joberg
Legendary Member
That's what you get when HR says you have to get a certain % of BIPOC into your organization; it's not about merit anymore, it's about politics/policy
Star Wars sequel trilogy.
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Solo4114
Master Member
See, now, this strikes me as a good reason to object to the director. It's less about "She said a thing in an interview once," and way more about "Wait, what the hell does a documentary director know about making tentpole space adventure movies?" For fiction films, she's directed three CGI-animated films, one short traditional animated film, and a couple episodes of Ms. Marvel.
That seems like a basis to be skeptical, not the outrage about some talk she gave nine years ago.
That said, at the end of the day it probably won't matter. At this point, it feels like LFL has announced at least as many upcoming projects and had them die on the vine as it has actually produced. So, flip a coin and guess whether this one will even end up being made...
What I don't get is the business strategy of announcing a bunch of movies well in advance, especially when the deals are so often falling thru anyway. What's that actually accomplish? Is it meant to assuage nervous shareholders? Do they think it generates positive buzz? If it was "We've tapped a big-name director of stuff our audience loves" I could understand; the goal there would be to gin up excitement about an upcoming project. But "We've named someone you've probably never heard of to direct a film we're not telling you anything about other than that it'll have the Star Wars branding on it" doesn't really seem to do...anything. And then, as noted, like 50% of their projects seem to fall thru anyway so every subsequent announcement is less and less exciting.
"DID YOU HEAR?! LFL ANNOUNCED ANOTHER STAR WARS PROJECT!!!!"
Oh yeah? What's it about?
"NO IDEA!"
Who's gonna be in it?
"NO IDEA!"
Uh...ok...are there any names attached at this point?
"IT'S A DUDE WHO WAS THE SECOND AD FOR THAT SHOW PROPERTY BROTHERS, AND OTHERWISE DID AN EPISODE OF THIS IS US!!!"
Huh...that's an......interesting choice...Well, let me know if there are any other developments, I guess.
[6 months later]
"THAT OTHER THING GOT CANCELED, BUT DID YOU HEAR?! LFL ANNOUNCED ANOTHER STAR WARS PROJECT!!!!"
Yeah, heard that one before...
Pretty much. He should say "8 figures or you can suck my balls."
cboath
Master Member
Like most things, there is a right way to do it and a wrong way. Too many people want to paint everything with the wrong way brush.adding diversity is a laudable goal, but that make up cannot be the only criteria.That's what you get when HR says you have to get a certain % of BIPOC into your organization; it's not about merit anymore, it's about politics/policy
You would think handing someine 200-300m to make a movie would require an expectation the person does a good job. Otherwise you have better odds at a poker table in vegas when you have never played poker before.
People are attributing diversity to unqualified because too many times it gets done with no regard to quality or context.
Exactly. There are some awesome former Imperial characters in the EU, like Kyle Katarn from the Dark Forces games. To make him a former Stormtrooper, but a janitor, is idiotic. That right there is the perfect example of no one involved (or at least with any authority) in the Sequels knowing anything about SW. If they did they would know droids take care of the menial jobs. I think there was a quote from Mark Hamill that said something about Finn, at one point, being one of Luke's students who was undercover getting intel on the First Order. It's like they discarded any good idea they had for what we got.
BTW, I think we all know that her comments were not related to SW in that clip. The reason people did jump to conclusions is because this is the kind of person and the kind of crap that Lucasfilm has been pushing for years. So yes it might be unrelated, but I don't think it's unrelated in that that is the reason they hired her. Otherwise she wouldn't even get a look and they would pick someone with some legit background in making movies. And when I say "crap" I don't mean women or women's rights, I'm talking about these militant feminists. You have to wonder about women like that and their relationship to their grandpa/dad/uncle/brother to have that attitude.
Solo4114
Master Member
Again, consider the context of her comments. When she says "I like making men uncomfortable," she's literally in the process of editing/doing post on a documentary film about a girl who was almost honor-killed by her father and uncle. She has -- at that point -- done very little work in Hollywood itself, and has focused the bulk of her career on documenting life in Pakistan. The "men" she's talking about are men in her home country, not nerds in the U.S. who love some space fantasy franchise. Folks like us aren't even on her radar screen when she said that stuff.
Aside from that, call me crazy, but "uncomfortable" is mild as far as how I'd like to make people who do or attempt honor killings feel. Nor do I think it is especially "militant" to want to -- at a minimum -- call people who do that to the carpet. That is tame compared to what I'd advocate.
