Lightsaber Hot-Take Follow-Up

Following up on last Monday’s Hot Takes on Lightsabers: Last week’s episode of The Bad Batch? That’s how you pivot a story around a lightsaber powering up. A perfect example of “oh snap, it just Got Real.”

(Also, are you watching Bad Batch? You should be watching Bad Batch)

Hot Takes on Lightsabers

This Monday dose of Hot Takes (tm) is brought to you by my having watched the trailers for both the next Rebel Moon¹ and the new Star Wars show The Acolyte² over the weekend.

I have some hot takes on Lightsabers.

Hot Take №1: Every Movie Should Have Lightsabers

I think the science-fiction movie community should do what fantasy novelists did with Tolkien’s elves, and just body Star Wars and run off with them. Put them in everything. The one thing from the Rebel Moons I fully endorse is the attitude of “it’s been long enough, we’re taking these.”

Hot Take №2: Movies With Lightsabers Should Use Them Less

A stylistic thing that the original trilogy did was that whenever a lightsaber powered up, it was a big deal. Partly, this was because they were expensive and hard to do, but the result was that they only³ came out at major story pivot points; when you heard that sound stuff was about to go down. Pulling a lightsaber out shouldn’t ever be casual, you know? It’s a sign the movie just shifted into a new gear.

This is where I segue and say I really like that Andor doesn’t have Jedi or the like, but I’d really like to see what that team could do with one (1) lightsaber fight.

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1. Rebel Moon — Part Two: The Scargiver; Yeah, it looks like more Rebel Moon!

2. The Acolyte; On the one hand, the track record for modern non-Andor Star Wars isn’t great? On the other hand, it’s being run by the same person who did Russian Doll?

3. Okay, the one genuine exception to this is the part in Return of the Jedi where Luke fights off the last speeder bike. But…

   1. This is Return of the Jedi, and that whole movie is a little thematically and structurally sloppier than its predecessors
   2. Plus, the whole middle chunk of that movie, from the sail barge exploding to Wicket telling 3PO about the bunker’s back door, is a total mess
   3. It’s pretty cool though, so we’ll let it slide

We Need to Form An Alliance! Right Now!!

Today is the fourth anniversary of my single favorite piece of art to come out of the early-pandemic era, this absolute banger by the Auralnauts:

Back when we still thought this was all going to “blow over” in a couple of weeks, my kids were planning to do this song for the talent show at the end of that school year.

(Some slight context; the Auralnauts Star Wars Saga started as kind of a bad lip-reading thing, and then went it’s own way into an alternate version of Star Wars where the jedi are frat-bro jerks and the sith are just trying to run a chain of family restaurants. The actual villain of the series is “Creepio”, who has schemes of his own. I’m not normally a re-edit mash-up guy, but those are amazing.)

Unexpected, This Is

This blew up over the last week, but as user @heyitswindy says on the website formerly known as twitter:

“Around 2003 in Chile, when the original trilogy of Star Wars began airing on television there, they did this funny thing to avoid cutting to commercial breaks. They stitched the commercials into the films themselves. Here is one of them, with the English dub added in. https://t.co/wC7N2vPNvv"

The source article has more clips, but I’ll go ahead and embed them here as well:

I’m absolutely in love with the idea that old Ben has a cooler of crispy ones at the ready, but the one with the Emperor really takes the cake.

This went completely nuclear on the webs, and why wouldn’t it? How often does someone discover something new about Star Wars? According to the original thread, they also did this for other movies, including Gladiator and American Beauty(??!!) Hope we get to see those!

What really impresses me, though, is how much work they put into these? They built props! Costumes! Filmed these inserts! That would have been such a fun project to work on.

Today in Star Wars Links

Time marches on, and it turns out Episode I is turning 25 this year. As previously mentioned, the prequels have aged interestingly, and Episode I the most. It’s not any better than it used to be, but the landscape around it has changed enough that they don’t look quite like they used to. They’re bad in a way that no other movies were before or have been since, and it’s easier to see that now than it was at the time. As such, I very much enjoyed Matt Zoller Seitz’s I Used to Hate The Phantom Menace, but I Didn’t Know How Good I Had It :

Watching “The Phantom Menace,” you knew you were watching a movie made by somebody in complete command of their craft, operating with absolute confidence, as well as the ability to make precisely the movie they wanted to make and overrule anyone who objected. […] But despite the absolute freedom with which it was devised, “The Phantom Menace” seemed lifeless somehow. A bricked phone. See it from across the room, you’d think that it was functional. Up close, a paperweight.

