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A WORLD WITHOUT HEROES....

The Kenobi series has undergone sort of a rapid critical reappraisal, mere months after release. The complaints go beyond the usual quibbles about dodgy effects shots and clumsy final episodes. Rather, it seems many fans went into the show very happy to get exactly what they wanted, then came out feeling like they only got exactly what they wanted.

The most cynical interpretation of this phenomenon is that Lucasfilm loaded our plates with the empty calories of fanservice, and our bellies now grumble for lack of substance. As a follow-up to Revenge of the Sith, this show does indeed feel like an afterthought. But Obi-Wan Kenobi has a lot more to offer than just the “rematch of the century.” It’s sort of a spiritual sequel to The Last Jedi, exploring the themes of heroism, failure, and the persistence of hope. Kenobi is flawed, but undeniably thoughtful.

Obi-Wan seems to avoid heroism as a form of self-punishment. It is the people around him who suffer.

Episodes VII and VIII used Luke Skywalker’s self-imposed exile to make a bigger (if not always articulate) point about the necessity of heroes — and even hero worship — in the never-ending struggle against evil and apathy. The hero, as an individual, is fallible and fragile. It’s their heroic stories that have the power to inspire other ordinary, fallible people to listen to their conscience, overcome their fears, and even risk their own lives. Luke’s failure shatters his faith in himself, and blinds him to power and meaning of his own story. To the people who admire him, however, Luke’s failure is just another obstacle for their hero to overcome. Symbolically, Luke’s final act of heroism is to give the entire galaxy an ending to his story: He literally takes on the guise of his former self and goes out in a blaze of glory that no fascist empire could suppress.

The show’s most effective scenes show Imperials violently inserting themselves into peoples' lives, making threats and demanding answers they don’t expect to receive.

Obi-Wan Kenobi is not so elegant, nor can it be. After all, Kenobi’s heroic self-sacrifice was the first thing we ever saw him do. What the show does better than The Last Jedi is demonstrate the real-world costs of Obi-Wan’s failure. We literally see our hero look the other way as the weak are persecuted. Like Luke, Obi-Wan seems to avoid heroism as a form of self-punishment; but it is the people around him who are made to suffer. The Empire and its agents hunt down former Jedi, who are now something like a religious minority, and tear through innocent, ordinary lives like a buzzsaw.

The show’s most effective scenes are those in which the Imperials violently insert themselves into daily life of jerkwater burgs like Anchorhead, making threats and demanding answers they don’t expect to receive. Former Jedi Reva, now an Imperial Inquisitor, cuts a lady’s hands off just for the sake of being scary. Lord Vader walks through a dilapidated village, casually torturing and murdering innocents with his black magic simply to flush Kenobi out of hiding. As another inquisitor says in an early episode, Jedi are drawn to others’ suffering — i.e., you find heroes by creating the need for heroism.

The Empire and its agents tear through innocent, ordinary lives like a buzzsaw.

In Star Wars, a young Luke Skywalker tells us that he hates the Empire but would rather just stay out of their way than fight back. (This is something I’ve addressed before.) In this show, we get a sense of why even the street toughs in Mos Eisley give stormtroopers a wide berth. To live in the Empire, even on a frontier world like Tatooine, is to live in fear of sudden, inexplicable violence. The people of Anchorhead probably still talk about the day Imperial weirdos with laser swords showed up, yelled at everyone, and cut some woman’s hands off.

Kenobi’s mistake with Anakin didn’t create the Empire, just as Luke’s failure with his nephew didn’t create the First Order. For both heroes, their true failure was their refusal to accept failure.

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SCENES FROM “THE DUEL”

Star Wars Visions begins with a short, heavily stylized, anti-canon tribute to 50s and 60s samurai films (jidaigeki). The obvious touchstone for foreign audiences would be the samurai movies director Akira Kurosawa made starring Toshiro Mifune, such as The Seven Samurai and Yojimbo. But the short’s creators are likely pulling from a much broader history of genre movies, TV, and comics.

Like most of the other Visions shorts, “The Duel” is a mashup of canonical Star Wars elements. There are Jedi and there are Sith. It’s unclear what these factions do in this galaxy, but ordinary people know enough about the Sith to identify them by their red lightsabers. There was a war not too long ago, though we don’t know who fought whom nor who won. Local bandits are using discarded Imperial-ish military hardware (including wonderfully repurposed Imperial and First Order stormtrooper gear) to harass a humble, multi-species village. The bandits’ Sith leader in high heels faces down a mysterious wanderer who the villagers refer to as “samurai” and “ronin.” The Force is strong with him, yet he claims not to be a Jedi — “unfortunately.”

Many jidaigeki stories take place in the Warring States period (Sengoku Jidai) of Japanese history, a literal “period of civil war” spanning 1467 to 1615 CE. This era began with a decade-long war that crippled the centralized military government, creating a power vacuum that no one successor was equipped to fill. Without a powerful shōgun at the top of the feudal food chain, regional samurai-class nobles (daimyō) were free to fight, betray, and invade each other with impunity.

A major theme of pop cultural depictions of this era is the breakdown of the medieval social contract. The daimyō feeds his military ambitions with onerous taxes and conscription, then he inevitably fails and dies in disgrace. The warlord’s samurai and other professional fighters are now masterless, unemployed, and often unemployable. Some become mercenaries. Others form bandit gangs and prey on the now defenseless countryside villages.

