The Mandalorian

[Ben Saunders]

Just finished episode one. This is really, uh… boring, isn’t it? Everything’s so slow, dreary and lifeless. Extended sequences of just… walking around. The main character is a featureless nobody who never says anything. That works for a videogame character, so that you can supplant your personality onto the character. And it works for Boba Fett, because he’s a minor character with less than 10 minutes of screentime who is basically just there to look cool and serve a plot function. And even then he has one or two lines every time he’s on screen. But it’s like The Mandalorian relies far too heavily on you thinking that people who look like Boba Fett are inherently cool – they aren’t. Captain Phasma was lame. This Mandalorian is lame. There’s nothing to grip on to.

Like much of Disney Wars, this seems far too reliant on brand loyalty and having us squee at things we recognise – Salacious Crumb! Parsecs! Those binoculars! Carbonite! Speeders! TWO cantina scenes in one episode! – and I’m struggling to imagine anybody wanting to watch this and praising it to the high heavens if it didn’t have the Star Wars name attatched to it. It’s clearly trying really, really hard to look like a movie, and it sort of does, almost, except it has none of the polish and pizzazz associated with that. The acting is fairly hokey a lot of the time, especially with the old dude offering the bounty and his younger assistant or whatever.

There’s a jumpscare in it which you see coming from 6 parsecs away. There’s a character with an animatronic face which manages to be worse than the Neimoidians were in Episode I. The music is like wallpaper. The colours are all washed out and it might as well be in black and white, which is a trend we’ve been seeing with movies and television and games in general for years now.

From the way fully grown adults who clearly live normal, well-adjusted lives were reacting on Twitter, I was expecting something a little bit more… grip-y.

Topic

[Dave]

Also, the “it’s just a fun movies about space wizards” argument is also silly.

Just to be clear, I’m not just saying that, I’m saying that they’re fun movies about space wizards that aren’t actually as far apart in quality as most people would have you believe.

[Ben Saunders]

I really think they are though, if nothing else the constant undercutting of any dramatic moments in TLJ with shitty Marvel humour is the biggest and most common complaint from people I know who even like the movie. It’s like Cat interrupting Rimmer’s speech in Siliconia, but over and over again for an entire film.

[Pete Part Three]

Nah.

[Flap Jack]

Actually, I’ve become convinced over the years that Lawrence Kasdan got too much credit for having “written Empire”…

But becoming convinced that Kasdan fluked his way to Academy Award victory and didn’t actually care about The Force Awakens is not based on actual evidence, you’re just jumping to that conclusion because you don’t like some of his (cut) ideas or like The Force Awakens itself.

Just as it’s completely unfair to give George Lucas little credit for writing Empire Strikes Back just because you hate the prequels (*cough* Red Letter Media *cough), it’s also unfair to do the same to Lawrence Kasdan, or, say, to give Rob Grant majority of the credit for Red Dwarf Series 1-VI just because you hate Series VII and VIII.

Also the Michael Arndt dismissal is even more baseless. You don’t just write a modern classic like Toy Story 3 without any talent just because Disney is in charge.

I wasn’t asking you to praise their writing on TFA or anything, just saying that it’s unreasonable to retroactively class people as hacks who don’t care about their work just because you personally didn’t like the result.

“Subverted expectations” is basically a meme at this point, but I really do get the impression that Rian Johnson believes that just the simple act of doing so is clever or satisfying in its own right, when it really isn’t.

But again, you’ve been given no reason whatsoever to think this (other than the fact that if it were true it would make your anger towards the movie feel more fair and righteous). Johnson subverted expectations in some ways with TLJ, but it all had a purpose beyond the subversion. You hating it does not mean it was done for no reason.

There’s probably no merit in debating the actual content of The Last Jedi here (such as pointing out how many of your criticisms apply 100% to Empire Strikes Back ;-P), and if you hated it, then fair, you hated it. But it’s not helpful to invent this idea that Rian Johnson made The Last Jedi purely to fuck with the audience. The people who made this film tried their best to tell an engaging story, and it sadly failed to please everyone. That’s all.

