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The Growing Emptiness of the “Star Wars” Universe
- krylon 8y agoWhen I watched the first of the new Star Wars movies, I felt pretty much the same. It was not bad as such, but it felt so derivative. More so, I felt that it was not derivative for a lack of imagination, but because the creators were playing it safe, deliberately avoiding any deviation from a proven recipe. And given that Walt Disney now owns the franchise, I have no expectation that any future movies set in the Star Wars universe will be any different. Which is a little sad, because the Star Wars universe is such a great backdrop to tell all kinds of interesting stories.
- toyg 8y agoThey are segmenting the universe, which is the right thing to do. The main storyline is meant to onboard kids, and will continue to do so in the foreseeable future, so you can expect more of the same there. Where the interesting stuff will happen is in the “underworld”/“legends” line that started with Rogue One and now continued with Solo. That’s where directors will be given enough freedom to write movies for grown-ups. Some will be good, some less so, exactly like the books and fanfiction that have been written over the years - riffing on an established universe can actually be harder than building a brand new one from scratch.
- iainmerrick 8y agoEverything is trilogies, and trilogies of trilogies. Star Wars has become Dragonlance. (I guess that’s not the worst thing to be -- I loved Dragonlance until I found better books!)
- grawprog 8y agoI couldn't handle the dragonlance books...I just couldn't do it...
- amelius 8y agoIt would be cool if movies could be forked :)
- jejones3141 8y agoPerhaps one could do for Star Wars what The Orville has done for Star Trek.
- ManFromUranus 8y agoThats essentially what the Mass Effect franchise is. Bioware got sick of being constrained by the Star Wars IP, costs, and continuity and simply created their own "Star Wars" which is actually much better than Star Wars IMO, or it used to be anyway.
- stephengillie 8y agoLikewise, Babylon 5 was originally a Star Trek reboot. One of the writers couldn't get his idea to take hold, so he went independent.
- BLKNSLVR 8y agoCheck out L8wrtr's Fan Edits of Episode I, II, and III. Semi-forks. https://ifdb.fanedit.org/sots/ https://ifdb.fanedit.org/sots/ https://ifdb.fanedit.org/trd/ https://ifdb.fanedit.org/trd/ https://ifdb.fanedit.org/dote/ https://ifdb.fanedit.org/dote/
- spodek 8y agoThe irony of a New Yorker article on the blandness of an institution lacking the punch of its early life is sadly obvious to long time New Yorker readers.
- danso 8y ago> “Solo” discovers that the young Han is pretty much identical to the older one, with the same skills, mannerisms, and values. It would’ve been interesting to learn that Han was once a sensitive boy with a musical gift A wacky, subversive twist like that would go a long way in getting me interested in Disney’s direction, but I just don’t associate them with anything particularly risky. Which is ironic because I thought the casting of Adam Driver was brilliant — it’s almost possible to imagine him single handedly saving the prequels if he were retroactively cast as Anakin. He’s good enough that I’ll go watch Episode IX, but the ending of “Last Jedi” left me incredibly underwhelmed. What storylines and character arcs are even worth wrapping up? I guess I’m mildly interested in how they’ll even attempt to make Rose and/or Finn relevant.
- le-mark 8y agoIn my opinion, the decades of novels in between star wars movies where much better than the prequels and sequels we eventually got. At varying times, different novels were canon then not canon. But in the end, Lucasfilm jettisoned the lot. Maybe there were IP issues involved I don't know but the Timothy Zahn novels were epic. Unfortunately, Lucasfilm didn't embrace them and mine them the way Feige is mining decades of Marvel comics for the MCU.
- ceejayoz 8y ago> But in the end, Lucasfilm jettisoned the lot. Maybe there were IP issues involved I don't know but the Timothy Zahn novels were epic. In fairness, Disney seems to have recognized that in re-canonizing characters like Thrawn.
- smacktoward 8y agoThe expanded universe had a lot of absolute junk in it. It's easier for them to throw it all out and then selectively re-introduce the few bits that are worth saving than it would have been to drum out the bad bits one at a time.
