HUMOR I want YOUR Star Wars hot takes

I'll argue that there is content that's better suited for books then that same content for film.

 

I liked Admiral Holdo.

...and then she died.

 

Oh here we go, this one will make people mad.

The Clone Wars has some great Star Wars storytelling, but I've always struggled to get into it because I find the CGI animation to be really, really ugly.

The last season of Rebels is the best cgi animation they've produced.

 

I agree. That's really the reason why I didn't watch TCW when it first aired. The angular animation turn me off and I hated the tree bark looking beard that Obi-Wan had and rectangular head of Count Dooku. I agree, the animation quality of the final season Rebels is on par with TCW.

 

I don't see that as a problem at all, actually.

Consider that when we watched IV, right in the first few minutes we're thrust into a pile of political jibberish that doesn't explain what any of it means, and we're actually never given a description in IV as to what the hell the political structural order was. It even seems conflicted; or rather, could be taken that way. On one hand there's a council, on the other hand there's an emperor, on the other hand there's rebels who appear to be sympathetic with the same anti-fascism as the Rebels, but the Rebels have to be Rebels instead of part of the Council? And then in a single line later on we're informed that the Emperor has disbanded the council...but that line carries literally no weight at the time. It means virtually nothing because we've never seen the council, we don't know what power the council has, no clue what their role in anything is except that Leia appears to think that an ambassador can tattle tail to them and I don't know...something will happen? What exactly she assumes they would do is not clear.

We only really get to know the political structure's in's and out's with the prequels. The original trilogy didn't tell us much. It was just this thing barely even mentioned, and only served to say, "There's a political structure. Here's a bad guy. These are the good guys. They have to hide from the bad guy while they try to find ways to fight the bad guy. There's a council (presumably democratic), it's in trouble. Heroes to save the day!"

That's about the same level we got in TFA. The politics are just not the point. TFA gave everything that was essential to the story that was being told. The reason why there's factions and how there is all this bad stuff even when there's a ruling good government, and why the resistance feels it has to be separate from the ruling government is entirely aside from the point. Regardless the reasons, THAT is what the world is, and that's how things are currently.

The why and how are not the story of TFA. That's some other story; a story that isn't about Rey or Kylo. It's some other story about the ruling government, the First Order, and the Resistance.

Just because every Star Wars has a political backdrop doesn't mean the political backdrop is the point of the story.

Where that goes awry is that there are fans that really love the hell out of the politics of the Star Wars universe. They loved all of the extra exposition in the Prequels that dove into the details more of the political climate and system. But that's because in the prequels, the political backdrop moves up a notch because we're covering the rise of Palpatine.

TFA isn't covering the rise of a political force. That political force, the First Order, has already risen and is now taking its first strike...like was done at first impression of IV. The council wasn't yet disbanded when the film began, but the Empire certainly had grown and risen. IV is the Empire's first strike in full force. They blow up a planet and disband the council.

If you wanted to know how all of this came to be that we see in TFA, well...that's another prequel that would be shoved between VI and VII. How Kylo came to be as he is, and how Snoke became who he is and got to where he is, the Resistance became what it is, and the First Order grew as it is.

None of that is truly covered in the ST, and it's really not going to cover that. That's the backfill; the landscape. We're to assume that as the axiom and setting and get on with life.

Films don't have to tell you everything, nor should they.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

Couldn’t disagree more. That line is EVERYTHING. It’s the central thesis to that story. Why exactly can’t this all powerful tyrannical Empire just apprehend someone like Leia who they already suspect is a Rebel sympathizer? Because she’s extended some degree of amnesty or diplomatic immunity by way of this Imperial Senate. OK, but why does this all powerful tyrannical Empire even have a form of representational government to start with? Because it’s all a farce.

It’s artifice meant to give the people the illusion of involvement when really it’s just a regrettable tool of control. A tool that’s no longer needed because of the Deathstar - a weapon of mass destruction and terror that the entire narrative revolves around (a rather transparent allusion to the nuclear powered imperialist America George feared may rise one day).

That line is incredibly crucial to understanding what’s at stake. It doesn’t simply inform us of incident though, it also properly demonstrates the sinister nature of the Empire. What it’s capable of and why it’s doing what it’s doing. MOTIVATION! So simple, so understated, and yet so functional and effective. Brilliant writing.

The Republic serves a similar utility in TFA. It’s presented as a stable structure - a security blanket. It relays a parental/oversite role. Our heroes will be safe because this guardian figure is out there. Having it be destroyed intensifies the drama by removing that possibility. They’re on their own now. There's no safety net. They’ll have to do it themselves (like removing Luke from the story in TLJ).

