It seems like over time George Lucas began to see Star Wars as mostly “his thing”. Or at least, in later interviews, this whole “director of the week” approach seemed to be replaced by “Star Wars is my thing and I want to micromanage everything”. But then that also went out the window after selling to Disney.
I’ve actually met people that claim they can’t tell if something is CGI. And there are people who defend the Prequels saying they can’t tell that the Clonetroopers are CGI.
I assume these people aren’t lying. There’s obviously some psychological aspect to this that isn’t well understood. To me, AoTC mostly looks like glossy shit, with some exceptions (some shots of Coruscant look cool to me).
Trees are more familiar to a lot of people, that’s true. Myself included. They’re still huge trees though, some of the largest on earth. I’ve been there in person and it doesn’t diminish the movie for me. If you’re doing all the planets as single biomes eventually you would end up covering a temperate forest world, not to mention they already had Tatooine in the same movie, so there’s a contrast there. You could do a jungle maybe, but that would also feel similar to Dagobah in the same movie.
There wouldn’t be fan films in the first place without films to be fans of!
True. The main issue is ROTJ has this 25-30 minute “Endor dead zone” where pretty much nothing happens (for some definition of “nothing”). They get trapped by Ewoks. C3PO is mistaken for a God. They’re carried to the Ewok village. Luke does a magic trick. Leia is there with new clothes somehow. They tell campfire stories, etc. This is about when you change the channel.
Now, I can see how you might counter this by saying something like “yeah but the same shit happens in ANH with endless scenes of R2/C3PO wandering around, getting caught by Jawas, sitting on the sandcrawler, etc.”
And yeah, it’s hard to argue that the ANH stuff is somehow objectively “less boring” than the “Endor dead zone” in ROTJ. But here’s my attempt anyway: the ANH slow scenes take place in the first movie before there’s that much of an ongoing narrative or built-up stakes. We’re basically in “exploration mode” at this point. But with Endor, we’re in the middle of a major climactic Rebel military op. When a film like this stalls in the middle of Act II for 3PO jokes and campfire stories, it’s more likely to test audience patience. Whereas with ANH, the slow scenes happen at the very BEGINNING when we’re just sort of along for the ride and learning about the world of Star Wars. It’s a very different context, which for me, makes a big difference. Also the ANH scenes have way more of an “alien vibe” than anything on Endor.
Maybe that helps communicate this point more clearly. Now excuse me while I take 100mg of Adderall so I can pay attention to ROTJ.
^ Yeah, I can understand that perspective. It’s just that something about the desert scenes on Tatooine just seem more “cinematic” to me, whereas ROTJ Endor scenes have this boring, fan-film-adjacent vibe to me. But that’s very subjective I suppose. Maybe it’s just because I think deserts are more interesting than forests, or I’ve seen lots of fan-films where they just shoot out in the woods because they see it as easily accessible production value. It also tracks with Lucas’ overall fatigue in ROTJ. He used to seek out “exotic” locales in Norway and Tunisia. For ROTJ he was like “let’s just get on the interstate and drive upstate”
ANH in particularly has lots of non-Zoomer-friendly scenes, like C3PO and R2-D2 slowly walking through the desert. That was so 70s.
We’ve all learned that Star Wars fandom is a painful minefield of missed opportunities. But one rarely discussed missed opportunity - one that for me seems particularly tragic - is the relationship between Leia and Vader. In A New Hope it’s implied that Leia and Vader CLEARLY have some prior established relationship. She’s not afraid to stand up to him and mocks him to his face. This is when Leia is in pure ANH “sassy Leia mode”. (This quickly disappears though).
Leia’s relationship with Vader develops further. Vader tortures her, and she manages to survive the torture without cracking. Vader may even respect this, it’s unclear, but the radio drama implies he does. But the point is, Vader has a closer relationship with Leia than he does even with LUKE in A New Hope. And moreover, it’s an INTERESTING relationship. Leia is unique in that she’s not afraid to stand up to Vader.
But this changes FAST. Both Leia and Vader in A New Hope are not QUITE the same characters they turn out to be in the next two films. The “real Leia” is more like the Leia we see in Empire Strikes Back, apparently. But a tragic consequence of shifting narrative focus is that the relationship between Leia and Vader is tragically DROPPED. And by the time we get to ROTJ, you barely notice, because the narrative focus has shifted entirely to Luke’s arc.
But as I’ve pointed out before, the Leia/Vader relationship has ONE more tiny bit of acknowledgement. It shows up somewhat vaguely in ESB in the carbonite freezing chamber. Chewie flips out and starts attacking Stormtroopers. Boba Fett nearly blows him away. Then it happens: Leia and Vader briefly lock eyes, staring at each other. They come to a strange non-verbal agreement: Leia deescalates the situation by calming down Chewie. Vader keeps his minions in check. No dialog is even exchanged. It’s like the final acknowledgement that Leia and Vader used to have an interesting relationship, with non-conventional power dynamics.
