NFBisms

Something about movie 4 that stood out to me was Vel and Cinta being on Ferrix at the beginning, before Kleya explicitly outlines the assignment. I think it flows really well in the moment, but that later scene where Vel is told about finding and killing Cassian stands out in that context. What are they meant to be doing in the earlier scene if not already looking for him?

I know you’re trying not to cut anything, but maybe removal of Kleya’s “sending messages / loose end” pivot and recapping of who he is, would sell that this is something they were already doing.

“Have you heard from Cinta?”
“She’s doing what she’s told. Cassian Andor. You need to find him.”
“Find him.”
“We can’t have him walking around with Luthen in his head.”
“You mean kill him”

That probably goes against what you’re trying to do here though and honestly maybe it could stay as is for a hypothetical fresh eyes audience, who won’t realize it’s out of order. I just clocked it.

Vladius said:
What I mainly don’t like is all the insane real world baggage that gets dragged into it. The Jedi are like an ascetic Buddhist FBI that is also a fourth branch of government and also the leaders of the military and also diplomats and also bodyguards. The Republic is the Roman Republic but it’s also the United States during the Civil War and also the United States in modern times. The Senate is the Roman Senate and also the United Nations times a million. The enemies of the Republic are the Confederates from the Civil War and also modern international megacorporations. Anakin has aspects of Christ but is not perfect like Christ and ends up being the Antichrist.
All of the religion and philosophy in Star Wars is both Christian and Buddhist, Western and Eastern, per Lucas. Which means that it has both traditional good and evil, and suggestions of Yin and Yang “balance” stuff, without distinguishing between the two.
This all leads to confusion and really, really, really bad takes from fans about what it all means. Stuff like you should be equally good and evil, or that Anakin committing genocide on the Jedi was good and they deserved it. And then you have a bunch of EU writers, Disney writers, and Dave Filoni encouraging this.

I think this is actually the strength of the prequels as they are IMO.

Lucas challenges preconceptions of The Story with every subsequent movie starting from “I am your father” in ESB; where the PT contradicts the OT is intentionally in conversation. To me, what’d even be the point of these if the story were only the genre tropes and archetypes we could extrapolate from the OT? The “insane” real world baggage is what makes them worth handling in detail at all. It moves the needle from fairy tale to mythology. It’s not meant to be instructive.

Whatever analogues are in that mix shouldn’t be 1:1, otherwise then we would just be talking about Catholicism. Falling in line to real life historical or contemporary example is a hacky commentative form anyway; the only reality that demands consistency in fictional worldbuilding are the sociological and theoretical mechanics. Any philosophy or culture can be made up in that context, and should. That allows space to work with empathy / thought that real world sensitivities make difficult. If you’re looking for specific analogy, of course it’s incoherent. Of course all of this couldn’t really exist. But the exercise is about how something works, not what they are.

Your mileage may vary on what the difference is, but to articulate how I see the difference: Lucas isn’t writing about the United States or Christianity (just as examples). He’d be writing about hegemonic imperialism and the sociology of principled beliefs. From there your personal engagement is your personal engagement. The murkiness of What It All Means™ is a feature not a bug. I like that we can all have different perspectives about it.

That said, pre-PT lore is something I am obsessed with thinking about. As much as I like all the things I like about the prequels, it’s more in an admiration for what it attempts than its execution. I don’t think they are good movies or have even been well served post-ROTS. It’s difficult to parse because the prequels are very formative for me - I like movie and literature the way I do because of them probably. So a more congruent PT / OT might have changed that. But I can’t deny the appeal of just seeing the stuff Obi-Wan talked about in a more straightforward manner. It just wouldn’t have stuck as long I think.

I’ll definitely use these for a rewatch some time! Such a simple idea but really worth it. The re-arrangement ideas really highlight how tight this show was, not a single thing wasted.

