Episode 8: The Disneyfication of Star Wars
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Transcript
[00:00:00] Blue: The Theory of Anything Podcast could use your help. We have a small but loyal audience, and we’d like to get the word out about the podcast to others so others can enjoy it as well. To the best of our knowledge, we’re the only podcast that covers all four strands of David Deutsch’s philosophy as well as other interesting subjects. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please give us a five -star rating on Apple Podcasts. This can usually be done right inside your podcast player, or you can Google The Theory of Anything Podcast Apple or something like that. Some players have their own rating system and giving us a five -star rating on any rating system would be helpful. If you enjoy a particular episode, please consider tweeting about us or linking to us on Facebook or other social media to help get the word out. If you are interested in financially supporting the podcast, we have two ways to do that. The first is via our podcast host site, Anker. Just go to anchor.fm -4 -strands. There’s a support button available that allows you to do reoccurring donations. If you want to make a one -time donation, go to our blog, which is 4strands.org. There is a donation button there that uses PayPal. Thank you. All right, welcome to The Theory of Anything. Today we’ve got our Star Wars episode we’ve been wanting to do where we’re going to talk about Star Wars. What went wrong? What went right? How can Disney recover from their current situation? Or I’m being a little bit too negative there because obviously they’ve made a lot of money doing it, so they’ve done something right. So let’s just go ahead and get started into this. So,
[00:01:51] Blue: cameo, tell me about your Star Wars background, because I know that you’ve got an extended Universe Star Wars background, if I understand correctly.
[00:01:59] Red: Well, you know, I have to admit, before we even start talking about Star Wars, that, well, I’m a Trekkie. You know, I kind of don’t care about Star Wars as much as a lot of people. In fact, I saw the first one when it came out, of course, like everyone did. I saw Empire Strikes Back, but then when it came to the last one, or the third one, or six, or whatever we’re calling that now, I was like a teenager, and I just never even saw it, and didn’t see it for years and years and years after. But I happened to marry a Star Wars aficionado. My husband really, really liked Star Wars, and we both are really big readers of sci -fi.
[00:02:50] Blue: That’s true for you, man. You give me some of the best recommendations.
[00:02:54] Red: Thank you. And so once he and I started dating, I went back and, you know, watched the Star Wars movies that I hadn’t seen, and then also started reading pretty heavily from inside of the canon. And I think there’s a lot of really, really well -written sci -fi that’s in the Star Wars universe. And, you know, during those years between when those first three episodes were made and when George Lucas came back and picked it back up again, there was a really big body of work around the story that was created, you know. And when people talk about canon, it’s that that they’re talking about. It’s this body of work that was created that had a lot of really strong fans who still wanted to participate in Star Wars, and there just weren’t movies being made, you know. And so for me, it’s been interesting watching the new movies come out, because especially the most recent movies, they’ve made, I think, a strategic decision to ignore what I think is a lot of really good, compelling storytelling that was better than probably George Lucas’s original. Anyway, now I’m just rambling, so I’ll stop. No, no, no, this is good.
[00:04:19] Blue: This is good. Do you know what? I didn’t, I didn’t at first understand that the books were in fact canon, right? I mean, like, if you were to look at Star Trek, and in, like, the Star Trek books, the books aren’t considered canon. So I thought Star Wars was the same way, but I discovered, I don’t know, 10 or 15 years ago, that George Lucas had a group that made sure it all stayed at least somewhat coherent, because he considered it all canon. Yeah,
[00:04:46] Red: he was not letting any, none of those books, they weren’t really quote unquote fan fiction. They were written by authors who essentially would apply to write within the, in the universe, would write stories, and yeah, their overarching storylines had to be approved by that kind of that steering committee of the canon. Yes.
[00:05:10] Blue: Well, that’s amazing, actually, that, that Lucas went to that level so that the, the stories done in the video games and in the books and such, the comic books would stay consistent and that they would be part of his extended universe.
[00:05:26] Red: Well, and you know, it is, it is fascinating because one of the things that’s interesting to me about that is that they weren’t making any, any movies or anything else. You know, what, why wouldn’t they have, while they were developing all this storytelling, and you know, these books are, were fairly popular, you know, in the scheme, I guess, of science fiction writing. But it is really curious to me that there was that really big gap where they were still maintaining the storylines, but not creating anything besides the book to continue to move that story forward. Right.
[00:06:06] Blue: You know, I haven’t read any of the books, but I did read some of the comic books from Dark Horse Comics, and they were really, really good. I mean, like, they felt so Star Wars -y. They were like spot on in a way that the more
[00:06:19] Red: recent movies just even if you didn’t know that there was a point that George sold the franchise to Disney, you would know it by watching the movies because as much, you know, kind of really strong, a lot of people really hated the three intermediary movies. Yes. The prequels. Right. The prequels. But they are still following this, this storyline that had this kind of long -term vision. And the more recent Disney ones, they’ve kind of just abandoned all of it. And honestly, that alone would have been, I think that would have been okay to have abandoned some of the canon if they had been replacing it with something better or something original or something interesting. So they replaced it with is the same story that they already told over and over again.