[…]

Like everything else that has ever been created, films are products of the age in which they were made, a factor that’s neither here nor there in terms of evaluating quality or importance. But I do think the prequels have a density and exactness that becomes more impressive the deeper we get into the current era of Hollywood, wherein it is not the director or producer or movie star who controls the production of a movie, or even an individual studio, but a global megacorporation, one that is increasingly concerned with branding than art.

My drafts folder is full of still-brewing star wars content, but for the moment I’ll say I largely vibe with this? Episode I was not a good movie, but whatever else you can say about it, it was the exact movie one guy wanted to make, and that’s an increasingly rare thing. There have been plenty of dramatically worse movies and shows in the years sense, and they don’t even have the virtue of being one artist’s insane vision. I mean, jeeze, I’ll happily watch TPM without complaint before I watch The Falcon & The Winter Soldier or Iron Fist or Thor 2 again.

And, loosely related, I also very much enjoyed this interview with prequel-star Natalie Portman:

Natalie Portman on Striking the Balance Between Public and Private Lives | Vanity Fair

Especially this part:

The striking thing has been the decline of film as a primary form of entertainment. It feels much more niche now. If you ask someone my kids’ age about movie stars, they don’t know anyone compared to YouTube stars, or whatever.

There’s a liberation to it, in having your art not be a popular art. You can really explore what’s interesting to you. It becomes much more about passion than about commerce. And interesting, too, to beware of it becoming something elitist. I think all of these art forms, when they become less popularized, you have to start being like, okay, who are we making this for anymore? And then amazing, too, because there’s also been this democratization of creativity, where gatekeepers have been demoted and everyone can make things and incredible talents come up. And the accessibility is incredible. If you lived in a small town, you might not have been able to access great art cinema when I was growing up. Now it feels like if you’ve got an internet connection, you can get access to anything. It’s pretty wild that you also feel like at the same time, more people than ever might see your weird art film because of his extraordinary access. So it’s this two-sided coin.

I think this is the first time that I’ve seen someone admit that not only is 2019 is never going to happen again, but that’s a thing to embrace, not fear.

Doctor Who and the Canon… Of Death

I’ve very much been enjoying the commentary around the last couple of Doctor Whos, especially “The Giggle”. There’s a lot of intersting things to talk about! But there’s a strand of fans, primarily ones used to American Sci-fi, that really struggle with the way Doctor Who works, and especially with how Doctor Who relates to itself. It fundamentally operates on a different set of rules for a long-running show than most American shows.

You see—Doctor Who doesn’t have a canon. It has a continuity, but that’s not the same thing.

⁂

Lets step back and talk about “canon” for a second.

“Canon” in the sense of organizing a body of fiction, originates with the Sherlock Holmes fandom. There, they were making a distinction between Doyle’s work and what we’d now call “fan fiction”. Using the biblical term was one of those jokes that was “ha ha only serious”, it’s clearly over the top, but makes a clear point—some things exist at a higher level of importance than other things.

But it also sets the stage nicely for all future uses of the term; it draws a box neatly around the core works, and the social contact from that point on is that any new work needs to treat the material in “the canon” as having happened, but can pick and choose from the material outside—the apocrypha, to continue the metaphor.

So, any future Sherlock Holmes work is expected to include the fact that he faked his death at the top of a waterfall, but isn’t expected to necessarily include the fact once he was treated by Freud.

Again, here the term mostly draws a line between what today we’d call “Official” and not. It’s a fancier way of putting the work of the original author at a higher level importance than any other continuation, formally published or not.

But then a funny thing happened. As large, multi-author franchises became the norm in the late 20th century, we started getting Official works that still “didn’t count”.

