Midichlorians worse than anything in the ST

While I think the Midichlorian aspect of the Prequels were really unnecessary, I don't really dislike or like their addition to our understanding of the Force. I'm really indifferent to it.

 

Anakin being the product of a 'virgin' birth was the worst thing for me.

 

Isn't there two types of "the force", living and cosmic? Midiclorians are probably part of the living force while the cosmic force is the mystical power we're most familiar with.
I still think it's kind of dumb though. Tpm had a theme having to do with symbiotic relationships, and midiclorians were a part of that theme.

 

I remember waaaay back in ANH when Obi Wan described the Force as an energy field created by life.
Then, on reading TLJ's novelisation, it described that Rey chose not to kill Kylo on being the first to awaken because 'it wasn't the will of the Force'.
Now it seems to have morphed into a godlike being. Weird.

 

The whole idea of destiny throughout the saga has to do with the will of the force. There is no luck or coincidences. That would be an example of the cosmic force.

 

Everything is at first a Godlike Being Will... until our science explains it.

 

Palps'Hold my Corellian Ale, I'm still alive'

 

The Jedi way, and I'm sorry but I have never liked it much since the PT.
It makes me think of Bob Dylan...'you don't count the dead when God's on your side.'

 

(Personally I thought the midi-chlorians was a slight misfire, but) perhaps we could better discuss things we like and how awesome this franchise is rather than recycle all the 22 year old arguments? Let's rise above all this stuff and refrain from wallow in the hate, and aim for greatness instead, yeah?

 

Yes.

 

I never was that annoyed by the Midiclorians thing. I was like ow ok that's how the force works and why some people can use it and others can't. For me it's as good a reason as any why some people can basically do space magic and others can't. Could the franchise have done without the explanation? Yeah, but knowing that's how it worked didn't annoy me at all.

 

The TCW presented the midichlorians' birthplace very nicely in the episode Destiny, which is by far one of the most spiritual Star Wars content.

 

The kick-back is typically one of two forms.
The weaker form of kick-back is that it's corny, et. al. This is uninteresting to discuss and your answer is a reasonable solution to that point.

However, there's a stronger form of kick-back that is more existential.
Before the Midiclorians were introduced, the Original Trilogy gave the impression and atmosphere of the Force being more like what's found in the short film that partially inspired Lucas (21-87), which in a portion of it highlights that people are connected to nature through "some kind of force or something".
More specifically, take this portion:

"Many people feel that in sort of the contemplation of nature and in communication with other living things, they become aware of some kind of force or something behind this apparent mask which we see in front of us and they call it god, or you know, depending on their particular disposition."​

Now, compare this with Yoda's dialogue.

"My ally is the force. And a powerful ally it is. Life creates it. Makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. You must feel the force around you. Here, between you, me, the tree, the rock. Everywhere."​

And Obi Wan's explanation.

"The force is what gives a Jedi his power. It's an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together."​

There's a pretty clear lineage between the tangent in 21-87 and the same idea being expressed in the first two Star Wars movies (especially Yoda's more in-depth explanation).

The point here is that the first time around definitely gave the impression that there was a power accessible by all life because it was made of all life, and that it was something we could connect with and empower ourselves with by so-doing - by listening to nature and life. Being still and communing with those around us and nature - listening with our being to them. Not just hearing or seeing them but feeling their living presence.

This is strongly juxtaposed against the Empire where everything is synthetic and machinery. Where no one has a name and are stripped down to numbers, which is the flipside of the other half of the 21-87 short film's quote from that same section, which says:

"(Referring the to the previous quote) To me, that is not the same as a world full of human beings. (In a world just simply full of human beings) There's something gone. There's something missing. And then the people say, well this is good let's have more of it. And somebody walks up and you say, 'Your number is 21-87 isn't it?', boy does that person really smile. Doctor. Have mercy upon my soul. If you can. Doctor. Doctor. No. It's too late. It's too late."​

The context of the era that Lipsett (the creator of the short film) is making is a comparison with Modern Industrialized Society against our Inherent Primal Nature (a rather big topic in the mid 60's arts).

And Lucas connected with this, to some extent, and made the Empire the "21-87" side of the quote, and the Jedi the "Force" side of the quote.

