NFBisms

yeah

“basic storytelling logic” he “should” be the wise mentor figure here who has something to teach the next generation

i don’t believe in this

Channel72 said:

WitchDR said:

rocknroll41 said:

So having all the main characters be men instead of women is “stepping out of gender politics”?

To be fair, Disney can’t write a single good female character to save their life. The only characters that have had any staying power are all male characters: Cassian, Din, and Grogu.

Mon Mothma and Dedra Meero are both incredibly written female characters. They’re more interesting than any of the male characters in Andor, except probably for Luthen. But I agree these are exceptions or outliers among mostly crappy Disney Star Wars productions.

tony gilroy rey movie when

PM sent to anyone who’s asked btw

Also just FYI for everyone, I’m renaming all the currently available files to “V1” ahead of season 2 just to delineate the difference between them and the eventual post-season 2 versions. I’d like to keep them available for archival purposes and I figured this would be less confusing. The old “V1” thru “V5” were just early drafts anyway, consisting of very minor tweaks and technical fixes between them; ultimately the same creative choices refined towards what’s stood for the past year.

Another way of looking at it is that, if I knew I would be making so many ‘versions’ then, I probably would have started with the naming conventions “v0.1” to “v0.5” leading into what is now V1.

I’m anticipating with the soundtrack pool expanding upon season 2’s release (as well as whatever new contexts might arise) I’ll be approaching the whole thing a little differently, with entire song / tone choices being different enough to warrant being called a new “version” and not just an iteration on the previous.

I don’t know if this makes sense or will ultimately be necessary, but yeah.

Things I’m looking out for in season 2 regarding this edit:

• A theme or motif for K2
• A theme or motif for Yavin 4
• A theme or motif for Krennic
• Possible Rogue One OST synthesis. Reversion to some of the original score might be in the cards here, Britell and Gilroy know they are producing a lead-in to an already made movie and might make the connection to it themselves. I do miss the real Stardust reprise and would reinstate it anywhere if needed.

I feel like we already knew this. Just season 2 matching season 1’s budget was always going to go this way, and it’s not like we don’t see it on-screen + the fact that the seasons are twice as long as almost all the other shows, if not only in episode count but runtime as well.

I think the one thing he’s “wrong” about, is that ROTJ codified anything about the setting’s potential.

Years of EU material - engagement from fans as writers just like he was at 15 - have taken the property in the diverse directions he craved throughout books, games, comics, etc. Stuff like the prequels’ commitment to slapstick, and the ST’s derivate nature is definitely symptomatic of ROTJ - but Star Wars as a whole is such a canvas, and in part because of its mythological nature. It has one of the most recognizable pop culture iconographies ever created.

What that does - the value of that, that a new IP doesn’t have - is that “The Galactic Empire” and “The Rebel Alliance” or “The Jedi” are a language unto itself. You can be literate - fluent - in Star Wars, and in broad ways too. Look no further than Tony Gilroy treating Star Wars lore as a history to research for Andor. George Lucas himself is able to make commentary on our assumed institutions by playing on the expectations of the myths he established.

These are the kinds of complex iterations that a blank slate story needs time and goodwill to build up to - not to mention on a meta level, wouldn’t have the cultural cache that the Star Wars iconography brings with it. There is genuine power - in a similar way a Christian could call something “demonic” and that has meaning - to Lucas making an observation about the world, and making it a contributing factor in the fabled, evil Galactic Empire’s rise. That’s allegorical weight that the Hunger Games’ Panem doesn’t have. That Dune needs to explain over two movies or more.

Star Wars is broad and pulpy, and that allows for depth in the margins, in iteration. It more than other sci-fi, is at the point of Sherlock Holmes: make him a doctor for this one, or Watson is Lucy Liu in this one, this one’s about his cousin, and here’s a heady deconstruction of his tropes. But it’s Star Wars, and it’s already a pastiche, ripe for modulation and dissection.

Not to say that narratives more blatantly about, say, the Troubles of Northern Ireland, police corruption in Baltimore, or the Bush administration - can’t also be great, but they have a different type of less palatable baggage; are limited by the scope of reality. Star Wars as a framework can go further off the tip, in those directions, far better than other sci/fantasy settings can. Especially because I think it’s encouraged by the original creator’s work (prequels) itself, more than maybe LOTR in a similar position ever would. Really the property is as dogmatic as its fanbase allows it to be.

