Star Wars Unpopular Opinions

How and where?!?

"I was told (by daffy72) that Lucas made it clear that everybody died except for the heroes - and Boba Fett."

This is the essence of what you told / wrote me and I can't possibly see where I misquoted you. But thanks for providing the source, it probably helps preventing further heated debates whether Boba Fett did or did not die (I'm also not aware that I presented any implication how you felt personally about Boba Fett's fate).

 

yes again you are misquoting me.

He said Boba Fett survived.
he never mentioned anyone else
i never said lucas said everyone died

that is just what is shown on screen- it shows everyone on the sail barge blowing up

FFS can you get back on topic and just state whatever your unpopular opinion is?

Is it that Bossk escaped Jabba's sail barge explosion? Is that your unpopular opinion?

 

Alright, that clears it up but, forgive, I think it's not unfair to say you may have been clearer on the matter. Here are your original quotes:

"I'm not assuming. I know. Everyone else blew up. if they were willing to kill boba fett like a b*tch you know everyone else went out the same way."

"The only one confirmed to have survived besides the heroes is Boba fett- said by Lucas himself."

How you could "know" that "everyone else blew up" (while I suggested that Bossk's movement could have suggested he was leaving before the explosion) was my question.
Then you replied with aforementioned Lucas statement for which you just provided the source.

But the context of the Lucas statement is apparently and merely limited to the survivors of the explosion, leaving the fate of Bossk undetermined unless we know for certain whether he stayed or left...

Now, considering that my impression was that you tried to talk me out of "Bossk escaped and survived before things really went south for Jabba and company" I'll officially file this here as an "unpopular opinion".

 

Unpopular opinion: Jedi Order is a dogmatic pyramid scheme. (Thanks PT.)

Poll Choice: Script + Music. (But only because it's a space opera the script includes story and characters.)

 

TPM Anakin is just like any other 9-year-old. Nothing wrong with that.

The script doesn't matter. Who cares about the dialogue? "Good" dialogue and "bad" dialogue convey the same information, just with different words.

 

In terms of the food on Dagobah. The area where Yoda inhabits is more of a mangrove swamp so any food would likely be fish, crustaceans, insects and other species of arthropod. In terms of other constituents of his diet, this may be algae, moss as well as any indigenous fauna. There may also be the likelihood that he harvested the sap from trees.

 

Poll: Story and Characters, with third being music IMO - the PT had a great story on the macro-level and the music was phenomenal. Those alone can carry me through them. The ST has phenomenal characters and a decent story 2/3 of the time, but the music doesn't do it for me 100% of the time either.

Unpopular Opinion Round 2 I guess.

Star Wars can learn a lot from superhero movies. A lot of fans (including some here) severely underestimate the sheer appeal superhero movies have on people, and the power and influence they have. Right now, the largest lesson Star Wars can learn from superhero movies is diversity. Star Wars, while more diverse than ever before, is still lacking in quality diversity (SUPERHERO MOVIES ARE NOT PERFECT IN THIS REGARD EITHER, AND I HAVE A LOT OF COMPLAINTS WITH THEM, BUT THEY ARE IMPROVING). Sure we've still got, Cassian Andor, Rose Tico, Finn, and Poe Dameron...and then you remember that Cassian's story takes place before RO...which means everything ties back to the OT again, and the latter have actors that seem so burned out and burnt by Star Wars I can't imagine them coming back in any live action capacity. And that's not even counting the controversy and harassment the actors have had to endure over the past 3-5 YEARS.

I want to see the Star Wars MOVIE SERIES that has a non-white lead the entire thing through. I want to see another one with a female lead of color. I want to see a Disney+ show that has those things, that can embrace the actor's heritage and not hide behind prosthetics, makeup, or a mask. Or at least have the character be alive going forward. I want to see a movie that has an ensemble with people from all over the world. And I want to see all of that done well. I want kids of all colors to relate to characters in Star Wars because they look like the kids themselves and act like heroes. Superhero movies already have that advantage because...you know...the heroes will almost always act like heroes...but it doesn't mean Star Wars can't strive for that either!

 

I just want a good story, well-told, with engaging characters. But that's just me.

 

Unpopular Opinion: Rogue One was not good Star Wars.

Most Important Ingredient To Star Wars:
Form. The way the story is constructed as a film is what makes it unique. There's no other film that is made the way the 9 films are made, and while Solo and Mando have some of that form, Rogue One lacks all of it and just becomes a sci-fi movie wearing Star Wars costumes.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

I love Rogue One, but I have to agree, it's not a very Star Wars'y. Actually, I would go so far as to say, it is not a particularly good movie. Had it not been for 3-4 great characters and a whole lot of fan service, I would probably find it hard to get through. But yeah, the parts that work for me REALLY work for me

My two biggest objections:
--Jyn's scenes are obviously cobbled together from two (or more) very different takes on the character. As a result, she acts completely random, joining the Rebel cause only after the Rebels kill her father... What?!
--The Eadu sequence is completely unnecessary and serves zero purpose. Nothing changes in that pretty long sequence, except it sets-up/executes Cassian's change of heart (which, I suspect, is the only reason it escaped being cut). Jyn still mourns her father as before, although now she joins the Rebel cause because her father was killed (in the Rebel assault on Eadu)

So there

 

Poll: characters and story
For me SW is about the characters and their stories.