I skimmed through to review your connective points, and actually had a few thoughts, though nothing too major. (Movie 2 is flawless on this front)

Something I might miss in this format are the credit drop moments, there’s something about not being able to sit with “Never more than twelve” in Movie 3 that is a little disappointing. There might be a better scene to transition to with more lead time than that Mothma dining room scene though. I was thinking you could switch it out with the scene of Syril in front of the ISB? There is a little more establishing shot and space before Syril stops Dedra. Whereas you currently have Perrin immediately talking over the fading synths from the previous scene. I also think the Vel/Mothma sequence might ramp up to prison break day a little better.

Movie 1’s transitions were the most obvious to me, and this is actually where I would be in favor of cutting ever so slightly more, or finding a new arrangement, at least a tiny bit of the Kenari segment. Maybe even just some rescoring work. I haven’t thought too hard about it yet, but I found both transitions a bit jarring.

I actually feel like this show is in a lot of ways trying to be for people who didn’t watch Rebels, though. It pulls this trick where there’s a new status quo as a refresh. The previous backstory becomes incidental exposition in service of a New Story.

For example, Sabine and Ahsoka’s history isn’t something Rebels watchers would be familiar with. New audiences and Rebels fans got that information at the same time. Functionally, the reception of that isn’t going to be that different between the two audiences. It’s a whole new dynamic we’re all on the same page of being introduced to.

This becomes the excuse through which the creative team can adapt and change certain things. Sabine is a slightly different character in these new dynamics. Ahsoka’s balance and zen is re-interpreted as overly detached; a character flaw as opposed to culmination. All of a sudden Thrawn isn’t just a smart Imperial who won battles, he’s Palpatine’s heir apparent. These things aren’t being worked through off of Rebels nor are they just picking up where it was left, they’re retcons in context, entirely new material out of it.

I think this is all a bad thing, btw. The show’s dialogue is overly expositional in service of this storytelling mode, and if the characters don’t feel entirely familiar, they’re play acting long-term relationships that haven’t been fleshed out anywhere, just told to us existed at some point. It’s more unnatural as a continuation of Rebels than it is as its own thing.

Another bright spot for me: I actually really like how this episode manages to - not justify - but kind of explain why Ahsoka has been so weird and counter to herself. That performance has still been bad and not very fun to watch, but there’s intentionality there that I can respect far more than anything in OWK or Mando.

So like what I got out of this episode was that Ahsoka before this was trying to train a Jedi the way she was most familiar with: as a wartime Jedi / soldier. (She couldn’t parse that out until now I guess).

And she had been treading so carefully (and half heartedly) on it with Sabine because that wasn’t something she believed in. But after everything she’s started to believe that maybe the alternative to that (who her and her Master were) can only lead to more Darth Vader.

Because they were those Jedi maverick types who didn’t quite fit into the dogma, and they were proud of that until it all went bad. Ahsoka chose to leave where Anakin clung on, and Ahsoka calls him on his hypocrisy on the way out. “I know you do, Anakin.” in response to his admission of wanting to leave sometimes is basically Ahsoka reading Anakin out loud. He doesn’t belong there any more than she does.

So when he falls to the dark side, it’s easy for her to extrapolate that it’s who they were in that institution was what was wrong. She blames herself for leaving that behind, for abandoning the commitment, and re-finds her “faith” in Jedi teachings, almost in the way Hell in Abrahamic religions motivates piety.

This episode was about remembering Anakin and The Clone War that brought her up with more clarity. What it was to her to be a Jedi before the war and that Anakin as he was, wasn’t just part of a Vader equation. Basically Ahsoka’s been misreading that history this whole time. Who the Jedi became in the Clone Wars was not all the Jedi can be.

I think we all expected her to progress from TCW as a cool, light-side aligned wanderer but I think this - her baggage about the Jedi Order - is more complex and pretty fun / interesting to untangle.

my friends and I counted an average of 6 seconds between lines of dialogue in the first two episodes, it’s dire

Slow pace isn’t bad, but this is mostly just super dull in that decompressed mode IMO. Maybe in light of the recent developments in Ashoka as a character this will get better - but Rosario has been sleepwalking through her performance up to this point. The more vibes-based storytelling I feel like Filoni is going for here also doesn’t entirely land when the visual part of the vibe often looks cheap. And the structure is so weird! The first four episodes could have been two, and this most recent one felt like it could have been much shorter, while also feeling like two disparate episodes mashed together.