Farmers, the bottom rung of this feudal ladder, are folk of constant sorrow. Their labor pays for the wars they’re forced to fight in. Their lord’s success means only more taxes and conscription, while his failure will mean bandit raids and chaos.

The samurai heroes of these stories are almost always ronin, i.e., masterless and disgraced. Having wasted the first half of their lives waging war for its own sake, fictional ronin often find purpose and redemption by choosing to protect the defenseless.

As a young Star Wars fan in the pre-prequel era, I envisioned the Jedi Knights being very much like the wandering ronin portrayed in Star Wars Visions. Indeed, the protagonist of “The Duel” is almost exactly how I imagined Darth Vader to have been after breaking from his mentor, Obi-Wan. A warrior who has turned his back on the very concepts of duty and honor in the single-minded pursuit of his own ideals.

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Seriously, this movie? Every. Last. Frame.

The women of the Resistance.

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ROSE’S ROOTS

Rose Tico isn’t a born adventurer. She’s not a princess, soldier, fighter pilot, or space sorceress. She has a plain name and wears a mechanic’s jumpsuit that’s a size and a half too big for her. When we first meet Rose, she’s alone on the lower decks of a Resistance ship, sobbing uncontrollably.

Rose doesn’t seem like a character who belongs in Star Wars and isn’t meant to, at least not at first. And that’s exactly why she does belong. Rose is the kind of character George Lucas had in mind when he wrote the earliest versions of Luke Skywalker, way back in the mid-70s.

George Lucas did not start writing Star Wars with a Luke Skywalker character in mind. There was a “Luke Skywalker” character in the May 1973 story synopsis, but he’s Luke in name only — a gruff general clearly patterned after Toshiro Mifune’s character in Akira Kurosawa’s Hidden Fortress. The name appears again in the May 1974 rough draft, this time attached to an even more grizzled general of the “Jedi Bendu” warriors.

The rough draft does, however, introduce a teenage hero named Annikin (sic), the 18-year-old son of “Jedi Bendu master” Kane Starkiller. Annikin is a far cry from our Luke Skywalker. Annikin is already a trained warrior, born into a Jedi family and living on the run with his father and younger brother. He’s more than a match for the Emperor’s “Sith Knight” assassins. (Note that this story takes place during a Jedi purge, as opposed to a generation after one.) Still, there is a touch of vulnerability to Annikin that would later show up in both Luke Skywalker and Rose Tico: he loses his 10-year-old(!) brother Deak in the first five minutes of the movie(!!), and suffers a brief emotional breakdown.

This little scene isn’t much, taken on its own; but consider it in the context of Lucas’s matinée aesthetic. Annikin is described as tall, “heavy-set,” and “ruggedly handsome” — essentially Buster Crabbe from Flash Gordon. True adventure serial heroes like Gordon simply did not display anything resembling human emotion, only stoic defiance and earnestness. Although there’s only one or two other “actorly” scenes in this very rough draft, the fact that they’re in there at all shows us that Lucas believed his heroes needed some degree of vulnerability.

Lucas, apparently, did not believe his young hero was relatable enough. After aging him down in the first draft, he replaced him entirely in the January 1975 second draft — Luke Starkiller. [1] Second draft Luke is the character at his most “ordinary.”

This Luke is the middle child in a large family of Jedi Bendu knights. He’s never met his father, a living legend known only as “The Starkiller,” and struggles to train his younger brothers, Biggs and Windy. He lives on a backwater planet with his “aunt and uncle,” Owen and Beru Lars — and their “beautiful sixteen-year-old daughter” Leia.

Second Draft Luke is not a born warrior, like his older brother Deak. He has a “laser sword,” but struggles in his training. He’s a history nerd and amateur archeologist who would “rather carve a jud stone, or work on [his] catalog of the ancients” than study the blade. This Luke is no coward, he’s just not a born warrior like Deak.

Ralph McQuarrie’s very first concept drawings for Luke are for this specific version of the character, who looks like a  shorter, huskier version of the Luke we know. McQuarrie draws Luke in a baggy, unflattering tunic, not unlike Rose Tico’s deliberately shapeless jumpsuit. The baggy clothes are, in both instances, reinforcing the character’s narrative: Rose and Luke are both young, out of place, surrounded by a world that’s bigger than them; they prioritize function and comfort over fashion, and would prefer to remain obscure, working in their own nerdy element.

The characters’ body types are equally important. Neither early Luke nor Rose is in any way “overweight.” They’re simply different from the shapes and sizes Hollywood has trained audiences to expect. Again, this is a sort of visual shorthand. We’re supposed to understand both characters as being separate from the wild world of adventure that awaits them. They begin their stories looking “ordinary,” like the audience, itself.[2]  Then, when the characters rise to meet the challenge of their unwanted circumstances, they can change clothes and be transformed into “heroes.” McQuarrie made both of the drawings above at approximately the same time, Summer 1975, depicting Luke as both farmer and Jedi. If J.J. Abrams had as much interest in continuing Rose’s story as he did in finding roles for his actor friends, we might have seen her undergo a similar transformation.

