Kind sir, you are doing me a boggle. (Off-Topic)

by Kermit , Raleigh, NC, Wednesday, January 24, 2018, 10:02 (2284 days ago) @ Cody Miller
edited by Kermit, Wednesday, January 24, 2018, 10:27

Yeah, which is why the critics who want Star Wars to be a Marxist critique are wetting their knickers. I've said here before. Star Wars doesn't do politics well. That's not a critique of Star Wars. There are more important things than politics, and Star Wars was about those things--something Joseph Campbell recognized about the first film.

I thought Star Wars was an allegory for WW2 fascism. Vietnam too. It's always been about Politics. Lucas even says so. Even the prequels were critical of Bush Jr.

And the hamfistedness of that was a low point of the prequels. Regarding WW2, yes, Lucas was definitely interested in WW2 films as inspiration, but the politics weren't front and center. Just because Nazi-esque uniforms served as good visual shorthand for evil didn't make the movie an allegory of WW2. (This reminds me of my eighth-grade teacher who insisted that we all write papers about how Star Wars was a retelling of the Wizard of Oz--as if that were it's only inspiration.) Regarding Vietnam, what director in the 70s hasn't sought to bolster his street cred by saying he was influenced by Vietnam? I repeat: the political takeaways from the Star Wars universe have always been problematic--case in point.

I'll all for getting away from the chosen one crap--the embrace of which was one of the cardinal sins of the prequels. The Force as I see it is the force as first presented--a power available to anyone who has the discipline to dedicate themselves to it. Now it just seems to be a super power some have. They haven't mentioned midi-chlorians explicitly (thank God), but I'm not convinced that they're gone. We'll see how Rey's stolen books figure in going forward. As far as I'm concerned, though, the Force as an idea has been compromised in perhaps a worse way in that it's used as narrative silly putty in The Last Jedi. It's stretched into things it has never been in the service of surprising the audience. And when there aren't clear-cut rules about how an imaginary world operates, we stop believing it and worse stop caring. Tolkien understood this in his bones. I don't expect Rian Johnson to understand the fantasy genre as well, but he really doesn't seem to care about any rules of the genre, much less understand why they're there.

I think Empire is guilty of this too is it not? In Star Wars, the force was just something that aided your actions. Like a feeling or another sense. Then later you could pull objects, see into the future, talk through space, or shoot lightning.

To some extent, perhaps, but a big difference is that for the most part these characteristics were introduced before they were necessary to advance the plot.