I call it a problem with the structure, because the way it’s presented, it doesn’t justify the circumstance. What value does it actually bring to the story that the Republic and the Resistance are separate things? It doesn’t really. Since we aren’t told why, that distinction becomes superfluous. It introduces an unnecessary complexity to the plot. Why isn’t the REPUBLIC ‘resisting’ this First Order? Why the secret support? What difference does that make? What point does that make?

Like George’s work, there’s subtle real world commentary being made with that premise. One about the dangers of nonengagement. The society ills of tolerating intolerance. How militant hateful organizations can gain shocking sway because they aren’t taken seriously as legitimate threats until it’s too late.

But that message is missing in the final cut. We can intuit what’s being implied, but we weren’t given all the proper pieces to do it. The message is lost and the causal relation to the setup becomes extraneous. They removed the 'cause', kept the 'effect', and evaporated the intent.

Does any of that make sense?

 

I think this is all nice, but you intuited all of that out of the original.

IV doesn't tell you that the anything about any of that. And then there's the whole bit that what makes that line mean nothing much at all is that the Emperor, via Vader, already did what he wanted to when he grabbed Leia. At no point in the film do we see an Empire that stops its actions because of a council.
They did what they wanted and quite forcefully so right from the start.

Honestly, by the point that the information is spit out that the council has been dissolved, back when, I always found it odd, because honestly I had always assumed the Emperor wasn't bowing to anyone to begin with ... "Emperor" mixed with the very forceful behavior of the Empire didn't really give any indication of a group that was having to answer to anyone anywhere for what they were doing.

I don't see any cause given in IV at all, honestly. Or, if there is one on the political side, it's pathetically thin to the point of being able to be completely overlooked.

Yes it's a film about stopping the oppressive Empire, sure, but it doesn't actually spend any time outside of roughly four lines telling us about the context of why we should care, or how it all came to be, or how these groups relate to each other.
Most of the information is something we assume by the group names. We assume a group called, "Rebels", when countered by the "Empire" are good guys and that they are an underground movement because they are "Rebels". We assume the old government had something of some kind of relationship with them because Leia is an ambassador of some kind and her planet is destroyed by the Empire.

That's just about the same thing we have in TFA. Sure, they didn't at some point blurt out why the Resistance has to be separate from the Republic, but we can say the same thing about IV. No one ever gave us an exposition as to why the Rebels were different from the Council instead of being a faction of the Council itself.

We just assume that because there's this Empire that's running around doing whatever it wants with considerable gusto and force, that the Rebels are underfoot. Council or no council.

The only reason there's this idea of needing an exposition is because we assume the Republic is powerful and in control because the Empire was destroyed in VI, and we assume the Republic took over, did well, one thing lead to another...car in the lake. (Paul Rudd joke)

So we then wonder, wait, why does the the Resistance have to be separate from the Republic? Why is the Republic not stopping the First Order?

Well, we don't know. That's how it is though.
Just like we didn't know how a council allowed the Empire to happen, but for whatever reason they did.
We find out later in the prequels, but during IV...no clue. It's just how it was.

We just didn't have any reason to wonder HOW the Empire happened like everyone was doing with the First Order.

To me...so what; in neither case is that actually important to the fairy tale. This is how it is, bad guys over there, good guys over here. Swords out. Magic flaring. High speed battles and chases at the ready...Aaaaand go.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

And you’re perfectly intitled to view it that way. That’s your prerogative. I’m personally not just interested in the surface level novelties. There is deliberate subtext at work here and I’m raring to engage with this story on every level it’s trying to operate on. Not just the low hanging fruit of swords and magic.

You don’t have to invest in the administrative/governmental component of the allegory - what that’s designed to represent and reflect within our own culture and society. That’s up to you. I do though, because it’s not in the story for no reason at all and it’s not there just to move the plot forward.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’m not lobbing a complaint at the ST, I’m expressing a reasoned criticism. Just because it doesn’t matter to you doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter at all. I personally have enjoyed these new movies. They’re generally well made and entertaining films. But I do see some faults. Some shortcomings. Nothing that ruins my experience, but is worth mentioning as part of the greater discussion between the adults I’m sure we all are
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Meanwhile, back at the Hot Take Thread…

The Darth Maul fight in TPM is the lamest in the franchise. All style and no substance. Two guys fighting a third because they’re dressed in white and he’s wearing black

 

I think it's pretty well covered that I don't consume just low hanging fruit by the various in depth writings I've done on the Star Wars chiastic structure.

My point was that the information about the Resistance's motives for being separate from the Republic is about on equal footing with the motive for the Rebels being separate from the council, and the context for how the First Order was able to rise to power in a world ran by the Republic is about on equal footing with the context for how the Empire was able to rise to power in a world ran by some republic.

