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9worldstales · 4 years ago

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MCU Loki: Why I fear they failed to deliver what they promised

At this point I’m kind of confused by who the “Loki” series is trying to reach or which is the goal/message they’re trying to pass along.

They had tried to intrigue assorted audience but, if you ask me, the series has often failed to deliver what it seemed to promise.

Of course I might be wrong. Or maybe I'm not seeing another type of audience the series aimed and managed to reach.

When the series started I wanted to keep a positive mentality and hope whatever seemed not to work would be fixed along the way or have a reason for existing that I just wasn't seeing because I hadn't seen the full story yet.

However, after 5 episodes I'm starting to lose hope the series will make a genuine effort to reach the fans at whom it seemed to aim.

PART 1 – “LOKI” IS NOT FOR THE OLD FANS WHO PRODUCED META SHOWING HOW HIS TRAUMA DAMAGED HIM

"I think it's the struggle with identity, who you are, who you want to be. I'm really drawn to characters who are fighting for control. Certainly you see that with Loki over the first 10 years of movies, he's out of control at pivotal parts of his life, he was adopted and everything and that manifest itself through anger and spite towards his family." [Loki's Struggle With His Identity Confirmed To Be A Focus Of His Disney+ Series]

What was it about Loki as a character that attracted you? He’s just fun, for one. He has a very playful sense of humor about him. I like how he never quite lets you know what he’s thinking. Beyond that, what I connect to about him is the same thing the legions of fans do, which is his humanity and his vulnerability. This is a guy who—yes, on the one hand, he was the prince of Asgard, seems like a nice life—but his father, in fact, killed his actual birth father, adopted him, lied to him about his heritage and parentage his entire life, he was forced to live in the shadow of his oafish older brother who was born to be king. He’s experienced a lot of trauma, and I think that what he’s looking for is just a little bit of control over his life. Which he feels like maybe he’s never quite had. That’s something I think we can all relate with. [From Loki to Doctor Strange and Star Wars, Michael Waldron Is the New Franchise Whisperer]

Let’s be honest, the audience for the “Loki” series is not really meant to be Marvel movies old time fans who enjoyed “Thor” and “The Avengers”, made countless Meta analyzing Loki’s behaviour and who wanted answers about what happened to Loki prior to “The Avengers” or wanted to see Loki’s family terrible dynamics be discussed, or at least to see explored the wrong dynamics of Loki’s interracial adoption (he’s taken away from his planet, the truth is hidden from him, his look is changed to disguise him as an Asgardian, nothing is done against the racial hate for the Jotuns at which Loki is exposed, even witnessing it from his brother) or talk how much in control of himself Loki was during “The Avengers” (okay, the web said the sceptre manipulated Loki, but what about acknowledging that in his own series? It doesn’t have to come from Loki who had no idea he was manipulated but someone could mention ‘think yourself lucky here the stones don’t work, they’ve the nasty tendency to manipulate people’).

The series has avoided digging into all that as much as they could.

Even when Loki talks with Sylvie, the most we get is a small big about how Frigga was awesome in his eyes and taught him magic, but this isn’t meant to explain any of the issues Loki had with his family, it just make Sylvie feel bad because she can’t remember her adoptive mother, as for the D.B. Cooper born out of a bet with Thor, yeah, fun but completely random. What’s meant to be the message about family dynamics here, that it was the bets between Thor and Loki that caused Loki to decide to conquer Earth? Or what about the Sif loop? Is it there to push on Loki the blame of his poor relation with Sif?

No, clearly not.

In regard to Loki the Frigga flashback is there to remark he had a loving and supportive family while the other two are there to have Loki admit he is ‘a mischievous scamp’, ‘a horrible person’ and ‘a narcissist’.

To put it in Classic Loki’s words: ‘Damn it! Animals, animals! We lie and we cheat, we cut the throat of every person who trusts us, and for what? Power. Glorious power. Glorious purpose! We cannot change. We're broken, every version of us. Forever. And whenever one of us dares try to fix themselves, they're sent here to die.’

In short it’s all Loki’s fault if he does bad, nothing happened to him that could have messed him up, he’s just a horrible person… however…

PART 2 – “LOKI” IS NOT FOR THE OLD AND NEW FANS WHO BELIEVED LOKI TO BE A DANGEROUS, EVIL, PSYCHOPATH VILLAIN EITHER

"Loki is an a**, and that makes my life as a writer, easy." ... "Due to the trauma in Loki’s life, I would even [accept a story] in which he is committed to being all bad." [Michael Waldron on Loki: He’s an a**. That makes things easy]

Considering the series is trying to pin SOLELY on Loki his wrongdoing, completely skipping the toxic way in which he was raised you might think they want to paint him as an evil, psychopath who was just born bad.

But no, that’s not the intention, we see it from the start.

Loki is given a quick briefing on how his beloved family loved him despite him hurting them, a briefing that contains false information which would work if we accept the briefing as manipulative but, at this point I’m not so sure that was the author’s intent. The Doylist purpose of the briefing is clearly to show the audience how Loki cares for his family, how he still has feelings, feels pain at the idea Frigga and Odin died and wish to make up with his brother.

It’s not just they loved him and did nothing wrong toward him, it’s also he who loved them and didn’t mean to harm them. That’s why we’re fed that damn discourse about Loki sending the Dark Elves to kill Frigga, because the series wants to remark that no, Loki didn’t want to kill his family, he loved them.

Tom Hiddleston used to say what Loki is came from a place of pain but the series didn’t explore that place of pain… it just gave him more pain and not just in episode 1. Episode 2 has him discovering Asgard is destroyed, episode 3 has him remembering Frigga, episode 4 shows him believing Sylvie die and watching Mobius being pruned. He doesn’t cry in Ep 5, episode 5 wants us to truly feel bad for Sylvie, not for him, but there’s a lot of bitterness from Classic Loki who commits a heroic suicide so you might say we get a sad Loki anyway.

And this also works as a shock to make him change his mind about his ‘glorious purposes’. Sorta, with Thor reminding us he’s not so bad and Loki explaining his behaviour as “I don't enjoy hurting people. I... I don't enjoy it. I do it because I have to, because I've had to. Because it's part of the illusion. It's the cruel, elaborate trick conjured by the weak to inspire fear.”

Plot-wise, this is completely useless.

The show will prove Sylvie is not Loki and has completely different motivations and Mobius, being an expert in Variants, should know.

What’s more why would Mobius care if Loki enjoys hurting people or not?

His goal is to capture Sylvie with Loki’s help. The most he should care about is how to keep Loki loyal to him, not if Loki has fun hurting people or not which, in fact, is a knowledge that won’t be used in his investigation.

No, this is here for the viewers, to tell them Loki isn’t a sadistic, evil villain, he’s someone weak who tries to scare others so as not to look weak. As Mobius will put in ‘a scared little boy, shivering in the cold’ who has an ‘insecure need for validation’.

What’s more?

The show will try his hardest to establish he’s not even competent.

Let’s talk of him as a fighter.

In the movies Loki is a competent fighter and side material establish he’s pretty strong, definitely much more than a human.

In “The Avengers” we see Captain America needs Iron Man’s help to beat him and, anyway, Loki’s plan was to be captured. Loki manages to walk away on his feet when Coulson hits him with that superspecial weapon and it’ll take him to be Hulk smashed after a fight with Thor and a meeting with an explosive arrow of Hawkeye before he can’t fight any longer.

This doesn’t happen in the “Loki” series.

Loki gets beaten up by various people in 4 episodes, preferably women (B-15, the people possessed by Sylvie, the guards on the train, Sif). You might say in episode 5 he’s not but actually Classic Loki is the one who gets swallowed by Alioth and our Loki instead survives because he has Sylvie supporting him as, on his own he couldn’t even distract Alioth.

Let’s talk of him as a wizard.

He can use magic, impressive magic but… it serves him mostly nothing. In the TVA his magic doesn’t work. Outside of it is mostly useless. It doesn’t help win fights. The Tempad he caused to disappear gets broken. To beat Alioth they needs enchantment, not his own magic. What’s more, when they’ve to go on the train his disguise wouldn’t have worked without Sylvie’s enchantment and, if this wasn’t enough, he got drunk, removed the disguise and wasn’t even able to make tickets appear.

Classic Loki too, with his impressive illusions is ultimately a distraction. Alioth tears easily through his illusions which aren’t even solid.

Let’s talk of him as a planner.

All Loki will accomplish is to escape from the Time theatre for a brief period in episode 1 and figure out Sylvie hides in apocalypses in episode 2. The rest of his plans fails or are not plan or are mocked over and not even put into practice.

Let’s talk about him as a manipulator with a silver tongue.

He can’t even persuade Mobius when he’s telling him the truth, Mobius dismisses it as a lie due to ‘cockroach's survival mechanism’.

And psychologically?

He’s just someone who crave attention because he’s a narcissist scared of being alone. Not a psychopath.

Loki is not meant to be a dangerous, evil, psychopath villain in this series, he’s a not serious man, a clown, a scared little boy in need of attention, a narcissist who needs to be loved.

Welcome to cartoon villain Loki, this Loki isn’t the Variant of “The Avengers” Loki, he’s the Variant of “Avengers Assemble”Loki… only he’s even less competent than him.

PART 3 – “LOKI” IS NOT EVEN HERE FOR GENERAL MARVEL MOVIE FANS

"That's a lot of Infinity Stones. That's true but they are useless there in the TVA, so I don't know. Is that gun loaded or not? We'll see..." [Loki Writer Comments On Whether TVA’s Infinity Stones Will Return In MCU]

“We had to create an insane institutional knowledge of how time travel would work within the TVA so the audience never has to think about it again. It was a lot of drawings of squiggly timelines.” Marvel already made its case for how time travel works in Avengers: Endgame, but that, Waldron points out, “is the way the Avengers understand it.” With a TV show it’s a little different. “I was always very acutely aware of the fact that there’s a week between each of our episodes and these fans are going to do exactly what I would do, which is pick this apart. We wanted to create a time-travel logic that was so airtight it could sustain over six hours. There’s some time-travel sci-fi concepts here that I’m eager for my Rick and Morty colleagues to see.” [How the Man Behind LokiIs Shaping Marvel’s Phase 4 and Beyond]

BC: The TVA is there to clean everybody up? MW: Yeah, Avengers: Endgame… that's how The Avengers understand time travel. 'Loki,' episode one, is how the TVA explains time travel to Loki and we're certainly building on what's come before us. [Loki: Michael Waldron On Gender Fluidity, Mephisto, Time Travel & More]

It’s true “Loki” is focusing on a new corner of the MCU but it interconnects very poorly with the movies before it.

Although Loki escaped with the Tesseract... it just dismisses completely the Infinity Stones.

Despite talking a lot about timelines and creating branching realities it waved away the whole plot of "Avengers: Endgame" as apparently supposed to happen even though it should have created branching realities.

We see Renslayer wave away how the Avengers went in the past causing the Tesseract to end up in Loki’s hands... and all the other things the Avengers did that affected the past goes unmentioned.

Bruce meeting the Ancient, Thor meeting his mother and taking away Thor’s hammer, Rocket being seen as he steals the reality stone from Jane, Tony stealing a suitcase and damaging the place in which the Tesseract was kept then meeting Howard Stark, 4 flacons of Pyn particles missing, an alarm given to the military bases, how Steve managed to bring back the sceptre if that timeline was pruned, how a timeline handled being without Thanos and Co as they went in the future or how they clearly didn’t bring the orb back the second they took it as Nebula remained unconscious there and nobody came and when she woke up Thanos could get her. It didn’t even explain why Steve remaining with Peggy didn’t change anything.

It's not that the audience has all explained... it's that they were told to dismiss it as 'meant to happen' and that was it.

What's more, the TVA apparently didn't list a finger to stop 2014 Thanos from going in the future and causing Tony Stark's death.

As if this wasn't enough, “Loki” just skips any possible connection with the movies, even hands Loki false information about them (he lead the Dark Elves to his mother when Loki had no idea the Kurse was a Dark Elf and they would have found her anyway as they were searching for the Aether which Malekith could sense, he’s born solely to cause pain and suffering and death, overlooks how he saved Jane twice or helped the Asgardian escape Hela) and never discusses them again.

Even with Classic Loki, who’s a Variant of “Avengers: Infinity War” Loki, they don’t talk about what happened after Loki’s supposed dead, apparently hinting it was better if he died, nor explain how Loki knew Thor survived.

PART 4 – “LOKI” IS NOT REALLY OFFERING A GOOD REPRESENTATION FOR FEMALES EVEN THOUGH IT CLEARLY AIMS AT FEMALE AUDIENCE

Let’s make a quick experiment.

Everyone, let’s name all the characters we remember which appeared in more than 1 episode of “Loki” for more than one minute.

We’ve, of course, Loki, Mobius, B-15, Renslayer, Sylvie, C-20 and Miss Minute.

5 females versus 2 males.

What’s more, females are not sexualized, they remains completely dressed, they’re clearly not there to attract male gazes, they’re represented as strong, dangerous, in control, something archived often by showing them beating males either physically or intellectually or in rank.

It seems promising. At first.

Is there someone who’s sexualized?

The “Loki” series takes care to offer us Tom Hiddleston naked.

So since there’s an abundance of females in the cast and Tom Hiddleston is shown naked is it aiming at a female audience?

Very, very likely but… but how’s then handled all this?

When Loki is seen undressed he’s not in a situation of power, like Thor who’s twice shows half naked in his movies but because he’s changing/washing and perfectly comfortable in showing his body and once in a situation which could be a male forbidden fantasy, to have many women massage your naked body, no, he’s shown as he’s powerless while being stripped by a machine. Clearly not a male power fantasy, more like a male nightmare.

And, in a totally not surprising way, pictures of this scene were spread by many female fans because it was aimed at them… though a part of them, was also honestly appalled at seeing this scene in contest, finding the forced stripping humiliating and degrading.

Sure, a naked Tom Hiddleston makes a nice eye-candy but this wasn’t how Loki’s many fans wanted to see Loki naked.

But let’s talk of female representation here, since the show seems to be interested in female audience… only who even though this was the representation women wanted doesn’t understand much of women representation in the first place.

Why?

For start because women here are all the same type of woman.

Strong fighters who’re in control and confident, with no real characterization beyond this to speak of despite the large amount of screen time.

Renslayer is an ex-hunter who can fight one on one against Sylvie and who clearly has the position of power she has because she was good as a hunter and shows her abilities in fighting after that Sylvie had beaten 2 guards at the same time. B-15 is introduced by beating Loki and is the commander of a squad. C-20 is another commander and, albeit possessed, can dispose of a part of her squad members.

Do I need to spend words on how Sylvie is depicted as this awesome fighter who has learnt to fight by herself, can keep at bay more than 1 Minuteman, can use a sword, has learnt enchantment on her own and is feared by all the TVA? Do I?

And it’s awesome to have women who are strong fighters in positions of command/power/control… but why women has to be represented as just that?

Even when they add a female as an one episode cameo, it's Sif, beating the hell out of Loki. And what about the Lady in Lamentis 1 who was too old to be strong but managed to blast away both Loki and Sylvie seeing through their deceptions?

Even the harmless Miss Minute can avoid being hit by Loki and gets she has to pretend to do researches to stall Sylvie and save Renslayer.

Women kick asses here… but that’s all they’re good for.

And so we get to Sylvie, who is the superior Loki Variant… because she’s female.

Kid Loki: You're different. Why? Loki: No, I'm not, you see? I'm the same, really. I'm the same as all of you. Have any of you met a woman Variant of us? Classic Loki: Sounds terrifying. Loki: Oh, she is. But that's kind of what's great about her. She's different. She's not trying to take over the TVA, she's trying to take it down. And she needs me. Now, you said Alioth is what keeps us here. You said it's a living thing. You said it's a shark. Well, if it lives, it dies. So I'm gonna kill the shark. I'm gonna kill Alioth, and I could use all the help I can get.

That’s what Loki preaches to his fellow Lokis who think a woman Loki would be terrific.

I mean, they’ve an alligator Loki, a POC Loki, but the one who has to be different is the female Loki. Because being female is a character trait.

Mobius: Okay. I feel like I'm always looking up to you. I like it. It's appropriate. [Ep 1]

Basically females in the “Loki” series are all representation of the Action girl trope and aren’t even different representation of said trope. I mean, “The Avengers” have 5 actions boy who’re clearly as different as they could be. Girls can be represented as different too, if they really aim at young audience they can take good old “Sailor Moon” as an example. 5 action girls who are strong and determinate AND DIFFERENT, more than just someone who kicks the adversary away.

And it’s not like they don’t know how to characterize people in a different way.

Mobius is an analyst who shows sympathetic traits toward the Variants and a certain level or intelligence. U-92 and D-90 are hunters who are shown to held Variants in little regard (U-92 wanted to attack the boy they found in the church, D-90 mistreated the scared people in the shelter). Casey is an harmless and naïve guy who had never seen a fish. The guy who made Loki sign the papers about what he said seemed emotionless but he clearly loved cats as not only he had one but on his cup there was also the image of a cat. Martin is clearly a bossy daddy’s son, who think too high of himself to the point he can’t respect rules. The boy in the church, despite thinking Sylvie was a demon, accepted and ate food she gave him and remained in the place despite the crime. He’s clearly more brave than he looked like but he’s also naïve as he easily trusted ‘the demon’ and Mobius.

What’s C-20 character trait when she gets described by Sylvie?

Sylvie: Yeah. She was just a regular person on Earth. Loki: A regular person? Sylvie: Loved margaritas.

She’s a regular person who loves margaritas. Liking a drink is not a character trait!

There’s a more diverse female representation in “Thor” than in “Loki”.

In “Thor” we’ve Frigga, queen of Asgard, loving mother and wife who’s powerless to erase Thor’s banishment. We’ve Sif, a dangerous and loyal warrior. We’ve Jane, the amazing scientist with a lot of enthusiasm. We’ve Darcy, who’s funny and who seems focused mostly on herself but who, when the city is attacked, worried to save all the animals at the pet store.

But maybe the one who gets the worst treatment is the supposed heroine, Sylvie, because the poor girl is turned into a Mary Sue.

In case someone isn’t familiar with the term:

“The prototypical Mary Sue is an original female character in a fanfic who obviously serves as an idealized version of the author mainly for the purpose of Wish Fulfillment. She's exotically beautiful, often having an unusual hair or eye colour, and has a similarly cool and exotic name. She's exceptionally talented in an implausibly wide variety of areas, and may possess skills that are rare or nonexistent in the canon setting. She also lacks any realistic, or at least story-relevant, character flaws — either that or her "flaws" are obviously meant to be endearing. She has an unusual and dramatic Back Story. The canon protagonists are all overwhelmed with admiration for her beauty, wit, courage and other virtues, and are quick to adopt her as one of their True Companions, even characters who are usually antisocial and untrusting; if any character doesn't love her, that character gets an extremely unsympathetic portrayal. She has some sort of especially close relationship to the author's favourite canon character — their love interest, illegitimate child, never-before-mentioned sister, etc. Other than that, the canon characters are quickly reduced to awestruck cheerleaders, watching from the sidelines as Mary Sue outstrips them in their areas of expertise and solves problems that have stymied them for the entire series.” [tvtropes.org]

So let’s see how she fits this checklist:

1) She's exotically beautiful, often having an unusual hair or eye colour: Sylvie painted her hair blonde even though the Lokis are supposed to be black haired

2) has a similarly cool and exotic name: She is the only Loki Variant who has changed her name from Loki to Sylvie.

3) She's exceptionally talented in an implausibly wide variety of areas, and may possess skills that are rare or nonexistent in the canon setting: Awesome at fighting she can enchant people, an ability the Lokis don’t posses, that she magically learnt on her own and that is necessary in the story. Also she figured out how a Tempad worked BEFOREseeing it in action.

4) She also lacks any realistic, or at least story-relevant, character flaws — either that or her "flaws" are obviously meant to be endearing: No flaws, all her plans involve fighting and brute force is no substitute for diplomacy and guile, which could be a flaw… if it wasn’t for the fact that the series will prove Sylvie can plan just fine without using fighting and brute strength and also be successful at it.

5) She has an unusual and dramatic Back Story: She was taken by the TVA when she was younger than Kid Loki but managed to escape them and had to live alone and on the run till then.

6) The canon protagonists are all overwhelmed with admiration for her beauty, wit, courage and other virtues, and are quick to adopt her as one of their True Companions, even characters who are usually antisocial and untrusting: Loki, who has never loved anyone, falls for her, Mobius saves her and apologizes to her, B-15, who used to look down at Variants, basically asks her what should they do and is shown admiring her, the Lokis don’t criticize her plan, Classic Loki dies to save her, everyone views her as the superior Loki Variant.

7) if any character doesn't love her, that character gets an extremely unsympathetic portrayal: Renslayer, the hunter who has arrested her, is currently playing the part of the antagonist who’s fascist and believes in a murderous, lying cult.