[00:07:29] Blue: So it’s interesting. Maybe let’s maybe let’s break this up a little bit and talk about each of the three trilogies and kind of how they compare, because I think that you’re getting at something that I find kind of interesting about the whole thing. So if we were to talk about the original trilogy, I mean, in a way you kind of just gave your opinion. You had a strong positive opinion to the first two, and then you weren’t that interested in the third one Return of the Jedi. And a lot of fans would agree with you on that. I actually loved Return of the Jedi, and I still do. But it is definitely the most flawed of the first three movies. Right. And the Ewoks was a questionable move. I think it’s very consistent with the way George Lucas does things, though. Originally, he was going to have Wookiees instead of Ewoks. And I think that would have worked better. But there was a point he was trying to make, which was that low tech could overcome high tech, if you had good on your side, you know, and things like that. There’s kind of a spiritual side to George Lucas that he was trying to make. And you can see that a lot in the Force and things like that. But it’s also mythical, right? And this is something I think a lot of people don’t get about Star Wars. Like, I think a lot of people do get this about Star Wars, but like if you’re into science fiction and you’re trying to compare Star Wars to science fiction, you may miss this, which is Star Wars isn’t really science fiction, right? It’s got this kind of techno science fiction shell that’s intentional.
[00:08:59] Blue: But what it is, it’s a myth, right? George Lucas was like one of the first ones to study Hero of a Thousand Faces and to really try to study the hero’s journey and then to try to turn it into a movie and to create a modern techno myth was what he was trying to do. So he didn’t really care about the science, like at all, because he was making a fantasy movie. He was making a sword and sorcery myth movie that just happened to have a science setting, right? A techno setting.
[00:09:30] Red: So I would argue a bit, Bruce, that that is true of all sci -fi and maybe all fantasy. I think that sci -fi is a genre is essentially just an excuse to use technology or a technology landscape to still tell the stories of myths, you know? Great storytelling triggers these big emotions for us and it’s a spiritual thing. Even the very most technical sci -fi that I read and I read some pretty hard science sci -fi, the really great stories are the ones that trigger that human part of us.
[00:10:17] Blue: Yeah. So let me just take this one level deeper, though, with Star Wars. If you were to say, because I agree with what you’re saying, but if you were to say like what are modern myths today? You can think of myths from before. You can think of King Arthur. You can think of Hercules. I mean, it’s not too hard to think of myths, but if you try to think of myths that exist that have been created modernly, it’s a lot harder to think of them. You might think of some that are kind of on the border, like Star Trek or something like that.
[00:10:47] Red: Right.
[00:10:47] Blue: But it would be hard to, the two that really stand out in my mind as the most modern myths that are going to continue to be mythical stories for a long time are probably Star Wars and Superman. And I think those are the two biggest modern myths that we’ve actually created. And when I talk about myths, I’m kind of thinking here a little bit, C.S. Lewis’s definition of myths, obviously was someone who was very much into trying to understand how to create myths and himself created one of the modern myths with Narnia. Maybe not quite up there with, I should have included Lord of the Rings. That would be a
[00:11:22] Red: modern myth. I would have said, yeah, and your lack of inclusion. Yeah, no, I should have included
[00:11:27] Blue: Lord of the Rings. You’re right. And I guess the reason why I didn’t is because I was thinking of myth, because Lord of the Rings is a modern myth, but it’s mimicking an older myth, whereas Superman and Star Wars are trying to be modern myths. Lord of the Rings was a modern creation of the old type of myth.
[00:11:46] Red: That I absolutely will agree with.
[00:11:50] Blue: Yeah, but it definitely should qualify as a modern myth. I agree. But it was definitely a intentionally, and that was what Tolkien was trying to do. He was trying to create an ancient myth modernly, whereas Star Wars and Superman are modern myths in modern settings, sciencey settings, things like that. So C.S. Lewis, what he points out, C.S. Lewis is one of his favorite authors was, actually, what was the guy’s name? It’ll come to me. But there’s this guy that he read when he was younger, and he was this Christian author, and it got him into myth telling. And one of the things he points out is that, like, if you were reading a novel, part of what makes a novel great is the language, that it’s well written, that you’ve got this beautiful language, things like that. Myths don’t use any of that. In fact, when you tell a myth, like if you were to tell the story of Cinderella or something like that, there is no official version of Cinderella. And in fact, there’s all sorts of different tellings of the same story. And yet, it doesn’t matter which version you hear, they’re all the same, ultimately, because a myth is about what happens. It’s not about the language. It’s not like a novel at all. So he points out that this author that he had found, he was not a great writer, but he was an amazing myth teller. And I really feel the same way about George Lucas. George Lucas is just not a good author. And he’s not even, he’s not even a good director, right? I mean, he would seem
[00:13:30] Red: that way.
