What's the point of this trilogy?

I think I'm going to take a break from posting here for a while. I've just realised that I'm actually a miserable so and so who isn't really contributing much to this forum except making people depressed!

Thanks for the nice comments by the way..on 'other' media it hasn't been so friendly! To those who still love SW, good luck, and it's nice to know that it still brings people a lot of pleasure, SW will continue for future generations, and I hope they find the escapism and inspiration I did when I was young. Have fun everyone.

 

I hope you find some peace of mind / happiness in your life.


I've enjoyed your relentless conviction, so I wish you well.

 

They don't matter to the story. The story does not change or make more sense if the actual method of Palpatine's resurrection was explained. Or make less sense because of the explanation's absence.

I'm not dictating how others engage. I'm stating the the obligations and criteria that others are imposing are purely their own concern.

That is not a how statement. It's a what statement. Kenobi might as well have said "Somehow, an energy field is created by all living things. And that energy force somehow surrounds, penetrates and binds the galaxy together." #

How living being create an energy field has never been a part of the story. Even when Midiclorians were introduced, it was actually only used to explain how Anakin was identified as possibly being the chosen one. And then it was discarded. An excuse to make things happen. But the story is not about midiclorians and the how of the force. Never.

How does their metaphorical status obligate Poe, and the film, to explicate how dark force use and cloning can produce and ersatz Sidious vessel?

So the dark force/Sith secrets and cloning don't have any metaphorical value (cloning, reproducing, repeating etc) that excuses Poe from explaining how that process went down?

Concepts of immortality have been periodically touched on in this franchise through the years. If they hadn't then I could understand people's dissatisfaction with Palpatine returning in any form. Like if the franchise had never mentioned faster than light speed travel, and then suddenly the story is affected by someone making a space journey in seconds that had previously required days/weeks of interstellar travel. How hyperdrive works has likewise never been a part of the story.

--- Double Post Merged, Jul 14, 2022, Original Post Date: Jul 14, 2022 ---

Like they do on TF.net? Eventually someone will use it to moan about something you cherish and then you won't like that idea at all.

 

That’s pretty much the point. The Palpatine character is quintessential to the film’s narrative. If you take him out, then you don’t have a story. The method of his return didn’t have to be immaterial. It could have been vital to the narrative and deepen its themes.

You see, fantasy movies like these aren’t documentaries or immutable historical record. They’re works of fiction. They’re the product of a writer’s imagination and conscious choices. When they made the choice to resurrect the Emperor character, the explanation for that could have been virtually anything. They could have come up with whatever the hell they wanted. Nobody was forcing them to push this convoluted clone kerfuffle. That was a choice.

And that choice wound up being so overly complicated and distracting that they decided to leave it out of the film altogether*. I’m not saying they should have included all the grueling detail of their unwieldly idea. I’m saying they should have come up with a better idea. One that actually supported and reinforced the story and its themes instead of confusing them. Is that so unreasonable a perspective?

You’re discarding individual opinions and perspectives as unreasonable and unnecessary because they don’t happen to align with your own. You’re actively discouraging people from sharing their viewpoints on a forum that exists to do exactly that. Are you not aware that you’re doing this?

Call it whatever label you’re most comfortable with. The point is that the line is an explanation. An explanation that the story doesn’t really need in order to work. The Force could have simply been presented to us as an entirely mysterious, amorphous magic. It was a conscious choice to tie its properties into the larger themes of the narrative. It supports and reinforces the philosophy of George’s fairytale and that’s not unimportant.

Again, you’re perfectly entitled to view it that way. You can stop at the surface and stay there and that’s fine. No one is demanding you dig any deeper. But they absolutely are not just a device. They’re also there to reinforce the underline theme of cooperation and interconnection. That Obi-Wan references a “symbiont circle” in the first act and Qui-Gon describes the midi-chlorians as “symbionts” in the second act, isn’t an odd coincidence. It’s on purpose. It was a conscious choice.

“I also like the idea of this symbiotic relationship, which is, again, an ongoing theme in the whole movie of people helping people. That there may be a completely different race of life form that lives inside your body, completely independent of you, but it has some influence over you.” George Lucas commentary for 'The Phantom Menace'

I’m not sure I understand the question. It seems you’re working from the perspective that anyone’s misgivings stem from not knowing the mechanics and nuances of this nebulous explanation. Personally, I’ve never observed that to be the case. The issue, to me at least, is what little it has to do with what makes the Sith villainous.

The Sith aren’t the villains because they practice ‘dark science’ or whatever. They’re the villains because their selfish actions cause others to suffer. Who suffered in order to make Palpatine’s secret Sith cloning nonsense happen? I don’t give a damn about the mechanics. I care about the ethics. The morality. The philosophy. Palps had a magic clone made . . . probably. What point is the story trying make with that? Answer: it’s not. It’s just a thing that happened. It’s an element of disappointing shallowness that had the potential for substantial depth.