8) She has some sort of especially close relationship to the author's favourite canon character — their love interest, illegitimate child, never-before-mentioned sister, etc.: She’s the Variant and love interest of the titular character.

9) Other than that, the canon characters are quickly reduced to awestruck cheerleaders, watching from the sidelines as Mary Sue outstrips them in their areas of expertise and solves problems that have stymied them for the entire series: Loki, the title character, has conveniently been turned into someone who’s a weak fighter and incapable of planning which Sylvie has to save by enchanting guards or giving him her sword or pruning herself or teaching him how to enchant and coming up with all the plans.

Now all she needs in order to be a perfect Mary Sue is to know how to sing well as Mary Sue usually do this as well, though I’m sure she can do it because Loki could so she surely can.

Sylvie is amazing, Loki himself said so:

Loki: No. We may lose. Sometimes painfully. But we don't die. We survive. I mean, you did. You were just a child when the TVA took you, but you nearly took down the organization that claims to govern the order of time. You did it on your own. You ran rings around them. You're amazing!

There’s nothing inherently wrong in having a new female character who’s competent, for whom the hero falls and who changes him… if all this is built around a solid plot.

Think at “Iron Man”.

Tony Stark is, to quote Tony Stark himself a “genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist”.

It’s amazing, isn’t it? But the movie shows us why he’s that.

It spends time setting up his pedigree, how he inherited the money and intelligence from his father, how he was supported as he grew and studied becoming always a greater genius. Tony shows himself to be charming before seducing his first woman onscreen so that when he does it makes sense. His philanthropic activities are, at first, just mentioned but seems rooted in how his father was a hero who helped fighting Nazi and then they became his mission. He felt guilty he was a merchant of death and tried to make up for it.

Sylvie too could have a solid plot behind herself.

Instead than magically knowing what a TemPad does and how it works and managing to escape with it, she could have escaped with, let’s say, a hunter that discovered the truth and decided to rebel to the TVA or just had pity of her. Maybe another Mobius Variant who used to work at the TVA prior to Mobius and that, instead than an analyst was a hunter. She might have learnt fighting from him and then he too died and she was left alone.

Enchantment might have been an ability she might have learnt coming in contact with a mind stone. It could have been an occasion also to talk how mind stones can influence people negatively. Or it could have been taught to her by Frigga who, with a female daughter, decided to teach her a different type of magic than Loki.

Her past could have been explored more instead than being tragic for the sake of tragic. We might have seen her fall in love and either be betrayed or have to say goodbye to her loved one because that reality got pruned. We might have seen her being interested in males and females alike as she’s supposed to be interested in both.

She could have had discussions with Loki that weren’t just about Frigga or about how the TVA kidnapped her from Asgard, she escaped and from that point on she was always on the run, or about how love didn’t feel real, but more about how they were, how they felt, what hurt them and what made them happy, what they liked and what they disliked, their ideals and their fears, things that can built up a relation.

Loki basically fall for her because she’s on a mission for revenge instead than power and seems confident. That’s his reasoning.

She falls for Loki… because apparently he’s the person who spend time with her who praised her. That’s not a solid love story, that’s desperation.

SYlvie could have flaws, she could have learnt diplomacy or persuasion from Loki or could have something she lacks and Loki has so that they would complete each other.

And since the purpose was to have Sylvie and Loki fall for each other… they could have let Loki have characteristics that can motivate the exceptional heroine to fall in love for him PRIOR to him falling in love for her. He might be shown good at something, instead than just a clown.

Even if we say the real purpose of this series was to turn Sylvie into the protagonist, the heroine, a good Loki character was still needed to explain why this awesome girl would fall for him.

So okay, there will surely still be women who can see themselves in Sylvie and imagine they got Loki… and it’s not bad really… but I think we deserved more.

Long story short, yes, “Loki” has many females in its cast and this is meant to draw the female audience… but the representation is poor as almost all of the females have no character traits and Sylvie is just a Mary Sue with no realistic characterization.

A good female representation is diverse and solid. Women don't need to be born irrealistically perfect out of nothing to be good, they can inherith and grow and learn to be as such like any human being.

Last but not least…

PART 5 – DOES “LOKI” REALLY OFFERS REPRESENTATION TO THE LGBT COMMUNITY?

BC: There is a lot of talk on social media about Loki being gender fluid. Wouldn't that actually be a natural fit for the character? MW: Yeah, I guess as, with all questions pertaining to that stuff, I think those answers, truly, are best experienced in the watching of the show, as opposed to me trying to answer them. Because it's just watching it and the way that's addressed and everything will just be more fulfilling. BC: Why do you think it's important that Loki is gender fluid? MW: I think that Loki is a character that a lot of fans see representation in. People that haven't felt represented before, and they see themselves in Loki and everything. So we want to do justice to the character, to who the character is in the comics and in Norse mythology as well. And you also … you know you want folks to feel represented, and everything. That's why it's important. It always has been. It comes from everybody on the creative team. [Loki: Michael Waldron On Gender Fluidity, Mephisto, Time Travel & More]

The series hugely spread the info that this Loki would be fluid and Bisexual. The news were welcomed with delight and it’s awesome how the series didn’t hesitate to put it on paper.

Loki being fluid was written for everyone to see, and Loki having male and female interests was spelled out for everyone to hear.

IT’S A GREAT THING!

However…

It’s all we got.

It had no relevance into the plot whatsoever, it’s just a random info we’re given.

Him being fluid was on a paper along with his other data like eye colour and birth planet.

Him being interested in males and females seems to be put there just to imply he tried a large amount of people before deciding love didn’t feel real.

Assuming the other Lokis too were fluid, they actually found terrific the idea of a woman Loki in a not positive way. They weren’t interested or asking for clarifications about what Loki meant.

Loki’s bisexuality doesn’t even get a side story, them sending Fandral to beat Loki instead than Sif because Loki cheated on him or something. I’m not upset Loki ended up with a female, this is one of the possibilities of a Bisexual person. I’m upset that this was used merely to attract the audience but then wasn’t explored. They could have said Asgard was open minded with it, or disapproved it so Loki had to keep it hidden, or it could have been Sylvie who discussed some experience in that regard.

We were told over and over it was a show about identity. We expected it to be explored instead we were just told ‘ah, by the way, Loki is bisexual, let’s move on.’ And that was all.

Having representation from an important Marvel character is always important, especially considering the shortage of representation. But honestly I expected more.

PART 7 – TO SUM IT UP

Many of the people who worked in “Loki” are fantastic actors. They worked hard for this series, I can see they tried their best.

The premises for the “Loki” series are interesting.

We get a Loki who hadn’t experienced most of what happened in the movies yet, we make him confront with someone who knows his life, the one he lived and the one he was meant to live and we also make him confront with Variations of himself.

Loki has the Tesseract and the TVA has plenty of infinity stones, we could explore them.

The TVA itself have a fascist organization that dictates people’s lives and murders whoever tries to do differently, that goes so far as to brainwash the people working in it, which mistreats and belittle the Variants and establish a manipulative cult around the Time-Keeper with elements of police brutality which could be very actual.

Time travelling was the plot of "Avengers: Endgame" they could have tied the movie to the series, esplore the why some time travels were allowed and some weren't or their effects.

There were references to plenty of awesome comics they could take inspiration from.

But unless it redeems itself with the last episode… well, so far it’s failing to deliver what it promised due to a really poor plot which doesn’t give the characters a chance to be themselves or to be characterized as they’ve no real story nor real differences to speak of.

They’re given more time than a movie as they’re a series… but that’s no good excuse for wasting said time.

I’m still hoping the last episode will be spectacular, that it’ll manage to erase the messes of the other 5… but, as of now I’m disappointed.

I’ll just keep my fingers crossed and hope they’ll surprise me.

#mcu loki #loki #loki laufeyson #loki odinson #9 worlds study

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aion-rsa · 4 years ago

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Did The Dark Knight Really Influence the Marvel Cinematic Universe?

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In 2008, there were two seismic events in the superhero movie genre so close together that you’d be forgiven for thinking they signaled the same thing. Over the span of a few months, Marvel Studios launched the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) via Iron Man, and director Christopher Nolan changed the perception of how seriously to take these movies with The Dark Knight. Both are credited as watershed moments for how audiences and (more importantly) the industry approached such stories; and The Dark Knight is specifically singled out as the gold standard by which all other masked crimefighter films are measured.

However, was Nolan’s haunting vision—one in which a lone avenger is the last, best hope for a major American city on the verge of collapse—really that influential on its genre? The Dark Knight certainly had a monumental impact on the culture, then and now. You saw it when Heath Ledger’s searing interpretation of the Joker made him only the second actor to win a posthumous Oscar, as well as when the film’s exclusion from the Best Picture race changed the way the Academy Awards handled its top prize. And just last year, The Dark Knight became only the second superhero movie inducted into the National Film Registry.

Yet when a friend watching last week’s The Falcon and the Winter Soldier premiere told me Marvel was returning to the “realistic” approach of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and by extension The Dark Knight, I couldn’t help but disagree. The new Disney+ series may have a slightly more grounded aesthetic than the last time we saw these characters (back when they were fighting space aliens over magic stones in Avengers: Endgame), but the medium-blending existence of the series belies the idea that Marvel took anything significant from the insular and self-contained Dark Knight Trilogy.

The Dark Knight vs. Iron Man

It’s interesting to look back at just those 2008 films since at face value they bore minor similarities. They both were focused on fantastically wealthy billionaires using their fortunes to fight wrongdoing on a potentially global scale; each movie was directed by filmmakers with indie cred thanks to Nolan helming Memento (2000) and Jon Favreau writing and starring in Swingers (1996); and each starred unexpected casting choices with Ledger as the Joker and Robert Downey Jr. jumpstarting a career comeback as Tony Stark.

But their goals and approaches were worlds apart. The obvious thing to note, besides The Dark Knight being a sequel to Batman Begins (2005) and Iron Man being an origin movie, is that Iron Man had an slyly hilarious sensibility, and The Dark Knight fancied itself an allegory about post-9/11 America. The former’s success was engineered in large part by Downey’s gift for comedic improvisation and freestyle. Indeed, co-star Jeff Bridges said in 2009 that he, Downey, and Favreau were essentially improvising their scenes from scratch every day during primitive rehearsals. “They had no script, man,” Bridges lightly complained with his Dude diction.

By contrast, The Dark Knight appears at a glance to be an exercise in self-seriousness and lofty ambition. Every scene, written by Nolan and his brother Jonathan Nolan, appears like a chess move, and each character a pawn or knight who’s been positioned to put contemporary audiences in a state of pure anxiety with War on Terror imagery and dialogue. Of course this clocklike presentation is itself another Nolan illusion, as smaller players like Michael Jai White, who portrayed gangster Gambol in the movie, have been quite candid about. As with almost every film, there is still a level of fluidity and workshopping on Nolan’s set.

Ultimately, the bigger difference between the Nolan and eventual Marvel approach is what each is hoping to accomplish with the film they’re currently making. More than just offering a “realistic” vision of Batman, The Dark Knight attempted to tell a sweeping crime drama epic that would stand alone, separate from its status as a Batman Begins sequel. Rather than being “the next chapter,” The Dark Knight was meant to be a cinematic distillation of Batman and Joker’s primal appeals writ large. With this approach, the film also broke away from the superhero movie template Batman Begins followed three years earlier, and which nearly all superhero films still walk through the paces of.

In essence, The Dark Knight showed that superhero movies could be dark and mature, yes, but they can also be subversive, unexpected, and genuinely surprising. Nolan’s previous superhero movie, as good as it is, followed the beats set down by Richard Donner’s Superman: The Movie nearly 30 years earlier. They’re the same beats trod by Iron Man and pretty much every other superhero origin movie, including a large bulk of Marvel Studios’ output. The Dark Knight, by contrast, reached for a cinematic vernacular separate from its specific genre. The movie’s not subtle about it either. The opening scene of Nolan’s epic wears its homages to Michael Mann’s Heat on its sleeves, and the story’s structure has more to do with Jaws than Jor-El.

The approach shook audiences in 2008 after they’d come to expect a certain type of movie from masked do-gooders. In The Dark Knight, superhero conventions could be subverted or obliterated when love interest Rachel Dawes is brutally killed off mid-sentence, or stalwart Batman is forced to claim a pyrrhic victory over the villain by entering into a criminal conspiracy and cover-up with the cops. The thrill of novelty was as breathtaking as the movie’s allegorical elements about a society on edge.

And even with The Dark Knight’s open-ended finale, it stood as a singular cinematic experience, complete with then-groundbreaking emphasis on IMAX photography. Nolan was so adamant about making this as self-contained an experience as possible that he jettisoned his co-story creator David Goyer’s idea of setting up Harvey Dent’s fall from grace for a third movie. Dent’s fate, as that of everyone else’s, would be tied strictly to the events of the movie you’re now watching.

“We Have a Hulk”

In Iron Man, and then more forcefully in Iron Man 2 (2010) and the rest of its “Phase One” era, Marvel Studios demonstrated a wholly different set of priorities. Similar to how Batman Begins paved the way for Nolan to do what he really wanted with that material, Iron Man 2 came to encapsulate Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige’s grander designs for the type of movies he was making. Where The Dark Knight was singular, unconventional, and two steps closer to our world than its comic book origins, Iron Man 2 was episodic, entirely crafted around audience expectations for a sequel, and even more like a comic book world than our own.

In other words, the first Iron Man gently submerged audiences into the fantasy by beginning with contemporary images of Tony Stark in a Middle Eastern desert; Iron Man 2 then made sweeping strides in defining what that MCU fantasy is as quickly as possible: Natasha Romanoff, aka Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) is introduced solely to establish the superspy who will be vital to The Avengers two years down the road, and the central narrative about Tony Stark fighting an old rival is put on pause to reintroduce the character Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) as a supporting, and superfluous, side character. The post-credit scene even arbitrarily introduces literal magic with a glowing hammer that has absolutely nothing to do with the story you just watched. Still, it’s a hell of a teaser for Thor which was due in theaters a year later.

With the release of Iron Man 2, Marvel Studios’ emphasis became diametrically opposed to the driving concept behind The Dark Knight Trilogy. Rather than each film being an insulated, standalone cinematic experience like the Hollywood epics of old, Marvel’s movies would be interconnected episodes in an ongoing narrative saga that spanned multiple franchises and countless sequels. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Unlike Nolan after The Dark Knight, Feige and his stable of writers always know where the next movie (or five) is going, and have a better idea of what the overall vision is than any single director working within this system. Ironically, this returns power to the studio and producer as the seeming authorial voice of each movie. Like in the Golden Age of Hollywood, directors are more often hired hands than influential auteurs.

However, this means the aspects Nolan really valued on The Dark Knight beyond a gritty “realism”—elements like spontaneity, subversion, and a distancing from superhero tropes—became antithetical to the type of movies produced by the MCU. For at least the first decade of its existence, the Marvel Cinematic Universe flourished by creating a formula and house style that is as predictable for audiences as the contents in a Big Mac.

When you go to a Marvel movie, you more or less you’ll get: an ironic, self-deprecating tone, a story that often revolves around a CG MacGuffin that must be taken from the villain, and a narrative in which disparate heroic characters come together after some amusing, disagreeable banter. In fact, more than Iron Man, it was Joss Whedon’s The Avengers (2012) which refined the Marvel formula into what it is today.

There are of course exceptions to this rule. Black Panther became the first Marvel movie since Iron Man to arguably tackle themes significant to the real world, in this case specifically the legacy of African diaspora. It also became the first superhero film nominated for an Oscar for Best Picture as a result; James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy movies might follow the narrative formula of most MCU movies, but they’re embedded with a cheeky and idiosyncratic personality that is distinctly Gunn’s; and in Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) and Captain America: Civil War (2016), directors Joe and Anthony Russo, as well as screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, attempted to inject a little bit of that “realistic” aesthetic from The Dark Knight. But only to a point.

Particularly in the 2014 effort, there was a push by the Russos to rely on in-camera special effects and cultivate what they often described in the press as a “1970s spy thriller” style. Ostensibly, the hope may have been to make The Winter Soldier as much a spy thriller as The Dark Knight was a crime epic. In this vein, there were even attempts to graft onto the story very timely concerns about the overreach of a government surveillance state, which had only grown in the decade since the U.S. PATRIOT Act was passed, despite a change in White House administrations. However, all of these ambitions had an invisible ceiling hovering above them.

Despite having overtones about the danger of reactionary if well-intentioned government leaders, like the kind personified by Robert Redford’s SHIELD director in the movie, Captain America: The Winter Soldier couldn’t become too focused on the espionage elements or too far removed from the Marvel house style. The story still needed to interconnect with other Marvel films, hence Redford’s character turning out to be a secret HYDRA double agent, and it still needed to give audiences what they expected from a Marvel movie. Thus how this “1970s spy thriller” ends in a giant CGI battle with citywide destruction as Captain America inserts MacGuffins into machines that will blow up HYDRA’s latest weapon for world domination.

It’s easy to wonder if the movie was developed a little longer, and didn’t have to play by a certain set of rules and expectations, that instead of backpedaling into comic book motivations, Redford’s character would’ve been a well-intentioned patriot amassing power “to keep us safe,” and in the process destabilized the institutions he claimed to revere.

Movies

What Did Batman Do Between The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises?

By David Crow

WandaVision: The Unanswered Questions From the Marvel Series

By Gavin Jasper

A Universe Without End

The Marvel method breeds a heavy need for familiarity and comfortable predictability, as opposed to disorientation and discomfort. Yet both methods are valid. While Nolan achieved near universal praise for The Dark Knight, his attempt to replicate it with the even more ambitious The Dark Knight Rises—an unabashed David Lean-inspired epic that took more from A Tale of Two Cities and Doctor Zhivago than DC Comics—left fans divided. It also was a narrative dead end for the corporate/fanbase need of an ongoing franchise. Nolan instead reached a final, artistic, and emphatic period for his cinematic interpretation of Batman mythology. By comparison, Marvel Studios has created a new cinematic vernacular that only ever uses dashes, semicolons, and commas. There is always more to tell.

Nolan reflected on these changing circumstances for superhero movies in 2017 when he said, “That’s a privilege and a luxury that filmmakers aren’t afforded anymore. I think it was the last time that anyone was able to say to a studio, ‘I might do another one, but it will be four years.’ There’s too much pressure on release schedules to let people do that now, but creatively it’s a huge advantage.”

This lines up with what Jeff Bridges said about the evolution of the Marvel method way back in ’09 after the first Iron Man: “You would think with a $200 million movie you’d have the shit together, but it was just the opposite. And the reason for that is because they get ahead of themselves. They have a release date before the script [and they think], ‘Oh, we’ll have the script before that time,’ and they don’t have their shit together.”

Bridges’ unhappiness with the new process notwithstanding, Marvel was rewriting the playbook about how these types of movies were made. Nolan’s approach of one at a time and years-long development processes created three distinctly different and relatively standalone Batman movies. But Marvel has shifted the idea of not just what a franchise can be, but also what cinematic storytelling means.

Instead of three movies, their rules and structures have generated dozens of well-received and adored entertainments, that when combined can produce experiences as unique as Avengers: Infinity War (2018) and Avengers: Endgame (2019): two movies that were more like a two-part season finale on TV than individual stories. And the latter became the highest grossing film of all time.

The success of this approach is further underlined when one considers competitors that tried to emulate both Marvel and Nolan’s approaches, relying on a lone auteur to build a shared cinematic universe—while also arguably taking the wrong lessons from the “dark” in The Dark Knight title. In the case of the DC Extended Universe, that approach collapsed on itself after three movies, leaving the interconnected “shared” part of its universe in tatters, and fans and studio hands alike divided on how to proceed with the franchise.The Marvel Cinematic Universe took a narrower road than that of The Dark Knight. But it turned out to be a lot smoother and much, much longer.

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kylo-but-not-to-me-ren · 5 years ago

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Thoughts on The Rise of Skywalker

Just a disclaimer that this post contains TROS spoilers

Hi there, it’s me again sharing my views on the latest Star Wars as a Reylo, fan and former film student (the latter may show at some point but it’s mostly a fan view).

I had pretty high expectations for this movie and I was not not happy leaving the screening, but I had some things that I thought would go down differently so here’s what I think.

Rey

I really like how organic Rey and Kylo’s connection and intimacy is portrayed in The Last Jedi, and J.J. expanded a bit on that which I think it’s very nice (and apparently they can teleport things via ForceSkype now which is an interesting take but I understand the reasoning).

One thing that I didn’t really like is that Rey is a Palpatine. I’ve seen one theory on this and it makes sense now, yet I was a great supporter of the theory that Rey was really a nobody, that she came from nothing like Kylo said. She could’ve been just like Anakin who didn’t have either Jedi nor Sith ancestors.

On a more positive note, Rey’s conflict with herself is an ongoing theme in this trilogy and I believe it was really well developed and has come to a satisfying conclusion. I felt like she was a bit lost in the beginning and I thought it was going to be an issue later on but thankfully it got better before it was too late.

