5 ms·

For quite a while, the further the films/series are separated from the original trilogy, the better they seem to be.

by ghaff 1y ago

meowface 1y ago
The first sequel just mirroring the original movie was so lame. Reference-baiting.
- ghaff 1y ago
  It's probably hard for the producers not to do fan service. But they can go overboard.
lucideer 1y ago
Ironically Andor is one of the closest to A New Hope narratively.
- ghaff 1y ago
  It ties in but isn't really part of the main storyline except incidentally. You could say the same thing about Rogue One though the tie-in is even stronger in that case. The Mandalorian is pretty separate other than baby yoda.
  - lucideer 1y ago
    It's not part of the main storyline of Luke's journey as an individual & the Jedi order but it is a very big part of one of the main storylines of a ragtag bunch of rebels sticking it to the empire. A storyline which I'd argue was strongest in A New Hope & the initial trilogy & was weakened by the increased focus on individual storylines in the anakin & rey trilogies.
    - sho_hn 1y ago
      I'd say this is giving the Anakin trilogy an unfair shake: While I don't enjoy watching the prequels much for being clumsy films, you have to hand it to Lucas for trying to significantly expand his space opera by adding in galactical politics, etc. Any thrust to make Star Wars about ideology and governance (and specifically parliamentary democracy vs. facism) really came from the prequels, and arguably you couldn't have Andor without their template just as much as A New Hope delivers the plot hooks for its premise. In retrospect, while its flowering may be Andor, it's the prequels that gave the franchise a bigger signature and message than just being a family drama. Taken together they now make Star Wars about something, which I think it never really had before. "What's that star war about?" is something you can answer now.
      - toyg 1y ago
        Yes, the overall narrative of the prequels was good and very promising. It's so unfortunate that they turned out to simply be shockingly bad as movies - "clumsly" really doesn't describe how stodgy and badly put-together they were. I honestly hope Disney will eventually remake them from scratch, with the excuse that FX have progressed dramatically since then. They could even reuse McEwan, considering he's supposed to be an older character already.
      - jimbokun 1y ago
        I don't think any of the politics from the prequel trilogy lands. It's too cartoony for that. Whereas Senator Mothma's story arc had me engrossed from beginning to end. From the complexities of a Senator's social life, to her financial difficulties, to the medieval like politics of marrying off her daughter for the sake of a political and financial alliance, to her risking more and more, to her brave and powerful speech condemning the empire. There is nothing in the prequels that hits nearly as hard. Because it's all dialog the audience isn't paying attention to because the Jedi stuff is more engaging, and because the political stakes never seem that great.
        sho_hn 1y ago
        Sure, the execution was crappy - but he chose to make one of his new main characters a Senator, had the Senate as a set piece, etc.
    - jimbokun 1y ago
      Andor and Rogue One are better prequels than the prequel trilogy in that they better match the tone of the original Star Wars and do a better job filling in the parts of the back story viewers care about. How did the Rebellion start? How was it organized? What led to building the Death Star? How did they get the plans to give to Leia to give to Luke? The only part of the prequel trilogy relevant to the story in A New Hope is the final battle between Anakin and Obi Wan.
      - JohnBooty 1y ago
        If the prequels taught me anything, it's that these questions are usually better left unanswered. What's cool about the Force isn't the mechanics of how it works. What's cool about the Force is that it's a mystical thing that's everywhere, binding all living things together. And we honestly don't need to know how the Rebellion started. It doesn't matter! They are the good guys, and they are messy but kind and loving and cool and they are rebelling against the cold and mean (but also sometimes cool) bad guys. In fact, the more dumb shit I know about them the less I can project myself onto them and see myself in their eyes. Because I have rebelled against mean authoritarian shit before, or at least dreamed of it, but I have never been involved with trade disputes or galactic senates or weird old religions. This is true IMO 99.99% of the time. Shockingly to me, Rogue One and Andor are so well done that they are exceptions to the rule.
  - twoodfin 1y ago
    My main (mild) criticism of the now-complete Andor->Rogue One arc is that it only put its toe into the waters of the Death Star. Giving that concept a thematic heft well beyond its Flash-Gordon-supervillain origins appeared “fully armed and operational” in the story, but in the end it barely rises to subtext.
    - toyg 1y ago
      But there is no conflict, no interest, in exploring a building site. What are you going to talk about, contractors installing pipes? How they get the best canteen food? It's actually better for the Death Star to be unseen, so that its full horror can only be imagined - and hence, becoming greater - in our minds.
      - ghaff 1y ago
        And as has been explored the economics don’t really make sense.
        JohnBooty 1y ago
        Yeah. For that level of resources they probably could have just had ten Star Destroyers orbiting every known inhabited planet. But real-world warfare history is full of these expensive disasters that, in hindsight, were spectacularly dumb ideas. I don't think the Death Star was meant to be practical. More of a terror weapon or trump card, akin in some ways to nuclear weapons whose true value transcends their practical value. The destruction of Alderaan felt like an allegory for Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
        alextingle 1y ago
        The US Navy has aircraft carriers, which are every bit as ridiculous as a Death Star. They are utterly useless against well armed opponents. But they still got built, for good political, and psychological reasons that have nothing to do with cost effectiveness.
  - Krasnol 1y ago
    The main storyline looks negligible compared to the work Andor has done for it. The first Star Wars movie is basically the story of the final part of the information's journey. It only gained depth with Andor and Rogue One.
- marcosdumay 1y ago
  You could have the exact same story on a completely different universe, without using any of the Star Wars IP by doing only superficial adjustments. But also yes, it's the closest thing to the original theme since the second movie.
  - colordrops 1y ago
    The second season is heavily tied to in-universe events that lead to Rogue One and A New Hope.
- e3bc54b2 1y ago
  It is one of the reasons I love Andor so much. Rogue One was so good that it elevated a A New Hope and Andor in turn (especially after S2) elevates Rogue One in similar fashion. The movie/show on their own are some of the greatest, but they don't limit their achievements to themselves and like a rising tide lift whoever they connect to. It is really really hard to pull that off, and people in Andor somehow managed that twice.
ninkendo 1y ago
I maintain that the Jedi are the most boring thing about Star Wars, and the less about them we hear in a story, the better. Andor managed to go the whole series run without a single lightsaber going brrr, and it’s the best Star Wars outside of the original trilogy. The empire is a compelling thing to make stories about, and what Andor does well is actually make the whole thing believable. It’s not a bunch of cackling supervillains aiming to be maximally evil, like it is in so many of the movies… it’s an actually-believable thing, filled with characters with their own motivations, none of whom are explicitly evil by themselves, but through all of them evil is done. The episodes of season 1 when Andor is arrested and sent to prison are the most compelling and actually-scary depictions of the empire ever put to film. It’s just that good.
- fmajid 1y ago
  What I really liked about The Acolyte is that it showed how evil the Jedi really are behind their holier-than-thou propaganda. Whoever governs really should implement a R&D program to eradicate the midi-chlorian infestation and rid the galaxy of the scourge of both Jedi and Sith in one fell swoop.

