Book of Boba Fett - brief thoughts (so far)

There's only two episodes. I've seen the first one twice and most of the second one twice. It's not really that great, but it has some potential. In some ways, Boba Fett has become a less compelling character than he was. Plus, he looks kinda old and flabby compared to when he went into the sarlacc. Given that nothing has happened to him that should make him become so, that's unfortunate. I mean, I know why it is; because they wanted to keep using Temuera Morrison who played Jango Fett in Attack of the Clones nearly twenty years ago. He just doesn't look anything like Jeremy Bulloch did in 1983. Even though Bulloch never took off the helmet, he's just obviously a very different man to even a casual viewer. (This was a problem already in the prequels. Not sure why Lucas cast Morrison. He was fine as Jango Fett, and did a good job, but if Boba Fett was supposed to be a genetic clone of him, that never worked, because he never looked anything at all like Boba Fett had in the original trilogy. Yet another bad call by Lucas during the prequels. I know that in the wake of the sequel trilogy, it's somewhat fashionable to now pretend like the prequel movies were good movies with good choices made during their production process, but the reality is that they never really were. They just weren't overt dumpster fires like the sequel trilogy movies have been.)

But honestly, I'm not really digging the very slow burn of current events with the crime lord stuff followed by his "A Man Called Horse" flashback scenes. I'm very tired of "white man must come to respect the primitives who took him captive and abused him" story. It's little more than Stockholm Syndrome writ large. Of course, they deliberately recast Boba Fett from a white man in the 80s to a Polynesian man in the 00s who is now a middle-aged man to boot. But still; the flashback scenes are much less engaging, and yet they seem to take up more than half of the runtime of the episodes so far. I'm sure that they're setting up some kind of "Fett's relationship with the Tuskens will be crucial to his success with the crime lords" type of resolution (I called it here first!) but again; I read A Princess of Mars years ago. It was published before my grandfather was born, and I'm already a middle-aged man about to turn 50 myself. The story isn't exactly a new one anymore.

And I don't really get where Fett is coming from in the non-flashback scenes. He wants to be a kinder, nicer gangster? Yeah, I don't get it. I want to see a combination of space western and space Scarface here, not space West Side Story.

The show has potential. I hope it gets better. Right now, I'm still waiting for it to do something interesting.