We don't know; it doesn't matter. Get on with the story. I was being humorous by summarizing the story as swords and magic, but the meaning was that the context of how those facts happened aren't important. They aren't needed for the allegory at hand in either of these films.

The prequels needed that for their allegory.
That was where we saw how the Empire rose and why the Rebels had to be separate.
Not in IV.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

Right. That’s something that seems to matter a great deal to you, but not at all to me. If you found what you interpreted to be a flaw in that “chiastic structure” though, it probably wouldn’t ruin the story for you, but I imagine you’d be critical. Heck, you might even want to share that criticism. Stranger things have happened.

Which is a woefully inaccurate comparison. The Senate in ANH and how it relates to both the Empire and Rebellion has a clearly defined story-based purpose. Delineating them is integral to the narrative.

Tarkin: ...the Emperor has dissolved the council permanently.
Tagge: ...how will the Emperor maintain control without the bureaucracy?
Tarkin: ...fear will keep the local systems in line. Fear of this battle station.

The only way for this to be any more explicit is if the camera were to turn around and George himself blatantly explained what was happening. The Senate served a purpose for the Empire: maintain control. It never had any real power then. It was just a yoke that existed at the Emperor’s whim. The second it was no longer necessary, it was disbanded. Simple as that.

Linking that body to the Rebellion in some way would needlessly complicate the story with no real benefit. Having the Resistance be an autonomous, but somehow still cryptically related, group to the Republic equally confounds the situation fruitlessly. If something that prominent and contrived can’t justify to the audience why it’s in the story, then it probably shouldn’t be in the story.

 

@eeprom, @Jayson, while i appreciate that you're having a nice civil conversation, this still really isn't the place for it.

let's not muddle the fun; this is the hot takes thread, not a defend and explain thread.
feel free to take up your conversation in one of the discussion threads. : D

 

high time that i threw some rocks into this thread !

Ben Solo is the most intriguing character in any Star Wars movie.. in fact i'll widen that to practically any movie i've ever seen.

Vader didn't save his son. He was planning on killing his master the entire time and taking Luke as his apprentice. the conflict Luke thought he felt in his father was faked by Vader.. there was no conflict. The deal went bad, and he decided to try the redemption route at the last minute. The whole fight was orchestrated by Vader to give him the opportunity to kill Palpatine.

 

The Daughter of Mortis > Son of Mortis.
Lost Stars is not a good book. Like something a bored 10th grader would write.
Mando looked like a fan film in some places.
Sam Witwer is a terrible Maul. If I wanted amateur Shakespeare monologues I would go to a high school production of Hamlet.
A Naboo Starfighter is way cooler than an X Wing.

 

. . . . . . . . . . . yes, sir

Hot take: Storm Troopers aren't bad shots. They had reasons for not hitting their targets and are unfairly maligned.

Yeah, but like a really fun 10th grader.

 

@eeprom
Out of respect for @FN-3263827 asking the conversation be ended, and @RoyleRancor wanting to see where it goes, I think I'll summarize and draw the conversation to an end with the following...

I think that our conversation highlights why Star Wars has so many Hot Takes that widely vary.
Star Wars has a level of ambiguity to it such that everyone is able to bring their own interests to each film and interprate them by their own vested interests. This means the films are able to be received by a very broad audience, and the consequence of being able to reach a very wide audience with inherently ambiguous material is that what sticks out as a sore thumb to one person is not inherently likely to stick out as a sore thumb to another.

Again, our conversation highlights this pretty well. To you, there is a very large difference between the trio of political factions in IV and VII and how the exposition of their relationships and the context of their existences is handled, while to me the difference is virtually non-existent, to the point that it hardly takes point of interest worth note for me - in neither film was I confused and left flummoxed about what was going on as a result of the content anymore than I am by any ambiguity in any Star Wars film.

For you, the scant amount of information in one film was enough for you to intuit a whole political theater of context and story, while in the other film, you felt unable to completely do so without additional material. For me, I never felt unable in either film to be able to intuit the basic premise of why things were as they were in VII any less than I was able to do in IV.

It hits us each differently, just like much of the symbolism in Star Wars. It means something, but what exactly it means is so widely ambiguous in most cases that Star Wars is about on par with religion for its adherent's schisms of interpretations.
Sometimes the most core aspects of the story are disagreed on. For example, there are those who say that with Snoke being dead, there's no longer a primary villain, while others look at the same film and presume the primary villain has always been, and will continue to be, Kylo Ren. Meanwhile, the PT has folks shuffling to different sides because the Jedi are viewed as erroneous and Anakin wronged, while others hold that Anakin was simply wrong and clouded, regardless of what mistakes the Jedi may have made. And in the OT, we have those who see Luke as a hero and his mentors as righteous men who helped him along his way, while others look at the same film and find deceit and manipulation in his mentors, and while still holding Luke as a hero, he is seen in this way as a more tragic one who is tricked into killing his Father; not simply purely vanquishing evil.

