A valid criticism. Coming from the mouth of something trying to replace it with something worse. A classic villain move.
I did enjoy the old EU Luke being a more reformist and grounded iteration of Jedi teachings. He started by rejecting Yoda’s warnings not to try and save his friends. He put friends over the high minded ideals of Jedi enlightenment right there in Empire Strikes Back. Then in ROTJ he spent the entire movie rejecting the obvious approach of simply killing Vader, instead trying to reach Anakin. Over and over Luke put people he cared about over esoteric codes.
(Remember when the original trilogy and much of the EU establishing Luke was written, the prequels and Clone Wars hadn’t been fleshed out, and Jedi were implied to be even more high minded and classical than they were shown in the prequels).
I’m convinced that Count Dooku was a character quickly shoehorned in as a villain when the filmmakers got pushback from execs for having Jar Jar Binks as the actual Sith Lord (with Palpatine merely being the Apprentice).
What execs? The Prequels are basically the highest budget indie film project ever. Lucas had total financial and creative control.
Not execs, read the OP. The theory is GL got scared of fan reactions to jarjar so he didn’t want to make jarjar that central.
Don’t quote the old magic to me @hyperhopper, I was there when it was written.
It’s a fun fan theory, up there with Chewie/R2 being secret leaders of the rebellion and pre-prequel theories about “what actually are the clone wars”, but it relies on George Lucas being incredibly subtle in a trilogy where every other metaphor is written on giant billboards with spotlights on them. I mean the whole thing is a setup to “Jar Jar is Snoke”.
There were similar rumors that Lucas had the entire sequel/prequel trilogies planned out at the end of RotJ from the mid 80s until the prequels came out. Down to the EU books/comics (which he famously doesn’t care about) being Lucas’ plan all along. It was just “the man” keeping him from making the movies. That the man didn’t stop him making the original Star Wars before he was an extremely famous extremely wealthy movie maker was handwaved away.
It’s the fun logic hoop fan version of “No Trump/Musk is actually playing 7D chess! What he actually meant was…”
To me, the scene that most defined what the Jedi order had become and why it needed to end was at the big fight scene at the end of Attack of the Clones where Yoda and Dooku were dueling. When Dooku pulled a pillar down with the Force and then Yoda used the Force to catch it to prevent it from falling on to Obi-wan. He then made a spectacle of it by spinning it around before throwing it back at Dooku. What he should have done was just use the Force to move Obi-wan and Anakin to a safe position and continued to pursue Dooku. That scene just demonstrated how full of himself Yoda had become. And it took until his duel with Palpatine before he realized that he was a large part of what had gone wrong with the Jedi order. I also always felt that he intentionally withheld a lot of information about the Jedi order from Luke in order to prevent him from rebuilding a similar system.
I have a really hard time separating a character’s decisions and the director/cinematographer decisions
Like, did Yoda do that or did someone decide he would do that because test audiences thought it looked cooler (or something like that). I hope I conveyed that properly
Aren’t the director’s decisions basically the same as the character’s? I mean, they’re fictional so the only insight into their character is what we’re shown by the media (i.e. the director’s choices).
Sure, but it’s one thing to think “Yoda was full of himself” and another to think “director wanted a cool looking fight”. They’re basically saying you shouldn’t analyze the thing too much because there wasn’t THAT much thought put into it. Not every move had the character’s thoughts and feelings taken into consideration.
High acceleration has… undesirable effects, let’s say, on a sack of meat and bones. “Space magic”, sure, but I’d argue that in a high-stress situation like the middle of a fight it’d be a lot less risky to move the pillar. If you fuck up calculating how much force (lol) to use, you might end up with Obi-Was instead.
I don’t remember the scene exactly. But it might be that the pillar was falling fast enough that he couldn’t move them (or it would be risky). Moving the pillar was way safer.
“You know what would be really interesting to do? Don’t denounce me as a Stalinist but, for example – it’s my old temptation – to rewrote Star Wars… presenting Palpatine and Darth Vader as good progressive egalitarian centralist fighting reactionary feudalist, all the Jedi bullshit. It would tell a completely different story, from the others point. What do they [Jedi] stand for? All that, ‘Republic’, what strange of Republic is when you have a Princess Leila, knights, kings and so on? No, Palpatine the Emperor and Darth Vader, they are - my god - progressive Bonapartist revolutionaries trying to get rid of the old world.”
From: Žižek on Reshooting Star Wars https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_DroaGggbc
But tbh I think that if we take the original trilogy, the Rebels are cleary fighting a reactionary imperialist power, ie. an analogy to the Vietnam war
As ive grown older i find myself disagreeing more and more with the jedi whom as a child i idolised as paragons of good. But palpatine, vader, and the empire are so many things before being “poor good revolutionaries” trying to take down the status quo simply from the good of their golden hearts. Theres always more than 2 choices people :)
But tbh I think that if we take the original trilogy, the Rebels are cleary fighting a reactionary imperialist power, ie. an analogy to the Vietnam war
Lucas was very explicit that this was always the intent. It’s not reallt subtle honestly, asymmetric jungle freedom fighters fighting wealthy imperialist?
Agreed but I did sometimes wonder what the ideal galaxy would look like to the rebels? Obviously it’s a fictional world, and they wouldn’t all hypothetically agree anyway, but would it be regressive or progressive?
Disclaimer: I don’t know a lot about Star wars
I think the pre-sequel shows have done a great job of showing the New Republic as a feckless liberal state too afraid to make any actual change. They are too distracted with trying to distance themselves from the Empire with incomprehensible amounts of bureaucracy and trying to reform Imperial Agents. The New Republic is so wrapped up with appearing to be the good guys that they neglect the citizens of the galaxy amd just let everything rot.
The Sith and the Empire didn’t help anyone either though, they made existence considerably worse for everyone other than a select few. They weren’t saviours or good guys, they were evil despots who sought to use lies to overthrow the existing power structure so they could fill the void with their totalitarianism.
What this meme is pointing out though is that they didn’t just use lies to overthrow the existing power structure, they also used truths.
Any complex truth can be twisted when it is overly simplified and points are selectively chosen to support the bigger lie.
