What is going on with Star Wars?

Favorite Books, Films, Artists, Actors
User avatar
Shada Dukal
Sheer Evil
Posts: 512
Joined: Fri May 22, 2015 9:58 am

What is going on with Star Wars?

Postby Shada Dukal » Mon Jun 04, 2018 8:11 pm

The movie “Solo: A Star Wars Story” was the proverbial last straw that broke the camel’s back. I believe it started with TFA and TLJ drove the last nail in the coffin. Obviously, the fandom does not like the sequels, but Kathleen Kennedy just told the fans that she does not need to provide exactly what the fans want, especially the male fans. The paradox is that I am a female and I am exactly as pissed off with the sequel trilogy and its political correctness as the male fans. I guess the last movie without being that bad per se just became the scapegoat for this communication breakdown between the majority of the fandom and the current owners of Star Wars.

So what are your thoughts about that?

After all, this franchise was my first sci-fi love. I have been watching it since 1982 when I was 10 and later I continued with reading the old EU. I have never been an omnivore devouring everything with a SW label on it, I do not claim encyclopedic knowledge about all eras and characters but still, I have devoted quite a lot of time to Star Wars. It really pains me to see something that has accompanied me through the bigger part of my life falling apart due to bad managerial decisions coupled with cheap SJW-agenda. Star Wars as an international cultural icon deserves better.
I am the Lizard King, I can do anything!
Jim Morrison

Gul Khold
Moderately Bad
Posts: 66
Joined: Sun May 17, 2015 9:33 pm

Re: What is going on with Star Wars?

Postby Gul Khold » Mon Jun 11, 2018 12:52 am

How to express my movie experience...

Well... I can say that the movie was pretty forgetable. I did not like the SJW robot (might be because she's the polar opposite of the sarcastic, nihilist type of droid I like - as you are aware), I do not mind an SW character being pansexual, but the Lando thing came out of fucking nowhere and was awkwardly written (C-3PO, despite being a droid, is ironically more organic in that regard), and some of the backstories and origins for things, like Han's gun, were unecessary. It is a blaster. We saw in A New Hope that Empire field officers had the same fucking model. Are they saying that, in Disney's canon, ALL Imperial officers in dress uniform somehow dismantled a rifle to get a heavy pistol now?

It was a lame experience for me, and I blame it squarely on Kathleen Kennedy. At least I'm glad I haven't paid a cent to watch it (I watched Deadpool 2, then hid in the toilet and went to watch it surrounded by a crowd of drunk teenagers and mixed my - used - ticket with theirs, so the taker couldn't see it was already stamped).

Which brings me to Disney's PR team blaming it on "Star Wars exhaustion", the idea that, because Solo came way closer to The Worst Jedi, the audience was "tired" of it. Well, shit, then the Disney idiots did not look at their own Marvel franchise, launching movies almost back-to-back, and yet being pretty good in the box office AND critical reception. Again, like Deadpool 2, which I found much more enjoyable and worth my money.

User avatar
Shada Dukal
Sheer Evil
Posts: 512
Joined: Fri May 22, 2015 9:58 am

Re: What is going on with Star Wars?

Postby Shada Dukal » Tue Jun 12, 2018 12:55 pm

Yes, that droid was a nuisance. I watched it with bitter schadenfreude because only two weeks ago I had ridiculed such a plotline in a PM. Lo and behold, what was a joke for me turned out to be their serious intention. I mocked a revolution held by robots demanding droid rights and guess what – Disney did it. Still, the droid in Rogue 1 was great – I truly don’t know what possessed Kathleen Kennedy. If she wants to be a SJW, she can join an Internet campaign, have a personal blog, found her own organization, but ruining a whole franchise is not worth it.

Lando’s pan-sexuality came as a bolt from the blue for me. Nothing in his behavior in the OT has ever pointed towards such a conclusion. He was a suave and flirty dandy but I did not notice any sexual dynamics between him and Han. I didn’t notice it in this prequel either. In fact, a writer needs a lot of setting and screen time to make a credible sexual profile of a character. People usually do not dwell on their sexual preferences while running to save their lives or swindling someone. They do that when they are at leisure. What is more, expressing pan-sexuality in a PG13 movie is virtually impossible.

Indeed, the dices and the blaster, these details were absolutely useless. At the same time we still don’t know how he learned Shyriiwook, what happened to his father and what did he do on Carida.