Superweapon VII said:
After Andor’s finished, I wanna see a Rogue One special edition which brings it tonally in-line with the show.

👀

yes, that should be assumed!

Channel72 said:

NFBisms said:

“Politics” do not [necessarily, or often] work via the same mechanics as a fable’s moral or lesson. These aren’t ‘messages’ at the end of an after school special or Saturday Morning Cartoon episode.

They are manifest in all work, as a reflection of the author’s perspectives, the context in which work is created. It can be as simple as the Empire dissolving the Senate being portrayed as bad, or as thematic as Leia being portrayed counter to conservative femininity. There are things you wouldn’t write, and things you likely would, if you were to write your own story. That is politics.

Lucas can go back outside of his initial intentions and verbalize what precisely might have inspired him. It’s no different than Spielberg realizing how his parents inadvertently inspired how the aliens communicate in Close Encounters. But instead of making The Fabelmans, Lucas makes the prequels.

Having political inspiration inherent to oneself doesn’t even have to interplay with intention. I absolutely believe Lucas intended to just make a fun, swashbuckling space opera. I absolutely believe Lucas was more influenced by Flash Gordon than he was Vietnam. But the context from which the story arose from him is worth talking about, especially for himself to analyze. There are aesthetics and what a story is (its genre form, its intention), and then there are the values a story inherently has.

Right, I’m mostly reacting to the (implied) idea that Lucas began writing Star Wars (either the OT or the Prequels) with some clear, historical/political allegory in mind, in the way that, say, George Orwell did while writing Animal Farm. I think it was more like, Lucas was thinking “I want to write this cool story with space ships and lasers and wizards and fairy-tale endings, and I sure love those old WW2 movies and serial adventures where they fight Nazis. But I also think my cool film-school friends are on to something with this anti-war and revolutionary stuff that’s going on now. I feel like I have something to say about all this, so I’ll sprinkle in some thematic fragments here and there.”

I mean, these perceived allegorical dimensions of Star Wars always seemed way more “tacked on” to me, and much less organically emergent from the story itself, than other comparable sci-fi like Dune or Star Trek.

I think what pulls me away from the idea that he just threw disparate stuff into a stew - is how notoriously overwritten and specific his (pre-edit of ANH, the prequels) writing was/is with proper nouns and fictional jargon. (In a way that is closer to Dune or Star Trek). While also, paradoxically not really being very precise about it all personally. He’ll still call lightsabers “laser swords” in interviews, and as seen with the prequels, is never married to his own story if he has a different idea.

I think Star Wars DOES live in a very metaphorical/allegorical space for Lucas in that way; a canvas for what he wants to say on topics from politics to cosmology. It’s not lore to him. I often think back to how unintuitive it is for Lucas to want to emphasize, that, no the Trade Federation are not Separatists actually during the Clone Wars. This, to the bewilderment of people working under him (including Filoni!) I think it’s clear Lucas has intention, he’s just usually all over the place as a storyteller. But that idiosyncrasy is the political dimension. He’s more consistent to the politics than the story.

So sure, it’s not clear, specific allegory but it is all freighted with his own views about any number of topics from conception. He’s not throwing a bone to his peers - he’s literally one of them, and just found his own way to express an ethos. An expression can be more than one thing. Revolution as a fairy tale is not a hard synthesis to parse out. It’s easier for me to take his word for it than it is keep downplaying what’s fairly obvious. He does THX before Star Wars. The Empire in Star Wars is a far closer to home dystopia than the one depicted there.

Anyway, for a clear example of Star Wars with (mostly obvious and intentional) political messaging done correctly, see Andor.

I think Andor is amazing, and in a lot of ways I prefer it to Star Wars proper, but it is jumping off of a state of play that is completely consistent to George’s Star Wars.

Channel72 said:

Yeah, I mean, whenever someone talks about Star Wars being “WW2 in space”, it’s generally accompanied by clips of X-Wings banking like a WW2 fighter plane, or gunners manning a huge laser canon and firing out the window into space like on a WW2 battleship, etc. The “WW2 in space” thing mostly refers to aesthetic/stylistic choices manifested in the groundbreaking visual effects. The story itself is more closely analogous to an asymmetric conflict between insurgents and an oppressive technocratic dictatorship.

