ST The morality of TFA

Re Palpatine's plan - while it is an allusion to the way in way power can take control, IMO, it's increasingly not a very elegant one and starts to fall apart as you start pulling the threads, especially when it comes back to what the Jedi think is going on and how it affects Anakin's turn (You're the mysterious Sith Lord I've just years trying to catch, supposedly, but I'll never question you on any of this again and I'll act like you have a point that the Jedi are evil even though the second you confess, it's obvious you've been playing every one off against each other and are therefore clearly evil) It's a classic case IMO of the illusion of complexity where actually, it's neither that clever nor deep.

Re - the morality presented across the saga, and TFA in particular, if people are genuinely suggesting the FO (or the Empire, or Palpatine) have morality on their side, then that's frankly a little disturbing.

 

It may depend on whether it is:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RootingForTheEmpire

or

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MisaimedFandom

 

Stealing vital military secrets with the intent of destroying government facilities important to national (galactic) security is a crime. Keeping leaders around you which are in open rebellion against the government is generally not good for the small guy. Ask the South what happens to you when you rebel.

I also am against the Resistance and the First Order since they both blew up planets. Actually, I'm against the New Republic as well. Watching TFA is like watching a WWII movie with just the Nazis and the Soviets; there are no good guys.

 

I'm not sure I trust your ability to judge who is or isn't a good guy.

 

The main criticism that can be directed at the New Republic is that they're not military enough - having downsized it considerably for peacetime (with most of what remained being at the capital planet at the critical moment of the movie).

In short - they were over-peaceful, over-naive - it wasn't a case of two aggressors going at one another.

 

Yes, the criticism would be similar to that levelled to the appeasement movement prior to the outbreak of WW2. Chancellor Villecham is not the most subtle nod to Neville Chamberlain. Leia is considered a warmonger by complacent senators because she sees the growing threat of the First Order ( she's basically Churchill). As for any funding, that comes privately from individuals on the senate who will back Leia privately but won't stick their neck out and go against official New Republic policy.

 

The Starkiller, if as small as the hologram implies, and as heavily modified as it is - seems less "planet" and more "terraformed asteroid".

Something 1200 km wide (10 times the diameter of the first Death Star) really shouldn't have a natural ecosystem of its own.

 

I am genuinely shocked that anyone could seriously walk away from the SW movies, thinking, "You know, that Palpatine fellow talks a lot of sense. I like the cut of his jib!" and "A stormtrooper refusing to participate in the wholesale slaughter of innocents? Talk about insubordination!"

Fascism is back in style, I guess.

 

He doesn't. The mental gymnastics required to do so would mean that someone who had done so would actually present it in context, as an alternative reading, rather than posting as if it were an obvious thing.

 

Indeed. But a coherent philosophy and a genuinely held belief are two different things, and furthermore, someone can be trying to get a rise out of people by being provocative while still agreeing with their own statements, even if not to the extreme degree in their presentation.

 

Fair point. In fact you could probably write a decent middle-class newspaper opinion piece about how people's political apathy and conformity in real life has actually led to people finding it hard to accept that even action heroes in films could be rebellious, and a having an approach to authority figures in films that seeks to find a way to make them benign, even when they clearly arent

 

I'm not sure why that's such a contentious point? History is replete with examples of dictators surrounded by men/women who accept the situation and 'do what they are told'. Why wouldn't that apply to Anakin/Vader, in terms of his relationship with Palpatine? It's not as if the relationship of Vader/Palpatine, in the OT, is portrayed as a 'normal' loving one... then I might agree that Anakin has forgotten who Palpatine is. On the contrary, Anakin is gone (almost) and Vader is a hate filled Sith Lord... which I assume is one of the reasons he's obsessed with finding his son and overthrowing the Emperor. It's a relationship of mutual dependancy, not one of love.

And if that dynamic doesn't hold water, where does that leave Kylo/Snoke? Kylo betrays the Jedi order and kills his dad because he didn't get much attention as a kid?

 

I don't buy the terraformed asteroid. Making it about 1/3 the size of the moon not only makes gravity a problem, but whatever magic they use to store a star's energy inside the planet/asteroid/moon.

 

Or we could just not take holograms too seriously.

 

Well the blu-ray is out, get the guy who did the Star Wars Technical Journals/Commentaries to start making some guesses assuming there is enough data.

 

Doubt he'd care - he quit writing shortly after ROTS - possibly because they made it clear that the Forest Moon was still inhabited, lush, and his Endor Holocaust theory was not going to happen.

blackmyron might be able to go into more detail - I think it was him that told us about Saxton's insistence on quitting if they contradicted him.