Personally, I enjoyed the total lack of Jedi and Sith (Darth Maul appeared for only 3 minutes). I also liked the train heist, the interactions within Beckett’s gang, and Beckett himself. Apart from that, the rest of the movie was pretty unremarkable. The insertion of the Cloud Riders galled me, they could let them be a rival criminal organization but, no, they need a progressive social message against oppression and tyranny. Cheap.

I hold Kathleen Kennedy responsible for this fiasco, too – I hope this will be her last movie for SW. Still, what is done is done, Disney will need a lot of luck to win the fans’ trust back. I don’t think it is a sign of “franchise fatigue” but a total disgruntlement at the message of SW and its new characters.

I really appreciate what you have been through to watch Solo. This sounds like hard work to me. Personally, I don’t like superheroes, mutants and characters with supernatural abilities so I don’t watch Marvel much but still I watched Deadpool 2 because of your recommendation. I saw it for free, at home. Torrents… There were several humorous exchanges, genre satire, fourth wall breaking, but, basically, as the main character admits – lazy writing. Time travel corrects everything and no one truly dies, and everyone regenerates and comes back.

Deadpool is R-rated while Star Wars is a PG-13 movie. So comparing them is like comparing apples and oranges. No one would ever dare to make R-rated SW although fans would adore it. It means losing the child and more conservative audiences.
I am the Lizard King, I can do anything!
Jim Morrison

Gul Khold
Moderately Bad
Posts: 66
Joined: Sun May 17, 2015 9:33 pm

Re: What is going on with Star Wars?

Postby Gul Khold » Tue Jun 12, 2018 5:48 pm

I suppose she somehow convinced Disney's suits that, because being an SJW is trendy, it'd bring more ravenue. I bet that, if somehow white supremacy were trendy, they'd instead have made Han to be a nazi or something like that. It's simply how the industry is affected. But, indeed, someone that has been around for a while like doubleK should know better than ruin a franchise for a cheap message.

Exactly!

Oh, yeah, I had forgotten those two points as well. It was never shown how he suddendly could understand Chewbacca or how it was in Carida. In a way, it just makes a point to prove that the guys calling the shots worry about unecessary details.

When I first saw the Cloud Riders, I figured they'd be something like a proto-Rebel criminal organization that would be more or less like Rondo Onahka's gang. It came off as that they couldn't really figure how to shove them and their whole 'message' in the movie and it all felt awkward.

The franchise fatigue was just her team likely unwilling to admit they just barfed out all over the franchise. Marvel was not affected by this supposed fatigue.

Eh, I'm not a huge fan of those either, but I like distracting myself from time to time. I wouldn't go and buy a Deadpool dvd, but I had more fun watching it than Solo. So I could consider my money better spent than if I had gone there just to watch the disappointment of an SW movie that it was. It also does help I do not mind Marvel's franchise going off the rails, while Star Wars was a huge part of my childhood and one of my first memories was watching it with my father. It is my favourite sci-fi (though I think it is more "sci-fantasy") franchise and it is sad to see that they steered it straight into the proverbial iceberg.

Hahaha, indeed. That would be a blast.

User avatar
Seerbah Pe’Rez
Posts: 24
Joined: Sun Mar 25, 2018 4:58 pm

Re: What is going on with Star Wars?

Postby Seerbah Pe’Rez » Tue Jun 12, 2018 11:49 pm

I think parental upbringing and what people are more willing to see is what affects these movies. The Disney ones on SW made the ematmosphere a little cheesy and comedic like they were targeting little kids instead of a broader audience. I haven’t seen Solo yet but after reading bad reviews over the last few weeks I might for the first time ever have to skip on one
Ask a simple question, get a complicated answer.

User avatar
Shada Dukal
Sheer Evil
Posts: 512
Joined: Fri May 22, 2015 9:58 am

Re: What is going on with Star Wars?

Postby Shada Dukal » Wed Jun 20, 2018 12:11 pm

Ok, people, I see your point, we are all disappointed, we all expected something else, we all have our pet theories and pet peeves. In my case, it is not a small pet peeve but a big rant.

