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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

Star Wars is unusual in that it's an explicitly Manichean universe. The "light" and "dark" sides of the force are equated with good and evil, and assigned in a way that's clear both in and out of universe. It's not a universe of grey areas.

(There's a lot of people trying to reinvent ethics and metaethics from the ground up in this thread, badly..)

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The entire meta-ethical point of the first six films is that the dark and light side are both in error and Skywalker brings balance to the force by being the first grey Jedi. So I wouldn't be so quick to judge.

Sadly Disney seemly want to make it pure manicheism again, probably easier for kids to understand and sell toys...

I wish some of the movies would get stories inspired by Kotor series, where the author really wanted to make the wars in star wars resemble real ones, with no obvious good and evil sides.

I'm personally hoping that with the success of these star wars stories that maybe they'll do what they let Marvel do with Daredevil/Punisher/Jessica Jones etc. and perhaps make a more serious (pure opinion here, btw) version of things in these universes like they have with their Netflix Collab originals. IMO they're the best thing in not just TV but all of the marvel universe right now (and arguably some of the best entertainment of this sort period, in my not humble opinion ;). Star wars could benefit sincerely from this treatment.

I'm unsure it is possible to translate the Netflix-Marvel series' success to non-Earth stories, let alone to Star Wars. To have the deep stories that you enjoyed they need enough screen time to tell the stories. The 4 individual stories + 1 miniseries of the Defenders is supposed to be about $200 million [1]. That comes out to 26 + 13 + 13 + 13 + 7? = 72, which is $2.7 million per episode. This uses mostly existing sets and straightforward special effects. Star Wars in particular is commonly set aboard complex spaceships or vastly different alien worlds in the company of aliens and robots. Therefore the investment required to initiate this seems like it would be significantly higher.

Game of Thrones, for context of a series with both well known actors and amazing sets and effects, is about $10 million per episode. If we assume that a Star Wars series would cost about the same and it would take approximately a similar number of episodes to tell such a story, that would be $720 million. I might be wrong, but I don't think such an investment in film has never been done before.

I think it will depend greatly on both the continued success of the Marvel TV shows + how the remaining Star Wars films perform.

1: [Marvel’s Netflix Bound TV Shows To Cost A Whopping $200 Million](http://www.digitaltrends.com/movies/marvels-netflix-bound-tv...)

Well, wasn't Rogue One exactly that treatment? It was a visceral and brutal experience (especially when one compares it to fable tales of SW). I left the cinema quite unsettled by how gray everything was, the sacrifices and commitment to the cause.

I'd really love SW movies to be more like that, less bland and mentally lazy (AND NO MORE DEATHSTARS FFS)

> NO MORE DEATHSTARS FFS

Oh God yes. I was so pissed when the Force Awakens culminated with yet another, bigger Death Star.

Even if you feel the need to stick with the super weapon trope, the Empire has PLENTY of other nasty machines sitting around.

They kind of had to. Episodes 1, 2 and 3 were really bad and to convey a subtle message like that good and evil aren't always clear requires nuance and skill to convey.

Like another commenter said, it's post-Christmas, time to get pedantic about Star Wars.

I find it hard to buy the idea that the climax of RotJ supports this idea. At the end of RotJ all is portrayed as having worked out as well as they possibly could have, and all because Luke has made the extremely deontological choice to not fight his father.

Does Episode III contain the phrase "Only a Sith believes in absolutes"? Yes, and that's why everyone hates it.

Wat? Luke brings "balance" by reigning in a Dark Side run amok, dismantling an Empire that got too powerful and literally oppressed the whole galaxy. That's the point of the OT. The "balance" is a galaxy with two Sith and enough Jedi to contain them, nothing more.

The Prequel Trilogy is a ham-handed social critique that tries to show you "how democracy dies" and attacks rigid institutions for being inhumane. Any "imbalance" for the Light Side is not even a topic - after all, the Force is just a bunch of nano-organisms in your blood! The prequels don't bring any meaningful element to philosophical issues surrounding the Force, and they are such terrible movies that they should just be ignored; a lot of people now rightly hope they will be remade by Disney, which would be the right thing to do.

I don't know. Luke brings "balance" by killing all known dark side users; only light side users exist now, and no one knows how it's going to play in the future (we merely see the celebration through the galaxy, not how things evolve in the years after).

There is no balance at the end, only one side is winning.

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