JCC Embrace The FU - Formerly the STAR WARS IS BAD thread

Fan service is just a way to automate an audience's reception to a movie with dopamine hits. It's bad storytelling, bad art, and makes for bad movies.

But there are ways to better integrate the concept of fan service into a film, lessening the badness. Jabba has a role to play at the podrace, and we return to him multiple times to reinforce his role in the proceedings. Is it fan service? Yes. Is it bad? Probably. Is it better integrated into the film than other sources of fan service? Yes.

R2 and Threepio have no role to play in Rogue One. The weird aliens from the cantina have no role to play in Rogue One. Darth Vader oddly has no role in Rogue One except to give the audience a cathartic thrill. It made about as much sense as Jabba the Hutt, not trusting Boba, showing up at Cloud City and murdering a bunch of civilians while trying to retrieve Han in carbonate.

If your audience is cheering as the antagonist murders a bunch of people, your audience is weird and you are a bad storyteller.

Unless the end goal is just for your content to please the consumer instead of telling stories or creating art. Unless the end goal is for your brand to look good on social media. If that's the case, welcome to the great democratization of content that the Internet has wrought. Welcome to late, late capitalism. Welcome to hell.

FYI studios now know they are competing with TikToks, that's how crazy everything is right now, and I cannot process what the hell is going on or how it is even possible to argue that any of this is a "good thing."

 

Personally I believe art should be as joyless and pretentious as possible, and the more miserable you’ve made your audience the more you have done an art.

 

Can a TikTok'er murder people in a hallway?

 

aren't there thousands of people pretending to be Darth Vader / Mark Hamill murdering people in a hallway on TikTok

 

Perfection

Remember what I just said about special pleading? The truth is every single SW film since ANH (with the possible exception of TESB) is stuffed full of what people term "fan service". Go back and watch ROTJ - it's full of all kinds of fan service and there's plenty of stuff in there that was basically put in just to sell action figures. I mean we were talking about this stuff in the 80s and 90s.. but no one cared because the movies were cool and honestly I liked my Ewok Village playset - it had a working net and everything!

Now, people are trying to pretend Star Wars is some kind of high brow art instead of fun space wizard movies. I mean I know that the goal of the fart and poop jokes in The Phantom Menace was definitely to create art and not just please consumers; that's for sure.

 

Liking movies is bad - no one should like movies.

 

No-one has ever argued that SW hasn't always been trying to sell toys, so I don't really understand your point. Or where this mysterious fan service is in the original trilogy. But if it exists, it's probably bad.

there's a great argument to be made here based on our mutual points that Star Wars singlehandedly eviscerated cinema over a 40 year period.

 

The original meaning of "fan service" includes, like, I dunno, having an attractive character wear a bikini.

 

Right, I can't really imagine Disney going anywhere near sex or bikinis. Their ST, Boyega and Isaac's mutual scenes aside, was as sexless as I can possibly imagine.

 

ROTJ has another death star FFS (although I guess one could argue that's not fan service - and instead is just lazy)

Chewbacca doing the Tarzan yell is pretty cringe worthy fan service type stuff.

If we include the SE edition sticking Hayden into ROTJ is totally fan service too

 

Chewbacca doing the Tarzan yell is just a dumb joke (albeit an interesting example of interweaving media), and the Death Star is just a lazy retread. George's Hayden insertion was literally for himself and his desire for a cohesive 6 film unit, literally no fans wanted him in the film.

But there is one fan service moment I can think of – recycling the Death Star escape musical cue from SW as the Falcon moves in to the DSII is definitely a cheap dopamine hit, ala recycling Yoda's theme as the X-Wing rises in TROS.

 

It's a shame too. Isaac would've looked good in a bikini.

 

Leia saying "I know" in ROJ is fan service , but its a good one.

 

See, that's actually a callback or a payoff tho, a legitimate narrative device to bring clarity and perspective to a story. It is a Pretty Good Thing to do.

 

HA - some grad student could probably do a paper on how Star Wars destroyed cinema and the end result is the MCU

People started pretending that Star Wars is some kind of super deep saga and now we have people talking about how Tony Stark is actually a really complex tragic character.


One could argue pretty effectively that the highest grossing movie of all time (Endgame) is 95% fan service.

 

You’ll settle for randomly shirtless Adam Driver and you’ll like it.

 

they already did , Peter Bisskind was writing such stuff in the 90s.

 

I see myself. I see my life. And I sigh.

And with my exhale passes cinema.

 

To bring this full circle - no one will ever convince me that the Darth Vader scene in Rogue One wasn't ****ing awesome. TESB was one of the first films I ever saw in the theater, so I've been at this for a long time.... and that has to be one of the 5 best scenes in any SW film. Enjoying that is no different than enjoying Vader choking out the dude at the beginning of ANH, choking out imperial officers in TESB, etc. I think Lucas himself gets that (and FWIW, he supposedly is a big fan of Rogue One) - which is why he had Anakin thrash all the separatists at the end of ROTS.

 

I assure you that Sturgeon's Law applies to cinema as much as it does anything else.

 

Never heard of that one... but as someone who kind of thinks "everything is terrible" I like it

 

I don't really take issue with the scene itself so much as what it puts into the heart of the audience. (Younger) kids aren't really enjoying any of that stuff, they are terrified, so it must seem strange to see adults acting like complete psychopaths around them. Although he's occasionally cracking jokes that adults might have chuckled at, the purpose of Vader's act in ANH and ESB are to inject fear into the heart of the audience, not glee.

And there's no way to argue that the audience is meant to feel glee about Anakin thrashing separatists in ROTS. It's a montage constructed to literally illustrate the collapse of his soul.

 

See - I think you are taking this all too seriously.... Vader is a fictional space wizard. Enjoying that scene is no different than thinking a scene where Thanos thrashes people in some Avengers movie is cool. It doesn't make you a psychopath, and really - that scene is very effective in making Vader scary.

I mean does it make you a psychopath to enjoy see the Nazgul thrashing the soldiers of Minas Tirith?

FWIW, I'm quite certain I'm far from the only person who though Anakin thrashing those annoying separatists at the end of ROTS was cool.

 

I'm speaking more to the intention of the creators and that impact on the work. The audience is free to take from it what they will, I'm not really here to judge that (although I know I have already, sorry).

You are correct that it's a super cool scene. I guess I'm just more interested in how the scene is constructed and why, and the effect those choices have on the movie itself. If that's too serious, sorry, I've just always been interested in the craft behind filmmaking. Sorry if that's annoying!

 

I enjoyed the scene. The problem was that it was the best part of the whole movie and not any other scene featuring any of the new characters.