[00:13:31] Blue: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, he really, really isn’t. But he is an amazing myth maker. And granted, he did better on the original trilogy than the prequels. And we can talk about kind of what’s the difference there. But even the prequels, there was a lot of this, a lot of the same myth making going on, even if it was not working quite as well at this point. And the three final movies didn’t do any myth making, as far as I can understand the term. They were big budget action movies. And I feel like that was one of the main things that got lost along the way. Partly Lucas’ fault for maybe not doing quite as well with the prequels as we would have hoped. But the people who are making the new Star Wars, I just don’t think they get the heart of Star Wars. I think that they don’t really understand this is about myth making. And that’s what we’re trying to do. And Lucas studied the book, Hero of a Thousand Faces, which lays out the monomyth, the fact that in all mythology across all the world, even in cultures that didn’t share with each other, that the myths are all very similar, and that they have certain steps and stages that you go through where that create the myth and it makes the myth very impactful psychologically. And Jung was very into this, by the way. And the author of the Hero of a Thousand Faces, he was one of Jung’s disciples. Joseph Campbell. Yeah, Joseph Campbell. Thank you, Joseph Campbell. So Lucas studied Campbell before making Star Wars and was intentionally trying to make a myth.
[00:15:06] Blue: Whereas I don’t know if anyone, trying to use what it was that makes myths great from history and put it into the Star Wars setting. And I think the first Star Wars in particular is very good at that. And you really go back and you look at the original Star Wars, everybody always talked about how it had such great special effects, but it was a low budget movie.
[00:15:25] Red: Yeah. Well, and you know, even being low budget movie, there wasn’t a concept really of special effects back then. There wasn’t, yeah. And you know, part of what makes it really when just talking about the quote unquote special effects is, other than 2001, a space Odyssey, at that point there wasn’t a lot of people showing space inside movies just because we didn’t really know how to do it. Right.
[00:15:56] Blue: And 2001 Space Odyssey, interesting you mentioned that one. That one really did have really good special effects. Yes. And it came before Star Wars. Yes. Right. So there were occasionally movies with strong special effects, but you’re right. They just didn’t do it. Nowadays, everybody has special effects in the movies no matter what their movie is.
[00:16:16] Red: Right. Well, and part of it is because we’ve made it kind of easy, but also a big part of it was, I think it’s a place where George Lucas really did. He was an innovator because he was.
[00:16:29] Blue: Yeah. Because
[00:16:29] Red: when people went back and later and said, wow, how did he make these special effects with his technology, he had figured out a lot of really creative ways to make space look pretty believable. No, the special effects aren’t great, but they’re also, they almost always enhance and very rarely detract.
[00:16:53] Blue: Yeah.
[00:16:53] Red: You’re very rarely pulled out of the experience of the story by noticing back, like the special effects are bad.
[00:17:03] Blue: Yeah. Yeah. He really did pioneer the modern special effects era. He did. I think was a significant part of his genius. Right. He, the things that he really seemed to do well since he wasn’t a good writer, he did terrible dialogue. The good dialogue that was in the first Star Wars movie was written by, I think, his wife because he couldn’t figure out how to do it. Right. It just wasn’t his thing. Right. But he really understood mythology. He really understood the other one was setting. So if you look at like all the Star Wars movies, including the prequels, they had an amazing sense of setting. And so like, for instance, in the first Star Wars movie, it’s this space odyssey. And yet it’s set in a dusty Western town. Right. I mean, very strange thing for someone to do. And yet it was so effective. And then they go off and fly off and they fly to this moon -sized spaceship that can destroy planets. So there’s a definite sense of setting in the first two. Then Empire Strikes Back, you’ve got an ice planet and you’ve got a city floating in the sky. And in the third movie, you’ve got a forest moon. Right. And then you look at even the prequels, you’ve got like Coruscant, which is a planet that’s one giant city. You’ve got an underwater city in the Phantom Menace. You know, I mean, he really put a lot of effort into deciding what’s the cool setting I want to set the story in this time. And
[00:18:35] Red: he had all these
[00:18:36] Blue: I don’t think it
[00:18:37] Red: was just setting, Bruce. I think it was also the kinds of characters that would come from those settings.
[00:18:44] Unknown: Yeah.
[00:18:44] Red: One of the things that is fairly interesting about George Lucas, within the sci -fi kind of within the overarching genre, a lot of people, especially up to that point, didn’t really imagine such varied universe, like a universe that had such a radical variety, you know, going back to Star Trek. Early Star Trek in part, you know, was mostly humanoids, very recognizable human kind of, and you know, maybe they had pointy years or maybe they had ridges on their face, but more of this concept of space being populated by people that were probably evolved from a similar brand.
[00:19:30] Unknown: Right.
[00:19:31] Red: And you even there’s a lot of mythology within the Star Trek world about how that happened and not,
[00:19:36] Unknown: you
[00:19:36] Red: know,
[00:19:37] Unknown: the
[00:19:37] Red: progenitors. Right. But one of the awesome things about George Lucas was this vision of species interacting with each other that are radically different.
[00:19:50] Unknown: You
[00:19:50] Red: know, Jabba the Hutt, his entire species, they’re totally different than us. They don’t look like us. They came from someplace totally different. And that was especially for him to try and do it in film, really, really, really impressive. I
[00:20:04] Blue: agree. I think it’s another thing that he just did absolutely stellar on. He was groundbreaking on. Now, I got to call out one thing on Empire Strikes Back.
