Tag: presence

Kenobi – Episode 1 – Just Dreadful

I haven’t seen any of the Disney Star Wars television series’ up until this point. In my opinion, The Last Jedi was just awful, and killed the franchise. (And The Rise Of Skywalker did nothing to counter this.) I’ve generally held the position that I won’t return to the franchise unless they decanonise The Last Jedi. So I’ve not seen any of The Mandalorian or The Book Of Boba Fett. I haven’t seen the Han Solo movie either.

But I decided to watch (at least the first episode of) the new Kenobi series. I didn’t have high hopes for it, but I liked Ewan McGregor as Obi-Wan Kenobi in the Star Wars prequel films, and thought he might be able bring a similar magic to this show.

But it’s garbage.

Starting with the worst part of it: the dialogue. The dialogue is just awful. It’s some of the worst-written dialogue I have ever seen on television. It’s glaringly expository – so obviously trying to just inform the audience about who’s who and what’s what that it immediately pulls you out of the story. When the main villain says his first line, I actually laughed out loud, it was so badly written.

The villains spend an awful lot of time monologuing. (It’s like the writers have never seen The Incredibles.) Monologuing isn’t so bad in a melodramatic, somewhat flamboyant and romantic setting like the actual films, but it really doesn’t work in a show that’s trying to be gritty. It also doesn’t work as the opener for your villains. The villains in this show spend a ridiculous amount of time pacing backwards and forwards, surrounded by what must be 0.0001% of Mos Eisley’s total population (I assume it’s Mos Eisley – I don’t think it’s ever said). They desperately try to look menacing and evil, but the writers seem to have a cartoon idea of what evil is. These characters have no presence whatsoever, and do not appear threatening.

Moving on to the next-worst part: there’s basically no plot. One of the first rules of writing for television must surely be: in the first episode, establish what your protagonists want, and are trying to do, and establish what your antagonists want, and are trying to do, and create tension between them. I see so many shows ignoring this principle nowadays – including this one. What does Kenobi want? Well … just to sit around and work cutting up meat in the desert. Not very compelling. What do the Jedi hunters want? To find Jedi. Kind of obvious in the name. How are they going to do it? Just sort of walking around and occasionally smouldering. There are three of them, but they don’t seem to have individual motivations. Leia gets captured, but obviously we know she’s fine in the end, so no real suspense there.

These things alone are enough to condemn the first episode, if not the whole series (which is only going to be six episodes long, so they’ve wasted the first episode not doing the essentials). But there are various other weird things that the show does that pull you out of it.

The main one is that where Kenobi works – at some kind of thrown-together outdoor factory in the middle of the desert, next to the body of some large creature that they’re cutting up and getting the meat from – when all of the workers finish for the day (which, curiously, is when the suns are still high in the sky), they just leave all these huge slabs of meat out in the desert sun. They do this every day. I was staring at the screen thinking ‘You’re just going to leave raw meat out in the desert sun? And then you’re going to continue cutting it up for sale the tomorrow? What?!’. How switched-off do you have to be not to notice a problem like that when you’re writing? Did no-one mention that during the production? (Or worse, and more likely, someone mentioned it, but a bad culture on the production meant that that person was ignored or shut down.)

Another one: Leia’s toy flying droid has a circular saw attachment, which it uses to untie her hands after she’s captured. What the fuck kind of children’s toy has a circular saw attachment? This droid isn’t big either – there is limited space for what kind of attachments to give it, and apparently the manufacturers decided on a circular saw.

They’ve also decided to do a Luke Skywalker on Obi-Wan Kenobi – he’s now a bitter, reluctant old guy who doesn’t want anything to do with the Jedi anymore. I mean, for goodness’ sake, who’s writing this shit? People didn’t like that in The Last Jedi; they’re not going to like it here. Stop doing this – it isn’t a good character point.

So it looks like this series is going to be a disaster. It’s a shame, because I don’t think it had to be. The CGI on the show is mostly excellent (though there are a few weird moments where it falls apart completely). The music is not especially good, but it’s not dreadful either – it’s passable. McGregor does what he can with the lines he’s been given, but he’s been given shit lines and no character work. The young actress who plays Leia is quite good (some very unrealistic lines, but quite fun). But while I like seeing a lot more of Alderaan, I don’t think they’ve chosen a particularly interesting story path for Leia.

So it looks like Disney continues to have no idea how to make Star Wars stuff, and continues pumping out shit.

Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope – Review

On to the originals. My posts about these films aren’t really going to be reviews, so much. Almost everyone already agrees that these are good films, so there’s no need for me to go through them and point out the good things in them. Instead, in these posts, I’m just going to make some observations about the films, and point out that some of the things that the prequels are criticised for also exist in the originals, but a lot of people are much more forgiving of them.