And this idea is egalitarian in distribution philosophically as it's portrayed. It's not elitist or selective. It's not evolutionary.

The Midiclorians struck those who intuitively understood some version of this as it was conveyed originally as a HARD reversal. Now it wasn't egalitarian at all and was downgraded to being just a prerequisite mechanism of elite warriors.

However, that's mostly because Lucas didn't finish his thought. In his version of the sequel trilogy he was going to expand further so that it became more clear that what was being discussed was that the Force is everywhere, but that we have to evolve as a species to the point where we behave more mature and listen (read: feel) to life all around as and work towards a symbiotic relationship with it rather than just slapping pavement down everywhere we want to walk and plopping artificial living environments at whim anywhere we would like to be different than it naturally is.

So, it's left as it is - a mechanic that is at odds with the original idea of egalitarian inherent connectedness all have the ability to commune with if they bother to "listen" to life and living beings around them.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

Always worth giving proper credit. This is a quote from cinematographer, Roman Kroitor during a recorded discussion with cybernetician, Warren S. McCulloch.

 

Midichlorians are fine in concept. Thankfully George thought better about turning the focus of the prequels onto this microbiotic world. (I wonder why he didn't quit and complain that it's not his story any more when the audience vocally objected to the story being taken over by the Jedi talking about organisms invisible to the naked eye).

And he was not successful in making it the focus of the sequels (see quitting mentioned above).

There are far more egregious things in the prequels. The lack of intuition on the Jedi's part regarding the connection between Padme's would be assassin, the Kamimoans and Dooku/The Confederation/Geonosians.

But also the battle of Coruscant being treated as just another day at the office after it's over. And the complete lack of diligence over what just happened. How were they able to get to the throne room so easily without any hindrance and yet they were apprehended soon after as easily as you would expect. What were Grievous and Dooku hanging about for? How come Grievous decided to abandon his own ship just because the Jedi were loose on the bridge? How come the invisible hand didn't jump to hyperspace long before? And if it couldn't, then how come the ship grievous escaped in could?

 

If we accept the premise that Palpatine was behind his own abduction, and what played out afterward was part of his dastardly scheme, then wouldn’t that explain away most of those inconsistencies? And wouldn’t the fact that this is an action/adventure story, with plot elements that exist to increase audience excitement, explain the rest?

I feel like too much has been made of his comment to James Cameron about “going to get into a microbiotic world”. It was something he wanted to address, apparently, but there’s no indication that was intended to be the focus. From what we know about the early script he worked on with Michael Arndt, a big bunch of the ideas did end up making it into the sequels.

His divestment from Star Wars seems mostly to revolve around his perceived lack of inclusion after the sale. He no longer had supreme authority over that universe and couldn’t settle for a mere consultancy position. So, he stepped away.

 

It seems that in 99 he just recognised "Well the audience isn't buying that, I'll just drop it."

But in 2013 Kennedy told him the audience isn't going to be buying it this time, either. And that gave him the opportunity to walk away completely on the basis of it not being his story any more. Which is what he said. Even suggesting that they only wanted to please retro fans of the OT. The same fans he "pandered" to when he dropped the midichlorians (and Jar Jar to a great extent) the first time.

I dont think that excuses the Jedi for being completely dim.

 

"Yes, Master. Whatever you say Master. I'll keep the seat warm for as long you like, Master..." - SNOKE, probably.

 

I don’t think we’re supposed to excuse them at all though. It’s more a feature than a bug. Palps had the Jedi so focused on putting out the fire he started, that they never grasped why he started it in the first place. They thought they knew what game they were playing, but they didn’t. They underestimated their opponent. More myopic than dim.

This is what he told Charlie Rose in 2015
________________________________________
GL : J.J. Abrams. He's a good director and he's good friends and all this sort of thing but he's also a top director, company, his own company and all this other stuff. And Disney, who was a little nervous -- you know, there's -- one of the issues was the first three movies had all kinds of issues. They looked at the stories and they said, we want to make something for the fans. So I said, all I want to do is tell a story of what happened. You know, it started here and it went there and it's all about generations and it's about, you know, the issues of fathers and sons and grandfathers.

