OliveTapenade
No bio...
User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
2hr ago
Well, the first response that went through my head was something like, "well, if you're content with AI slop for entertainment, you do you, but that's cold comfort to those of us who expect more than that". That's probably too mean and contemptuous a thought, though, so let me back up and try again.
I've yet to see anything to convince me that AI can write a half-decent film script. Even if, for the sake of argument, it can do better than the worst human writers, I'm trying not to be content with the bottom of the barrel, or even the middle of the barrel. George Lucas definitely has limitations as a writer and director, though I think some of them are overstated. He struggles with some types of dialogue more than others; and at any rate, I think much of that is compensated for by his immense skill as a visual director. Lucas can compose a scene or a shot incredibly well, far better than most of his contemporaries. For films like Star Wars, which are substantially about immersion, awe, and atmosphere, I can't underrate that.
I'm a bit curious what you mean by 'some proper SF'? What sort of SF do you think AI would make possible? What are you hoping for?
OliveTapenade
5hr ago
I don't think this is true, actually. My experience of fandom debate was that TLJ certainly had a lot of people talking about Star Wars, and it didn't end it all. On the contrary, some of the post-TLJ material was well-received. If anything, I think the biggest ST-era breakout was The Mandalorian, which was post-TLJ. I've seen in the wild people with Mandalorian bumper stickers on their cars, or graffiti murals of Baby Yoda. The ST itself didn't make much impact, but The Mandalorian did. (Some years after that, Andor went on to have widespread critical success, but I rate that a bit lower because I don't see as much genuinely popular reaction to Andor. There's no Andor equivalent of Baby Yoda.)
My recollection of the time was that TFA brought with it a lot of hype and optimism, TLJ was extremely divisive and split the fanbase, and 2019 brings us both RoS, which was universally panned, and The Mandalorian, which was successful and widely enjoyed, even by people who disliked the ST itself. Rogue One was also genuinely popular on release, with maybe hopes that the franchise might be rallying after the disaster of RoS, but everything since then has been a steady drip of mediocrity - nobody cared about Solo, and nobody cares about The Book of Boba Fett, or Ahsoka, or Obi Wan, and then The Acolyte was the nadir of the TV progression thus far. Official Star Wars material has slid into mediocrity and garbage and nobody cares any more. Andor is the one bright spot in terms of fan reaction, but Andor is noticeably a much more niche product.
I agree that Star Wars is functionally dead, as a franchise, and that Disney is mostly to blame, but I see doom setting in with the very premise of the Sequel Trilogy. TFA was well-received at the time but it set the films on a course towards irrelevance.
OliveTapenade
5hr ago
I'm just not at all convinced that TLJ is why RoS was bad. I agree that TLJ doesn't give you a whole lot to go on, but then, TFA didn't either! None of these films seemed to be written with sequels in mind. The problem is the whole premise of the Sequel Trilogy, and it seems to me that blaming everything on TLJ is scapegoating Johnson too much for Abrams' failures.
That seems particularly evident to me if we look at the directors' other work? I didn't think much of Knives Out or Glass Onion, but I found them more-or-less watchable and entertaining, in a dumb sort of way. With Abrams, however, the obvious comparison is Star Trek (2009) and Star Trek Into Darkness. Abrams had done this once before - ST2009, like TFA, is a soft reboot that leaned into the popular perception of what the franchise was clasically about, which at the time was greeted with a lot of hype and received positively, and then STID, like RoS, is a stale, creatively bankrupt attempt to imitate the original franchise, which was widely panned. Abrams fumbled the set-up with Star Trek, and he went on to fumble the set-up again with Star Wars, in pretty much the same way. Would he have done better if not for Johnson? I just cannot see any reason to think that. He screwed up and effectively killed a big budget science fiction film franchise in exactly the same way before people gave him Star Wars.
OliveTapenade
20hr ago
Eh, I haven't seen Andor, but I'd describe Rogue One as both the best of the Disney films and an extremely forgettable, mediocre outing. There's just very little in Rogue One to like, I find? It has some pretty space battles if CGI spaceships blowing each other up does it for you, I guess.