Watching the films in the order that is chronological for the internal universe really highlights that the original Star Wars films were very simple films. The prequels are a lot busier by comparison – a lot more happens in them, over far greater scales, and it happens a lot faster. In fact I think the complexity of the prequels is part of the reason why a lot of people don’t like them (not that I ever really hear anyone say that), whereas the simplicity of the originals is partly why they are so successful. The originals don’t try to do too much – why, in Episode V, Han, Chewbacca, and Leia spend most of their time just trying to avoid capture. In this way the originals are also unlike the main Disney films. Those films are also very busy – it seems to be a very common thing with modern Hollywood films – they don’t like to have a scene with just two characters talking or trying to solve a problem – they like to have five characters all talking to each other while trying to solve one problem while walking to another location where there’s another problem.

An example of the simplicity of this film is right at the start. When C-3PO and R2-D2 land on Tatooine in their escape pod, they land in the middle of nowhere. This is very likely, given that Tatooine is mostly desert. Their first objective is to find their way out of the desert. Even this goes wrong, and they end up being captured by the Jawas. They do eventually find Luke and get to Obi-wan, but all of this takes quite a bit of screen time. If this were a Disney film, I expect the droids would land right outside wherever it is that Obi-wan lives.

In the original films, C-3PO and R2-D2 get a lot more to do, and are a lot more interesting. They don’t get as much to do in the prequels – partly because those films are just so busy – and they are merely accessories in the Disney films. The banter between them is much better in the originals – it’s great that R2-D2 plays the fool in order to get his way, and that we can tell that simply from what he does and what C-3PO says.

Peter Cushing is just amazing. He has such extraordinary presence. Just from the way he walks into the room in his first scene, you can tell that he’s in charge – the way he walks is brisk, confident, and assured, but not arrogant – which is what you would expect from someone near to the top of the empire, and who has a lot of power and authority. Despite there being other people playing similar parts in Star Wars films since then, no-one has managed to equal that portrayal – no-one else has had that presence.

Even though it was actually different in the original version of A New Hope, when it came out in cinemas, I really like the concept of Jabba the Hutt. I really like the idea of giant slugs being the mobsters of the universe. This shows the raw creativity that went into the original Star Wars films. Again, if this were a Disney film, Jabba the Hutt would probably have been humanoid. The Disney films seemed to be very against having any characters that deviated much from humans.

As with the prequels, there are some bad reaction shots in this film. In fact there’s one particularly egregious example, and that’s Luke’s reaction to seeing his aunt and uncle incinerated. This reaction is nowhere near strong enough. This reaction is so underplayed that the first two or three times that I watched this film (many years ago now – back when I was about twelve or something), I didn’t even realise that those skeletons were his aunt and uncle. I just thought that they were two other random people who happened to be in the area – precisely because Luke’s reaction isn’t very strong. Luke is looking at the bloody skeletons of his aunt and uncle, and his reaction is to just slowly look away. It’s not strong enough.

There are also several bad lines in this film. The dialogue between Luke and Han when Luke tries to convince Han to rescue Leia is a bit unrealistic. And the dialogue between Luke and Biggs is – I dislike the word ‘cheesy’, but that’s the only word that really describes it. The performance of that dialogue is amateurish. It’s bad in the same way that some of the dialogue in the prequels is bad.

They convey the sense of scale in this film very well. This is something I’m very interested in with films that have very large objects or environments in them. In this film, the Death Star genuinely feels big. This is something that they failed to do in The Force Awakens – in that film, Starkiller Base did not come across as something planet-sized. Conveying scale well is all about physics. Large objects in large environments work differently to everyday-sized objects. Another example of a film that failed to convey scale well was Jupiter Ascending. In that film, ships go in and out of Jupiter’s Red Eye storm. The ships are shown as being comparable in size to the storm itself, but in reality, the Eye of Jupiter is 1.3 times the width of planet Earth – far bigger than the ships.

Part of how the scale of the Death Star is conveyed is the final battle of the film. The final battle has a lot of screen time, and we see a lot of the surface of the Death Star in it. This close, the surface of the Death Star appears flat. This is what shows its scale – we’ve seen that the Death Star appears spherical from afar, but when you get close to it, it’s so big that you can’t tell at all – and we see lots of positions in between these two extremes throughout the film.

This final battle also shows the simplicity of the film – which is part of its success. The rebels make multiple attempts to blow up the Death Star, and several of them fail. This raises the tension. As the battle goes on, fewer and fewer ships remain to make the attempt, and the more times they fail, the harder we understand it to be. The fact that the film takes its time in this battle is what makes it successful.

And finally, my favourite scene in this film is the final one – for one reason: the music. The music in the final scene is just fantastic. Of course, this film being the first Star Wars film, it gets the credit for all of the main music in the series, but I particularly like the music in that final scene. It’s not just triumphant, but a true finale.

So this film is good, but not without its flaws. Its main success over the prequels comes from it giving enough time for the various scenes and sequences – it doesn’t rush anything. In terms of raw creativity, world-building, performances, music – this film and any of the prequels are roughly equal, I think.