[00:20:14] Unknown: So
[00:20:14] Blue: Star Wars, being a low budget movie, it did great with myth making. But if you really go back and watch it today, it’s not a strong action film. Right. I mean, maybe you thought of it that way when you were a kid, but it’s in some ways it’s survival into the modern era as a great, the great movie that it is, isn’t that it was this action film. It’s really more the mythology and things like that. Empire Strikes Back was like a mixture of the two. And in fact, I would dare say Empire Strikes Back might be one of the best movies ever made. Like a genre. Yeah. It is aged so well. It is such a good movie. It’s still exciting to watch. And it’s even though they don’t have great special effects and great stunts yet, it’s still just well done. Whereas Return of the Jedi was a little lackluster in many areas. I would have to give credit for the whole scene in Jabba’s Palace, where Luke takes them on. That one scene might be one of the best scenes in any movie ever. But the rest of the movie is just okay. And although I loved the ending of the movie, I thought that the, so if I were to compare this with Empire Strikes Back as kids, we didn’t see Luke on your father coming. Right. Right. I mean, like it blew us away. I mean, it was one of the greatest twists of all times. And then we spent years between Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi on the playground arguing whether Luke was going to turn to the dark side or not. Sure. Sure. Nobody foresaw Darth Vader turning to the light side.
[00:21:57] Red: That’s actually an interesting
[00:21:58] Blue: point. Yes. It was brilliant on Lucas’s part. I think that that part of the turn of the Jedi was just so well done and really saves the movie from some of the other parts that maybe aren’t quite as good. And raises it to, I think, still one of the, you know, still the third best Star Wars movie, if that makes any sense.
[00:22:18] Red: Yeah. Well, yeah, that was the third best.
[00:22:22] Blue: So, and there was, there’s something even profound about it. The idea that ultimately the way the Emperor gets defeated is that the bad guy defeats him. Right. Because he’s been turned to the light side. He’s realized, this isn’t the path I wanted to walk. I wanted to be a Jedi. Right.
[00:22:42] Red: And you know, I think one of the big flaws with these most recent films, Rogue One, Episode 9, or The Rise of the Skywalker books, I mean, movie is, so far the approach has been to just throw that same thing back at us, you know. It wasn’t exciting to see Kylo Ren turn from the dark side because we’ve seen that. Right. And which isn’t to say that at the end, like having a character make that kind of a choice, you don’t get to do it if you’ve already done it once. I just, you know, I think the way of doing it ends up feeling like they’re just spinning up the story again.
[00:23:27] Blue: So let’s move and talk about the new movies. Because first of all, let me just say I don’t hate the new movies. I’ve enjoyed each of the movies. Most of them fall into the category, well, all of them fall into the category of I’m glad I saw them once, which really is actually saying something because most movies, I’m not even glad I saw them once. That’s why I don’t go see a lot of movies. I’m with you. Okay. So I don’t buy them on DVD. I bought the first one and actually have never really watched it since and regret that I bought it. So I just didn’t even bother buying the rest of them. And because I sort of just realized Disney’s not going to make these movies great. Right. I mean, they’re, they’re just, they’re, I’m not trying to say something truly bad here. I’m just trying to be careful. I say this because I, I don’t want to be someone who’s just bashing on these movies, but they weren’t the mythic Star Wars movies that we had grown used to. Right. They were just big budget, fun popcorn movies. And that’s not a bad thing. That’s like really still a hard thing to pull off well. Right. But I was expecting something so much more. And they just don’t even seem to get that mythic side of Star Wars. And as, as you have pointed out a couple times, they were repeats. Right. I mean, they were so anxious to make it feel like Star Wars that they basically just rewrote previous Star Wars movies that the Force Awakens is almost the exact same movie as the first Star Wars movie. Yeah.
[00:25:04] Red: Well, and for me, I think the shame of that, this is, this is why I really struggle with, with these movies is there was great storytelling that they could have leveraged to make these great movies. Like the, the story that they, that they, that they made a bastard version of with with Kylo Ren being, being the sun and you know, all of those things are things that happen in the canon, but tweaked in weird and somewhat unnecessary ways. Because, because they could have taken some of the stories almost exactly as they were written in, in some of the books and had a much more compelling movies. It’s just, to me, it’s so interesting that they did choose to completely ignore or take just a couple of pieces out of, out of canon and then mix it up with the original storyline and then just, and I suspect because I know that Disney does this a lot, there’s probably a big group of writers who wrote it to one or two and you know, they don’t list it that way. If you go and look at who’s listed as the writers for this, I mean, it’s JJ Abrams is, is listed as the author for Force Awakens and The Rise of Skywalker. Or at least a big, you know, big part of it. They’re, they’re, they’re listing him as having a screen, screenplay rights amongst other people. So
[00:26:38] Blue: yeah, I don’t know what you’re getting at. I think is exactly my point of view on this. So to tie this back into kind of epistemology a little bit, part of what comes out of Deutch’s theories on epistemology using Karl Popper’s theory of knowledge is that good art is hard to vary. So we talked about hard to vary explanations being hard to vary, make them good explanations. Good art is hard to vary, right? You tweak it a little bit and you do it wrong, it gets a lot worse. Trying to make it so it’s really good is hard because of that. And that means that art is in some sense objectively good or bad. And I’m always hesitant to take that too far. I’m always hesitant to take it too far because there’s still is obviously a certain amount of taste. And I think one of the reasons why that’s true is because things are rarely all good or all bad, right? I mean, when you look at the Star Wars movies, the new ones, they do a lot of things well, right? There’s reasons why I can understand why some people love them, but I can also strongly understand why some people hate them. And it’s because they’re a mixed bag. If I could liken this to the DC movies, Zack Snyder was probably just not a really good person to be making the DC movies and largely ruined that franchise, unfortunately. I agree. But if you go and you look at the movies he’s made, every single one of them has some real genius strokes in them. I mean, this is obviously a talented guy who just doesn’t quite know how to pull it off.