[Dave]

if nothing else the constant undercutting of any dramatic moments in TLJ with shitty Marvel humour is the biggest and most common complaint from people I know who even like the movie

I know we’ve been through this before, but there’s silly humour like that throughout all the movies, OT and prequels and spinoffs and all.

Han Solo’s “we’re all fine here, how are you?” is a great example (which I think is very funny, by the way). Loads of the Yoda stuff in ESB is goofy too, as are the Ewoks. And the prequels are full of stupid drama-undercutting comedy shit (naming no names).

Again, as a criticism it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

I do think it’s interesting though that those who grew up with the OT and liked it were disappointed with the silly and flippant bits in the prequels, and those who grew up with the prequels and liked them were disappointed with the silly and flippant bits in the sequels.

I think that when you’re a kid you can take these kinds of movies too seriously in your mind, and that sets the tone of the universe in your head – so when the new movies come out (and they’re just as silly in places as the old ones were, but you’re in a position to recognise that now) it feels like a big tonal shift even when it’s all pretty consistent.

It’s no coincidence that so many of the people who grew up with the prequels and reject the sequels on this basis gravitate towards the more serious and po-faced Rogue One, because that’s what they think Star Wars should be.

[Ben Saunders]

Again, attacking the previous movies is not defending the new ones.

I’ll just say it’s a different KIND of humour with a different tone that permeates TLJ. You can still loosely describe it as “quips”, but it really is fundamentally different. It’s more self-aware and much more “gag”/one-liner based than the original trilogy and even the prequels, where the funny lines were much more based in-universe and in-chatacter, things the characters might actually say in those situations. There is very little “tense moment completely undercut by shit humour” in even the prequels. Attack of the Clones is worst for it, 3PO with a droid head in the Geonosis Arena is the closest we get to Marvel comedy in the Lucas stuff. But everybody agrees Attack is the worst Lucas film.

Marvel humour does feel a bit like an evolution of the type of humour found in the older movies, but it’s become warped, it’s own kind of monster, and it’s much more absurd and “haha isnt the concept of star wars itself ridiculous” than ever before. If you dont accept this, whatever, I see it as infullable truth.

Basically, you’re saying that because there is “humour” in the old films, I can’t complain about the kind of humour in the sequels. But I’m not just complaining that they do jokes, it’s the kind of jokes, the tone and the attitude they represent.

It’s not like I don’t recognise that the old films are silly, I do, especially the Phantom Menace, its just these new ones are silly in a way that is much more egregious and much more damaging to itself than a fart gag or a poorly delivered pun.

My favourite stretch of Star Wars is the opening act of Revenge of the Sith, aboard the invisible hand, which for much of it is the complete opposite of po faced and dour. It has a fun, adventurous tone, with plenty of in-character banter and joking around. “Not to worry, we’re still flying HALF a ship”. “Another happy landing”. “Oh, its you. ” etc etc. Magnificent stuff

[Ben Saunders]

Also, I didn’t criticize Arndt. I said I’m sure he’s lovely. Rian Johnson though, you genuinely get the impression from the behind the scenes stuff that he fancies himself an intellectual and just loves the smell of his own farts

[Flap Jack]

Seems like some hefty projection there. Rian Johnson is proud of his work (as he should be!) and so naturally he’s going to act as he feels. Taking this as him being some sort of smug, self-important arsehole is just a way to feel more resolute about hating the movie.

This is another thing that’s reminiscent of the reaction to the prequels. There was a persistent projection of George Lucas as an arrogant, lazy, selfish control freak who had contempt for the fans. It was no more true for Lucas then than it is for Johnson now. As I’ve said, people like what they like and dislike what they dislike and that’s fine, it’s just the level of vitriol around this topic that is not cool.