The whole Vader/Leia dynamic is basically dropped ENTIRELY in ESB, except for the above-mentioned brief “cameo”. And it’s not like there wasn’t opportunity. When Leia and Han walk into the dining room on Cloud City, they come face to face with Vader. If this were A New Hope, Leia would be like “Oh, Lord Vader. I knew it was you. I could smell you from outside.” But this is not that kind of movie, and this is not that kind of Leia anymore. ESB Leia is more reserved, less confrontational, even seemingly a bit more scared, perhaps not so confident without legit diplomatic cover. But it’s still a missed opportunity. I’m not saying I necessarily wanted “sassy Leia” to make a comeback, I’m just disappointed that the Vader/Leia relationship disappeared almost ENTIRELY from these movies.
And the final insult: in ROTJ Leia discovers Vader is her father! The man who tortured her, tortured Han, and blew up Alderaan is her actual father. And she has ZERO onscreen reaction to this information (she cries but that’s emotionally conflated with Luke’s issues). How awesome would it be to see Leia confront her father? But there’s just no room in the movie for this. Leia is needed elsewhere for Ewok-related reasons.
BTW I’m not insinuating some kind of underlying sexism here (although that probably existed in some diffuse form throughout the OT production process), just that the story was always about Luke (as it should be because that was what spoke to George Lucas), so sadly there just wasn’t room to explore this very interesting relationship between Leia/Vader. I feel like this may also be another casualty of the compressed production process (compressing hypothetical future sequels into a single Episode 6). But for me, this feels like the single most painful missed opportunity in the OT.
Villeneuve didn’t include the “dinner scene” in Dune. That is all you need to know about him.
But yeah, ROTJ has always been weird for me because unlike most mediocre movies, ROTJ is mediocre in a DIFFERENT way. Usually mediocre means that on average, any random scene in the movie is kind of mediocre, with maybe a few exceptions. But in ROTJ you get more of like an computed average level of mediocrity, because some scenes are AMAZING and others are just bleh. Like the Emperor throne room stuff and battle of Endor is incredible 5-star stuff. Ewok battle is more like 1 star. Jabba sequence: maybe like 2.5 stars, has lots of problems, is visually interesting, kinda cool but slightly janky. ROTJ doesn’t have one single tone. The throne room scenes are almost like a different movie from the Jabba rescue or Ewok battle.
But if I really had to distill down the reasons for why ROTJ kind of doesn’t work, it’s this: they obviously had no real idea what to do with 2/3 of the main cast. They just throw Han and Leia on “Ewok ground battle duty” despite neither of these characters having the requisite traits to justify this. They just needed the “big 3” to somehow stay involved in the ongoing plot.
Just wanted to discuss this interesting change between the public perception of Lucas in the early 80s to late 80s. Nowadays we have this idea of the “Sequel Crazy Hollywood Exec” who just wants to keep pumping out sequels, milking the franchise until it’s dry. It’s a ubiquitous cliché, especially in the age of Marvel and all that. But when applied to Star Wars, it’s a bit less of a cliché. In fact, my personal recollection from the late 80s/early 90s is that Lucas seemed like the exact OPPOSITE. Everyone WANTED him to make sequels, but it was like PULLING TEETH to ever get a new Star Wars movie. He was uniquely somehow the exact OPPOSITE of the “Sequel Crazy Hollywood Exec” cliché. The perception was that Lucas COULD just keep printing money and giving us more awesome movies, but he didn’t WANT to. This was the “reluctant Lucas” era. I realize historically this involved exhaustion from his divorce, but nonetheless this is a unique situation for a profitable franchise. Although arguably, few franchise films in the 80s went beyond 3 films, but usually that limitation was a result of poor box-office performance or critical backlash eventually, which doesn’t really apply to ROTJ per se.
What’s even more interesting is that immediately before the “reluctant Lucas” era, Lucas actually WAS considered a “Sequel Crazy Hollywood Exec”. In the early 80s, the general public looked at Lucas in the same way we now see Disney/Marvel: a “Sequel Crazy Hollywood Machine” that wants to keep pumping out sequels and keep printing money. This era was before my living memory, so I can only infer its existence indirectly. But a strong piece of evidence for this as a widespread perception in the early 80s appears in the lyrics of the Weird Al Yankovic song “Yoda”, a parody of “Lola”, and released in the mid-80s. It has lyrics like this (paraphrasing):
I know Darth Vader’s really got you annoyed,
But remember if you kill him then you’ll be unemployed,
Oh my Yoda… (chorus)
The long term contract I had to sign,
Says I’ll be making these movies to the end of time!
Oh my Yoda… (chorus)
But alas, Lucas/Hamill did NOT ever continue making these movies til the end of time, and those lyrics seem weirdly off now, unless you reinterpret them to mean Prequels/Disney stuff. But the idea that the general public perceived Lucas as a sequel-making machine tracks with early 80s Lucas-hype about possibly 9 or 12 movies in the future. But it’s funny how quickly the perception went from “Sequel-crazy exec” to “we need to kidnap Lucas and force him to make more movies at gunpoint.” And it’s even funnier how the narrative changed AGAIN after that to “go back in time and prevent Lucas from making more movies after ROTJ”.