And we’re over halfway through. The premise of Other Galaxy is only now starting

It’s such a weird, kind of bad show. But I kinda like it lmao.

RogueLeader said:

NFBisms said:

I love Hayden Christensen

I was wondering you’d think about this episode! I felt the way Hayden acted here was similar to how you had him be in the new canon cut.

Yeah you know me, always been a Hayden truther, so seeing Hayden playing Anakin the way I always knew he could was sick. And it was great to see such a range he could play with here. The softness he has that even animated Anakin doesn’t, adds a lot of nuance to a performance where he is acting more outgoing and fierce. I feel like the character we get out of this bridging is only more enticing and interesting than he was before.

And he still gets to do the intense dark-sided work that was never in too much question! I think I only ever liked lightsabers as much as I did because Hayden was swinging them.

I’ve had a lot of issues with the show overall, but he was great

I love Hayden Christensen

I think for me the problem with fans recently is less about the opinions themselves, and more the rhetoric used / perception-of-industry expressed through them. Like, I did not like BOBF or Mandalorian, and Obi-Wan was pretty bad - but there’s this broad refusal to engage with why they might have turned out that way, in favor of an easy boogeyman scapegoat - Disney The Apparently Principled Entity, Kathleen Kennedy The Devil, Hacks On Payroll etc. - and like, not actually any of the stuff that could be interesting to dissect about the work. Did you hear Pedro Pascal doesn’t care about Mando anymore???

If it’s not melodramatic doomerism about a franchise, it’s gossip and agenda-driven speculation, not really about critique. You can have gripes, I have gripes, negativity is fun, but when you start pairing it with the most brain-dead understanding of the industry, I just mentally check out. And I think what rubs me the wrong way ultimately is that it contributes to Art As Content; all accountability goes straight to the top - the President, a CEO, the Corpo. These movies and shows are their products in the practical sense, sure, but the medium is still Art. It sucks to have the attitude of audience shift to this mode of Dissatisfied Consumer. That’s not the same as being a critic.

(NOTE: I also actually think “constructive criticism” in that way isn’t too much better. That’s still entitled.)

And look, I’m not about attacking, say, Deborah Chow or Rick Famuyiwa or Robert Rodriguez, even Filoni/Favreau personally. That would probably suck more. But they are still the authors of their work. And yes, corporate influence is real too! But parsing out where creative meets that in the middle, or even fails to compromise, is closer to what productive speculation would look like. You’re just harder pressed to really go in and be as mean as you want when the target is no longer a dehumanized Thing - which I get it - it’s probably a “fun” part of Narrativizing Media Dissatisfaction as anti-corporate “rebellion”. It’s just really not That, and the smugness about it is grating.

I think what makes it continually frustrating is that we also now have more instances in this new governance, of outliers to that Narrative, like Andor or Visions. You don’t even have to like them to see that collaboration and creativity isn’t as suppressed or micromanaged as some YouTube grifter would have you think. Hollywood isn’t just the execs, it’s also everyone working in it, and while you don’t have to automatically like everything because Someone worked on a thing - don’t you want to like more things? Media is communication, the process of receiving / deciphering shouldn’t be binary. We’ve moved far beyond telegraphs, right?

If it’s “fun” to talk about stuff, then think about stuff too.

but how are we supposed to feel cool and important if our discontent doesn’t karmically punish those who have the jobs we wished we had

absolutely! still based

Andor’s political statement continues with an economically friendly, free To access archive

Vladius said:
No one said that anyone bought into the tokenism. I don’t really understand what your point is here.

pretty sure you did, sorry if i misunderstood, this is what i was latching onto:

their female, black, etc. status is picked ahead of time as a shield for criticism

anyway - My point was, anti-wokeness is still on a conversation about the mere inclusion of progressive ideas/representation and that’s boring at best. There are real discussions we could have about representation and all the nuances about what makes an example good or bad, but anti-woke can never move on from the fact that they exist at all and will be embedded into work through a variety of different means. It’s an attitude content to default to the most vanilla, uncontroversial take about corporations with a dash of reactionary politics, handwaving every interesting thing there is to talk about in regards to media and its creation.