I don't think Disney's choices have been oriented around that stupid South Park "PuT a ChIcK iN iT! mAkE hEr GaY!" attitude, either. They dared to have a female protagonist in their stories and characters of color. Oooh. How subversive. The problem wasn't "They cared too much about diversity." The problem was "They had no clear plan for what their story was, other than basically redoing the OT." If Rey had been a dude, the same problems with the story overall would've existed, but the Industrial Rage-Bait Complex wouldn't have had anything to grift about.
Cephus
Master Member
She also says she's an activist and puts activism into absolutely everything she does. That's the biggest problem. She's also completely unqualified to helm a major Star Wars movie, which is another. I'm entirely fine with her criticizing her home country. She just doesn't seem capable of separating her activist side and her filmmaker side.
Except the only reason they are doing it is for woke optics. They are not just hiring whoever the best actor for the role is, they have a checklist and are hiring based solely on diversity, not skill and talent.
Joek3rr
Master Member
The problem is didn't stick to a plan. There was George's treatment(s?) And Michael Arndt's. But they didn't really stick to any of it. Though Michael's did help map out the story leading up to the films. Leia's short lived Jedi training that's seen in Episode IX, is from his treatment.
The ST sucked even for the individual segments when they stuck to a plan.
There is no 2-hour chunk of the whole trilogy (probably not even a 1-hour chunk) where the main characters don't show bad writing/plotting.
As for whether the diversity/wokeness stuff was directly a problem?
The ST didn't have the obvious clumsy male-bashing that we have seen in some of Hollywood's other output lately.
And racially, I was fine with it.
But it was 7 hours of flawed male characters + flawless female characters. The difference in the portrayals is glaring when you step back and add it all up. It's a SW trilogy that didn't sell Halloween costumes to 7yo boys (except maybe Kylo Ren).
Imagine this trilogy with all the main characters being gender-swapped. Rey is a guy, Kylo is a woman, Poe & Finn are women, Leia is a grumpy deadbeat-mom who dies, etc. That mix of gender portrayals would NEVER have been allowed. That wouldn't have gotten past the brainstorming-in-the-coffee-shop stage.
There is no 2-hour chunk of the whole trilogy (probably not even a 1-hour chunk) where the main characters don't show bad writing/plotting.
As for whether the diversity/wokeness stuff was directly a problem?
The ST didn't have the obvious clumsy male-bashing that we have seen in some of Hollywood's other output lately.
And racially, I was fine with it.
But it was 7 hours of flawed male characters + flawless female characters. The difference in the portrayals is glaring when you step back and add it all up. It's a SW trilogy that didn't sell Halloween costumes to 7yo boys (except maybe Kylo Ren).
Imagine this trilogy with all the main characters being gender-swapped. Rey is a guy, Kylo is a woman, Poe & Finn are women, Leia is a grumpy deadbeat-mom who dies, etc. That mix of gender portrayals would NEVER have been allowed. That wouldn't have gotten past the brainstorming-in-the-coffee-shop stage.
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I don't think the ST is woke. I think it's just bad film making. I lean more towards the tin foil hat conspiracy that the ST was a reboot of Star Wars designed to bring in the Chinese audience that kind of missed out on the original movies.
Cephus
Master Member
If they wanted to attract the Chinese, they wouldn't have cast John Boyega. That's why they had to drastically reduce his image on the posters for China. It's also why they had to put the Black Panther mask on Chadwick Boseman for Chinese posters.
Again, most fans have absolutely no problem with female characters, directors, etc. Any accusations of that flies in the face of Mara Jade and Jaina Solo ranking at the top of favorite EU character polls for years, all the female characters in the OT and Prequels that no one complained about, and all the women involved with the movies behind the scenes, that no one complained about. Lucasfilm just thought they could scream "GIRL POWER!!!" and we'd have to accept their poorly written characters. If they want a strong female character (like literally any main female character in the EU), they should treat it with the respect they seem to demand of the audience for Rey. It's also not a one off thing, because there are numerous female characters that are poorly written: Laura Dern's character (no idea on the name), Rose, Reva (Kenobi). Reva had a couple places where she almost became an interesting character, but they couldn't pull the trigger. They just hope they can force them because if you don't like it, you're a misogynist. That's not giving female characters the respect they should have. That's why people hate the characters, not because they hate women. Well I mean I'm sure a small percent hate women, but you get my point.
This.