- gambiting 8y ago
- alistproducer2 8y agoSW always felt empty to me. Where star trek always dealt with deep philosophical questions of humanism, consciousness, sentience, and took scientific plausibility seriously SW dealt with very shallow concepts and eschewed scientific realism in favor of hyper space or whatever. Just not nearly as interesting.
- ceejayoz 8y ago> took scientific plausibility seriously Didn't Star Trek essentially pioneer the concept of technobabble? > eschewed scientific realism in favor of hyper space or whatever Warp travel? Subspace? Q? Accelerated human evolution into lizard people?
- AlexandrB 8y ago> Warp travel? Subspace? Q? Accelerated human evolution into lizard people? There's a lot of bad Trek out there. But also a lot of good Trek. The best of it is like a slice of speculative fiction - like a mini District 9, Interstellar, Her, or Arrival. The worst of it is pure melodrama with technobabble layered on top. I think what the parent is getting at is that Star Wars never, ever goes the speculative fiction route. It's all "character drama in space".
- hobochili 8y agoFair to say that Star Wars is more psychological than philosophical?
- stephengillie 8y agoTo me, it's more political than mechanical. Star Wars has more political and interpersonal conflicts lead to shifts of power. Palpatine gained control of the Galactic Senate through political maneuvering - letting the Trade Federation apply political pressure through shipping fees, and then manipulating weak-minded senators while their stronger-minded companions are fleeing the Trade Federation. Rarely are technical details relevant to the plot - starship fuel or reactor operation details are vague at best, an executive summary. They don't goto Watto for engine parts, but a whole new engine, and Jedi aren't trained on starship repairs as they have astromech droids. Star Trek has more situations where mechanical failure or damage leads to interpersonal conflicts and shifts of power. During the Klingon Civil War, you get a pretty good idea of how Geordi keeps the Romulans away. Ship fuel was a main plotline through the entire Voyager series. Everyone on every Starfleet ship has taken a college class on how the warp core reactor works, and they flaunt that knowledge regularly.
- bsenftner 8y agoThat Emptiness has been apparent event since the 2nd film, and is simply continued by Disney. Disney is milking a dead cow, to the delight of the Star Wars fans who have been sucked into this drivel for nearly 40 years. It's a fucking space cowboy western with Buck Rogers quality sets, acting, and direction. Beyond the metaphors lost from the original film, Star Wars has been decades of childish marketing and quality story line missed opportunity disappointments.
- whywhywhywhy 8y agoIt's not just milking, it seems they have actual contempt for the existing fan base to the franchise and trying to dismantle the foundation piece by piece in the worst way possible while simultaneously trying to build their own thing on top. I'm not a Star Wars fan (Episode 1 killed it for me), but watching this from the sideline has been nothing short of bizarre to me.
- Retra 8y agoThe existing fan base isn't the 6-10 years old toy-demanding target audience. In 15 years, those people will be spending their money trying to participate in the nostalgia being engineered today and the existing fan base will be largely irrelevant.
- baud147258 8y agoBut then why are they making origin stories that would only interest existing fans?
- abalos 8y agoI didn't hate Solo, but it's really disappointing that Disney is throwing away a whole bunch of ridiculously good IP. One example is the Knights of the Eternal Empire trailer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkgzXpKbVGE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkgzXpKbVGE). I want to see that story. I felt more in this 5 minute trailer than I felt all throughout The Last Jedi. That can be said for pretty much all of the trailers from The Old republic.
- binarymax 8y agoCompletely agree. There's thousands of years of stories in the universe - why keep focusing on the same 100? Anything from the old republic or some ancient Sith history would be fresh and new (for the cinema), and very welcome. But I guess we're just fans of good storylines and not the targets of the Disney marketing machine.
- corey_moncure 8y agoOh wow. Why couldn't we have had this instead? The emotional payload of this 5 minute trailer was greater than hours of watching gungan turds, I mean every Star Wars movie made after the '80s.
- baud147258 8y agoI've like all the trailers for SWTOR (and enjoyed playing the game), but trailers are different from movies, they are telling a short story without any details, which, expanded on a full-length movie, would be on the same level as the Disney movies.
