I don’t think that’s what is implied. They’re implying that works with a lot of inspirational sources created the original Star Wars Trilogy, but then Star Wars was used as the sole inspiration for a bunch of other films. The post title says that this is a problem from a creativity standpoint.
Something I admire about the fallout show that just came out is it actually has quite a few callbacks to the original source material (a boy and his dog, 1975) that inspired the first Fallout game. There are probably other influences that would be fun to learn about and it conceivably could be taken further to make a completely standalone series, and now I’m wondering what something like that would look like.
This does not make sense. Are you saying that the ideas (or lack of ideas) of the prequels are what contributed to the problems of modern Star Wars?
The prequels had flaws, but ideas and worldbuilding were the least of them. Say what you will about the bad dialogue and directing choices, the prequels at least attempted to tell a fresh story that expanded the universe, and didn’t just rely on nostalgia.
George Lucas could have just made another OT-style adventure, but he deliberately chose not to. He could have used more practical sets and effects, but he wanted to push the medium. He made a lot of mistakes, but he also laid the foundation for future stories to take place in the universe he built.
If anything, one of the big problems with modern Star Wars is when they ignore that foundation. Writers and directors are concerned with putting their creative stamp on things, which leads to incoherence.
The meme is riffing on the criticism that Star Wars has become too self-referential. That modern Star Wars are inspired only by earlier iterations of Star Wars, rather than the more diverse list of inspirations for the original film. It's not a comment on the quality of the PT.
I think you’re absolutely correct. When Disney bought it and invalidated/retconned all established Star Wars lore and world building, they threw out the foundation.
I think the idea is that the original movie drew it’s ideas from a ton of sources and that the new films’ only sources of ideas are earlier star wars films.
You take some raw meat, not even necessarily very good meat, and run it through a meat grinder. You’ve got hamburger, and you can make a pretty delicious hamburger.
You take a cooked hamburger and run it through a meat grinder, and you’re getting something else, and if you try to make a new hamburger, it’s going to taste weird.
There’s not enough raw pulp going into the meat grinder for the latter entries.
I thought there was plenty to like about both Solo and Rogue One, but they both relied too much on nostalgia and familiarity to be actually decent on their own. I’ve heard good things about the original cut of Solo and wish we could have seen that.
Solo just really suffered because everyone was so burnt out from the sequel trilogy just failing on so many levels. I didn’t bother seeing it until years after release.
Solo at least had a coherent plot with multiple memorable performances. Donald Glover and Woody Harrelson both were a ton of fun whenever on screen. Adam Driver carried the ST but Kylo’s Redemption arc in Rise was boring.
I had 0 expectations for Rise, and it met those expectations perfectly. It did stupid things, but that was their only real option, unless you believe Kylo not getting redeemed or Rey being evil were ever an option.
Solo took an established character and largely ruined him. The movie was also extremely boring, placing characters that obviously live in mortal peril to regularly build tension.
I mean, it makes much more sense if you analyze who the grinders are, too. The old ones were George NOT having full control, pulling inspiration from classics.
The new ones were made by J.J Abrams, one of the most creatively bankrupt morons in Hollywood, pulling from his ass. He was smart enough to realize people like mysteries, but was never smart enough to figure out how to reveal a mystery or tie it in to an overarching story.
Yes, but the meme is that a wide variety of inspiration from good movies was used to create Star Wars and then Star Wars was used to spawn out a bunch of stuff without any apparent additional inspiration.
Might not be literally true for every subsequent movie included in the meme, but the overall point is accurate.
Andor is also amazing (not on the list) but I’d argue it isn’t really inspired by Star Wars. It is in the same universe, but I think it takes a lot more from other media, and also real life, than it does from Star Wars.
Rogue One is alright. Not amazing but not as bad as the rest. It is largely still just Star Wars with a different cast. There’s hints that it could have been something special, but it wasn’t allowed to.
Even the original trilogy isn’t “great”. The star of Star wars has always been the fantasy universe. The story was already cannibalizing on itself by ROTJ (Death Star…2?)
Rogue One/Andor shine because they treat the universe as the star. They’re still compelling even if it was the only content that existed outside of the original trilogy, IMO anyways. People can enjoy whatever they want for whatever reasons they want.