[00:28:10] Blue: I mean, even like Batman versus Superman, everybody made fun of how Batman comes around when he finds out his and Superman’s mother have the same name. There was something actually ingenious about that. It could have been so good if it had been written better. He had a good idea. He just didn’t have the writing chops to pull it off. And I feel the same way about the Star Wars movies. The writing is subpar. The skill of the writers is subpar. If you were to compare them to, say, the Marvel movies where the writing is just really good. And I think that’s the main thing that is kind of screwed up with the Star Wars movies at this point. And is that you really like you’re comparing it to the expanded universe. Those were some really awesome writers that wrote those books, right? I mean, they had, they got some of the best writers in the business to write the Star Wars books. They did. They did. And they didn’t do that for the movies. I think they kind of came at it with, well, you know, J.J. Abrams is good at making big budget movies. So we’re going to put him in charge and he’s going to write it where they really needed to go out, find people who understood Star Wars and the mythology of Star Wars, get them to write it and then let J.J. Abrams make the movie. And I think that you would have had much, much better movies if you had really concentrated on making the writing good.
[00:29:28] Red: Right. So some more interesting things to me. These last three movies, I think one of the more surprising things to me than anything is how you hear about like universally, they get panned and you’ll go and look on rotten tomatoes and they’ll be getting like 50%. But when I talked to people who are Star Wars fans, they liked the movies. Yeah. Maybe not always loved, but even in some cases, like especially after the last one came out, I was surprised at how many people I would talk to who just really, really enjoyed the way the story progressed. There was a lot of really, really positive sentiment. Yes. It surprised me a little bit because I could not muster it myself. And I had to just kind of acknowledge that because I don’t love the franchise that there has to just be this place where so much of that is just love of the characters and getting to see the characters again.
[00:30:34] Blue: So especially the old characters. Right. One of my friends who had been a big Star Wars fan, he didn’t actually like the last movie very much. He loved it the first time he saw it. And then he went back and watched it again and he realized he didn’t like it right now. This is kind of an interesting thing, the fact that you may like a movie at first and then you think about it and you realize you didn’t like the movie. Yeah. It goes back to the idea of objectiveness, pure taste. And the opposite can happen. I’ve had movies that I walked out of theater disliking the movie, stopped and thought about it for a while and realized, wow, that was a good movie. Right. Right. And I’ve had this experience numerous times. And again, I want to, I’m not trying to downplay other people’s feelings. These movies do some things really well and it doesn’t surprise me too much that there are a number of strong fans for the movie. But one of the things my friend mentioned is he said every time one of the original characters on the screen, when Han Solo shows up in the final movie, for example, you just melt like it’s just an amazing scene and you care so much about Luke and Han and Leia. But then when you have the other characters on the screen, maybe you don’t care about them quite as much. Right. Is they’re not well developed characters like the original characters were. And I know this is how I feel. If I were to, and let’s get down to the writing on this, the main characters, Rey and Finn, they’re both poorly written characters.
[00:32:04] Blue: I think they’re I think Rey raises above the bad writing because of the actress, Daisy Ridley. Yeah,
[00:32:12] Red: she’s amazing.
[00:32:13] Blue: She’s amazing. And she’s because her character is just really kind of just a Mary Sue. Right. I mean, it’s just a character that never does anything wrong. It’s everything right. It’s good at everything she tries in the first try. No struggle. So there’s no real interest towards her. But she’s the actress is so good. She sells it.
[00:32:30] Red: Yeah, she does.
[00:32:31] Blue: She’s really a great actress. And so Ray, I like Ray, but I can still tell that she’s not a well written character. Finn, the actor is great actor, but that character is just not a very well written character. And I don’t really like him much. Right. Whenever he’s on the screen, I get a little bit bored. And they try to make him a comic character at first. And then that didn’t work. So in the final movie, they don’t even have him making jokes anymore.
[00:32:58] Red: Yeah.
[00:33:00] Blue: You know, and so that’s the that’s the first thing I would mention is that that the characters aren’t very well written. Okay, now Kylo Ren is actually a fairly well written character. And you may disagree with me on this one. Let me make my case, though.