More precisely, it’s pertinent that the influence is, as Mocata mentioned, Dambusters and the like - not archival footage or documentaries about World War II. The old war movies being pulled on are important for what they contribute to film language, not the subject matter or what they “educate” about history. It’s iconography, how to communicate heroism and bravery in war. What a good dogfight looks like on-screen.

But perhaps it has more in common with a fantasy where an evil Kingdom is defeated by an unlikely hero than anything rooted in real world politics.

To this point, these aren’t exclusive! People hold real-world viewpoints in more or less the same ways as a story. Those ideals came from somewhere first, and then were narrativized.

“political messaging”

“Politics” do not [necessarily, or often] work via the same mechanics as a fable’s moral or lesson. These aren’t ‘messages’ at the end of an after school special or Saturday Morning Cartoon episode.

They are manifest in all work, as a reflection of the author’s perspectives, the context in which work is created. It can be as simple as the Empire dissolving the Senate being portrayed as bad, or as thematic as Leia being portrayed counter to conservative femininity. There are things you wouldn’t write, and things you likely would, if you were to write your own story. That is politics.

Lucas can go back outside of his initial intentions and verbalize what precisely might have inspired him. It’s no different than Spielberg realizing how his parents inadvertently inspired how the aliens communicate in Close Encounters. But instead of making The Fabelmans, Lucas makes the prequels.

Having political inspiration inherent to oneself doesn’t even have to interplay with intention. I absolutely believe Lucas intended to just make a fun, swashbuckling space opera. I absolutely believe Lucas was more influenced by Flash Gordon than he was Vietnam. But the context from which the story arose from him is worth talking about, especially for himself to analyze. There are aesthetics and what a story is (its genre form, its intention), and then there are the values a story inherently has.

That’s just the thing isn’t it? Most of the prequels’ production predates 9/11 and the ‘war on terror’ response. He’s already challenging the ‘moral authority’ of neoliberal order in TPM, before even the turn of the century. It’s not hard for me to believe that Lucas was not a fan of American foreign policy even back in the 70s, when it was popular among artists to be critical anyway.

I can agree that it’s not manifest in the OT in overt ways, but on paper it’s young people radicalized against hegemonic power and joining rebels. Think about how Luke indifferently lives under the Empire and even yearns to join the Academy as a banal escape at the start of Star Wars. A New Hope in that way is almost the fantasy of a 70s college protestor blasting “What’s Going On” by Marvin Gaye while picketing police brutality, or Watergate, environmental issues, etc, etc. (Stuff like the Biggs deleted scene makes this a lot clearer.) The World War II imagery just empowers that kind of youthful anti-establishment as noble a cause as those heroes in fable. Rebellion as a heroic war movie.

This does not mean Star Wars is commenting on or even being overt allegory for any specific issue. Star Wars is not “about” Vietnam. I just don’t think Lucas is “making it up” to sound cool or edgy, when he talks about what it means to him. We’re talking about a hippie cosmology-loving, anti-war film student here.

It’s important to note also that WWII films are not necessarily about the history of WWII; like Westerns they are mythology of ideas. It’s about the iconography, a valorous vision of heroes and unambiguous evil; at the time a more modern template for a war adventure in the burgeoning film medium. Lucas employs that imagery because he’s a film buff. It’s not like he’s saying anything about 1100s England when he pulls on Errol Flynn in The Adventures of Robin Hood.

Well, he wasn’t talking about the Cold War at large, or even communism. If we can understand parts of the genre pastiche are westerns and others jidaigeki, then it shouldn’t be too hard to understand mixing and matching historical themes as well. And again, the quote isn’t even really about intention, Lucas and Cameron are discussing “terrorism” and its relationship to hegemony via Star Wars. Viet Cong can be swapped out for any group of rebels in history, Lucas is just talking about what it was in the 70s (when Star Wars was being made and released). The important part is that the Empire is the hegemonic power, and again you can swap that out with any in history whether it’s the British, the Nazis, America, etc. Star Wars is a simple story, not a sociopolitical treatise.

