ST ST Criticism Discussion Thread

Because very few of the rank badges in the OT are systematic or consistent. Unless you think very single one of the Imperials who appear in ROTJ all have the same rank.

It doesn't really make any sense for Leia, a long-time agent of the Alliance who's consistently portrayed as being a Rebel VIP, to hold the same rank as a kid who joined three years ago and commands a single fighter squadron.

e: In fact this is addressed by the Star Wars Technical Commentaries:

There exists one publicity photograph of Skywalker predating his wampa encounter, in which he has the same pattern of squares as Princess Leia. This may be an error or it may indicate subsequent promotion, with the Princess remaining at the lower rank. The fact that his shoulder patch in this picture differs from the one he wore in The Empire Strikes Back hints that it is just a costuming error, and should be completely dismissed.

https://www.theforce.net/swtc/domino.html#plaques

In the actual film, Luke is shown wearing a different rank plaque:



In any case, I don't really understand the idea that "General" somehow represents a clear-cut promotion from "Princess." IMO there's a whiff of militaristic chauvinism about that. Like if your daughter just so happens to be playing dress-up as a princess, you should whack her on the nose with a newspaper and tell her to put on some epaulettes instead, lest she betray the cause of womanhood.

Leia was a much more powerful and inspiring character as a princess than she has been as a general.

 

@The_Phantom_Calamari (Why TFN doesn't have a beer gif I don't know.)

My deep dive into this (several thousand words at this point) paints a picture that Leia's strength was in recruiting good people to a good cause. This, her role, required that she be in the front lines as a demonstration of what it takes to do the job, but, being in the front lines is not actually what she is best at. It is not her strength. She's not afraid of it not being her strength. She is afraid that she is not doing her job if those around her falter. I can cheerfully absorb the attack that this analysis makes me a misogynist or whatever. A great number of words that fly around nowadays are basically like particles in the air that you just adapt to.

ESB script, written by Leigh Brackett, affords / awards Leia a good amount of power / influence. I still don't know what her formal rank is, but her informal level of military authority or parity can be bracketed (accidental pun ). That takes a lot of time to do carefully.

ROTJ script, written by Lucas, does not take TWO opportunities to afford / award Leia an amount of power / influence / skill that might ought to have been considered in the specific context, in an effort to not upstage the bravery display moment of male lead Han and the skill display of male lead Luke. Looking back from 2018, these opportunities not taken on Leia's behalf now benefit from some Ptolemaic epicyclc micronarratives. There is absolutely gender role partitioning against Leia's parity occuring in ROTJ. (I tediously am required to footnote that this has nothing to do with Jabba, etc, etc.) The generous complexion is that it is unconscious and a piece of its time. A defense of the generous complexion is that Lucas endeavored to get women and minorities into each of the subgroups of rebels. As yet, I don't know what to think of that tweet about Leia's attribute of being a Princess or a General. It's all a very interesting and deep question. I think there's a Leia that lies beneath the Leia, that can only be glimpsed by a deep dive into what Leigh Bracket was doing in early ESB. That is, after all, the last known course and heading for Han Solo's efforts on behalf of the Rebellion, prior to his field appointment as General after having been in carbonite, recovered from hibernation sickness and temporary blindness. There is a there, there, to be seen in what Leia and Han represented in the corridors of Hoth and in cut scene dialogue.

 

Stormtroopers will be Stormtroopers... doing Stormtrooper things

 

Aeryn Sun from Farscape is, to me, the gold standard of what Finn should have been.
(Note that Boyega is more than up to the task; JJ and RJ weren't.)

Spoiler

Imagine if instead of his nonsense heel-face turn, Finn had been one of the soldiers sent to apprehend Rey. She outwits and escapes all the others, he figures out her plan and blocks the exit, but realizes she's hardly a 'dangerous terrorist' and hesitates - she knocks him out and takes him prisoner.
He knows if he goes back having shown such weakness he'll be executed, but he's still struggling to overcome a lifetime of indoctrination. She's hesitant to trust him, but he proves helpful, repentant, and sometimes charmingly naive. They help each other grow as people and develop feelings. Go from there.
I can't fathom how they fumbled every concept in the ST so badly.

 

I got the impression from each film of the OT that Leia clearly outranked Luke and Han. Whether or not her rank was formally stated doesn't matter - she's clearly one of the leaders of the military and civil portions of the Rebellion.

Her being a general in her own military organisation in TFA, neither feels artificial nor a self promotion.

 

“Princess” is a hereditary title. “General” is a title earned through long military service. So by definition, the latter, as a title, is indication of a more meritorious achievement than “Princess.” This isn’t about military chauvinism, whatever that means. It’s about the clear difference between a hereditary and an earned title. And it’s especially important given Leia’s gender.