Unpopular opinion:
Most films of the saga aren't actually that good. The universe - the characters and the lore - is what makes Star Wars so appealing to me.

 

You're not talking about R1 being plot driven, are you? Do you mind giving an example on how the story should have been constructed to fit the Star Wars form?

 

I want that too, but at some point I'd like for kids to look at Star Wars stories in the future and say "I like it not only because it's good, but because X character looked like me. And that inspired me to do great things/tell great stories/be a better person." Having a character that looks like you and is a good role model - especially when you're a minority - is LIFE CHANGING.

 

Sure.
I apologize to any who have read me write this elsewhere a few times.

Star Wars was created by Lucas in a particular nuanced way, because Lucas is a rather esoteric artist who comes from a background of very esoteric film art - pure cinema (which he has now returned to in his retirement).

Leading up to his professional years, Lucas loved watching the NFB films from Canada (They have a youtube these days. I highly suggest it! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeihXBww7ckKsKDF3JX13gA).

One of the methods of filmmaking that Lucas latched onto early on was collage film. Collage film is defined by taking film from other works and recutting the different pieces of film together that weren't originally intended to be cut together and in so doing, make a new film by doing so. If you want a tangible example of what this looks like, one of Lucas' favorites of this form is 21-87 (though, he loved all of Arthur Lipsett's work...as did many others in Lucas' circle - Kubrick even offered Lipsett a job, but he declined).

In making ANH, Lucas did something that hadn't really been done before. He took the idea of collage film where you physically edit together disparate pieces of film to make a new one and transformed that into a conceptual collage film. Lucas would mentally take scenes from films he loved and edit the idea of those scenes together in his mind, and then write that down into a script that had his own characters and narrative story running over it.

So he was still telling a linear narrative film, but he was building it conceptually underneath like a collage film artist.
Everyone noticed this, but took it as either one of a few things: homages to, nostalgia of, or copying/ripping off, other films.

Several reviews of ANH back when it came out lampooned it, or praised it (depending on if it was appreciated or not), as being a sort of blender or Frankenstein of every film you had ever seen while at the same time something new (the last praise only shows up in the praising reviews).

And almost every film in the saga has had some kind of similar remark after its release: it's only nostalgia, it's a copy of ____, it's derivative, it's ripping off, it's a bunch of homages of ____, etc....

Now, starting with ESB, Lucas started adding previous Star Wars films into the pile of filmstock to conceptually re-edit into a new film, instead of only films other than Star Wars. No longer was he just recreating a scene from The Searchers, or some film. He was recreating a scene from The Searchers, as well as recreating scenes from ANH.
Then in ROTJ, same thing.
Prequel Trilogy comes along, same thing there as well. Most notably the entire Pod Race is heavily recreated from other classic (or obscure) racing films, and we have Lucas overtly talking about recreating the same scenes from the OT, but with a twist of inversion.

Lucas also mixed this collage film approach with narrative methods he learned from his education in anthropology and literature. Narrative devices of mythology, such as the Hero's Journey and Chiasm (repeating themes through inverted actions and events).

The Sequel Trilogy has chosen to keep up with this approach, which I thought was fantastic because it would have been sad to see this really unique art form just disappear...especially from the very story which created it.

Now, the Sequel Trilogy did it differently in some ways that Lucas because they're different artists, but they still did it.

When it comes to Solo and Mando, they too follow the idea, but to a lesser degre.
Here, it migrates a bit closer to an homage, but it's still mostly following the original art form.

Rogue One, however, just doesn't have it at all.
It doesn't create themes which are the primary driver of the narrative. The plot points are the primary driver of the narrative, and the characters are the motivator for those plot points. (It's not character driven because it already had a very solid plot point it had to connect the dots to get to regardless of what the characters did.)

Rogue One, however, isn't being driven by tonal motifs and themes like stained glass, or murals of mythology. It doesn't have the characters do something because that's what the archetype does in this kind of scene.
They do things for two reasons: They need the character to grow. They need the character to accomplish something which moves the plot to the next plot point which is on the way to the main plot point of the entire film - how the plans got to Leia, and why the Death Star had a design flaw.

Compare that with Lucas talking about why Han shoots second (which I disagree with, but it's a good example of how the films work in their artistic form).