Plus the "newcanon figures" for the Death Star sizes given in Ultimate Star Wars and Star Wars Absolutely Everything You Need To Know, contradict his ones.

 

For me, it's the way the whole of Palpatine's plan is handled. On the surface, it seems quite clever, but once you start to dig deeper, I'm not sure there's much there. Because it's all kept in the shadows we don't get much nuance or insight, it's just a series of reveals that don't add up to anything particularly satisfying once you start to think about it and once you think about the logistics of his plans, it all starts to feel not only incredibly and needlessly convoluted but it also gets the in the way of the rest of the story. IMO The Jedi look like absolute idiots. They're not foxed by cleverness. They're stymied by a plot that demands they not actually investigate anything with any urgency. Is there depth to Palpatine's motivations? We get two words. Revenge, which is never explored again in the films, and ABSOLUTE POWER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!, which while cool for a megavillain, is not something I would describe as deep.

The problem with Anakin "doing what he's told" is that at no point to this point is Anakin presented as thinking the Jedi are evil - he's annoyed by them because they won't put him on the council, but the only Jedi who has acted in an un-jedi manner is Anakin when he executed Dooku. He does believe the Sith are evil. At the point that he learns Palpatine is the Sith Lord, he knows he's been betrayed to the most crazy extent. All that action running around the Invisible Hand trying to rescue the Chancellor. The three years of war and death caused because the Chancellor is controlling both sides and behind everything - including assassination attempts on his beloved. At no point does Palpatine give one word of justification for why he did any of this. Not one. His pitch is great - I can save for your wife - but that has nothing to do with any of the grey moralising George is clunkily attempting to sledgehammer into the plot in terms of the Jedi vs Palptaine.

There is lip service to Anakin's confusion, the writing is not strong enough IMO and it all comes across as confused. There is brilliance in there. But it is lost in a muddle of weak plotting and poor characterisation that has always come secondary to the demands of plot. A certain amount of that is understandable, but when the entire key moments of the trilogy revolve around such moments - Padme declaring her love for Anakin, the turn, it becomes a shadow of what it might have been.

George is trying to present the Jedi as taking a dangerous decision to remove Palpatine from power by force. Unfortunately, they're also 100% correct to, so when you suddenly boil all of that down to "he's evil!" / "no, he's evil" and then wants you to kind of feel like Anakin kind of has a point even if he's totally made a terrible decision - including the level up by killing kids thing - it's all over the shop. And a lot of that has to do with with how murky the whole plan is portrayed - it's murky because (imo) it doesn't actually hold up to much scrutiny, even if the initial idea - politician manipulates conflict to gain power - is strong. Because once you start to think about what every other character who deals with Palpatine is thinking, to me it doesn't make much sense, especially when it comes to Anakin.

The desperation to save his wife is brilliant, and strong enough so that on a shallow level, Palpatine's reveal and Anakin's reaction to it kind of makes sense. But any deeper than that and it falls apart. So bringing this ramble back to morality, I think people often confuse "grey" or "complex" in the PT, for muddled. As usual with George, the broad strokes behind it all are fascinating and in the hands of someone with a defter touch, could be very fertile territory. But the ambition outstrips execution again for me. I appreciate others will feel differently and if works for people, fantastic.

In relation to Snoke and Kylo, we don't know how all that pans out yet. I hope there is nothing so needlessly convoluted, and I have no problem with a deeper, relatable human flaw being the root cause of Ben's turn, just as I have no problem with Anakin's fear of loss - let's not forget, George wanted Anakin to be 9 because he felt that was the age at which being taken from his mother would best sow the seeds for his fatal flaw. I think to portray Kylo's fall (of which we know very little yet, as opposed to the three film fall of Anakin Skywalker) as purely because mum and dad were bad parents is akin to saying Anakin became Darth Vader because he was taken from his mummy when he was too young. Both are clearly intended as factors, but are not the whole picture.

This is just my opinion. Even where it comes across a bit strong in parts, I appreciate none of the above is fact or beyond dispute. That's just what I come away with. I also appreciate it's way off topic so apologies, was just replying to the debate.