You are much more optimistic about AI than I would be. I'm afraid I consider AI an unmitigated disaster for creative industries.
OliveTapenade
20hr ago
I'm certainly not saying that I think Luke should never fight. There were plenty of excellent EU stories featuring Luke where he got up to dramatic adventures. But I think there's a fundamental tension in Star Wars - on the one hand, Yoda is right, wars don't make one great, humility and pacifism are good. On the other hand, adventure is good. Ambition, that yearning to do something more, everything epitomised by this scene - that's also good. The best Star Wars stories, in my view, manage to navigate this tension and find a balance. Passivity or apathy are not virtues.
At the same time, mere activity is not a virtue either. Violence or ability to destroy by itself is not to be lauded. That's why, for instance, that scene with Luke in season two of The Mandalorian is such a painful exercise in point-missing. What does it to take to be prepared for heroic action, without glorifying action as such? What is the proper internal disposition of a Jedi?
It makes me think of Kipling - to wait and not be tired by waiting, to dream and not make dreams your master.
OliveTapenade
20hr ago
Well, I'd agree that there's a level of counter-signalling in the critical love for TLJ, or at least, automatic contrarianism to a fanbase perceived as stupid, entitled, and so on.
Where I disagree is with the suggestion that TFA was anything other than an active dumpster fire in its own right. To be as clear as possible, I don't think TLJ is good. TLJ is a bad film. I just think that TLJ is the least bad of the sequels. The fact that TLJ is as bad as it is while also being the least bad of the sequels says something truly dire about the other two, and that's the point I'd argue more fiercely.
OliveTapenade
20hr ago
Even LotR is a good example of a movie failure along these same lines - the films injected a lot of arbitrary or fake drama dependent on character stupidity (e.g. everything with film-Arwen, Sam abandoning Frodo in Cirith Ungol), rather than trust that the original story was tense enough on its own.
OliveTapenade
20hr ago
I actually think that TLJ itself is extremely derivative and not deep. Critics who said that it was were, in my opinion, engaging in, if not cope, then I think a type of reflexive disagreement with fans. TLJ is mostly a by-the-numbers retread of ESB, in the same way that TFA was a by-the-numbers retread of ANH. You have the desperate flight from the Empire, bickering on a spaceship in an extended escape sequence, an excursion to a corrupt world run by shady businessmen, the protagonist being disappointed and challenged by a cranky old Jedi Master living in exile, a dramatic showdown between protagonist and central villain in which the villain reveals a horrible secret about the protagonist's past, and then the movie's conclusion is the heroes just barely managing to escape and regroup. TLJ isn't a swerve - it's the same damn thing as TFA.
The people hailing it as a clever subversion or deconstruction of Star Wars were mostly people illiterate in the wider Star Wars canon and therefore ignorant of the many superior deconstruction stories already in the franchise.
OliveTapenade
20hr ago
Those scenes present Ren as a petulant child, which suffices for my point, I think? The ST fails to develop truly credible villains.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
This scene is in TFA. As is this one.
Ren was a figure of mockery from the first film.
I mean, I do find TFA near-unwatchably bad, but I'll grant that maybe I have an unusual hatred for it. But I think that if your contention is that TLJ is to blame because it didn't radically swerve course and reinvent the whole ST, then that still seems like a position where a lot of blame would unavoidably fall on TFA for contributing so little to the trilogy that the second film had to reinvent it from scratch.
Considering that TFA was an Abrams contribution, and the universally-despised RoS is also an Abrams contribution - could even a hypothetically perfect TLJ have rescued the trilogy beyond even Abrams' ability to screw up in the third act? I doubt it.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
Eh, I feel like that reading could only make sense if The Force Awakens by itself was a tolerably good film, and it just isn't. TFA already sucked. Maybe you think TLJ made it worse, but I really don't think TFA is defensible on its own merits.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
I like the observation around spiritualism in politics, though I don't agree with the denominational framing. It seems to me that even in the 16th century, and continuously both then, both Protestant and Catholic traditions have included both strong intellectual and mystical currents. For every pietist movement, among the Protestants, there's a resurgence of interior practice among Catholics. For every Catholic intellectual spring, there's a flowering of Reformed theology. The identification of Catholicism as more systematic, analytic, or 'ordered', versus a more experiential, personalistic Protestantism strikes me as a bit too cute to be plausible.
