Mithrandir said:
So, the story can’t be wrong just because it doensn’t match up to our expectations. That’d be close-minded.I very clearly did not say that. To reiterate, just because it doesn’t match expectations doesn’t make it wrong.
Just because it’s not what you or I might have expected after ROTJ doesn’t mean it’s a definitively wrong way to do it (…) it’s pretty close minded to outright dismiss the story they’re telling just because it wasn’t what you expected
Mithrandir said:
And the designs apparently are a minor things as well.YUP.
Interestingly, we’ve crossed our points of view in this regard. Debate over TFA has been going on recurrently in the forum for over a year and a half under the rehash/not rehash label. Curiously not rehash team has, recurrently as well, claimed that despite the similarities in the general outline of the story and plot it is the details what prevent TFA from being a rehash of ANH. Amongst those details, the designs (of characters, of factions, of wardrobe, of props, of backgrounds, of ships, etc.) certainly are not a minor thing.
Details, and in this case particularly the visual language, are meant to characterize and utterly singularize a general structure, a story. From that point of view, they are relevant.
From other point of view, and since without that structure that sets an order (and the “order” of TFA is what is meant to be dangerously close to ANH according to the rehash team; only to say then that even the details are too close to OT) the details are meaningless, they are not relevant.
In the end it’s not a spectrum where you could say I’m more like here, more like there. It’s a contradiction with no singular resolution. And it’s a contradiction that depending on the scale of the analysis, ends up movilizing the approach always into something both new and old.
Not even a perfect copy of La Gioconda is La Gioconda even though they could be objectively identical. While the copy is something new, sill it never ceases to be a copy.
Why is this important? Because when you apparently take your position militantly in one part of the question, as if it was a spectrum, for instance:
You clearly have a very different way of looking at films than I do. (…) I will say that in my mind it’s all about the story, and what feeds into it and how.
Down that road you end up denying the formal, “accesory” details of the work. And further down that road, had your sentence be taken as a general law, it arises some questions such as
If a movie is all about the story and what feeds into it and how; in the end if a movie is about the plot (what happens) or the script (how does it happen) then what does make cinema something else than just filmed theatre in the first place? Or furthermore, what does make theatre something else than just outloud-read literature?
I think that when it comes to art, the platonic hierarchy between substance and detail, what’s essential and what’s irrelevant has to be constantly put in jeopardy, because there is no such thing as a clear and defined line.