[00:33:13] Red: Okay.
[00:33:14] Blue: He is he is the only character where I actually cared a little bit about his background. And when I was kind of curious where he was going to go and things like that. So I felt like I knew him to some degree. Interesting, which I didn’t feel towards the other characters. And now it’s super obvious he’s actually a hero, right? Yeah. And this is actually a problem. Or it turns out to be a problem. I shouldn’t say it’s a problem. In and of itself that could have been okay. The problem with Kylo Ren is that they keep trying to make him the villain. And when you know he’s the hero from the outset, he’s a terrible villain. And he doesn’t come across as threatening. Ray beats him in the very first movie. From that point forward, he’s really not very threatening. Now, if he’s really just the hero, but in disguise, even if we know that that’s what it is, that’s probably okay. But you’ve got to have a real villain. And we didn’t have a real villain. So
[00:34:17] Red: it’s that that actually was really interesting to me. And I I don’t know if you’ve ever seen girls that that Adam Driver really got his started. In fact, I know you haven’t because I can’t imagine you sitting down.
[00:34:32] Blue: Um,
[00:34:34] Red: he I can totally see why somebody would have watched Girls and then cast him as a villain. Because in that movie, he’s he I mean, in that series, he’s just a really crappy boyfriend that she’s dating. And he’s abusive to her. And he’s he comes across really villainous, just being a regular dude, like he makes you uncomfortable watching him. Yes, you’re like you’re you almost are yelling at her like back away from this guy. He’s really an awful human. Like why would you keep going back to him? Um, I can’t decide how they managed to remove all of that from Adam Driver. He’s I really dislike watching him because I feel like they misused him. They never make him feel threatening or scary.
[00:35:22] Blue: In the least, he just seems whiny. Yeah. So he he’s so let’s let’s kind of talk through the movies and his story arc because I actually think that that’s a huge problem with the movies is they took a character that was really somewhat interesting and they created a really bad story arc for him. So in the first movie, they start off making him look like he’s going to be the new Darth Vader. But he quickly starts to take a different light. You see him with his father. He ends up killing his father, which by the way, wasn’t my favorite scene because it on solo deserved a heroic death of some sort. Right. Not a not a not as kid killing him. Yeah, just and not even a sacrifice to save other people or something like that. Right. And not the greatest writing there.
[00:36:08] Red: Right.
[00:36:08] Blue: Um, but you did start to realize Kylo Ren isn’t necessarily a bad guy. They were intentionally nodding towards that. So and that’s fine. If since he’s not the main bad guy, Snoke is, it’s okay for him to not be a bad guy. But then in the last Jedi, we’re going to let’s admit the last Jedi is by far the most controversial of the movies. Yeah, they kill Snoke. And the way they did it was really kind of clever. And if it had been the final movie, I would have applauded the move because they’re setting up for some big battle and instead he gets him with a little trick and kills him, which I think is funny. And I think it’s interesting. So I thought it was well done. But Snoke was the bad guy. And now we have no bad guys left because Kylo Ren clearly isn’t a bad guy. Right. And you’ve got his little sidekick guy, whatever his name is, who screams a lot. All of them are like little boys. They, they scream and really hard to take any of them seriously. Right, right. Now let’s compare that to the original movies where Darth Vader is the main bad guy in the Emperor’s kind of in the background most of the time. Darth Vader never loses a fight until the last movie. Oh, that’s a great point. Okay. So his and then look at he never starts screaming. That was a mistake Lucas made in the, the, the episode three where Darth Vader shouts, no, that was not Darth Vader. Right. Right. Other than that scene, Darth Vader never loses his call. He is so menacing because of that. That’s a great point. Yeah. Right.
[00:37:47] Blue: And where Kylo Ren and the other members of the Empire, First Order or whatever they’re calling it these days, they, they, they lose their cool really easily. They, they, I mean, like even Grand Moff Tarkin in the first movie was a really menacing bad guy. He did a really good job with that. There was no one like that except Snoke in the, in the, the last three movies. And they killed Snoke in the second movie and they didn’t even solve any of the mystery surrounding Snoke before they killed him. And they had to give a few throwaway lines in the third movie to try to explain where he came from. He was some clone that the Emperor had been making, you know, or whatever. Right. Clearly just made up on the spot because Ryan Johnson had killed one of the more interesting subplots. And you, you really can’t have good heroes without having a really, really menacing villain. And this is something that I wrote about this for Escapist magazine many years ago. Are you familiar with Final Fantasy seven, the video game?
[00:38:56] Red: Yeah.
