First the movie. It's been out a week now, so I'll give a quick capsule overview. As Overlord DVD said, and I agree, it's the best of the sequel trilogy, yet it's also the worst. It's the best in that it's the most charming to watch, and the characters finally have some charisma and chemistry. There's a handful of ideas that are actually kind of clever, even if they're hampered by being stuck in a stupid plot, and of course, it's a very pretty movie most of the time. It also minimizes the wokeness, no doubt as an apology of sorts for the Last Jedi, as well as the numerous franchises that are falling to audience rebellion due to their execrable social and political posturing and their outright hatred for the core audience that loves them.
It's the worst of the Star Wars movies because the plot is stupider than any others. It finally manages to undo literally everything that happened in the Original Trilogy (and even the whole point of the prequel trilogy, for that matter) just so Rey can do it right the way those stupid white males like Luke and Han and Annakin and Kenobi couldn't. It doesn't even bother explaining how things happen. Why is Palpatine alive after we see him die, and then to make it even more final, the Death Star he just died on is blown to atoms? I dunno. Shut up and consume. Speaking of the Death Star being blown to atoms, why is the wreck of it sitting out there in the ocean on Endor? I dunno. Shut up and consume. This kind of farcical nonsense happens over and over again.
Also, Rey is such a dire Mary Sue, that she gets new powers that would have dramatically changed the course of the prior movies if they were actually a thing. The force teleport thing between her and Kylo, and the force healing are usually shown as the most egregious offenders here. Although--I have to be fair and point out that the force teleport is a kind of unique thing because they are a force dyad (whatever that is), so it isn't meant to be something that's just a magical convenience. (No, it's a rather deus ex machina plot device unique to these two characters.) And the force healing is a thing that's been common in many Expanded Universe things for some time now, and technically, we saw it more recently in an episode of the Mandalorian a few weeks earlier. Nobody seemed to complain about it then; in fact, in general, the people who love to hate on the movie love to love on the Mandalorian. But the fact is that the Mandalorian is just as cavalier with established Star Wars plot points, even though they're usually more local and detailed in scope. The force healing that Baby Yoda does to old Apollo Creed is just the biggest; the details about Mandalorian society are completely at odds with other canon sources of info on the Mandalorians such as the Clone Wars and even Star Wars Rebels. Since when can Mandalorians not take off their helmets? They do all the time in those two shows. Since when are Mandalorians not a race but a creed? On Mandalore and Kalevala in the Clone Wars, they absolutely were the former not the latter, but the new show makes the opposite true. (Although I'm not naive; I know what's happening here. George Lucas invalidated a bunch of older EU stuff about Mandalorians, and the Disney custodians have been just semi-quietly bringing it back since the acquisition as much as possible.) On the other hand, they at least are telling entertaining stories (mostly) and the set up for new stuff, especially given the last couple of episodes, is intriguing for once. If the Mandalorian is the template for New Star Wars, it won't be great, but at least it won't be terrible either. It'll be somewhere between the quality of the Clone Wars and Rebels, most likely. Hopefully more like the former than the latter, as r-selected writers and quiet woke moments, such as Sabine Mary Sue, the Mandalorian Asian girl, and bratty Ezra, who's supposed to be a cool, relatable teenager, but only if you were a really stupid, entitled, bratty teenager does that actually work, etc. kinda ruined Rebels a fair bit, and the moments of brilliance it had was much fewer and farther between than on the earlier show.
If I were somehow suddenly put in charge of Star Wars, I'd... well, first, I'd fire almost everyone working on it and tell them to take a hike. Lower budget stuff with compelling characters, as in the Mandalorian, would be my first step to rehabilitate the brand, whether to theatres or a streaming service or however it was most convenient to be done, with the goal towards making blockbuster movies again. But I'd have some other design principles in common first too:
- First, I'd have everyone on whatever creative team I put together go outside and engage in some coed team sports. If that doesn't alleviate the nonsense about women acting like men and vice versa, then those who can't get with the program get fired too.