The themes of growth, change, and reluctant heroism were baked into the Star Wars cake from the very beginning:

“[I]n a way the subject [of Star Wars] and everything is young people,” Lucas has said, “and it’s a subject that is the very same subject that American Graffiti is about. It’s about a young boy leaving his world and going off into the unknown to a great adventure. American Graffiti focuses on that final night when that decision is made. Star Wars carries that story on to what happens after you leave.”[3]

[1] The July 1974 “first draft” of The Star Wars is largely the same, mostly just changing names. It does, however, age Annikin (now named Justin Valor) down to 16.

[2] Rian Johnson has compared Rose to the kind of girl he would have been friends with in high school (or something similar, I can’t find the exact quote).

[3] Star Wars, DVD commentary, 2004: 20th Century Fox.

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WAS LUKE SKYWALKER A PACIFIST?


Luke Skywalker’s appearance in last December’s season finale of The Mandalorian rejuvenated the “pacifist Luke” fan conversation. Some interpret Luke’s action-packed cameo as a rebuke to The Last Jedi, and a betrayal of the character’s pacifist beliefs. Others say the episode depicted Luke as a flawed hero who has come to believe in his own legend, arrogant and violent. Fans in the latter camp assert that Luke achieves his full potential as an enlightened, pacifist hero, only at the end of his life.


As usual in “the fan discourse,” everyone is wrong. Luke Skywalker was never a pacifist.


Pacifism is “[t]he belief that war and violence are unjustifiable and that all disputes should be settled by peaceful means.” [1] To be a pacifist, Luke would have to reject the legitimacy of violence under any circumstance. And there’s no real evidence for that. In fact, Luke may be even less pacifist-ish than the Jedi tradition he inherited.


Above: Luke Skywalker makes the bold, radically pacifist choice to not kill a defenseless old man.


BUT ROBBO, WHAT ABOUT WHEN LUKE THREW DOWN HIS LIGHTSABER IN RETURN OF THE JEDI?


Yes, Luke cast his weapon aside. He also picked it up again and clipped it to his belt.

It’s important not to lose sight of what is actually at stake in that fight. The movie goes to incredible, almost comical lengths to show us that the Emperor wants Luke to fight. If Luke loses control and kills his father in a violent rage, that will (by some immutable law of the Force) turn Luke to the Dark Side. Luke throws down his weapon because his real goal isn’t to kill Vader or the Emperor, but confront and defeat the seductive power of the dark side. If it costs him his life, so be it.


Don’t take my word for it. In July 1981, George Lucas explained the situation to screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan:


Luke is angry and is using the dark side and the Emperor keeps saying, “See how much stronger you are becoming—hate him more!” … And just when you think Luke is going to kill Vader, the Emperor says, “Finish him.” Now we have Luke about to kill an unarmed defenseless man; we’ve never done that before. If he kills a defenseless man, especially a defenseless father, then he has gone over to the dark side. But Luke turns off his lazer sword, throws it at the Emperor. “I have controlled my hate; I don’t hate my father.” [2]


Return of the Jedi is not an especially subtle film. Luke tells us exactly why he won’t kill Vader: He’s a Jedi, like his father was before him. He’s not renouncing the Jedi approach to violence, he’s embracing it.



Above: An impressionable child stares in awe at Master Skywalker’s splendid ballet of TV violence.


IF ANYTHING, LUKE SKYWALKER BELIEVED HIS JEDI FOREBEARS WERE TOO PASSIVE.

Once again, my fellow over-thinkers, don’t get so lost in the subtext that you ignore the actual text. Luke kills dozens of people in Return of the Jedi. Some of these people, such as the Imperial scouts, are killed for literally just doing their jobs.


The movies, themselves, portray all of this violence as heroic. The music soars, the camera fixates on the steely resolve in Luke’s eyes, etc. Star Wars adheres to the default moral posture of action-adventure fiction.

The Last Jedi shows us that Luke Skywalker does not change his mind in old age, even after making the single biggest mistake of his life. He considers the Jedi to be failures—not because they strayed from their beliefs—but because they sucked at their job:


[I]f you strip away the myth and look at their deeds, the legacy of the Jedi is failure… . At the height of their powers, they allowed Darth Sidious to rise, create the Empire, and wipe them out.
Luke is simply acknowledging the obvious.

The Jedi of the prequel era failed to defend “peace and justice in the Old Republic.” They lost sight of the most cardinal virtue of Saturday matinée morality: The only valid use of power is to protect the powerless.


A deleted Last Jedi scene makes this very point. In it, Rey sees a boat approaching the island. Luke tells her it’s a raiding party that routinely kills and robs the island’s natives. Rey immediately decides that they have to put a stop to this. Luke responds:


Do you know what a true Jedi Knight would do right now? Nothing… . That burn inside you? That anger, thinking of what the raiders are going to do? The books in the Jedi library say ignore that. Only act when you can maintain balance. Even if people get hurt.



Above: Rey rushes off, weapon in hand, ready to die defending a village of weirdo fish ladies. If that isn’t the Jedi way, then the Jedi just plain suck.


Rey, naturally, runs to the caretakers’ rescue, only to find that Luke had tricked her. Flustered, she says: “I was trying to do something.”


“And that is what the Resistance needs,” Luke responds. 

That’s the opposite of pacifism.

In the real world, the sacred Jedi texts make a valid point. Doing what feels right in the moment often leads to misery and disaster. But, thank the Force, Star Wars isn’t real life.


[1] oxforddictionaries.com.


[2] Rinzler, The Making of Return of the Jedi.

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How to kill four stormtroopers using just a stick.

