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willidleaway · 5 years

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Star Wars, episode 9

In short: Without spoiling anything, remember how I was on about how Episode VIII was a good movie, a mediocre one, and a bad one fighting for space to each other’s detriment? And remember how this (I thought) left Episode IX with way more to bite off than it could chew?

Well, probably not, but it seems I had reason to worry. Episode IX is full of droids and spaceships and fights and explosions, but it also feels simultaneously empty and overstuffed. The plot isn’t stretched nearly as thin across so many parallel subplots as was the case with Episode VIII, but it’s still got two to three movies’ worth of story squeezed together into something resembling a supercut with just the essentials, and part of the problem seems to be it's more of a sequel to Episode VII than it is to Episode VIII.

So even though it competently hits familiar beats for fans of the original trilogy, and even though many people will like it well enough for that, it feels regressive and conservative and lazy. Good actors are wasted. Good characters are underused. Noise and nostalgia take precedence over sensible storytelling. It warrants more disappointment than anger, but maybe not a non-zero amount of anger, and it worries me about the future of Star Wars movies.

Spoiler-filled breakdown behind the Read More break.

In less short: OK, so let’s review where we were when Episode VIII ended:

Kylo Ren has killed Snoke and become Supreme Leader, with nobody to dictate his actions. Cool.

Rey’s parents are nobody and we shouldn’t be fussing about her heritage as if heroes always have chosen status or weird bloodlines. Cool.

The Resistance are basically now a ragtag crew that fits in a light freighter, with no allies to come to their rescue. ... This is a bit of a difficult spot to get out of.

Within the first 30 minutes of so, Episode IX sets it up so that:

Not only is Snoke not dead, but it turns out he was Sheev all along, and he’s still going to dictate Kylo Ren’s actions. Oh.

The Resistance is magically where it was at the end of Episode VII. Oh.

Then a bit further in—maybe an hour or so?—it turns out Rey has some kind of weird bloodline after all, namely Palpatine’s. Oh.

Palpatine being Snoke is annoying because Palpatine’s supposed to be dead and Snoke’s supposed to be dead, and when you have a long-dead Sith Lord that turns out to have been pretending to be a recently dead Supreme Leader, it seems reasonable enough to demand an explanation—none is given, of course.

The Resistance being magically reverted to its Episode VII state is understandable given the need to have Carrie Fisher in the movie through unused footage from that movie, but in view of all of the other retcons of Episode VIII, one can’t help but give this a bit of side-eye as well.

The retcon of Rey’s heritage is the real tell that

this is trying to be half of the trilogy all at once, which is a problem because it’s supposed to be the third act;

and in the process it’s also trying to erase a lot of the actual Episode VIII, which is a problem because it’s canon.

The thing is, much of what happens in the sequels could fit sensibly into three films with just a bit more work. Keep VII mostly as is; for VIII, trim the pointless safecracking subplot and the misguided mutiny subplot (and ideally replace them with a single subplot that keeps Poe and Finn in the same madness), and extend to include the reveal that Snoke was Palpatine and that Rey is his granddaughter; and then this leaves IX with enough breathing room to actually flesh out the implications of those reveals, the Force dyad, and so on, before moving on to the action of tracking down the Sith dagger and everything that ensues from there.

Of course, then it would follow exactly the beats of the original trilogy. Episode V ends with a big family reveal, and Episode VI then spends time dealing with the implications and reconciling the reveal with what was previously stated. But the sequels have been in such lockstep with the original trilogy that frankly I’m surprised that’s not what they went for to begin with.

Yet it makes sense when you take into account the completely on-the-fly plotting that the sequels have obviously been subjected to. VIII basically tore down some of the most delicious set pieces of VII—the mystery behind Rey’s identity, the presence of Snoke as Kylo Ren’s puppetmaster—and IX is basically tearing down that tearing-down. I know JJ Abrams wasn’t wholly responsible for the story of Episode IX, but it does feel quite a bit like he’s going ‘oh god no, that’s not what you were supposed to do with that from my movie! or that! or that! this is what you were supposed to do!’ and trying to build the house of cards back up. He’s not got enough time to do it right in two hours and a bit, and he knows it, but gosh darn it he’s still going to try. And maybe at some point he gets frustrated and yells ‘okay, Snoke was supposed to be a puppet of Palpatine, all right? just—just start the movie with that, it’ll be fine, because I don’t know how to even make that work with the carnage that Rian left behind’. So then facts are rapidly established and moved on from, because we’ve got a lot of ground to cover—mainly a lot of ground from VIII, to cover up.