Also Rey is so goddamn powerful and strong with the Force I love her so much.

When Rey and Kylo are battling in the old Death Star and she stabs him with his own lightsaber but then she feels Leia’s gone and immediately realises what she has done and without second thought she kneels to heal Ben crying. My heart exploded I felt so many things at once I can’t explain.

“I wanted to take your hand. Ben’s hand.” hsdcsgfyufgyufgeryfcgeif i died.

The ForceSkype teleporting feature I ALMOST FAINTED BECAUSE I GENUINELY THOUGHT SHE WAS GOING TO KILL BEN INSTEAD OF PAPLS WHEN THEY EXCHANGED LOOKS I WAS SO RELIEVED AND HAPPY WHEN SHE GAVE HIM ANI’S BLUE LIGHTSABER.

DARK REY WITH HER DOUBLE RED LIGHTSABER.

THAT YELLOW LIGHTSABER. I WANT IT. NOW.

Also maybe that “I am all the Jedi” line is a nudge to Avengers: Endgame? (*cof* hi Disney *cof*)

Kylo Ren/Ben Solo

Next up is ma boi Kylo Ben, who has been my favourite character this whole trilogy and hell Adam Driver portrayed him so wonderfully. In TLJ he grew so much as a character, not only as a villain but a person who went through a lot, has an abusive master and is constantly being haunted by the guilt of killing his father.

To start this off, I want to talk about those first scenes. OH MY GOD KYLO TAKING ALL THOSE PEOPLE IN THE FOREST IN SLOW MOTION AND HIS SOLO JOURNEY TO EXEGOL. After that I got mad at Palps when one of his first lines was “I have been every voice you have ever heard inside your head” because it means Ben has been manipulated his whole life and didn’t really have a choice other than turn to the dark side.

Kylo’s arc is by far my favourite and in my (completely biased) opinion the best written one. When he’s introduced in TFA, he’s a promise of a new Vader but he’s not quite there yet. Kylo has conflict inside him, a spark of light still, and to put out that spark once and for all he’s instructed by his master to kill Han Solo, but as we’ve seen it has “split his spirit to the bone”, to quote Snoke.

Later on in TLJ when the ForceSkype starts we begin to see more of Kylo’s vulnerable side, specially when Rey is talking to him in the hut. Kylo takes his fcking glove off to take Rey’s hand and that’s when Reylo became canon and you can’t change my mind.

Fast forward to TROS, Kylo is already the Supreme Leader and he’s as strong as Rey (but most likely more skilled because he had extensive training while Rey had only a few lessons and read some books?) and they are Force Dyads which makes them absurdly powerful together.

One thing I noticed is that every time Rey and Kylo claim to have seen the future both of them are always on the same side, either Dark or Light, but always together. They’ve never mentioned a future where they are apart and/or on different sides. *all the Reylo feels*

Then when both are battling in the old Death Star and Rey stabs him but heals him shortly after and Ben is ready to let Kylo Ren die to become Ben Solo again is brilliant. And that dialog with Han made me shed a tear or two. (a random side note is that I got a tiny bit upset when he threw his lightsaber away because his lightsaber is so cool and I just got one myself but I absolutely understand the need to get rid of it).

I WAS SO HAPPY WHEN MY BABY BEN SOLO BURST INTO PALPATINE’S CHAMBERS (?) WITH ONLY A BLASTER AND LOOKED SO GOOD. Also I almost cried when he took the blue saber and beat the shit out of the Knights of Ren.

LITERALLY THE RISE OF SKYWALKER.

BEN HUGGING REY’S BODY RIGHT BEFORE RESURRECTING HER.

“Ben”

THE KISS. THAT SMILE.

BEN SOLO DESERVED BETTER.

And yes, I believe Ben Solo isn’t truly dead and Rey can help him come back and they can live happily like they deserve to be.

Thank you Adam Driver for being the highlight of this movie (and dare I say, trilogy) and bless us with amazing acting.

Poe Dameron

I love Poe, he’s great and I loved that they gave him more screen time and I get they were trying to build another trio like in the OT but maybe making Poe, who was already a great pilot like Han also be a former (spice) smuggler is a bit much? We could use new characters and it’s okay if you wanna recycle the idea but please don’t make them identical.

Another very important point is why do you need to make up a female love interest for Poe when there’s clearly one already? During the whole movie I felt a sexual tension between Finn and Poe just not to have them together in the end, I was very disappointed. MAKE STORMPILOT CANON YOU COWARDS.

Finn

To be honest, Finn is not one of my favourite characters and I believe it’s mostly due to poor writing. Finn is a great character and had so much potential being a deserter of the First Order but his arc wasn’t so well developed in the trilogy as a whole and one of the arcs I least enjoyed in TLJ was Finn and Rose’s adventure in Canto Bight. It all felt like a distraction even though they were doing something seemingly important but failed at the end.

In TROS, Finn finds a group of other Stormtrooper deserters and I thought maybe it’d push his storyline forward but not so much. I was a bit disappointed but there were also lots of other things happening that I didn’t pay much attention to Finn, one of the reasons being that I already didn’t care much about him before so now it was kind of meh.

I said it before and I’ll say it again, MAKE STORMPILOT CANON.

A positive thing on Finn is that now they explored how Finn is Force-sensitive and now he finally realised he doesn’t need to run away and is willing to fight.

Rose Tico

As I’ve mentioned before, her arc with Finn wasn’t my favourite in TLJ but that’s okay because you can’t make everyone happy all the time, yet I saw many people complaining about her character and even Kelly was attacked that she left social media. And now there were so many complaints that they decided to basically ignore Rose and she’s in like three scenes.

I don’t think they even gave a plausible explanation why Rose couldn’t come along with Finn, Poe and Rey other than the fans didn’t like her character and they were trying to recreate the original trio.

General Hux

Well, to be honest I was almost certain he would die at some point but killing him off like that? He deserved a bit of dignity. But his scenes were funny, which I’m not sure if it’s good or bad because he’s a First Order general so... he’s supposed to be more serious, I guess?

As weird as it is, I kinda get his motives for being the spy, to see Kylo Ren fall so he could ascend to the Supreme Leader position, but things didn’t work out but at least we got a bit of that Kylux tension, right? *sigh*

Knights of Ren

One of my great disappointments of this movie.

They didn’t say a word, were only referred as murderers (not sure about the word exactly but it was something like that), had a couple of fight scenes and died. I wish they made an appearance in TLJ but they were only mentioned in Rey’s vision and Snoke mentioned them once but that was it.

They had some really impressive costumes and weapons, though.

Overall a great movie, lots of nostalgia, would recommend.

So there it is, my thoughts on The Rise of Skywalker after watching it for the first time. Please feel free to share your thoughts as well and let’s talk :)

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mariolucario493 · 5 years ago

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A Frozen 2 review no one asked for! (POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD)

Okay, hear me out. I’m probably in the minority when I say this, but...

I think it’s better than the first one.

I liked the original Frozen just fine. I liked how it depicted anxiety and how it subverted a lot of Disney tropes, but I probably wouldn’t put it in my top ten.

(Which, in case you’re interested, is:)

10. Tarzan

9. Aladdin

8. Beauty and the Beast

7. Frozen 2 (this one!)

6. Lilo & Stitch

5. Wreck-it Ralph

4. Moana

3. The Lion King

2. The Hunchback of Notre Dame

1. Zootopia

(And that’s not even including the Pixar ones.)

But it seems that the general consensus of Frozen 2 is the same as a lot of sequels (especially Disney sequels): that it’s not as good as the first one. Or, dare I say it, that it’s just the first one all over again. But here’s my argument against that. I think being similar to the first one actually works in its favor.

What do I mean by that? Well, after the prologue, the movie opens with a song called “Some Things Never Change,” in which all the characters sing about how happy they are in their current life. Although Olaf worries that change might be inevitable (I love how woke he’s become, btw), no one is really seeking anything new. Now that sounds like the setup for a lot of recent Disney movies, I know. But it's an idea that’s really explored throughout the entirety of the movie.

Every character reacts to change differently. Elsa is nervous, but tries to embrace it anyway; Olaf dismisses it as something he will understand when he’s older; Kristoff feels like he and his friends are drifting apart; and Anna struggles to accept it overall. And we see how each of them goes through it. Even the inclusion of darker themes allows the audience to react similarly to the characters onscreen. Kids probably won’t always understand what’s going on; but they’ll have a good time anyway. And just like Olaf, they’ll understand it when they’re older. That does seem to be one of the major criticisms I’ve seen for Frozen 2, that it’s too dark and too complicated for kids. But Disney’s never been afraid to tackle heavy subjects before, because they know that challenging the audience helps them grow. And hey, at least it’s not Crimes of Grindelwald, right?

I think the reason they made Frozen 2 similar to Frozen 1 was the same reason they used similar themes in Frozen 1 that we were already familiar with - princesses, magical kingdoms, curses, goofy sidekicks. And that’s to deconstruct and subvert them. In fact, I might even go so far as to say that this was an attempt to remind Disney to always try new things, which they have had trouble with recently. Just look at all those live-action remakes that no one asked for. The exact same thing all over again disguised as something new, but without all the stuff that made the originals so good in the first place.

Frozen 2 also continues the tradition of having interesting female protagonists. Well, interesting ANIMATED female protagonists, anyway. It’s not like the Aladdin remake, where Jasmine has a whole new song about girl power, but then she becomes the damsel in distress anyway and does nothing to fight back. It’s not like Captain Marvel, who makes a big deal about being a female superhero even though the Avengers already have several much more interesting female members. It’s not like the new Star Wars movies, in which they’re so focused with making Rey a strong female role model that they forget to give her a personality. And it’s not going to be like the Mulan remake, which I’m just going to assume is going to be another soapbox feminist’s wet dream. Oh, wait, I forgot this is Tumblr, and they love that shit.

But really. Starting with Tiana, Disney’s animated leading ladies have become such well-written characters. From Rapunzel to Vanellope to Judy Hopps to Moana to Elastigirl, they are fully fleshed-out characters first and agenda pushers second. Anna and Elsa are no exception. Elsa battles magical spirits and tames a water horse, and Anna has a crisis of ethics that feels really genuine. All without saying something dumb like “Look how capable I, a female, am in this situation, in comparison to my less competent male companions.”

Oh, by the way, for those of you who wanted Elsa to be revealed as a lesbian, I think we have a few more hints that she may be. She does not end up with a love interest, but I noticed she does seem to get along really well with Honeymaren. So maybe? Definitely better than the live-action Beauty and the Beast, am I right?

Oh, and the songs are great. We get not one, but TWO big numbers from Idina Menzel. Olaf and Kristoff both get new songs that are pointless, but still really funny. Anna has a new song that is one of the emotional highlights. The lyrics are just as clever, and they help further each character’s story arc. Even the lame pop versions of the songs over the end credits, which I usually DESPISE; hearing Imagine Dragons’ cover of “Into the Unknown” was actually pretty decent.

So, those darker themes. The reveal that one of Anna and Elsa’s ancestors was a genocidal tyrant who built the dam as a way to restrict the Northuldra tribe’s resources, and then declared war on them. Pretty ballsy, I have to say. And pretty creative that the villain of this movie is a character who is already dead before the movie even begins. Kind of like Coco, but they don’t even interact with him as a spirit or anything. What I like about this is that it kind of explains why the father in the first movie didn’t always do the right thing when it came to raising his kids. Locking up one of your daughters because she has supernatural abilities seems like a terrible move. But when you consider that Agnarr’s father was also distant from his son and had the goal of suppressing magic, you realize that it may have been a subconscious choice on his behalf. And hey, it’s also revealed that the reason Agnarr left on the ship that would eventually be his grave was to find answers about Elsa. So he probably felt remorse about it.

And now it’s time to compare this movie to today’s political climate. And before you start typing about how I’m wrong like Tumblr users are prone to do, maybe take a hint from the first movie and let it go. This is just my personal analysis.

The Northuldra tribe is clearly inspired by the Sami, the indigenous people of Norway, who have been persecuted for generations. But I don’t know much about Norwegian history, so let’s just compare it to America. Now let’s see...does America have a history of persecuting its indigenous population and disguising acts of war as offerings of peace? Hey, didn’t this movie come out just a week before Thanksgiving?

That’s right, I’m going there. Come to think of it, this whole movie radiates Thanksgiving vibes. It’s set in autumn, and it opens with everyone having a big feast with pumpkins and stuff.

King Runeard is a historical figure within Arendelle, and he is considered a hero. The dam that Runeard built is a monument that is ultimately destroyed by Anna in the film’s climax. And Anna initially refuses to do so because she believes the dam represents all that her kingdom stands for. I might be crazy, but this reminds me of how people are starting to take down statues of Confederate soldiers or how many cities have stopped recognizing Columbus Day as a national holiday, despite others saying that they are important parts of our heritage. One of the lines in “Some Things Never Change” is “Arendelle’s flag will always fly.” Sounds kind of like those conservative nuts who think the American flag is an infallible symbol and anyone who disrespects it (say, by taking a knee during the national anthem) is not a true patriot. Might be grasping at straws with that one.

And what Anna decides to do ultimately makes Arendelle a better place, even though she worries that it will be an unpopular decision. So we have a person in a position of political power who puts aside her own hubris for the good of her people. She asks for nothing in return, and knows that the right choice is not the easy one. She destroys a physical bridge, but builds a metaphorical one. Anna really is the type of leader we need. And if you think that it’s ethnocentric that a white person saves the day for a minority, remember that Anna and Elsa are actually half Northuldran on their mother’s side.

Yes, I believe Frozen 2 is up there with Zootopia as one of the great Disney flexes on right-wing extremists. But it’s subtle enough that we can enjoy the characters, the music, and the story first; and the message second. It reminds us to step outside our comfort zones and to always think about what it means to do the right thing.

If you didn’t like the first Frozen, you probably won’t enjoy this one either. I can understand what people mean when they say the movie throws a lot at you and doesn’t always feel focused on a coherent story. But regardless, I think it is an important movie.

#frozen 2 #disney #review #anna #elsa #olaf #kristoff #sven

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legobiwan · 5 years ago

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I’m freaking out because i just...i’m SO psyched for the Kenobi series but i’m so afraid that they’re gonna give him a romance. I hate it because i...i just, and you’ve talked about this before, he’s he perfect Jedi. To Obi-wan, being a good person IS following the code, even after the order is gone. He wouldn’t have realistically ever left the order for kryze (even tho i don’t consider that canon that always felt ooc to me) or the others bc he’s completely devoted to the code above all else 1/2

Especially after what he saw happen to anakin and padme because of that attachment. I highly doubt he would, 8 years later, be willing to even have temptation of a romantic partner. And god forbid we hear more Rey Kenobi theories. I’m just worried Disney is going to do a disservice to his character bc hollywood HAS to have a romance plot in everything. Do you think they’ll go down that route? 2/2

So we’re dealing with a few different issues here. Let’s break this down:

“The Perfect Jedi”

Obi-wan attempts to be the perfect Jedi. He tries, oh so hard, to keep himself at that exacting, impossible standard. Of course, no one is the perfect Jedi - not Obi-wan, not Yoda, not Mace Windu - and certainly not Qui-gon. (And yet there is something in there, the delicate balance of striving towards excellence as opposed to striving for perfection, and it is an important distinction, one that I don’t think the Jedi, as a whole, always got correct as a sense of extremism took root within certain sectors of the Order.) Now, the reason behind this predilection - well, we could point at a few factors. Obi-wan’s sense of impostor syndrome (not at all helped by one Qui-gon Jinn, who seemed to be constantly thinking Obi-wan was somehow behind on his development, as shown in Master and Apprentice.)

(There’s a whole other meta I’ve touched on regarding the whole inter-Lineage…I don’t want to use the word trauma, but let’s just say they all inherited their predecessors’ issues and manifested them very differently.)

But yes, from the get-go, it seems that Obi-wan needs to prove himself. To Qui-gon, as a Padawan. To Qui-gon’s memory, when he takes Anakin. To Anakin, to prove he could be the Master of the Chosen One. To the Council. Etc. It’s a lot of pressure on one person. And the thing is, Obi-wan cracks, more than once. His sardonic, biting sense of humor is indicative enough of his less-than-perfect adherence to the Code, not to mention all the rules he bends for Anakin, his devotion to Satine - which is an interesting case study. In the end, Obi-wan does not succumb to Maul’s taunts to go feral/Dark Side but Obi-wan’s actions on Mandalore, precipitated by his very un-Jedi actions regarding Satine, set off a cataclysm of far-reaching events. As does his refusal to kill Anakin on Mustafar, which could be construed as a wild infraction of the Jedi Code. I mean, had Obi-wan killed Anakin, made *sure* of it and not walked away, what would have happened?

And yet, he tries to do good. Even as he realizes his faults, his part in moulding galactic events. Obi-wan could have done more, could have done differently, and yet despite his awful circumstances, he never gives in to hate. He is flawed, imperfect, but still holds on to some core part of himself. And I think that core part is something…that’s not the Jedi Code. The Code, in the end, is meaningless after Mustafar. (And I really REALLY hope the series touches on this idea of loss of faith, because Obi-wan held on to the Code so tightly, as a way of justifying so many of his actions because what else did he have? And I love existential crises when they’re not my own. HA!) The Code may have been his way of telling himself he was doing good - was doing what Qui-gon wanted, what the Council wanted, what was best for Anakin…but I wonder when Obi-wan sat down and thought about what he wanted for himself? Without expectation, without other people’s narratives. (Okay, so I may be projecting a bit here.)

I’m getting off-topic here. Would Obi-wan have left the Order for Satine? No. He would have thought about it, fantasized about it. But at that point, he would have been too wrapped up in expectations to actually do anything about it. And by the time the Clone Wars came around? He was too responsible, too enmeshed. And…you know, I get it. I’m around Obi-wan’s age in TCW/RotS. There’s so much narrative to unpack in your life, so much expectation that you can internalize or throw away and whose story is it anyway? Those around you? Your own? Some odd mixture therein? But Obi-wan wasn’t ready to let go of that narrative, of those expectations, of the ghost of Qui-gon and so, no, he wouldn’t have left the Order. But there would be nights, those nights. When the lights have dimmed in the quarters on board the Star Destroyer, when the company you keep is an empty durasteel table, half a bottle of Corellian whiskey, and twenty years of what if…

But you were asking about romance, about attachment. (So often conflated, although never one and the same. Or perhaps they are different terms for the same idea, not love in the carnal sense but illogical devotion to someone or something. I always like the idea of there being many words, ideas for love, as the Greeks made popular in our culture. Love, or attachment to an idea or a thing can be just as wonderful, as intoxicating and dangerous as it can be with a person.)

Realistically? An Obi-wan set adrift in Tatooine might get attached, despite everything. (The novel Kenobi does a fantastic job of illustrating this.) We yearn for connection, and someone who has all but cut themselves off from interaction with other beings…how long can you hold out?

This isn’t to say I would support a full-fledged typical Hollywood romance in the series. Because honestly? Not the time or place.

Now, if it is something where Obi-wan feels a connection with someone and then purposefully acts against it? I would be okay with this. As it would be in service to the idea that he is (tragically) cutting himself off, believing himself to taint others, to be less than. And given the trajectory of recent streaming, I’m more confident than I would have been a few years ago that a series can do without a “typical” romance. (Which…thank the gods for that development. I don’t mind natural romance (I’m looking at you, Good Omens), but the shoe-horned heteronormative plots I was forced to endure through the 80s, 90s and early 2000s were…tiring, to say the least.)

We’re in a new era now, with these streaming services, with the impact fandom has on media, with social mores changing for the better, in my opinion. (But seriously, it’s wild for an old fogey like me to watch unfold. A little weird, I’m not going to lie, but on the whole, a positive development.) I’m going to put my faith in a few things, including a) Ewan McGregor wouldn’t have signed on to this if it weren’t going to be something interesting and nuanced (and gods know he held out long enough, so I’m assuming the man has standards) and b) Disney wants our wallets and has a pretty good grasp of its demographics (probably a scarily accurate grasp, but that’s another story for another time), so I’m not too worried about a prototypical romance plot.

Now, as to Rey Kenobi theories, I have to admit, I enjoy them, only because I’ve been struggling for more Kenobi content recently. I doubt that’s the route they’ll go down, especially in light of all the rumours circulating about Episode 9. And so, in the end, what I hope (and believe) we’ll get is a very human story about a man who tried to live by a narrative and failed, and tried to reconstruct himself not totally escaping the chains of those events and people, but still trying to do good.

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takerfoxx · 5 years ago

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The Rise of Skywalker Review

All right, new year, new decade, and all that jazz. Now, I do have a few things I wanna say about reflecting back on where I was and where I am now, personal growth and all that, but first, I have some major I need to get out of my system, something that’s been eating at my mind all week, something I really need to sit down and dissect to properly suss out my thoughts and feelings.

And that thing is this: what the fuck happened with The Rise of Skywalker?!