And it's a family soap opera, ultimately. I mean, we call it a space opera. But people don't realize it's actually a soap opera and it's all about family problems and -- in fact, it's not about spaceships. So they decided they didn't want to use those stories. They said they were going to do their own thing. And so I decided, fine. But basically, I'm not going to try to -- they weren't that keen to have me involved anyway. But at the same time, I said, I'm not going to -- if I get in there, I'm just going to cause trouble because they're not going to do what I want them to do. So -- and I don't want the control to do that anymore and all I would do is muck everything up.

So I said, OK. I will go my way and I'll let them go their way and it really does come down to a simple rule of life which is, when you break up with somebody, the first rule is no phone calls. The second rule, you don't go over to their house and drive by to see what they're doing. The third one is you don't show up at their coffee shop or other things.

You just say, no, go on, history; I'm moving forward, because every time you do -- and we all learn this from experience - every time you do something like that you're opening the wound again and it just makes it harder for you. You have to put it behind you and it's a very, very, very hard thing to do. But you have to just cut it off and say, OK, end of ball game, I got to move on. And everything in your body says, don't, you can't. And these are my kids.

CR : All those "Star Wars" films.

GL : All those "Star Wars" films.

CR : They were your kids.

GL : Well, they are my -- you know, I loved them, I created them. I'm very intimately involved in them and obviously to --

CR : And you sold them?

GL : I sold them to the white slavers that take these things and --

CR : OK, but having said all that and having talked to you for the last -- and known you for a while and admired you, I mean, it must hurt you. It's your family. It's the last story. It's your story. It's you.

GL : But I knew there are three more stories and I knew that was going to probably take -- you know, to do it right would take about 10 years. And I said, I'm 70. I don't know whether I'll be here when I'm 80. You know, every 10 years, the odds get less. And so I said -- and I'm not ready to do it because I wanted to do these other things. So I have to make the decision on my own that it's time for me to move on.

So it wasn't like they were taken away from me or they were -- and they felt they knew -- you know, they wanted to do a retro movie. I don't like that. I like -- every movie I work very hard to make them different, to make them completely different with different planets, with different spaceships, with different -- you know, to make it new.

CR : So are you at peace with this?

GL : Yes.
________________________________________
Maybe the underline bone of contention was over the midi-chlorians and their connection to the Whills or whatever, but it sounds to me like it was much more personal than that. He couldn’t be halfway in. So he needed to be all the way out.

 

I greatly admire Lucas (obviously, avatar, little bit of text under my avatar - he's one of the three main teachers I've learned from for cinema theory), but this idea of his that he talks about regarding not liking to do "retro" thing for fans is somewhat a mixed bag of sort of true, sort of not.

To say that Lucas doesn't care what fans think is really obscene. Even coming from Lucas, where he's definitely said that multiple times. But he also talks at considerable length about audience psychology and dramatic effects. Which, well - that's doing things for fans/audiences.

Further, Lucas' Star Wars 1977 is a veritable rolodex of samplings from other movies and fueled by nostalgia. Pretty much all of the Star Wars movies are. In fact, I think nearly everything he helmed was made in such a fashion to a certain level. It's one of the beauties of his style.

And mostly, the main thing he gets on about in this regard (being different, not repeating) the most is really just the aesthetics. It's not actually about story or any of that which bothers him.
Anytime he's brought it up he spends the time talking about planets and ships. Not the story or plot.

I think that's the massive difference. And it's one that I think separates Lucas' approach to his style and Abrams/Johnson's approaches to Lucas' style.
When Lucas wants to approach, for lack of any actual coined term for it I call it, "nostalgia collage" movie making (i.e., all of Lucas' Star Wars), he works very hard to put a radical new coat of paint on it so that the nostalgic feel is subtle and not immediately obvious. More like it feels like things you've seen before, but you can't put your finger on it.

However, when Abrams and Johnson (and really, ANYONE now) comes in and does Star Wars, they want it to, "look like Star Wars". And the nostalgia collage they work from includes the style of aesthetics of Lucas' Star Wars. That is, Star Wars has become its own fuel source whereas originally Star Wars' fuel source was only other movies outside of Star Wars.

So, I do agree with Lucas on the difference, but I think there's some clarification (which he's notoriously bad at providing) needed in the meaning of his wording, as I'm pretty sure what he means is that he doesn't like reusing Star Wars as the nostalgia fuel for Star Wars.

Cheers,
Jayson