It’s funny how the themes of these movies are supposed to be progressive—VIII was all about moving forward from failure and fear and despair, IX about recognising you are not alone and facing the problems of the world with that knowledge—and yet the plotting of these movies are continually regressive, retreating to ground already trodden to death by the original trilogy (both figuratively and, in the case of JJ’s films, literally—Death Star II, Endor, ...), and in many cases retreating within itself. A regressive strategy may work for prequels—after all things must gravitate towards the ground truth laid down by the originals—but it doesn’t work quite as well for sequels.

That’s really the key thing I wanted to say—IX feels insular, like it came from a parallel universe with a completely different JJ-led VIII and only realises it about ten minutes of the way in, and it feels a bit lazy falling back on clichés that VIII tried to explicitly preclude. But I do have some more specific thoughts on a few characters.

Rose: So, there was a lot of media buzz when VIII came out about Rose because ooh look she’s the first Asian woman to get any kind of significant screen time in a Star Wars movie isn’t that nice. And then there was a lot of racist and sexist abuse thrown at Kelly Marie Tran and that’s not very nice at all. And Rose’s character arc in VIII unfortunately overall turned out a bit lacklustre frankly so that’s just a bit mediocre. So clearly, given that Rose has been held up as this point of diversity in an otherwise not-terribly-intersectionality-friendly universe, we want to maybe shore this up a bit, right? Make sure that if Star Wars is going to have an Asian woman, that she’s going to be really prominent as things start going down in this last movie?

Erm, no. We’re just leaving her at the Resistance base to do tech things. Oh, we’ll bring her back out for the final battle, sure, and she’ll be part of the ground invasion, but for most of the movie you’ll barely realise that this was almost a major character in the last movie. The droids will have more agency and screen time than her.

Good choice, lads.

Hux and Pryde: VII wasted Max von Sydow, VII and VIII mostly wasted Gwendoline Christie, and now behold: the whole sequel trilogy wasted Domhnall Gleeson.

As demonstrated by performances in films like Brooklyn and Ex Machina, Domhnall Gleeson is actually an excellent actor, not merely competent. Yet in these movies, he doesn’t seem to have actually been given a role, only a caricature of one and a set of gags. First, he’s supposed to be a sort of perpetual rival to Kylo Ren—very mad, but very competent. Then, he’s basically openly laughed at by the Resistance and entirely subdominant to Kylo Ren. But finally in this movie, the writers remembered he’s supposed to be a peer, and makes him a mole out of spite against Kylo Ren, but basically absolutely nobody involved can take this seriously because of course it’s ridiculous.

To be honest, I don’t see how they could have ever made a rival to Kylo work. Here’s a more compelling idea. How about this: a former Imperial officer, high enough in rank to occasionally report directly to the Emperor himself, obviously loses all of his power and prestige with the end of the Empire. But then the First Order rises up, and he somehow gets to head the First Order’s military forces—but has to report to this upstart, this Kylo Ren. It disgusts him to have to report to this undignified hull-tearing snot nose, but he does it because he knows that behind the mask of Snoke is the Emperor, having cheated death, and through his devotion and the devotion of many others, the Emperor will rise again and—Kylo Ren or no Kylo Ren—reclaim what is rightfully his!

Oh right that’d basically have been General Pryde if they’d thought of him back when they were making Episode VII.

And of course, Richard E Grant—star of Withnail and I, of Can You Ever Forgive Me?, and of many fascinating Doctor Who stories of various canonicity—is in this role, and good god that’s even more of a tragic waste because of what General Pryde could have been if they’d actually plotted out a proper trilogy and realised that someone like Pryde would have worked a lot better than someone like Hux as right-hand man to the main villain.

Still nowhere near as wasted as Gwendoline Christie, mind.

Jannah: Yeah, Jannah and her company are all right. I just mention her because I am so glad that we didn’t get another Mickey Smith and Martha Jones situation where the black people just got coupled up at the last minute. Just thought I’d mention that.

Poe/Finn: Look, it’s like Kirk/Spock, okay? All the subtext is there, and it’s just a matter of you reading between the lines. How you read between the lines is entirely up to you—I argue there is a place for deep platonic relationships as much as romantic relationships, homo- or hetero-gender (although there may be a personal bias involved here).

But let me just say this: in the original trilogy, you had a young Jedi trainee and a pilot and his rescuee, with the latter two having this bickering old married couple dynamic. Those two are absolutely an item by the end of the trilogy, as in they have their big rotten kiss at the end of VI. (Possibly at other points too. I couldn’t possibly tell you.)

In this sequel trilogy, you have a young Jedi trainee and a pilot and his rescuee, with the latter two having this bickering old married couple dynamic. So where’s my Poe/Finn kiss at the end of IX?