There are a lot of things in Star Wars that don’t make sense. We all know they don’t make sense. Chirrut’s seemingly superhuman ability to clobber stormtroopers with a stick is, I’m happy to say, not one of those things.

The scene in Rogue One where Donnie Yen’s character fights off a half-dozen troopers is, believe it or not, the only fight scene in any Star Wars movie that isn’t pure choreography. Although Yen’s actions were almost certainly rehearsed, I can assure you that he’s really hurting those stunt men. And he’s hurting them in ways that would absolutely hurt real soldiers wearing real body armor.

That’s because most martial arts that Yen has studied—including Judo, Wing Chun, and Hapkido—are based upon techniques developed for medieval battlefields. Warriors from this era typically wore relatively lightweight (yet dense) armor made of lacquer, leather, metal plates, and sometimes chainmail. Although arrows could pierce such armor, close-range weapons like swords were less effective—to say nothing of bare fists. As such, martial artists learned to attack weak points in the armor (e.g., joints at the elbows, armpits, neck, knees, and belly). In Rogue One, we see Chirrut doing exactly that, jamming his staff into segmented stormtrooper armor as seen above—favoring soft tissue like the throat and armpits. 

Look at that. The stick is literally bending from the force of Chirrut’s weight, right into the soft spot where the trooper’s breastplate and abdominal plate meet. And just under the rib cage. That is cold-blooded, Mr. îmwe…

The other thing ye olde martial artists could do was bypass their opponent’s armor altogether by attacking the joints of the human body. Donnie Yen does this to the hapless trooper he uses as a human shield, slipping his left arm behind the stormy’s right arm while both men face the same direction, then forcibly lifting the trooper’s elbow forward and out. I can tell you from my short and pitiful experience as a martial arts student that this is excruciatingly, blindingly painful. If Donnie had continued lifting that guy’s elbow upward, he would have swept him off of his feet. This is because our bodies will reflexively move themselves in any direction necessary to prevent tearing our own muscles.

Another true to life (and truly painful) thing Chirrut does to his quarry is jam his stave between their throat muscles. This is something you can try at home, kids! Take your thumb (or better yet, an unsharpened pencil or the handle of a wooden spoon) and ram it as hard as you can into the crevice where your neck meets your head. Notice how hard it is to swallow or breathe?

Now jam the same implement into your lower throat, right above your sternum. You’ve now found an entirely new way to suffocate; and I’ll bet your entire body feels compelled to sit down for some weird reason. This is because your neck muscles are all paired, linked together like rubber bands stretched laterally from your chest to your chin. And they don’t like to be forced apart! You may also notice that whatever direction you’re jabbing, that’s mysteriously the same direction your upper body feels compelled to go. This is how Chirrut/Donnie manages to swing that trooper around like a human shield: he’s forcing his foe’s right arm up, which gets him on his tippy toes, then pokes the stick into the guy’s throat to move him to the left or right.

One cool thing to consider: How would space kung fu have adapted to fight droids? Their joints aren’t like humanoid joints, and they have no musculoskeletal system at all. More importantly, droid bodies won’t react to pain, which severely limits the effectiveness of just about anything an unarmed human could do. The thing about Star Wars droids, though, is that they seem to have very human-like sensory limits and reaction speeds (which is ridiculous but necessary for space opera storytelling). Chirrut’s martial art has probably developed movement techniques that confuse droid targeting sensors. We already see Chirrut moving weirdly, swooping side to side, when fighting the troopers, which I’m guessing was something Donnie added just to show how his character might throw off his enemies’ aim. I’ve heard that ninja in feudal Japan had a weird walking technique that, viewed at a distance or in the dark, looked like the movement of a deer. This supposedly threw off any guards who might be looking their way. Droid targeting is likely tuned to focus on typical aggressive humanoid movements, and might be confused by erratic motions, or unnaturally stiff movement—anything that doesn’t seem human. If the droids can’t see body heat, Chirrut might wave his robes around to mask his shape from droids as well.

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Why did Leia stop to pick up an elderly Jedi, anyway?

Imagine you're Princess Leia. You're a member of the Imperial Senate who has just committed treason. Rebels, who were financed and equipped by your father, have just stolen secret blueprints for a planet-destroying superweapon from a fortified government archive during a heated battle. At least a dozen of your own crew died just trying to get these blueprints onto your ship, all killed by a 2-meter tall cyborg wizard in black body armor. The same guy who literally just watched your ship narrowly escape him and jump into hyperspace. As per your father's instructions, you are to bring the stolen plans to Alderaan, where your planet's brightest minds will scrutinize them for a weakness.

But before you do that, dad asked you to stop by some dirtball nowhere planet and pick up an old man who used to be a space-cop.

If you were Princess Leia, wouldn’t you ask why? Considering that 10,000 Jedi failed to stop the Emperor, why risk your life — and the fate of the galaxy — to pick up just one? With an evil space-wizard hot on your tail, wouldn’t you consider skipping the old man and dropping out of hyperspace someplace safer? What can this one guy do that’s so important? Is Kenobi an impossibly gifted fighter pilot? Or a brilliant engineer?

Nope. As we learned in the prequels, the Jedi were just a bunch of dudes who could jump really high and knock people over with their minds. If that’s all they were, then Bail Organa’s plan is terrible. But Rogue One was written to sync up with the original movie’s concept of the Jedi Knights, and the original movie’s Jedi Knights were something altogether different than what they became.