Perhaps the prequels are uniquely suited to appealing to kids, which is why they are getting more love these days from people who grew up with them, as well as kids today who are seeing them for the first time. If that’s true, then perhaps the only cohort who can’t widely appreciate them are those who were already too old when the films premiered.
Yeah, and if TPM was some standalone children’s movie, nobody would bother criticizing it.
But the tonal shift of TPM towards a more explicitly juvenile tone was really jarring I think to many OT fans. To quote from an early 1999 review of TPM from Eli Roth:
“There are so many other glaring problems with [Phantom Menace] that I don’t even know where to begin. You should understand when you go to see it that this is truly a movie for kids. I remember suffering through Hook thinking, ‘Man, Spielberg’s really lost it. He had kids, and it completely fucked him up. He’s afraid to kill anybody–bad guys included.’ I think Lucas is going through something similar right now, having kids of his own.”
I think this was a really alienating experience for OT fans. It was for me, at least. Of course, in retrospect, the juvenile tone of Phantom Menace was barely even the biggest problem, and some people even argue that TPM has aged the best among all the Prequels, since it’s the only Prequel with the narrative structure of a “normal movie” and it predates the switch to 100% digital film-making.
Regardless, even in 1999 when TPM was released, before I had any ability to judge it in a wider context, I already had this subconscious realization that this new version of Star Wars just wasn’t made for me.
^ Well I mean, there’s tons of classic films that appeal to all generations. I’m thinking of stuff like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The Wizard Of Oz - movies that came out ages ago but have still been widely viewed by children of subsequent generations. I guess the OT is another example of this. But I do think that living through the release and hype of a movie as a child at least increases the chance of fondly recalling the movie later in life, even if not everyone falls into this particular pattern.
Clearly, this is a multi-variable thing. A lot of the movies that came out when I was a child are now considered universal classics - like Raiders of the Lost Ark, Back to the Future, etc. I love these movies - perhaps partially because of the nostalgia, but I also love modern “classics” that came out when I was older, like the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The Prequels are a strange case of films that have mass appeal, but nonetheless remain universally “controversial” because of their widely-perceived flaws. It’s like tons of people love them, but they’re never good enough to break through into a universal “classic”. One way to explain this is to hypothesize that their appeal is mostly concentrated among a certain age demographic who saw these films as kids.
I rewatched Revenge of the Sith around a year ago, just to see if my opinion would change in light of the widespread “reevaluation” of the Prequels. But no… it still mostly sucked, sadly. This is a case where I genuinely, authentically really want to like these movies. I’ve always been fascinated by the story of Anakin Skywalker, at least on paper. But I just can’t enjoy the actual Prequels. They’re just too flawed, to the extent that the flaws actively prevent me from just enjoying these movies on their own terms. I have too many expectations about what these films should have been, and at the same time the films regularly violate like, just normal cinematic conventions that most people would likely agree constitute “good” film-making.
But anyway, clearly I’m in the minority here, because the recent box office returns alone shows how much people love Revenge of the Sith, at least. What will be interesting is to see, in the coming decades, if the Prequels still maintain such a devoted fan base. My theory is that the current popularity of the Prequels is one case that is mostly driven by nostalgia - that is, like 90% of devoted fans fell in love with these films as children. If I’m right, the Prequels should slowly drift back into being considered mediocre as the late Millennial generation continues to age.
This may seem condescending to Prequel fans, but from my perspective it’s the only explanation that can explain how such seemingly obviously bad movies (from my POV) have such appeal among a particular age group. In contrast, the popularity of the OT can’t be as easily explained as entirely the result of nostalgia, because the OT films have many devoted fans among the younger generations as well, I assume. The OT has become more like a universally acknowledged cinematic classic, along the lines of the Godfather Trilogy or Casablanca or whatever. I would be shocked if any of the Prequels ever end up on like an AFI top 100 hundred list or whatever. But who knows - I’ve consistently been wrong about the Prequels. Back in like 2006 I simply assumed they would fade into obscurity, but I turned out to be totally wrong about that. Somehow Lucas’s weird, quirky and often tone-deaf movies spoke to the generation that came after me.
Okay but you said “thousands of years,” which is different from a few centuries.
Right, sorry I meant “thousands of years” from the perspective of like a Rabbi alive today, who inherits a scholarly tradition of Talmud study/commentary going back to the Babylonian exile and including many highly developed ideas about the Messiah. I was responding to your earlier comment about the Jews not paying sufficient attention to the meaning of prophesies in their scriptures. I initially understood your comment to be referring to modern Jews living today, so my response was intended like “What do you mean not paying attention? These guys have been studying this stuff for a living for like 2500 years.”
Everything they came up with was based on prophecies, like Isaiah’s. Most of those prophecies also tell Israel that they’re going to get wrecked by foreign powers and have to repent and return, so the Messiah would not be “meaningless” just because it hasn’t happened yet.
