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- cross-posted to:
- movies@lemmy.world
- movies@lemm.ee
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Yes yes they are. Don’t need to look past the sequel trilogy films. Which are essentially:
A happy days reunion special.
Running from set piece to set piece with a mess of a plot
Fuck it let’s just bring Palptine back to make it look like we had some grand plan.
You’re not wrong but I really like Mando.
First season was pure gold, but everything afterward has been a slow decline. I would rather argue in favor of Andor. That show was way better than anything since episode VI.
Andor, Mando season 1, and Rogue One. Those are the only Disney produced Star Wars content worth a watch.
If they had cut the second season down to a length where it didn’t feel like a good deal of padding up to the final episode, then the entire arc would have been A+. That last episode was just a surgically precise hit right in the feels.
You wanna bet money on the slow decline of Andor?
They’re only doing two seasons, so the slow decline would have to be over the course of about ten episodes.
Yes
that is a good analysis
A bit verbose
Y
Succinct, and accurate.
Yes. As far as I’m concerned, with notable exceptions of stuff like Andor (this is AMAZING), the real Star Wars story is the pre-Disney EU, which was, contrary to popular refrain, fairly consistent once they got the “keeper of the Holocron” to make sure the stories were relatively cohesive and didn’t contradict one-another.
A bunch of the authors even worked to retcon-remove the Dark Empire storyline with the reborn Emperor in their various series by referring to that as “mere rumors” and whatnot.
That’s not to say the entire EU was marvelous. But I read the vast majority of it - overall it entirely eclipses what Disney has been doing in terms of quality and depth. Not to mention…Disney, with their tabula rasa, still have stories contradicting one another and introducing inconsistencies…
For me, Disney’s Episodes 7-9 never happened. I consume and recognize anything that doesn’t materially contradict the prior EU - I’m O.K. with smoothing over, explaining away, and massaging stuff to make it work. But “Kylo Ren” is a dollar store knock-off of Darth Caedus.
Episodes 7-9 were, from a creative standpoint, made with pure contempt. Watching that shit felt like there were MBAs in the writers room reminding people that on brand strength alone these movies were guaranteed to make a profit so all their nerdy ideas were pointless. And they were right. Those movies sleepwalked into being highly profitable. The creative damage it did to the franchise is nerd shit for nerds, and MBAs are winners and they won.
It’s not even worth going over their failings. They’re so creatively bankrupt that they’re not even worth any critical analysis (not that that hasn’t been done to death).
I’m just sad that the Sword of the Jedi is never going to be finished.
Seeing Disney just repeating all EU mistakes (superweapon after superweapon, Palpatine clones, inconsistencies) is just rubbing salt in the wound.
I disagree that the entire EU was better. To me, it seems like the combined works in the EU were just so enormous that there were enough high points one would positively remember WHILE at the same point allowing for singular bad instances to be mostly ignored. With the unified canon disney has established, having one bad trilogy will forever taint all the remaining pieces because you can’t handwave TRoS away and pretend it didn’t or will not happen in canon. Marvel and DC comics have hundreds of timelines and hundreds of different iterations and versions of heroes and wildly different stories and you can pick and choose what you like and ignore the rest. If disney does a poop at any point in the one solidified Star Wars timeline, that poop is now there to stay and everybody now has to bend over backwards to make it appear like it’s less of a poop than it really is.
They seem like normal movie execs. They don’t understand what works or doesn’t work then they make weird conclusions that they will use as blanket decisions for everything else they do. Then they get confused why everyone isn’t throwing all of their money at them.
Their content is fine. It’s just not great and it certainly never reaches they hype the brand thinks it deserves.
It’s iterative AI slop but they don’t even have the excuse of being AI.
Disney is bad at an awful lot of things. Why would they be good at Star Wars, of all things?
For this I look to my wife. She is someone who did not grow up with Star Wars so she has no bias or expectations. She also doesn’t keep track of lore and “universes”. I mean, unless we binge watch, she’ll literally forget who main characters are. For her she either likes or dislikes a show on its own merits. Most Disney releases she has outright hated. Unexpectedly, she enjoyed " the one with the red sand" (The Last Jedi). My theory is that she had no hangups with all the lore breaks and such. Expectedly, she loves “baby Yoda”, even if she can’t remember anything else about the show (honestly, neither can I). I have not shown her Rouge One yet as I am waiting for Andor Season 2 before we binge it all.
I wonder if watching Rogue One before Andor (and of course right after once again) or seeing the whole thing chronologically will be a better overall experience.
I haven’t watched Rogue One in a good long while, but I remember it feeling rushed and disjointed. It was a visually beautiful film which seemed like it had ideas that had been muddled with by the powers that be forcing re-writes. I think I read afterwards that was the truth, but I actually could sense it just during my viewing.
Andor seemed like it reached the potential the Rogue One was aiming for. It keep the great visuals and designs, while really fleshing out the ideas.
I would say for a fresh watch, Andor first and Rogue One second will probably create some needed investment in the character that isn’t contained in the movie itself.
For the most part, yes. Someone needs to make a Star Wars in the spirit of the first Pirates. With everyone double crossing each other except the Jedi
That was Solo. Everyone double crossing each other doesn’t necessarily make a good movie.
Solo was decent enough, but Christ it would have been better if they hadn’t thought the fan-service in the prologue to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade should be stretched out into an entire god-damned movie. I was also only “whelmed” by the scenes on Mimban and I don’t quite get the online begging for an entire movie of nighttime mud-blasting. Like, just watch a couple war movies, y’all.
Solo is so forgettable I don’t remember any of the references you are making. Could you explain Last Crusade and night time mud blasting?