I think it is true that within a left wing of politics that has largely abandoned traditional Christianity there are new outlets for spiritual or mystical practices, and interest in Buddhism and New Age practices are one sign of that. The rise of spiritual-but-not-religious people would also fit into that category. Across different political tribes there is a common need (not in literally all people, but in enough people) for some sort of spiritual engagement, and if traditional religion becomes unpalatable to one tribe, they will find some alternative way to express that need. The risk of this on the left, I suppose, is that doing this from step one again carries with it all the risks of individualist religion - solipsism, narcissism, or even just falling into common pitfalls that a mature tradition might be able to warn you against.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
Look, I don't want to defend TLJ overall, because I think it's a bad film, but I feel like this deserves a reminder of what the OT was about. Remember that the dramatic climax of the OT is Luke Skywalker throwing away his weapon and refusing to fight. The idea that what a Jedi needs to do is lay huge beatdowns on people is explicitly contrary to the text. Jedi are humble servants of peace, remember? Wanting a flashy show of power, a character demonstrating his dominance by crushing his foe, is Sith logic.
I thought that scene worked, actually, because even though Kylo Ren has all the physical power in the scene, he is obviously a pathetic loser and nobody, not even his own underlings, has respect for him. He has power but no presence. Meanwhile the projection of Luke has no physical power at all, but he has all the presence. He does not even need to be there to be more powerful than Ren could ever be. He, like Obi Wan before him, is more powerful than someone like Ren could possibly imagine.
The OT repeatedly makes that point. Just being able to destroy stuff, just being able to win fights, is not what makes one great. You may recall that the power to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force.
Again, I am not defending TLJ in totality. I think that the entire Sequel Trilogy is a creatively bankrupt exercise in point-missing and I never want to watch that film again. But in this one, very limited context, I think it is really missing the point of what the OT was saying about power to conclude that Luke was in some way a failure because he didn't physically dominate Ren.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
That description is also untrue.
I feel like I'm only going to have to say this more and more in the future, but do not trust AI summaries about anything, especially not niche subjects. Come on, if you want to know what I, Jedi is about, the Wook has a detailed plot summary right there.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
...I was going to make an objection here to including Legacy of the Force, but then I saw that you mentioned The Crystal Star as well, so I assume you are taking the piss.
There are indeed a lot of excellent Star Wars novels and sequels, though, and Rogue Squadron and New Jedi Order are definitely among them.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
I'm half-convinced of a theory by Adam Roberts - Holdo has to be incompetent because the narrative logic of the film demands it. We want to see the heroes pull out victories against impossible odds, the more impossible the odds the more dramatic the victory, and at some point that requires incompetence from the commanding officers who got the heroes into that terrible situation in the first place.
On the other hand - in the original trilogy, nothing like this happens. The Rebel commanding officers in ANH, ESB, and RotJ are consistently professional, authoritative, and well-reasoned in their decision-making. If they make a bad call (and probably the only one is falling for the Emperor's trap in RotJ), it is nonetheless a bad decision that we can imagine a sensible person making, given what they knew at the time. If we look at how the background Rebels behave at Yavin, Hoth, or Endor, they are generally calm, reliable, and seem to know what they're doing. They seem like people you would trust to have at your back. So clearly it's possible to tell a dramatic story in this genre, where the heroes win a desperate victory against overwhelming odds, without incompetent commanders.