As I say, though, it’s like Kirk/Spock, and like Kirk/Spock, it’s such brilliant chemistry that you can always rely on fan fiction to compensate for the cowardice of the canon writers. But it’d have been nice to have some level of canon validation.

Kylo and Rey: Yeah, speaking of big rotten kisses ... That is not the kiss I wanted at the end of IX. You didn’t have Luke kissing Anakin at the end of VI, did you?

That’s my main complaint, really, and otherwise I still think Adam from Girls (I’m sorry that’s just how I think of Adam Driver for some reason??? even though I’ve never even seen Girls???) looks a bit goofy at times. But Kylo and Rey’s arc felt like one where they were equals (possibly the bloodline reveal helps a bit there), they worked together well, it had a reasonable conclusion, etc. The Force bond thing is still creepy, and still a bit weird in how you can pass matter back and forth, but I suppose it was established in VIII, and I happen to think the way it was used in this movie on Exegol was actually pretty brilliant.

The droids: You thought I was going to talk about C-3PO, but it was he, D-O!

Sorry, couldn’t resist. Overall, I'm still not entirely cleared up on what happened with the droids, actually. It seemed like there was just this whole roundabout subplot around Threepio only to return everything to status quo, and maybe D-O had some information they could probably have used to begin with???

Other miscellaneous thoughts:

How much study in the Living Force does it take to do the becoming-one-with-the-Force thing, anyway? We see that Leia and Ben both vanish into nothing after death, and Leia definitely is a Force ghost confirmed at the end. But I thought season 6 of TCW made it pretty clear that this required a lot of training and study, which is why Qui-Gon was training Yoda so that he could then presumably train Obi-Wan (as the end of III suggests) in the art of immortality. To be fair Anakin never was trained in this, but given that he’s the Chosen One, I think he gets a bit of slack on what Force powers he can use. Luke and Leia were never trained on screen, of course, but Luke had years to read all the sacred Jedi texts, and he knows Force Telepresence (still can’t be bothered to find the actual name of that), so I figure he’s a very good autodidact, and likely trained Leia at some point as well as a Force ghost. So where does that leave Ben? I don’t know, maybe the Force ghosting thing is just a thing that runs in the Skywalker bloodline.

‘The dead speak!’ is the goofiest way to open a crawl since ‘War!’ from Episode III. Another reason the Palpatine reveal should have just been towards the end of Episode IX.

Trebuchet jetpack troopers? Really? Was that meant to be threatening, hilarious, or both? Because I only found it hilarious.

Also oh hi Wedge. Also oh hi Hayden Christensen’s voice. God I wish they’d had his actual visual Force ghost alongside Luke and Leia.

Did ... did Maz do anything other than basically be at the base and then give Chewie a medal because har har we love making references to the original movies? No? ... What a waste of Lupita Nyong’o, then.

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devilofmidtownwest · 7 years

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Just sending in my thoughts on the show, not trying to start any arguments. So I actually found iron fist really enjoyable. I know it wasn't perfect and maybe I just found it better because I needed my superhero fix, but I am surprised to see how much hate it gets. I still think it was the worst out of all of the other Netflix marvel shows but I didn't think it was that bad. What are your main reasons for hating it?

I’m glad some people are coming forward and saying they liked it! I generally wish the Marvel Netflix universe well. I really wanted to like Iron Fist. I had some faith that, based on how well they did the other shows, they would handle some pretty dated and racist material and give it a real update to reflect modern sensibilities, but alas, no.

(1) Iron Fist follows the “white savior” trope to the fullest extent. Danny Rand goes Asia, then a magical kingdom in a magical Asian dimension, and not only becomes a fighter, but becomes THE BEST fighter, better than all of the natives. And then he literally STEALS a superpower from their tradition (the show implies pretty heavily that he was not supposed to be the Iron Fist) and uses it to beat them up. That’s hardcore “white people are better than Asians, even at Asian stuff” right there.

(2) Danny Rand claimed to be a Buddhist monk but he knew literally nothing about Buddhism. I don’t think anything he said was actually Buddhist. In fact, many things he said were contrary to Buddhist teachings. (And he pronounced “Om Mani Padme Hung” really wrong) The writers did absolutely no research on Buddhism - oranges don’t represent forgiveness, and Buddhist monks can’t even wear green. They also can’t fight people in anger, but you know, you’re going to have some of that with a kung fu show.

(3) Speaking of kung fu, the fight choreography was really, really bad. I would have been less annoyed by it if the Marvel Netflix hadn’t specifically made a name for themselves with their outstanding fight choreography. The actor playing Danny Rand was clearly not up to the task and/or given enough prep time, and they couldn’t rely on a stunt double because his face was uncovered, so it was pretty easy to tell that just about everyone he was fighting - many of whom were chosen for their roles for their martial arts skills - was better than him. And this is specifically Iron Fist’s thing, being a kung fu master. It’s what he was sold as in the comics; it’s part of his charm. It’s kinda like not making Luke Cage strong or bulletproof?

