ST So J.J. Abrams wants Star Wars to feel real.

It really makes me want to weep for humanity when people actually think that the character of Carol Marcus (as seen in ST: Into Darkness) is worthy of any note... Have I entered that same alternate reality where One Direction recorded Sgt Pepper and Abbey Road and where Star Wars is full of big breasted, size zero women and where the men go around punching each other in the face. Welcome to homogenized Star Wars boys and girls.

 

Awesome, now you follow it up with an attack on big-breasted woman. News flash: We can't control how big our breasts grow. There's no (negative) correlation of breast size and intelligence.

Oh, I agree that she was a much stronger character in TPM. But after she met Anakin she became increasingly weaker and more and more hypocritical.

I am confident that Abrams is capable of presenting much stronger female characters to us. Maybe even a female Darth.

 

Of course she doesn't lack "moral courage". She's always doing what a perfect person would be doing and with no motivation other than doing what's expected of her. Why? Because she's a great leader. Why is she such a great leader and a strategic genius at 14? Because Lucas said so.

Padme is such a failure as a character, it's not even funny. You can make fun out of loads of things on the prequels (and the trilogy too), but Padme is so bland, I kind of feel sorry for Natalie Portman. I can only imagine her reading that script for the first time and thinking how to do this.

She has NO backstory, absolutely none, other than being little miss Perfect all the time and it's not Portman's fault. The fact that she's respected and followed in this sterile universe doesn't matter at all. The love story could've been a platform for a bigger range in her character but we all know that side of the story is just dead and I've seen better love stories in episodes of Hannah Montana.

As I've said before, she probably lost the will to live because she didn't have any to begin with.

 

Leia seems like a missed opportunity as well. I would've preferred to see her confronting Vader and leading the rebellion rather than flirting with Han and dressing up like a forest princess. As far as I'm concerned, a strong arc from beginning to end for a lead woman in the sequel trilogy would be a first for the series.

 

Yeah, it's interesting that the writers seemed to sacrifice Padme's character simply to increase Anakin's motivation for turning.

Here's what I wanted: Padme stands up to Anakin when he becomes Vader even more aggressively than we saw in ROTS. Rather than saying you're breaking my heart, she joins with Obi-Wan in calling Anakin evil to his face. Anakin force chokes her like before, but this time, he injures her in an unambiguous way, and she falls unconscious. After Obi-Wan defeats Anakin, he learns from the med droid that the children must be delivered despite the fact that Padme is dying from her injuries and still unconscious. The twins are born and Padme recovers for a moment, just long enough to name the children before she dies. While she dies, we hear her having difficulty breathing, even choking a bit, suggesting her link to Anakin's fate.

 

In ANH:
Leia gets her hands dirty shooting various stormtroopers and defends the rebellion under torture by Vader and even in the face of utter distraction of her home planet and later she does not evacuate Yavin when faced with the DS.
In ESB:
Leia stays till the end of Echo base supervising the evacuation of her troops and later handles herself rather well against Solo as well as Lando and Vader.
In ROTJ:
Leia infiltrates Jabbas palace in hopes of rescuing Han, kills Jabba with only a chain and leads a suicide attack on a killer bear infested forest moon.
The only time she is acting a bit bland/softer is after she gets the news that her torturer that held her back when her home planet was destroyed is actually her father and the guy she flirted with and kissed a few times is actually her brother... Oh my...

 

It's interesting how we tend to equate women showing their bodies off with weakness, which we probably wouldn't do with bare-chested men. I thought Carol Marcus was a really interesting character too, although I was surprised they went so far with the sexy aspect. But this new Star Trek is trying to sex up all the main characters, including Spock for goodness sakes. Yeah, showing Carol's body off was meant to seduce the male audience, but it was also meant to seduce Kirk, which it did. I actually felt like Carol's beauty was dominating Kirk and was sort of funny, but she had plenty of other ways to dominate men too, including her own father. Which was cool. That did make her more admirable than ROTS Padme.

In my last semester at college we talked in my workshop a lot about a post-feminist attitude (different from anti-feminist). What that might entail. Maybe one aspect is that it's not always exploitation to show the body of a woman (or a man) off for titillation's sake, but more important what sorts of actions and beliefs the characters have. Or I suppose as we see in lots of genre entertainment, it's exploitation while also being empowering. A mixed message maybe, but more complex than the simple binary approach would have us judge it.

 

Oh, definitely, Padme is far from a believable or well-written character with any depth. I wasn't trying to insinuate that she was. (I never thought I'd say the day when I would be interpreted as defending the prequels, heh.) I was responding to Darth Pevra's assertion that she is 'such a weak and submissive woman' and Pfluegermeister's questioning of her 'moral courage.'

 

Actually, she was very heroic and strong in AOTC, more so than in TPM IMO. She commented in interviews that she liked the way Lucas allowed females to be strong yet pretty (Leia fits this also).

BTW- you're female? For some reason, I always thought you were a guy.