Now, just for the record, I’m that lapsed Star Wars fan who grew up with the original trilogy, who had a full shelf of EU novels that I read and reread over and over until their covers fell off, who spent untold hours replaying both of the Knights of the Old Republic games, was majorly let down by the prequels and became disillusioned by the franchise as a result, who reacted to the news of Disney’s acquisition of the franchise with cyncisim, who thought that The Force Awakens was decent but otherwise substance-less knock-off of A New Hope, who was bored to tears by Rogue One, who skipped Solo entirely, but who actually was surprising engaged and receptive to the subversive themes and new places that The Last Jedi took the franchise even if it was very flawed structurally and thought that it was the best Star Wars film since Return of the Jedi.

And hell, let’s just state my reasons right now. The Last Jedi came out at a time when I was just so tired of people trying to recapture lightning in a bottle with once-great franchises that had lived on long past their expiration date with trying to pass off clearly inferior knock-offs to their original installments as sequels. I mean, it can work, sure. Both of the Creed movies followed the Rocky movie formula pretty closely but were still great, and even if it didn’t click with me the way it did with other people, Fury Road was a fantastic film. The thing is though, both of those movies were still being handled by their original creators, specifically Sylvester Stallone and George Miller, while my beloved Star Wars and Jurassic Park had become divorced from their daddies and were now being handled by people who just. Didn’t. Get it.

And then The Last Jedi came along and was all, “Shut up about bloodlines, they don’t matter! Your main character is not the descendant of some already established character, she’s just some rando Force-sensitive that caught up in all this and decided to answer the call, so let her stand on her own! The Jedi were a well-meaning but immensely flawed, so leave them in the annuals of history and stop venerating them! Same with your heroes! Also, your Resistance has its hands dirty too because it’s a fucking war and war makes monsters of everybody while the little people suffer, sometimes you need to listen to the people in charge instead of being a hothead bucking the system, and the intimidating villains in black are in truth a bunch of insecure man-children playing dress-up to make them feel better about themselves and are pretty pathetic until they take that last step and become actual threats because that is how fascism works!”

Do you realize just how refreshing all of that was? Oh my God, is the Star Wars franchise actually…moving forward? Are we getting new stuff that’s not hampered by George Lucas’s unbearably hackneyed writing?

Yes, the whole Finn and Rose sidequest contributed nothing to the plot and ultimately went nowhere. Yes, the whole Poe vs. Admiral Holdo had the looming question of “Why doesn’t she just tell Poe that she’s got a plan instead of doing everything to set the team rebel off?” which undercut its message. These are major problems, I acknowledge that. The thing is, they are easily fixable problems that would have been smoothed out by a few more script treatments. It sucks that they weren’t, but as for me, they were roadbumps, not dealbreakers. I noticed them, I saw that they were major problems, but they didn’t make me angry, and I liked what they were trying to say enough for me to still be with it. And I felt that all the Luke/Rey/Kylo stuff was gangbusters (yes, I loved cranky, disillusioned old Luke. I know Mark Hamill didn’t care for it, but that’s fine, it worked great for me), so I ultimately left feeling pleasantly surprised. As if in, it was a flawed but very refreshing experience, one that said things I had been feeling for a long time and took things to interesting places that I actually wanted to see play out. I even got choked up when Luke let himself fade away when feeling absolutely nothing when Han died the previous film.

Unfortunately, that seemed to be a minority opinion, with many other Star Wars fan outright detesting it, sometimes to a pretty gross level (you know what I’m talking about). So when JJ Abrams was brought back on board to try to salvage things for the final installment, my reaction was, “I’m going to hate it, aren’t I?”

Still, I knew I was going to see it anyway, just to say that I did. And…welp.

…

Dafuq was that?

All right, all right, now before I continue, I need to acknowledge something. First of all, I have nothing against JJ Abrams as a person or even really as an artist. From all accounts he’s a cool guy who’s been taking all the backlash he’s been getting with a commendable amount of maturity, and he was placed in a very unenviable position by taking the reins in the midst of a very volatile situation. Plus, he had set a ton of things up in TFA that TLJ burned to the ground. Granted, it was a bonfire that I thoroughly enjoyed, but as the person watching his ideas just get cut off, that must have been frustrating watch. Like, what was he supposed to work with once he was brought back on after Colin Trevorrow had gotten the boot? And on a side-note, they really need to stop bringing Colin Trevorrow into big blockbuster franchises.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, we had the tragic passing of Carrie Fisher, which, in addition to being a terrible loss in general because she was a wonderful person that we’re all the poorer without, this movie was supposed to in some way revolve thematically around her, much like the TFA did with Han and TLJ did with Luke. But with her gone, they were just left with footage and recorded dialogue from deleted scenes from the first two films, which is next to nothing to go off of. Now there’s a debate to be had about whether or not it would be appropriate to CG her face onto a different actress, and I do get them feeling that doing so would be ghoulish…but they kinda already did that to bring Tarkin back in Rogue One, so…

Even so, that really sucks, and as awkward as the Princess Leia scenes are as a result, it isn’t their fault, so I’ll leave it at that.

And finally, it must also be acknowledged that a lot of the things I’m going to criticize them for were present in the original trilogy, and were just as awkward then. The OG movies weren’t perfect, folks. We’ve come to accept these flaws, but they were just as clumsy asspulls back then as they are now.

All right, now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, I actually want to start off on a positive note, specifically talking about the stuff I liked.

Let’s begin with the thing that I consider to not only be good, but actually kind of great: the relationship between Rey and Kylo Ren. Their weird Force-link in TLJ was one of the few new ideas that everyone seemed to like, especially since neither of them could really control it and were equally befuddled by it. It’s just a cool idea, a new aspect of the Force we haven’t seen before, and it’s slowly built upon, actually affects both the plot and the characters, and leads to some great scenes between the two of them.

And you know what? I was actually surprised by how much I liked these two together. After the wooden pile of bleh that was Anakin and Padme, I was bracing myself for more of the same. But as it turns out, Daisy Ridley and Adam Driver have an incredible amount of chemistry, and Adam especially was able to pull off the whole tortured bad boy who’s trying to be a villain but feels endlessly conflicted in a way that Hayden Christensen never could (though to be fair, Adam had way more to work with). So giving them that weird link where they’re forced to interact at different points despite being galaxies across from one another is a fantastic idea.

And I was happy to see that not only was this idea not walked back on, they actually built on it. Without giving too much away, there’s an amazing scene where they actually have a lightsaber fight despite being in two completely different locations and not really knowing where the other is, with the camera jumping back and forth from each other’s perspective and items from each other’s surroundings keep getting thrown into the other’s area and it’s honestly really great.

There were also a lot of visuals that were pretty great. The whole indoor lightning of the Sith Planet was neat, as was the flying stormtroopers, and that festival was pretty cool, and…

Actually, come to think of it, most of the scenes in this movie are, when viewed in isolation, pretty good, and could have worked if they had been buffeted by, you know, proper buildup, actual pacing, and taking the time to let events have weight.

But that leads us to this movie’s biggest failing, the problem that bring the whole thing crashing down. And that is it will just. Not. Slow. Down!

Seriously, don’t take a bathroom break, because if you do, you’ll come back to find everybody on a totally different planet doing something completely different, and the plot point you left on is completely in the rearview. It’s exhausting how quickly this movie jumps around from place to place, where we get a look at a setting and characters that might have been interesting if we got to spend actual time with them, only to drop it and we’re onto the next part. This isn’t a story, it’s a list of bullet points! It’s a three hour highlight reel of a whole-ass fourth trilogy, one that could have been cool to watch if they had chopped it up into three parts and fleshed them out into three movies. Hell, I’ll tell you where to end each one: Rey vs. Kylo on the Star Destroyer, Rey vs. Kylo on the wreckage of the Death Star, and the actual finale. Expand on the stuff in between, flesh things out with actual, you know, character development and consequences instead of zipping around, trying to come up with as many places as they can to cram into Star Tours’ randomizer.

And that’s what this basically is, an overly long Star Tours ride! Now I like Star Tours just fine, because it visits places that hold actual meaning due to being properly developed in actual movies, but these places just left me feeling hollow. And while we’re on the subject, did we really need another desert planet, ice planet, and forest planet combo? Spice things the fuck up! Say what you want about the prequels, but at least they tried to take us to cool new places.

And you know what? I’m going to say it. This movie is actually worse than the prequels. Not because it’s nearly as clumsily written and woodenly acted, or because it’s dragged down by dumb attempts at comedy; it’s none of those things. But at least the prequels were trying! George Lucas might be totally inept as a writer and should not have been given free reign, but there were attempts at things like proper plot and character development, pacing, plot twists, mystery, building things up and paying them off. Just go read the novelization of Revenge of the Sith. It’s fantastic! Same plot, same events happening, same conversations, but the dialogue is reworked to give the characters actual personality and it’s narratively told in an awesome and creative way and it’s overall just a great book. So George Lucas’s movies had the framework of a good story, he just wasn’t the right person to tell it.

In contrast, this movie has actual good acting, and the dialogue isn’t anywhere nearly as corny, but it’s just so unbelievably basic. It’s surface level writing, with barely a hint of cleverness and very little personality other than what the actors are about to wrangle out through their performances. But structure-wise, other than to expand it into a full trilogy, I don’t see how anyone can turn this mess into an engaging, single-movie narrative. So much happens, and it just feels so empty.

And…okay. Let’s address the Bantha in the room. Let’s talk about Palpatine.

Why is he back? Why? Just…why? He doesn’t need to be back! He doesn’t! It’s stupid, it’s hackneyed, it’s not even explained! I mean, there’s an offhand mention of cloning, so yeah, it’s feasible, it just makes no narrative sense! Hell, the fucking opening title crawl just plain says, “Yeah, he’s back. No reason, he just is” and goes on from that. And apparently he’s been behind everything that’s happened, like Snoke and Vader’s voice in Kylo Ren’s head and stuff, because things just can’t happen without being masterminded by someone I guess.

Really? This is the best they could come up with? I know TLJ cut off a lot of their plot branches, but goddamn it, this is the best you’ve got? Resurrect Palpatine? They do remember that the first two movies from the trilogy barely had the emperor as a presence, right? Vader carried them all just fine! Just run with that! Have Kylo Ren be the main antagonist! Have this be able his ascension to actual mega threat instead of Darth Vader cosplayer. If you want Ian McDiarmid to ham it up in the robes one last time (and hey, who wouldn’t?) just give him a cameo! Like, a holographic message to any potential successors Kylo Ren is looking for. Have him be the devil on Kylo’s shoulder in a is-he-real-is-he-just-a-hallucination sort of way. Make him something tempting Kylo Ren to fully embrace being the new Sith Lord, something Kylo has to overcome if he wants redemption. But don’t bring him fucking back! That’s just so, so stupid.

And Rey being Palpatine’s granddaughter kind of pisses me off. Her being revealed as a nobody from nowhere in the last film was great! I loved that idea! But no, let’s just retcon that whole business because we’re trying to apologize for the only one of these movies that had any balls and everybody has to be the descendant of someone important. Even fucking Lando gets a long-lost daughter in this! No, I’m not joking, he totally does.

Now, could Rey’s Sith heritage have worked? Sure! In of itself, it’s a rad idea, one that could have been used to explore all sorts of awesome themes…if that had been their plan from the beginning instead of a cheap attempt to replicate Empire’s big plot twist. But let’s face it: they threw it in as a desperate attempt to placate the fans. There never was any sort of plan. Abrams made the first movie with the sole intention of trying to recapture that nostalgic feel and fucked off, Rian Johnson took over with no notes and decided to do what he wanted, Trevorrow got fired, and Abrams got brought back for PR reasons because hey, people liked his movie, and he had to scramble to piece something together! Damn it, Disney! You literally have infinite resources! Hire someone with actual creative talent!

Oh wait, you did, and people hated it. Fuck.

So yeah. Rey’s parentage? Total waste, raises more questions than it answers. Chewie’s apparent death? Total waste, because he was actually on another ship! Though you could Force sense these things, Rey! Dark Side Rey in the trailer? Total waste, just a Force vision. That whole bit with C-3PO potentially sacrificing his entire identity? Total waste. No one seems to care, he gets no say, and after his memory gets wiped it’s treated as comic relief. Yeah, one last look at your friends indeed, Threepio. Some friends you have there. Oh, except Artoo’s got your memory backed up, so it doesn’t matter, just like everything else.

Oh yeah, and fuck Chewie’s medal! Who was really asking for that?

What a mess. What a disjointed, soulless, pandering mess. What a waste of potential, squandered on nothing. Bleh.

Oh well, at least we still have the Mandalorian. I’ve started watching that and it’s really cool so far.

#star wars #the rise of skywalker #rey #kylo ren #jj abrams #the last jedi #the force awakens #george lucas #rant

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myaphelion · 6 years ago

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On video games, Children’s Lit, and the hatred of new media in academia

"On the other hand, television, movies, and video games have eroded what is expected of children in terms of both language skills and attention span. What these visual media have done is provide watered-down and even simplistic renderings of many classics, as well as privilege plot over characterization, style, and narrative point of view. Video games are the most bastardized of these visual media because the focus lies exclusively with what happens next. Thus, although making children more aware of the world around them has resulted in their beginning to read texts in a different way, the same means by which children have become able to challenge the existing paradigms make it more difficult for them to read those texts."

- William Thompson, ENGL305, Literature for Children (rev. C4)

So. About this part of the Children’s Lit course I just completed.

I’m not much of a stranger to people crapping on new media—it’s been happening since the beginning of time, and I’ve read about and seen it time and time again. First music, then books, then film, then television, then more new music, then music videos, and now video games and various forms of internet media. Still, in an academic setting, especially in a school that offers courses on gaming, I didn’t expect to see this. But here we are I guess??? (Academia is garbage, don’t ask me.)

Anyway. This gives me an excuse to compare the history of children’s lit to the history of video games directed at children, along with explaining why this quote bothered me so much in a bit greater detail.

Okay, so let’s start with the quote itself and pick it apart a bit. I can agree with the author’s assertion that more easily accessible media makes it harder to sit down and do something like read a book cover-to-cover—I know for a fact it’s happened to me and several other people. On the other hand, having media that’s more easily accessible like movies, TV, and (some) video games can lead people towards reading the source of their favourite things. Not to mention that some stories can’t be told in books—choose your own adventure stories are little substitute for the programming of a game where you can see your actions have consequences in real time rather than just reading about it on a page, which may not have as immediate or as harsh an impact.

“Watered-down and… simplistic renderings of many classics [that] privilege plot over characterization, style, and narrative point of view.” What, course author, have you been watching, besides the oldest of Disney movies, and even then—even then!—they have a style all their own. Just because something is different from the original ‘classic’ that you may love, does not necessarily make it ‘watered-down’ or ‘simplistic’. I do agree that some movies, TV shows, and video games bastardize the works they’re based on. But—and this is an enormous but—books can do the very same for other universes. Have you read some of the worse Star Wars Extended Universe novels lately? God knows they didn’t help the SW canon when they were still considered canon. And your comment about ‘plot over everything’ is just… ridiculous. Some of the books I read in the course, and some of the stories you pointed out from the early days of children’s literature, by your own admission, heavily favoured either plot, characters, style, or narrative POV to the exclusion of one or all of the others. It’s not just new media that do this—any poorly-written or poorly-conceived piece can lack one or more of these things. Even good media can have problems with one or more of these things that are made up by the strength of the other areas. Some media isn’t meant to have amazing characterization, or style, or narrative POV—some media really is all about the plot, and that can be very much a positive thing.

Now, the final bit of the quote that’s relevant. Let me remind you again what it says. “Video games are the most bastardized of these visual media because the focus lies exclusively with what happens next.” As… as opposed to what, author? Do you think that people just pick up books in order to analyze the absolute crap out of them until they can only enjoy them on that level? Hell no! The ordinary person, and especially the ordinary child, will pick up a book because they want to know what happens. Nobody except the person with their head so far up their ass they can see the sun out their own mouth is picking up a piece of media to just see what the writer’s intent was—unless they’re doing an academic course, I guess. Generally, however, if a book or other piece of media is boring as sin and the reader or watcher doesn’t want to see what happens next… they’re going to put it down and not come back. Yes, style is important, and yes, authorial intent and all the rest is important too—but those things are not exclusive to the realm of literature, and they are there in video games, too.

The real point of this, however, is that the author of this course seems to believe that video games are a form of media that can never reach the heights of literature, even children’s literature. Not so. Video games are a very new medium as opposed to any other media that’s current, save for internet content, which is a baby medium even compared to video games. This means that video games are still going through the kind of growth that children’s literature went through, albeit slightly more accelerated given just how many games are pumped out per year.

When literary works for children were first introduced in medieval times, and pretty much up until the eighteenth century, they were intended merely to educate and instruct. These books tended to be directed towards literate young boys, especially in the earliest ones, and were often Christian in nature, urging young lads to follow God’s word lest they be punished in the fires of hell. As such, children’s literature didn’t really exist as we think of it today, and kids were more prone to reading whatever interesting adventure stories or tales they could get their hands on, such as Aesop’s Fables or Robinson Crusoe. These stories were never intended to be read solely by children, but rather intended for an adult audience first. However, given that they weren’t objectionable by nature, kids devoured them because of their adventurous content, and loved that these stories were fantastical and jogged their imagination.

It wasn’t until the mid-eighteenth century and John Newbery’s printing company exclusively for children’s literature that kids finally had books to call their own that weren’t just moralistic or educational. While Newbery wasn’t doing it out of some saint-like desire to provide books to children, but for monetary gain, it allowed authors who really did feel like they wanted to write books directed at children that were just for fun to finally have some precedent for their publishing. I could go on from here, but suffice to say that by Victorian times, children’s literature had finally become a full-blown genre of its own. No longer were children forced to read books that could be dry and dull, or books that weren’t really meant for them. Instead, they had books that were all their own, with stories they could relate to and sink their teeth into.

Like I said, though, video games are still new media. Kid gamers haven’t yet had their own John Newbery, but there have been companies and solo developers that have tried. During the 70s, when gaming was the hot new thing, kids’ games didn’t really exist. Everyone played Pong and its ilk, and the educational games on the Magnavox Odyssey were the closest things to kids’ games that existed at the time. Again, a pattern begins to emerge, as we see that the earliest video games either weren’t directed at children, or were mere educational games, intended to serve as teaching tools and nothing more. However, when the video game crash happened and Atari was taken down, Nintendo rose from the ashes in North America to become a video game juggernaut that still exists today. While much of their marketing was directed at kids, with ROB selling the Nintendo Entertainment System as a toy rather than the dreaded ‘video game console’, most of Nintendo’s games weren’t directed solely at children either. The developers who focused on kids in the NES days, again, were primarily educational developers, making games like Mario is Missing! that used famous characters to try and teach kids everything from geography to counting.

The PC and home computer market wasn’t much better, though this is where things begin to get interesting. While console gaming soon almost entirely dropped games directed at children, save for a few titles that were mostly tie-ins to existing children’s properties and sold on name brand alone, even if they weren’t very good, computer gaming was more concerned with appealing to children. Given that home computers were sold as devices that were meant for the whole family to use, of course kids were gunning to play games on their new computers. When the multimedia and CD revolution happened in the 1990s, several big companies rose to the top of educational software, as well as true games for children that were not intended to teach, except as a good side effect. Let’s talk about a few of those now.

Knowledge Adventure, Broderbund, and The Learning Company were three game studios that primarily focused on educational games for children. However, each of these companies tried their best to make learning fun instead of dull, like most educational games had been beforehand. One look at KA’s Jumpstart series, or Broderbund’s Living Books, or TLC’s Reader Rabbit, and it’s hard to argue that these games aren’t fun as well as educational. As a kid, I played all three of these series, and while each of them was arguably intended to educate as well as entertain, I hardly noticed. I was having too much fun learning fractions by measuring out ingredients in Jumpstart 2nd Grade, or reading about D.W. The Picky Eater, or trying to find the Math Magician in Interactive Math Journey.

However, the reigning king of children’s software in the 90s and early 00s was undoubtedly the late, great Humongous Entertainment. Their business model was to create point-and-click adventure games for kids, games that educated on the periphery, but were primarily intended to entertain. Putt-Putt, Freddi Fish, Pajama Sam, and Spy Fox have become icons of children’s media from this time period, and each of them is fondly remembered by kids of my generation because of how fun these games were. Sure, they didn’t tell very complex stories, but the down-to-earth problems of Pajama Sam, the detective antics of Freddi Fish and Spy Fox, and the kooky adventures of Putt-Putt and the one-hit-wonder Fatty Bear were all relatable for kids, and took place in worlds that children wanted to explore and visit over and over again. These games had an art style that was instantly recognizable, with animation often rivaling the cartoons of the time, or at least comparable to them. Thankfully, they’ve been rereleased on mobile devices and on Good Old Games and Steam—they haven’t been lost to time.