The rough drafts of Star Wars portray the Jedi Knights more or less like medieval knights or samurai — i.e., a hereditary class of career soldiers but with psychic powers. Lucas’s earliest drafts feature several Jedi generals, ship captains, and the like. In ye olden days, the Galactic Republic did not maintain a military, but would instead send Jedi to command the armed forces of individual planets when necessary.

But in addition to natural military expertise, the Jedi could also use their psychic power to influence and affect the fighting spirit of entire armies. It's something that's been explored in the EU for almost as long as there's been an EU. But this power, sometimes called "battle  meditation, didn't originate with Knights of the Old Republic, nor with Tim Zahn's books. It's from way back in the second draft of Star Wars, January 28, 1975.

In this version, the light and dark sides of the Force are called the Ashla and the Bogan. When the Knights of the Sith are in the battlefield, the power of the Bogan weighs their adversaries down with feelings of hopelessness and despair. See, for instance, this exchange between Han and Luke during their escape attempt:

HAN It's no use...we're lost.

LUKE No, no, there's a debris chute. It's the Bogan force making you feel that way. Don't give up hope... fight it!

In contrast, the Jedi Bendu can use the power of the Ashla, the light, to improve their forces' morale, maintain their soldiers' focus, and make their enemies freak out. For instance:

SITH KNIGHT Yes, my Lord, the Ashla Force is strong upon us. I can't hold the panic. How could it be?

VADER We must strain -- counter the force. Their attack is organized; they're going for the poles. Concentrate there.

Old-timers like “Grande Mouff Tarkin” (a good guy in this version of the story) know of this power, but doubt the decimated Jedi Bendu can still pull it off. Rather than rely on the ancient warrior Starkiller, Tarkin wants to have a Dune-style cyborg (i.e., living!) computer create the battle plan:

TARKIN With all due respect, sir, the time has come for it to be said... After our crushing defeat, and the destruction of Ogana Major by this Death Star... the Council has voted to trust the cybormitic [sic] analysis for future attack and planning procedures. Your contact with THE FORCE OF OTHERS is weak to the point where it can no longer be trusted. This new attack formula is contrary to the cyborg plan and depends too much on faith...

This scene survives in the final draft as my beloved Death Star conference scene, in which it is Lord Vader and not a Jedi who is being called into question. Note that Vader insists that the Force, itself, is a far more potent weapon than a planet killer. He wouldn’t say this unless the Empire could somehow rely upon the Force to guide them to victory. This “battle meditation” ability (for lack of a better term) would also add extra weight to Ben Kenobi’s boast that his death will only make him more powerful. As a ghostly presence, he’s able to guide Luke to victory in a way that might not have been possible while Ben was alive. Finally, don’t forget that the Jedi-less Rebels still go into battle saying “May the Force be with us,” which is exactly what quasi-religious spirit-generals like Starkiller must have been saying to fighter pilots for centuries.

So that’s why it’s so important for the Rebels to call General Kenobi back into service: The Alliance is hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned and needs to call upon a higher power (particularly after most of their capital ships were destroyed or captured above Scariff in Rogue One) to help them do the impossible. 

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Who does Darth Vader hate?

For all the screen time he gets, we don’t really know much about Darth Vader’s inner life. What are his likes and dislikes? What are his feelings toward the Emperor, Tarkin, and any others who outrank him? This wasn’t explored in the movies, and has been inconsistently portrayed in ancillary media. What I can provide you, however, is a short list of Stuff Darth Vader Hates. May it give you a deeper insight into the Dark Lord’s evil brain.

Darth Vader hates the Imperial Senate. These clowns have apparently thwarted Vader before. He has a job to do—ferret out rebels and uncover their “hidden fortress”—and the Imperial Senate is seems more interested in appeasement. How do I know? Well, for one, Darth Vader’s underlings (who often have American accents like his own) are worried that arresting Leia will piss off the Senate. More importantly, the dark lord derides previous “mercy missions” by Princess Leia, which means she has a history of negotiating peace with dissident worlds before guys like Darth Vader can show up and kick some sense into their rebel asses. In contrast, Leia’s security detail has a rehearsed response for any question: “This is a consular ship. We’re on a diplomatic mission.” This time, however, Darth Vader has traced the stolen Death Star plans to a sitting senator. He has irrefutable proof of her criminal activity. This time, it seems the Emperor has given Vader carte blanche to do whatever it takes to recover the plans. This time there will be “no one to stop” him.

Darth Vader also hates the Imperial elites. On the other end of the spectrum, there are the dudes sitting around the Death Star’s conference table. These guys are military governors of various Imperial territories, and their primary concern is maintaining order in their regions. They treat Darth Vader as an occultist weirdo, a Rasputin-like sorcerer the Emperor has imposed upon them. (This is built upon in the Archie Goodwin newspaper strips.) In the radio dramatization, Motti repeatedly suggests to Tarkin that he should use the Death Star to usurp power from the Emperor. Darth Vader, in turn, thinks of these guys as infidels. Faced with civil war, their solution is to pin all their hopes on this new weapon they’ve built—nothing more than a really big gun. Vader hates them for their arrogance. The Force is the real weapon, and it lends its strength to whomever is deserving. By putting their faith into their “technological terrors,” these twits are ignoring the possibility that the rebels will harness the power of the Force and use it against them. Which they do.