The annoying thing about anti-woke discourse is that it’s reactionary to a climate that’s at least a decade past at this point. No one ever really bought into that kind of tokenism except ineffectual lib Disney adults in 2014, or like, literal children. So all the whining about a corporation chasing a profitable demographic feels smug and incurious. If it’s a shield for criticism, then corpos need a new blacksmith, because this discourse has never failed to pop up about anything.

Even if something is crap - why is part of the “analysis” going to the race/identity well at all? The answer is always rooted in specific confirmation biased speculation, and it’s only ever triggered by the subjectivity of if the work in question landed well or not. And even in a positive direction, that lens becomes condescending, as though gay/black/minority/whatever progressive thing rose above itself this time. feels unfair

who needs media literacy when wokeness can be the eternal scapegoat

yeah, this show sucks but I can’t get overly doomer about “Disney” Star Wars as a whole when Andor season 2 is still coming out next year

EDIT: also Acolyte sounds good

Really, everything that sucked about Mando still sucked here so idk why we’re acting like Disney has “finally” lost the plot with the IP. I think assessing creative over corporate is way more meaningful than Disney Bad, bc so far we can trace every fault of every show back to creative

but also Disney Bad.

i just don’t think anyone’s being super smart or analytical about pointing fingers at the understood-to-be-bad amorphous entity. If anything, acknowledging how one can work with and through that system to achieve results like Gilroy did, and what Favreau might have lacked in ambition / imagination, is more insightful than anything anyone has said in this thread on this topic so far

godfrey reggio’s star wars

Look, I’m not saying his opinion is better because he got “critic” status. My initial post is really quite economical because I literally open saying that I feel the distinction on RT is useless, and then even talk about what I think Criticism is which IMO shouldn’t [just] be a consumer review telling you what to see.

Chris Stuckmann still put the work in that most audience reviewers definitely didn’t. He has 2million subs on YT, you don’t have to respect it to realize that’s not really a normally attainable thing

I think the critic/audience distinction on RT is completely unproductive and should be abolished, but I think the fact that a critic’s knowledge of film isn’t cursory is what gives them more weight. It’s just populist snobbery to construe that as “elitist” just because they have more education or put the work in to have that engagement IMO. If anyone could be one then we’d all be

Criticism isn’t about being right or wrong, and even the perspective of it as “consumer review of product” is wildly off base about their value in society, but I digress

Maybe I’m just dumb, but other than the music evoking it - I really didn’t see Rogue One doing the classic gee-whizz space opera? They were kind of going from tragedy to tragedy, under the orders of a militarized intelligence op. Interspersed with drama more than any of the characters having some sort of clever fun. And they all die in the end.

I think the whole “grimdark tone” discussion is off-base of what I was actually saying about Rogue One’s internal logic though. ESB could be dark, ROTS could be dark, The Clone Wars could be dark. Rogue One is moving in a different space than just gesturing towards unpleasantness in the ways those do. I’m not denying the tonal dissonances in Rogue One, but the proto-Andor DNA can’t easily be washed out because K2 has some one liners (I’m assuming?).

I do want to stress that to me the part of Rogue One’s DNA that translates over into Andor isn’t just the visual aesthetics or surface tone. When I talk about its “geopolitical texture”, it’s in how:

• Jedha is understood and talked about as an ongoing warzone. The franchise typically conceptualizes war as skirmishes beginning and ending in an afternoon, so much so that we have signifiers like BBY to denote the Death Star run that was over in 20 minutes. We visit Jedha as a place that more or less carries on in the midst of heightened tensions, until it doesn’t.