 

To be honest, I’m not sure. Most of the discussion here seems to be proceeding from an unstated assumption that because TFA has OT iconography, it shares OT morality. But, if the thread on who won is any indication, despite the iconography, TFA actually has more in common with the PT. One could even go so far as to make a case that TFA is really a distillation/condensation of the entire classic saga, a PT story wrapped in a cloak of the OT. One difference being that whereas in the PT the good guys turn out to be noble failures and everything falls apart, in TFA the presumptive good guys just flat out fail. It is kind of like watching a WWII movie of Nazis versus Soviets - it just turns out bad for everyone. Maybe, the old Bart Simpson quote that there are no good wars except the Revolution, WWII and Star Wars is under revision with this new management?

With that perspective in mind, let’s take a critical eye at this idea that Finn is good because he didn’t kill innocent villagers:

First, the scene takes place at night. This can be used as an indication to the audience that not everything is as it might seem. Things look different in the dark than they do in the light of day.

Second, to my eye, this didn’t look like a village. The structures had a temporary, maybe even nomadic, feel to them. Now, Jakku is poor and we don’t see much of any infrastructure anywhere. But, if we were really meant to take this as a village, there should have been some sort of marker of permanence. Maybe one large structure, a central courtyard, a gate like the one at the outpost, something like that. Maybe it was there and I missed it.

Third, when the First Order arrives, these “villagers” calmly and expeditiously take up defensive firing positions. They are armed with what appear to be military grade blaster rifles which they use with lethal effect on First Order troops. Peaceful villagers, when confronted by an unannounced aggressor swooping in would tend to be frightened, confused and on the verge of panic. If the goal was to make them innocent, they should not have been armed or shown to be so proficient with arms. (Alderaan didn’t shoot back.)

Fourth, and most problematic for this claim of innocence, there is one among them who is in possession of militarily significant information. The “villagers” don’t disown or disavow this man. They stand with him and fight.

What one could see is not a peaceful village full of innocent scavengers but a temporary encampment of insurrectionists and spies. (Think Rebels on Hoth.) If true, then it is likely that the First Order has placed a death sentence on their heads because that is, historically, the fate of insurrectionists and spies. They resist because they know they are being hunted and, if found, will be executed.

And, if all that is true, then Finn’s real motivation comes from seeing his brother in arms die. He doesn’t take a courageous stand against an immoral act because: a) the act isn’t immoral (at least not from the First Order’s perspective which is the only perspective Finn should know), and b) he’s shell shocked and really just a spectator. This aligns with the First Order’s response to his battlefield inaction. They want to make him a better soldier.

 

McLaren, when you watch Robin Hood films, do you side with the Sheriff because Robin is outside the law?

Do you think Longshanks was right in trying to crush the Scots because they objected to legalities such as Prima Nocte?

 

That's conflating two separate but chronologically close events: yes he didn't shoot in the actual battle, because he saw his friend shot down by armed resistance (the bloody handprint etc.) However, the First Order did in fact win the battle and the armed villagers became disarmed captives... before Ren ordered them all wiped out. Finn still refused to fire at any point. Yes it's possible he was still in shock but could just as easily have been driven into a rage by his buddy's death and killed a few villagers if we were supposed to see him as morally compromised or challenged.

The image that people keep coming back to is Nazis and the Genocide with the whole 'obeying evil orders makes you evil' debate but frankly in this particular instance you could draw equally accurate parallels with something like the My Lai massacre in Vietnam - with Finn as Hugh Thompson, Jr.

 

"First, the scene takes place at night"

Convincing stuff.

 

Yes, the problem is not shooting opponents in battle. It's the execution of unarmed prisoners. It's worrying this is under debate (the morality of the First Order, not the nuance of Finn's desertion).

 

"Third, when the First Order arrives, these “villagers” calmly and expeditiously take up defensive firing positions"

Guess what the key word is, when it comes to establishing the good guys? I'll give you a clue. Think of what the word "aggressive" means.


"Fourth, and most problematic for this claim of innocence, there is one among them who is in possession of militarily significant information. The “villagers” don’t disown or disavow this man. They stand with him and fight."


Yes, an invading military junta has the right to take anything it wants without question. Resist? They must be BADDIES.

This is poor, poor stuff. I'm embarrassed to reply to it.

 

Yeah, sorry, this is very weird. I hope it's trolling and not a reflection of posters' morality.

 

Or it could mean that it takes place at night.

The Tusken Village in AOTC as roughly the same. It's still a village.

The idea wasn't that they were peaceful. The idea was that the First Order overran them and when they surrendered, they were slaughtered like animals for no reason than they could do it. That's barbaric. According to our Geneva Convention, when a prisoner is unarmed and has surrendered, they are not to be executed on the spot. Hell, that's a moral code dating back to about six hundred years ago.