- secstate 8y agoSee, but with Disney, at least there's an outside chance they try an Old Republic movie. So long as Lucas held the keys, nothing at all was going to be made except for cartoons mistakingly marketed at children. And books that had a limited audience. My question to you: Have they thrown it away by making Solo? It all still exists, and they're apparently full-steam ahead making new products with that IP.
- bshepard 8y agoI shared this mostly because of the Gibson quote enclosed, and if you don't want to read the article, here's the quote, which involves a coolhunter who can viscerally sense cool and uncool evaluating Tommy Hillfinger: "This stuff is simulacra of simulacra of simulacra. A diluted tincture of Ralph Lauren, who had himself diluted the glory days of Brooks Brothers, who themselves had stepped on the product of Jermyn Street and Savile Row . . . . But Tommy surely is the null point, the black hole. There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul."
- stochastic_monk 8y agoThere’s a picture from Radiohead’s original OK Computer website which this reminds me of. “DENY OXYGEN There is nothing I can say which will come as any sort of surprise to anyone. There is no work I can produce which hasn’t been done before. There is no music I can listen to which doesn’t remind me of something else. There is nothing I can do that isn’t documented in weekly magazines. My life is essentially a last-minute rush to reorder trivial, pointless, or stolen ideas into a primitive semblance of originality. Most of my time is spent crying in darkened rooms trying to remember who I was.” The Gibson quote also reminds me of Synecdoche, New York, a stunningly beautiful film I probably can’t fully recommend because it’s so brutally depressing.
- SiempreViernes 8y agoI think that partly this is simply an effect of accumulating experience as you get older. For example, these days it feels like I don't find as much good novel music as I did before. But of course if I haven't heard any music at all, everything will be novel, and so looking where I have already looked plenty before will not turn up as much novelty. I mean, I can still find plenty of novel thing if I look outside of the top lists of the UK and the US, or look longer back in time, so its not simply that my tastes have narrowed but rather I just have a better overall knowledge, and what I would have found novel before I now recognise as inspired from something else.
- JamisonM 8y ago
- 5DFractalTetris 8y agoReminding me that a cornerstone of my childhood was a series of cinematic figurine advertisements cribbed from one of Kurosawa's weaker pictures doesn't heal the wounds any faster.
- 5DFractalTetris 8y ago...but also, "Thx 1138" is basically perfect cinema and my life was better for it. Thank you, Mr. Lucas.
- empath75 8y agoI’ve enjoyed the stand alone movies quite a bit more. The new trilogy suffers from having so many protagonists that none of them seem worth caring about. It seems they have HBO-envy and wanted to ape the structure of a long form multi-POV serial and jam it into a 2 hour movie and it just doesn’t work.
- Fricken 8y agoA lot of the big franchise blockbusters these days suffer from the creative/producing team trying to fit 2 pounds of poop into a 1 pound bag. I appreciated both Rogue 1 and Solo because they were straightforward, procedural action/adventure serials that let me feel like an 11 year old for a couple hours. They weren't trying to be high art, just well crafted.
- Cthulhu_ 8y agoI'd argue it's more Marvel-envy (movies, not epic TV shows), and since Disney owns both, it's more of a "hey this worked, let's try it with another franchise". I'm no expert, but I feel the Marvel universe is better at it than Star Wars.
- baud147258 8y ago> the Marvel universe is better at it than Star Wars I think that's coming from an existing story structure (Comics) which work very well for multiple PoV serials and big cross-over finales. In addition to that, with the comics, there are a lot of storylines that can be used as inspiration
- empath75 8y agoThe best marvel movies are also fairly stand alone.
- bynkman 8y agoA bit click baity. Solo delivered what was promised. But really, I think his big issue is really the big issue with Hollywood. But he doesn't really address that. Most new takes on regular tropes are being written for TV. Our trope vocabulary is bigger now than years ago. (Maybe seeing Upgrade on Sunday, will deliver. We'll see.) And really, we are in an era that has an embarrassment of riches. Which is probably why I've become more picky with my media intake.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- paulie_a 8y agoI only saw star wars as an adult and even the original ones seemed overhyped and unimpressive. Bad acting, bad storyline. It's a "meh" series. I haven't even bothered to see the new Disney ones.
