overanalysingstarwars

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The Last Jedi - spoilery thoughts

Spoiler warning.

The fact that The Last Jedi appears to have been a divisive film has really surprised me. Thus far I’ve enjoyed all three post-Lucas Star Wars films, but the problems with both The Force Awakens and Rogue One seem fairly hard to dispute. In the case of TFA, it was Abrams’ love of mystery boxes combined with an unwillingness to play anything but safe with the plot and beats of the film. In the case of Rogue One, it was undeniably a bit of a mess with the main antagonist lacking any real agency, alongside the fact that it works on the basis that there is a flaw at the heart of A New Hope’s storyline which is not only debatable, but which ending up posing more questions than it answered.

The Last Jedi meanwhile tells a satisfying story, giving all the main characters meaningful arcs, and clearing up all the lingering plot threads from TFA in a way that didn’t feel like a cheat and allows Episode IX to progress without similar baggage. Given the weight of expectation hanging over it, that it ends up doing all of that while still looking better than any Star Wars film before it, and delivering on gut-punch emotional moments seems nothing short of miraculous.

It’s not a perfect film, and there are parts of it that I would accept need chewing over. It is certainly a long film, and it would have been nice if they had somehow cut 15-30 minutes from the running time. The second act in particular, I would accept is a bit of a mess. I’d also have to accept that some of the comedy fell flat, or appeared at unwelcome moments. Two examples spring to mind: General Hux is reduced to comic relief, which I think diminishes the threat of the First Order; similarly, the bit where Rey can’t get over the fact that Kylo is shirtless and asks him to put on a towel undermined the drama of what was meant to be an intense scene.

More annoying for me was the fact that everyone seems basically fine with the fact that Poe, Rose and Finn’s plan to hack into the hyperspace tracker not only ended up being pointless, but thanks to JD’s betrayal, lead to the majority of what was left of the Resistance at that point being killed. I completely buy that Admiral Holdo wouldn’t tell Poe her real plan, and I’m fine with the fact that his rogue mission ended up in farce. What I don’t buy is that she would end up being completely cool with it, and even confess to liking Poe at the end of it - as opposed to being utterly furious with him. And I’d expect to see more remorse on the part of Rose and Finn once they discovered quite how few survivors there were next.

Both those problems however would have required little more than a couple of altered lines. A bigger complaint people have is with Rose and Finn’s mission to Canto Bight in its entirety and how it detracts from the very intense and personal struggles going on between the First Order and the Resistance, and Luke and Rey (and Kylo). I’ve seen a lot of people argue that the whole plotline should have been excised entirely.

While it would have been interesting to see another editing pass for this section - I might have cut down the chase scene by a couple of minutes for example - I can only disagree. Not only would removing it entirely have left Finn with basically nothing to do in the film, but this subplot is the heart of the film. In it, Rose explains to Finn-as-surrogate-audience what they are fighting for and what the stakes are. It changes the entire scope of the film from one about souls of Rey and Kylo and the lives of a ragtag group of resistance fighters, and makes it about the fate of the galaxy. None of that would be apparent if the Canto Bight subplot had not been present. More to the point, it is the first time any Star Wars film has meaningfully reflected on what’s at stake. 

In A New Hope, Alderaan is wiped out but we never get to see a single inhabitant other than Leia (who quickly bottles up her feelings). A handful of people run around a bit on Bespin when the Empire takes over in Episode V. I guess we have cuddly ewoks as the “ordinary people” surrogates in Return of the Jedi, but really they represent a bunch of negative stereotypes about indigenous people. We get to see a handful of wealthy senators looking anxious when the Hosnia system is blown up in The Force Awakens, but that’s about it. What I’m saying is that the Canto Bight subplot’s brief reflection on the cost of war and tyranny on ordinary people is about 40 years overdue and I’d be loathe to see it go. It is entirely right that the film ends with that child looking defiantly up to the stars.

The other big complaint I’ve heard is that character X is underused. Character X is, variably, Captain Phasma, Admiral Ackbar and Maz Kanata (the Onion has a version of this focusing on Nien Nunb). This is hard to take seriously; they’re minor characters who should remain so. Phasma herself only exists as a character at all because the filmmakers of The Force Awakens got worried about all the criticisms about the lack of female characters in it (a problem which is fixed far more satisfyingly in The Last Jedi, even if Rose is possibly open to the accusation of being a MPDG). 

Don’t get me wrong: I really hope Phasma isn’t dead and comes back as a seriously mean cyborg in Episode IX with an even bigger chip on her shoulder against Finn, but her role in this film was perfectly adequate for the film’s purposes.

