense wisdom about the force, etc), instead of just hang out in bars and get blitzed while listening to Jizz Music (We’re all deep enough heads that I don’t need to explain this, right?)

It may be the only Star Wars movie like this, actually? Like, it’s full of weird creature designs that are actually weird for specific plot-related reasons, instead of just being like an open canvas for insane production design (which, by the way, is also good). I guess there are moments of this in the other movies, but with most of them you can imagine the script was originally something like, there’s an alien here that menaces our heroic trio, fill in with some cool thing later. This is, by the way, why I really like the fucked up mind reading alien from Rogue One: It is barely explained, and yet whatever it does fucks up Riz Ahmed so badly that he is basically a different character after it happens. That’s good content.

Oh: The main prequel thing here, I guess I’ll finally talk about why I like what the prequels do to Yoda so much.

When he’s introduced in ESB, it’s really hard to draw a line between “Jedi Mastermind who is putting on a show to figure out if Luke is truly devoted” and “This character is actually a legitimately whimsical Wacky Swamp Elf, potentially senile, very little of the zaniness is an act.” Yoda is a really well written character, guys! He’s definitely kind of based on this zen/daoist stereotype of both hermits being true masters of whatever as well as actual enlightenment turning you into a kind of incomprehensible weirdo. Yoda just fits that mold really well, although to be fair there is strong evidence to suggest his initial goofiness was really just a performance.

But, if you come to this after having seen the prequels, it really just feels like… something has changed with Yoda in the intervening decades. To me, this actually works much better than the similar thing going on with Obi-Wan. You can tell that everything Obi-Wan says about the past was not really written with that much intent to actually revisit that in later entries of the series, and based on how the prequels played out there are loads of other things that are at best deliberate misdirection or irony (beyond the, uh, main big lie, right?) and at worst just total tonal inconsistencies. I could probably write a thesis about the layers of irony of Obi-Wan referring to the lightsaber as a weapon of a more civilized age re: what actually happens in the prequels. But, I care about you, dear reader, so I won’t.

Anyway, by the time they got to Empire, you can tell that there is at least a bit more thought going into the broader world that these characters are a part of. I really like that Obi-Wan is all, “I was just like him when I was young…” and I feel like we do get to see a bit of that in the prequels. But to me the thing that works best, and, again, this is just a product of really sloppy and unimaginative writing, is how the prequels totally lift the veil on Yoda’s weird speech patterns–he just, like, talks like that no matter what? Even when he is talking about totally mundane bureaucratic bullshit, he doesn’t just use really strange syntax for effect, he just … doesn’t really know how to speak English (or whatever) normally. The aesthetically worst cases of this are when Yoda is actually trying to say something with gravitas in the prequels (Begun, the clone wars have. Fuck this line forever.), but I just think it’s hilarious when he is like The transport ships to the battlefield send! or saying other inane things in a really convoluted way.

So Yoda is just this weird alien dude who for some reason can’t talk right, but once he goes into seclusion on a swamp planet he kind of starts to lose his mind a little bit, and goes from being this overly serious Jedi Council Bureaucrat Hardass to being a kind of wistful and whimsical imp. All of the advice he gives about the force in the Prequels is about how to control it, how to keep yourself chaste, how to be virtuous and dignified. In ESB he also warns of the danger of the dark side, but everything he says about why the force is actually good just seems so much more convincing. As with his weird speech patter, I know that this is just because the prequels are poorly written and the original movies are not, but I like that this creates the effect that Yoda didn’t actually understand what was so great about the force until he left behind the bureaucratized version of it and had a chance to really contemplate it for himself. He also seemingly gains more pronounced precognition abilities in this period too, which makes a ton of sense to me.

Soooo I guess I ended up writing a ton anyway, sorry.

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oh the other thing i wanted to add was that I am so, so glad that Lucas at least had the good sense to let Hoth remain deserted and desolate seeming and not fill it up with CGI snow dragons or whatever. The new stuff on Tatooine is not that appalling, and I actually think the contrast it creates with Hoth is really great. Like, Luke wanted to run away from his podunk ass home planet to have exciting adventures… when we next see him, he’s being murdered by a yeti on a desolate chunk of ice somewhere out in the middle of nowhere. The true lad’s wartime adventure experience.

It is actually totally appalling

OK, the ROTJ stuff is bad, but I don’t mind the additions in the first one. Especially the outdoor scenes, in the originals those parts always seemed too much like empty film sets.

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The added CGI is so, so ugly. So ugly. Ugly. So, so god damned ugly.

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The Prequels Are Good

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Also this means I have Completed the Saga and am now fully prepared to immerse myself in the glories of Episode 8.

A few random thoughts about ROTJ & FA

-I have in the past been very down on ROTJ. It’s still my least favorite of the original films, and the one that is IMO the most ruined by the special editions (that CGI blob dance number in Jabba’s Palace is a dark omen of things to come, but to me is way worse than anything in the prequels. Because it totally fucks up the tone of what is otherwise a fairly grim sequence.)