The first 15 minutes of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade are set 30 years before the rest of the movie, and teenage Indy has a single day where he is introduced to grave-robbing/“muscular archaeology” as a concept, uses a bullwhip for the first time, gets the small scar that Harrison Ford has on his chin, is traumatized by snakes, and receives his fedora. Solo nominally spreads things out more, but in the course of one movie he gets his name, the blaster, the dice, meets Chewie, meets Lando, wins the Falcon, does the Kessel Run, etc., etc. It’s cute until it’s not.
For “nighttime mud blasting,” I was referring to the scenes when Han is in the Imperial Army on that planet where they’re fighting WWI style battles, all of which are in the dead of night and everything is covered in mud, and you can’t really see any sense of scale, I think mostly to save time and money during the Ron Howard re-work. It’s pretty generic stuff, but it does show war as a not entirely heroic activity (a patriotic, gung-ho officer is immediately blown up, and Han implies they’re the invaders), and therefore a certain segment of fans are obsessed with it as a more “sophisticated” take on Star Wars.
Eh, hard pass that was not Solo. Solo was a walk around old characters going “look at this! Yep! Thats how that happened!” The heist was cool, but it was not in the same spirit at all.
My working theory always was: Star Wars is better without lightsabers
The more lightsabering and force using there is it gets worse.
The biggest problem is they’ve over committed what those things are and what they can do.
A lightsaber can cut through anything and the force can do just about any telekinesis you want it to.
Now you need to either ignore these incredibly powerful tools or carefully design intricate, thoughtful problems that can’t be flashily solved by CGI theatrics.
So what do they do? Well, 9/10 times, they just make a normal fucking movie/show with Star Wars painted on top. Lightsabers can be blocked by whatever weapon the bad guy has (make it zappy and then it’s basically the same as a lightsaber). Things get knocked just out of reach, people hang by their fingers of ledges, bad guys run away down that long street with no way to catch up and some Jedi stands there like a fucking oaf wishing it wasn’t so.
All Disney does it up the ante. More power, more different lightsabers, more aliens, more locations. But then they slap that shit on whatever story they have laying around.
I think you can have in-depth Star Wars feeling/knowledge. If you start out without even a hint of a coherent plan like they did, you will fail.
The article lands on “not actually all that bad, especially from a business perspective, but could be much better,” which is kind of unsatisfying, but I did like the opening analogy to the Falcon: “The garbage will do.”
One thing they absolutely have to do is get better acting and production values that match the sequels, or at least Mando S1. The Volume should only be used when the scene makes sense for it, so either spaces that are themselves enclosed, or where the actors’ blocking reasonably makes sense. Kenobi was particularly egregious with this, especially the airspeeders sequence. Everything is just so slow and small and anything that can’t be done in VFX is crowded into a very tight space. When the Acolyte tried to build bigger sets… I dunno… something came off wrong, like they contracted the whole thing out to the Disney teams that make the public spaces in Galaxy’s edge, which like all theme parks trade a certain amount authentic screen presence for durability. I doubt the sets are that durable, making it all the worse when they look how they do. BOBF’s infamous scooter chase had some other issues, but what locked it in as a blunder was the cheap visuals that screamed, “We can’t afford enough set to zoom through it at more than jogging speed!” Somebody needed to tell Robert Rodriguez that this isn’t Spy Kids. Andor had a large but not unlimited budget, but the key is (barely greebled AK-47’s aside) that they used it wisely and got bang for their bucks; they made choices that fit the story into the budget (they actually made two TIE fighters feel terrifying), and it ended up looking just right for the most part.
Then the acting. All 5 Disney movies did okay with this, and the sheer watchability of the performances an one area where I think they ALL outshone all three PT movies. Star Wars has never been known for “realistic” dialogue, but the OT sold it by having actors with movie star charisma, veteran chops, and a decade of “new Hollywood” naturalistic sensibilities. Then you had a collaborative process that took better takes and excised material that couldn’t be made to work. The ST was less organic, but similarly collaborative and while almost cloyingly modern and quippy at times, you don’t get the sense that the actors are struggling with the material. I don’t want to lean in too hard on overly simplistic narratives here, but the amount of control that Lucas had in the prequels undoubtedly led to an under-emphasis on the parts of filmmaking he finds less interesting, and too much reliance on newfound abilities to “fix it in post.” He somehow got awful performances from Natalie Portman and Samuel L. Jackson, and even fairly uneven ones from Ewan McGregor.
The shows, however, have mostly skewed to the worse side of things. Not quite so stilted as the PT, but there is a serious lack of charisma and humanity emanating from them, and it just makes things less fun, and when your dialogue mostly exists to deliver exposition, it leaves us more willing to nitpick details. Andor has a grimmer tone, but there is charisma there. The performances were compelling and I had to watch. You cannot and should not make all Star Wars like Andor, but you could make it all as well-conceived as Andor.
.
First time I see an article with a question where the answer is “yes”.
I really like the Star Wars universe. Trash and all. Could Disney do better? Yes. Could Lucas Arts have done better? Absolutely. Art is never perfect, but that is what makes the art beautiful. Perfection is boring.
But as someone who used to despise Star Wars, you really need to pay attention to the extended universe(EU) to get a more complete picture. The EU fills in all the holes that the movies/shows create, provide a better view of what the force actually is, and often provides more interesting stories by not focusing on the Skywalker saga.
I now absolutely love Star Wars only because I gave the EU a chance.
Yes, but it wouldn’t be possible without fans that are willing to eat this drivel up.
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the best thing Disney can do for Star Wars now is to give an extremely large sum of money to Tony Gilroy, and step away.