[00:38:57] Blue: So that our remake is coming out or maybe it’s already out,
[00:39:00] Unknown: but
[00:39:00] Blue: the remake’s coming out here soon. It is considered one of the best video games of all times. And it’s got this really, really well done story with characters that are super well, you know, well written and you love the characters. The bad guy in that game is Sephiroth, who’s considered one of the greatest villains of all time. I don’t think he’s that well written. His reasons for being bad are so vague. And he kind of looks cool. He uses this cool looking sword. But you don’t, he, as far as well written villain, I wouldn’t have pegged him for the level of popularity he now has. I believe the reason why he is such a popular villain today is because he kills off in the game one of the most lovable characters, Eris. And from the moment he did that, and she was dead for the entire rest of the game. And you, she couldn’t resurrect her. There was nothing you could do to get her back. And the moment he did that, I think he solidified his place in the world of villains as one of the worst villains of all times. Because he had killed this super lovable character. And I think that’s what it takes. You got to have this interplay. The villain is villainous because they do things that really make you angry. And the good guys are really great good guys when they’re able to stand up with this villain that you know is really more powerful than them. They’re taking chances to try to take the villain down. And you didn’t have that in the Star Wars movies. Snoke seemed to be that. And then he just sort of gets killed off. And while we’re
[00:40:52] Red: talking about villains, and I’m going to say we give ourselves like about 10 more minutes and then wrap out five to 10 more minutes. Okay. I want to talk about Anakin for a minute. About who? Anakin. Oh, Anakin. Yes. So, you know, my fair amount of ambivalence about the original three movies, I think my overarching opinion of Star Wars went down and continues to go down every time I have to watch those middle three movies. And I have to watch the story arc of Anakin. Because it really bugs me that the reasons Anakin was given to turn to the dark side. I do think he had a compelling, I’ve always wanted a much stronger reason for him because he had no reason to turn, but there was nothing there. I agree. I agree.
[00:41:52] Blue: Since we know he has to turn. Now, this is something Lucas always makes you feel like he has this whole story written out in his head. And it’s not true. If you look at the annotated screen, you know, annotated screen plays where they talk about what changed over the different screen playwrights, right? He and Darth Vader wasn’t Luke’s father originally, right? That, like even into the first rite of the first draft of Empire Strikes Back, he’s still not Luke’s father. Luke actually envisions, sees his father and it’s not Darth Vader.
[00:42:22] Red: Oh, interesting. And sees
[00:42:23] Blue: his sister and it’s not Leia. And so it was only over time that Lucas really started to realize, oh, I need to make Darth Vader Luke’s father. And he really does make up a lot on the spot. Like this isn’t like Tolkien and Lord of the Rings where it’s really all thought out. He makes you feel like that’s what he’s doing, but he really just has general ideas and then he pulls them together and reuses them in different movies. And, and because of that, I think he wrote himself into a corner where you know that he has to turn and he know he has to be a hero and then he has to turn, but I don’t think George Lucas had the writing chops to really pull off how to make him turn and make it convincing.
[00:43:05] Unknown: Right.
[00:43:05] Blue: Because George Lucas is not a great writer, right? This is where it would have been nice if he had brought in a better writer to figure this out.
[00:43:12] Red: To come up with a really compelling reason for Anakin. Well, and it’s not, you know, so much of what hits ours for me isn’t just because it bugs me that Anakin doesn’t have a compelling reason. I also think the Jedi act like a bunch of idiots. Who puts a 16 -year -old boy in charge of an 18 -year -old girl and then he’s surprised when they become lovers. Yes. Fair point. You know, and they’re, they’re constantly like being all wise and, and what they’re doing, I mean, it’s just, it really, I have a really, really hard time, especially the, like the second or the third one of the middle trilogy, watching this group that are supposed to be so enlightened, continually doing these really stupid things.
[00:44:04] Blue: And
[00:44:05] Red: maybe there’s a beautiful analogy for, like, you know, us as a, as a people that even, even the best and most brightest and most beautiful organization that’s supposed to represent good can do really dumb, awful things in the name of good. You know, I mean, I’d love to have to believe there was this overarching concept of that, but it’s just really frustrating for me every time I watch those movies. Can we
[00:44:31] Blue: talk just quickly about The Last Jedi? Because I feel like we should say a little bit about that. So some people loved The Last Jedi, and that doesn’t maybe surprise me too much because it actually does a number of things well. But I think The Last Jedi was the movie that made me feel like I don’t really care if I see the next Star Wars movie or not. And it’s not because I disliked the movie so much as it is that it felt like it wrapped everything up. And it’s interesting. And the writing was particularly bad in The Last Jedi. A lot of people disliked the politics in The Last Jedi. Now, I actually wanted to fend the politics a little bit. There’s nothing wrong with putting politics into your story, right? But that’s a risky thing to do. And last year, I did a took a lot of risks and people will often point that out. They say, last Jedi took a lot of risks. But that’s not a virtue on its own. A virtue is if you take a risk and pull it off, which last year I did not do, right? If I were to use Marvel as the example, Endgame was a risky movie. You take every superhero in the universe and you make a non -action film until the last 30 minutes of the movie, right? That’s a terrible risk. And yet they really made it work, right? Last Jedi took risks all over the place and they underwhelmed me. And the politics was an example of that.