Fundamentally, I get the impression that a lot of people miss the point of this film. It is all about looking beyond the obvious and searching for deeper truths. It’s all about accepting that the world is full of grey areas, but that that isn’t an excuse to give in to nihilism. And it’s about failure, and having to live with it.

Shortly after The Force Awakens came out, I posited the theory that Rey would turn out to be Anakin reincarnated. I’m not claiming to be the first to come up with this, but I did come up with it independently. But in the intervening time, I came to really hate it as a theory - the only thing it had going for it is that it wasn’t quite as dumb as the theories that she was Obi Wan or Luke’s daughter, or that Leia and Han had another child but completely forgot about her, for reasons. When I first heard it proposed that Rey was no-one, I realised immediately that this was by far the best development, but I couldn’t dare hope that Rian Johnson would do something so un-Star Wars by having this be the case. I’m so delighted that he went in this direction, and similarly freed the saga from the other non-mystery, namely over who Snoke was (which, for the record, I was convinced would turn out to be Sifo-Dyas). It would have been so easy for this film to have slipped into the cheese and laziness that typified so much of the Expanded Universe, and it feels so liberating that it did not go down that route.

On a thematic level, this is by far the most satisfying and mature Star Wars film to date. In achieving this, it doesn’t detract from the previous films, but enhances and deepens them (The Force Awakens especially). I’m itching to see it again, and am incredibly excited to see what new Star Wars saga Rian Johnson has in store for us in the future.

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It's fun to overdecorate Star Wars cakes! A joint effort with @xela1910

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Reposting this from earlier since Tumblr doesn’t allow you a proper right to reply:

Only on Tumblr can you get castigated for not having read a novel which was written weeks after you wrote your article, and called a sexist for citing an explanation that you state you don’t actually like.

I don’t understand how you think I could have read Moving Target, Lost Stars or Aftermath before they were published? But well done for having read them now and bolstered them with your own headcanon.

My original point was that the prequels missed an opportunity to give her more of a backstory, instead of leaving her on the cutting room floor. The fact that several books have now been published set around the time of the original trilogy hardly contradicts that.

Mon Mothma: what’s her story?

The rebel briefing scene in Return of the Jedi has one of the most perplexing moments in the original trilogy, and that is the random appearance of Mon Mothma. She has half a dozen lines and then vanishes. Unlike the various generals we see pop up throughout the trilogy, whose purpose is clear, Mothma’s role is less obvious. I mean, we know of course that she is the head of the rebellion, but the film doesn’t tell us that.

Her cameo is both redundant and crucial. There is no reason why her lines couldn’t have been spoken by Admiral Ackbar, and yet - thanks to Caroline Blakiston’s sublime performance - no other part of the trilogy does a better job at conveying the idea that we are only seeing a small portion of the wider story about the rebellion.

Watching Jedi again recently, I was struck quite how odd the performance is. One minute she’s all smiles and twinkles - we’ve got the Empire by the balls you guys! - the next she’s desolate. It looks to me as if she’s on some strong anti-psychotics and is a hair’s breadth from throwing herself out of the airlock. According to the Expanded Universe, this was because she had just learned that the death of her son Jobin during the Battle of Hoth had been confirmed to her moments before. But it seems to me that there’s more to the story than that. Again, it’s a testament to Blakiston that while I don’t really care about the backstory of General Dodonna or Admiral Ackbar, she manages to make her even smaller role in terms of screen time that much more compelling.

I wish we’d seen more of her during the prequels. She pops up in the deleted scenes of Revenge of the Sith as a young senator (what is it about the prequels and teenage politicians? If she’d been in her 20s it would have better reflected Blakiston’s real age in Jedi) and seems to be pretty much exactly the same as she was 24 years later. She’s even virtually wearing the same clothes, or at least chain of office.

That doesn’t fit with me at all. Why are the politicos who are around at the start of the rebellion still in charge a quarter of a century later? Surely people would retire or rise to power during that time? Is the fact that someone was a senator during the period when the senate stopped doing its job and handed Palpatine the Republic on a plate really a suitable qualification to be in charge? Pretty much the only thing they had done to attempt to restrain him had been to sign a petition (the useless “Delegation of 2000″ - also to wind up on the cutting room floor for Revenge of the Sith - which includes such notable signatories as Jar Jar Binks, the incompetent senator who was duped into proposing giving Palpatine executive powers in the first place).

An opportunity was missed to give Mothma a much more interesting backstory, and an expanded role, to give us an insight into the idealistic young woman who would go on to earn her place at the head of the rebellion rather than simply have it handed to her. It would have been so much more interesting to see her as part of a resistance cell acting against the Separatists’ invasion of Chandrilla, working closely with a Jedi sent to help them, only to witness Order 66 and realise that the ideals her comrades had just died for had themselves been killed by Palpatine.