"I was thinking mythologically — should he be a cowboy, should he be John Wayne? And I said, ‘Yeah, he should be John Wayne.’ And when you’re John Wayne, you don’t shoot people first — you let them have the first shot. It’s a mythological reality that we hope our society pays attention to." - George Lucas
​

This is how Star Wars ticks.
It does things because of an archetypal logic that works to build towards themes that convey conceptual messages.
Lucas once obsessed for a few months over the lighting and coloring of Palpatine's office in the Prequel Trilogy because he wanted to ensure that he was conveying the right thematic message with the scene (I believe it's mentioned in the making of documentary footage...one of the VFX leads laughs about the frustration of continually changing the room's color because Lucas was very specific about exactly what color it should be).

And that was just one room as a set. He did this with everything.
Carrie Fisher said (to paraphrase) that Lucas was a breathing editing machine. That every film you ever saw was up there in his mind and he could just edit them together in his mind.

That's what I mean by the form of it.
I made the comparison elsewhere to classifications of painting. It's paramount to saying, "Impressionism".
If you're looking forward to seeing some impressionist art and when you get there, you see Andy Warhol art, it can be great art all it wants to be, but it's not what you were looking forward to as the form of art.
If you're in the mood for Baroque, High Classical isn't really going to cut it.

It's like what makes a Hitchcock a Hitchcock. Just wanting to see a "horror" film doesn't really cut it.
More similar to the point, my wife loves exactly three Alien films: Alien, Prometheus, Alien: Covenant.
She doesn't pay attention to directors, or anything to do with the craft of film (she's a book and writer person - film is fantasy playtime where she doesn't like to know the behind-the-scenes stuff).
So she didn't notice the commonality in all three of these. She just knew that she liked these three and the other films didn't feel like these three.
That's because these three are all made by Ridley Scott, and Scott makes films from a deeply philosophical vantage point. As such, they feel very different from the other Alien films.

It's like that.
Only the OT and PT feel like Lucas' version of the art form of Star Wars, but the ST still has that feel pretty strongly in it (it's actually louder than Lucas - like how when you emulate a painter's style, you tend to over-exaggerate the style by accident more than the original artist did - Lucas was much more soft and graceful; there's an elegance and subtlety to how he did it), and Solo and Mando continue it as well - but it's like the lite version of the form.

However, Rogue One just doesn't do it at all. It has the trimmings like it wanted to do it sometimes (like it looks like they were at one point aiming to do a Vietnam film riff...for example), but I don't know if it was the mess of the production or what...for whatever reason, R1 just doesn't have this art form in it.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

IMO he wasn't a great character, but not because of the actor.

 

Agreed. I like Samuel L Jackson in a lot of things, but I don't care for his character in the OT that much. (Granted, the problem here is with writing and characterization and not with Jackson's acting, I think).

 

It actually is Jackson's issue, but not because he's a bad actor.

Star Wars is like Star Trek (the old stuff) in a way that both are similar to Shakespeare.
Think of Patrick Stewart as Windu and it works.

Even Anthony Hopkins, Kenneth Branagh, James Earl Jones, or Keith David...but lets stick with Stewart because no one chews Shakespeare like this man.

The problem is that Lucas is mind bendingly rigid.
He will not bend the script to an actor, and the way Star Wars is written in dialogue is like Shakespeare (a perplexing mush that seems impossible to emote through in a way that makes sense - recall that several actors have remarked - but doing so can result in an amazing scene).

Further, Lucas is a fan of documentarianism, specifically of direct cinema flavor - the notion that you shoot the film under the lens as if you were shooting a fly on the wall documentary.

That means you don't do heavy and overtly "movie" camera moves as the main approach, and you let the background be pretty and...the background. It's not a Michael Bay movie.

This, however, means the weight of the energy in the shots without action rests firmly to our eye on the actor and their microexpression performance.

We're emotionally high-def focusing on their behavior.
Like a play. Like Shakespeare. We're not as far, but a lot friggen closer to Shakespeare than we are to The Matrix.

The Matrix has cuts all over the place and is filled in nearly every moment with a visual distraction. Even their kiss has sparks jumping out in the background, and is saved to happen at the climax of tension in the movie when our lizard brain is in overdrive.

So distracting (which is cool - makes a good movie...I mean...that's basically every Edgar Wright movie).

But Star Wars doesn't do this for most of its time.
It saves it for climaxes and emotionally charged contests.
For the rest of the time it's in passive documenatry mode.

When you mix that with the challenging dialogue, it's hard!

You have to believably emote very theatrical dialogue with minimal help from the lens.

To make it harder, your director isn't going to be interested in changing much to help you too often. He's not even going to help coach you through acting it, either.

He's going to barely talk and mostly mildly smile off and on and talk about intensity sometimes.

So...yes, it's Jackson, but...um...not really.
A fantastic actor did as good of a job as was possible for them to do in an inasanely hard acting environment.

It's like how people are on SNL. It's like that.
That doesn't mean they suck. It means, dude...SNL is hard!

Jackson sufferring on Star Wars doesn't mean he sucks at acting. It means Star Wars is hard.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

Unpopular opinion. Darth Bane is such an important character. If it wasn't for him and the rule of two the sith would not have survived