Take ROTS as an example. Anakin desires the power to save his wife from death. The desire itself isn’t evil. It’s how he intends to go about doing it that decides that. To save her life, he has take the lives of others. This darkside power has a price and that price is the suffering of innocents. Get it? It isn’t just a machination of the plot, it’s a moral dilemma with painful consequence that allows the audience to see why it’s wrong.

Palpatine's resurrection doesn't have that. It's not a moral allegory. It's just a part of the plot. He needed to be back and so now he is.

First, nobody was expecting Poe Dameron, Resistance fighter, to miraculously have knowledge about the evil wizard’s revival. That’s a strawman argument. It makes perfect sense Poe wouldn’t know or care. The issue, as I stated previously, is that the movie itself doesn’t seem to know or care either. So the line became the summation of this critique. It didn’t matter who said it.

Second, I’d absolutely love for you to explain to me the metaphoric value behind “dark force/Sith secrets and cloning”. How that’s related to the flawed nature of humanity that allows for the endurance of evil? Or was that it? A clone is a reiteration of a thing and so is this story? So what makes that ‘evil’ is that the word “dark” was put in there

Nobody’s complaining that ‘life beyond death’ exists in Star Wars. That’s another strawman argument. They’re complaining that this particular version of it wasn’t paid proper attention. It wasn’t made to matter to the story beyond perfunctory plot requisites. But it could have been more than that.

*

Spoiler

“It was kind of a delicate balance and went back and forth a lot about how much we wanted to reveal,” she said. “Some scenes changed quite a bit, the way that we wanted to present it to the audience. In the end, we ended up showing a lot less of it than we started with.”

There was originally “a little more information about it, what was keeping [Palpatine] alive,” but, Brandon said, “it seemed to go off topic.”

“There was so much information in the film and so many characters that we wanted to have an audience concentrate on. I think we felt we didn’t want to clutter the film up with things you didn’t need to know,” she said. - Maryann Brandon, editor for 'The Rise of Skywalker' link

 

Off topic (as Brandon puts it) means it doesn’t matter.

 

Exactly my point. So come up with something that DOES matter. That's how stories work

 

Not really. Whether or not it matters determines how much time you spend explaining something. And if he explanation of how is off topic, then by definition it doesn’t matter.

 

'Quantity over quality'? Interesting take. Especially with this series. The Force is paramount to everything. But we spend very little time really detailing it. The tiny bits we get though are intricately connected to the larger ethos of the tale. Because the details aren't the focus, it's the spirit of the thing. The nature.

There's a number of spiritual explanations in this series. But none of them are particularly verbose. They're one or two lines that certainly don't tell you everything. But they cut directly to the truth of the matter. Saying so much by saying very little. You don't have to spend much time explaining something to communicate its importance.

It's pretty simple. They could have dreamt up whatever they wanted. What they came up with though was pointless and confusing. So, they left it out. And good for them, I say. I wish more storytellers would recognize a story element isn't working and make editorial calls like this. Get all that gobbledygook out of there.

But that's sidestepping the underline reality that the pointless thing they came up with didn't need to be pointless. It could have been instrumental to the whole piece had they chosen a different approach. It's that level of care and craft that makes a mediocre story good and a good story great. That's really what we're talking about here: missed opportunity. Instead of being totally disposable, it could have been the very foundation the whole story rested on. It could have been elevational rather than irrelevant.

 

Yeah but it's your take.

 

As much as you may want some grand theme for these films there just isn't one. These films exist to make money and that's it. Even the marketing reason given, the Skywalker saga, doesn't work as they are all killed of so Palpatine's sprog once removed can steal their name.

 

Thanks for the laugh....


reminds me of when the web was actually fun &u could say whatever u wanted without needing to hand out xanax to calm the [BEEPINGBUPPIES] back down

 

I thought the point of the ST was the next generation carrying on the legacy of the Skywalker/Solos....but post TROS I think it was just to get rid of Lucas's characters.

Why they thought replacing them with a Palpatine was a good idea is beyond me, however.

Looking at TROS compared to the first two films, I am absolutely certain that it was Abrams practically shoving Rey in our faces as 'this is the new hero', as just about every other character took a back seat to her. I'm sure a lot of people will disagree with me, but this didn't endear her to me at all - quite the opposite, in fact. They never did this with Luke.

 

TFA was the one ST film that I really liked but I would agree with @madcatwoman17 that Rey was pushed as 'this is our new Jedi hero' from the very beginning. George Lucas made it clear that in his mythology force-sensitive people have to be trained to weild The Force as a Jedi Knight can do. Yet somehow Rey acted like a Jedi on steriods from the very outset.