For quite a while, the further the films/series are separated from the original trilogy, the better they seem to be.

by ghaff 1y ago

For quite a while, the further the films/series are separated from the original trilogy, the better they seem to be.

meowface 1y ago

The first sequel just mirroring the original movie was so lame. Reference-baiting.

ghaff 1y ago
It's probably hard for the producers not to do fan service. But they can go overboard.

lucideer 1y ago

Ironically Andor is one of the closest to A New Hope narratively.

ghaff 1y ago
It ties in but isn't really part of the main storyline except incidentally. You could say the same thing about Rogue One though the tie-in is even stronger in that case. The Mandalorian is pretty separate other than baby yoda.
- lucideer 1y ago
  It's not part of the main storyline of Luke's journey as an individual & the Jedi order but it is a very big part of one of the main storylines of a ragtag bunch of rebels sticking it to the empire. A storyline which I'd argue was strongest in A New Hope & the initial trilogy & was weakened by the increased focus on individual storylines in the anakin & rey trilogies.
  - sho_hn 1y ago
    I'd say this is giving the Anakin trilogy an unfair shake: While I don't enjoy watching the prequels much for being clumsy films, you have to hand it to Lucas for trying to significantly expand his space opera by adding in galactical politics, etc. Any thrust to make Star Wars about ideology and governance (and specifically parliamentary democracy vs. facism) really came from the prequels, and arguably you couldn't have Andor without their template just as much as A New Hope delivers the plot hooks for its premise. In retrospect, while its flowering may be Andor, it's the prequels that gave the franchise a bigger signature and message than just being a family drama. Taken together they now make Star Wars about something, which I think it never really had before. "What's that star war about?" is something you can answer now.
    - toyg 1y ago
      Yes, the overall narrative of the prequels was good and very promising. It's so unfortunate that they turned out to simply be shockingly bad as movies - "clumsly" really doesn't describe how stodgy and badly put-together they were. I honestly hope Disney will eventually remake them from scratch, with the excuse that FX have progressed dramatically since then. They could even reuse McEwan, considering he's supposed to be an older character already.
    - jimbokun 1y ago
      I don't think any of the politics from the prequel trilogy lands. It's too cartoony for that. Whereas Senator Mothma's story arc had me engrossed from beginning to end. From the complexities of a Senator's social life, to her financial difficulties, to the medieval like politics of marrying off her daughter for the sake of a political and financial alliance, to her risking more and more, to her brave and powerful speech condemning the empire. There is nothing in the prequels that hits nearly as hard. Because it's all dialog the audience isn't paying attention to because the Jedi stuff is more engaging, and because the political stakes never seem that great.
      - sho_hn 1y ago
        Sure, the execution was crappy - but he chose to make one of his new main characters a Senator, had the Senate as a set piece, etc.
  - jimbokun 1y ago
    Andor and Rogue One are better prequels than the prequel trilogy in that they better match the tone of the original Star Wars and do a better job filling in the parts of the back story viewers care about. How did the Rebellion start? How was it organized? What led to building the Death Star? How did they get the plans to give to Leia to give to Luke? The only part of the prequel trilogy relevant to the story in A New Hope is the final battle between Anakin and Obi Wan.
    - JohnBooty 1y ago
