The Fall of Skywalker

I strongly suspect that this is completely true.  Sadly, as I said, because I don't talk about Star Wars much with my wife, she bought tickets for us to go see it in gigantic imax on Friday.  Granted; we used free ticket vouchers, so we didn't buy them per se, but for accounting purposes and from an opportunity cost perspective, we've contributed to the opening weekend of Star Wars.  Sigh.  Sometimes she's pretty cute when she's trying to help but gets it wrong.  So, although next weekend isn't likely to be a great opportunity for me to log in and review the movie, I'll eventually do it (probably too late to matter, because everyone who will see the review will already have seen the movie or decided that they won't under any circumstances anyway.)  As the video linked above says, we can already basically review the movie based on the spoilers that have been leaked; even through desperate reshoots, recuts, and re-edits, they still don't have a fan pleaser on their hands, and they know it.  I almost wish that they had gone with their disastrous first instinct, just to make sure that Kathleen Kennedy and Jar Jar Abrams never work in Hollywood again.

Meanwhile, the Mandalorian has played out pretty much as I predicted it would in my earlier post on the subject.  It continues to be... OK.  Not bad at all.  Which, compared to everything else going on in Star Wars the last several years means that relatively speaking it's fantastic, but the truth is that the show isn't great.  I actually really hoped for more from it.  Granted, even though it's a shorter show streaming on a streaming service, it's still a show at the end of the day, and I always give shows several episodes to find their legs before I judge them completely.  But we're almost done now; there's only eight episodes in the first season, and we've now seen six of them, and it really hasn't quite risen to the level of being more than a paint by numbers, emotionless Western set in space, with characters that have almost no charisma or chemistry with each other.  Nobody is really a memorable character; even the title character of the show himself.  The only break-out is Baby Yoda, and there's not even any good reason for it other than he looks like a much quieter and more passive version of Gizmo from the Gremlins movies who doesn't shed. This isn't meant to sound like a negative review, because I don't dislike the show at all; I just really hoped to actively like it better than I do.  Sigh.

For whatever reason, though, I'm getting re-enthused by The Old Republic again.  Now granted, I haven't played that in a long time, and I actually had some issue where it wouldn't launch on my computer with the hot graphics card anymore (probably because I still have Windows XP on that computer and hardly anything runs on that anymore unless it's an old version of the program.)  "Our" laptop has been effectively commandeered by my wife as her own (and it doesn't have a graphics card anyway, and although I attempted to install it on that, it didn't run very well), "my" laptop is provided by work, and I can't install games on it.  I am, however, expecting a new second desktop, which we'll put in the office at home instead of the bedroom, and one of my first things to do with it once it's up and running is reinstall Steam and Old Republic, and then enjoying games that I haven't played in a year or more, including Old Republic, which I' never really played as much as I'd have wanted to.

Playing Old Republic is both fantastically fun in some respects and shockingly frustrating in others, but I'm aware of the limitations of the medium and the studio, so I don't expect to be as frustrated by the unfortunate elements of it as if I didn't understand those quite well, at least.  It's curious that there's a fair bit of activity here.  A new expansion just came out a couple of months ago, and I was probably dragged in because of both my intense schadenfreude watching the sequel trilogy burn in a dumpster and anticipating both the Mandalorian show and the new episodes of the Clone Wars in February.  The Old Republic's most frustrating aspect, though, is the potential I can see through it and in the setting, which isn't realized because something like The Mandalorian or The Clone Wars wasn't the product of the setting.  Can you imagine a decently made ensemble cast ongoing series set in that setting?  How awesome would that be?  Granted, BioWare probably has some strange rights meaning that Lucasfilm would have to pay them royalties back in return to use their version of the setting, or some other such complication, but that's exactly why I've always thought that going forward in time from Return of the Jedi sufficiently that the setting can be made to resemble the Old Republic setting in some ways, and yet do its own interesting things at the same time. That was the whole point of my Star Wars Remixed tag, after all, and I still maintain that that would make better new Star Wars than what we're actually getting by a long shot.  In fact, that's almost always been the main problem with new Star Wars; both the sequel trilogy and much of the Expanded Universe material, for that matter.  It either tinkered with a story that was already told and didn't need any expansion or tinkering, or it sperged out on some minor detail and made it tedious.  What it always needed was new stories about new characters, yet set in the same setting.  Preferably characters that were a little more evergreen, in many respects.  The saga of Luke Skywalker was always a closed circuit; there isn't anything you can do with Luke after Return of the Jedi that's interesting or desirable, because his story was already done. This is the fatal flaw of both the prequel trilogy and the sequel trilogy; trying to milk the same story that was already concluded.  It's also where the potential of the Clone Wars and The Mandalorian, when they were really on their best game, came through.  If only the creators (including Lucas himself in the 90s and 00s) had had the sense to do something new like this, we'd have had a very different conversation about the Star Wars franchise than the one we've had the last couple of decades, where fans are labeled as "toxic" because they rightly recognize that the potential is being wasted.

Anyway, here's an interesting hybrid video put together that's The Mandalorian + The Old Republic.  If this doesn't at least jump start thoughts in your mind about the potential of Star Warsian space opera, there's no hope for you.