Mind you, this changes nothing regarding Princess Leia’s clear decision to not rest on her royal laurels, and to fight and sacrifice for the Rebel cause. She showed great merit, and significant political end military prowess in the OT, and later in the Resistance. All the title “General” does is acknowledge that meritorious record in a title. A title she deserves, given her sacrifices for the Galaxy. Why would you have a problem with her being recognized for that in her title, rather than only referred to in her inherited royal capacity?

 

It's also important to note that, according to canon, unlike the Rebellion, the Resistance is only a military organisation. The civil element is the New Republic.

 

True. Though before Hosnian Prime bit the dust, it was still civilian-controlled, as it was ultimately accountable to the NR in TFA. But yeah. It’s a military organization.

 

Yes, I totally reject the notion that Leia's role as a princess in the original trilogy was in some way regressive or flawed and needed to be fixed by the sequels. Star Wars is a fairy tale universe, where being born a princess means you've been granted a great responsibility which you either need to live up to or forsake. Leia rises to the challenge and lives up to her title and then some. In fairy tale land, to be a prince or a princess means to be the heir to a power greater than any more mundane title can afford. To degrade that power by asserting that it is somehow inferior or undeserved is to, once again, deconstruct the mythic aesthetic of the Star Wars universe in service of some passing twenty-first century political agenda.

A fairy tale princess is not the same thing and does not signify the same thing as historical or present-day monarchism. It is completely disconnected from such things. It's a symbol of virtue and political responsibility. This is yet another example of people failing to understand Star Wars on the symbolic level in which it was intended, instead trying to mold it into a perfect reflection of contemporary society. If you're at the point where you're watching a Star Wars movie and finding the "princess" part of Princess Leia problematic, I submit that it's time to move on to a different form of entertainment.

I mean, really. How far did you get into reading The Lord of the Rings before you threw it against the wall in disgust for promoting hereditary kingship?

 

I love LOTR (the books) just as much as I Iove Star Wars, and don’t at all disagree with your point about fairy stories and Star Wars’ original function as a fairy story. However, after Rogue One, I have come to the conclusion that Star Wars can and should move beyond just the mythic mode of storytelling, and explore the mimetic mode. Including the more historical, realistic mode of Rogue One. I’d like to see all different kinds of storytelling in the GFFA. Spy stories, westerns, epic fantasies, etc. No reason, IMO, to be restricted to pop space fantasy.

 

Spy stories, westerns, and epic fantasies are all modes of storytelling which rely on semiosis to greater or lesser degrees in order to function. None of these things are one-to-one reflections of reality, and to the extent that Star Wars utilizes these genres it should be in their more mythic modes (as in the manner of James Bond, the Dollars films, and Lord of the Rings, respectively). Star Wars stories should never be "realistic," no matter the genre. Star Wars is escapist. If it is not escapist, it ceases to be Star Wars. Star Wars is not just a collection of characters, settings, and props; it's a storytelling philosophy. There's no point in slapping the Star Wars label on something if there's nothing to differentiate it from any other movie in the genre aside from the presence of X-wings and blasters.

 

SW is, in many ways, a synthesis of different genres, with the Saga films having a particular mix. While it could be argued that the Saga films shkuld stick to a certain mix of genres, changing the mix for non-Saga material doesn't mean it ceases to be SW.

Leias shift from Princess to General in the ST is symbolic of her shift away from political life to primarily military. In the OT she qas a much greater mix of both.

 

No, that’s just your opinion on what Star Wars should be. I think it should expand well beyond its original storytelling boundaries. Rogue One came closest to breaking the envelope, exploring mimetic modes (think of Draven listing off Jyn’s legal infractions) and I loved it. I’d be interested in seeing more along those lines, and beyond.

Otherwise, IMO, this franchise will start getting stale. Treat it primarily as a world, rather than a specific storytelling style, and you have endless possibilities for invention and reinvention.

 

I do seem to remember Luke was promoted to commander at Echo Base in the original radio dramas. The scene took place just before we encounter Luke in the movie.

I had looked at this photo while looking for images, but decided the colors were not clear enough.

In ROTJ she is clearly a General, however.

I agree with the spirit of this. I too always believed she was more General Rieekan’s peer, rather than his subordinate. Though I do also feel that her rank does matter. If she was, for example, portrayed as having no formal rank, I would feel that criticism is warranted.

I couldn’t agree more. It might be just an opinion, but it’s one I wholeheartedly share. The escapist nature of Star Wars, to me, is it’s most precious characteristic. Rogue One had it, the ST doesn’t.

Preservation and celebration of Star Wars’ distinguishing characteristics should be the default mode at LFL. These characteristics should be viewed as a strengths and not limitations to the creative process.

 

We should rename this the "Was Leia a General?" thread.