Or something. Anything really to make the most enigmatic character in the original trilogy more than just a sad politician who seems to have just floated from senior role to senior role throughout her life without having really apparently had to work for any of it.

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Ahsoka stands as a great character with a complete arc in her own right; she is much more than merely a plot device for Anakin, and it’s well worth your time to get acquainted with her. However, for viewers familiar only with Anakin’s journey from the films, she perhaps more than anyone else—Obi-Wan, Padme, Palpatine—brings balance to the Force by creating the necessary foil for his growth. Get to know Ahsoka, and by the end of it, you’ll like Anakin a hell of a lot more, and you’ll also understand why Ahsoka’s return in Rebels brought many fans to tears.

How Ahsoka Tano Completed the Arc of Anakin Skywalker (x)

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In the season finale of Rebels, we saw a climactic showdown between a dark master of an obscure religious order and an orange skinned character with what is definitely not hair on their head. Was this about the Republican Presidential Nomination?

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Maybe Rey is the secret love child of Padme and Sabé?

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The thing is though, neither of those scenes with Padme conspiring with the nascent rebellion are especially flattering for her. In both scenes she’s condescended to and basically told what to do; she doesn’t exhibit much agency - a point which I’m confident the fan community would have complained about if they’d been left in.

I certainly think it’s a shame that scenes *like* these weren’t included. In fact, I’d go further and say it was a criminal missed opportunity not to make Bail Organa and Mon Mothma more central figures throughout the whole prequel trilogy. But I’m not going to waste a lot of tears about skipping a couple of scenes about a lame-ass petition that was never going to go anywhere.

Five Most Important Deleted Padme Scenes

To put it technically, Padme got totally screwed during the editing process of both Attatck of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith.  She was easily the most deleted character in both films, with entire subplots excised that drastically undermined her personal motivations and importance to the overall saga.

All of these scenes are available within these two longer videos, if you’ve never seen them or want to rewatch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDPmS7a1UYo (AOTC)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-hFh35U3go (ROTS)

5.  “A Stirring in the Senate (Bail’s Office)” (ROTS; 07:24-09:22)

Three major scenes were cut from ROTS dealing with the formation of the Rebellion in the shadow of Palpatine’s growing power, of which Padme was a key founder.  I’ll say more of this subplot later, but I will say that a major aspect of Padme’s character marginalized in ROTS due to these cuts was her position as a political nemesis of Palpatine. 

4.  “Padme’s Bedroom” (AOTC; 12:06-13:28)

This is a scene that really would have helped the Anakin/Padme romance, it’s true importance is due to the stories Padme tells about the holopictures that hang on her wall.  In one she is exuberant and passionate, hugging two alien children.  In another she is stoic and reserved, ready for her first day as a junior legislature.  Both of these offer a look into Padme’s past, which we almost never receive.  We also get a peek at the pain she herself holds within:  those kids she was hugging were members of a species whose sun was about to explode; Padme was a part of a project to save the children, but the kids were never able to adapt off-world and they all ultimately died.  Having to deal with helplessness, extinction, and survivor’s guilt before she’s ten years old, and still ending up as good a person as she is:  that takes strength

3.  “Padme Addresses the Senate” (AOTC; 00:01-01:58)

I have a pretty simple reason for loving this scene:  “My noble colleagues.�� Less than an hour ago an assassination attempt was made against my life.”

Less than an hour ago!  I know there’s no shortage of Padme being a badass in this movie, but I personally find this way more stone cold than waving a blaster around.  Someone tries to kill her, she loses a very good friend (and six others apparently), and then she immediately strolls into the Senate anyway.  Knowing that one of the beings in that room likely tried to kill her. 

Besides, this would have reinforced Padme’s role as a political nemesis of Palpatine AND helped the audience understand that Padme had transitioned from Queen to Senator. 

But, really, she’s just badass. 

2.  “Padme’s Parents House” (AOTC; 09:00-12:05)

There are too many reasons to count why cutting this scene was criminal.  Helping add some spark and depth to the Anakin/Padme romance, offering the audience a look at Padme’s mother, father, sister, and nieces, and showing a largely different side of Padme are some major ones.  Besides the radical change in attire (you’re fooling no one, Padme), we get to see her loosen up and be a daughter/sister.  Immediately she’s much more like a 24 year old, blurting out “we’re STARVING!” to her mom, rolling her eyes at her sister, and staring longingly out windows at a hot boy hoping no one will notice (while, once again, absolutely everyone noticed).