      If the prequels taught me anything, it's that these questions are usually better left unanswered. What's cool about the Force isn't the mechanics of how it works. What's cool about the Force is that it's a mystical thing that's everywhere, binding all living things together. And we honestly don't need to know how the Rebellion started. It doesn't matter! They are the good guys, and they are messy but kind and loving and cool and they are rebelling against the cold and mean (but also sometimes cool) bad guys. In fact, the more dumb shit I know about them the less I can project myself onto them and see myself in their eyes. Because I have rebelled against mean authoritarian shit before, or at least dreamed of it, but I have never been involved with trade disputes or galactic senates or weird old religions. This is true IMO 99.99% of the time. Shockingly to me, Rogue One and Andor are so well done that they are exceptions to the rule.
- twoodfin 1y ago
  My main (mild) criticism of the now-complete Andor->Rogue One arc is that it only put its toe into the waters of the Death Star. Giving that concept a thematic heft well beyond its Flash-Gordon-supervillain origins appeared “fully armed and operational” in the story, but in the end it barely rises to subtext.
  - toyg 1y ago
    But there is no conflict, no interest, in exploring a building site. What are you going to talk about, contractors installing pipes? How they get the best canteen food? It's actually better for the Death Star to be unseen, so that its full horror can only be imagined - and hence, becoming greater - in our minds.
    - ghaff 1y ago
      And as has been explored the economics don’t really make sense.
      - JohnBooty 1y ago
        Yeah. For that level of resources they probably could have just had ten Star Destroyers orbiting every known inhabited planet. But real-world warfare history is full of these expensive disasters that, in hindsight, were spectacularly dumb ideas. I don't think the Death Star was meant to be practical. More of a terror weapon or trump card, akin in some ways to nuclear weapons whose true value transcends their practical value. The destruction of Alderaan felt like an allegory for Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
        alextingle 1y ago
        The US Navy has aircraft carriers, which are every bit as ridiculous as a Death Star. They are utterly useless against well armed opponents. But they still got built, for good political, and psychological reasons that have nothing to do with cost effectiveness.
- Krasnol 1y ago
  The main storyline looks negligible compared to the work Andor has done for it. The first Star Wars movie is basically the story of the final part of the information's journey. It only gained depth with Andor and Rogue One.
marcosdumay 1y ago
You could have the exact same story on a completely different universe, without using any of the Star Wars IP by doing only superficial adjustments. But also yes, it's the closest thing to the original theme since the second movie.
- colordrops 1y ago
  The second season is heavily tied to in-universe events that lead to Rogue One and A New Hope.
e3bc54b2 1y ago
It is one of the reasons I love Andor so much. Rogue One was so good that it elevated a A New Hope and Andor in turn (especially after S2) elevates Rogue One in similar fashion. The movie/show on their own are some of the greatest, but they don't limit their achievements to themselves and like a rising tide lift whoever they connect to. It is really really hard to pull that off, and people in Andor somehow managed that twice.

ninkendo 1y ago

I maintain that the Jedi are the most boring thing about Star Wars, and the less about them we hear in a story, the better. Andor managed to go the whole series run without a single lightsaber going brrr, and it’s the best Star Wars outside of the original trilogy. The empire is a compelling thing to make stories about, and what Andor does well is actually make the whole thing believable. It’s not a bunch of cackling supervillains aiming to be maximally evil, like it is in so many of the movies… it’s an actually-believable thing, filled with characters with their own motivations, none of whom are explicitly evil by themselves, but through all of them evil is done. The episodes of season 1 when Andor is arrested and sent to prison are the most compelling and actually-scary depictions of the empire ever put to film. It’s just that good.

fmajid 1y ago
What I really liked about The Acolyte is that it showed how evil the Jedi really are behind their holier-than-thou propaganda. Whoever governs really should implement a R&D program to eradicate the midi-chlorian infestation and rid the galaxy of the scourge of both Jedi and Sith in one fell swoop.