Unlike others, I reserved any gripping at the time since it was Film 1 of a 3-part trilogy. I thought, who knows? They might have a good explanation for it. But -- alas -- they did not. Rey's powers only grew in Films 2 and 3. Contrast this to The Mandalorian where we learned in Season 2 that little Grogu had been a student when Order 66 was given and, since then, learned from the knee of Luke Skywalker himself.

 

I liked Rey initially...and was one of those who defended her to the critics who called her a Mary Sue. But, Daisy has a lot of natural charm, which I suspect is what carried her character throughout TFA and TLJ. By TROS, even Daisy couldn't save Rey, she came across as a self righteous fanatic, even in the supplementary material...in a post TLJ pre TROS spin off comic it creeped me out a bit when she referred to the Resistance as 'the cause'...as this title has been used by terrorist groups, and personally, I did not like it one bit.
When she defeated Kylo in TFA a lot of people criticised how she was able to pull this off, and Pablo Hidalgo hinted that Rey 'borrowed' Kylo's fighting skills when she read his mind...this should have been mentioned in TLJ, and much as I loved Rian's film, even he didn't try to come up with a reason for Rey's skills being superior to Kylo's...although he did have that scene where Snoke berated Kylo for losing to a girl who had 'never held a lightsabre before'. The end scene also once again emphasised how 'magnificent' Rey was with the little rock lifting scene, but at least Johnson had Luke shocked by Rey's natural skills...he described them as akin to his nephew's, along with her impulsive traits which put her at risk from the dark side.

Which brings me to TROS. Luke had a journey to make, which was the heart of the OT, a journey in which he faced his darkest fears and darkest impulses, but Rey never really seemed to be 'at risk' of being seduced by the dark side as Luke was. The closest she came was when she stabbed an unarmed Kylo, but even here she was given a 'get out of jail free card', metaphorically speaking, by having her suddenly sprout healing powers that had NEVER been in the movie universe before, and frankly for this fan, didn't sit well with me at all. If such a thing as Force healing existed in Lucas's films then why couldn't Anakin produce it, the Chosen One, and save his mother? And Padme, for that matter. The fact that he couldn't was a major contribution to his 'fall'....like Superman, he had all that power yet couldn't save the ones he loved.

The fact is - and I don't know if this was Abrams, Terrio, or DLF's idea - Rey wasn't so much a 'Luke self insert' but someone who was depicted as better than Luke - better than ALL the Skywalkers, in fact. Stronger than Ben - she didn't 'succumb to the dark', as he did. Stronger than Anakin - she did not give in to temptation, as he did. And finally....even stronger than Luke, as she was practically a Jedi master without training, able to use a mind trick, defeat the grandson of the Chosen One, and practically use god like powers of healing that none of the Skywalkers showed a single sign of. Without any. training. at. all.

Rey isn't a Jedi, and most certainly isn't a Skywalker. She is vastly superior to them, a Goddess of the Force, and judging by supplementary material they are continuing to depict her as such. She's not so much superhuman...as inhuman. And completely unrelatable.

 

Huh?

 

Yeah. Whatever happened to "Live, laugh, love."?

 

I’ve seen this criticism since 2015. I’ve never really understood it. What exactly is the inexplicably extraordinary feat that Rey demonstrates in TFA? I mean, the ‘mind trick’ scene does a crappy job at establishing why she’d attempt that very specific ability. But other than that, I don’t get it. “Jedi on steroids”?

 

ATTN - Lord eeprom: The following tongue in cheek response contains some SARCASM and lots of SNARK, please proceed with caution. The contents of said quotes belong to the ether and are in no way indicative of how LOTR akshually feels about character progression, potatoes with force powers and talking about the same "wow Luke was no Mary Sue" issue thing 10 years later.

"Nothing; outside of being a nearly-flawless, neophyte lightsaber combatant and the most natural force user that the Galaxy Far, Far Away has ever seen....

What did you expect from MY grand daughter?"

"Hi. So, here's the number. Call Bespin, maybe?"

"Dude. Geonosis happened and I had to pick my boogers with a metal hand."

***
Don't mind me.... I'm just messin around with the old arguments, for sake.

 

Yeah, Luke receives a whopping one lesson in the Force in ANH. And luckily it’s exactly the thing he needed to know in order to make that impossible shot at the end. "Let go your conscious self and act on instinct."

Same thing with Rey. "Close your eyes. Feel it. The light, it's always been there. It will guide you." She receives one lesson about the nature of the Force and that’s how she succeeds at the end. Just like Luke, she does the one thing she was told to do and it pays off. Checks out to me.

I think that wording comes off a bit harsher than you might have intended.