1.  “Seeds of Rebellion (Padme’s Apartment)” (ROTS; 09:23-10:25)

I began and ended with elements cut from Padme’s Rebellion subplot, because I feel that’s the biggest blow to her importance in the saga as a whole.  In the theatrical cut it is still possible to infer that she helped found the Rebellion, because she is so close to Bail and Mon and is such a staunch defender of freedom.  But the audience shouldn’t have had to infer, and at least one of the three rebellion scenes should have made it into the film. 

With Padme as an explicit founder of the Rebellion, then Leia leading it and Luke joining it in the OT becomes so much more powerful.  It also helps give depth to the resolution of Padme’s “original sin:” being the one who got Palpatine elected Chancellor.  The OT becomes the story of Padme and Anakin’s kids helping fix their parents’ biggest mistakes:  Leia fixes her mother’s political FUBAR, while Luke fixes their father and the mess he made of the Jedi religion. 

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I wonder what the near-universal embracing of BB-8 into fandom's heart says about the changing nature of geek culture? While R2-D2 can be said to be "cute", he's also beaten up, stoic, grumpy and, if C-3PO is to believed, frequently very rude. BB-8 on the other hand is pure cuteness. Brave, to be sure, but utterly adorable in a way that R2 isn't. I can't help but feel that audiences in 1977 wouldn't have accepted a droid as cute as BB-8 is. Certainly the post-Star Wars films that featured cuter versions of R2 weren't especially successful. Silent Running's Hewey, Dewey and Louie were pretty cute in a film that was looking pretty dated in the early 70s and hardly universally loved. Johnny Five in Short Circuit was pretty cute - but also a killing machine. In the noughties meanwhile we have Wall-E, Adventure Time's BMO and Big Hero 6's Baymax. And now BB-8. It does feel as if "cute" seems a much safer option these days in an era of universal cat videos and geek culture's emergence from the basement. What do you think?

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The Mary Sue has latched onto the reincarnated Anakin theory, citing a page on 9Gag (not suggesting it was stolen; the 9Gag article makes some different points and it's a fairly obvious direction to go if you're trying to think of an alternative to the "Luke's daughter" theory).

I haven't heard the argument that it is a misogynist position to take; for the record, I think that Rey is awesome and will take on all comers who suggest she's some kind of Mary Sue. I think you could make just as strong an argument (unfairly) about the Luke's daughter theory being misogynist; after all, it bases all her agency in the hands of her parents.

Frankly, I think there's a much stronger argument to suggest that the idea that there is something essentialist about a character's gender and that there is something fundamentally wrong with them changing genders is alarmingly transphobic. But there you go.

Who is Rey? My theory

Contains spoilers for The Force Awakens, yadda yadda yadda

Keep reading

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Sadly Trinity syndrome applies, certainly by the time of Jedi when Han is made a general after spending a year in carbonite and put in charge of the forest moon ground force despite Leia being eminently more qualified. Indeed, it ought to be called Leia syndrome.

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It isn't.

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Good point about Maz; I'd forgotten that!

Who is Rey? My theory

Contains spoilers for The Force Awakens, yadda yadda yadda

Keep reading

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And so they heard that. And that made it into this comic book. So it’s the first time, you know, me figuring out my character’s back story suddenly becomes a comic book, becomes canon.

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“Re-imagining four common products from 2010 as if they were designed in 1977: an mp3 player, a laptop, a mobile phone and a handheld video game system. I then created a series of fictitious but stylistically accurate print ads to market them.”

From Alex Varanese.

More images in the Alt1977 series can be found here.

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That's not Wedge; that's Fake Wedge!

Remember when Luke compares shooting womp rats to blowing up a space station

womp rats

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Yes, but FN-2003 is actually Slip. Zeroes is FN-2000.

“Traitor!”

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Who is Rey? My theory

Contains spoilers for The Force Awakens, yadda yadda yadda

One of the things that The Force Awakens did brilliantly was leave the audience with questions. For all the perplexing things that happened in the Prequels, I didn’t walk out of the cinema after watching any of them with any burning mysteries raging in my brain. At least, that is to say, that there were plenty of things that needed answering in the prequels, just that the prequels didn’t answer them (such as what the deal was with Anakin’s conception, who ordered the clone army precisely and what exactly was that Darth Plagueis sequence was about - all questions which have subsequently been explored in subsequent media but left ambiguous in the films).