The Deuteronomic covenant in general had a mandate to behave properly or be conquered by other nations. But I’m not sure to what extent the average Levite living in say, 800 BC, would be aware of the idea of a future eschatological savior/Messiah. Perhaps there were seeds of the idea in things like the Book of Judges, with God raising up a national hero to defeat some foreign adversary of the week. But I very much doubt the idea existed in its later eschatological form until around the time of the Babylonian exile, and I don’t think there are any truly unambiguous examples of Messianic prophecy that significantly predate the exile. (I realize Isaiah canonically predates the Babylonian exile and the historical prophet Isaiah lived through the Assyrian conquest of the northern tribes; I don’t know what beliefs you subscribe to regarding the dating of the book of Isaiah, but the explicit name-dropping of Cyrus the Great forces me to date the latter part of Isaiah using a secular methodology that assigns a later date).
Of course, some theologians discern Messianic prophecies all the way back in Genesis, so I guess your mileage may vary here. And I realize this easily gets into a discussion about what counts as a Messianic prophecy. If something like Isaiah 7:14 (the virgin birth) should count as a true Messianic prophecy, or just a short-term prophecy about some local political situation. I assume the latter option.
You also mentioned the southernmost two tribes were still there like the loss of 10 tribes and the entire northern kingdom to Assyria isn’t a massive deal.
Well, the Assyrian conquest of the Northern tribes was certainly a huge deal at the time, but the Messianic stuff really mostly came from the perspective of Judah, which considered itself politically distinct from the north. But this is almost tautological to even mention: the northern 10 tribes by definition couldn’t participate in any Messianic prophecy to lament the Assyrian conquest, because the 10 tribes ceased to exist after they were conquered by Assyria and thus had no means of writing down prophecies on scrolls. And all 3 of the Major Prophets were from Judah, not northern Israel, and so their Messianic prophesies mostly concerned Judah. This is also a bit redundant to say, because of course Messianic prophecies are by definition about Judah, since the Messiah is from the line of David. Sometimes Judean prophets include the northern tribes in prophesies of doom and restoration (Isaiah prophesied doom for the north), but most of the Messianic stuff is generally in the context of the exiled Jews in Babylon returning home (which of course only symbolically includes the northern tribes). Again, your mileage may vary depending on what you consider a Messianic prophecy.
Messiah was not intended to be a general Chosen One sort of character category to be dropped into media hundreds of years later, so your original criticism that it’s all about one guy saving everyone with no one else taking any effort doesn’t make sense. If the messiah was a political messiah coming to free people from the Romans, they would still need to take part in the revolution, and if the messiah was a spiritual leader or some mixture of both, people would still need to repent and get their act together.
Okay well, firstly, I’m not at all sure that a political Messiah necessarily implied participating physically in an armed insurrection. Maybe it did, in some cases or to some people, like the followers of Bar Kochba. But then, in the Gospels, James and John are at one point clearly under the impression that Jesus is capable of calling down fire from Heaven and fucking everyone up all by himself. Jesus also said he was capable of summoning an army of angels at any time, but chose not to in order to fulfill his actual mission. A political Messiah might be interpreted in some cases as just an ordinary human general or military leader, but others might have expected supernatural ability from such a figure, in the vein of Elijah. (Modern Judaism tends to model the Messiah around Elijah, a connection going back at least to the time of John the Baptist).
Regardless, I concede your point that if the Messiah is exclusively a spiritual leader, as with Christianity, then my original criticism doesn’t apply. But wouldn’t you agree that the “pop culture” version of Messiah is closer to the original Jewish idea of a political/military figure who will overthrow some oppressor? At least, in stuff like the Matrix that’s pretty much the idea (even if those movies apply a bullshit layer of spirituality/mysticism over everything), and Dune has the same idea (except in that case the idea is subverted). And my criticism is simply that this concept basically encourages the idea that on an individual level one is effectively powerless to change their situation without waiting around for help from some future prophesied leader. In pop culture, Messiah stories often overlap with “Hero’s Journey”, and are often told from the POV of a “reluctant protagonist Messiah”, emphasizing the individual agency and destiny of the protagonist Messiah while implying that the rest of humanity is cosmically ordained to wait around to be saved by the main character. Even if the protagonist Messiah has help from other characters, the Messiah is still implied to be cosmically necessary whereas others are expendable.
I think Star Dates contain meta-information about the actual episode or season number, IIRC. But I doubt they were ever used consistently. In reality, an actual inter-stellar calendar system would have to somehow compensate for the bizarre, counter-intuitive fact about our Universe that “now” is a subjective concept entirely dependent on the location and speed of an observer.
Anyway, yeah the Battle of Endor makes more sense logically as a starting point for the new calendar. From an in-Universe perspective, I don’t know when the new dating system officially began. Was it established immediately after the Battle of Yavin (perhaps partially as a propaganda tool for the Rebellion) or did they think of it later and then retroactively apply it backwards to begin at Yavin? Who knows, I doubt any canonical source addresses the issue. In any case, real world calendars are often conceived of after the fact and then applied retroactively to some past duration of time. Perhaps in retrospect, the Rebels came to believe that the Battle of Yavin was like a “sacred turning point” in their favored historical narrative, and so they chose that as “Year 0”.
