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Tag Archives: Star Wars
In its Debut, Star Wars: The Bad Batch Decides Whether to Obey or Rebel
From the beginning, Star Wars’ iconography featured the motley, earth tone-draped freedom fighters of the Rebellion against the pristine, black-and-white perfection of the Empire. Before the audience ever knew the details of the conflict at hand, this imagery told us everything. The rigid, overpowering force of the film’s Imperial villains contrasted with the shaggier, freethinking rebels who dared to oppose them.
Star Wars: The Bad Batch follows in those vaunted footsteps. The series — from Star Wars animation impresario Dave Filoni, head writer Jennifer Corbett, and supervising director Brad Rau — frames itself as a contrast between the wilds of personal choice and the strictures of mandated conformity. As the Empire emerges from the ashes of its predecessor, those who fought for the Republic must decide what their place will be in this new galactic order. Will they stay good soldiers or become free but wanted men?
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Is Both Too Much and Not Enough
[CAUTION: This review contains MAJOR SPOILERS for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker]
The Rise of Skywalker never stops. From minute one, it is utterly relentless, bringing back major characters, leaping across time and space, and blowing through plot point after plot point at breakneck speed. Lucasfilm head Kathleen Kennedy recently speculated that if director J.J. Abrams had known he would be spearheading this final installment back when he originally signed on for The Force Awakens, he would have saddled up and directed the whole damn trilogy. The Rise of Skywalker bears that out, if only because it feels like Abrams tried to cram two movies into one here.
Attack of the Clones Is Like its Protagonist: Rife with Potential But Deeply Flawed
The strange thing about Attack of the Clones is that there’s the ghost of a better movie within it. Its script is atrocious, and the visuals all but sink the film as its scenes grow progressively uglier. But buried within that mess is a noble effort to cultivate the root causes of Anakin’s turn, a solid mystery adventure for “Obi Wan Kenobi: Space Detective”, and even a minor bit of political intrigue. Its weaknesses far outnumber its strengths, but the best thing you can say about Episode II is that in different hands, or under different circumstances, it could have been great.
The Star Wars Holiday Special Should Never Be Forgotten
While the debates among the Star Wars faithful rage on — about how each film should be ranked, which events are canon, or who shot whom and when — one simple truth remains. However high its highs, however great its triumphs, a franchise as long-lived and wide-ranging as Star Wars will inevitably produce a serious amount of utter crap.
Posted in Movies, Sci-Fi Movies
Tagged George Lucas, Holiday Season, Movie Reviews, Star Wars
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Solo: A Star Wars Story Is a Blast as an Adventure Flick, and a Chore as a Character Study
Solo has the scruffy confidence to be its own film. Of the ten Star Wars movies released so far, it’s the only one that doesn’t directly tie into the events of the main saga. That alone makes it interesting and laudable as the first real silver screen step of Star Wars ceasing to be a series and starting to be a “cinematic universe.”
Posted in Movies, Sci-Fi Movies
Tagged Film Reviews, Han Solo, Lando Calrissian, Ron Howard, Star Wars, Star Wars Anthology Films
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Star Wars Rebels Chooses Not to Remake the Past in “A World Between Worlds”
I’m always suspicious of time travel stories. Too often, they open up a big can of worms that even great T.V. shows can’t reseal. They tend to either involve paradoxes and bits of convenience that we just have to accept as part of the time-bending shenanigans. But most of all, they create problems for both plot and drama.
If you can just go back and change some explosive event in the past, why not travel back even further to a more boring one that lets you avoid the conflict altogether? And more to the point, why do any of your actions matter if they can simply be undone down the line? Time travel risks breaking your universe and weakening your ability to tell meaningful stories.
So I was worried, naturally, when Star Wars Rebels introduced what amounts to time travel in “A World Between Worlds”, thereby allowing the show to revisit two of its most heightened and dramatic moments. It’s a choice that connects this series with the past, present, and future of the Star Wars franchise, while also creating the opportunity to rewrite these major events in the show’s own history. But fraught though these time-tampering opportunities may be, Rebels approaches them in a way that is not only satisfying in terms of mechanics and continuity, but which exists as an episode-length rejoinder to the idea of “let’s just fix the past” that’s otherwise inextricably a part of the DNA of time travel stories
Star Wars: The Last Jedi Is About Making Mistakes, But the Trip to the Casino Planet Isn’t One of Them
Even viewers who loved The Last Jedi tend to point to its trip to Canto Bight — the luxurious planet full of well-heeled gamblers and wealthy libertines — as a misstep. It’s been decried as pointless, indulgent, and ultimately inessential to the other major events of Episode VIII.
But while not the strongest element of The Last Jedi, that sojourn to the casino planet is vital to Finn’s arc, to the animating ideas at the center of the film, and to the movie’s parting shot, in a way that fully justifies its inclusion in the movie, even one already pushing a 2 ½ hour runtime.
Star Wars: The Last Jedi Embraces the Past, Instead of Discarding It
CAUTION: This Review Contains Major Spoilers for Star Wars: The Last Jedi
Throw away the past. The rap on 2015’s The Force Awakens, the film that revived Star Wars for a new generation, was that it was too derivative, too indebted to A New Hope, too bound to the blueprint that had launched the series. There was a sense that in its second outing, this new incarnation of Star Wars needed to break new ground, that having established this new setting, these new characters, and its new conflicts and mysteries, it was time to break from what had come before.
Hope in the Shadow of the Empire: Star Wars and the Jewish Identity
Star Wars has always drawn a connection between the Empire and the Nazis. From the very beginning, the franchise presented images of Grand Moff Tarkin and his officers, replete with enforcers dubbed “stormtroopers,” wearing uniforms that likened them to the men who served Hitler. It’s a visual choice that’s meant to tell the audience who the Empire is at a single glance, without needing to unpack the details that the franchise would explore in the ensuing decades.
Posted in Other Animated Shows, Television
Tagged Episode Reviews, Judaism, Star Wars, Star Wars Rebels
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Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith Is Just The Room in Space
This December can boast the release of a pair of films from two very different franchises. The first is Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the inescapable cinematic behemoth set to capitalize on the new, Disney-fueled era of Star Wars. It’s primed to tell the next chapter of the new trilogy that began with 2015’s The Force Awakens. The second is The Disaster Artist, a movie, based on a book, based on the making of another movie. That other movie is The Room, a transcendently bad, gloriously inept film that is the modern challenger for the title of “The Worst Movie of All Time.”
And on the surface, Star Wars and The Room have nothing in common. One is set in a distant galaxy, and the other is set in San Francisco (and not even the futuristic sci-fi version of the city from Star Trek). One features magical warrior monks doing battle with laser swords, and the other features (comparatively) average people, mostly tossing footballs at one another. Star Wars shows off imaginative new technologies on a cinematic scale, and The Room includes someone secretly recording their fiancée with a Nixon-era tape recorder.
But look past those surface-level differences, draw down to the core elements of each franchise’s installments, and you’ll discover something shocking — Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith is just The Room in space. Search your feelings; you know it to be true.
Posted in Classic Films, Movies, Sci-Fi Movies
Tagged George Lucas, prequel, Revenge of the Sith, Star Wars, The Prequel Trilogy, The Room, Tommy Wiseau
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