Sarah Connor was one of the most perfectly badass female characters in Hollywood history. And Disney/LFL would not be capable of making anybody like that, because she was flawed and had legit growth. She spent the first 2/3rds of first movie as a damsel in distress who needed saving & coddling by every other human male on the screen. In T2 she reached a total breaking point. She went on a mission to terminate Miles Dyson because she had become everything she was fighting against.
This stuff would all get voted down in the Disney/LFL writing room. That's because they aren't creative storytellers, they are product-pushers. They design female heroes that way.
When Microsoft releases the latest Windows OS, they don't want to advertise how crappy this version started and how hard they had to work on it before it was running right. That's not how you push a commercial product. No, they emphasize how the new OS came out of of the developers' womb being naturally better at everything, all the time. Immaculate conception. Rey's total lack of failings & character arc.
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Cephus
Master Member
Nobody complained about Patty Jenkins being tapped as a director for Star Wars, at least not until people saw what happened when she was given free reign with WW84. Nobody ought to give a damn about the gender or sexual orientation of ANYONE involved in ANYTHING in Hollywood. Anyone who does is the problem.
I saw a video where the girl pointed that out as well. People didn't start grumbling until the second WW movie flopped, but it was only out of worry about if she could pull it off, not her gender.
Wakeem
Sr Member
I only watched the first half or so of Wonder Woman 1984 and it didn't seem that bad. I tend not to like the female heroes that need the romantic interest. So perhaps the first half is the best part. And we got lucky with the first Wonder Woman movie since it felt at times like the first Reeve Superman movie. All I know is Ripley didn't need the romantic interest and she's still one of the best female movie characters (in the first two Alien movies).
I still think Rey is an ok character. It's just the movies themselves aren't that good. If they think they can make a better movie with Rey then fine. I wouldn't bet on it myself after the Sequels. I still haven't fully seen the third. I'm just not ready yet.
I still think Rey is an ok character. It's just the movies themselves aren't that good. If they think they can make a better movie with Rey then fine. I wouldn't bet on it myself after the Sequels. I still haven't fully seen the third. I'm just not ready yet.
Solo4114
Master Member
Ok, first, I disagree that the women were flawless and the men were flawed.
Leia was not "flawless" at all, for starters. It's implied (although we never see it and they never directly address it in the films) that Leia was kind of absent from parenting Ben, and/or that she pushed him into being a Jedi when he really either wasn't ready or didn't want to. She was focused on her political career, which apparently didn't last because now she's running an insurgent group. And as a mother, she absolutely failed because her son is a wannabe fascist tyrant and a murderer -- including his own father, and her marriage fell apart. In TLJ...she's mostly unconscious. She reprimands a few guys, cries about her brother (I think?) and that's about it. In TROS, as I recall she was barely in it (because Carrie had died), but she and Han kind of redeem Ben. Other than that, she trains Rey some, goes thru some training herself in some flashback and...dies. That's not flawless. If anything, I'd say that's "barely in it." By contrast, the male characters got a lot of screen time. Han dominates TFA before he gets shanked by his kid. Luke is an enormous part of TLJ. And by TROS, none of them are really around, except for the aforementioned bits with Han and Leia (maybe Luke was in it, but other than a voice at the end, I don't remember. There's a lot about that movie that's hazy for me and I've only seen it once).
So, who's left? Well, let's see. There's Rose, who's in one movie and gets sidelined in the next one. In the one movie, she, likewise, is not depicted as flawless. She's right along there with Finn and Poe, leading the way on their failure of a plan to somehow break the encryption of the hyperdrive tracking, making just as many bad decisions as those other two do. The one (1) moment where she shows a modicum of being "better" than Finn is when she prevents him from suiciding into the big cannon because she believes there's another way to beat the First Order. Again, not flawless.
And that leaves us with Rey. Now, Rey is THE central figure for the trilogy. She is the OT Luke of this trilogy. And like Luke, she's good at a lot of stuff. She can fly super well. So could Luke. She's got amazing aim. Luke had that, too. She can apparently pick up and wield a lightsabre almost perfectly with zero to minimal training. Just like Luke. And she becomes a Jedi after some indeterminate amount of time thanks to the power of time compression in films. Again, just like Luke. Now, they do some stuff in the film that lampshades her abilities in ways they didn't do with Luke. Her familiarity with the Falcon, for example, and her "No idea!" response when Finn asks how she can do this is a great example. It's finally explained in TROS as being, I guess, because "ShE's A pAlPaTiNe" or whatever, but I always found that to be a weakass explanation in a film full of weakass "put a bow on it" moments. But really, most of the problems people have with Rey come from, I think, JJ's love of "mysteries." In TFA, he seeded a bunch of these, as we've discussed to death here. But one of them is "Why is Rey so powerful?!"