Darth Vader hates incompetent boobs like Admiral Ozzel. It’s interesting to compare the ill-fated Admiral Ozzel and Captain Needa to General Veers and Admiral Piett. Veers, of course, is the spitting image of competence: He does exactly as ordered, delivering the Rebel base to Lord Vader with a swift and efficient assault. While Piett makes mistakes, such as letting the Millennium Falcon escape with a damaged hyperdrive, they are really the fault of underlings like Needa. Darth kills Ozzel and Needa because they had just one job, and they blew it.

Darth Vader hates careerist nitwits like Director Krennic. For all his glorious villainy, Darth Vader isn’t a strategist. Whatever task he’s given—e.g., finding stolen data tapes—the Dark Lord pursues it single-mindedly. Did the Emperor tell him to protect the Death Star? Then he’s going to get into a TIE Fighter and shoot down the rebel pilots individually. Did the Millennium Falcon just go into an asteroid field? Then guess who else is going into an asteroid field—it’s everyone. Krennic is a schemer, a man with vision. Rather than approaching the Death Star as a job to be completed, Krennic looked at is as a personal project, a step up the Imperial career ladder and a chance to stick it to Tarkin. If it were Darth Vader’s job to build the Death Star? Simple. Choke, kill, and promote your way to a healthy and productive office dynamic.

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How Fast is Hyperspace?

Although the movies make it seem like hyperspace make time and distance irrelevant, that can't be true. I don't mean instantaneous travel is scientifically impossible (though I'm sure it is), I mean it's at odds with the implicit logic of the Star Wars setting. In this case, the logic of hyperspace travel isn't implied by plot or dialogue, but by our own world. Distance must mean something to the characters because it means something to the audience. We can't help but assume distance is relevant, no matter what the movies show us.

Star Wars has always depended—heavily—on the audience's assumption that the logic of our world applies unless and until a movie contradicts it. (For instance, nobody doubts that the humans in Star Wars reproduce sexually even though this is never expressly stated.) That's the secret ingredient that allows the storytellers to place all of the action in a zany space opera world without taking time to explain any of it. Hyperspace, like moisture farming, spice mines, space gangsterism, etc., isn't explained because audience is filling in the gaps with its own earthling experience. We assume growing up on a moisture farm is as humble and isolated an existence as growing up on a dairy farm, and so did the man who wrote he story and the actors who performed it. The only major thing the movies bother to explain is the Force, because there is no analogue to space magic in the real world.

Although hyperspace is no less magical than the Force, it isn't explained because the movies presented it as if it were simply the fastest means of travel available. We see that although a farmer like Luke is excited by the prospect of traveling this way, his mind isn't blown by the very idea of it. Interstellar travel is presented as expensive to someone of Luke's means, but not unthinkably so. Most importantly, we also see that it takes a skilled professional to safely "jump" to hyperspace. (It "ain't like dusting crops," after all.) Hyperspace travel is, in Luke's world, more or less what air travel is in ours—or at least how air travel was in the 1930s adventure serials Star Wars was built out of. When Luke and Ben travel by hyperspace from Tatooine to Alderaan, it's pretty much like Ingrid Bergman flying from Morocco to the United States in Casablanca.

It's not just the audience that assumes Earth norms apply. The characters in Star Wars, all created exclusively by earthlings, talk and act as if the distance between stars still means something:

Luke tells Threepio that "if there's a bright center to the universe, you're on the planet that it's farthest from." This implies that the distance between Tatooine and the cultural centers of the galaxy is meaningful.

Han says the Falcon will make "point five past lightspeed," which means there's some speed measurement that  can outrun light without entering hyperspace, and that this too is meaningful.

Han brags about how he's "flown from one side of the galaxy to the other," which isn't really brag-worthy if anyone with a hyperdrive could do it in a weekend.

All of this is pure nonsense, but we don't worry about that as long as we feel like our assumptions are still valid.

The absurd speed of hyperspace travel doesn’t work unless our attention is fixated on something else. For instance, when you stop to think about it, it’s kind of absurd how Empire Strikes Back intercuts scenes of Luke’s training on Dagobah, which seems to take place over several weeks, with scenes of Han and Leia’s escape from Hoth to Bespin, which they manage to accomplish in about a day. This paradox doesn’t jump out at me because, other than the fact that nobody changes clothes, there are no visual or narrative clues as to what is happening when.

Compare this to Force Awakens, in which Kylo Ren appears to travel from Starkiller Base to Takodana in the time it takes Rey to run a couple kilos. After rewatching the scene several times, I think Kylo is already in the same system as Rey when he watches the Starkiller beam pass by; but because there’s no shot establishing that, it seems as if he just magically teleported himself across the galaxy.

Take care, Lucasfilm. Movie magic is a finicky thing.

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A spoiler-free Rogue One review from one of those obnoxious OT purists.

Ever since word of Rogue One’s extensive reshoots leaked last summer, there’s been a fear rumbling in the gut of Star Wars fandom. Reshoots are normal, but six weeks of them? That’s a telltale sign of last-minute plot changes, my friends. And sure enough, the final version of Rogue One bears all the hallmarks of a movie that was made out of another movie. There are superfluous characters and narrative leftovers flapping around everywhere.

But then it all comes together. And it comes together so artfully that most of the movie’s cruder elements can be appreciated the way we appreciate flaws in handblown glass. They make a 200-million-dollar, shareholder-pleasing blockbuster feel like it was touched by human beings.