- oblio 8y agoI agree. My guess is that for its time the special effects were cool so people ignored the bad acting (especially) and the universe just built so much hype that it just became an institution few people dare to criticize openly. Also, popular with children + nostalgia :)
- krapp 8y agoCredit where it's due - for its time the special effects in the original series were groundbreaking and revolutionized the industry. The original trilogy pioneered many techniques for practical effects, bluescreen, modelwork and cinematography which would become standard in action movies for years to come, and the prequels arguably did the same with the scale with which they integrated CGI and motion capture with live action.
- amp108 8y agoI don't know what makes the storyline "bad", necessarily, but I really don't understand the acting charge, especially against the original 1977 release. Alec Guinness, James Earl Jones, Peter Cushing, Harrison Ford--none of these are slackers. Anthony Daniels might not have much range, but he fit perfectly in the scope required of him. Mark Hamill was convincing as Luke. The only weak link to me, bless her soul, might have been Carrie Fisher. And maybe a few bit-players. But the bulk of the show was carried by capable, if not excellent, actors.
- paulie_a 8y agoThis is just my opinion. All of those actors are great! They were just not very good in star wars
- Matticus_Rex 8y agoFor a contrarian view... I love all of the new Star Wars movies. And most of the new books. All of the new comics. Rebels was fantastic. I will buy and consume every bit of it, and I will genuinely enjoy it.
- Clubber 8y agoI enjoy them too. I remember when the prequels were announced sometime around 1998 or 1999. I literally cheered on my couch. Some are better than others of course, but they are still very entertaining.
- xkcd-sucks 8y agoStar Wars has always been an aesthetic more than anything else
- Zhyl 8y agoI feel the same way about the Matrix. Even the first film sacrifices a lot in order to be more cinematic. I like both aesthetics, admittedly.
- Apocryphon 8y agoSacrifices what- the parallel computation reason for the Matrix in favor for the simple "humans as batteries" explanation to simplify it to audiences? I never had a huge problem with that, but that's the one complaint I see thrown around a lot with the first movie.
- Zhyl 8y agoThat is a complaint I have with the first movie, but my main beefs are with movies 2 and 3 making almost no sense whilst having bigger and more expensive set pieces. The first movie's main crime is that it promised so much but never really explored any of the themes, characters or locations that they established.
- DanAndersen 8y agoEli Schiff wrote a good review of TLJ a while back that similarly describes the dead emptiness/meaninglessness of Star Wars nowadays: >The sequels, and in particular, Rian Johnson's latest episode, have now fully deconstructed the Star Wars universe, and shown the characters and their motivations to be vacuous. The only character remaining who really grasped the depravity of the situation is Kylo Ren. Now that there is no hope for heroes (even the Resistance doesn't believe in those anymore—after all, heroism reinforces a hierarchy that must die), we await the climactic explosion of an end to this universe that it deserves. >More likely though, given that we're dealing with Disney, we probably won't get anything of the sort. And for that reason I now realize why fans of all stripes didn't like The Last Jedi. What they saw in the mirror was so horrifically disfigured and alienating that it couldn't be confronted. For though history is far from over, with everyone either too smart to continue living, or too stupid to die, it may be there's no one left with the will to make history anew. http://www.elischiff.com/blog/2017/12/27/star-wars-death-drive http://www.elischiff.com/blog/2017/12/27/star-wars-death-dri...
- viraptor 8y agoI find it weird that they only present an old person's view. I understand the demographic of the newyorker, but this review may only make sense if you saw the movies in the order they came out in. But there's a huge number of both kids and adults for whom this is their first (or close to) star wars experience. I can't unsee the previous movies to get it that way, but many people haven't seen Chewie and Han yet, they don't know about the card game, they don't know why Han shooting first is significant in any way, and who will think it's obvious why Han is bragging about the distance not speed. Let's not forget to try to understand what will they see, while we complain about some issue with prequels.