Also pretty funny that you keep going back to the “criticising older movies is not a defence of the newer ones” point, when you criticised the sequels by defending the prequels earlier. Comparison doesn’t suddenly become an invalid critical tool just because you’re talking about similarities rather than differences.

[Offline]

Yes that jarred with me, that Lucas somehow had contempt for the fans or was lazy. As much as some people may dislike the prequels, he put everything he had into them, he did a hell of a lot of foundation work that allowed the FX and production teams to go about their duties without major hitches and it smacks of the fans wanting it one way and feeling put out when the creator of Star Wars decides to go another way and inject politics, world building and a sense of continuity and bring about an overall cohesive episode to episode storyline. I’m not their biggest fans, but the prequels do line up very well alongside each other, there’s a clear arc with Anakin and the Republic and emerging threat of the Sith.

The sequel trilogy smacks of writing a film, setting up questions to be answered and that’s about it. The oft-quoted Abrams mystery boxes are evident in The Force Awakens and instead of Rian answering or continuing those mysteries while bringing in his own ideas, he just takes left-turns and very awkwardly subverts expectations of story and previously set-up plot. It begins with a rejection in Luke just throwing away the lightsaber and ends with some kids looking up into the night sky, what happens in-between has no reflection of what came before, no consequiences in what is happening at that very moment and no nods towards of what may come.

The Rise of Skywalker feels like a salvage and a greatest hits for the previous episodes and it really shouldn’t be. It should be a firm and final resolution of the sequel trilogy and it feels like a tribute much like The Force Awakens. You can’t accuse Revenge of the Sith of being a tribute or a rehash, it’s a firm resolution to the Anakin Skywalker and rise of the Sith and Empire stories.

[Flap Jack]

… it may be a TOUCH premature to say what The Rise of Skywalker feels like. XD

Honestly though, the production of these movies is too quick and too planned for the fan narrative of “OK if unoriginal start with TFA, screwed up by TLJ, Disney panicking to fix it with TRoS” to be at all reflective of reality. The broad strokes of this trilogy would most likely have been fixed since 2014.

They “mystery box” aspect to people’s complaints can get a bit odd, too. The only real mystery box of The Force Awakens is the quest to find Luke, and at the end they find him, and then in The Last Jedi everything that happens with Luke and all we learn about Luke makes perfect sense with what had been set up in the previous film. Rian Johnson didn’t throw away or “subvert” J.J. Abrams’ mystery box, he satisfactorily solved the mystery.

OK, maybe giving a mystery box a satisfying conclusion that doesn’t immediately set up another bigger mystery box is incredibly subversive in itself, but still.

[Ben Saunders]

Why did he leave a map behind if he just wanted to fuck off and die

“It was a map to the first Jedi temple, not Luke” is incorrect

The narrative Disney themselves have promoted is that they just let Rian do whatever the fuck he wanted with TLJ

[Flap Jack]

I’m sure RJ got a fair amount of freedom to work out the details, but I doubt Disney would have let him deviate from the overall plan for the trilogy.

To be clear, I wasn’t saying that Epsiode IX hasn’t been written partly as a reaction to how Episode VIII was written (because obviously that’s how serialised storytelling works, regardless of which aspects were written and when), just that The Rise of Skywalker’s writing and direction would not have been reworked in response to the *reception* of The Last Jedi. That would be too late.

The map question is a good one, and I don’t have a definitive answer. People seem divided between “he didn’t want to be found, but was open to being found if there was an *extremely* good reason” (which Rey wanting him to help with the Resistance is not) and the explanation you off-handedly dismissed, that Luke didn’t make the map as a breadcrumb trail for people to find him, people just deduced/knew that he’d gone to this jedi temple area, and had to go from there. Take your pick I guess.

Thankfully the map question is at worst a minor plot hole. It’s not a big deal.

[Offline]

Red Dwarf has been going downhill since ‘The End’.

[Pete Part Three]

>My favourite stretch of Star Wars is the opening act of Revenge of the Sith

Could you not have opened with this statement and saved some bother?

[Author]

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