 

Of course Leia is a General.

 

He really did not mean it the way you are saying he meant it though. Yoda was Qui-Gon Jinn's master, and never the other way around. Qui-Gon Jinn was given a gift by the Force, and just passed on the instructions to Yoda. He did not even teach him how to become a Force Ghost. Yoda was taught all the lessons that he needed from the five Priestesses and the trials that he went through, to "achieve immortality" on Dagobah after he died.

As I told you before, Yoda telling QGJ that he is now his apprentice, holds no more gravity than Vader telling Obi-Wan that he has now become the Master. It was merely a show of respect from Yoda to QGJ, and nothing more, and certainly not to be taken as evidence that Force Ghosts can actually take up on an apprentice.

We haven't really seen his janitorial skills yet!

Yeap, I wholeheartedly agree as well. I generally don't like it when people become purists when it comes to art, people that cannot see a franchise evolve. But that doesn't mean changing the core of the universe, and most importantly, it does not mean taking it into a direction that renders the past invalid and pointless.

Over the last 20 years I have lived through the PT, the Clone Wars, the Rebels, and before it was rendered non-canon, all the EU material, such as novels and videogames and comics. And before TLJ, I had seen literally hundreds of new elements and ideas added to Star Wars, and not a single one bothered me. The midichlorians, the holocrons, the ancient Sith and ancient Jedi and their wars, the Ruusan Wars, the rule of two implemented by Bane, the One Sith, the Lost Tribe of Sith, the New Jedi Order, hell, I was ok even with the Yuuzhan Vong despite that they did not feel like Star Wars to me, and even with the most mystical and "dangerous" aspects of TCW and Rebels, such as Yoda's trips, Anakin's and Obi-Wan's adventures on Mortiis, the Nightsisters, and the World Between Worlds recently.

But TLJ does not expand, add, or dig deeper into the rules already established. It just... violates, in my opinion.

 

In my opinion, this franchise has already become “ stale” because of the sequel trilogy. Instead of progressing the story forward from RotJ, they regressed the story backwards to the point where things are now worse in that galaxy than they were when the skywalker saga started in ANH.

Along the way, the filmmakers pretty much retold the story that we already got in the original six films. They gave us another Jedi massacre, leaving us with only one Jedi, which is even worse than the two in ANH. They gave us another fallen skywalker, a new darth Vader wannabe. They gave us another palpatine in snoke. They gave us another Death Star. They gave us another rebels versus empire style conflict. They gave us another failed republic. They gave us another tatooine and another Hoth. They gave us almost all the same ships, from xwings to AT-ATs to tie fighters to the millennium falcon. They even gave us some of the same scenes copied almost frame to frame including some of the same dialogue as in that throne room scene.

And things ended up worse, with no traditionally trained Jedi; no Jedi master; only 20 resistance fighters; one ship; no weapons except for hand weapons; and no base.

Please tell me how this is new and exciting, and how this isn’t uncreative, stale, and downright lazy?

Before I saw the new sequel trilogy, I thought we were going to get a logical continuation of the story from RotJ. I thought we were going to move forward and get a new story and go in new directions. A huge part of the problem, in my opinion, is not only did they redo too much of the Lucas story and regressed everything, but they didn’t give us a small new Jedi order. Even if there had been only a half dozen new Jedi, the story could have been vastly different, as we could have gotten many different kinds of Jedi missions, focusing on one or two of the new Jedi or the whole Jedi order working together in each film. There would have been many new characters and many different directions that the storie could have gone in. Jedi are a what make Star Wars unique, yet the current filmmakers seem adverse to including them in their films.

 

This is the best summary of this topic @ChildOfWinds , I cannot like this enough.

 

Let's hope Episode IX is the ROTS is the sequel trilogy and make us forget the mess we are watching.

 

Speak for yourself, TPM and AOTC to me are masterpieces compared to TFA and TLJ, and I have watched the former movies more than 20 times each. I have watched TFA maybe 4 times, and I will never watch TLJ again.

 

Unfortunately they wanted to make him more of a comic relief character and actually him being more stern could have been a way to play that off. He could have been the comically serious in comparison to all of the other characters considering his environment. For someone who spent his entire life within a draconian entity like the First Order I would expect him to not be as “well adjusted” as he seems to be.

 

A bit ironic given your avi wouldn't exist without AOTC.

 

I think we're going to have to agree to disagree, because I view the intention behind both statements to be fundamentally different. Whilst Vader's statement meant to mock Obi-Wan (and he wasn't necessarily saying he was Obi-Wans master, but that he was now a Master), I view Yoda's statement as a serious commitment to train under Qui-Gon. In any case Yoda is receiving training and guidance under Qui-Gon between the trilogies, which I think Luke could provide to the same extent to Rey (obviously of a different type though).