“We’ve almost got some of their telecommunications cracked; the front end even runs on a laptop!” The Mac that sunk a thousand ships could have been merely clunky product placement, not a bafflingly stupid tech-on-film moment.
“Senator Amidala is in a coma. Even if she recovers, she will never be the same and may not live long.” But no… George had to have his god-damned funeral scene, even if it demanded Simone Biles levels of mental gymnastics to save Carrie Fisher’s most emotionally resonant moment from ROTJ, as well as one of the more intriguing OT lore dumps.
Bonus points if a scene was scripted or filmed and got cut.
It was right there all along:
Grand Moff Tarkin : Are they away?
Darth Vader : They’ve just made the jump into hyperspace.
Grand Moff Tarkin : You’re sure the homing beacon is secure aboard their ship? I’m taking an awful risk, Vader. This had better work.
Evidently most of the fandom needs to have it beaten over their heads a bit more blatantly than that.
Another thing that would have been helpful is if it was made clearer just how monstrous the Ewoks actually are. There wouldn’t be as much shame to the Imperials for losing against them if people had only internalized a bit better that:
Is it cannibalism? It feels more like a (talking) bear eating a human.
I do feel like the Stormtooper point got lost on Lucas too by RotJ honestly. In Empire they do pretty good except when they’re, again, explicitly trying to lure the hero into a trap. RotJ has the most weirdness of the originals and probably the most EU ‘redemptions’/revisions. With stuff like “here’s what was really up with the Ewoks”, Boba not dying, etc.
Replace some of the stormtroopers in ROTJ with regular army forces and it might have helped the stormtroopers’ reputation.
Conversely: Stop overthinking Star Wars. I get that people love the universe but the movies are straight up just not deep at all.
Are we really pretending George was thinking about this while making Jedi? Like in a script review some young guy pipes up: Hey George, how do the Ewoks sneak up on Luke when he has force powers? And George calmly explains, “Well son, Ewoks may look cute but they are actually deadly hunters with expert tracking and stealth skills”
The Ewoks win against the empire because the script says they do. It looks stupid because they are children/(dwarves?) in costumes who can probably barely see what’s going on.
I know I’m being a major grump but reading these comments make my eyes roll out of my sockets. It’s like watching art critics fawn over an 8 year old’s painting because they’ve been told it’s a picasso.
I say all this as someone who enjoys the OT but finds it increasingly embarrassing to admit to having any interest in the property.
Overthinking is the best kind of thinking.
No. I’m a proponent of the death of the author school of literary analysis. I don’t care what George Lucas was thinking. Indeed, he’s shown himself to not be the best at figuring this sort of stuff out.
What I’m doing here is having fun. I’m taking a work of fiction and seeing how far I can run with it. You, on the other hand, are feeling embarrassed about having fun and avoiding it. There’s a famous quote by CS Lewis that I think is apt here.
I was anticipating this response and you’re entirely correct. I’m happy you enjoy thinking about Star Wars lore and I shouldn’t be shaming anyone for having fun. I shouldn’t feel embarrassed and I understand that that is a character flaw and something I should work on.
Aside from that, there is this feeling of confusion and frustration that I think has some validity, but which doesn’t necessarily justify me being a dick online about it. I think my frustration is that Star Wars has a specific meaning to me which is very different from what it has become today, and it’s frustrating watching the “original meaning” get washed away in a sea of merch and fan theories. I know it’s stupid to hold a specific interpretation as the correct one and try to force that on others, but I hope you can at least empathize with the feeling of watching something you like morph into something completely unrecognizable.
To me, Star Wars is trilogy of corny action adventure movies with a cast of quirky characters set in a fantastical but ultimately very shallow universe. A trilogy that revolutionized the VFX industry and brought fantasy into the mainstream. I feel alone in viewing the ip this way, I feel alone in thinking Rogue One was a boring lifeless husk of a movie that no epic battle scenes could redeem.
I assume take pleasure in sharing your love of Star Wars fan with other fans and that’s more or less what I’m after I think. I’m sorry for being a dick about it.
Oh, we can certainly agree about that sort of feeling. I am very much not a fan of the Disney sequel trilogy, for example, and seeing them enthuse about how it’s all part of the “Skywalker Saga” and how Rey is the true “chosen one” and all that rot is just awful. But still, the “let’s see if I can make it make sense” part of me has still had some fun with trying to fix up even small bits of that pile of wreckage.
I’m not even a fan of the prequel trilogy, despite the retroactive “redemption arc” they seem to have received in recent years. I think they’re still pretty bad, they just got a coat of polish in the form of the Clone Wars and a “this is what bad really is” comparison to stand next to in the form of the sequel trilogy.
Shallow puddles are still fun to splash around in. :) Sometimes the shallowness actually gives me more flexibility and fun in theory-crafting about it.
Anyway, there’s room for all sorts of fans, and I’m sorry that you’re feeling alone. I’m sure there’s others out there that share your view, it’s probably just a bit hard seeing them with the current amount of activity from the other kinds of fans.
“Not to mention how many troopers we lost under orders to not shoot to hit.”
Actually that raises another point. It is really unclear in the first film what exactly Vader’s position of authority is. Because he seems kind of subordinate to Tarkin at points. He even tells Vader to leave that officer alone when he’s strangling him, and he obeys the order.