I saw Star Wars in the theater when it was just called Star Wars. I couldn’t agree with OP more. However I have zero trust that Disney will make more adult oriented shows for the simple reason of merch. What’s the merchandising opportunities of Andor? You can’t sell lightsaber replicas when there’s no lightsabers to replicate.
But you can’t have merch if you don’t have a popular story and they’re jeopardizing the popularity of the whole franchise. I just saw an article talking about the 5 least profitable films from 2024 and 4 of them were from Disney. They make sport of beating dead horses until the world collectively. They’ve already killed Marvel and Star Wars is bound to be next.
I think you can do a bunch with jedi/sith, but you have to use the force for something more interesting than pushing things and jumping pretty high. The extended universe novels had all sorts of cool shit force users could do with it. They should lean in to that kind of stuff.
It helps too when they’re not over used. You have to think how genuinely frightening force users must be to the average person. They don’t need to go full-on “The Boys” levels of trope subversion, but showing the force as it might appear to your normie citizen might be interesting. I would think most people feel a mixture of awe, fear and mistrust.
We got a little bit of that when CGI Luke showed up at the end of the Mandalorian season to take away Baby Handpuppet. Seeing the mandalorians, who train to fight their whole lives, struggling so hard to get through the ship and deal with the droids, and then a Jedi shows up and just kind of breezes through them. It’s that kind of perspective that makes the jedi and sith seem impressive.
It’s a similar reason people responded so well to Darth Vader’s scene at the end of Rogue One, he just seems genuinely superhuman when seen from that kind of bottom up perspective.
I completely agree - force users should be few and far between, but if you’re going to put a Jedi Master or Sith Lord onscreen they should be goddamn impressive. It would be something you became creative with while mastering, but all we see them do is hop around and shove stuff.
I think the Jedi/no Jedi debate isn’t useful. I believe the major difference is whether or not the writing is good or not. Andor felt like the best star wars material ever written, a whole different league. Mandalorian season 1 felt like fresh, fun star wars. Season 2 felt messier and more corporate with it’s connections to the greater universe. Season 3 felt bad. Ashoka felt bad. Boba fett felt bad.
They feel worse the worse the writing gets, Jedi or not.
I agree that seeing a wider range of stories from different time periods (other than the ones Disney has already fucked up - looking at you FO and the rehash of 4-6) would be great. But that’s not what will predict the quality - well paid writers with a vision and a team around them interested in that vision is what we need.
I just want smaller scale stories where the stakes are high not because of some galactic consequence but because we become attached to the characters and their small worlds.
Andor felt tense because the world was small so smaller scale crises seem larger. I felt more when >!Kino said he couldn’t swim!< than I did when the Death Star obliterated everyone on Scarif.
The only reason why I want less Jedi in my star wars is because I want them to feel special. Star Wars has a massive Galaxy where Jedi were a rarity even before the purge so give me more of that. Don’t blow your load every 10 seconds by shoehorning lightsabers into every story.
Give me a film noir set on Nar Shaddaa or a heist set on Alderaan. I’m tired of the overuse of Jedi like I’m tired of the overuse of Tatooine. That planet is supposed to be a backwater with nothing going on hence Obi Wan choosing to hide there but instead we visit it every other Tuesday because executives think people want sand and brown doors.
For all the shit that Lucas gets, I have to say that his vision for Star Wars has not been replicated. And when you grow up watching those films, you become hyper-sensitive to anything that doesn’t “feel” Star Wars. I honestly believe that’s why the Sequel trilogy wasn’t received well, and why the TV shows fall flat for the most part.
Andor had one heist arc, amid a broader story about radicalization and the creep of authoritarian power. It’s a damned ambitious show. I’m so glad it exists.
They should leave the Skywalker saga. There’s thousands of years & a whole galaxy to fill with stories, and they keep dancing in the same 100 years & the same planets.
Man if I see Saw Garrera appear in some obscure corner of the galaxy with a band of proto-rebels again I’m going to be mad, Cad Bane too, fun for a bit but how do we keep running into the same characters in a whole galaxy? I’m sure there were more but I always noticed how they kept appearing.
I actually don’t want any more Star Wars content. I’m seriously bored now. Perhaps if any of it was good it would be different but so much of it is so bad.
I watched “the bad batch” cartoons because I liked clone wars some millennia ago. It was ok, ::: spoiler and luckily the protagonist is not secretly a jedi :::
Let me go against the grain here: I see a lot of people saying “we need a show like this, we need more of that”, but we don’t really need more Star Wars. We need good Star Wars, not more Star Wars.
Most people want the occasional movie and show about the central Star Wars story, not a multitude of spin-offs about not-Star Wars which happen to be set in the Star Wars universe. They should develop more original stories and settings. “Go out and make your own Star Wars” in the words of George Lucas.
The only problem is the central movies have turned out to be absolute dogshit under Disney.
Yeah, hard agree. “Andor was great because it wasn’t about Jedi” is the wrong lesson to take.
Andor was great because it was made by people who were deeply passionate about what they were doing. They took the set dressing and the context that Star Wars offered and they used it to tell an incredibly powerful story of resistance against fascist oppression, everything that means and entails and what it costs. They created something powerful and vital that deserves and needs to exist.
We need more media that was created out of passion. We need artists to be set free to make art, not shackled to producing whatever a studio thinks is popular. That doesn’t mean it all has to be high minded, subtle or complex; John Wick was a work of artistic passion and it shows. The art is “Look how cool it is when Keanu Reeves shoots people”, but that can be art too. Subtle, complex morality plays or guns and explosions, or Jedi having lightsaber duels. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that people creating it really, really give a shit about what they’re making, and are allowed to make it the way they want to.
And funnily enough, AI powered tools will help with this. It’ll allow more singular or low number group creatives to take on works that would have required full studio teams (and the money to back said teams) in the past
They are not obsessed with jedi, they are obsessed with making money. Wait what that little shit yoda is trending on twitter? Throw everything away, we need more baby yoda.
I really feel like somewhere along the line they forgot that what made Star Wars cool was the gritty ‘Han shot first’ scifi spaghetti western stuff. The Jedi are an important piece of that but it’s so sanitized now - ain’t nobody suddenly finding their bloody arm laying on the ground anymore.
I loved the franchise when I was a kid for exactly those reasons, and then Star Wars started talking about failed trade negotiations and midi-chlorian counts. I haven’t paid too much attention since then, but I get the impression I haven’t missed much.
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