Still, after Humongous’ dissolution, no companies have come up to take the reins of kid game developer. While kids have been playing games intended for everyone, or even games intended for adults, games directed primarily at kids that aren’t educational have become few and far between again. The 90s had a glimmer of hope that we might get the Newbery of kids’ games, but that glimmer was shattered when Humongous went down. With independent developers and the continued presence of companies such as Nintendo that are willing to publish games for just about anyone, however, it’s pretty much only a matter of time until entertaining kids’ games can take their place neatly in the pantheon of video games.

So what am I trying to say with this whole thing? I don’t know. I guess I’m just trying to dissolve the idea that games are a less important form of media than anything else. Just because they’re new, doesn’t mean that they have no merit. They haven’t had the time to grow like most new media has, and especially in the department of entertaining children, they’re lacking. I say that given a few years—maybe a few decades—we’ll see the Newbery of gaming rise, and children will finally get games of their own that adults want to play too.

Also that that quote is still crap. I’m not going to let that go ever.

#video games #new media #children's lit #children's literature #big ol' essays #i am so sorry this got so out of hand holy fuck #blue's writing shit

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unknown-de-mordor-blog · 7 years ago

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Five ships I’m still not over

Beleg Cúthalion/Túrin Turambar

Universe: Middle-earth, first age

Ship name: Nothing that’s widely used in the fandom, I don’t think. But I like to think of them as ‘Black Sword (referring to Turin’s cursed weapon) and Strongbow (direct translation of Cúthalion)’

To me, there's no character more tragic than Turin son of Hurin, and no pairing more tragic than him and Beleg. And no clearer love, too. I don't know if J. R. R. Tolkien intended for them to go that far, but their emotional connection is so deep and powerful that whether you ship them or not it's undisputedly one of the most beautiful relationships in Tolkien's lore. Alas! It's not powerful enough to undo the curse placed on Turin and his clan, which ends both his and Beleg's life all too soon and all too tragically. So, yes, I count Beleg as one of the elves who die for love.

Favourite quote: 'I would lead my own men, and make war in my own way,' Turin answered. 'But in this at least my heart is changed: I repent every stroke save those dealt against the Enemy of Men and Elves. And above all else I would have you beside me. Stay with me!' 'If I stayed beside you, love would lead me not wisdom,' said Beleg.

Uh, I love this so much because it shows the difference in their temperament and maturity. Beleg's an elf who has lived through and fought in so many wars. He's an (elf)man of duty, honour and intellect, and Turin is still a young man whose pride and stubbornness can seriously get in the way of a grown-up conversation. And Beleg is so not having any of that in this scene. He’d do anything for Turin, including ditching his command to find him, but he can pull some tough-love moves, too, when Turin’s unreasonable.

Uzumaki Naruto/Uchiha Sasuke

Universe: Naruto

Ship name: sns, narusasu, sasunaru

I think Naruto and Sasuke canonically love each other, I really do, but I don’t think they are together romantically at any point in the series. And that’s by design, really. Sasuke -- the last of the Uchiha, the tragic figure of the Naruto series (still not as tragic as Turin, but let’s not do this morbid comparison) -- has too many issues to work through, and Naruto isn’t in the position to really help him through them. So as soul-deep as their bond is, they couldn’t have been together and survive each other. Although, I really want that to happen. That’s what fanfictions are for, I guess.

Favourite quote: ‘If you attack Konoha, I will have to fight you... So save up your hatred and take it all on me, I'm the only one who can take it. It's the only thing I can do. I will shoulder your hatred and die with you.’

Honestly, Naruto might just as well propose to Sasuke with that because he’s essentially saying ‘give me your worst, I’m not leaving and never will’. I know friends could be like that, too, but normally not to this degree and not with this kind of commitment. I’m not surprised at all when Sasuke has to ask Naruto why the hell he is doing all this for him. It just goes beyond reason, really.

S'chn T'gai Spock /James T. Kirk

Universe: Star Trek

Ship name: K/S, Spirk

The Daddy of all ships! Pun intended! Spock and Kirk's friendship really walks that fine line of are they/aren’t they. I personally think they aren’t (another controversial statement coming from a shipper), but they’re so cute together you just can’t help think: what if they are? They have this deep trust and affection for one another anyway; why not push it a notch further? ‘This simple feeling,’ as Spock calls it, might as well be love.

Favourite quote:

Kirk: How's our ship? Spock: Out of danger. Kirk: Good... Spock: You saved the crew. Kirk: You used what he wanted against him. That's a nice move. Spock: It is what you would have done. Kirk: And this... this is what you would have done. It was only logical. I'm scared, Spock. Help me not be. How do you choose not to feel? Spock: I do not know. [tears fall] Right now, I am failing. Kirk: I want you to know why I couldn't let you die... why I went back for you... Spock: Because you are my friend. [Kirk places his hand against the glass and gives the Vulcan Salute as he dies]

It’s actually really hard for me to pick a quote for these two because I think every ‘Jim’ from Spock does the job except nobody else would understand it but me. (Second to that is, ‘Captian, not in front of the Klingons.’) While I love them teasing each other a lot, I think Kirk’s death scene from Star Trek Into Darkness has all the right punches to it. Spock has been unable to accept the feeling of friendship towards Kirk (actually just feelings in general) until the moment he watches Kirk dies behind the glass door. And all just comes out like BOOM! Not to mention how close Spock comes to killing Khan for revenge before Uhura tells him that Kirk can be saved but they need Khan alive. Honestly, that’s the only reason Khan’s head doesn’t go plop in Spock’s hands.

Morgoth/Sauron

Universe: Middle-earth, first age

Ship name: it just came to my attention that the fandom is calling this ship Angbang (a wordplay on the name of their home/fortress Angband). Nicely done, you naughty people. Also Melkor/Mairon if you’re going by their proper first-age names.

I think a lot of people seeing this ship would go ‘what?!’ Like, how is that even possible when Tolkien didn’t write a single scene with the two of them in it. I’d say in this case the absence is more powerful. Tolkien wrote the Silmarillion and the Unfinished Tales as lore, so they necessarily come from the perspective of the tellers; i.e., humans and elves. That doesn’t mean Tolkien didn’t drop hints about the complex characters that the dark lords of Middle-earth are. He even has Elrond says that people don’t start out evil, not even Sauron. So the question becomes, what the heck happened? And the heck that starts it all out is pretty much in the first few chapters of the Silmarillion where Morgoth is clearly a powerful and inventive figure but in many ways an outcast and shunned by everyone including the very power that made him. (*cough* daddy issue *cough*) And then we are made aware of the fact Sauron, who is also powerful and creative, isn’t on Morgoth’s side from the get go but decides to join him later. The power-hungry dark lords we are later told about aren’t that at all, so it raises the question of their true characters and motives. If anything, I think the length in which Sauron would go for Morgoth thousands of years after his master is defeated and shut away says something about their bond with each other. And if I know one thing, it can’t be fear or respect. If I have to make a guess, I think it is akin to love.

Favourite quote: There isn’t anything I can quote from the source material since there hasn’t been a dialogue or anything they say to an audience that could be trusted as genuinely representing who they are. One thing I do scream about is the scene in the Return of the King movie when the black gate opened and behind there isn’t just the tower with the eye of Sauron but Mount Doom next to it in the same frame. I was like ‘I know Morgoth’s not here but isn’t that him in spirit.’ Yes, I’m a proper trash for these two.

Also, there’s this awesome comic series (unfortunately discontinued) by Suz. It’s legitimately hotter than the fire of Aule’s forge, honestly.

Beren/Lúthien

Universe: Middle-earth, first age

Ship name: I’m not aware of any ship name for these two but ‘Beren and Luthien’ is catchy enough as it is.

How else to finish this list but to dedicate the last entry to the greatest love story of Middle-earth, and, yes, I'm saying that with a straight face because, holy hell, this couple defies expectations left, right, and centre. Luthien, our elven princess, is an active participant in her own fate. She falls in love with a human who, in an act of valour, accepts her father's stupid, impossible task to steal the most treasured jewel from Morgoth the Dark Lord himself. Luthien basically runs away from home, finds her man captured and tortured, and tears the goddamn fortress down in a showdown with the-dark-lord-to-be Sauron himself (which makes you question the competency of everyone else in Middle-earth). They then proceed to steal the jewel together. They don't quite succeed in bringing it back and Beren loses his hand in the process, but hey, they could say it's in his hand, somewhere, and now could they please marry because otherwise I have a feeling that Luthien is going to elope with her boyfriend and her mom and dad won't be seeing her again ever.

And this is really just scratching the surface of Luthien’s feisty personality quite unbefitting of most princesses until the recent overhaul of attitude by Disney. And all this came from a man who was born in the Victorian era when women's autonomy wasn't given or respected. But I think Luthien's depth of character comes from the fact that she has a real-life counterpart, and so she feels more like a real woman. And the love between Beren and Luthien feels compelling because its the love the professor himself had for his wife and life-long partner, Edith. You can check out their gravestone. I'm so not making this up.

Favourite quote: The song of Lúthien before Mandos was the song most fair that ever in words was woven, and the song most sorrowful that ever the world shall ever hear. Unchanged, imperishable, it is sung still in Valinor beyond the hearing of the world, and the listening the Valar grieved. For Lúthien wove two themes of words, of the sorrow of the Eldar and the grief of Men, of the Two Kindreds that were made by Ilúvatar to dwell in Arda, the Kingdom of Earth amid the innumerable stars. And as she knelt before him her tears fell upon his feet like rain upon stones; and Mandos was moved to pity, who never before was so moved, nor has been since.

It’s not a scene between them, but this is how far Luthien’s love and badassery goes. She loses Beren in a battle to protect her father’s kingdom, and she dies grieving him. In the afterlife, she gets to meet the god of death Mandos and sings him a song of their love and her grief. Apparently, she’s so good with words and music that Mandos is like, ‘I can’t handle the feels. You can have your husband back and have a mortal life with him.’ And Luthien takes the deal, of course.

#my post #tolkien verse #naruto #star trek #beren and luthien #spirk #angbang #sns #narusasu #sasunaru #turin and beleg #shipping supreme #I'm enterprising these shit

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coll2mitts · 4 years ago

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#89 Head (1968)

From the minds of Jack Nicholson and Bob Rafelson, is a 110 minute acid trip featuring The Monkees. Their television show had been recently cancelled, and this movie is essentially their former-Disney star “I’m an adult!” moment in an attempt to break free of their preassigned roles and become Serious Artists.

I cannot adequately express the despair I felt when Head literally announced there would be no plot to this movie, and would instead be a series of skits. It makes sense in the context of The Monkees, since they were formed for a television show. Each section of the movie has a different genre, ranging from a traditional Western, a boxing movie, a television commercial, a stage-performed musical number, horror... they are all here, which makes an overall narrative pretty hard to discern, other than The Monkees’ general discontentment with their current position.

It begins similarly to A Hard Day’s Night, where the Monkees are being chased by... we don’t know what yet, but we can assume it is not excited teenage girls. They then launch themselves off of a bridge, trip on LSD, find some mermaids, and hold a kissing contest that only triggered my Covid-spread panic. The movie doesn’t give you much time to breathe before it comes in hot with a football player attacking soldiers, a football stadium cheering for war, and The Monkees playing a live concert with a screaming crowd cut together with scenes of civilians being killed during the Vietnam war.

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Not gonna lie, I didn't think I'd have to address the Vietnam War at all during this project (unfortunately, Meet the Feebles took that assumption away from me rather quickly). To be honest, I was really expecting this more from The Beatles, especially with John Lennon's very famous pivot to anti-war protest songs. In college, I wrote a sociology paper on the Vietnam War's influence on popular culture and the function of the media created, and not once in all my research were The Monkees even seriously cited, other than some coy allusion that “Last Train to Clarksville” might have had something to do with a soldier travelling to an army base. I was so taken aback by the opening scene of this movie, that I literally pulled out my paper and the books I had purchased to write it to see if I had missed something. There was ONE sentence about Mike Nesmith singing a protest song before he joined The Monkees. Granted, if you were alive during the 1960s, to be ignorant of the war in general would have been so incredibly tone-deaf. Had I realized this movie would be political in any way, I would have expected this. In one book, the author had compiled over 750 songs that directly addressed the war. Record sales tripled during the decade, and Woodstock might be the most famous festival we’ve ever held in the US - processing the war through music was very much *a thing*. So, of course, I had to dive into this, because my brain can't just be like, "Well, I guess The Monkees hated the Vietnam War like the majority of the population, I guess.”

There wasn’t much to find, other than this bizarre clip of Davey Jones on an 80s talk show bragging and singing about how he had evaded the draft. Turns out, the writer/director of this picture, Bob Rafelson, really controlled the message of this movie, and he inserted these scenes as commentary on the performative aspect of war, and how television “...makes you inured to the realities of life. Oh yes, it brings it into the living room, but then you don’t have to fucking deal with it. There is no distinction made between the close-up of the young girl responding hysterically to the appearance of The Monkees and to the shot of the assassination at the same time. And then the hysterical girls attack the stage where The Monkees are playing and shred their clothing off. But they’re not The Monkees, they are wooden dummies. They’ll shred anything, as long as it’s the thing to do. Rape the stage, attack the musicians, real or unreal, who cares? And it was just pointing out that there was a sort of a mindlessness to, as The Beatles used to complain all the time, to the appreciation of the music.”

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There’s a lot going on in this statement... I’ll agree that the constant barrage of violence and unrest eventually numbs you to it. Especially now, with a 24-hour news cycle, and twitter just bombarding you with every fucking egregious thing going on in the world at once. A sense of hopelessness overtakes you; The doom-scrolling will only pacify you into not acting, because what the fuck can you do to change anything? There are too many problems, and they’re too large to solve on your own.

The second part of this statement, where teenage girls will do anything “as long as it’s the thing to do” is pretty insulting. I suppose the attitude of teenage girls being easily manipulated to enjoying things was amplified with Beatlemania. Its continued on, where bands like New Kids on the Block, The Backstreet Boys, and One Direction are immediately dismissed as superfluous because teenage girls like them, and teenage girls are shallow because they’re driven by their hormones. What’s unbelievably frustrating about this mindset is it has been disproved time and time again, INCLUDING The Beatles. I know more dudes who rep for them than I do women. Shit, in this dumpsterfire of a year, Harry Styles’ new album has been one of the few positive things that has kept me going, and that came out 10 months ago. With the success of kpop as well, a lot more people are starting to come around to “manufactured content that teenage girls like can be good, actually”.

The Beatles complaining about how their music is secondary to the mania about them is really rich, considering their legacy now. It’s not like they were that attractive or charming... I sat through 2 of their movies and the only person I even mildly connected with was Ringo, because he was a goofy dope. I’m fairly certain teenage girls were buying their records and going to their shows because they liked the music. As a former teenage girl, let me tell you, the illusion of depth and sensitivity is way more attractive than a pretty face.

Teenage girls made The Monkees and The Beatles successful, and for the director, who directly profited off of that success, to make a movie that criticizes them really rubs me the wrong way. Also, it was the fucking 1960s, about as volatile of a decade as you could get *until* now. Maybe teenage girls focused so much on The Monkees and The Beatles because it was one of the few uncomplicated things that could bring them reprise from the violence unfolding around them. But whatever, disparage their money lining your pockets, I guess.

The skits afterward are pretty unremarkable. Micky is in the middle of a desert trying to get happiness out of a Coke machine, only to find it, and the task itself empty. He then blows up the Coke machine with a tank given to him by the Italian army.

The Monkees are given a tour of a manufacturing facility, only to see what they are producing isn’t a quality product, and the workers themselves are either fake, or endangered by the endeavor. There’s a few scenes where they fight against their predetermined personalities in the band, or what their fans might think of their behaviors. They are used in a dandruff shampoo advertisement and vacuumed up and held hostage in a black box. There is an outstanding upbeat musical number performed by Davy (and Toni Basil!) about a boy whose father left him. He lays it all out on the dance floor, only to be criticized by Frank Zappa of all people, for not having a message in his music that will save the youth of America.

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While they are searching for answers on how to escape the box they’re trapped in, or purpose in what they’ve accomplished, they find nothing. Peter tries to enlighten them with a bunch of culty bullshit, but instead Davy loses his shit and starts physically attacking literally everything featured throughout the movie, culminating in The Monkees running from their movie studio and jumping off a bridge to free themselves. They unfortunately are captured and shoved back in the black box, awaiting the next time they will be carted out to market something else for The Teens to buy.

I probably don’t need to tell you that this movie flopped. The studio purposely left The Monkees out of all the promotional material because they thought it might detract from the serious motion picture they were trying to release. The problem with this, however, is if you don’t know anything about The Monkees, this movie is not going to make sense to you. I had to watch several behind-the-scenes clips to get any semblance of an idea what they were trying to achieve. Sure, the Capitalism and Manufactured Entertainment is Bad theme is pretty easy to pick out, but why The Monkees were the ones saying this after being immersed in the middle of it for three years is an important position to understand beforehand. And even if you were a Monkees fan, like my mother was, this basically shits on their entire experience in show business, so it probably doesn’t hit too well with their core demographic, either. I respect what they were trying to do here, but it’s no mystery to me why this movie has almost entirely been lost to time.

I’d like to say this ends my series on rock bands that decided to make musical movies, but next on the list is a little story about a pinball-wizard-that-could, Tommy.

#unwarranted opinion #100 best musical movies of all time rotten tomatoes

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thezachrogers · 7 years ago

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#justiceleague

The most non-anticipated comic book film of the year is in theaters now!

Ehh. That’s pretty much the summary of this film. With only a four film/two origin stories buildup to unite the six (Marvel had a five film/four origin stories build up to Avengers) Justice League doesn’t even break the top 25 of 2017, not even top 75 all time comic book list among Rotten Tomatoes, which honestly is heartbreaking.

Please note everyone that I am not a DC hater. I grew up the biggest Batman/Superman/Justice League fan. The Dark Knight trilogy stands as my all time favorite movie series. Yes, I am a bigger Batman fan than I am Star Wars and Marvel fan. However, Warner Brothers wanted to rush the DCEU franchise to compete with Marvel. If you didn’t know Captain America: Civil War and Batman v Superman both had the same release date. The Motion Picture Society of America let Disney hold their May release date and BvS had their late Winter release moved up to February simply because one thing: story.

These WB writers just cannot figure it out. They want to cut against the grain and it just isn’t working. Disney-Marvel has laid out the formula to make a perfect comic book universe. Give every character their own origin story/solo movie before they all come together in one film. WB - “lets make a sub-par Superman movie with the director that made Sucker Punch, then lets put a different Batman that is not Christian Bale in a sequel THREE YEARS LATER!”

This film has the biggest three comic book characters of all time in one movie. Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman are in one film (FOR THE SECOND TIME) and they still cannot break a billion. And then you give Thor his third (some would argue tired) film and it breaks Rotten Tomatoes records; and no one knew who Thor was seven years ago...

This is confirmed, not rumored that there are some massive changes happening to the DCEU. After the success of Wonder Woman this year (and yes that was a fantastic film; the only good film out of the 5 DCEU films) that there will most definitely be Wonder Woman 2 dropping in 2019 with its story taking place in the 1980s. Ezra Miller is getting a Flashpoint film that will rewrite the entire history of the DCEU. What this means is they will dismiss Man of Steel, Batman v Superman, Suicide Squad, and Justice League out of existence. This is a very similar approach to what Fox did with X-Men Days of Future Past in 2014 to write the Logan and First Class series into the X-Men canon without any plot holes.

Positives to take away from Justice League? I really like Ben Affleck as an older, tired, and bitter Bruce Wayne/Batman. Gal Gadot was born to play Wonder Woman, and it is very clear that Ezra Miller’s Flash is a similar play to Tom Holland’s Spider-Man. I haven’t decided how I feel about Mamoa as Aquaman. He looks cool, but his Baywatch acting ability shines in this movie. Its just not there. Cyborg sucks. Jesse Eisenberg continues to suck as Lex Luthor. Cavill is a great Clark Kent/Superman, but as long as Zack Snyder (director/writer/lead executive producer) continues to sit on the throne, his character will continue to suck.

I mean come on! Who thought Steppenwolf was a good idea as a villain? Who the hell is Steppenwolf? What about DARKSEID, THE JOKER, THE ENTIRE RESUME OF BATMAN VILLAINS!?

This movie dragged, there were some good moments, but all in all it was just okay and a cluster-you-know-what of CGI.

When you have that many big heavy hitters in one film, Justice League should blow us away. But it doesn’t. That’s why I say it sucks.

Rotten Tomatoes gave it a 40%, IMDB gave it a 7.2/10, I give it 3/5 stars.

Coming later today - review for The Disaster Artist

- Z

#justice league #wonder woman #2017 #movies #dceu #batman #aquaman #superman #gal gadot #khal drogo #game of thrones

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otnesse · 8 years ago

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Galactic Empire and Fascism, an analysis.

