Tag: Disney Star Wars

Disney Star Wars, Legacy, & Snuffing Out the Torch

On By Christopher LansdownIn TV & Movies, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Disney Star Wars is an endlessly fascinating thing not because it is such a colossal failure, but because it was such a predictable colossal failure that managed to be even worse than one would have expected it to be. (If you want to laugh at part of it, consider reading my review of the second film, The Least Jedi.) The aspect of this failure I want to discuss today is the issue that the sequel trilogy intrinsically needed to pass on the torch, and how they snuffed it out instead.

There’s nothing wrong with the idea that the sequel trilogy should have passed on the torch from the original characters, who are now in their sixties and seventies, to the next generation. This was necessary from a purely practical perspective for keeping the franchise going, but the good news for Disney, as far as this goes, is that passing on the torch is an intrinsic human activity. We’re all here only for a while, and then we’re gone, so we’re all eventually replaced. Passing the torch on to the next generation is a very human thing to do and part of our natural lifecycle. Indeed, as we grow older, healthy human beings begin to want to pass the torch on as befits our stage in life. And there’s the rub. Healthy human beings want to do that. Hollywood’s problem is that it’s filled with utterly broken people who wouldn’t know healthy if they were handed a textbook on it.

This is related to the reason Why Moderns Always Modernize Stories. Because, at base, they are will-worshippers, they cannot have real community. The will must be subservient to the intellect in order to have real community, because the intellect is the way one will can communicate with another; intellect is the thing which allows one self to know another, because of the shared reality that neither created. Because the modern worships the will, they can only love what they create, which means that they cannot love other human beings. So they must necessarily be radical individualists, and this makes it impossible for them to engage in the human activity of passing on the torch. In a Nietzschean struggle of will, at most one can win. When human beings pass on the torch, they both win, because both gives up a portion of themselves to the other.

A mentor does not want to make a protege a carbon-copy of himself, but neither does he want his protege to be completely independent. What he wants is to give the best of himself that his protege is capable of accepting to his protege. He wants the protege to accept this and incorporate it into how the protege acts, but not to replace himself, but to build the two together, so that the protege is more than either of the two of them would have been alone. SImilarly, the protege does not want to be a slave to his mentor, but neither does he want to be completely free of his mentor. He wants to honor his mentor, incorporating the best of his mentor into himself. Thus each man, in his turn, is both himself and a summation of those who came before. The past does not dominate the future, nor the future dominate the past, but the two co-operate. This is the way healthy human beings pass on the torch.

Moderns, however, being will-worshippers, can only exist in a war of all-against-all. They cannot love, because that entails giving up a part of themselves to something they didn’t create, which they can only understand as death. This is actually a universal weakness of will-worship; anything which is not imposing one’s will is the same thing as death to the will-worshipper. Thus it is not possible for someone’s work to be completed and it now to be time to pass on the torch. Thus for the modern to understand passing on the torch, the legacy character must be broken and then die. The new character can’t learn from the legacy character because then he would be dominated and, to the degree the teaching worked, killed, by the legacy character. The new character can’t love and wish to honor the legacy character because love is a lie and only the desire to dominate is real. (Hence the modern aphorism, “everything is about sex except for sex, which is about power.”)

So it was inevitable that the sequel trilogy would fail to establish new characters, since they had to be enemies of the beloved legacy characters, and how can you love the people who killed off the legacy characters you love?

Of course, Hollywood knows that it can’t tell passing-the-torch stories, but it does believe it can tell bait-and-switch stories. The idea was something like people nostalgic for the legacy characters would drag children and others who didn’t care about the legacy characters to the theater, who would then love the new characters while not caring about the broken legacy characters who died off. Which is where the sequel trilogy managed to be an even more colossal disaster than one would have predicted. It takes rare skill to make so many completely unlikable new characters.

The Acolyte Episode 7: The Big Reveal

On By Christopher LansdownIn Missing the Mark, YouTube ChannelLeave a comment

In the penultimate episode of Disney’s new show The Acolyte, in theory a “star wars” show, we finally get the big reveal… that the witches were slightly more evil than we were shown in episode 3. Also, the Jedi were telling the truth when they said they thought the planet was uninhabited??? I discuss the morality presented and how this episode that only makes the witches look worse was supposed to make the Jedi look bad.