As usual for things like this, Patient Zero is Star Trek. When The Next Generation got going, the people making that show found there was an awful lot of material out there they didn’t want to have to deal with. Not fan-fiction, the official vs fan device was clear by the mid-80s, but works that were formally produced by the same people, had all the rights to do so, but “didn’t really happen.” Specifically, the Animated Series, but also every single spin-off novel. So, Roddenberry & co. declared that the “Star Trek Canon” was the original show and the then four movies, and everything else was not. Apocrypha. Official, but “didn’t count.”

(Pushing the biblical metaphor to the breaking point, this also introduced the first “deuterocanonical” work in the form of the Animated Star Trek, where nearly everything in it has been taken to have “happened” except the actual plots of the episodes themselves. And those force-field belts.)

(And, it’s absolutely insane to live in a world where we act like the Voyager episode “Threshold” happened and Diane Duane’s Rihannsu didn’t, but at least the rules are clear.)

And this became the standard for most big sprawling multi-media franchies: sooner or later nearly all of them made some kind of formal statement about which bits were “The Canon.” And the key detail, always, was that the only reason to formally declare something like this was to leave things out. This isn’t always a bad thing! As I said before a lot of this was around establishing a social contract between the authors and the audience—“these are the things we’ll adjust future work to fit, and these are the things we’re giving ourselves permission to ignore.”

The most extreme version of this was Star Wars, twice over. First, you have the overly complex 4-tired canon of the late 90s and early 00s, which not only established the Canon, but also provided a borderline-talmudic conflict resolution system to determine which of two pieces of canon that disagreed with each other was “right”.

Then, after Disney bought LucasFilm, they rescoped the canon, shrinking it down to pretty much just live action movies and the Clone Wars cartoon, banishing all the previous novels and such into the Deuterocanonical wilderness of “Legends”, which is sort of like if Martin Luther had also been the CEO of the company that bought the Catholic Church.

But, the point remains. Canon is way to exclude works, largely as an attention-conservation device, a way for a franchise to say “this is what what we commit to pay attention to, and the rest of this is fun but we’re going to ignore it.”

⁂

Which is where we get back to Doctor Who.

Because Doctor Who is unique in that no one in a position to do so has ever made a formal declaration about “Canon”. And this makes a certain kind of fan go absolutely bananas.

There’s no point in having a canon if you’re not excluding something; the whole point is to draw a box around part, rather than the whole thing. And that just isn’t Doctor Who’s style.

There’s a quote from 70s script editor Terrance Dicks that I can’t find at the moment, that goes somesthing like “Doctor Who’s continuity is whatever the general public can remember,” and that’s really the animating principle. It’s a more free-wheeling, “it’s all true”, don’t sweat the details kind of attitude. This is how you end up with three completely different and utterly incompatible destructions of Atlantis. It’s not really a show that gets wrapped up in the tiny details? It’s a big picture, big concepts, moving forward kind of show.

And this completely violates the social contract of something like Star Trek or Star Wars, where the implied promise of having a Canon is that everything inside it will fit together like clockwork, and that any “violations” are opportunities for deep navel-gazing stories explaining the reasons. This leads to those franchises worst impulses, for example both to aggressively change how the Klingons look in an attempt to prove that “this isn’t your Dad’s Star Trek”, and then also spend three episodes with the guy from Quantum Leap explaining why they look different.

Doctor Who on the other hand, just kind of says “hey! Look how cool the Cybermen look now!” and keeps moving.

The point is, if you’ve bought into the clockwork canon worldview, Who looks incredibly sloppy, like a bunch of careless bunglers just keep doing things without any consideration of what came before.

(Which is really funny, because I absolutely guarantee you that the people who have been running Who the last two decades are much bigger fans of the old show than anyone who’s worked on Star Trek over the same period.)

So when the show got big in the US, the American fans kept trying to apply the Star Trek rules and kept getting terribly upset. This has spawned a fair amount of, shall we say, internet discussion over the years. The definitive statement on Doctor Who’s lack of canon is probably Paul Cornell’s Canonicity in Doctor Who. But there’s those Trek fans that remain unconvinced. Whenever the show tosses out something new that doesn’t really fit with the existing material—bigeneration, say—there’s the fan cohort that goes completely mental. Because if you treat decades old stuff as having higher precedence that new ideas, the whole thing looks sloppy and careless.