I don’t think that Star Wars is well suited to host any RL social-political agenda. Star Wars is based on archetypal themes – the son redeeming the father’s sins, blood is thicker than water, the power of friendship, the individual choices and their consequences, the balance between chaos and order, the revenge and forgiveness, the cyclic nature of human endeavors, the individual as a catalyst who has the will power to change the galaxy. These themes are universal, timeless, and supranational, they are part of the collective human unconscious.

The spirit of Star Wars was adventurous because no matter whether we rooted for the Empire or the Rebels we saw individuals making their choices, triggering certain events and dealing with the consequences. Some choices appealed to us others not so much but the characters made them as fully enfranchised players, as people who really wanted to do them despite the circumstances or the consequences.

In the sequel this causation is inverted, the circumstances and the consequences force the characters to be what they are, they are so to say "frozen" in their predestination, their choices are limited by default, they are victims without agency who simply react to what happens but are hardly in control. They do not lead but follow the fallout of events.

We see an insignificant Rey who is a piece of social trash dumped on Jakku, trying to suppress her memories and to forget that she is no one. She is almost autistic in terms of communication, she never relaxes, she is always grumpy and terse, she is rude to people who try to help her, she does not smile, she does not possess a shred of femininity and personal charm. She was born a victim of systematic oppression and all her choices are the choices of a cornered animal confronting the hunter. Her constant shock and fear invoke glimpses of supernatural abilities that look even more conspicuous considering her underdeveloped self.

In other words, Rey has no agency, she is limited to pointless suffering or accidental miracles due to her entrenched limitations. Even if the First Order never existed, she would never be a fully-operational human being because huge chunks of her personal make up are missing. How exactly is such a character inspiring to anyone who wants to see a sci-fi fairy tale with brave characters achieving their goals? Who would like to identify themselves with such a lousy socially stunted creature – do people think of themselves as frightened desert rats trying to survive?

Then we have Kylo who is a victim of his dysfunctional family – his parents walked away from each other, his uncle betrayed him, he felt alone and was forced into a role that he did not want to play. His abilities estranged him even further, he cobbled hastily some identity for himself by emulating and worshiping his grandfather because he never knew him personally. So again, the circumstances has made him what he is, he just throws tantrums and severs any connections to his painful past.

How exactly is this inspirational – even Anakin as a slave raised by a single mother was happier and more normal that Kylo who grew up free and surrounded by two parents and a loving uncle. At what point did Kylo become so evil that his own uncle contemplated killing him, didn’t he spot any early signs, any telltales? It turns out that Han, Leia and Luke are horrible people who let the only child in their family turn into a hysterical sociopath full of hatred and did nothing to prevent it or alleviate it. It is so sick and morbid.

We also have Rose Tico who snivels about her dead sister, stuns Finn while sobbing incoherently, drags him to a casino, where all patrons have harmed her, her sister, the space horses and the entire universe, in that order. She gallops over the tables of the plutocracy running the military complex, liberates a space horse, and in the middle of a lost battle declares that all we need is love. Fortunately, she is rendered comatose and I hope she will stay that way forever.

Oh yes, I almost forgot – we also have Poe and Finn who are reduced to a trigger-happy space-jockey with a cause and a victim of Imperial oppression grappling to reclaim his lost human identity. They are male characters so they have to be made bumbling, precipitate and ineffective because otherwise it is the Patriarchy, you know. Poe heroically raids everything he sees and loses an entire Bomber Squadron, not that it was a great loss, but what do you expect from someone who is not part of the Matriarchy Cabal?

In the meantime, the Matriarchy flies in the vacuum of space after surviving air decompression and returns to the ship like Mary Poppins but without an umbrella. The Force is strong with the Matriarchy. Leia (and Carry Fisher) deserved something better. Then an Admiral with pink hair in a long evening dress concocts a plan B that is exactly as lame as everything the Resistance has done so far but Poe & co are not privy to it because they are just males who don’t have the internal wisdom of the Matriarchy. So the Admiral sacrifices herself to make sure that the Matriarchy is always right, even when she loses. In the end thanks to the combined efforts of the Matriarchy and the counter measures proposed by the bumbling males the First Order reduces the Resistance to several survivors that fit into the central compartment of the Millennium Falcon.