For Lucas, it’s just valent to his prequels (and the context of the 70s) that his Empire is America. It’s a reflection of Star Wars’ contemporaneous moment. One of the most ‘revolutionary’ times in pop art and music.

Famously canon novelizations - even if - are still outside the text of a film. I think TLJ makes a lot of assumptions based on what’s intuitive about TFA as a million dollar blockbuster, not its nonexistent subtext, or place inside a then newly refreshed canon. It’s certainly not in deep conversation with [basically] merchandise.

You don’t have to presume I have a viewpoint about the Force that’s any different from yours, it makes it really hard to take any discussion in a new direction. I agree with you. Now take it from there! I appreciate how fair you’ve been to ‘both’ sides of the divide on this while having your own POV, but it often feels like I’m being lumped in with some other nebulous TLJ defender archetype.

But the Sequels show us that Rey kind of just “downloads the Force” after her “mind-meld” with Kylo Ren.

There is absolutely no evidence in the movie itself that this is what happens. It’s way more of a stretch than what I laid out as the mechanics of TFA, where Rey has “seen” Star Wars™. There is absolutely a physical aspect and real training involved in mastering the Force - I would never ever dispute this - but Rey has basically gotten the workout class via her idolization of the story. Through what’s already the fable-istic nature of the Force’s mechanics, and learning about Luke, she’s basically gotten the number of reps and sets of exercises she should do, alongside the philosophy quotes that would help her keep routine. Not to mention she’s an athletic scavenger jumping massive gaps and climbing ropes among dangerous wreckage, fending for herself to begin with. Farmboy Luke is raised by a loving family (attachments), doing chores, dusting crops, flying for leisure. He’s apolitical - ambitious to leave but not for meaning or purpose - not like Rey who already looks up to heroes.

This doesn’t make her a better character, but it feels like we’re bending over backwards to make it all worse and contradictory. It’s just hack-y.

Rian just had this silly Zoroastrian-inspired idea of darkness rising to balance out the light, and vice-versa, perhaps the result of a corrupted interpretation of Lucas’ vague nonsense about balance in the Prequels. It sounds like some ad hoc idea Rian invented to justify Luke giving up on the Jedi.

This take on the Force is rejected by the movie. It’s a [popular] expectation (gray Jedi, anyone?), in the same vein as EU Luke, that is disposed of to reinforce the Original Trilogy. This where it gets so messy in reception, because Rian’s engagement with Star Wars, like everyone’s, is personal and varied and doesn’t fit into a box.

He doesn’t do an idealized, super Luke because like me he saw that Luke literally didn’t beat the Emperor with his powers, he bet on his dad and his friends. The type of guy who literally did take himself out of a picture so that he wouldn’t endanger the mission on Endor. That’s the interpretation. You don’t have to agree with it or how it was done, but it emphasizes Luke for who he was, not as a trained Jedi, but a son. A farmboy in over his head, just a guy, like you or me. That’s why he resonated [to Rian, to me].

That doesn’t mean he was a “lie”, and it all has so so very little to do with the prequels, or the Jedi as an institution or even an idea. This is a trilogy bereft of any of that kind of worldbuilding or connection - we all know it - but all of a sudden that has valence in this particular critique? No, it’s a personal character arc: Luke embracing his flaws and the triumph he is capable of even with them. It’s more analogous to impostor syndrome than it is about history.

What is the meaning generated when you equate ‘resistance fighters in places like France and Norway’ to the Viet Cong, putting American imperialism in imagery analogous to the Third Reich? It’s not a baffling contradiction, it’s the alchemy of the whole thing.

Vladius said:
But if you critically examine that at all, it’s deeply cynical about what heroism is, and about the value of tradition or culture. Again, the Jedi and Luke are a noble lie.

*uncritically examine, take at face value

I’ve always felt like some of the other stuff in this thread re: TLJ’s script shortcomings and the [unintended] thematic knock-ons are consistent to TFA, not necessarily subversive.

I didn’t want to get into it really, but everything with regard to TLJ positing something about the Force that is incongruous to the OT – the Rey “having all she needs” bit as a dismissal of the OT’s themes – I see where people are coming from there, but The Force Awakens introduces OT iconography as legible artifacts to the characters in the world.

