Star Wars was a fairy tale, fantastically realized, that all ages could enjoy. The Empire Strikes Back was its excellent, mythical continuation.

Return of the Jedi was a two hour toy commercial. Producer Gary Kurtz and George Lucas did not see eye to eye on this, and I side with Kurtz who was more about the integrity of the story. By this time Lucas had grown weary of the franchise and was more concerned with box office and merchandising.

Then years later with the prequels Lucas set about demystifying what was so gloriously mystical about the original iteration of his creation in the first place.

That mysticism is part of what made the original two films so great even to the point that the third entry in the original trilogy still manages to coast on the fumes of the first two films in the minds of many.

Then Disney comes along and like the rest of the current zeitgeist in Hollywood, there's this resistance to earnestness. Fairy tales are always being subverted now. Most Hollywood creatives now are these detached deconstructionists and TV-style writers or they're political animals refusing to be caught in an uncool pose. Everything's gotta be done with a wink and a smile.

The strange thing is everyone is so into "nerd culture" now and how cool it is, and yet the thing that actually made us nerds back in the day was our strong embrace of the earnest and the fairy tale to the point that it made us decidedly uncool.

Luke and Yoda and Vader and the Force weren't created specifically for spectacle and scenes and characters weren't written to be "badass". The fairy tale mysticism of the originals was brought into the world with heart and purpose and through changes in general societal norms and all the corporate ballyhoo and Hollywood post-modernism that's been lost.

And Hayden Christiansen is back. Probably just a voice-over guiding Rey through the lost city. He's had plenty of time to take acting lessons, so maybe I won't be cringing.

The toxic anger and hate just fed and fed and fed into this narrative that the movies weren't just "bad" but "wrong."

I've said that all along.

Mouse wars is WRONG when labelled as Star Wars. Everything about it is WRONGWRONGWRONGWRONG.

But had they taken it out of the Stars Wars universe and made it as a stand alone trilogy with Space Wizards instead of Jedi, and Dark Wizards instead of Sith, and sold it as a female empowerment alternative to Star Wars, it would now be getting acclaim instead of hate.

I got lucky and snagged some okras at the Asian grocery and made gumbo with turkey, shrimps and crawfish:

How many fingers from how many ladies?

Quote from: Edward M. Grant on April 17, 2019, 09:18:11 AM

I don't see any evidence of 'write to market'. I don't know anyone in the real world who actually liked Han Solo Dies At The End (I can't even remember the official title of the movie), and few on the Internet. It was just dismal in every respect, and the only decent parts were the ones the original characters were in.

The Force Awakens was a competent movie that did what it needed to do. It wasn't great, but it wasn't bad. It needed to bridge the gap between the original trilogy and those whose first experience with Star Wars was the prequels. And it has been so long since there had been a SW movie that they probably felt they DID need to sort of rehash a lot because you can't assume everyone watching even KNOWS what is going on.

I also believe Harrison Ford sort of DEMANDED that they kill off Han, as he really didn't want to do any more of the movies. He actually thought Han should have died in the original trilogy.

Rogue One was the "we need to fill that huge plot hole that has been tormenting us for literally generations" movie. I actually enjoyed it, but I went in expecting a tragedy. Continuity wise, you sort of new how it had to end. It was just a matter of seeing how it would get there.

I feel a lot of the current trash talking about TFA and RO is based on the hatred of TLJ. TLJ was horrible. Not from "SJW" point, but from just horrible filmmaking and storytelling. Rian Johnson has zero respect for the source material and DIDN'T EVEN TRY to make any of it work within the continuity of the entire franchise. Johnson was more interested in making a "Rian Johnson" movie than a Star Wars movie. The backlash is what hurt Solo (which, though I didn't like the actor they chose for Han, was a good space western otherwise). If TFA had been decent, I don't think people would be going back and trashing the other movies as well. A lot of it is just venom over TLJ.

There is a lot to be said for that perspective.

I think another problem Disney had was the excision of the non-movie elements from the canon. I know why Disney moved in that direction--it wanted to untie its hands to create whatever stories it chose. But the net effect was to anger a fair percentage of the fans before the first movie ever hit theaters.

And then were was George Lucas's famous remark (which he quickly had to apologize for) about selling the Star Wars franchise to Disney being like selling his children to white slavers. When the father of a franchise denounces its current incarnation, how can that not lead to bad feelings?

I also think the long gap between movies played a part. Not only did it make it less likely that fans would know the backstory (hence the need for the rehash you mentioned), but it gave anticipation among die-hard fans so long to build that it would have been virtually impossible to satisfy their expectations.