But it’s not carelessness, it’s just a different world view to how this kind of storytelling works. Thematically, it all works together. The details? Not the point.

I tend to think of Who working more like Greek Myths than a documentary about fictional people. Do all the stories about Hercules fit together? No, not really. Is he always the same guy in those stories? Yes, yes he is.

Same rules apply to the madman in a box. And if someone has a better idea for a new story, they should go ahead and tell it. Atlantis can always drown one more time.

The Casablanca Threshold

A thought experiment.

How many purely fictional universes are complex enough to support something like the movie Casablanca?

Casablanca does very little of its own exposition, because the school system handles most of the heavy lifting in history class. But think about the number of things the audience needs to know to understand whats going on. France, Germany, the Vichy regime, the situation in ’41, that the US is still neutral, why both sides can sit next to each other in North Africa.

Specifically, think about the scene with the competing national anthems! The movie has to do very little to explain why that woman is crying to "La Marseillaise”, and part of what’s so great about it is that everyone already knows, no one has to narrate to the audience what’s going on. How many fictional settings could pull off a scene with that much subtext and moving parts without needing somebody like Spock to explain everything right before it happened?

Lord of the Rings could do it. Star Trek could probably do it in some cases. Game of Thrones?

This idea spun out of a conversation about Star Wars, and how “Rick’s” is mood it often tries to hit, despite the “vibes-over-lore” worldbuilding meaning that it has no way to do anything like the national anthems scene. (Which is not even remotely a criticism, just a different approach to that kind of fiction. And, to be clear, Star Wars is mostly successful at it.)

It’s an interesting threshold to think about for fictional world-building. Is the world built out enough, and has it already delivered enough exposition, that it could pull off something like Rick’s?

2023’s strange box office

Weird year for the box office, huh? Back in July, we had that whole rash of articles about the “age of the flopbuster” as movie after movie face-planted. Maybe things hadn’t recovered from the pandemic like people hoped?

And then, you know, Barbenheimer made a bazillion dollars.

And really, nothing hit like it was supposed to all year. People kept throwing out theories. Elemental did badly, and it was “maybe kids are done with animation!” Ant-Man did badly, and it was “Super-Hero fatigue!” Then Spider-Verse made a ton of money disproving both. And Super Mario made a billion dollars. And then Elemental recovered on the long tail and ended up making half a billion? And Guardians 3 did just fine. But Captain Marvel flopped. Harrison Ford came back for one more Indiana Jones and no one cared.

Somewhere around the second weekend of Barbenheimer everyone seemed to throw up their hands as if to say “we don’t even know what’ll make money any more”.

Where does all that leave us? Well, we clearly have a post-pandemic audience that’s willing to show up and watch movies, but sure seems more choosy than they used to be. (Or choosy about different things?)

Here’s my take on some reasons why:

The Pandemic. I know we as a society have decided to act like COVID never happened, but it’s still out there. Folks may not admit it, but it’s still influencing decisions. Sure, it probably wont land you in the hospital, but do you really want to risk your kid missing two weeks of school just so you can see the tenth Fast and the Furious in the theatre? It may not be the key decision input anymore, but that’s enough potential friction to give you pause.

Speaking of the theatre, the actual theater experience sucks most of the time. We all like to wax poetic about the magic of the shared theatre experience, but in actual theaters, not the fancy ones down in LA, that “experience” is kids talking, the guy in front of you on his phone, the couple behind you being confused, gross floors, and half an hour of the worst commercials you’ve ever seen before the picture starts out of focus and too dim.

On the other hand, you know what everyone did while they were stuck at home for that first year of COVID? Upgrade their home theatre rig. I didn’t spend a whole lot of money, but the rig in my living room is better than every mall theatre I went to in the 90s, and I can put the volume where I want it, stop the show when the kids need to go to the bathroom, and my snacks are better, and my chairs are more comfortable.

Finally, and I think this is the key one—The value proposition has gotten out of wack in a way I don’t think the industry has reckoned with. Let me put my cards down on the table here: I think I saw just about every movie released theatrically in the US between about 1997 and maybe 2005. I’m pro–movie theatre. It was fun and I enjoyed it, but also that was absolutely the cheapest way to spend 2-3 hours. Tickets were five bucks, you could basically fund a whole day on a $20 bill if you were deliberate about it.