Obviously, the real world explanation is that Star Wars 1977 is where it all began. I’ve also seen newer timelines from official Disney material that use Episode 7 and the destruction of Starkiller base as the start of a new dating system or reference point. (bleh…) It’s like the Disney “regime” took some cues from actual dictators and rewrote (fictional) history to center around a new favored cult of personality.
If the Special Editions merely cleaned up VFX errors like this and polished up some of the old matte lines and green screen issues, I would be a much more enthusiastic proponent of them.
In my experience the “coolness” factor of Star Wars is not so straightforward to pin down. Certainly, one could look at old footage from the time the movies were released in theaters (1977-1983) and come away with the impression that Star Wars was universally considered cool by the general public. The huge lines of movie-goers seemed to be sampled from the general population - including hip 70s teenagers. Star Wars appears to have been a cultural phenomenon with universal appeal. It was certainly cool, and distinct from more niche, “nerdy” sci-fi sub-cultures around shows like Star Trek.
However, all of that was before my time. I grew up in the VHS era of Star Wars in the late 80s and early 90s. In my anecdotal experience, by this point in time (ca. 1985-1995), Star Wars had drifted towards being decidedly LESS cool. Star Wars was still not quite the same level of nerdiness as Star Trek, but let’s just say the majority of Star Wars fans from that time probably wouldn’t appear to have been sampled from those long lines of “cool 70s teenagers” lining up to see Star Wars for the 20th time in the summer of 1977. Rather, a random sample of Star Wars fans in 1985-1995 would probably look similar to a random sample of people attending a Star Trek convention.
Certainly, by the late 90s, being an enthusiastic Star Wars fan while attending an American high school was not exactly the best way to climb the teenage social hierarchy if you had that sort of ambition. Fortunately, I didn’t, and my friends were all hopeless nerds anyway. Nonetheless, Star Wars briefly returned to being universally cool in the mainstream in 1997 when the Special Editions were released in theaters.
TLDR: Star Wars was cool, but only in short bursts, usually corresponding with a theatrical release. In between theatrical releases it was decidedly LESS cool, and dedicated Star Wars fans were viewed as nerdy losers similar to fans of more niche sci-fi like Star Trek.
This movie is totally 100% definitely happening with absolutely ZERO chance of ever being cancelled. Seriously and definitely totally 100% happening, definitely.
Oh shit, I just noticed I actually care about a Star Wars product coming out soon. That doesn’t happen too often these days.
It’s interesting how Ben Kenobi’s (brief) mentorship with Luke centered mostly around the lightsaber and how it could be used in conjunction with the Force. But then in the next movie, Yoda never even talks about lightsabers, except to tell Luke he doesn’t need his saber in the cave. I would conjecture that this was a creative decision resulting from a variety of factors that break down as follows: 90% practical limitations restricting how the Yoda puppet could move convincingly, 10% a thematic decision consistent with Yoda’s philosophy of self defense.
Once the practical limitation was removed, Yoda immediately started doing flips and shit while bouncing off walls with a mini glow stick.
I hate Messianic prophecies in general, or the very idea of a Messiah, because it encourages the idea that all hope for the future is dependent on one dude, instead of like, the group effort that is required in real life.
Granted, Star Wars doesn’t incorporate a true Messiah into the mythology. Vader is more like a very round-about Messiah who only saves the Universe after he fucks over the entire Universe. So it’s at least a twist on the idea of a Messiah, kind of like Dune. But I still don’t like it, because it shrinks the Universe by elevating one guy to cosmic significance. At one point, Luke was just a random farmboy and Vader was just a cyborg SS officer carrying out the will of his government. There was a backstory intertwining the two of them, but it was personal, not a matter of cosmic importance.
Nothing is really a “true Messiah” because the Messiah is from Judaism, and (except for Messianic Jews) believe that the Messiah hasn’t come yet. The actual Messiah according to Christianity was of course Jesus Christ, who was a perfect being and the only possible person who could save humanity from sin and death. Jesus specifically rejected the people who wanted him to be like the conquering hero Messiah we have in fiction. He repeatedly told everyone to repent and get their own lives in order, and didn’t fulfill their fantasies of overthrowing the Romans or making himself king in a mortal sense.
There aren’t any messiahs, chosen ones, etc. in fiction who are anything close to that. It’s just a phrase people throw around like destiny or prophecy. The concept has a very specific real world context that often gets tossed out the window.
I mean, I think most people would interpret the word “Messiah” simply to refer generically to the idea of a “Chosen One” who is prophesied to appear at some designated time and play a pivotal role in overthrowing an oppressor. The Jewish concept in the OT (Old Testament, not Original Trilogy 😉) is the origin of the idea, yes, and is also a straightforward implementation of the concept, even though mainstream Judaism teaches the Messiah’s coming is a future event. The concept obviously morphed over the years, going from a prophesied savior from the Romans in the first century modeled after the O.G. King David (with various historical claimants appearing in the first century and failing badly) to various Rabbinical reinterpretations over the years.
