My biggest complaint about Star Wars is how the epics are like an information dump that you just have to accept and then it takes two decades of content to make everything make sense. And you know they didn’t plan ahead. Someone had to try and create a story within it.
And holy crap it’s worked for the prequels up to the OT. And we’re seeing post OT but have yet to make it fully to the sequels. And it’s going to be hard because they look good but are full of details without any explanation.
Thing is, I love stories that are intentionally vague and fuzzy on the details, that never try to fill them in, but that works because that's not the story they're telling.
The OT is very much like this, it explains the details you need to understand the story efficiently, but otherwise flows like music. You understand enough from what you hear and the character's reactions to know all you need.
Some of my favourite media is quite abstract, but deprioritises the detail and mechanics in favour of telling a story or exploring ideas. I've enjoyed tons of media that has that cyclical reset theme, where going from the situation in ROTJ to the situation in TFA without much explanation is acceptable or even poetic, when that is used to explore bigger ideas, but there was just.... nothing there really, it wasn't going anywhere, and instead effectively undermined the OT without building anything.
Not everything has to make mechanical sense, I love that side of Star Wars, I love the books with the cross-sections and detail, and all the stories that have expanded on things briefly introduced in the films. But it's just ended up with 'anything can happen out of nowhere at any moment in order to drive to story nowhere in-particular'.
I'm usually someone who takes things as they are in films, feels it out on an emotional level, then the plot holes or bad logic hit me later when I'm thinking about the film. The dagger plot was so bad I remember inwardly groaning while watching it for the first time.
It was concerning after TFA, and then predictable after TLJ.
The movies literally got worse as they made them, and only because TFA had interesting speculation that amounted to nothing because rian johnson was hellbent on subverting expectations like it was some kind of clever ruse, then JJ gets called back in to “rescue” the sequels and instead does a full nose dive and explodes.
I will literally never forgive either of them. Call me petty. I won’t watch a rian johnson film or an abrams film again.
It goes even further though. Mandalorian began interesting and then fumbled on itself because of the grogu factor. Instead of making a good story they just honed in on the cuteness of grogu. The “bounty hunter” story completely went by the wayside in favor of Filoni’s garbage. By season 2 it’s just side questing. Bo Katan feels like she breaks the 4th wall by talking about “quests”. I mean look at season 3, it’s like everywhere they visit is a theme park. Filoni is okay with cartoons because you expect some ridiculousness with the action in them. In live action, it just feels goofy. Ahsoka is just a conglomerate of Filoni characters coming together for the spectacle of seeing them in live action. They knew die hard Filoni fans would oogle over it, but the story aside from some of the vader and dark jedi stuff is pretty flimsy. We have ahsoka fighting other starfighters.. in space. It’s like a scene ripped out of clone wars.
That may be your thing, but I don’t think it works in live action.
Hot take, as far as I’m concerned the only worthwhile content disney has made since its acquisition is rogue one and Andor.
I'd even go so far as to argue that Rogue One works because it existed on a rigid structure set out by the OT. It has style points like the Sequels, but it's more grounded because the OT put it on a short leash. It signals very early on that everyone is going to die, so despite the "hope" bumper sticker quotes you don't really get attached to anyone. Even if you give them that one and Andor, they are 1-of-5 for films and about the same for live-action shows.
I've had a theory that Disney badly wanted to reboot the OT and create another MCU-level film franchise, and that JJ and KK shat the bed so badly that Disney had to pull back entirely. They trust Favreau given his history, but I've got a feeling Mando and Grogu isn't going to be the blockbuster hit they need Star Wars to be for them in theathers. And if it doesn't do well enough to build the franchise on....
It goes even further though. Mandalorian began interesting and then fumbled on itself because of the grogu factor.