Rey not only knows history (the OT plot), she puts on a Rebel helmet like she’s play acting the story, she can recognize the Skywalker lightsaber on sight, and engages with Han Solo and the idea of Luke Skywalker like a fan girl. For me, Rey goes into TLJ knowing Luke lifted rocks, and has even heard the lessons he learned from Yoda because as per JJ she’s basically “seen” Star Wars.

TLJ does it what it does, however you feel about it, off of that. It’s consistent to that. It’s messy as hell, obviously, but it’s not as brazen or bold as it gets credit for honestly. It’s thoroughly about reinforcing Star Wars ass Star Wars. It just does something mildly interesting with TFA’s margins and context as opposed to ignoring it.

I’ll go a step further and say it’s less cynical about its meta by being character-driven too. The characters are being challenged on their expectations (which are, granted, ours), but as a gesture towards the universe having some kind of material reality and tangible consequence.

Channel72 said:
The most charitable interpretation I can come up with is Rian Johnson was going for something along the lines of a “Wizard of Oz” type message, where it turns out the Scarecrow and Cowardly Lion had all the brains or courage they needed all along, and just needed to believe in themselves to access it. Something like that. That is sort of compatible with what happens with Rey’s journey of self-discovery, where she sort of self-learns the Force. There’s nothing inherently wrong with a message like that, but it’s not a fit for Star Wars and what was established before, where the Force requires a mentor to learn and is already part of a pre-packaged, venerated mythology.

For me, it’s consistent to the OT in that Luke’s power was always himself, his love of his friends, what he would see in his father - not his training. I think the path to the Force clearly has many different forks either way, otherwise what even is “the Dark Side”? and what is Luke even doing through ANH into Empire if not imperfectly wielding the Force with little to no training? He doesn’t have mastery of himself or his emotions when he’s doing backflips on Dagobah. In the arc of his “training”, that movie ends with him failing to complete it.

It’s hippie cosmology, not literally muscles to work out. Size matters not

To my previous point, Rey has aspired to and used Luke as an example presumably all her life anyway. Idk, it’s hardly anything to me, the lesser of TLJ’s problems.

sigh

Yeah, I see that too, I just think it’s symptomatic of an unwieldy/messy script more than it is intentional malice or whatever for the series. That’s ridiculous to me, it’s at worst a guy who has different ideas [than you or someone else] about how this all works and who these characters are.

It’s about how the past has everything to teach us. Specifically, failure. It’s not about discarding the past, Yoda talks about growing “beyond” [it]. That’s the quote. Rey is going to make different choices than Luke, and Luke is not going to let those past choices define his identity. Rey is not going to define herself by her past as an unwanted nobody.

All of the other read is just meta-textual baggage that has more to do with the aforementioned “culture war”. But nobody is shitting on our toys, maybe they just always played with them differently

I think if TLJ actually did what you laid out (maybe not the specific bad faith interpretation but) actually being subversive and not falling back into reinforcing the same stuff, it would be great, and not just half interesting.

In full context of the interview, he’s just jumping off of a point Cameron makes first actually. It really is more about patterns than him citing specific source. Like, “today’s [insert insurgency here] are yesterday’s Viet Cong”, etc, etc.

Tangential but I somewhat recently read a book of interviews with John Milius, where he talks about Lucas’ unmade Apocalypse Now, describing him and their company as extreme hippie radicals - maybe Lucas is being honest about the original intent in SW; however overt it would’ve been just didn’t make it through the notorious editing process 🤷

also just kind of an insane story, they were gonna do that shit in the actual war

I think it’s pretty obvious that he’s drawing a line (in these interviews, at least) between American foreign policy and fascism. Iconography evocative of what’s nostalgically remembered as a heroic war against unambiguous evil, makes a point when transposed onto a conflict where the hegemonic power is fighting insurgents.

Pointedly, “when I did it” communicates that it’s not even really about Vietnam in particular, but the re-occurrence of Empire vs. rebels throughout history and the news cycle.

Not excluding that he is being revisionist here either way. It fits neatly into the themes of the prequels so it makes sense why he would recontextualize the whole project in that lens.

You make it sound so good!