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My overall take: it’s excellent, and my chief feeling at the end was “disappointed.” This is only partly the series’ fault. It’s partly the inevitability to ending up at Rogue One, which is melancholy. It’s partly that it was a long three years’ wait with high expectations, and there’s no way a handful of episodes could live up to those fantasies.

The series falters in its own right due to its compressed timeline. You can tell it was four seasons’ worth of storytelling compressed into one. It reminds of seasons 4 and 5 of Babylon 5: it’s clear they had a good plan, and they had to pivot hard to align it with a different production timeline. They couldn’t quite pull it off, but they came about as close as anyone could. I hope there may be either deleted scenes (maybe a directors’ cut?) or a novelization/comic book that uses the five-year story they clearly had mapped out, character building and all. I’d buy it. The action, script, filming, etc. remain top notch.

As many have noted, this series is incredibly important, trenchant, and bloody prophetic as a fictionalization of the fascist upsurge we are currently living through. At times, it was difficult to watch because it hit so close to home. That’s needed and deserves high praise.

Spoilers follow( Read more... )

I am loving Andor. It is the best show I have seen in a very long time. My silence about it on DW is largely due to my having next to "no notes." This is a random splat of Star Warsian thoughts inspired by Andor. Light spoilers through Andor ep. 7. Note: I wrote this post just after ep. 7 but didn't post due to life/overwork/chronic pain. I'll write more after the series ends.
( Spoilers through ep. 7 follow... )

I really enjoyed the first 1.5 hours or so of Obi-Wan Kenobi, so much that I won't do a very formal review but mostly just express my appreciation. I really liked the first few episodes of Bob Fett, but after that, I feel it lost its way, and I haven't really been enthusiastic about a new Star Wars release in years. This I really greatly enjoyed.

(Very minor spoilers below)

It's not perfect. (Small Jedi rant, then the good stuff.) In general, I wish post-OT Star Wars would be a little smarter in writing Jedi. Though there are a number of good exceptions, default writing from c. 2000 on seems to present them as ordinary "good guys" with magical black belt skills rather than people who have intensively studied a philosophy somewhat reminiscent of Zen. For one thing, they're often written with a lot of ego, as, for example, Yoda's (paraphrased) "I have failed; I must go into exile" in RotS. I don't buy that Yoda as an 800-plus-year-old Jedi master has that much self-pity and self-importance, and I don't really buy it from Obi-Wan either... but that's actually a fairly mild complaint, and more about a whole generation of SW writing than this show.

Leia is amazing! Let me say it again.

Leia is amazing! I won't go into details for the unspoiled. It was great to see Carrie Fisher's swansong in the sequels, and I'm more grateful than not for the skillfully CGI-enhanced glimpses of young Leia we've gotten since--but this is almost like having A New Hope Leia back but with more to do. I was so impressed!

Overall, I really enjoyed Obi-Wan himself, minus the Jedi complaint above and maybe a bit too much leaning into his being rusty on every single survival skill. But I loved his rustic life on Tatooine, especially its mix of quite restful/peaceful and traumatized, daily witnessing injustice. That actually makes perfect social sense for being "retired" to the boondocks at a time when the Empire is on the rise.

I enjoy the Inquisitors as antagonists. It was great to see the Organas and Alderaan fleshed out a bit. Very nice presentation of Owen--a great bridge between the prequels and ANH, and a great balance of crusty curmudgeon and courageous guy deeply devoted to protecting his family. I am looking forward to more.

Spoiler Free:
It deserved more space. I agree with those who say it's jam-packed and ticks a lot of boxes. I liked it but wish it had more breathing room.

I also agree the trilogy, as a whole, is incoherent, with The Rise of Skywalker (TRoS) ignoring The Last Jedi (TLJ) as much as possible without (much) literal retconning. And it's fair to say TLJ ignored a lot of The Force Awakens (TFA). The result is two films that sort of track and a middle film that doesn’t, with the final film trying to do two-film’s worth of storytelling. [1]

I also agree a saving grace, in all three, is the characters: the core actors are great, their performances excellent, their chemistry palpable, both among the younger crew and in their relationships with the older guard. This pleases me enormously as a character-oriented viewer—and, indeed, the core four from these movies are the most recent experience I've had in film/TV of falling in love with a new set of characters, the next most recent being Game of Thrones (starting 2011). All this is to say, it’s very hard for me to find characters I love, and that this trilogy accomplished it must stand for something real.

I also like the film's sociopolitical vantage point. Star Wars has always engaged with the real world. The original trilogy harkened back to the Nazis and arguably alluded to Vietnam with Endor. The prequels explicitly addressed the post-9/11 years, critiquing the erosion of democracy in the name of protection from external threat. This trilogy, and TRoS in particular, addresses our current moment of seeming helplessness, of the consolidation of power in the hands of ever fewer, the acceleration of climate devastation, and the mounting fear that those of us who don’t want these evils (they are evils) are simply too outgunned, literally and financially, to do anything. The basic message of TRoS is to keep hope alive; we have a chance. The way it executes the good guys' victory (is that a spoiler?) is not easy to relate to the real world, but the message of hope remains crucial. And perhaps on a real-world level, this makes the message of TRoS the most important of the Star Wars movies'.

Spoilers follow( Read more... )

My partner put me on to this article on The Last Jedi defying expectations, and I'm going to pass along the recommendation. It's a good discussion of how The Last Jedi touches on some scary things in life and why this is good at the same it can be difficult to take.

For me, this article articulates something I've been feeling about this film, seeing it in my forties, at time when I feel somewhat battered by life myself and decidedly not young anymore. Now, I don't mean my life is particularly upsetting. I feel psychologically more sound than I did in my younger life. I just feel very aware of accumulated weights of life, whether that's measured in physical infirmity, flagging memory, shrinking time and hope for accomplishing goals/seeing social change, scars (and lessons) of various errors and emotional injuries, and a general sense that I've done half of it and the remaining half is starting to seem less and less important (on a cosmic sort of level). I'm younger than Luke and Leia, but I feel with them a lot. I feel for the younger guard too but am keenly aware I don't have their energy, even in a less superhero-esque mundane sense. The movie captures that difference very well. It's very true to both youth and age. I think it came at just the right time in my life, and that's probably one reason I'm liking it more and more the more I think about it.

Spoiler Free: It's a very good movie. It avoids a lot of cliché while remaining "Star Wars" and having a number of subtler call-backs to previous themes and arcs. All the major characters are developed pretty well, including nice doses of humor. Plotwise, the film reminds me a bit of the second X-Men movie, that is, very good but so complex that it loses a certain clarity and, well, force of narrative movement.

Despite some gripping action bits and good light saber fights, overall, the action lost impact for me by being too big, crowded, and defined by implausible escapes. True, Star Wars action has never been realistic: storm troopers' aim is a meme in itself. But I don't think it's just nostalgia goggles saying I can better suspend my belief for people dodging blaster fire than surviving giant explosions unscathed (and I'm not talking about intervention by the Force).

On the whole, it's a strong contributor to the Star Wars universe that makes me want to see it again and see the next one.

Spoiler-Lite Initial Thoughts( Read more... )

M, my coworker, has recently become addicted to Battlestar Galactica and forwarded me this article by Jonah Goldberg, which offers a conservative's eye view of the purported liberal shark-jumping of BSG (with additional references to several other series). I wanted to comment on a few of its points.

( Read more... )