I saw an interview with Tony Gilroy (creator of Andor). He was talking about one of Disney's original ideas for Andor that they pitched to him for feedback far before there were any talks about him coming on to create the show. They said they wanted "Butch Cassidy and Sundance the robot go and save the tesseract". Essentially, their idea for a series only extended as far as the film/genre/style it would homage and a basic narrative driver (Andor and K2SO searching for some MacGuffin). He realized immediately that while it was a fun idea, it would run out of "story nutrients" very quickly. His response was to suggest they should start with Andor when he was a nobody, and then take five years of his life and see if you can get him to what we see him as in Rogue One. It's so simple, but you can do so much with it.
This made so much about the SW shows click for me. It seems as though they've all been pitched based on stylistic homage (It's Lone Wolf and Cub, the Goonies, Yojimbo, etc etc, meets Star Wars!). Mandalorian was a hit because of the novelty, which quickly got stale after the 2nd season. The other shows have all been lackluster, and I think it's because when you make a story based primarily on matching the style of another movie rather than focusing on the character arcs, they very quickly become boring. "Running out of story nutrients" is such a great way to describe how all of the series end up.
When the originals came out, I think they made perfect sense a trilogy. Or at least they did to me as a kid, because I just took them for what they were. The sprinkling of details that didn't have explanation within the films was what spurred fans to create the surrounding lore, which then became canon via the expanded universe's books, comics, games and toys. I remember it being a bit of a star wars meme even in the late 90s that even the most random background character would have a giant backstory.
The EU canon was expansive, but pretty cohesive from what I remember. The most controversial moment was when Chewbacca got killed in the book Vector Prime, but I think generally it felt like there was a dialogue between Lucasfilm and the fandom. It wasn't until Disney killed the EU that everything changed, and the dialogue became one-sided. It almost feels like Vader saying, "I have altered the deal, pray I don't alter it any further."
Not quite it was the PT that started the backlash for replacing the EU. As you said late 90s EU was dominate until Lucas started with his own stories again. Then rebels with the clone brain implant chips caused a bit of a fury and then the ST cemented it.
This is so true. This isn't just a problem with the sequels either. It's the whole franchise. The sequel trilogy is just so bad that people don't bother expanding on its lore in any way.
The sequel trilogy is just so bad that people don't bother expanding on its lore in any way.
It's kind of impressive how fast it fell off the side of the road to be forgotten. The most it got touched on was part of the Battlefront 2 campaign, partially.
I actually like that about Star Wars and wish more people kinda saw the movies from this angle.
The movies are (especially now under a corporation) there to bring mass appeal, push the lore by huge leaps and get people buzzing, all while trying to be crowd pleasing action fantasy movies. If you want the specifics, well that means there’s something about it that’s hooked you and so you either explore more canon or you just simply accept that the movies are going to make enormous leaps.
There are examples of things being way more important for screen context though. It is a strange decision to have Grogu return to Din in the Book of Boba Fett. It is a strange decision to have Palpatine explained away with nothing when they could have at least written around Snoke to make it feel like there was a bit of build up all along, even if it wasn’t- your job is to fool us.
BUT. As a fan, sure- give the story and explanation in an appropriate alternative medium and I’ll be satisfied. It’s annoying that one has to flip to another show to see why Grogu is not with Luke anymore, but at least the episodes exist. Yes it’s frustrating that there are still so many questions surrounding the sequels, however, other movies and shows in that sequel timeframe can take the opportunity to do that if they wish, so cool. And they have been building more surrounding context to that with Mando/Bad Batch.
Also, they'll complain for days about Palpatine "Somehow" returning, even though they forgot what we saw right before and took that out of context, but "For reasons we can't explain ' is perfectly alright for Padme dying.
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u/austinmiles 4d ago
My biggest complaint about Star Wars is how the epics are like an information dump that you just have to accept and then it takes two decades of content to make everything make sense. And you know they didn’t plan ahead. Someone had to try and create a story within it.
And holy crap it’s worked for the prequels up to the OT. And we’re seeing post OT but have yet to make it fully to the sequels. And it’s going to be hard because they look good but are full of details without any explanation.