On the other other hand, though... that works in the OT, at least in part, because the villains of the OT are credible and intimidating. The OT has Tarkin, Vader, and Emperor Palpatine to work with, all of whom are convincingly threatening. The films never undermine their villains. The Rebels might be capable professionals, but so are the Imperials. That is not the case in the ST. The sequels have devoted significant screen time to establishing that their villains are a clown show. Kylo Ren is an immature brat who establishes screen presence through mere physical violence - he's a thug, with none of Vader's presence. Hux is a resentful boob, seen quivering with impotent rage more than he is genuinely threatening people. The heroes do not take these villains seriously. In the opening scene of TLJ, the heroes ring up and sass the villains. This undermines them as threats. (Comparison: in the OT, the heroes never mock the villains. I think the closest it comes is Han referring to the Imperials as slugs. But Tarkin, Vader, or the Emperor are always treated with deathly seriousness.) So the sequel films cannot rely on the villains to establish a sense of threat. The villains are too weak, in narrative terms, to do that.
Now the obvious response here is, "Well, then they shouldn't have had awful villains." I tend to agree. But I think there's a case you can make that the ST has lame villains for a valid storytelling purpose - Kylo Ren isn't supposed to be the second coming of Darth Vader, but rather him being an insecure Vader fanboy is part of the point. Where the Empire in the OT was generally composed of mature adult men with confidence and a degree of professionalism, the First Order in the ST are insecure twenty-something alt-right imitators. Maybe the films are trying to make a point about neo-Nazis or something. Okay, sure. But if you go with that, if the films are meant as some kind of deconstruction of youths imitating the patterns of evil regimes of bygone eras, then all of the films need to support that, and they can't just re-run the plot beats of the OT.
And unfortunately they do. Even TLJ, honestly, is a pretty by-the-numbers re-run of ESB; I don't know why people think it's subversive or deconstructive. But you can't just re-run those plot beats while changing the things that made them work in the first place. Re-running the OT can work and produce a genuinely beloved Star Wars story - the original Knights of the Old Republic is just a straight OT re-run and everybody loves it - but it has to be done with more skill than went into the ST.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
I'm far from convinced that TLJ was what actually killed Star Wars. For my money TLJ is easily the best of the Sequel Trilogy, though I admit that is a low bar. The Force Awakens had a positive reception at the time, but that reception was based almost entirely on hype, and as time has passed, I think audiences have cooled on TFA and have mostly come around to realising that it's bad. And, of course, The Rise of Skywalker was obviously garbage from the moment it hit theatres - I have never seen anybody, even the most devoted of fans, try to defend that mess.
My sense is that Rian Johnson made an attempt to cook a meal with the ingredients he was given, and while the result was kind of crap, it was, given what he was working with, about as good as could have been expected. J. J. Abrams did more to make more Star Wars impossible, and the profusion of forgettable Disney TV slop only did more to undermine the brand.
I agree that Star Wars is functionally dead now, but I think that death began with the Disney acquisition, its first signs were evident with TFA, and then by RoS it was too obvious for anyone to deny. TLJ is a bad film. But it is not as bad as either its predecessor or its successor, and while it took part in the franchise-killing Sequel Trilogy, I don't think it can be accused of either the first or the last blow in that killing.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
Well, the word 'everyone' was obviously hyperbole, but as I think my links showed, dislike of AI appears to be widespread and more popular than support for it. Many people have tried out LLMs, but that by itself doesn't tell us how much it is genuinely liked.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
I'm not even sure that the left specifically hates AI, or if they're not just part of the general case, which is that everyone hates AI. People who like AI, in my experience, are a small, extremely non-representative sample of tech-obsessed weirdos, and even they get roundly jeered at by other tech-obsessed weirdos.
There are specifically left-coded critiques of AI, but likewise for right-coded critiques. I think the technology is just widely hated in general. Per Ipsos, Americans' views on AI do not appear to split by political tribe. It may change in the future, since AI optimism skews towards the young, the wealthy, and as per Stanford's HAI, the educated, which are all more left-leaning demographics. I'd cautiously predict that if AI hate becomes partisan coded, it will be coded more as right-wing or Republican.
OliveTapenade
11d ago
And yet at no point does Bartender even attempt to criticise Count's point. That's the issue. The top-level post is, essentially, arguing that James Watson was a kook - someone who held not merely weird or unusual views, but views that are essentially bigoted, judging entire people because of inherited characteristics that do not reliably cluster with the traits he ostensibly cared about.