The first third of the movie is a case in point. It centers on various characters’ attempts to find a guerrilla leader, Saw Gerrera, who has some of that classic “information vital to the rebellion.” Saw, in a subtle nod to George Lucas’s earliest drafts of The Star Wars, appears to have lost his mind along with most of his body fighting the Empire. He gets one good line, where he laughs off the possibility of an attempt on his life: “Kill me? There isn’t much of me left.” The same could be said of Saw’s Taliban-esque guerrillas, and of the occupied holy city of Jedha. Everything that comes in contact with the Empire is, in some way, broken and ruined. That even includes Imperial skunkworks boss Orson Krennic, whose life’s work is casually stolen from him by a sneering “old boys’ club” of military governors.

Even if such information doesn’t advance the plot, it does finally give us a good idea about the Rebel Alliance and why it exists. It’s a shame the Jedha sequences weren’t more carefully integrated into the story; but Jedha is still the most fascinating location Star Wars has taken us since the Mos Eisley Spaceport. (And of all Rogue One’s cringeworthy shoutouts to the original movies, there’s an encounter on Jedha that is worth the effort.)

Unfortunately, Rogue One shares the prequel trilogy’s obsession with taking us on wild rides to places we don’t need to go. By my count, there are seven unique worlds total. The unnamed planet where we are first introduced to Lord Vader is so unnecessary as to be offensive. Even though its design was lifted directly from original trilogy concept art, the garish CGI establishing shots clash with every other frame of the movie. As soon as you see it, you know it’s something they did simply because they could. Thankfully, the little scene that unfolds on this world is pretty good.

The absurd number of location changes notwithstanding, Rogue One mercifully gives the audience a few chances to catch its breath—something no Star Wars movie has done since Phantom Menace. In the final heist sequence, Gareth Edwards, his two writers, and three editors somehow manage to communicate the heroes’ multiple sci-fi nonsense-objectives in such a way that the audience actually understands what every character is trying to do and why. That is something no Star Wars movie has done since Star Wars. In my theater, there were audible gasps whenever things went wrong. That kind of movie magic only exists when everyone is 100% dialed in.

I would not recommend anyone watch it before seeing Star Wars for the first time. In fact, although they really do sync up pretty well, I wouldn’t recommend a Rogue One, Star Wars double feature even to diehard fans. Because, stupid shout-outs aside, this movie is its own thing. It’s a chaotic mix of Return of the Jedi and The Dirty Dozen—the sacrifice of war with a little Saturday matinee warmth and optimism. This hybrid spirit shines through in the performances of Felicity Jones and Diego Luna (whose understated portrayal of hitman-with-a-heart-of-gold, Cassian Andor, isn’t getting the praise it deserves). Both characters dive headfirst into a suicide mission that the rebel high command refuses to sanction, not because it’s the “right thing to do,” but because it’s the only way to justify previous sins and sacrifices for the rebel cause. It’s the kind of nuanced statement that has no place in The Adventures of Luke Skywalker. But there were hints of it way back in 1980, when Yoda warned his student against saving his friends by risking “all for which they have fought and suffered.” 

Yes, Rogue One often seems like it doesn’t know what kind of movie it wants to be. But it does decide, and its confidence in its choice won me over.

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Many of these scenes were supposed to occur in Lord Vader's iron castle. The message for the audience was that, with all his power, Darth Vader still feared one man. And Darth naturally hated anyone who could make him feel powerless. But to kill the Emperor, he would need help from Luke Skywalker, the son of the man Darth murdered over 20 years earlier.

This motivation was present in Leigh Brackett's draft, but was probably dropped after George Lucas decided to make the dark lord into Luke's father. It sort of diminished Darth Vader's character a bit, but this wasn't really his story. What really mattered was giving Luke a meaningful challenge.

Sketches of Vader’s meditation chamber and the Emperor          // The Art of Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back                       // by Ralph McQuarrie

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Why can’t stormtroopers shoot? There’s a bad answer and there’s a good answer.

Question: How come the good guys in Star Wars seem to hit stormtroopers without even aiming, while the stormtroopers themselves can light up an entire room without hitting anything? In the prequels, we saw that clone troopers could nail battle droids one-per-shot like they were Lee Van Cleef. What gives?

Bad Answer: It’s because stormtroopers really did suck! In fact, the heroes of the original trilogy were never in any real danger! The reason Ben Kenobi says “only Imperial stormtroopers are so precise” is because he’s a dumb old man who is confusing them with clones! After the prequel era, the Empire got cheap for some reason, hired regular schmoes to replace the clones, and skimped on their training! Sure, the Empire would pay to arm hundreds of millions of soldiers, feeding each of them three meals a day and handling all their medical care. And the Empire would pay to outfit each of them with head-to-toe body armor, including specialized armor for cold and tropical climates. But marksmanship training? That would just be silly!

Good Answer: Stormtroopers can’t hit our rebel heroes because it’s a movie, and random bad guys in movies have never been able to hit the heroes. This was true of the westerns and war movies Star Wars was based on, and it’s still true in the Marvel Studios blockbusters of today. You probably don’t even notice it in anything but Star Wars, and there are good reasons for that: You’ve seen Star Wars a hundred times; but more importantly, in the Star Wars galaxy the blaster shots are completely visible. They glow bright red! And they move way, waaaay slower than real bullets! If you did the same thing in The Wild Bunch or Captain America: The Winter Soldier you’d see the bad guys there can’t hit easy targets either. Yet when stormtroopers are aiming at random people—when the story allows them to be scary bad guys—and they’re fighting nobodies like the white helmet guys on Princess Leia’s ship, stormtroopers certainly hit their fair share.