• The Alliance conceptualized as different factions, and rebels as a whole having diverse ideologies. Saw as an “extremist” compared to Yavin’s cell is a broad example, but it’s there - and there’s also just subtle flourishes to the in-universe speak that maintains The Empire as an Establishment over this revolution. The Rebels are typically understood almost as its own secret pseudo-government/military, but so much of Rogue One’s first acts emphasizes how beholden they still are to Imperial law, and how fragile whatever authority over their people actually is.

• Careerism in the Imperial ranks is given grounded play here. Between Krennic and Tarkin, but also in the Ersos’ blurred professional/personal relationship to Krennic, particularly what’s suggested in the Republic/Empire transition period. Catalyst is a pretty good book so maybe some of that is leaking into my appreciation here, but Rogue One still provides the space for this kind of detailed worldbuilding, and services more grounded drama than melodrama.

And then there’s other stuff that just fills out the world far more thoughtfully than we’ve gotten from the franchise recently. The Whills as a non-Jedi institution that has their own, non-instrumental relationship with the Force is a great concept! I’m not saying it gets to really dig into these things, but it’s coming at it exactly how Andor did. And when I say “seriously” I’m NOT talking about tone or grit or darkness, but in how it lacks pretension and cynicism. It’s all about buying into this Star Wars thing like it was a derived from a sci-fi TTRPG guidebook; nerdy engagement with a fixed, detailed lore, blowing up an aesthetic element and giving it logistical play. Pretending this was all real, and that it should feel real, and be handled like it was real material. Not winking at the conventions that betray that illusion through whimsy and one liners.

It’s not about What Would George Lucas Do, it’s unconcerned with reacting to questions of What Is The Spirit or “Soul” of Star Wars? None of that genre-play or legacy-posturing. Just being a movie. It can be dry because of it, and it’s absolutely mashed together with a more traditional Star Wars third act, but I really do think it’s all there in the macro.

I think the value of Rogue One was always in its approach to the galaxy, that Andor then took the ball and ran with to its full realization. Andor doesn’t happen without RO and not just as a parent film to the spin-off.

Like, all the fanservice and Fated Plot were just grist for a film that dared to look at the classic lived-in OT aesthetic, and conceive of it as lived in beyond the visuals. It gets a wrap for being “slow” in the first half but the geopolitical texture it establishes for what’s usually been a pulpy backdrop was enticing IMO. Even the characters being unremarkable and thinly sketched added to that sense of scale; the conflict of the time as tangible “historical” incidence, not genre theater inhabited by larger-than-life figures.

It’s cool in that sense! I think all of that is overlooked because Dr. Evazan and Ponda Baba show up on Jedha, but there’s a lot of stuff in the film’s storytelling language that originated what Andor is now. It took Star Wars as a lore seriously, which for me was a lot coming off the heels of TFA which clearly conceived of Star Wars as a brand more than anything.

Man, there’s nowhere else on the internet but an old-school discussion board to have nerdy diatribes, I don’t know where else to take it

I actually liked The New Republic being conceived as its own brand of neoliberal horror, but I don’t know, the conceptualization of what The Empire as an institution even was, is disappointing here. While I get the surface level comparisons to Andor, it doesn’t have a grasp on any tangible theory to fill out the spaces it’s playing in. (And certainly not the writing, it’s very journeyman here.) For as much as it “explores” a postwar reconstruction, it still moves in a Good/Evil, malice-of-an-out-group kind of ideology.

It’s a pretty high school social studies understanding of historical play.

Maybe I’m just attached to the interpretations provided by the prequels and then Andor, but Imperialism as Establishment, as oppression evolved from power evolved from status-quo, works far better for me than “Imperial” conceived as a pseudo-nationality. The episode codifies the former Empire’s structure as one that went out of its way to be bleak and awful; Palpatine and his powerbase as one and the same.

It just rubs me the wrong way that it’s even being called Andor-lite. They’re not necessarily incongruous in the macro beats, but philosophically coming from entirely different places. Without any real poli-sci informing the premises, its storytelling ambitions are just cynical for the sake cynicism.