TLJ, to it's credit I think, responded with "Oh for f--IT DOESN'T MATTER WHY. What matters is what she chooses to do with that power." The "why" of it is all about satisfying the audience's desire for explanations, and has zip to do with the character and what makes her tick or her growth. That's not to say that the answer can't be made to be relevant to the character's growth (example: the explanation for Luke's power being that he's Anakin's son, and more importantly that Anakin is Vader makes the explanation directly related to Luke's internal conflict about his destiny and what his parentage means for that). I far prefer the "Rey's a nobody. She's powerful for reasons we can't explain, and that's fine, because what matters isn't why she has the power, but what she does with it and what that says about her as a person." The rest is window dressing. I would also argue that Rey exhibits some major flaws in both TFA and TLJ (again, can't really remember TROS that clearly). She consistently tries to walk away from her position as the galaxy's future savior, rejecting the mantle of hero even though she has the power to help people. That, to me, is a HUGE flaw. And arguably one that Luke never exhibited. Luke was all in on being a hero and accomplishing his destiny. He might've made bad choices while doing it, but he never was like "Yo, this ain't for me, man. Can't you old guy heroes do it instead? Look, I even brought your old sword back for ya." Rey, however, does exactly that. She hard rejects the mantle of hero, and she casts about for answers as to her parentage because she doesn't want to have to make a choice for herself. If anything, I think TLJ leans hard into Rey's flaws, but they're flaws that are deeper and more about her character than "Oh, you had a dumbass idea that didn't work out."
TROS explains the whole Palpatine thing (poorly), and tries to do the "I....am your father" thing, but it doesn't really land because it's all happening at the 11th hour in the middle of a roller coaster ride, like you're trying to explain the plot of Tenet to someone while playing laser tag with them. That stuff all has less to do with wokeness and waaaaay more to do with plain ol' sloppy storytelling. Although I suppose "Rey might give into her rage and anger and go all darkside!" is something they try to highlight. It just doesn't really have any time to breathe or register with the audience because (1) it's undone in seconds after it happens, and (2) who cares we're on to the next thing anyway even if it had stuck around. NOTHING lasts in that movie because it's too busy barreling towards the end credits with no time to take a breath.
As for how it'd play if you gender-swapped the main roles? I think it'd play the same way: mostly a mess because of said sloppy storytelling and the lack of a plan going in other than "We're gonna do the OT, but bigger and with a younger cast." Beyond that, I don't think it'd matter. It certainly wouldn't matter to me. Because the dumb stuff that people do in the films, the flaws the exhibit, have nothing to do with whether they're men or women, and everything to do with the decisions they make. To some extent, they have to do with the trope they represent: e.g., the brash pilot whose crazy plan is so crazy it...just...might....work and saves the day. Except not this time, because said pilot was an idiot. Make Poe Dameron a woman and...it's the same story, and it doesn't matter that she's a woman. I mean, you can speculate how audiences would've reacted, but honestly, I don't think it would've made a difference overall.
For purposes of representation/inclusiveness, it's worth remembering that even with their flaws, these characters are all treated as unequivocal Heroes with a capital "H". Rey, Poe, Finn, and Rose may screw up in TLJ, but there's never any question that they're Heroes. And honestly, it's really ONLY in TLJ that anyone displays real flaws anyway. The two JJ entries are just too damn busy to spend time actually exploring character flaws, male or female. Character? Pfft. They ain't got time for character. They have moments they need to get to for the vibes.
Again, this isn't about what the Rage Industrial Complex wants you to think it's about. The fact that Rey is a woman is not why she's poorly written (to the extent that she is). She's poorly written because JJ's films don't really do characters, and Rian Johnson only has one film to do character development for an entire trilogy, all piggybacking off of JJ's "mYsTeRiEs" that never mattered anyway, and then being undercut by the subsequent film.
If you want to be charitable, JJ's style is a big part of the problem, and the tonal and stylistic whiplash of VII to VIII and back to IX are another huge part of it. If it was all just a big rollercoaster ride, people might care less, but sticking VIII in there serves as a massive contrast to the other two films and only further demonstrates how "We're not really doing characters" seems to be the approach to the rest of the trilogy.
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