The Christian Messiah is a Rian Johnson style “twist” on the original Jewish Messiah concept. Paul of Tarsus was like: “Oh, you thought your Messiah would come and overthrow the Romans with his laser sword? Try again, idiots. Instead, your Messiah will appear briefly and provide free healthcare to a few random people, deliver some cool parables and magic tricks, then get arrested and killed, but then rise from the grave, thus recontextualizing all Old Testament Messianic prophecy as part of an eschatological continuum beginning with Original Sin and culminating in a “second coming” event, where the Messiah will return upgraded with new super-powers and kick lots of ass, rather than a boring Maccabee-style Jewish Warrior King who implausibly defeats Tiberius Caesar. Expectations subverted.”
If you are a Christian, it isn’t a twist on the concept. It’s the original concept that the Jews didn’t understand because they weren’t really paying attention to the prophecies.
Yeah, I understand that. Stuff like Isaiah 53 and all that. I wouldn’t say the Jews weren’t paying attention - I mean, the Rabbis analyzed all this stuff for a living for thousands of years. They just interpreted most of the Messianic prophecies as referring to the nation of Israel collectively, or to an unknown future descendant of David, rather than the specific Messiah from Nazareth named Jesus/Yeshua. The Jewish interpretation is at least more straightforward in the sense that it assumes a straightforward political coup/revolution and doesn’t require the Messiah to first die, rise from the dead, then come back to finish the job after an indeterminate number of centuries (and also doesn’t associate the Messiah with an entirely new covenant doing away with the old Laws or at least “spiritualizing” their interpretation - although some Biblical prophecies hint at this). On the other hand, the Jewish interpretation arguably doesn’t handle certain Biblical prophecies as well, mostly the ones presumably describing a Messianic figure as somebody who is meek and must suffer for the sins of Israel.
Anyway, in popular culture, a Messiah is a way more flexible concept and usually reduces to a generic “Chosen One” like in the Matrix or Harry Potter.
The professional rabbis didn’t exist until after the return from Babylon around 500 BC. Before that there were actual prophets, and Jesus refers to them murdering a prophet named Zacharias some time in the interim before the New Testament.
Yeah but those professional rabbis had already been around for centuries by the time Jesus lived, so presumably they already had fairly well-developed ideas about how to identify the Messiah when he finally arrives. Although, obviously, there were different schools of thought (Pharisee vs. Sadducee vs. Essene, etc.) about all this. According to the Book of Acts, a high-ranking Sanhedrin member even entertained the possibility that Jesus was actually legitimately the Messiah.
But arguably, the very idea of a Messiah would be mostly meaningless until at least the 6th century BC when the inhabitants of Judea were conquered and exiled to Babylon and thereafter forced to live under foreign rule. Until that point, the nation of Israel (or at least the Southernmost two tribes) had been independent for centuries, so there would be nothing to be “saved from” that would cause the idea of a Messiah to emerge.
That’s why they call it a Chosen One and not a Messiah. Messiah is a very particular cultural concept and really the only other big place you would find it is in Dune. Dune also plays fast and loose with various other religious concepts, mainly from Islam, but it’s done well and it makes sense given that it’s a mishmash of cultural elements they inherited from 10,000 years of human history.
IIRC, the actual original meaning of Messiah was just any King, any “anointed one” literally, and was used in the Old Testament to refer to “ordinary” historical kings like David’s friend-turned-enemy Saul, and even to refer to some pagan rulers like Cyrus the Great. Come to think of it, I don’t remember off hand if any of the Old Testament prophecies actually even use the word “Messiah” - but I haven’t studied this stuff for a while, so I might be wrong. I remember at least that some of the more obviously Messianic prophecies (in the books of Ezekiel, Daniel, etc.) used more obscure terminology like “Son of Man” (also a later epithet for Jesus which likely just meant something like “a normal human” in Hebrew) to refer to the Messiah - but the gist of all these prophecies was basically “your life sucks now because a foreign power rules over you, and it’s your fault because you worshiped Baal and other pagan gods, but don’t worry because some day you’ll return home and your country and way of life will be restored”.
Fast forward to the 1st century AD when Jesus lived, and it seems the Pharisees (and also Jesus’ own disciples) had some pretty well-developed ideas about what a Jewish Messiah should bring to the table, and presumably it involved (at the very least) overthrowing the Roman occupation in Judea. They even already had a historical model to base this on: the model of Judas and Simon Maccabee who successfully overthrew a previous occupying foreign imperial power and gained independence for Israel about 200 years before Jesus was born.
Yeah but that kind of thing doesn’t exist before TPM. And the idea of the saber was heavy or hard to control unless they concentrated was a behind the scenes idea from the first movie, right?