After cruising through TVTropes, and discovering a YMMV entry under “What do you mean it’s not political” that implicitly compared Emperor Palpatine in Revenge of the Sith to Donald Trump regarding treatment of aliens (which, for the record, we don’t have a problem with immigration and nor does Trump, rather, we have a massive issue against illegal immigration, which is simple distinction that people unfortunately seem to miss right now especially in media), I decided to make a post regarding whether or not the Galactic Empire from Star Wars was fascist or not. Honestly, I’d say it’s not, though that being said, it has been acknowledged by George Lucas that fascism did play a role in their development via design elements. However, in that case, it was more due to Lucas mistaking fascism for conservativism (similar to how the left constantly claims that Donald Trump is “a fascist” even when he isn’t under even the most basic observations, let alone close scrutiny). To solidify my point, I’ll quote one of my most hated pieces of dialogue from the disaster that was the second season of Supergirl (shame, since the first season started out with a lot of promise, and I don’t intend to watch the third season in large part because of what the writers did by overtly going into left-wing politics, not to mention certain social issues, and overall having a very bad plotline [sure, there have been some leftist bits portrayed positively in the first season, but on the other hand, it also promoted Conservative principles as well, such as the concept of family and actually treating eco-terrorism in a negative light with the Kryptonians that acted as the main villains of the arc, not to mention it actually managed to avert feminist messaging at one point by having Cat Grant actually express remorse at choosing her career over raising her own kid she had out of wedlock, and considering she actually had a kid there, it also implied she didn’t have an abortion either. And I can tell you, she if anything would have been utterly SLAUGHTERED by the feminists clique at NOW as well as by Hillary supporters for actually expressing remorse at choosing her career over being a mother. And either way it was definitely not to the extent that this season was regarding pushing politics and social issues.]. At most, I’ll probably watch the season premiere just long enough to learn the identity of the other Kryptonian baby that had that blood ritual.):

“one misattributed quote from a candidate and you put a fascist in the White House.” – Snapper Carr, Exodus.

Considering how they showered Marsden, a blatant Hillary expy, with love, I don’t you need two guesses as to which Presidential candidate he was referring to (and quite frankly, even ignoring the Trump burns, I hated that line because of its inaccuracy in its ideology and inherent meaning: Perfect attribution of quotes does not guarantee that a fascist [and by that, I mean an actual fascist and not someone like Trump], or a communist, or any particularly evil person will be prevented from becoming president. That, and Snapper Carr with that line and prior lines in the episode came across as acting more like Mike Wallace during that Ethics of America segment where he implied he’d sell American soldiers down the river in order to not ruin his objectivity when traveling with a Vietcong unit, but I digress…). And actually, this whole quote is actually pretty relevant to Star Wars and the Galactic Empire as Palpatine had in fact been based on an American president that the left hated in a similar manner to Trump for various reasons. His name was Richard Milhous Nixon, and he was needlessly demonized, including claiming he had masterminded Watergate when in reality he had absolutely no involvement in the situation and if anything was also irritated that this had happened and demanded to know who was responsible for it, not to mention falsely pinning him to Vietnam when in reality it was LBJ and even JFK’s war before it was his war, and if anything, Nixon was the reason why America actually left Vietnam as victors (yes, we actually won Vietnam. The fall of Saigon was due to our congress stabbing our allies in the back during Watergate. The loser of a war does not head and dictate the negotiations of surrender, which we did.).

Uniforms and Terms:

First, people have said that the Empire’s uniforms and their use of certain terms (ie, Stormtroopers) made them fascist. I won’t go into full detail on how the Stormtrooper Corps aren’t the same thing as the Nazis’ stormtroopers (or at least the Sturmabteilung) in even role, let alone appearance, since I kind of already did that in full detail in an earlier post. However, while Lucas I’ll admit did mention wanting a fascistic feel for the Empire when creating the uniforms, that doesn’t mean that the Empire was actually fascist, any more than calling Donald Trump a fascist must make him fascist as well, or the fact that Ho Chi Minh quoted the Declaration of Independence makes him a Jeffersonian lover of liberty. And besides, the uniforms for the Empire were derived more from German Uhlans during World War I, which predated Nazi Germany and fascism by a significant amount of time. And quite honestly, if you ask me, claiming someone is fascist just because they happen to wear that kind of uniform is just stupid, since uniforms don’t speak to one’s political ideologies. I mean, what, are we going to claim that NYPD Commissioner Frank Reagan from Blue Bloods, Prince Eric from Disney’s The Little Mermaid, or General Pepper from Star Fox are fascists just because they wore similar uniforms (heck, Eric’s wedding outfit even resembles a Grand Admiral’s uniform)? Not to mention, they’re military uniforms, and there have been plenty of uniforms within even the Allied Powers (meaning Britain and the USA) that had similar appearances to Imperial uniforms. If anyone in the Star Wars films actually resembled fascists in terms of uniforms, and more importantly ideology, it was the First Order. The Empire, on that note, does not goose step, either, which would be a surefire sign that it is fascist (its marching style, if anything, resembles that of Geldoblame’s men in Baten Kaitos’ opening when it shows Gibari).

Military buildup:

See, one of my biggest annoyances is the conflation of military buildup, even having a military at all, and going to war as automatically making someone a Nazi or fascist. It was annoying when Paul Verhoeven did it with Starship Troopers (though at least he had the excuse of growing up in Nazi-occupied Netherlands for thinking that. Lucas should know better), and it was also annoying when George Lucas and even Hideo Kojima inferred similar things. Yes, militaries can and have done attacks on neighboring countries, and also tried to conquer neighboring countries. But that’s not their sole role. They also act as a line of defense against an opposing army, not to mention also acts in the defense of citizenry and will also aid in relief efforts should things be serious, and they also are called in to aid allies if needs be. There’s a reason why a common expression for the military is that it acts as a nation’s sword and shield. The Nazis and fascists specifically intended to control at the very least Germany and its various former nation-states, if not the world, not to mention conquered countries specifically to fund their welfare programs. Building up the military is not the sign of an incoming dictatorship or the coming of fascism. America built up its military significantly after 9/11, and it’s nowhere close to becoming fascist right now.

Nationalism and nationalization:

On that note, I also get irritated when people think merely having parades for a national holiday or prominently displaying the flag in terms of national pride and love of country makes one fascist. We Americans do that, especially those of us who are patriotic. Heck, I’ve got the American flag hanging outside my house right now, and besides which, I’ve gone around seeing some houses that have the circular red white and blue flags draped over as well. My neighborhood even has an annual Fourth of July parade that I make every effort to see and we have fireworks celebrating it. The Empire’s celebration of Empire Day is not really all that different. And besides which, being fascist doesn’t mean you actually love your country. Joseph Goebbels, the infamous Nazi propagandist, actually made clear that he, if anything, held contempt to even the mere idea of nationalism or loving one’s own country (I believe his exact words were, and I quote, “the NSDAP [Nazi Party] is the German Left. We despise bourgeois nationalism.”). And based on the fact that Palpatine was perfectly willing to forfeit his own life to get Luke to turn to the Dark Side (even going as far as to goad him into murdering him), it’s pretty clear Palpatine probably had no qualms with the Empire running without him (unfortunately, the Aftermath trilogy had Palpatine try to have Gallius Rax basically blow up the galaxy at Jakku due to not being able to rule the Empire anymore, in an explicit contradiction to not only his actions in Return of the Jedi, but also Revenge of the Sith where he tried to goad Anakin to kill him in a similar manner, not to mention mentioned in a very eager tone that Vader will soon become more powerful than either Yoda or himself).

On the topic of nationalization, the only time nationalization was ever brought up was via Imperialization, and even that was largely limited to those that had either gone against the Empire explicitly or otherwise were originally of the Separatists (at least, it was the case in the former Expanded Universe). They actually left various companies that either were loyal or otherwise had no major issues with the Empire alone, and in fact, they even managed to expand the Corporate Sector to 30,000 star systems and even managed to create the Corporate Sector Authority specifically to allow for transparent mercantilism to go on unabated, only asking for a yearly tribute in return. That kind of thing would actually be AGAINST fascism and/or national socialism, as they won’t tolerate any form of free markets at all, and would in fact point to the Galactic Empire being a pro-capitalist institution (and I mean that in a good way, obviously). If anything, the Old Republic came closer to actual nationalization as we know it via the Trade Federation (which before it became its own cartel was a branch in the main government meant to heavily regulate trade and cut down on any growth of mercantilism if the former Expanded Universe materials are to be believed). And despite what Biggs Darklighter said in that deleted scene to Luke Skywalker from A New Hope, there is literally no indication that the Empire had any intention of nationalizing any farms, moisture or otherwise (especially when the Imperial Handbook doesn’t even mention anything about moisture farms or small business proprieters, let alone nationalizing them. And believe me, considering they had absolutely no qualms against mentioning speciecide as a government policy in the handbook, if they wanted to state their aims at nationalizing something like the Lars Homestead, they would have mentioned it directly within the Imperial Handbook, especially when that book was written around the time of A New Hope in-universe.). And don’t get me started on immunity spheres established by the Empire where it is forbidden for Imperial soldiers or ships are allowed to set foot in there, one of which included the Wheel, which is essentially a space station version of Las Vegas.

Ideology:

Now, let’s get into the ideology of the Empire and that of fascism, or more specifically National Socialism, in-depth. Let’s look, for starters, at the 1925 Nazi Platform:

1. We demand the union of all Germans in a Great Germany on the basis of the principle of self-determination of all peoples.

2. We demand that the German people have rights equal to those of other nations; and that the Peace Treaties of Versailles and St. Germain shall be abrogated.

3. We demand land and territory (colonies) for the maintenance of our people and the settlement of our surplus population.

4. Only those who are our fellow countrymen can become citizens. Only those who have German blood, regardless of creed, can be our countrymen. Hence no Jew can be a countryman.

5. Those who are not citizens must live in Germany as foreigners and must be subject to the law of aliens.

6. The right to choose the government and determine the laws of the State shall belong only to citizens. We therefore demand that no public office, of whatever nature, whether in the central government, the province, or the municipality, shall be held by anyone who is not a citizen.

We wage war against the corrupt parliamentary administration whereby men are appointed to posts by favor of the party without regard to character and fitness.

7. We demand that the State shall above all undertake to ensure that every citizen shall have the possibility of living decently and earning a livelihood. If it should not be possible to feed the whole population, then aliens (non-citizens) must be expelled from the Reich.

8. Any further immigration of non-Germans must be prevented. We demand that all non-Germans who have entered Germany since August 2, 1914, shall be compelled to leave the Reich immediately.

9. All citizens must possess equal rights and duties.

10. The first duty of every citizen must be to work mentally or physically. No individual shall do any work that offends against the interest of the community to the benefit of all.

Therefore we demand:

11. That all unearned income, and all income that does not arise from work, be abolished.

12. Since every war imposes on the people fearful sacrifices in blood and treasure, all personal profit arising from the war must be regarded as treason to the people. We therefore demand the total confiscation of all war profits.

13. We demand the nationalization of all trusts.

14. We demand profit-sharing in large industries.

15. We demand a generous increase in old-age pensions.

16. We demand the creation and maintenance of a sound middle-class, the immediate communalization of large stores which will be rented cheaply to small tradespeople, and the strongest consideration must be given to ensure that small traders shall deliver the supplies needed by the State, the provinces and municipalities.

17. We demand an agrarian reform in accordance with our national requirements, and the enactment of a law to expropriate the owners without compensation of any land needed for the common purpose. The abolition of ground rents, and the prohibition of all speculation in land.

18. We demand that ruthless war be waged against those who work to the injury of the common welfare. Traitors, usurers, profiteers, etc., are to be punished with death, regardless of creed or race.

19. We demand that Roman law, which serves a materialist ordering of the world, be replaced by German common law.

20. In order to make it possible for every capable and industrious German to obtain higher education, and thus the opportunity to reach into positions of leadership, the State must assume the responsibility of organizing thoroughly the entire cultural system of the people. The curricula of all educational establishments shall be adapted to practical life. The conception of the State Idea (science of citizenship) must be taught in the schools from the very beginning. We demand that specially talented children of poor parents, whatever their station or occupation, be educated at the expense of the State.

21. The State has the duty to help raise the standard of national health by providing maternity welfare centers, by prohibiting juvenile labor, by increasing physical fitness through the introduction of compulsory games and gymnastics, and by the greatest possible encouragement of associations concerned with the physical education of the young.

22. We demand the abolition of the regular army and the creation of a national (folk) army.

23. We demand that there be a legal campaign against those who propagate deliberate political lies and disseminate them through the press. In order to make possible the creation of a German press, we demand:

(a) All editors and their assistants on newspapers published in the German language shall be German citizens.

(b) Non-German newspapers shall only be published with the express permission of the State. They must not be published in the German language.

(c) All financial interests in or in any way affecting German newspapers shall be forbidden to non-Germans by law, and we demand that the punishment for transgressing this law be the immediate suppression of the newspaper and the expulsion of the non-Germans from the Reich.

Newspapers transgressing against the common welfare shall be suppressed. We demand legal action against those tendencies in art and literature that have a disruptive influence upon the life of our folk, and that any organizations that offend against the foregoing demands shall be dissolved.

24. We demand freedom for all religious faiths in the state, insofar as they do not endanger its existence or offend the moral and ethical sense of the Germanic race.

The party as such represents the point of view of a positive Christianity without binding itself to any one particular confession. It fights against the Jewish materialist spirit within and without, and is convinced that a lasting recovery of our folk can only come about from within on the pinciple:

COMMON GOOD BEFORE INDIVIDUAL GOOD

25. In order to carry out this program we demand: the creation of a strong central authority in the State, the unconditional authority by the political central parliament of the whole State and all its organizations.

There's plenty other sources for Nazi or fascist ideology such as table talks, but this should suffice.

Now, let’s look at each of these tidbits, one by one, and compare them to various sources within Star Wars relating to the Empire:

1. Not sure why the Empire would even need to demand that as a manifesto. It’s pretty clear the Empire was pretty much united as it is. Heck, a majority of people actually voted IN the Empire in the first place during Palpatine’s Declaration of a New Order. And I don’t think Palpatine demanded for a specific group of people to be united, just the galaxy. In fact, Palpatine doesn’t even MENTION other galaxies in said speech, nor does the Imperial Handbook voice any plans to conquer any nearby satellite galaxies, not even the Rishi Maze which is the closest galaxy satellite to that of the galaxy the Empire was situated in.

2. Again, nowhere, in either the Declaration of a New Order OR any other policy (Imperial Handbook or Imperial Sourcebook) does it even imply that they wanted equal rights with the other galaxies. Not to mention since the Republic, the Empire’s immediate predecessor, actually WON the prior war, there’s literally nothing there that’s even remotely similar to Nazi Germany there, especially the revoking of a treaty (now, that being said, the First Order might have similarities there). Heck, the Empire didn’t even need to pay reparations either, since, again, they won the Clone Wars.

3. Okay, that might actually be a similarity (though not necessarily the demanding part, just colonization as a whole). However, even there, lots of countries at the time engaged in colonialism, and none of them were actually fascist.

4. No mention whatsoever about any restrictions against people holding citizenship due to being a separate species. Heck, as a matter of fact, the Empire accepted taxes from even the likes of the Ugnaughts if one of the Marvel Comics is to be believed, which implies that even the likes of aliens, while ultimately having second-class citizenship, nonetheless are recognized as being citizens and actually having citizenship. Oh, and at one point, the Empire actually managed to save a sentient alien species from being hunted down upon discovering said alien race was in fact sentient.

5. See 4 above.

6. See 4 and 5 above. In fact, probably the only thing that’s even remotely similar about this point is the bit about citizenry being the ones who choose the government, and even then, that just goes without saying for any nation. Even America demands that only citizens participate in the voting process, and we’re the farthest thing from a fascist country right now and for most of its history. And as far as corruption, well, yeah, even here in America, we demand pretty high moral standards of our politicians. It just goes without saying.

7. Nowhere was it even remotely implied that the Empire be mandated to kick out any aliens (well, both literal aliens the figurative term of being excluded from citizenship solely based on their race) if they fail to feed and clothe anyone.

8. Yeah, considering the Emperor allowed for Intergalactic Passports, not to mention the Imperial Senate as well, it’s highly unlikely he had any problems with immigration into the Empire so long as it was legalized.

9. Don’t recall the Empire mentioning anything about equal rights, actually, whether for or against them.

10. Doesn’t really mention much in terms of sources anything about the Empire actually mandating citizenry work physically or mentally for the benefit of all. It does mention making an effort to be loyal to the Empire, but beyond that, nothing that indicates that the citizenry engage in what is essentially slave labor (and I mean those who weren’t imprisoned).

11. Nowhere does the Empire even remotely mention anything about income relating to work or any unearned income, whether it be the Imperial Handbook or anywhere else.

12. Yeah, considering the Empire built up its military for defense of its Empire from any internal and external threats, I highly doubt the Empire would have even approved of what was essentially an anti-war statement in there, especially confiscating war profits from soldiers.

13. Other than the bit about Imperialism (which doesn’t even demand the nationalization of all firms, just those that went against the Empire), it really doesn’t match up.

14. Nowhere is it even remotely implied, even under the bit about Imperialization, that the Empire demanded that large companies share profits among each other.

15. Never commented on old age pensions at all, and considering the Empire makes clear they do not want anything except the most basic elements, I really doubt they’d support increasing old age pensions.

16. See 14 above. Also, the Imperial Handbook doesn’t even imply that the Empire intends to nationalize stuff like moisture farming on Tatooine. Nor, for that matter, does it even remotely imply wanting to communalize various storefronts or renting large storefronts to small tradesmen.

17. Again, absolutely no mention whatsoever, at least in the Legends universe, that the Empire ever wanted to do agrarian reforms or nationalize farms, not to mention making land speculation and ground rents illegal.

18. Other than the bit about traitors (which, BTW, even our constitution demands the death of any people who commit treason, so it’s just goes without saying), the Empire really doesn’t mention anything about waging any war on those people, or demanding for their death.

19. Other than the bit about having prisoners undergo slavery, it really doesn’t seem to impact prior laws at all, and it certainly doesn’t use materialism as a reason.

20. The only thing that really comes to mind regarding this point is COMPNOR, in particular the Education branch of the Coalition of Progress branch and possibly the Sub-Adult Unit, regarding education (which even that comes across as being more similar to the AFJROTC than, say, the Hitler Youth). Other than that, there’s no similarities at all to the Empire’s method of education compared to that of what was demanded here. That bullet point if anything comes closer to what the creed of the Umbrella Organization from Resident Evil, or more specifically the Wesker Children, promoted, or even the Jedi’s taking of younglings.

21. Other than maybe bits relating to the Imperial Military (and let’s face it, with any military, you need to be in pretty top shape to be in it, as otherwise, you won’t last very long), there’s little to suggest the Empire demanded an emphasis on “national health.”

22. Seriously? Do you really think the Empire would just abandon/gut its entire military apparatus in favor of what is essentially a citizen militia? There’s definitely no similarity here at all.

23. Ah, yeah, about that, even Freedom of the Press in our Constitution specifically states that slander is not covered under that inalienable right, meaning we don’t have the freedom to propagate lies.

a. Kind of goes without saying, really.

b. I don’t recall the Empire ever indicating that they had any particular problem with what language HoloNet sources were to be given in, or requiring specific permission to actually publish them in a different language.

c. Doesn’t mention anything about turning a profit in newspaper industries either, whether for or against it.

24. Regarding religion, the Empire largely maintains religious freedom, especially if it doesn’t act against the interests of the Empire. The only ones who receive any negative stigma are the Jedi, and even there, there have been Jedi who become dark side converts and become Inquisitorious. I won’t comment on the Christianity bit since that religion doesn’t even exist in Star Wars.

25. Other than maybe the bit about the Emperor’s absolute status, there’s little similarity regarding the Empire to that of Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy with that point (and for the record, even with the Magna Carta, kings, queens, emperors, and empresses had absolute status at various points, in fact, probably the only ones I can think of where they didn’t have absolute status and were figureheads is with Great Britain today and Japan for most of the time barring of course Imperial Japan during World War II). Heck, even there, the existence of the Corporate Sector Authority and various immunity spheres shows the Empire doesn’t necessarily adhere to an absolute status regarding central authority. Heck, even there, the Emperor does in fact take advice from several of his officers rather than blowing it off out of some self-inflated sense of superiority.

So yeah, at most, there’s just below half that actually have any resemblance to the 25 planks, and even those that match up have also had similarities to those in countries that obviously weren’t fascist, communist, or anything like that. Also, there’s zero indication that the Empire even supports abortion towards inferiors or anything like that, or has any problems with disabled people (in fact, one of the Empire’s most loyal supporters was a cripple. And I’m not referring to Vader, or even Grand Admiral Teshik.). Not to mention, do you really think a fascist or communist, both of which are totalitarian ideologies, would so much as even THINK of creating something they would have little amount of control over such as, I don’t know, immunity spheres, or even the Corporate Sector Authority’s explicitly being a place of free trade and free market? In fact, you can find this and plenty of other information about these elements to the Empire here (http://www.galacticempiredatabank.com/RebProLies.html).