Bartender cedes this entire issue. Bartender accuses Count of trolling or baiting, and argues that Count's various points are carefully chosen to provoke the Motte. But at no point does Bartender defend Watson, or argue that the points Count chose should not be relevant to a judgement of him, or that the points Count chose are out of context and unrepresentative, or try anything else similar. The closest Bartender comes to an actual argument is suggesting that the comparison between Watson and Josephson is ill-chosen, but since that comparison is not necessary for Count's criticism of Watson to land, it hardly suffices as much of a rebuttal.
I don't think the top-level post here is great. I think Count would benefit from doing more work to explicitly stitch together an argument. Count's post ought to link those quotes together into a worldview, show more compelling evidence as to the general worldview that Watson held, and then indicate why that worldview is wrong. I'll even grant that there's a bit of consensus-building in the top-level post, which is against Motte rules, though I also think that Bartender and some of those around him are trying to consensus-build in the other direction.
But just as an argument? Count puts forward at least the sketch of an argument against James Watson's character. Bartender does not engage with that argument in favour of accusing Count of trolling. Well, that's as may be. But it means that the argument around Watson slips past. Bartender is arguing about Count, but he is not arguing with Count.
OliveTapenade
11d ago
Clearly you rate me higher than I myself do.
OliveTapenade
12d ago
This isn't debating, though. Bartender_Venator's post is not debating with BurdensomeCount - it's deflecting by making a post entirely about the person himself. It is a very well-polished deflection, but it is nonetheless a deflection.
OliveTapenade
12d ago
I think I'd be more sympathetic to that if, well, I hadn't tried that. It usually goes badly.
Yes, there is probably a useful conversation to be had around capitalism and climate and hope for the future somewhere down the line, and I've had those as well, but it is almost never helpful to respond to a person expressing irritation or exhaustion with, "actually, you're wrong, here's why".
Sure, I'll absolutely agree that the core problem is the overall management of the franchise and lack of vision.
But I'm not sure that following up a stale retread of ANH with a stale retread of ESB is that much of a betrayal, really? That sounds more like he understood the brief. To the extent that he tried to do anything even a bit more interesting than just making the OT again (and again I think the extent to which TLJ is subversive or radical is wildly over-stated), I'm more inclined to give him credit for at least trying something. Sure, it didn't really succeed, but I give a film-maker more credit for trying to do something, even if they fail, than I do one for just painting by numbers. If nothing else, a TLJ that just painted by numbers would have done nothing to arrest the decline.
Quarrels between authors are, as you say, not unknown from the EU. EU author-feuding or attempts to undermine or pull back on each other were common - Traviss and the Mando hissy fit, Troy Denning misunderstanding or trying to retcon NJO, Timothy Zahn sniping at Dark Empire in Hand of Thrawn, KJA writing Callista and the various Luke shipping wars, you name it. I feel a bit ambivalent about all that in hindsight. It was undoubtedly bad from the perspective of maintaining a uniform level of quality, but it also meant that the EU, lacking a single dominating authorial voice, became a case of survival of the fittest. The Luke shipping wars were not resolved by some voice from above coordinating all the others - instead a number of different authors wrote love interests for Luke and eventually the one that achieved the most buy-in from the fans was eventually given the nod. (Ironically, the only one that wasn't originally written as a love interest.) Callista and Gaeriel and all the others have just been dismissed with "yeah, the early EU was weird". The Mandalorian stuff is a huge mess and there are multiple contradictory ideas of who the Mandalorians are as a people - Traviss and Filoni are probably the biggest influences, but let's not underestimate the TotJ comics, the KotOR portrayals, even Republic Commando - and generally the ideas that resonated were taken up by subsequent authors, and the rest abandoned. The EU was a big pool where different authors sank or swam, and because Lucasfilm back in the day were quite generous with the license, a lot of people tried different ideas. And now in hindsight, well, ask any EU fan and they will give you a curated list of the good bits, and those are the parts that live on.
More options
Context Copy link