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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31065 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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It's pure "this is cool, don't think about it".

He's a bad match for Star Wars.

I agree he wasn't a good match, but "rule of cool" wasn't the reason. Star Wars is a space opera conceived as "WW2 fighter planes, Jidaigeki, and Wild West, ... IN SPACE." In other words, rule of cool. None of the rich details of the exotic universe make sense, they are there because they look cool. Lucas wanted to cast a Japanese period drama samurai star as Obi-Wan Kenobi because of "how cool that'd be". Consistency is maintained in OT and prequels because of inertia and involving a single auteur whose vision of "cool" didn't change too much.

Hiring a "rule of cool" director was a good idea. The mistake of was that Johnson's brand of cool was different. Hiring a director who worships "canon" isn't necessarily a bad idea, it can work for some time, but eventually it will result in milking the original vision empty, producing soulless merchandise.

I think both these things can be true; Star Wars probably is the exact kind of setting that can't run on Rule of Cool all of the time, and Lucas' ideas were reined in by those around him during the Original Trilogy (such as his wife)--the Prequel Trilogy allegedly is the way it is because Lucas got full control and little pushback.

Much of Star Wars universe "internal consistency" is the result of EU authors and fans just padding out, expanding and smoothing the inconsistencies of stuff that Lucas threw in due to Rule of Cool. As one of the most obvious examples, witness the attempts to make "Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs" make some sort of sense.

witness the attempts to make "Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs" make some sort of sense.

That's funny, because at least the early scripts seem to address this point:

Han Solo: Fast ship? You've never heard of the Millennium Falcon?

Ben: Should I have?

Han: It's the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs.

Ben reacts to Solo's stupid attempt to impress them with obvious misinformation.

https://imsdb.com/scripts/Star-Wars-A-New-Hope.html

It's actually a remarkable character moment, especially for George Lucas: Han Solo thinks that he is dealing with a dim old man (and a hillbilly youth) whom he can confuse with space babble. I like to think that the Kessel Run isn't even a real thing and Han made it up because it sounds impressive.

Of course, this subtle character moment was ruined in Solo by retconning the achievement to something about distance, because modern Star Wars writers are hacks who would never think of actually reading Lucas's scripts, despite being paid a lot of money to understand Star Wars.

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