I’m inclined to agree with you that the idea of precognition in lightsaber combat did not necessarily exist explicitly in Star Wars prior to TPM. But even in A New Hope, you have Luke using the Force to deflect laser bolts with a lightsaber. I don’t know if that implies that ALL lightsaber combat generally entails Force usage for precognition - but for whatever reason that’s the idea I always had in my head, even before the Prequels.
Frustratingly, there are no scenes on Dagobah involving lightsaber training, although there are remnants of this in a deleted scene. It’s unclear what lesson was taught in that scene and there doesn’t seem to be any trace in early drafts of the script either. It would have been interesting to hear Yoda’s ideas about lightsaber combat circa 1980.
What’s so ironic is that there is a lot of evidence that the primary reason Luke Skywalker had such limited percentage of screen-time in the Sequels, compared to say, the legacy characters in Cobra Kai, is because the screenwriters initially feared that the legacy characters would absolutely overshadow all the new characters (at least in the case of Luke). The screenwriters (presumably including Lawrence Kasdan himself?) seemed to just outright throw up their hands and admit they simply weren’t skilled enough as screen-writers to write a story that included both legacy and new characters side-by-side without the legacy characters completely overshadowing the new ones.
When I first saw TFA in the theater, I enjoyed very much the chemistry between Finn and Poe and also between Finn and Rey. The new characters and actors in the Sequels weren’t bad at all. Finn especially was a novel and interesting character concept. The problem was ENTIRELY 100% in the screen-writing.
Anyway, as another counter-factual to the Sequel Trilogy (but a VERY controversial one), I’d offer Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Now hear me out on this for a second. I know the movie mostly sucks. But the way the movie introduced a new character (Indy’s son Mutt) to inherit the legacy of Indiana Jones was arguably handled correctly. They put Indy in an absentee father role - similar to Sean Connery in The Last Crusade - and showed how Indy and Mutt had a lot to learn from each other. The movie did a good job depicting Mutt’s unfolding relationship with Indy, who had just as much screen-time (or more) as Mutt. Of course, the movie turned out to suck anyway, mostly for plot-related reasons, but the handling of a new character introduced to inherit the legacy of a beloved aging character was arguably done correctly and skillfully, or at least was on the right track conceptually.
Crystal Skull could have served as the archetypal example of “new character replacing beloved aging legacy character” done more or less competently - and also serve as a much closer analogy than any Netflix series for an illustrative comparison with the Star Wars Sequels - if only the rest of the movie wasn’t ruined by such a lackluster and poorly conceived plot.
Anyway, say what will you will about George Lucas - and certainly, I doubt his weird “Midichlorian Micro-adventure” Sequel Trilogy would have been particularly good - but I’m convinced that Lucas at the very least would have handled the interplay between legacy characters and new characters a lot better than Disney did. Disney arguably also had ulterior motivation to promote the new characters at the expense of legacy ones, because Disney had already invested billions into theme parks, toys and promotional materials based around Sequel Trilogy locations and characters, gambling that a new Sequel Trilogy fan-base would soon grow to eclipse the aging Gen-X/Millennial fan-base of the Original Trilogy. This business decision still seems clinically insane to me, but then again I’m not a CEO so what do I know? But after paying 4 billion USD for Star Wars, why the hell would you risk alienating the demographic in your fan base with the most disposable income to buy Star Wars shit? I guess they assumed TFA’s “retro” aesthetic would be sufficient to keep the older fans - and it was, for a time. To be fair, George Lucas took a similar risk when marketing the Prequels to a new generation, but his gamble actually paid off financially, and the Prequel characters arguably weren’t really “inheriting” the legacy of any OT characters in the same way. George Lucas also probably has much better business instincts than Bob Iger or Kathleen Kennedy, and probably could have easily explained to them that a character like “Jake Skywalker” is not likely to sell too many action figures, and that Star Wars’ historical profitability had just as much to do with new iconic starship designs and nerdy world-building materials driving merchandise sales for decades after the release of the films as it did with box-office revenue and VHS/DVD purchases.
Just thought I would share this: I stumbled upon this old episode of David Letterman from 1980, where he interviews Isaac Asimov. At one point (timestamp 2:56) Letterman asks Asimov if he saw Empire Strikes Back (which had just come out that year), and Asimov says “I enjoyed Empire Strikes Back so much that when they finished it I jumped up in my seat and yelled ‘start the third part!’”
Some random observations I find interesting:
I hate Messianic prophecies in general, or the very idea of a Messiah, because it encourages the idea that all hope for the future is dependent on one dude, instead of like, the group effort that is required in real life.
Granted, Star Wars doesn’t incorporate a true Messiah into the mythology. Vader is more like a very round-about Messiah who only saves the Universe after he fucks over the entire Universe. So it’s at least a twist on the idea of a Messiah, kind of like Dune. But I still don’t like it, because it shrinks the Universe by elevating one guy to cosmic significance. At one point, Luke was just a random farmboy and Vader was just a cyborg SS officer carrying out the will of his government. There was a backstory intertwining the two of them, but it was personal, not a matter of cosmic importance.