(4) The total conflation of Asian cultures. Colleen Wing, a Chinese woman, placed by a Chinese actress, wielding a Japanese sword and raised by the Hand, who adhere to a very vague Japanese honor code, but the Hand (at least the people that Danny visited on that campus) doesn’t seem to contain many Japanese people. Even the other scripted Asian, Davos, wasn’t played by an Asian guy. The showrunners just took whatever they wanted from wherever they wanted to make their script go, without paying any attention to the cultural sensitivities of that part of the world, which is why I can’t even get my Asian-American fans to watch it. Like they have seen every other Marvel show and movie and they are just skipping right over this one.

(5) Oh, and having an old Chinese woman as a tea-drinking opium dealer is pretty racist, too. But I like Madame Gao so much I’m willing to forgive. Except for that scene in Daredevil where she was ALSO running a laundromat, painting cherry blossoms, because someone was just ticking off racist boxes?

(6) The non-mystical part of the plot was super duper boring. It’s not hard to make problems of the 1% (as Iron Fist was pitched in certain promotions) interesting; people do it all the time. Americans love to see rich people get taken down a peg and we love office dramas. But G-ddamn did I not care who was running Rand Industries. Danny was super obsessed with it because either the plot demanded it or he wanted to be super rich, which is not exactly a lovable character trait. He associated his dad with a company that makes dangerous chemicals? Doesn’t sound like he and his dad had much of a relationship. Seeing him act like a totally unqualified CEO who doesn’t know anything about his own business was kind of fun, but most of it was about stakeholding and shares and company protocol and didn’t make a whole lot of sense. I found it hard to care about a guy who is offered 25 million dollars to go away and thinks it’s nobler to stick around to try and get more money. I’ve never been offered 25 million dollars to sit around and do nothing. I would very much like to be offered ANY amount of money to sit around and do nothing. It made Danny act like a whiny, greedy asshole, which I could understand if he had just come out of a monastery and got really seduced by the material pleasures of life (which happens to a LOT of ex-monks), but he was just right out of the gate, “This company is mine and I want it.”

(7) Danny was a creepy stalker who should have left Colleen alone. Walking in with dinner? Buying her building? Do you know how freaked out I would be if this guy I couldn’t get rid of was now my landlord? Because I would be VERY freaked out. I would probably get a restraining order. But then we learn that, contrary to the way she’s been acting, she’s cozying up to him because of the Hand? Maybe? I’m super confused but that doesn’t make him any less creepy.

(8) There are very specific laws about 72-hour holds and how psychiatrists operate. Considering not one but two characters’ fortunes hinged on it, you would have thought somebody would have looked this stuff up.

(9) Holy shit, the Hand has a cure to opium addiction? Dude Ward you make pharmaceuticals!?! How is this never mentioned again?

(10) The acting was not spectacular. Most of the main characters were having a trouble holding down their British/Kiwi accents, which kind of made them sound like they were from nowhere. Certainly not New York. It wasn’t so much of a problem until real actors showed up, like Rosario Dawson or Carrie Fisher Anne Moss, and you were like, “Oh, that’s how you sell a ridiculous line.” I actually didn’t enjoy Claire too much because she really outshone her co-stars, and her “why the fuck are we doing this stupid plan” question didn’t get answered.

(11) This whole show seemed very much like a rush job. A lot of care and devotion went into the previous shows. You could tell that the showrunners were deeply versed not only in the mythology of the shows but also some parts of them were visual masterpieces with their use of color and framing to resemble comic panels. They had plotlines that developed and ended. Characters grew. They had a reason for being there. You could tell what they were about and where they were going. Iron Fist was a visually uninteresting show that spent 13 hours setting up the Hand plotline in the Defenders, a plotline that already ruined the second half of Daredevil season 2. It wasn’t a show about the Iron Fist. We didn’t learn what the Iron Fist was, or what he was supposed to do, or why he wasn’t doing it. He didn’t seem to know himself, but the fact that he became the Iron Fist without knowing what the hell the Iron Fist is supposed to do wasn’t a plot that was explored, even though it could have been a really interesting one. He just told everyone what he was over and over again, as if somebody in the room forgot, and never supplied any explanation because he didn’t seem to have any information. This is not mythology building. This is just killing time until the plot comes along.

(12) Oh yeah, and Danny struck a black kid and called him a monkey. Let’s not forget that shit.

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