Disney’s The Acolyte Episode 5

On By Christopher LansdownIn Missing the Mark, Science Fiction, TV & Movies, YouTube ChannelLeave a comment

In this episode we look at the big light saber battle, the reveal of who Mae’s master is, various ideas of what the Jedi aren’t allowed to do in combat and why that misunderstands the nature of honor in combat, and other things.

Other episode reviews:

Why Watch The Acolyte

On By Christopher LansdownIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

I was recently asked by a friend why I watch Disney’s new “Star Wars” show The Acolyte. Owning, as I do, over $1000 work of Mystery Science Theater 3000 DVD box sets, part of it is that I enjoy laughing at bad movies (and movie-like TV shows). That’s a big part of it, though The Acolyte is very slowly paced, which makes it a lot less fun in that way than, say, The Least Jedi.

Another part of it is that there are things you can learn from bad art which you can’t learn from great art. Great art speaks to the human condition; it is universal and therefore transcends its time. Bad art is mired in its own time. Therefore, if you wish to understand a time period, you should look at, not the great art from that time period, but the bad art from it.

And I am curious to try to understand the kind of people who make The Acolyte. There is a sense in which Grand Admiral Thrawn is correct: if you want to understand a people, study their art.

Bad Writing Doesn’t Work With Mystery Plots

On By Christopher LansdownIn Science Fiction, TV & Movies, UncategorizedLeave a comment

For some odd reason I decided to watch Disney’s new show, The Acolyte. I guess all the buzz about how bad it is got me intrigued. And it’s bad, to be sure. It’s not all that fun, though, since it’s very slow. Each episode could have five to ten minutes trimmed from it without removing any plot points, dialog, or important reaction shots. Which is not to say that they wouldn’t benefit considerably from trimming some of that, too. The episodes are about forty minutes long and with decent editing for pace, I think they could easily be twenty five minutes long without feeling rushed. Which would make enjoying the badness a lot more fun.

Anyway, the point I wanted to get to is that The Acolyte is, at its core, a mystery. It’s not detective fiction; it’s more like a suspense thriller—you don’t know who the good guys are or who the main character can trust. Everyone has a story, we only know parts of them, and we don’t know if any of these stories are true.

Now, when this kind of thing is done well, the fun is that you start to figure out who you can trust because there become cracks in the stories of the people you can’t trust. Things they say or do don’t quite fit in and though they have explanations, the explanations don’t quite fit.

Frankly, I think it’s quite rare for this sort of thing to be done well because it’s very hard to pull off. But what really doesn’t work in this genre is having gaping plot holes early on. For example, having a fire break out in the vacuum of space which gets put out by smothering it with a fire extinguisher. Later on, when a stone building catches fire like it’s made of paper soaked in gasoline, you can’t say, “That couldn’t have come from the fire Mae started because there was no way for it to spread so quickly in a stone building. It must have been the Jedi and they used Mae happening to set fire to a book as a cover!” You can’t say this because the idiots who wrote a scene with metal catching fire in the vacuum of space easily might not realize that stone doesn’t catch fire as readily as paper soaked in gasoline. Then again, for all we know, they did and the pointless scene of the metal-on-fire-in-outer-space was meant to prepare us to accept stone catching fire.

I think that the way you’re supposed to watch this kind of show (that is, what the makers of it hope you will do) is to turn off the rational part of your brain and just feel whatever the music and acting is telling you to feel in the moment with no reference to having seen anything before. Which really doesn’t fit into the suspense thriller genre, in which the primary pleasure (outside of the frequent action scenes, which The Acolyte is sparse on) is intellectual.

This also makes guessing the identity of the sith master (or whatever he’s supposed to be that’s t he obvious equivalent of the sith) no fun. My best guesses—based on the psychology of the writers so far, not the plot—is either master Vernestra, mother Kora, mother Aniseya, or someone we haven’t met yet. I think that the fourth episode is trying to set us up to believe it’s Qimir (the character that Critical Drinker refers to as “discount Ezra Miller”), which means that it’s almost certainly not him because it’s too early for it to be him. Now, in a well-written show, you could consider various bits of evidence presented within the episodes. In this show, that would be a waste of time because anything that you see could easily just be the writers being incompetent. And even my guesses about who the sith is are based on the assumption that a character being in the same scene as the sith means that they definitely can’t be the sith. For all I know, that’s not true and master Sol or Yorg is the sith.

This is one thing that, for all its flaws, I have to give The Last Jedi. Rian Johnson never wrote anything that depended on you remembering anything else he wrote or thinking that it made sense.