As for the prequel era, those clone troopers had the advantage of (a) being on the good guys’ team, and (b) fighting a wall of harmless CGI droids that could be mowed down like crabgrass without sacrificing the PG rating. It’s a contrivance like any other. Considering that there are now five Star Wars movies with “stormtrooper marksmanship,” and up to three more on the way, it’s kind of ridiculous to keep contorting the logic of the entire Star Wars galaxy to fit within the parameters of what we saw in two of the prequels. Just chalk it up to movie magic and go about your business. Move along.

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Learner Versus Master.

Another batch of screens from Harakiri, which I featured in an earlier post. I’m still thinking about that famous duel between Ben Kenobi and his wayward pupil, Darth Vader. It’s one of the earliest elements of the Star Wars backstory, predating even Lucas’s April 1978 decision to merge Darth and Luke’s murdered father into the same character. As indicated by Darth’s line “When I left you, I was but the learner,” their climactic duel was supposed to be rather one-sided. In short, Ben effed Darth up. Quite handily. In my mind’s eye, it went down very much like this incredible duel in Harakiri, which demonstrates the absolute dominance of the (slightly) older samurai over a younger, less seasoned opponent. It ends without showing the final moments. Instead, the movie cuts to the “present,” where the hero tosses a severed topknot into the dirt, before the feet of the upstart samurai’s evil master. The victor then proceeds to slaughter everyone in that room.

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Dark Side Pilgrims?

Now this is interesting. Apparently some Force-worshipping pilgrims to Jedha wear red, burka-like shrouds that bear a strong resemblance to the red-robed “Imperial Royal Guards” seen in Return of the Jedi. The resemblance is almost certainly intentional, even if Lucasfilm hasn’t decided what it all means.

Let’s start with what we can reasonably infer. If they’re pilgrims, they’ve traveled to Jedha from another world for religious reasons. The only other Force-worshiper we know of in this time period—Chirrut—doesn’t wear such garb. (Chirrut and his pal Baze are apparently from Jedha, itself, and are not on a pilgrimage.) Unless the shrouds are everyday clothing on their planet (which seems impractical, given that the shrouds even cover the hands and fingers), we can assume the garments have some sacred purpose. They’re the space opera version of the irham worn during a hajj to Mecca. In fact, a quick search revealed similar clothing worn by Christian pilgrims in medieval Europe, as well as a striking outfit still worn by Japanese pilgrims (pictured above) while hiking to the Three Grand Shrines of Kumano, a Shinto tradition. Note that each tradition settled on loose-fitting robes and/or a walking stick as part of their ensemble.

Since we’re assuming the similarity between the Jedha pilgrims and the Emperor’s guards is intentional, it’s only natural to ask whether they’re adherents of the Dark Side. If they were, there’s no reason they couldn’t share the same holy sites as people like Chirrut, Lor San Teka, and Maz. Although a Jedi Knight must eschew the darkness, an unpowered person might be able to safely ponder its mysteries while still leading a normal life. If the Force is like the Dao, or like the Hindu Brahman, then the Dark Side would be essential to the entire belief system. For example, in Hinduism one of the principal aspects of God is the beautiful and fearsome warrior Kāli, who represents the most powerful, dreadful, and essential of forces—time. Not just time in general, but time that brings death and total collapse. As best I can tell, Kāli represents cleansing destruction. She wears a necklace of human heads and a skirt of human limbs and shrieks with mindless fury. Yet She is nonetheless the “mother of all,” and protector of the righteous. The Mahanirvana-tantra describes the paradox beautifully:

Because Thou devourest time itself, Thou art Kāli, the original form of all things … Re-assuming after Dissolution Thine own form, dark and formless, Thou alone remainest as One, ineffable and inconceivable… Thou art the Beginning of all, Creatrix, Protectress, and Destructress that Thou art.

To the western mindset, Kāli seems almost satanic. (That’s how Her worshippers were cartoonishly portrayed in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.) But She is worshipped and revered by all Hindus — even adored in some places. There are entire sects of Hinduism devoted to Kāli. She’s like the lightning that sparks a forest fire, burning up dead growth and fertilizing the earth so new plants can sprout.

Any believer in the Force would have to acknowledge that the mystical energy field lends its power to good and evil alike. On a certain level, the Force transcends morality. If there are Dark Side pilgrims on Jedha, true believers would have to welcome them.

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“Season’s Greetings from the EMPIRE” by landomcquade

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Between takes

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It’s nice to see Lucasfilm paying attention to classic stormtrooper armor/pauldrons for the first time in 39 years. (Pauldrons are those color-coded shoulder thingies.) We saw them make a big comeback in TFA, so I was kind of expecting to see it in Rogue One. But it’s details like this that make me feel pretty good about the movie’s respect for the OT, cartoon characters notwithstanding.

Now if only someone had had the sense to remove the very NOT-1977 hairline detailing from the tank trooper helmets…

‘Rogue One’: New ‘Star Wars’ Images Revealed in Topps Trading Cards