So why is the Empire considered fascist?

To answer that question, you need to go back to the time Star Wars was being created, as well as look into the background of the franchise’s creator, George Walton Lucas.

You see, George Lucas was a raving leftist, of the stripe seen during the 1960s where they viewed protests as an excuse to riot for no real reason beyond platitudes. Heck, he even admitted as much in various interviews, including a 2012 interview with Charlie Rose on CBS, where he outright admitted that he got his left-wing views from growing up in 1960s San Francisco which was a hotbed with various radical elements, including anti-Vietnam War protests as you can see here: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/george-lucas-billionaire-down-on-capitalism/ (the same interview also had him making some negative statements on Capitalism, more on that later). Oh, and he also at one point described his ideal movie making studio philosophy as being “the workers have the means of production” (Skywalking, p.246), meaning that at the very least he flirted with Marxism, and later on during another interview with Charlie Rose (you know the one: where he infamously compared Disney after the sale to “white slavers”) actually implied that Soviet filmmaking at the height of the Cold War was preferable to the American Hollywood model (ie, the Soviet filmmaking where you get a bullet in the head if you criticize the people in charge) as you can see here: http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/ken-shepherd/2016/01/04/george-lucas-soviet-directors-had-more-freedom-i-had. In fact, during the Vietnam War, he outright rooted for the Vietcong to win. Back then, leftists often denounced any conservative principles as being “fascist” or “nazi-esque”, mostly because of a misnomer promoted by the likes of Josef Stalin shortly after World War II where he denounced the Nazis as being “right-wing” both to paint actual right-wing groups in a very negative light (the Nazis and fascists in reality were part of the far-left, and they merely viewed the Communists as rivals for control over the left, not actual feuding enemies in terms of ideology), and also as a CYA attempt to deflect any potential blame from reaching Communism. An infamous example of attempts at comparing conservative principles or conservatives to Nazis or fascists was during the HUAC investigations as well as McCarthy’s investigations into Soviet infiltration and subversion of America (which, BTW, contrary to popular belief, McCarthy had no involvement in HUAC, as he was part of the Senate, while HUAC was strictly House of Representatives territory, and he had nothing to do with the Hollywood Blacklist), where quite a few people often accused their accusers as being Nazis to deflect any potential blame of being communists, even when confronted with direct evidence to their Communist ties. This sort of thing is still in existence even today, as evidenced with the aforementioned quote from Snapper Carr from Supergirl, heck, Neo/Thomas Anderson’s “Gestapo crap” comment to the agents in the first Matrix movie even. In fact, as I alluded to earlier in this post, he even had particular ire against former President Richard Milhous Nixon, where he claimed he was responsible for causing Vietnam to happen (a lie, since Vietnam occurred under JFK and LBJ’s watch), running for a third term (of which he expressed no interest in such an idea), and probably also the fact that he exposed Alger Hiss as a Communist spy and indicted him for perjury. In fact, Lucas during the 2008 election cycle even called Barack Obama a hero (and for the record, Obama's policies came far closer to actual fascism than the Empire did), and in 2012, he also indicated he was, among other things, “a dyed-in-the-wool 99%er before there was such a thing” in an unsubtle attempt at promoting solidarity for the Occupy Wall Street group (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/magazine/george-lucas-red-tails.html).

Now, taking all of that into account, let’s start with the beginnings of Star Wars. It was 1973, Vietnam was still ongoing, and Richard Nixon is embattled with Watergate. Lucas decides to make Star Wars, then-titled The Star Wars, partially due to the fact that he wanted to cover Vietnam, and partially in response to Nixon’s Watergate bit (note, Star Wars was originally planned to be the third in a thematic trilogy dealing with denouncing America’s involvement in Vietnam, with the first film being American Graffiti, and the second being Apocalypse Now [yes, Lucas was in fact supposed to make that movie]. However, while American Graffiti played and performed as well as he wanted it to, he ultimately wasn’t able to complete Apocalypse Now before Warner Bros. shut down his studio American Zoetrope due to uncertainty regarding the film as well as the previous failure of THX 1138, so he decided to make Star Wars, his planned third film, early, and specifically include elements from Apocalypse Now.). Among the first drafts for the film included a statement on yellow sheets that detailed the theme for the film, which basically said that the Rebels, or, technically speaking, Aquilae, was supposed to be similar to a “small independent country like North Vietnam” that was being threatened with conquest, and that the Empire was supposed to be like America in 1983 (not those exact words, but he said that it was like America 10 years from when he said it, which at the time was 1973), essentially its emperor had been assassinated by “Nixonian gangsters” and elevated to power in a rigged election, and creating a total thought control police state (ironic, since the only character in the movie to actually engage in total thought control at all was Obi-Wan Kenobi with his little “Jedi Mind Trick.”), and even states that they are at a turning point, whether they support Fascism or Revolution (and based on his overall comments, I don’t think he’s referring to the American War for Independence). Although some things from that draft were changed, the overall themes based on Lucas’s later comments haven’t changed at all, which also included the whole Rebel Alliance angle. However, apparently this wasn’t enough, as when making Return of the Jedi, he decided to make the whole Vietcong promotion theme a bit more overt by having Emperor Palpatine’s best troops be taken down by what are essentially animate Teddy Bears known as the Ewoks.

Eventually, about a decade after Jedi, he decided to make the Prequel Trilogy of Star Wars, and he went even further than Return of the Jedi. Basically he made the Republic essentially a bastion of liberal-style nanny state big government, and the “Senate” was closer to the United Nation in Space, or Star Federation from Star Trek. Oh, and the government was so deeply broken, apparently not being able to enforce anti-slavery laws within what was technically its territory. The Jedi were depicted as essentially being Ivory Tower types, as well. Oh, and Supreme Chancellor Finis Valorum was specifically modeled after then-President Bill Clinton as a beleaguered man (before the infamous Monica Lewinsky scandal, I should add), which Terrence Stamp, Valorum's actor, even noted. And remember when I mentioned that Lucas’s 2012 interview with Charlie Rose had him mentioning how he was anti-Capitalist and adhered to a more Communistic approach to democracy? Well he starts showing hints at this with the Trade Federation. Speaking of which, the whole Trade Federation plotline and their invading Naboo was largely made in response to the Republican Revolution of 1994 that was made in direct response to some far-left policies Clinton was making, including tax increases as well as the NAFTA agreement, policies that were obviously unpopular among the electorate. Around this time, Newt Gingrich made a speech called Contract with America, which proposed among other things requiring a three-fifths majority before making tax increases. This all occurred around the time Lucas was on his eighth day draft-writing what would become the film. Lucas, as you can probably guess, was not at all happy with this, and decided to use the Trade Federation as being essentially strawmen for the Republican Revolution regarding motives and overall characterization (and he doesn’t even attempt to be subtle about it, either: The leader of the Trade Federation, Nute Gunray, for example, had his name being taken from two sources: The first from Newt Gingrich himself, obviously, and the second being Ronald Reagan, the latter was mostly out of revenge for SDI being labeled Star Wars, even though it was Ted Kennedy and the leftist media who called it that in the first place; and Lott Dod, the Neimoidian senator representing the Trade Federation, was named after Chris Lott, the GOP leader in 1997.).

But, oh, that’s still not far enough for him. The very next movie, Attack of the Clones, makes Lucas’s anti-war political views extremely apparent by revealing that, for the thousand years the Republic existed, or at least the thousand years since the Ruusan Reformation if we go by Legends, it turns out the Republic lacked a military of any kind at all. Worse, the film also obviously tries to paint even trying to form a military at all as being an inherently bad thing and would mean the loss of freedom and creating new fear, especially when Padme Amidala, as a clear expy of the Left’s view of Hillary Clinton here, goes to Coruscant as a Senator and tries to vote against the motion (and pre-release materials alongside the movie even goes as far as to imply that Padme may have in fact LIED to the Senate by implying heavily that the pro-Military senators were responsible for her near-assassination, when she in fact suspected that Count Dooku of the Separatists was responsible for the hit). Oh, and if the Trade Federation’s villainous role in the prior movie didn’t tip you off to Lucas’s anti-Capitalist agenda, this movie broadcasts it in a huge billboard by having the main villains, the Separatists, basically being composed of corporations, even explicitly giving their names to the cause, which besides the Trade Federation included among others the InterGalactic Banking Guild, the Corporate Alliance, the Commerce Guild, and the Techno Union. There may have also been a few hints at 9/11 being staged for a coup, especially in the ending, although given the timing, not to mention Attack of the Clones most likely entered development before 9/11 occurred, he was probably intending for that to be the Gulf of Tonkin Incident as an inspiration if anything.

Even that wasn’t far enough for Lucas, apparently, as Lucas then had in Episode III more overt Bush-bashing by essentially implying that the War in Iraq was an excuse for Republicans to take over America and turn it into a fascist Empire (really.), and overall seemed like it was pushing an anti-War viewpoint that you would expect to find on MSNBC or MoveOn.org for more indirect instances of Bush-bashing. For more direct indications, there’s Padme’s “So this is how liberty dies… with thunderous applause…” shortly after Palpatine declares himself Emperor, apparently done in relation to the Patriot Act, and then there’s the infamous instance in the movie where Vader and Obi-Wan confront each other on Mustafar. Specifically, Vader yells “If you are not with me, then you are my enemy!” in a very thinly-veiled reference to President George W. Bush’s “You’re either with us or the terrorists” line on September 20, 2001, which was directed to the United Nations, not to the American citizenry. Obi-Wan, in response, declares “Only a Sith deals in absolutes.”, one of the most stupid and confusing lines in the movie, especially when it made the Jedi seem like they were the moral relativists and postmodernists, maybe even moral nihilists. Apparently this two bits had been added in fairly early on, around the time of the Iraq War, and largely because of various protests in the Bay Area against the war and Bush, in an eerily similar manner to the protests against Vietnam and Nixon before then, and apparently thought Americans would have agreed with Obi-Wan because of this, thinking they thought nuance was lost from Bush’s “black and white worldview.” Oh, and he also promoted the movie during the 2005 Cannes film festival. You might remember that particular film festival, it was most infamous for its various film moguls using the festival and the showing their films to essentially flip the bird against Bush (http://www.cbsnews.com/news/sith-invites-bush-comparisons/2/). Lucas, to be fair, acknowledges that he didn’t necessarily plan on Bush being the subject of Star Wars, but that’s solely because he already had Nixon in mind before Bush was even on his radar. He nonetheless compared Vietnam to Iraq claiming the comparisons were unbelievable (well, he’s right about one thing: thinking there is any comparison between those two wars beyond our trying to stop a grave threat is pretty unbelievable), and he divulged further into his ideas of democracy turning into a dictatorship (they’re one and the same, if you ask me, and I don’t mean that in a good way for either), by basically implying that Robespierre’s France, of all things, was good or at least preferable to Napoleon’s France, or his implying something similar to the Weimar Republic to Nazi Germany. Not to mention most of the comparisons don’t even work, and neither does the claim that wars make dictatorships and destroy democracy (America was forged from war against Great Britain, and we aren’t even close to a dictatorship). Heck, some Expanded Universe materials around the time of Revenge of the Sith even had references to the Triad of Evil, in an unsubtle reference to the Axis of Evil. And in the Clone Wars cartoons (the 3D animation one, not the one with the animation style that was similar to Samurai Jack) there was a character named Saw Gererra whose basis for that Marxist terrorist Che Guevera were as lacking of subtlety as Lott Dod’s basis for Chris Lott was.

Closing statements

Well, I’ve been an Empire supporter for a little over a year now. Not exactly particularly happy with this development, since I go by a rule that I never, ever root for villains, and I was forced to break that rule with the Empire. The reason I had to make that exception dealt with Lucas’s statements about how the Empire was meant to represent America (and more specifically, when How Star Wars Conquered the Universe by Chris Taylor revealed that even the Rebel Alliance was supposed to be Vietcong expies. I don’t root for communists, because they tried to exterminate those of my religion, or any religion, for that matter, all for the sake of atheism, which I maintain is no religion due to a lack of gods or supernatural elements). Either way, I figured I’d set the record straight regarding the Empire and Fascism, because quite frankly, barring the uniforms, they really have no similarities to actual fascism (heck, they don’t even practice any socialist principles while the Old Republic seems to be more socialistic/communistic in nature). If anyone disagrees, fine by me, but I suggest you try to find any sources that definitively match up with Nazi ideology in a very precise manner, and more than just uniforms.

Author's note:

I'm basing this mostly on the Legends version of the Empire, mostly because, quite frankly, I'm not exactly fond of what's become of Star Wars under Disney, even speaking as someone who is a Disney fan.

#meta #Star Wars #anti-george lucas

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das-roog · 8 years ago

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Star Wars Thing

So I love Star Wars. Big surprise, I know. I have a shrine to the original trilogy in my closet, rage-vomit when I think about the prequels and I’m very happy with the trajectory the movies seem to be taking recently, with “The Force Awakens” and, more recently “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story”, both feeling like a return to form in a galaxy I feel more at home in than the one I’m actually from.

As such, I like to keep reasonably informed about what’s happening with it without spoiling myself silly. It’s a delicate balancing act, especially on the internet, which tends to be a spoiler minefield. Even trailers are becoming increasingly reliant on showing too much.

Movie posters, however, are a completely different matter. They’re juicy morsels of information, tantalizingly promising space adventure without actually telling you anything; you can indulge as much as you want because they have little substance to them.

I, like many of you, salivated over the newest little nugget released a little bit ago concerning Episode VIII: “The Last Jedi”. For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s the banner that was recently revealed:

Cool, right? That looks pretty badass and it’s got me pretty pumped. There’s not a lot of information to glean from this piece, considering it’s kind of just our three heroes in action poses, but it still gets me excited. So, I’m going to talk about it and make some observations.

Overall Presentation

I like how sleek this looks. It’s designed really well and the eye is really naturally drawn from Poe, past Rey and along her lightsaber to Finn. I like the warm color scheme of the poster, with the reds, browns, tans and blacks. It contrasts really well with the stark white background, which I also really like. It gives this a cleaner sort of look. Not the sort of sterile feeling I get when I watch Star Trek, but clean as in the design is simple, smooth and strong. Star Wars promos and posters tend to be really busy and epic, and I’m sure the final poster for “The Last Jedi” will be also, but this image really works for me. The weird red fragments in the background are strange, but it feels like it’s part of a larger design, so I don’t have a problem ignoring it, for the most part.

The Characters

The banner features our three heroes from “Force Awakens”: ace pilot Poe Dameron, Jedi-in-training Rey and ex-Stormtrooper Finn. The banner is effective in communicating their basic characteristics; they look ready for action and each communicated pretty effectively their roles. Poe is pretty clearly a pilot, Rey’s obviously a Jedi. Finn’s has the least to communicate in that regard but it’s okay; he’s still got an action pose, though it does look like he’s the only person concerned with whatever’s going on to the left of them.

A few things to take away and, warning, this is going into speculation territory and I’m 100% about to drop some spoilers about “The Force Awakens” so, uh...you know, if you haven’t seen that movie yet, turn back now. Abandon all hope (of avoiding spoilers) ye who enter here.

Poe’s presence as one of the three characters featured on such early promotional material suggests that he’s going to play a bigger part in Episode VIII. Now, as a guy who ranks Wedge Antilles in his top 3 Star Wars characters of all time (he’s #2 if you’re wondering; Han Solo is #1, obviously), this is nothing but good news; Poe was probably my favorite character in Episode VII and more of him in the next episode can only be a good thing. Thankfully, it appears his capacity as a badass pilot seems to be intact and hopefully we can expect more X-Wing awesomeness. Also preserved, I hope, is the buddy-dynamic between Poe and Finn, which was one of the more enjoyable aspects of “The Force Awakens”, at least in the early parts.

Finn is still wearing his jacket, which is good because that jacket is rad and I want one in real life. Again, his pose is the least telling of the three. I’ve seen it said that the shirt he’s wearing in the picture looks like a Jedi robe, but it actually looks more like Han Solo’s shirt from “The Empire Strikes Back” (pictured below).

It’d be cool if that suggested his turn as a sort of psuedo-Han smuggler in the wake of Solo’s death at the end of Episode VII but I doubt it. I mean, it’s probably just a shirt. I’m all for nitpicking the tiny details to make outlandish claims but it’s only a shirt. Not much to glean there, I think.

Rey, though, looks absolutely radical. I love her hair style change. I’m not a hair guy so I can’t tell you why it works, but I can tell you that I like it a lot. Her pose is confident and powerful. She’s got a firm grip on the Skywalker lightsaber and an expression that dares you to try to duel her. It’s an awesome hero pose and I’m looking forward to seeing how the character grows under Luke’s tutelage.

The Story?

So I don’t know what the story for the next episode will be. I’ve read a bunch of weird theories, like Rey being the reincarnation of a Force-Tree or something (really!), but none of them seem likely. The story for “The Force Awakens” left things open-ended but vaaaaague. We know there’s more to the story (outside of the fact that it’s a Star Wars movie and Disney loves the Scrooge McDuck-style pool of money it’s going to make them). Kylo Ren escapes the destruction of Starkiller Base and the nature of Supreme Leader Snoke is largely a mystery. Luke’s whole deal is a big question mark, as is the identity of Rey’s parents (a question I care less about than most people on the internet, apparently). If nothing else, none of the characters really finished their arcs (not in a bad way): Finn’s in a coma, Poe’s...I don’t know, making a sandwich or something and Rey ended the movie on that powerful moment with Luke.

Soooo yeah, there’s a lot of open story threads but no clear indication of where the story is going outside of basic presumptions one can make based on the earlier films. For example, this one will probably be the darkest and might not have a happy ending (being the second in a trilogy).

But there are a few things to consider. I don’t claim to know where the story’s going or what’s been happening but I have some mostly-baseless speculation. After all, Lucas has said that the movies are supposed to “rhyme” and Episode VII sure did rhyme with Episode IV, so one can assume that Episode VIII might rhyme with Episode V. By “rhyming”, I mean that certain themes, plot elements and tone are similar to the other episodes in that position in their respective trilogies (As the first episode of their trilogies, for example, Episodes I, IV and VII all had a lot of similarities, which I might cover in a future post).

Baseless Speculation!

So while I don’t have much concrete information to go on, a lot of my speculation comes from A) What I’d do as a writer and B) The fact that I read somewhere that “The Last Jedi” is supposed to pick up like, literally where “The Force Awakens” left off.

Finn’s main thing at the start of the story is looking for Rey.

Poe is probably going to drag Finn along on a mission for the Resistance. I doubt the movie will have the “war movie in space” feel that “Rogue One” did, but Poe’s involvement outside of working for the Resistance feels out of place at this point, especially if little to no time has passed between Episodes VII and VIII.

Kylo Ren will be much more intimidating this time around due to his “increased” training. Odds are low that he’ll kill Luke, though. He just might end up maiming Rey, however, considering main characters tend to lose hands fighting the Big Bad Guy in the second chapters of these movies. Anakin lost most of his friggin’ arm to Count Dooku in “Attack of the Clones” and Luke famously lost his hand to Darth Vader in the iconic Bespin Duel in “The Empire Strikes Back”. It’s not terribly out-there to suggest the same might happen to Rey.

Rey and Luke are going to have some philosophical training sequences and will become involved in Poe/Finn’s mission through sheer “The Will of the Force”. Possibly (hopefully!) because she has similar force visions of Finn and Poe suffering, as Luke once did.

Luke will be awesome, I hope. Though he’ll probably be a little unwilling to train Rey at first because of what happened to his last crop of new Jedi (hint: the movie is titled “The Last Jedi”).

Speaking of the title, “The Last Jedi” does not refer to either Luke or Rey; it’s referring to the both of them together. The plural of Jedi is Jedi, after all. Just another thing they have in common with Moose.

While I have little doubt that the movie will be the darkest of the third trilogy, I don’t think it’s going to go too dark. Like, it’s not gonna pull a “Rogue One” on us. Whatever happens, even if the good guys technically lose, I think it’s going to end on a slightly hopeful note, much like the end of “Empire”.

We’re going to get some answers regarding Rey’s parents because apparently people care about that. That’s fine, you need to expound on that a little bit for sure since you set it up in “The Force Awakens” but I just hope to god she isn’t a Skywalker. I know the main trilogy is the Saga of the Skywalkers but like...I don’t want Rey to be a Skywalker. I have a bad feeling, though, that Luke being her father is going to be a funhouse mirror to the Darth Vader being Luke’s father reveal. But maybe that’s too obvious, I don’t know.

We’ll get a liiiittle more info on Snoke, but I think any big reveals about his character will come in Episode IX, where I think stopping him is going to be a bigger focus.

There will, without a doubt, be BB-8 + R2-D2 duo shenanigans for the kids. Search your feelings. You know it to be true.