Nothing is really a “true Messiah” because the Messiah is from Judaism, and (except for Messianic Jews) believe that the Messiah hasn’t come yet. The actual Messiah according to Christianity was of course Jesus Christ, who was a perfect being and the only possible person who could save humanity from sin and death. Jesus specifically rejected the people who wanted him to be like the conquering hero Messiah we have in fiction. He repeatedly told everyone to repent and get their own lives in order, and didn’t fulfill their fantasies of overthrowing the Romans or making himself king in a mortal sense.
There aren’t any messiahs, chosen ones, etc. in fiction who are anything close to that. It’s just a phrase people throw around like destiny or prophecy. The concept has a very specific real world context that often gets tossed out the window.
I mean, I think most people would interpret the word “Messiah” simply to refer generically to the idea of a “Chosen One” who is prophesied to appear at some designated time and play a pivotal role in overthrowing an oppressor. The Jewish concept in the OT (Old Testament, not Original Trilogy 😉) is the origin of the idea, yes, and is also a straightforward implementation of the concept, even though mainstream Judaism teaches the Messiah’s coming is a future event. The concept obviously morphed over the years, going from a prophesied savior from the Romans in the first century modeled after the O.G. King David (with various historical claimants appearing in the first century and failing badly) to various Rabbinical reinterpretations over the years.
The Christian Messiah is a Rian Johnson style “twist” on the original Jewish Messiah concept. Paul of Tarsus was like: “Oh, you thought your Messiah would come and overthrow the Romans with his laser sword? Try again, idiots. Instead, your Messiah will appear briefly and provide free healthcare to a few random people, deliver some cool parables and magic tricks, then get arrested and killed, but then rise from the grave, thus recontextualizing all Old Testament Messianic prophecy as part of an eschatological continuum beginning with Original Sin and culminating in a “second coming” event, where the Messiah will return upgraded with new super-powers and kick lots of ass, rather than a boring Maccabee-style Jewish Warrior King who implausibly defeats Tiberius Caesar. Expectations subverted.”
If you are a Christian, it isn’t a twist on the concept. It’s the original concept that the Jews didn’t understand because they weren’t really paying attention to the prophecies.
Yeah, I understand that. Stuff like Isaiah 53 and all that. I wouldn’t say the Jews weren’t paying attention - I mean, the Rabbis analyzed all this stuff for a living for thousands of years. They just interpreted most of the Messianic prophecies as referring to the nation of Israel collectively, or to an unknown future descendant of David, rather than the specific Messiah from Nazareth named Jesus/Yeshua. The Jewish interpretation is at least more straightforward in the sense that it assumes a straightforward political coup/revolution and doesn’t require the Messiah to first die, rise from the dead, then come back to finish the job after an indeterminate number of centuries (and also doesn’t associate the Messiah with an entirely new covenant doing away with the old Laws or at least “spiritualizing” their interpretation - although some Biblical prophecies hint at this). On the other hand, the Jewish interpretation arguably doesn’t handle certain Biblical prophecies as well, mostly the ones presumably describing a Messianic figure as somebody who is meek and must suffer for the sins of Israel.
Anyway, in popular culture, a Messiah is a way more flexible concept and usually reduces to a generic “Chosen One” like in the Matrix or Harry Potter.
- Canto Bight
Bare with me. This is by far the most memorable world introduced in the ST. Everybody remembers it, and its name, from TLJ. Mostly because everyone was complaining about it.
I agree. I hate TLJ, but the idea of a sci-fi Casino is pretty cool. It could have worked in a different context. I think one of the Thrawn books or at least something in the EU had a similar concept, except it was more like a sci-fi luxury cruiseliner in space, with gambling (unless I’m totally remembering this incorrectly).
Well I mean Yoda only said it was the Force that should never be used to attack. You could argue that the unruly bar flies being chopped just with a weapon was fine.
I guess. I always imagined that using a lightsaber required constant usage of the Force, using precognition to know where to position the blade, resulting in those famous Jedi reflexes.
I agree the Jedi should use lightsabers more sparingly. Although, the “defense only” thing is hard to salvage even with the OT alone, given that Kenobi was supposed to be a war-time General. Even in A New Hope, Kenobi violently murders those two alien thugs in the Cantina. It was self-defense, obviously, but Kenobi could have handled them in some non-lethal manner, presumably. I mean, he could have tried to “mind trick” them into leaving Luke alone, for example.
This reveals that the Jedi underwent some conceptual evolution even between 1977 and 1980, because in Empire Strikes Back the Jedi as described by Yoda are much closer to a “defense-only” Zen Buddhist school of thought, whereas Obi Wan Kenobi in Episode 4 had at least some traces of the stereotypical haughty Samurai who doesn’t hesitate to whip out a katana sword and put some unruly peasants in their place.
In practice, George Lucas sort of side-stepped the whole issue in the Prequels by making all the “bad guy minions” to be droids whom the Jedi can freely stab and slice to pieces while bypassing ethical dilemmas and undesirable MPAA ratings.