-Aside from the dancing, if all of the movie kept pace with that opening sequence RoTJ would probably be my favorite in the original trilogy. I love the way it subtly shows that Luke has become a bit wiser tactically, opening with this very long gambit of everyone getting in place for the final showdown on the barge (which makes sense because ESB establishes that Jedi can sense the future, so it’s not like it requires too much suspension of disbelief to assume that this is Luke’s plan all along), but also that he’s kind of an asshole: No matter what he knows about how it will go down, he is still putting literally everyone he knows in mortal danger just for the sake of maybe rescuing Han.

–I don’t mind the ewoks themselves, but I do think the important story beats that happen on Endor are handled a bit clumsily. Something always struck me as odd about the scene where Luke tells Leia she’s his sister, and watching it as an adult I can with some certainty tell you that that something is Cocaine.

–C3P0 the god is bad, C3P0 finally fulfilling his promise of fluency in a billion languages or whatever (i know most of them are robot languages) is good

–The “celebration” sequence added to the end of RoTJ is really sad and weird now knowing that everything apparently goes to shit again before FA

–It’s weird to me how little FA actually tells the audience about what happened between episodes 6 and 7. I know I have defended JJ Abrams approach to world building in the past, but looking back on all the films, I feel much less confused about what may or may not have transpired between 3 and 4, because it basically doesn’t matter. We know the senate more or less agreed to let Palpatine become emperor, we can presume that he used momentum from the war against the separatists to a) convert to authoritarian rule b) do genocide to non-humanoids wherever possible c) make being a droid illegal. Darth Vader presumably in this time continues to learn how to be evil and do evil shit, Bail Organa foments resistance within the senate and secretly participates in the rebellion, Luke and Leia grow up basically with no idea who they are, Yoda is in exile on Dagobah, Obi Wan is in exile on Tatooine but watching over Luke. There is probably EU stuff that goes into more detail, but everything you need to know is pretty clearly telegraphed. The death star is designed based on geonosian plans, and we learn in Rogue One more about how they did this.

What do we know about what happened between 6 and 7 without reading comics and novels and shit? The Empire lost, but somehow became the First Order and created a planet-sized weapon without anyone knowing, the rebellion somehow morphed into a new senate that we don’t learn anything about until it is destroyed. Snoke… appeared? And took control of everything? Luke tried training a new generation of Jedi, but failed and Ben Solo went bonkers, possibly already under the influence of snoke, and turned into Kylo Ren, which is apparently a title not a name because the phrase Knights of Ren is used but never explained.

I have read an article that explains some of the bigger space politics questions from the new EU, namely that the new republic (or whatever it’s called) and the empire eventually reached a kind of a truce, with the empire still controlling some systems, and that the resistance forms as a way of defending against the expansionist ambitions of the First Order, which I gather is some kind of radical sect within the remnants of the empire… an Alt-Empire, if you will… and that the resistance is doing this without the authorization of the senate.

The whole resistance-as-unofficial-movement-within-the-republic is basically just a way of resetting the almost inconsequential status quo of episode 4 (that the rebellion is popular among the senate but not officially endorsed), and I guess it makes sense, but I feel like there could have been a biiiiit more to indicate that the empire is never fully defeated even after the second death star blows up. It would just make the sudden robustness of the First Order make a little bit more sense.

–I’m pretty sure Han Solo says “Get out of the way, ball” to BB-8 at some point, and believing that this is what he actually says is my favorite line in the movie.

–In retrospect, I should have been more suspicious of the gravitas of basically everything involving Han. When you watch the original movies, it’s almost funny how inconsequential Han is for almost all of the movies. He is a dashing and charming but not particularly trustworthy person in ANH, a bros before hoes type of rake in ESB, and basically a macguffin in ROTJ, and then all of a sudden he is treated like some kind of grandfatherly sage in FA. The father-son scene works for me, but it’s laughable that we’re expected to take this as seriously as the Anakin-Luke conflict, when the series has never been about Han. I think the Han-Leia scene in FA is well written, but it’s played like a soap opera, when I feel like they should have tried to make it feel a bit lighter. Likewise, any reference to what he’s done in the interim is written like classic Han (after the war was over I basically just peaced out and became a swindler again), but because of… what happens later… it sort of foreshadows that this basically means he’s an absentee father. Which. Fine, I guess, but it just seems to be expecting way too much emotional investment in the character that doesn’t really vibe with the way he’s actually presented in the OT.

–The tl;dr of the above is: Han is to Episode 7 as Boba Fett is to Episode 2, don’t @ me

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Do you think ewoks snort space cocaine when they are eating people and preparing people to be eaten?