Wrapping Up

Well, that’s my two cents on the whole thing. Feel free to share your own thoughts, theories, speculations and opinions on anything I talked about here. I love talking Star Wars, so you know.

Thanks for dropping by.

#Star Wars #The Last Jedi #Writing

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renzywenzy · 8 years ago

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Rogue One: A Star Wars Story Review

*Spoiler Warning*

Holy shit. That was a damn good movie and a fine addition to Lucas Arts Disney’s Star Wars film series. Allow me to preface my review by saying that I have started writing this just a few short hours after watching the film but who knows when I’ll finish? I’ve digested it as much as I can and I’ve taken down notes of all the important things I wanted to talk about and now I believe I’m ready to start this review. That out of the way, here is my review of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

So to start with this movie, I’d actually like to point out all the stuff that I did not enjoy first and then go to the positives. I don’t have much criticism so I wanted to get that out of my plate first. So here are the negatives.

Cons:

1.) The lack of compelling characters. This is probably my biggest gripe with the film. I was never able to fully invest in these characters emotionally. That’s not to say that these people have bad characterizations or that their dull. It’s just that they lack the emotional depth of other main characters before them. This is most likely because the movie itself doesn’t give them enough time to fully develop. Let’s take a look at some of these characters.

Felicity Jones plays the main protagonist, Jyn Erso. Jyn is the daughter of the former Imperial scientist and now kidnapped farmer Galen Erso (the mastermind of the Death Star) and her initial actions are motivated by the chance to meet her father again. Problem is I didn’t really care and that’s because the plot didn’t give enough time (or any time at all) to strengthen that father-daughter bond. That’s why when they finally meet each other again and Galen is killed, it unfortunately doesn’t evoke any emotion and it actually felt a bit flat. I really really wanted to care about her journey on being with her father again but I realized if I had to try so hard then the movie isn’t executing that aspect right. One of the main issues with Jyn is that her problems with the Rebellion aren’t explored enough. It’s just one of those aspects about her that’s mentioned in one or 2 scenes but not expanded upon in any sort of meaningful way. She reminded me a lot of Han Solo. Like Han in his initial scenes in A New Hope, Jyn is someone with a criminal background who does not side with anybody and only does things for her own benefit. That is until she becomes part of much bigger cause. This was an awesome aspect of her. However, even though she is bad ass (really bad ass by the way), she just lacks the charm of Han Solo and she doesn’t go through the same carefully handled character progression that Han goes through which is a huge shame.

And then there’s Cassian Andor played by Diego Luna. Now with Cassian, I liked his inner struggle a bit more. His problem was that he kept doing bad things for the Rebellion and that he felt as if these actions are not justified. This could have made for some really good character progression but it’s just that his inner problems were solved just as quickly as they were introduced. Again, if the film had highlighted this aspect of him more than it did then Cassian would be a better character overall.

Honestly, I would’ve given these issues a pass IF we would see more of these 2 in future films but seeing as how they died in the end (like I said, spoilers) then their characters’ potential growth is pretty much over and done with.

2.) The story is nothing to talk about. Or at least nothing really exciting to talk about. After watching this film, all I could really say about it was that it was about finding the plans to the Death Star. That particular aspect of the narrative is strong but nearly (key word) everything around it feels pretty flat. There was just not enough life or any of that “wow” moment in the story. Any scene where I’m supposed to show emotion just does not work. It’s never given any weight so sadly it’s never earned. For example:

In that scene where Jyn is listening to a holocommunicator message from her father and she starts breaking down. Yeah that scene. I didn’t really care, it didn’t emotionally affect me in any sort of way, it didn’t make me want to see her reunite with her father and I found that scene pretty manipulative. Before you say I’m some sort of insensitive asshole, I have genuinely cried in films before but for those emotional scenes that had a lot of build-up and where the emotional payoff was earned. Same can not be said for most of the “sad” scenes in this film. Yes, there were characters here who I did like (and even love) but I still didn’t care for their deaths and we’ll get to those characters in a little while.

3.) The first act of the film is choppy. This is more or less piggy-backing off of what I just said about the characters not being given enough time to develop. 30 minutes into the film and I felt like it was all over the place. Introduce a character, skip, introduce another character, skip, sprinkles of exposition here, skip, introduce another character, and skip. There was a lack of focus that hurts the pacing. With issues #1 and #2 mixing together, I found myself asking “Are we supposed to give a shit?” a bunch of times at least in the preceding half. Thankfully, the focus is finally set and established by the latter part of the 2nd act and nearly, if not all of the 3rd act. Which bring us to the positives.

Pros:

1.) Now, going into a Star Wars film means that I had certain expectations. After watching the great Force Awakens, there was a certain magic that I was looking for that’s very hard to explain. What I will say is this: Rogue One offers the same kind of magic but presented differently. What I mean by that it has a darker and rougher tone than previous films. Probably the darkest that it has ever been. There was an image in the beginning that I’ll never forget that I wish I could show. I hope my description can suffice. The main character, Jyn, was being escorted (to prison, most likely) and the Stormtroopers escorting her had dirty armor. If memory serves me correctly, I don’t remember any Clone trooper or Stormtrooper from the originals, prequels, and even Force Awakens look so untidy. They’re usually in mint condition even during battle. But in here, they look like they’ve been through a lot of shit and are just tired. This was an image that showed me that this is going to be a Star Wars film with a dash of grit and for this film, it worked overall. The best part of the story is how the Rebellion/Republic aren’t presented as the heroic bunch of do-gooders that have an unwavering sense of morality. No no no in here they are willing to get their hands dirty and kill people who may not even deserve it. The character of Forest Whitaker, Saw Gerrera (Nice job in tying in this story with Rebels), represents what a radical extremist in the side of the Republic looks like. He’s not necessarily a good person. In fact, the people Jyn associates with aren’t clean cut themselves. They just happen to be a side that’s the lesser of two evils.

2.) Speaking of the other evil, the Empire subplot that focused on the tension between main villain the Orson Krennic (who is a solid bad guy) and the CGI-laden Moff Tarkin (we’ll get to the CGI eventually) was pretty cool. The confrontations between the two men of the Empire were honestly some of the best scenes and it made me care about the villain a bit more. Yeah, Orson is an asshole who throws hissy fits and unfairly kills scientists who did nothing wrong and but seeing him be bullied and taken out by an even bigger asshole - who also takes Krennic’s credit - made me root for him a little bit (at least against Tarkin). Oh and that final scene where Krennic looked at the Death Star as it was about to obliterate the planet along with him was marvelous.

3.) That brings me to my next positive point: The action-packed and thrilling third act of the film. There really is not much to say here except that it’s where shit hits the fan and the glorious blasting and dogfighting begins. The action sequences in these final minutes are so well-done. The rebel wings taking out the 2 Star Destroyers was a thing of beauty and the Darth Vader fight scene (if you can even call it a fight because it was extremely one-sided) was just plain bad-ass. One tiny negative I can point out is the continuity issue with the AT-T walkers. I thought Empire Strikes Back has taught us that tying them up was the only way of taking them down. I first thought that maybe the Empire upgraded their AT-T walkers because of how they were taken out in this battle BUT I remembered since everyone was destroyed by the Death Star, who’d be alive to tell them about the walker weakness? Just a small gripe in an otherwise massive positive.

4.) Donnie Yen as Chirrut Imwe and Aland Tudyk as the voice of K2SO. These two were the highlights of the supporting cast. Yen provides his usual martial-arts badassery as the blind but force-sensitive monk. In fact, his character adds more to the idea of the “Force”. It’s honestly refreshing to see (no pun intended) that this intangible power is present even with someone without the ability to see. This means that there is much more to learn and hopefully, Chirrut Imwe marks the beginning of more characters like him to appear in future movies. Maybe we’ll get a character with no arms at all and yet, still can kick ass just with his/her mastery of the Force. That would be a little silly at first but I believe it will work.

Tudyk delivers a sarcastic brand of comedy that adds layers to droid characters. Although his jokes can sometimes be unnecessary, when they do hit, they hit hard. What I loved most about his character is that he really didn’t have that much character development. Now, I know development is important but the reason I didn’t need it from K2SO is that he is basically an expendable, comedy-relief character. Besides, because Jyn didn’t go through much character progression herself, I’d find it improbable for K2SO to become completely open and warm to her so his ongoing mild surliness was appropriate and consistently entertaining.

5.) The fan service. Now there’s not a whole lot of fan service here like in the Force Awakens but there are just enough to put a smile on anyone’s face if they get the references. Some of them may have felt more forced than others (*cough* R2-D2 and C-3PO *cough*) but at the end of the day, I’d rather have them in than not at all. My personal favorite reference was seeing Cornelius Evazan and his buddy again. For those who don’t remember him, he’s the dude who has the death sentence in 12 systems. It was just awesome seeing him and his deformed face again and with his arm still intact. The biggest fan service here is arguably seeing Darth Vader and his daughter, Princess Leia, again. Speaking of which.

5.) I was a bit iffy about the CGI in this film. Particularly Moff and Leia but after thinking about it and after looking at their digitized selves again, I honestly didn’t mind it. It’s nowhere near as bad as the work done on Han’s head when Greedo shot first and it’s much better than I had initially expected. I honestly didn’t care if it was CGI, it was nice seeing Princess Leia again.

Ok, this part’s gonna get a bit serious. There was something a bit poetic about all this. About me watching this film on the precise day that I did. I had seen Rogue One just a few days after Carrie Fisher’s death (God rest her soul) and seeing Princess Leia at the time of watching meant much more than ever. When I saw her, it hit me and it really dawned on me that she was gone. She was a huge part of my childhood because I had the biggest crush on her when I first watched her in “A New Hope”. There was just an air of magnetism in her eyes and in her voice that attracted me. Not only that, she was really the first badass heroine that I had ever seen in movies. She was a strong woman who spoke to and for generations and for that, I’ll miss her badly. Damn, can you imagine how people will feel watching her in Episode 8?

Overall, Rogue One is a strong entry in the Star Wars mythos. Solid performance from the cast even if the film doesn’t have the engaging characters like a Luke, Han, Leia, Rey, or Finn. It falters somewhat in the beginning but quickly picks itself up and goes all out in most of the 2nd act and in the entirety of the 3rd. While it may lack some of the personality and magic of previous films, it has its own unique depth by adding some grit to its more grounded tone.

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lazybarbarians · 8 years ago

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Star Wars: Catalyst: A Rogue One Story by James Luceno

Ragnell: So, after a brief break last week (it was a holiday), we read Star Wars: Catalyst: A Rogue One Novel which you know is extra fun because it has an extra colon!

This novel is a prequel to the prequel everybody likes, set sequentially after the other 3 prequels that nobody likes. It takes place before the events of Rogue One. Spoilers, they build a Death Star. (Extra spoilers, a magic teenager from the middle of fucking nowhere blows it up.) But for those of you who watched that movie and ask “How did these people get into this situation?” then this is the book for you.

Kalinara: also, if you watched and thought “is it just me, or is Krennic really kind of obsessed with Jyn’s dad?” This book seems to clarify: yes, yes he is.

R: I must warn you, that this book contains graphic depictions of social climbing, child care, bureaucracy, workplace competition, shameless use of high school contacts for your own professional advancement, and several instances of unadulterated exposition about the nature of kyber crystals. Which power lightsabers.

Also, Lightsabers do not appear in this book. Not even once. Not even in a flashback.

We open with Galen and Lyra Erso, a pacifist scientist and his religious environmentalist wife, trying to synthesize kyber crystals on Vallt, a neutral planet in the Clone Wars while Lyra takes notes and prepares for impending motherhood. Just their luck there’s an insurrection and they get captured in an attempt to make Galen work for the Separatist. So poor Jyn is born while her father’s in prison. But not to fear, Krennic is here! Lt Commander Krennic, who knows Galen from Smart Dude School, arranges for their rescue because he thinks Galen’s specialty will really help him get to the Front Row of researchers on the Super-Secret Battle Station Project they have been assigned to.

Krennic uses a smuggler to get them out, and then destroys the new Vallt government for Orbit. Galen, of course, does not accept a military job immediately and instead offers Krennic a way out of military service. Which is sweet but a major character misjudgment So Krennic greases the works of the Republic so that Galen can’t leave Coruscant, and is bored out of his skull and eventually accepts a mind-numbing QA position on another planet. Towards the end of the war, that planet gets the shit bombed out of it and the Ersos again have to flee back to Coruscant. But the war is over! And the Jedi are dead! So, no need for a military job, right?

Still, Galen does need a job so it’s Krennic to the rescue again. With a “clean energy research project” using kyber crystals. He even has a suitcase full of them. Which Lyra points out probably came form the lightsabers of murdered Jedi but really, he’s offering the chance to build UNLIMITED ENERGY for the New Galactic Empire. That can’t be sinister, right?

Little does Galen know, Krennic’s been working behind the scenes at the Empire, convincing Palpatine’s Vice, Mas Amedda (Remember the creepy blue dude with the horns and headtails? He gets lines!) to back him while he maneuvers against Governor Tarkin to gain influence and monitors the Ersos to make sure Lyra’s not radicalizing her husband.

The time goes on and Galen gets more into his work, and Lyra gets offworld with a friend and gets to see the environmental devastation being wrought by the Empire on protected lands. And things aren’t adding up from their POV. They finally have a talk about it, then confront Krennic. Krennic handles the confrontation so poorly it confirms he’s evil and that Galen’s research has been weaponized. Fortunately, this coincides with Krennic using his favorite smuggler against Tarkin, and Tarkin sending the guy back to Coruscant to make him a spy in Krennic’s organization. Because no one in the fucking Empire gives a fucking fucking about their actual job except guys like Galen Erso who lose faith in the system when they realize their labor has been twisted to evil. Of course, because Krennic used the same smuggler to escort Lyra off-world before, and because the smuggler knows Saw Gerrera this blows up in both Krennic and Tarkin’s faces because he arranges to distract Krennic and smuggle them off Coruscant.

The book ends on some really sweet interaction between Jyn and Saw, and promises that the beginning of the movie is just a few years away.

I do enjoy tie-in books, because I can always picture the actors in their roles. (And through the miracle of the internet can find images of them at the age they’d be during a prequel!) I have long had a problem with Star Wars books, though, because I always have to look up the species online to picture them. But that’s just a small nitpick. If a Star Wars books is funny, quick-paced and adventurous with an engaging hero I can get over that. Oddly, this book is… none of those things. I don’t hate it, I kinda liked it, but if not for the movie I think it’d have bugged me.

K: It’s definitely a “prequel of a prequel” situation. As a stand alone novel, it’s definitely lacking. There really isn’t an overall plot, as I’d define one. And while we have an effective villain, we’re stuck in a position where we can’t get a lot of closure, because that closure will happen in Rogue One itself. As a prequel though, it’s pretty effective.

R: See, this book starts off very very slow. Krennic is the most interesting viewpoint character early on, though it picks up when they bring in Tarkin. (Man I love Tarkin.) Can’t say I grew fond of Has or would’ve been sad if he’d died.

K: This book definitely utilized Krennic well. I think Krennic, like Tarkin, and probably Hux in TFA, represent an interesting, almost banal type of evil. They may get a grandiose gesture or two, but the true nature of their triumphs and schemes are not going to be showcased in a movie like Star Wars. The quiet machinations, social climbing, sneaky backroom financial dealings and so on could perhaps make a good sci-fi version of House of Cards, but they’re not going to waste a filming budget on that when we could have lightsabers instead.

But that’s where books like this one can come in handy. In Catalyst, we get to see Krennic at his most effective. He really is more than just the hapless ineffectual douche that Tarkin and Vader metaphorically shove into a locker.

R: I knew the final fates of the Ersos, so it was hard to get too engaged with them. After a while, I got into the second part, though, I got invested. Galen and Lyra start to come alive after then. Lyra’s faith becomes evident in her reactions to the anti-Jedi propaganda and the kyber crystals, and her husband slowly starting to parrot that stuff. We get to see her keep her head and her wits about her as the Emperor, aided by legions of guys like Krennic and Tarkin, rewrites reality. We can see how a man like Galen Erso ended up in the situation he was in, how naive he could be, how he meant well but couldn’t resist when everything he wanted was placed on a silver platter in front of him with the label “Cruelty-Free!”, and how his curiosity and desire to understand the kyber crystals had him rationalizing all sorts of things away.

K: I really liked Galen and Lyra too. We got to appreciate Galen a bit during Rogue One, of course, as someone forced into Imperial service but taking what steps he can to get the word out and sabotage what he’s created. But here we get to see exactly how he fell into that situation. And it’s very sympathetic.

One thing that I think tends to get lost when we discuss older Imperial characters, whether they be the real assholes like Tarkin and Krennic, or more hapless ones like Galen, is that they didn’t start off as Imperials. They started out as soldiers or scientists of the Republic. Palpatine was the Chancellor before he was the Empire, and he had a very long time to lay the groundwork of his most evil deeds long before he named himself Emperor, or Darth Vader came blasting into the picture. The true change from Republic to Empire, from flawed-but-fundamentally-well-meaning-democracy to a totalitarian dictatorship was slow and gradual, and a lot of people were blind to what was happening until it was too late.

R: With this book we see different levels of that too. We see how Has, Galen, Krennic, and Tarkin all ended up sliding into the Imperial machine due to the Clone Wars, for different motivations and different rewards and different levels of satisfaction.

K: Lyra’s faith was an interesting note, and something that I’ve really liked about the new Disney canon. In the old Expanded Universe, the Jedi were very much like Han describes them in A New Hope: hokey religious practitioners with little to no connection to every day life. Even after Luke brings back the Jedi Order, they are very separated from the day to day life of the citizens of the Republic.

The Disney canon so far, from Catalyst, Rogue One, Heir to the Jedi and so on, have painted a different picture of the way that the Jedi and the Force interact with common people. A woman like Lyra, who has never met a Jedi in her life, can still venerate the kyber crystals and their connection to the Force. The rebels still give Jedi blessings. Different cultures still tell stories of those of their number who went off to become Jedi, and treasure their heirlooms. It becomes clear in the new canon that Han’s dismissal of the Jedi, or that Admiral who scorned Vader and got choked for his trouble, are yet other demonstrations of Palpatine’s powers and machinations. He’s cut the Jedi off from common, ordinary people. That’s not the natural state of events.

I think maybe when we do see Luke’s idea of a Jedi Order, we’ll see something very different from the isolated little boarding school/temple on Yavin IV. But maybe something more organically linked to the people. (And hopefully something that would allow more to survive/escape Kylo’s treachery.)

R: I like that aspect too. It must be leading up to whatever we’ll see Luke set up, and I really don’t want the later purge to have been as effective as the first. I think there should be a handful running around who’ll show up in the next two movies.

I also like the Jedi being a specialized practitioner of a faith that is actually pretty widespread. They’re like priests in the Disney canon, which suits Luke a lot. In Shattered Empire Rucka has Luke planning an espionage mission with a volunteer pilot, and killing a bunch of Imperials during it, but afterwards Luke and the volunteer sit down and discuss whether or not she should leave the army. Not from the point of view of whether or not it’s good for the Alliance, but whether or not it’s the right choice for her. Like a Chaplain would. And it’s a role that really fits Luke Skywalker’s character arc

Of course, even with that in mind the Sith-Jedi thing is still a sectarian dispute. So after Palpatine has cut off the Jedi from the common people, and driven belief in the Force underground… has he replaced it with anything? Are there non-Sith Force-believers out there who are like a dark side version of the Guardian of the Whills or Church of the Force?

Aside form that, I wish we’d had more Saw. I thought the end bit with him was lovely, and very sad in light of his role in the movie. In the early years of the Empire, saw Gerrera greeted defectors with kind words and admiration. By the time of the Death Star, he’s so paranoid he tortures the messenger and holds the message in terrified uncertainty about its truth. It’s tragic.

And, much as I grouse, I appreciate a little exposition on kyber crystals. They’re confusing little things. I guess, with this book establishing they can’t be easily synthesized they’re even more confusing (are the Sith using natural crystals or do they just have a method?), but it’s good to have a little material on them and know how difficult it was to power the Death Star.

But really, if anything’s worth reading in this book, it’s the inner workings of the Empire. Rogue One let us know both the Empire and the Rebellion were logistical nightmares. Rebels tells us why the Rebellion is so screwed up. Catalyst tells us why the Empire is so screwed up. How all of the secrecy and backbiting and political jockeying that has run rampant in Palpatine’s organization is doing in the Empire piece by piece. But going by the Vader-Emperor relationship in ESB and ROTJ, we can surmise that in-fighting is a top-down trend.

#Extreme Bureaucracy #How to Trap Friends and Influence the Galaxy #No Space Wizards Were Harmed in the Making of this Novel #There are no lightsaber duels in this book #Everything you never wanted to know about kyber crystals but nothing significant #Star Wars #A Disney Prince(ss) in Space #Star Wars: Catalyst #James Luceno #Rogue One #Do we really need that many colons?

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