Obviously, the big reveal at the end of Empire Strikes Back is one of the great moments in film history, but even as a small child, I remember having lots of questions at the end of A New Hope (or “Star Wars” as it was then known). The efficient script is full of little titbits that people obsessed over for years. It’s kind of hard to remember what Star Wars was like before it had the Expanded Universe around to explain away every little bit of dialogue or set dressing, most of which didn’t need any explanation. My memory may be faulty, but what it felt was, well, this. Now. And for all The Force Awakens’ flaws, this is one thing that Abrams achieved brilliantly.

The biggest two mysteries we are left with, which the next film in a scant 18 months will presumably answer are: who is Snoke, and who is Rey, or at least, how are both of them related to the plot. In terms of Snoke, the most popular theory is that Snoke is Plagueis. Many of the attempts at debunking this theory are fairly weak in my opinion. For example, the argument that it couldn’t be Plagueis because at one stage they planned Snoke to be a woman doesn’t really work because at that stage in the development they were just spitballing.

For me, the strongest argument against Snoke being Plagueis is simply that it is too obvious (at one stage I did get excited over the fact that it is never revealed in the films that Palpatine was Plagueis’s apprentice and that Snoke was his actual master, but the fact that Plagueis’s role is confirmed in the novel Tarkin, which is canon, rather kills that theory). For what its worth however, I reckon that even if Snoke doesn’t turn out to be Plagueis, functionally he will to all intents and purposes play the same role; he’ll be some sith master who sat and watched while Sidious had his fun - possibly trapped by Sidious and then freed when he died. That, or he’s one of Palpatine’s advisors that we see in Return of the Jedi, such as “Sim Aloo” (who he actually looks quite a bit like).

The bigger mystery is Rey’s identity, or more pertinently, her parentage. The idea that she is Ben Solo’s sister must be discounted for the simple fact that has now met both her “parents” who didn’t appear to miss her. The most “obvious” answer, that she is Luke’s daughter is probably a bit too obvious, and I can’t help but feel there is a little bit of misdirection going on with the constant references to the lightsaber being Luke’s. As any Jedi student knows, the only lightsaber you own is the one you build yourself.

For a similar reason, I’m not persuaded by the popular theory that she’s Obi-Wan’s granddaughter. The fact that he had the saber in his possession for longer than either Anakin or Luke is neither here nor there as far as I’m concerned. He had his own one, and there is little reason why he would get Anakin’s out and play with it. And the fact that we hear his voice during Rey’s vision doesn’t really mean anything given that we already know that he and Yoda (whose voice is also heard) are both force ghosts.

No, for me, there is only one answer, and that is that Rey is Anakin, reincarnated. And presumably, like Anakin, she has no father.

For this theory to hold water, I offer the following evidence:

1) While Obi-Wan and Yoda do appear in her vision, Anakin - another establushed force ghost - does not. There is some artwork suggesting that a weird Anakin/Vader amalgam was to appear in the vision, but that doesn’t disprove this theory; after all, a young version of Rey also appears in the vision, so why not her previous incarnation?

2) If Luke knew he had a daughter, I seriously doubt he wouldn’t have been keen to find her. It’s also likely that Han and Leia would have known about her and been at least a little suspicious that Rey might have been her after meeting a girl with preternatural abilities and who Maz was keen to give a Skywalker family lightsaber to.

3) The only character who appears to have any interest in Rey’s force abilities is Kylo Ren. He seems especially angry when he first hears about Finn and BB-8 being helped by a girl. Now, we know that Ren has a Vader obsession and he will almost certainly have had visions himself. So it makes sense to me that a girl with force abilities will have troubled his psyche in the past and it now looks as if his visions are starting to come true. Dramatically, it would also be quite satisfying for him to discover that his nemesis is actually also his role model during the great reveal in the climactic moments at the end of Episode VIII.

4) The films draw from Eastern mysticism when it comes to their portrayal of the force. Reincarnation is a common feature of many Eastern philosophies, so this is all drawing from the same wellspring.

5) Anakin/Vader has appeared in the first six episodes of Star Wars. The whole series is about him. So it makes sense for him to remain a key character in Episodes VII-IX.

6) Rey has the exact same skillset as Anakin (great pilot, great engineer). Some of this is clearly learned from her time on Jakku, but it is also clearly innate. She is also a very quick student when it comes to the force. Almost as if she already knew all this and forgot it? Reincarnation will do that to a person.

7) As I alluded to earlier, the whole immaculate conception thing of Anakin’s has never been clearly explained, at least not in the films and primary media. This is an opportunity to clear up a plot hole which fundamentally makes sense of the whole saga.

8) It would really, really piss off the MRAs/real life Kylo Rens.

So there you have it. That’s my theory; what’s yours?