But now, taking a family of four to a movie is in the $60-70 range. And, thats a whole different category. That’s what a new video game costs. That’s what I paid for the new Zelda, which the whole family is still playing and enjoying six months later, hundreds of hours in. Thats Mario Kart with all the DLC, which we’ve also got about a million hours in. You’re telling me that I should pay the same amount of money that got me all that for one viewing of The Flash? Absolutely Not. I just told the kids we weren’t going to buy the new Mario before christmas, but I’m supposed to blow that on… well, literally anything that only takes up two hours?

And looking at that from the other direction, I’m paying twelve bucks a month for Paramount +, for mostly Star Trek–related reasons. But that also has the first six Mission: Impossible movies on it right now. Twelve bucks, you could cram ‘em all in a long weekend if you were serious about it. And that’s not really even a streaming thing, you could have netted six not-so-new release movies for that back in the Blockbuster days too. And like I said, I have some really nice speakers and a 4k projector, those movies look great in my living room. You’re trying to tell me that the new one is so much better that I need to pay five times what watching all the other movies cost me, just to see it now? As opposed to waiting a couple of months?

And I think that’s the key I’m driving towards here: movies in the theatre have found themselves with a premium price without offering a premium product.

So what’s premium even mean in this context? Clicking back and forth between Box Office Mojo’s domestic grosses for 2023 and 2019, this year didn’t end up being that much worse, it just wasn’t the movies people were betting on that made money.

There’s a line I can’t remember the source of that goes something to the effect of “hollywood doesn’t have a superhero movie problem, it has a ‘worse copy of movies we’ve already seen’ problem.” Which dovetails nicely with John Scalzi’s twitter quip about The Flash bombing: “…the fact is we’re in the “Paint Your Wagon” phase of the superhero film era, in which the genre is played out, the tropes are tired and everyone’s waiting for what the next economic engine of movies will be.”

Of course, when we say “Superhero”, we mostly mean Marvel Studios, since the recent DC movies have never been that good or successful. And Marvel did one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen, which is gave everyone an off ramp. For a decade they had everyone in a groove to go see two or three movies a year and keep up on what those Avengers and their buddies were up to. Sure, people would skip one or two here or there, a Thor, an Ant-Man, but everyone would click back in for one of the big team up movies. And then they made Endgame, and said “you’re good, story is over, you can stop now!” And so people did! The movie they did right after Endgame needed to be absolutely the best movie they had ever done, and instead it was Black Widow. Which was fine, but didn’t convince anyone they needed to keep watching.

And I’d extend all this out to not just Superheros, but also “superhero adjacent” moves, your Fast and Furious, Mission: Impossible, Indiana Jones. Basically all the “big noise” action blockbusters. I mean, what’s different about this one versus the other half-dozen I’ve already seen?

(Indiana Jones is kind of funny for other reasons, because I think Disney dramatically underestimated how much the general audience knew or cared about Spielburg. His name on those movies mattered! The guy who made “The Wolverine” is fine and all, but I’m gonna watch that one at home. I’m pretty sure if Steve had directed it instead of going off to do West Side Story it would have made a zillion dollars.)

But on the other hand, the three highest grossing movies that weren’t Barbenheimer were Super Mario Bros, Spider-Verse, and Guardians of the Galaxy 3, so clearly superheros and animation are still popular, just the right superheros and animation. Dragging the superhero-movies-are-musicals metaphor to the limit, there were plenty of successful musicals after Paint your Wagon, but they were the ones that did something interesting or different. They stopped being automatically required viewing.

At this point, I feel like we gotta talk about budgets for a second, only only for a second because it is not that interesting. If you don’t care about this, I’ll meet down on the other side of the horizontal line.

