“meh” is most certainly welcome here!
Does this apply to MCU movies as well?
An important difference is that Star Wars hasn’t had any equivalent to Black Panther, Thor: Ragnorok, or Captain Marvel, much less a Deadpool or a Logan (Marvel, but not the same “universe”, I think?). And it’s certainly never had a Dark Knight. Whereas filmmakers are using comic books to tell serious, trenchant, and compelling stories, Star Wars is only ever going to be the silly nonsense Rod is describing.
-Tom
I don’t think you could do a Thor: Ragnarock, Deadpool, or Logan in a Star Wars movie without a significant portion of the toxic part of the fan base going apoplectic that it’s not the Star Wars spirit or some crap like that. Given the hate for Daisy Ridley’s character because of her gender, I assume that there will be no forthcoming equivalent of Black Panther in the Star Wars universe.
The comic book movies have also benefited from having comic books where these kinds of story lines have happened with these characters already. I honestly don’t know if the Star Wars comics and novels had those kind of darker or more comedic or more mature content. By mature I mean content that might not be appealing or appropriate to kids but would be appealing and appropriate for adults.
I’m not trying to call out Star Wars as immature. I’m just trying to think through why comic book movies have been able to offer at least a slightly more diverse range of movies and characters than the Star Wars franchise has.
Edit: I want to go on the record as saying I have enjoyed the new Star Wars movies. With the exception of Solo.
https://www.amazon.com/Death-Troopers-Star-Wars-Legends/dp/0345520815
But you’re absolutely right. I just like the idea that there’s a Star Wars book about a Star Destroyer overrun by zombie stormtroopers!
They’ve had a longer, freer, and much richer history. Star Wars has been an IP under the stranglehold of more restrictive (protective?) corporate entities since it was born. Comic books had room to breathe and develop underground for a long time. And there’s also no real unifying tone for comic books, which allows for stuff like Deadpool, Thor: Ragnorak, Logan, and so on. Star Wars was always just an earnest space opera and not much else.
Ha ha, you saw Solo!
-Tom
In movie sphere perhaps (and I don’t mind, I grew up with it and love the world even if it is a fairly tale), but Knights of the Old Republic 2 is more impressive naratively than those Marvel offerings.
Both Kotors felt like running around in very small theme parks. I couldn’t really get into them. The weapons felt like something by Nerf too.
As for the movies, I only really liked the OT. The prequels had some good casting (Ewan McGregor!) and some bad casting (Hayden Christensen), and were all over the place with everything else. The sequels have stronger casting, but the cast doesn’t really do much to advance the story. We know very little about the characters, and they seem like bystanders to the events around them [ed. more than] half the time. Also, I’m angry they turned Luke into a clown solely for comedic effect. Not sure I will see Ep IX.
This is like an “Anonymous” meeting.
Hi Rod. My name is Navaronegun, and I haven’t liked Star Wars since the Prequels gave me many great naptimes in a theater, but got chamoked by peer pressure (spousal) into seeing two awful toy ads made by a nostalgia merchant hack with a lens flare fetish and a crazy person who can’t write coherently films of this new run that I found to be a waste of my time. I just don’t really care. I look for new horizons and new things for my sci fi fare. I’m happy.
Yes.
X-Wing Alliance and maybe the Thrawn novels were the last things Star Wars I liked.
[ed]
Forgot about Rogue One. It was excellent until they started attacking that Sandals resort tropical planet.
My Dad watched the original trilogy in the theaters and fell in love with the movies. He wanted to share that with my brother and I and waited until we were old enough to watch them all together (on VHS tapes). I have a vivid memory of watching Empire Strikes Back, and pausing it to eat dinner and I made a comment that the Sheppard’s Pie we were eating looked like the guts of a Tuantaun.
My brother and I fell in love with the original trilogy too. It really captured my imagination as a child and I found what books I could to continue immersing myself in all of it. Sure it’s magic in space and rather simplistic, but that is fine. I now think of it as a fairytale for the modern world. A retelling of old pulp fiction tropes bundled into a really fun adventure.
When the prequels came out we were all excited to renew our father son bonding moments; this time in the actual cinema. They were kind of fun and we had the post-movie excitement and glow for about an hour. Then when eating dinner after each viewing and discussing them you could sense the gradual feeling of disappointment seeping into the edges of our conversation as the initial rush faded away. The Prequels kind of dispelled some of the magic that existed in our family’s fandom.
We still keep the tradition of watching new Star Wars movies together, father and sons, in the theater through all of the sequels released to date. We still enjoy them, but I think have become fatigued with it all. Disney has oversaturated the market by releasing so many movies in a short time frame. That oversaturation along with the poor writing of the prequels has really stripped away all of the mystery and suspension of disbelief for us. Boba Fett was cooler when he never took off his helmet and a young boy could run wild with his imagination of what was underneath. The Force was cooler and fascinating before midichlorians and Leia flying through space like Superman.
Star Wars was cooler as a kid when I was desperately pining for other sources and was mostly left unsatisfied with the lack of options.
The oversaturation has mostly killed my interest in Star Wars. My son also has not picked up any interest in it besides a peripheral one in some characters like BB-8.
I also couldn’t give a shit about MCU and the explosion of bland paint-by-numbers superhero movies that dominate the box office of late.
Speaking of the over-saturation…
Ugh. Headline clickbait site Express/co/uk. I hate that their clickbait stuff works so well, they get so many views.
Sorry to resurrect this old thread. My girlfriend has never seen any of the films before, so I convinced her to start watching them a couple of nights ago. We began (of course) with A New Hope, and it’s odd to notice now how unrelentingly white and male the cast is. (Odd because I never noticed it before.) The briefing scenes in the hanger look like a white power meeting. Even in ESB, Billy Dee Williams really is the token black character. There aren’t any other non-white (or non-male) humans even in the background or piloting speeders during the assault on Hoth.
I mean, it was the '70s. Casting a Black man as a voice in a non-“Black” movie was downright progressive.*
* please don’t murder me, people who know things about cinema history
This is one of the things I appreciated about The Expanse books, and to a lesser extent the show. If you genuinely have a representative Earth government, and if demographics stay approximately the same, then about half of the Earth politicians and admirals in your show should be from somewhere in South East Asia. Or put another way, you’d expect 1-2% of your characters to be white males from North America.
* I like this new trend of ending posts with a brown star, like writing ‘Fin’, to indicate that you have reached the end of the comment.
But Star Wars wasn’t Earth. It was a galaxy far, far away!
Excellent point.
*
Though he didn’t actually get credited with the voiceover work until RotJ (by his own choice.)