this post was submitted on 05 May 2024
317 points (91.8% liked)
Movies and TV Shows
2092 readers
219 users here now
A community for entertainment industry news and general discussion about movies and TV shows.
Rules:
- Be civil.
- Please do not link to pirated content.
- No spoilers in the title of submissions. And please use spoiler MarkDown in the body of discussions. This is a courtesy to other users.
- Comments solely criticizing headlines and/or journalism will be removed for being off-topic.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I’ve always wanted some media from the Star Wars universe from other points of view. Maybe a sitcom from a family living on Coruscant? A drama about a business that makes ships for the Empire/Republic? A drama about someone in the business of Death Sticks, like Breaking Bad/Weeds? A romance between two aliens on two different planets and all between them?
There is literally a galaxy of possibilities with the usual formulas for other shows/movies set in this same universe.
I think we can look at the Marvel shows to see some good examples of what works and doesn't work. Star Wars, like Marvel and in some ways moreso, also has the problem of being expensive. Exotic locations, costumes, CGI--these shows cost as much as $250 million a season. You'll probably make your money back, but the production on something that feels like it "fits" in the bigger SW canon can easily carry a lot of risk.
And I think that's the real issue: for the price tag, I want Andor--a show that has something to say about the human condition and says it in a way that's beautiful--but it's very easy to just get "just more Star Wars" instead (and see also: superhero fatigue).
There's room for light sabers in good stories, but the stories have to be good themselves. I think there's an incentive to start from light sabers and then try to fit a story in, and that's working backwards. Some stories are going to want space wizards--but a lot aren't.
That's an excellent point about front-loading a light saber into the story is not a guarantee. Andor's prison break arc - we only get to reap the the excellent tension and planning and loss because there's no deus ex machina. Adding a light saber or even force-sensitivity to that story beat would take that juicy tension and make it, "super easy, barely an inconvenience."
There's a conversation I've seen in tabletop RPG circles and had with my table about this: "the Jedi problem", that you simply can't tell a story that has both Jedi and non-Jedi in it (and on screen together) without a great deal of contrivance to explain why the Force can't immediately solve a lot of problems that could otherwise empower character development. The original Star Wars films really only work because Luke is a student and the other Jedi are either dispatched (Obi-Wan) or too old to hand-wave anything (Yoda). As much as I love watching Ian McDiarmid chew the scenery, the other two trilogies both suffer from having competent (sometimes) Force users basically making everyone else irrelevant by their mere presences. The power levels just aren't compatible.
I prefer to call it the Sokka problem.