 

Padme also gets her hands dirty shooting a blaster and defends her planet by standing up to the Trade Federation in the face of utter devastation of her home planet. She only evacuates the planet when she feels it's absolutely necessary to save her people, and then goes on to bravely return and lead the attack to retake her seat of government. In the next film she handles herself rather well when she opposes a war/army, demands that she and Anakin go save Obi-Wan, and then later is shown as fully capable of taking care of herself in the arena. She does things actively and capably, and yet I agree that the character does not live up to her full potential by trilogy's end.

Similarly, your examples show that Leia has her moments as well, and yet despite those I still think more could've been done to make her character less of a love interest for Han and more fully realized on her own merit. None of what you mention excises the bicker-flirting I dislike or makes up for the fact that still I would've preferred to see her confronting Vader along with Luke, or actively leading the rebellion rather than tagging along with Han's strike team (and getting lost and dressing up in the process). And thanks for reminding me about Jabba's palace. I can't believe I actually forgot that Leia was the only main character the narrative chose to be objectified as a sexual object despite all of the main cast being captured.

 

Lee_
Yep, I'm a woman. But you wouldn't be the first to tell me I have a "male writing style".

 

One could make similar arguments with Padme. The strength in the Leia character doesn't rely on her fearlessness alone and I agree about the missed opportunity bit about her in Return of the Jedi.

She has faults, big ones. She's arrogant and expects the princess treatment at first. She's also very ungrateful towards her rescuers. In ESB she's not that high maintenance but she's still so stubborn, she denies any attraction or feelings towards Han, she's never going to give in easily, even when they kiss, she's being mean to him. She's a feisty little one that's not easy to deal with. That makes sense when she's briefing the pilots before the Battle of Hoth, this chick knows what's going on and if you look at her the wrong way, she's going to tear you a new one. On top of this, which at least for me, it's her main character trait, she's fearless and ideological . . after all, it makes sense. All of her people died, of course she would fight in their honor even if death is a possibility. The destruction of Alderaan is part of her backstory as well, it's not just a cool explosion to demonstrate the real power of the death star.

In ROTJ, you can tell she's coked out of her mind, she isn't really there, she even looks kind of sad and beat. They give her the pop culture sex element with the gold bikini which is out of character. It could've been an opportunity for Star Warsy comedy, but no, she was just there looking hot. After all that she's just hanging around, getting in speeder bike chases, becoming queen of the forest, and so on. She's just the lady in the movie and things happen to her. She doesn't even use the force besides "feeling" that Luke wasn't on that thing when it blew. She never really feels like Leia SKYWALKER, which was her arch in a way. It has Lucas written all over it.

Still, a much stronger character than Padme, if you can even call her that.

 

It will be interesting to see how Leia and other female characters are handled in the sequel trilogy. I predict that at least one female character will have her own arc, rather than serving purely as a plot foil to the males.

 

Oh, OK. Yes, the female comes through more in the online personalities more so with others than with you for sure.

That, and I have a default picture in my head of anyone I chat with on a SW site as NOT female, but instead someone who can't get a date with a female.

 

There is such thing as a female who can't get a date with a female. Lesbians do exist, y'know.

 

True, but they don't fit into the SW fan stereotype (I guess that's why we shouldn't believe stereotypes....).

As a closet SW fan (I don't know many people that like it in my personal life), I don't actually tell anyone I date that I am a SW fan (because of associated stereotypes). Who knows though, maybe I should have hope at this point I could meet a hot one that is a SW fan!

Anyway, back on topic....

 

At CEII I was astounded that there were so many female SW fans (most of them in quite revealing costumes as well), I would guess that 1/3 of all attendants was female and only a tiny fraction of them seemed to have been dragged there against their will by their nerdy boyfriends...

 

Awesome- I've got to go to one of these...

 

I can totally see them focusing the trilogy around one of the daughters of Han/Leia, and essentially making the trilogy about her arc. Cameron was able to do with Aliens and Terminator, and it would give a different take then the OT/PT where they were dominated by male characters (Anakin & Luke).

 

That's a rather unusual interpretation of my post.

 

What's rude is derailing this thread with a subject (lens flares) that has been hashed and rehashed a million times. WE GET IT.

Okay, back on track now.

Sorry, mods.

 

That was smart of you to edit this post from what you put in before

 

Some don't remember good that they have edit buttons.

 

Growing list of subjects that immediately numb my mind:

Lens flare
Default haters of shaky cam (hey, sometimes it's a great effect)
Default haters of rumor sites, particularly the xenophobic vibe of the LR haters
Knee-jerk binary reactions to the PT and OT, which I myself have been guilty of
Thrawn
BC
Solo Twins

 

The cast - especially the new cast are the ones that have to make it 'feel real'.

Some of the best scenes in ESB were that of Luke and Yoda.

Mark was phenomenal in those scenes with a puppet no less - he made Yoda seem very real and you felt for Luke when he 'failed' the great Jedi Master in some of his training.

I think that is what JJ is looking for.