[00:45:53] Blue: If the politics flows from the story and it’s a natural part, it makes some point and it really makes you have some sort of insight you didn’t have before, then it’s good. It’s a risk that paid off. And if it comes down to, you’re going, well, why didn’t Holo just whatever her name was, why didn’t she just tell them what her plan was? I mean, it was so poorly written that it was clearly the story had been forced fit to the politics, right? Which is why I think everybody hated it. Or a lot of people, and some people liked it because they just liked the politics, right? And that’s maybe a lame reason to like the movie. But if that’s your thing, then that’s your thing. But it’s not too surprising that most people just kind of rolled their eyes and went, oh my gosh, I can’t believe they just force fit that in there. Or the fact that they take a shot at capitalism by going to that gambling planet. And again, you’re kind of just going, that wasn’t even well written. That was dumb, you know. And last year, I did a number of things like that where when they finally get Luke Skywalker to show up, I was so excited because it’s like, okay, it’s a huge risk to make him not be the hopeful character from the past movies, right? Yeah, to have him be the opposite of that. And then he redeems himself in the end. But how does he does it? Well, he’s actually just a hologram. You don’t even get a real battle.
[00:47:09] Blue: And or for that matter, when they send all these ships out and they’re, you’ve got these ships going towards these walkers and you’re going to have this big battle. And then they’re almost there and they say, this isn’t going to work. And they abort the battle so that they can have a dippy love scene. Okay, all of this is just really poor writing. And the reason why is because when you’re when you’re a writer, you’re making promises to your reader, right? This is Brandon Sanderson. I’m kind of channeling here.
[00:47:41] Red: Okay, yeah.
[00:47:41] Blue: If you have, if you create a mystery, you’re promising the reader, you’re going to solve the mystery. If you, if you hint at something, you’re promising to explain what it is later. If you’re hinting at, you’re going to have a big battle, then you either owe them a big battle or something cooler than a big battle, right?
[00:47:57] Unknown: Something
[00:47:57] Blue: more compelling
[00:47:58] Red: than
[00:47:59] Blue: the big
[00:47:59] Unknown: battle.
[00:47:59] Blue: Right. And at every step, last year I underwhelmed, right? It would promise a showdown between Luke and Kylo Ren. And then you don’t get it. And what you get is less interesting than, than what was promised. And then they had set themselves up so well where there’s like, nobody’s coming and then Luke shows up. And I thought for sure what was going to happen is the rest of the galaxy was going to see Luke on his own taking on the entire first order. And even though he was going to lose and he was going to die, it would inspire them to all get all their ships and come out, which they ended up doing in the third movie where it made no sense at all. Right. They should have done that in the second movie and they should have ended the second movie on a high note, right? I mean, it’s, and they were setting up for it and then they didn’t do it. Well, and part
[00:48:50] Red: of that, I think, is because they are in sequel mindset. What, what are we going to keep out for the next one where there’s almost like the opposite of an abundance thing, like, oh my gosh, we only have so much storyline. Let’s not let’s not change the story yet, which is so ridiculous because there should be. And in fact, if you go back to Canon, there’s, I sent you a there’s this list of all of the all of the books that have ever been written and how many years they are before or after episode four. That’s it. That is how they track everything. And so there’s most, well, a lot of the canon happens within the first 20 to 30 years of, of, of those episodes. But a lot of it happens. A thousand and the more recent stuff that’s being written is thousands of years removed from from those original storylines because the universe is enough is is rich all by itself. Right. Don’t have to have Luke to have the the power of the dark side and the force and the Republic and all of the things that exist in this universe. There isn’t the dependency on those original characters. I agree. Did
[00:50:18] Blue: you ever play Knights of the Old Republic, the video game?
[00:50:22] Unknown: You
[00:50:22] Blue: know what, that was one of the best Star Wars stories I have ever seen. And it was a video game. And it was set thousands of years before the Star Wars movie. So you there was no chance of coming across any of the characters you knew and loved. Sure. And BioWare who made the made that game, they told an amazing story and they developed these characters. So you’re playing a character that you made up yourself. And this is a big spoiler partway through. So you’re dealing with two Sith and they’re in the background. And there was Malak and Revan, I forget, which I think was Malak was the one that was still around Revan disappeared. And he was defeated by the Jedi. And so Malak is starting to pull together his forces to challenge the Jedi. And you’re trying to deal with Malak and partway through the game, they’ve been dropping little hints that I totally missed. But then when when they finally pull them together, you go, Oh my gosh. And it turns so they’ve been dropping little hints that your memories had been erased. And when they finally find out who you really are, you’re Revan. And you are the Sith master that Malak was just the disciple. And the rest of the game is you as the rise of Revan. But now as a Jedi, if you’re following the light side, you can actually follow either path because it’s a game. You as the rise of Revan, but now as a Jedi coming to challenge Malak and to remove him. And the characterizations were well done. The story was amazing. The twist when it happened is like I had to get up off the ground because it was such a cool twist.
[00:51:57] Blue: I mean, right up there with Luke, I’m your father. And it was a show of force as to how to make a good Star Wars story. And a lot of it came out at the same time as like the prequels. A lot of people were hailing it as the true prequels.
[00:52:16] Red: Right. Well, because it didn’t feel like it had to satisfy people with expectations around story. Right. Okay, I think that is a fantastic ending point for today.
[00:52:28] Blue: All right. Okay. Well, thank you everybody for listening. And we’ll see you next.
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