Rogue One was meh except for the visuals. The train heist has the most beautiful explosion VFX in s very long time.
Story wise it was meh but it paved the way for Andor which better committed to the WW2 action/spy thriller angle without the Star Wars prequel bagage dragging it down. Yes it’s a prequel itself but it won’t need to connect to space wizards which tend to bog down a lot of the Star Wars offshoots.
I can see the WW2 spy thing for bits of Andor, but not most of it. Not Andor’s part at least. It’s more about leftist revolutions. I know Andor’s actor has some connection in his past with the Zapatistas, an anarchist group in Mexico. It pulls from a lot more than just that obviously. It’s also crazy that it can be made under Disney somehow.
For the WW2 spy thing, I guess it’s because I’m very fond of WW2 spy movies based on real events. There are quite a few European movies portraying events and operations done by their local partisans during WW2 and I feel Andor takes some inspiration in those.
I wouldn’t call partisans spies, but I get your meaning. Yeah, I’m sure it does take a lot from those. It is a smart show with a crew who seems to know where to draw influences from, and does so broadly. I can’t say the same for any other modern Star Wars sadly.
Yes it’s complicated and all a question of point of view calling someone a spy, partisan, terrorist, freedom fighter.
But in the end it’s spycraft involving locals vs. some powerful oppressive State. Often involving another sympathic State supporting the partisans using straight-up spies.
I’d even go further, people have seriously just forgotten the first 2/3rds of Rogue One. The characters are stiff and boring, the plot is meaningless because you know nobody survives, and the few action sequences before the big battle are nothing to right home about.
Once you get to the big battle, it’s bombastic and exciting, and you even get a little tension from “but how exactly do all these people die?” I don’t even think it’s just nostalgia talking, the battle really was executed incredibly well. It’s like ~45 minutes of the greatest sci-fi war porn ever made. It’s so high quality that it makes you forget the other hour and a half of your life that the movie wastes on Jyn Erso’s angst.
I don’t know about you, but knowing the characters die does not make them uninteresting to me. They aren’t real in the first place. Why does the fact that they die matter? Its the same as saying the character building for any other character that isn’t in a sequel doesn’t matter. Once they’re off the screen, does it matter if the character is dead?
In fact, I’d potentially say them dying adds more to the character potential. We get to see what made them willing to die. That said, I don’t think Rogue One pulls this off. Andor absolutely does, and it’s the best thing that has come out of SW because of it. We rarely get to see that in this universe. We sometimes see what people will kill for (with Anakin at least), but not the reason they’re willing to die for the cause, other than just they’re supposed to because they were written as heroes.
I’m not claiming that you cannot tell an effective story when you know the fates of the characters, just that Rogue One was particularly ineffective. Usually to make those plots compelling you need to have interesting well written characters with motivations you can understand and care about. The most compelling character Rogue One has is a funny robot.
Exactly. The first half of the movie doesn’t deserve the ending it gets in the second half.
I unsubscribed from /r/starwars after a few weeks of trying to have a friendly conversation about it. “The first half didn’t develop the characters as well as it could have”. You come back a half hour later to a -36 score. People were rabid fans of that movie and that was the final piece that made me want to not interact with that community anymore.
belong with the group in the second panel. I love Star Wars and I’m also very critical of how much it reuses concepts and content across its (mainly film, but in other mediums occasional as well) catalog. There’s a whole fucking galaxy of shit out there – approximately 50 million populated worlds and 100 quadrillion sapient lives in known space alone (according to the EU, so take it as you will) – and we see like two dozen planets and one family in the movies. It’s frustrating.
The point is that the star wars films draw inspiration from Star Wars and nothing else. It’s like a loss for the industry as a whole that new big studio scifi films aren’t being written or produced aside from one single intellectual property. It doesn’t matter at all if some of them were decent.
No one missed the point. The fact of the matter is the three properties I mentioned drew upon traditions, stories, and storytelling methods outside of the Star Wars franchise. The fact that the produced a result far beyond their peers in the catalog is evidence of the actual artistry in their creation, not the point itself.
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