The baddies don’t have any reason to be bad apart from the fact that the goodies are so ineffective that it would be a shame to let them have the Galaxy. This is not the Empire what we all know and love, there are no memorable characters like Tarkin, Motti, Needa, Piett, no cute mooks whose marksmanship we might mock but whose persistence and loyalty we admire. No, The First Order’s personnel are just evil, we don’t need to know how and why they serve the First Order, or what they like or do when they don’t listen to Hux’s hysterical speeches. Disney made no attempt to create goofy stormtroopers as a comic relief, or imperial officers raising their eyebrows with dropping jaws when Luke and Han shovel Chewbacca into their turbolift cabin.

Instead, we have Captain Phasma who aimlessly torments badly programmed child soldiers because, unlike the Empire, no one joins the First Order voluntarily. No proud destroyers waddling around like space Leviathans, but a dreadnought that can’t protect its own point-defense guns and stands still while the Resistance bombers approach it at a snail’s pace. The generic Empire that represented the basic human desire for order and stability in the wake of the Clone Wars is speed-dialed into a technological nightmare that is impersonal and incompetent to the point of suicide. What is more, this newly created nightmare has virtually no opposition because the victors chose to relinquish their status.

Sorry, people, this is not Star Wars but a sequence of errors peppered with lame characters who only run from one scene to another to fill in a certain quota or to reinforce a particular message. They don’t generate the plot but are just planted there. The layered tapestry of different polities in SW universe is reduced to the First Order and the Resistance, the First Order is presented as an amorphous evil conspiracy that exists outside the characters’ will and scope.

Even the Force, the hallmark of SW, is powerless and can’t offer any meaningful solutions so Luke runs away to a lonely island, switches off the Force, and wallows in self-pity and negativism. Luke’s Force does not work anymore because it is overprivileged (the Jedi were overprivileged due to heredity and special training) so Rey has to come up with an inclusive egalitarian Force all by herself.

Now tell me, is there anyone in that galaxy who is not a victim of oppression, deeply entrenched inequality, tyranny, dysfunctional personal relations and systemic suffering? Shit, Star Wars was supposed to be fun, it is a mixture of loose allegory and appreciative fantasy in terms of genre, it has never been meant for a one-to-one commentary of RL gripes as the illustrative fantasy or the strict allegory for example.

In the end, most old fans don’t give a shit about the new insertions because Disney killed all characters they cared about and supplanted the carefree and irreverent spirit of the franchise. In-universe, no one cares about the New Republic, the Resistance and the First Order, no one bothers to answer Leia’s distress signal. So this is how franchises die when no one gives a shit. If Kennedy tells the fans they don’t matter, who is going to watch it then?

Now give me your rants and pet peeves.
I am the Lizard King, I can do anything!
Jim Morrison

Gul Khold
Moderately Bad
Posts: 66
Joined: Sun May 17, 2015 9:33 pm

Re: What is going on with Star Wars?

Postby Gul Khold » Wed Jun 20, 2018 9:06 pm

I am stunned. You said it all and more. And it is awesome coming from you - you're a woman. If I said that, any argument would be null and void because I'd be a basement dweller living off my parents (regardless of that not being the fact, but hey, ALL males who disagree with new SW ARE basement-dwellers living with their parents).

The saga, as far as I am concerned, ended with the last EU/Legends material: Legacy. It ended, the rest is Disney Fanon given a budget. I go watch SW expecting a callback to my childhood and, as you mentioned, the basic adventure with good vs evil, heroes vs villains, family, friendship and redemption. Not a lecture about neoliberal feminism.

Gul Khold
Moderately Bad
Posts: 66
Joined: Sun May 17, 2015 9:33 pm

Re: What is going on with Star Wars?

Postby Gul Khold » Sun Jul 01, 2018 7:29 pm

There is a pretty decent video put forth by what could be called a moderate fan that address most of those issues very well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDF4SnCK87Q

User avatar
Shada Dukal
Sheer Evil
Posts: 512
Joined: Fri May 22, 2015 9:58 am

Re: What is going on with Star Wars?

Postby Shada Dukal » Tue Jul 03, 2018 10:23 am

Yes, indeed. I love this channel – Generation Tech. The presenter is really knowledgeable and intelligent. I like his Empire-themed stuff. I can only second what he says. Disney really antagonized large segments of the established fandom with its dubious and insulting messages. And Star Wars is hardly a place for polarized RL-commentaries.
I am the Lizard King, I can do anything!
Jim Morrison


Return to “Miscellaneous Culture and Art Discussions”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 0 guests