Because the thing is, most of those movies that, ahem, “underperformed” cost a ton. The new M:I movie payed the salaries for everyone working on it through the whole COVID lockdown, so they get a pass. (Nice work, Tom Cruise!). Everyone else, though, what are you even doing? If you spend so much money making a movie that you need to be one of the highest grossing films of all time just to break even, maybe that’s the problem right there? Dial of Destiny cost 300 million dollars. Last Crusade cost forty eight. Adjusted for inflation, thats (checks wolfram alpha) …$116 million? Okay, that amount of inflation surprised me too, but the point stands: is Dial three times as much movie as Last Crusade? Don’t bother answering that, no it is not, and thats even before pointing out the cheap one was the one with Sean friggin’ Connery.

This where everyone brings up Sound of Freedom. Let’s just go ahead and ignore, well, literally everything else about the movie and just point out that it made just slightly more money than the new Indiana Jones movie, but also only cost, what, 14 million bucks? Less than five percent of what Indy cost?

There’s another much repeated bon mot I can’t seem to find an origin for that goes something along the lines of “They used to used to make ten movies hoping one would be successful enough to pay for the other nine, but then decided to just make the one that makes money, which worked great until it didn’t.” And look, pulpy little 14 million dollar action movies are exactly the kind of movie they’re talking about there. Sometimes they hit a chord! Next time you’re tempted to make a sequel to a Spielburg/Lucas movie without them, maybe just scrap that movie and make twenty one little movies instead.

—

So, okay. What’s the point, what can we learn from this strange year in a strange decade? Well, people like movies. They like going to see movies. But they aren’t going to pay to see a worse version of something they can already watch at home on their giant surround-sound-equipped TV for “free”. Or risk getting sick for the privilege.

Looking at the movies that did well this year, it was the movies that had something to say, that had a take, movies that had ambitions beyond being “the next one.”

Hand more beloved brand names to indie film directors and let them do whatever they want. Or, make a movie based on something kids love that doesn’t already have a movie. Or make a biography about how sad it is that the guy who invented the atomic bomb lost his security clearance because iron man hated him. That one feels less applicable, but you never know. If you can build a whole social event around an inexplicable double-feature, so much the better.

And, look, basically none of this is new. The pandemic hyper-charged a whole bunch of trends, but I feel like I could have written a version of this after Thanksgiving weekend for any year in the past decade.

That’s not the point. This is:

My favorite movie of the year was Asteroid City. That was only allegedly released into theatres. It made, statistically speaking, no money. Those kinds of movies never do! They make it up on the long tail.

I like superhero/action movies movies as much as the next dork who knew who “Rocket Racoon” was before 2014, but I’m not about to pretend they’re high art or anything. They’re junk food, sometimes well made very entertaining junk food, but lets not kid ourselves about the rest of this complete breakfast.

“Actually good” movies (as opposed to “fun and loud”) don’t do well in the theatre, they do well on home video.

Go back and look at that 2019 list I linked above. On my monitor, the list cuts off at number fifteen before you have to scroll, and every one of those fifteen movies is garbage. Fun garbage, in most cases! On average, well made, popular, very enjoyable. (Well, mostly, Rise of Skywalker is the worst movie I’ve ever paid to see.)

Thats what was so weird about Barbenheimer, and Spider-Verse, and 2023’s box office. For once, objectively actually good movies made all the money.

Go watch Asteroid City at home, that’s what I’m saying.

Exciting Consulting Opportunities

I’m going to start a consulting company. I will offer one product: companies making movies or tv shows show me the finished version of their “digitally de-aged” actor zombies, and I will say “no, just use the real guy instead, it’ll be fine.”

Starcruiser, coming in for a landing

On paper, Disney’s Star Wars Galactic Starcuiser—aka “the Star Wars Hotel”—should have been right up my alley, being that I’m a massive fan of Disney Parks, Star Wars, and role playing. Instead, I was more bemused than intrigued, intending to think about going if the price went down and the plague died back a little more. Instead, it’s shutting down after just over a year and a half in operation.

Disney’s marketing was always vague about what the actual experience was—is it a hotel with a lot of theming and meet and greets? An attraction in it’s own right? Larp summer camp? Did they really build a hotel in Florida without a pool or windows that open?

Therefore, I absolutely devoured Adrian Hon’s detailed writeup of his stay, and Jason Snell’s additional comments and links over at Six Colors.. This is by far the clearest description I’ve read of the experience; and while I wasn’t that interested in going before reading this, having read it, I’m still disinterested, but for totally different reasons.