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I don’t think this, I know this

i mean maybe it was because i watched it the year after it came out but honestly the way force awakens was just “yea those guys are still kicking” with no further elaboration was sorta the thing that rang most true of that movie for me. like people used to make that clerks joke about all the bluecollar construction guys blown up with the death star but surely the converse is true and there were always all these cops, judges, teachers, deathstick vendors in the background of these movies privately saying things like well actually the empire had a lot of good ideas and at least the uniforms are cool. han solo’s son radicalised from reading too much space reddit. just some topical starwars posting for you here :^)

i remember enjoying FA more than the other films! i guess i never “got” star wars in that like doesn’t the closed structure of the hero’s journey and the chosen one and exactly one empire versus exactly one rebellion and so on kind of contradict the point of setting everything in space which is the openness of having a million different aliens and planets and things all happening at once. i get the appeal of a small story taking place in a larger world you just see glimpses of but for me that’s kind of scuttled from the sense that what’s happening in the small story is really all that matters in this entire fictional universe. it’s not like FA does anything much to break from this mythos but i guess some of the structural jankiness and like inherent dubiousness of being the type of sequel that it is and having to pile a whole bunch of OCs on top of the original structure set it off a little for me. or maybe it’s just that the first movies were so mythologised even when i watched them as a kid that i could never experience them fresh, apart from the desert scenes of return of the jedi which were pulpy and sort of gratuitous enough to remain charming to me.

i wonder if the matrix sequels really would be better if they changed to starring the coat lady and glasses man from that videogame tie-in instead of any of the main cast.
but i will also never watch any of the secondary media that could confirm or refute this idea…

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I agree, I think what irritates me about the First Order is it feels, aesthetically, kind of like the Twilight Princess to the prequels Wind Waker. Like, ok, that’s a bad analogy for a bunch of reasons, but it just feels… “classic star wars my friend, this is it” in a way that is too extreme for me.

On the other hand, I totally get that the venomous baby snake version of the resurgent empire would be even more into being Space Nazis, aesthetically and ideologically, than the actual empire that preceded them, but in my dream version of Ep 7 there’s a little bit more wind-up before we are made to witness the power of their fully operational battle station.

As in, if the movie opened with everyone under the assumption that the First Order was actually some kind of radical, insignificant splinter group desperately clinging on even after the rebellion was victorious, and then halfway through you realize that they’re way more powerful than everyone realized. It seems like that’s what the movie wants you to think, but from the first frame they pretty much have their shit together way better than the empire ever did at the height of their powers.

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I don’t want to come across like I don’t like FA though, it’s a stupidly hard task to introduce a new cast of characters when the old ones are basically pop mythology at this point, but I 100% would rather hang out with Finn, Rey, and Poe than Luke, Leia and Han, and that goes a long way.

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i remember seeing FA during opening weekend with a packed house that essentially all simultaneously called what happens to Han like about 5-10 minutes before it happened, and the shared unspoken camaraderie that came with everybody basically going “ah, but yeah…” (someone actually yelling “it’s like poetry, it rhymes”)

one of my favorite aspects of FA was how Kylo was basically an angry alt-right loser who can’t live up to the fantasy delusion he created about his grandpa and throws a tantrum when he’s outclassed by a g-g-g-giiiirrrllll, and hopefully it’s brought up more in the new one, with more topical flavor. though if that theory about Kylo being redeemed while Rey goes Dark side is true, then that could be a bit of a disappointment.

please don’t kill Luke, Disney.

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I don’t think I will ever again watch a Star Wars movie that doesn’t have Luke in it, the contract is sealed.

I think the problem with the First Order is that the vagueness makes the stakes unclear. The OT is very clear: Empire big, Rebellion inside it & not as big. Like what even is the Venn diagram of the First Order and the New Republic, geographically and politically? Is the First Order just a rump Empire with its own systems under its control? How big is it relative to the New Republic? Or is the First Order an Empire-nostalgic fascist movement inside the NR? Like is FO:NR::Rebels:Empire?

The lack of all the answers to these questions means I don’t know how “big” the story is. It doesn’t need to be The Fate Of The Galaxy. I just need to know whether it is or not.

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also the planets destroyed by the Starkiller are the prequel planets right? because i always read this as a continuation of what JJ Abrams did with the first Star Trek movie, by basically being like, “fuck what you know, nerds, this is MY shit now”

also now that star wars is gonna be an annual thing, i still get mad everytime i think of the Han Solo Solo Movie for driving away Lord & Miller, and i’ll probably always hate it just for that, even if the movie is ok. (much the same way i’ll always hate the Ant Man movie more because they drove away Edgar Wright and what could’ve been)

This is a very good stance, because I am 100% about Star Wars just being the Skywalker Family Chronicles.

these are very good ESB thoughts and I like the Yoda thoughts in particular.

When I watched the last time ESB a couple years ago, I was struck by how Han, Leia, Chewbacce, and C3PO just hang out on an asteroid for the entire middle-half of the movie (and an indeterminate amount of plot time). I got really hung up on it during that viewing to the point that for the first time ever I was thinking maybe IV was a better film than V (the viewing of IV right before that had been very kind to it), though thinking back on it I don’t know why I thought that matters that much. Idk.

AFAIK no, they are the “Hosnian System,” which is where the base of the new republic senate. I’m surprised they didn’t call it the “Notalderaan System”