- Then, we'd do an exercise where we watch both the older 1981 Clash of the Titans and then the 2010 (or whatever year it was exactly) one back to back, with a particular emphasis on the characterization of Perseus and his love interest (which for some dumb reason isn't even Andromeda in the second movie) and why they work. If I really need to spell out the fact that masculine men and feminine women are attractive to normal people of both sexes and r-selected palette swaps between men and women are off-putting to normal people of both sexes, then I clearly have the wrong creative team. Adhering to biological sex roles works because... well, because it's biology. Anything else marks the movies as a time capsule from a period of Clown World.
- By the same token, what is Star Wars? A space opera? Yes, heavily based on the Lensmen, Dune, Flash Gordon and John Carter. It also has lots of elements of the Western in it, and Ruritanian romance. What do all of these have in common? They are unique stories created and told by white men for white men. And while they have a kind of timelessness about them that makes them popular across the world, the core audience for Star Wars has always been white men. We're not going to chase phantom diversity audiences, we're going to focus on our core demographic. The majority of the protagonist, and even secondary and love interest characters should all be white. Diversity casting (otherwise known as blackwashing and brownwashing of white, American culture) is cultural appropriation of the most egregious kind, and if it's good for the conservative goose, it can be good for the liberal gander. You don't get to complain about cultural appropriation of non-white cultures while looting white cultures for whatever you want to take, and expect us to accept that.
- The sequel trilogy was a debacle, but for "normies" they probably don't want it soundly denounced. A better way to go about it is what I've always suggested for STAR WARS REMIXED; go forward in time far enough that you wipe the slate clean. Refer to some of the characters of the old movies as legendary figures about which no truth is remembered, and strongly imply that we don't even know anymore what of what is seen in the older movies was actually true and what wasn't. And then largely ignore them anyway and focus on more immediate characters and events. Nostalgic callbacks are for losers who don't have anything interesting to say in their new movie. A few are kinda fun, but don't overdo it. Feel free to depart from some of the tropes of Star Wars if necessary; this was done to good effect in many of the better Clone Wars episodes, for instance, and some of the better material in Old Republic. The latter was seriously held back, on the other hand, by trying to imply too much stasis in many ways; four thousand years before Star Wars, everything was pretty much exactly what Star Wars had been? C'mon.
- Knock it off with the Jedi and Sith. Sure, you can have them, but the orders after thousands of years won't look like what they did in the prequels. I actually like how the Remixed version had a kind of fragmentation of force using and lightsaber wielding traditions as well as a balkanization of the political structure of the galaxy anyway.
- As another aside, in the original trilogy, while the Jedi and Sith were both these kind of space wizards, their powers were subtle, understated, and not terribly drastic and amazing. When the Emperor starting shooting lighting out of his hands at the end, that was a dramatic moment, because nobody suspected that that could even be done, and it's strongly suggested that he was some kind of force using prodigy anyway (same for Yoda.) As the movies progressed, even under Lucas' supervision, the Jedi and Sith became outright superheroes, completely disconnected from anything that a "normal" adventuring character in the galaxy could ever expect to be able to match. The Mary Sue aspects of Rey were previewed by the Mary Sue aspects of the Jedi overall long before Rey took it over the top. Let's pull that back down. Sure, they have some pretty cool acrobatic and combat abilities with their sabers, and they are capable of some minor misdirection and persuasion here and there. Force abilities and lightsabers themselves have gotten too over the top.
- Now, that doesn't mean that wild Hong Kong style fight scenes should go. Those are, of course, freakin' awesome. No, what it means is that rather than an action tax on the Jedi, everyone should, if need be, be a credible threat, because cool, swashbuckling action isn't limited to people who use the force. A Mandalorian, for example, should expect to be the equal of any Jedi. Stormtroopers should be feared rather than mocked. Experienced, James Bond-like agents, smugglers, criminals, soldiers, mercenaries, bounty hunters, and what-have-you should all be action heroes of comparable ability to any Jedi, Sith or member of any other knightly order.
In fact, it's really not that hard to make good Star Wars content, as a variety of fan films on Youtube and elsewhere show. It's just that the people in charge of making actual, official Star Wars content are incompetent people who hate the audience for the franchise, and hate what the franchise actually stands for, so they are deliberately tearing it down. Not that I think these highlight all of the dot points I do, but they are reasonably good Star Wars fan films, which proves the point: it's not really that hard to do.
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