I agree with one point in his writeup wholeheartedly: the marking on this was strange.. Disney advertised it as a deeply themed hotel connected to the Star Wars section of the park. Essentially the next level up in theming their park-connected hotels; the Grand Californian’s side door into California Adventure but without breaking character.

Instead, it’s a deeply themed 2-day full immersion live role playing experience, where you get to take a break and go on some Disney rides in the middle of the day.

It’s hard to know if this is really a “failure”, so much as an experiment that came to a conclusion.

Some thoughts!

First, and I say this with all the love in the world, if I’m going to be locked in a windowless bunker for two days, “Star Wars fans with too much money” is not the demographic I want to be locked in with.

And, look. The key word in “windowless bunker” is “windowless”. Covid is still real; in the world after March 2020, spending two days in such a place with a bunch of strangers is a whole different cost-benefit analysis.

I was going to make a crack here about how a trip for a family of four to the Starcruiser including the airfare to Florida cost more than my college education, but you know what? That’s probably about the right price. Not just because of the clearly high operating costs, but any lower than that, and the temptation to show up dressed as a Star Trek away team, or Doctor Who, or Corben Dallas, would become overwhelming. For six hundred bucks, you might be willing to mess around, but for six grand the buy-in is high enough to make sure everyone is there to actually play as intended.

And, not to go too far down the Trilogy Wars path, but, GenX-er here. The fact that it’s set at some poorly-defined point between the Sequels is fine, makes sense. It has Rey in it, that’s great! She’s a great character, my kids love Rey. But man, if instead that was two days at Echo Base on Hoth, helping Luke trap Wampas and blow up Probe Droids I’d have slapped that credit card down without a moment’s hesitation.

(But, Star Wars Land—excuse me, Galaxy’s Edge—has this same challenge throughout, though. Stars Wars is at least 4 different distinct audiences now, depending on which one was the one you saw when you were nine, and it’s only going to become more so. There’s a reason it’s “Fantasy Land” and not “Sleeping Beauty Land.” It’ll be interesting to see if the more Sequel-specific parts of the park get sanded down to a more “evergreen” median value Star Wars. Or if they retool to be more oriented towards the Disney+ shows, instead of a movie that’s now almost a decade old.)

Speaking of Corben Dallas, I’d probably also have dropped five grand to spend two nights at the Fhloston Paradise?

And maybe this is just me, but I’m deeply weirded out by the number of people who took the First Order path—are there really people who want to pay that much money for the privilege of ratting out beloved characters to space fascists? I feel the same way about the storm troopers who “occupy” sections of the park. Maybe throwing the largest marketing department in the world behind making fascists fun and cuddly isn’t the best possible move here in the Twenties?

Anyway. It sure sounds like for a specific demographic they built the perfect attraction. I usually think of myself as an Extrovert, but personally that all sounds exhausting.

I _am_ looking forward to seeing what they do with what they learned from all this. If nothing else, I really want to wander around that thing they built without the commitment. I’d happily stand in line to get “shuttled up to orbit” to do that bridge training co-op game. I hope the building ends up something like an Epcot pavilion, where you can pop in and wander around for a couple hours in the middle of the afternoon.

The Prequels, slouching towards respectability

From Polygon today:  “The MCU keeps copying the Star Wars prequels”

It’s been interesting to watch recently as the years have started to treat The Phantom Menace well.  I’ve seen several pieces now over the last year or two with a favorable view of the prequels—did folks rewatch them for the first time in a decade over lockdown and realize they wern’t as bad as they remembered?

I’d submit George Lucas does the Big Special Effects Jamboree Action Scene better than anyone working today.  Even Phantom Menace, probably the worst-received work of his career on release, has a meticulously crafted final three-part action sequence that puts most movies to shame.  Always exciting, never confusing; the cuts from place to place are clear, you can tell where people are relative to each other, and every character in the movie gets at least one highlight moment to shine.

After dozens of movies with the same confusing all-computer graphics smash-em-up third act—Marvel and otherwise—it’s worth going back and looking at what the master of the form did, even in his lesser works.