Star Trek or Star Wars?

Lucas always said he wanted three worlds in each of his films, and with contrasting tones and moods.

It holds up pretty well as a guiding principle, but it also explains how he boxed himself in as a writer.

 

The way people talk about the original Star Wars movies does not match in any way what I see on the screen.

I like them well enough as cultural touchstones. They were an important moment in our collective consciousness and should be respected as such. They were possibly the purest example of a blockbuster event in the times before media became ever-more specialized and we all watch different things. And they more or less invented the merchandising tie-in. And the special effects were leaps and bounds ahead of anything anyone else was doing at the time, which is important.

But other than the special effects and the music, holy hell do those movies *suck*. Outside of those two aspects, it's some straight-to-video quality shit. The dialog is bad. The acting is horrible, but I've read that it's not the actors' fault and Lucas kept making them re-do their lines until they sounded crappier and crappier. The characters are shallow cliches. The pacing is abysmal. The actual plot is acceptable because you can charitably describe it as an homage instead of just a cliche.

All the complaints people have about the prequels are true, but I've never understood the belief that all their flaws make them in any way different from the originals. They're exactly like the originals.

 

the casting sucked for the prequels, and that set the standard for the mediocrity that followed.

Portman was the worst casting choice in the franchise and delivered some of the singularly worst performances.

She collected the checks, mailed it in and went to Harvard Yard when it was all over.

She was many times worse than the much-maligned Rose character from VIII.

Or Jake Lloyd, for that matter.

 

In portman’s defense she was being asked to have romantic chemistry with a child but not let it be creepy

 

The novels help highlight the potential for stories beyond people in Starfleet, but I'm not sure how many people consider them as part of the larger narrative. The books you mentioned are a big part of that. I'm also a big fan of Articles of the Federation, which was a sort of mixture of Star Trek and The West Wing, focusing on a Federation president and her staff.

 

I get your meaning, but it requires acting. And I can't think of a male lead with whom Portman's ever had on-screen chemistry.

 

Yep.

I was 10 years old when the original came out. It was the greatest thing I'd ever seen.

Now they're just painful to watch -- and strikingly boring.

The only Star Wars film I've seen since the original three is "Rogue One." It pretty much sucked too. I did find it amusing the way they would show a cameo appearance of a past character -- hey, look down that hall, it's C3PO! -- and it would linger on the shot forever so people in the theater could applaud. (It's more amusing if, like me, you watched it on a plane.)

 

About Gideon …

Spoiler: just wondering …

Darth Vader fanboi, or is something else going on here?

 

I'm with you on this, and it is why I like Voyager as well - Star Trek, to me, is at its best when it is getting into weird shit. Like, I want to see them dealing with the Borg, and the biological creatures that even the Borg are afraid of, in the fringes of deep space. I am far, far less interested in yet another re-telling of the rise of Captain Kirk, or how Starfleet or the Federation started, or Old Man Picard, which seems to be what the recent Star Trek stuff is about. I understand why that's happening - it is way easier to get that stuff green lit. But the people in charge of Star Trek need to look at Marvel and Star Wars, where some of the fringier stuff - Guardians of the Galaxy, The Mandalorian - provide(d) blueprints for how they could proceed, satisfying the audience while still having some meat on the bone for the critics.

 

Probably better for the HEY MANDO thread, but:

Spoiler

They've kept most of his background hidden, but from his position in the Empire and now remnants of the Empire, and the fact that The Mandalorian starts five years after Return of the Jedi, it is almost certain the Moff Gideon knew of Vader. He also seems to be knowledgeable about the Force and its power, from what he's trying to do with it in the most recent episodes.

It wouldn't surprise me if we got an episode or some backstory about his relationship to Vader at some point. A prominent thing in the SW EU, before Disney nuked it, was the idea that powerful Sith lords would have "hands" or operatives, doing clandestine things for them in secret, across the galaxy. From Rise of Skywalker, the Emperor seemingly had a bunch of weird cultists prepared to revive him / keep him alive, and there is some theory work going on that Gideon is engineering the pre-Snoke Snokes in his facility there, along with your usual, run of the mill Super Soldiers.

 

I just now realized I had that on the wrong thread. I feel shame and denounce myself.