Because of the ambiguity, each step of the way, as each film comes along, we are all able to create our own assumptions and meanings; meanings that teach some message that is of value to the individual holding those views, and so when another film comes along and adds a new layer of detail, scant as they may be, that doesn't align with those assumptions, it's not a simple matter of being off about a narrative arc, but an entire message and meaning is changed and in some cases ruined for those individuals. It can be seen that the individual wasn't wrong before, by the individual, because the message and meaning they took away was so visceral and made a level of sense that spoke to them, so it can be very easy to instead see the new additional film as wrong and that the creators of the new film don't understand Star Wars rather than assuming a position that their derived meaning and value out of the previous film(s) was wrong. No one can be wrong about what meaning they take from a film; what it meant to them, and what it spoke to them.

For this reason, Hamill is quite right when he notes sarcastically that folks have been complaining about Star Wars for as long as its been around.
Star Wars has an impossible task in that it's basically the same problem that religions have. Look at early Christianity; there are piles of outrage and dismissals because new texts would come along and those new texts didn't line up with what was taken as the message and meaning out of the rather ambiguous allegory that came before, and so folks just outright dismissed the new additions, argued over their meaning and tweaked their views to make them fit, or in some cases, psychologically and physically attacked those who were fans of the new additions.

Luckily Star Wars isn't to this caliber. It is very strikingly similar in cultural response, but it isn't quite to the level of hysteria thankfully that early Christianity experienced at such levels.


So that's where I'll rest it.
We disagree on this tangent, but only because Star Wars does what it does better than any film series in film history - it connects with people through implicit ambiguity that ends up meaning something to people in a very deep way. It evokes out of us our own views that we already carry and crystallizes them for us in form.

So the Hot Takes will always be plentiful.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

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Well, yeah, man. I kind of assumed

 

"You're wrong." "...maybe." Is the new “I love you.” “I know.”

Thanks, BDT.

 

Since you guys seemed to like my last post here, I’m going to leave some more hot takes here. Might want to get an oven mitt for these...



-Other than showing how Anakin was a slave as a child, The Phantom Menace is kinda pointless. That being said, Qui-Gon Jinn and Darth Maul are awesome characters.
-Obi-Wan’s mullet in AOTC looked awful.
-EA Battlefront 2 is actually a pretty fun game now.
-The EU and The Force Unleashed gave people unrealisitic expectations for Force powers in the films and shows.
-The Prequels oversaturated lightsaber duels and use of the Force. I’m glad the new movies use them sparingly.
-A lot of people group ROTS in with the rest of the prequels as being “bad” when it’s actually quite a bit better and people group ROTJ with the rest of the Original Trilogy for being “great” when it’s quite a bit worse (but certainly not bad.)
-Rey is not a Mary Sue. That term has been used to death and has lost all of its meaning.
-None of the newer movies are any more or less political than the original six.
-The Last Jedi should’ve been called something else.
-People should stop comparing MCU to Star Wars. They’re not that similar.
-Ezra should’ve died at the end of Star Wars Rebels.
-Kylo is one of the best Star Wars characters ever and should be redeemed at the end of TROS and live.
-I’m interested to see The Mandalorian, but the SWCC footage seemed to excite everyone else more than me.
-This is coming from a guy who absolutely LOVES The Clone Wars show, but I’m honestly more excited for Jedi: Fallen Order than Season 7 of TCW.
-The Rise of Skywalker could be the best Star Wars film of all time.
-The Last Jedi would be a lot more beloved by the entirety of the community if people would look past their damn nostalgia.
-Yoda and Palpatine should never have used lightsabers. Such a lazy choice.
-Chewbacca is never given the proper respect by fans or people in-universe.
-Galaxy of Adventures is the unofficial successor to the massive failure that was Forces of Destiny.
-The comics and ROTJ don’t give enough attention to Luke’s ability as a pilot.
-I didn’t care for Yoda’s portrayal in the prequels and I’d like to see Yoda more like his portrayal in TLJ.
-Luke going to Crait in person would have been much worse than what we got.
-The Kessel Run from Solo was great and doesn’t get enough praise.
-Shriv from BF2 is a great character who should be featured more. Hell, give the Duros his own movie!
-Canto Bight’s place in TLJ isn’t all that different from Jabba’s Palace from ROTJ.
-The ST is the most consistently good Star Wars trilogy so far.

Okay, that’s it from me... for now.