The Growing Emptiness of the “Star Wars” Universe | Hacker News Reader

The Growing Emptiness of the “Star Wars” Universe

newyorker.com

87 pointsbshepard102 comments

I shared this mostly because of the Gibson quote enclosed, and if you don't want to read the article, here's the quote, which involves a coolhunter who can viscerally sense cool and uncool evaluating Tommy Hillfinger:

"This stuff is simulacra of simulacra of simulacra. A diluted tincture of Ralph Lauren, who had himself diluted the glory days of Brooks Brothers, who themselves had stepped on the product of Jermyn Street and Savile Row . . . . But Tommy surely is the null point, the black hole. There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul."

There’s a picture from Radiohead’s original OK Computer website which this reminds me of.

“DENY OXYGEN

There is nothing I can say which will come as any sort of surprise to anyone. There is no work I can produce which hasn’t been done before. There is no music I can listen to which doesn’t remind me of something else. There is nothing I can do that isn’t documented in weekly magazines. My life is essentially a last-minute rush to reorder trivial, pointless, or stolen ideas into a primitive semblance of originality. Most of my time is spent crying in darkened rooms trying to remember who I was.”

The Gibson quote also reminds me of Synecdoche, New York, a stunningly beautiful film I probably can’t fully recommend because it’s so brutally depressing.

I think that partly this is simply an effect of accumulating experience as you get older.

For example, these days it feels like I don't find as much good novel music as I did before. But of course if I haven't heard any music at all, everything will be novel, and so looking where I have already looked plenty before will not turn up as much novelty.

I mean, I can still find plenty of novel thing if I look outside of the top lists of the UK and the US, or look longer back in time, so its not simply that my tastes have narrowed but rather I just have a better overall knowledge, and what I would have found novel before I now recognise as inspired from something else.

A link to the "DENY OXYGEN" image: http://www.radiohead.com/rh0021.html

Great quote...reminiscent of a world where machine learning and linear regression have been applied ad nauseam to everything. regression upon regression.

As the article points out, it seems this is happening in the pop movie world, with superhero movies and rehashes, remakes galore, including star wars (franchise ended for me with Battlefront and KOTOR 2).

Always be on the lookout for sparks

Interesting quote, but this can also be applied to the novel "Pattern Recognition" from Gibson itself. After devouring the Neuromancer Trilogy, I anticipated some of the same vision and greatness in this book. Sadly, this is one of Gibsons "most derivative, most removed from the source, most devoid of soul" Work.

I strongly disagree. Pattern recognition broke new ground for Gibson. It was a novel examining the role of information and aesthetics have in shaping a very near-future society. Neuromancer is a grand, outer-space cowboy adventure, with all sorts of interesting technological ideas, but it's certainly distinct from what pattern recognition achieved.

IMHO, still his most derivative and soulless. Moreover, it doesn't say anything new about the subject, and the main plot devices artifice were so implausible that I frequently stopped reading to wonder whether Gibson was really just phoning it in, or actually that out of touch/practice.

I, as well, found it and its two sequels quite engaging.

It's a different space -- in some ways -- from the Neuromancer trilogy's space.

But Gibson approaches it with the same attention and insight.

And these days, good lord, "image" is such an enormous factor in our -- increasingly global -- culture.

It’s unsurprising because Disney itself is a simulacrum.

"The Disneyland imaginary is neither true or false: it is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate in reverse the fiction of the real. Whence the debility, the infantile degeneration of this imaginary. It's meant to be an infantile world, in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the "real" world, and to conceal the fact that real childishness is everywhere, particularly among those adults who go there to act the child in order to foster illusions of their real childishness."

Well, it's also a sane business practice. When you have limited abilities to predict what is going to be successful, you are tempted to use the schemes that worked well in the past. You take the ingredients that are known, combine them using aesthetic means that are attractive in a given period, and promote it well. In this way you minimize the chances of failure. Experimenting with novel things is not a safe strategy when you repeatedly invest millions, and your way of doing it works. That's why you have, for example, a remake of the Beauty and the Beast (and many other), both by Disney. They know the target group will go and watch it and enjoy anyway.

I think this quote can be applied to 99% of television and Hollywood.

> “Solo” discovers that the young Han is pretty much identical to the older one, with the same skills, mannerisms, and values. It would’ve been interesting to learn that Han was once a sensitive boy with a musical gift

A wacky, subversive twist like that would go a long way in getting me interested in Disney’s direction, but I just don’t associate them with anything particularly risky. Which is ironic because I thought the casting of Adam Driver was brilliant — it’s almost possible to imagine him single handedly saving the prequels if he were retroactively cast as Anakin.

He’s good enough that I’ll go watch Episode IX, but the ending of “Last Jedi” left me incredibly underwhelmed. What storylines and character arcs are even worth wrapping up? I guess I’m mildly interested in how they’ll even attempt to make Rose and/or Finn relevant.

In my opinion, the decades of novels in between star wars movies where much better than the prequels and sequels we eventually got. At varying times, different novels were canon then not canon. But in the end, Lucasfilm jettisoned the lot. Maybe there were IP issues involved I don't know but the Timothy Zahn novels were epic.

Unfortunately, Lucasfilm didn't embrace them and mine them the way Feige is mining decades of Marvel comics for the MCU.

> But in the end, Lucasfilm jettisoned the lot. Maybe there were IP issues involved I don't know but the Timothy Zahn novels were epic.

In fairness, Disney seems to have recognized that in re-canonizing characters like Thrawn.

The expanded universe had a lot of absolute junk in it. It's easier for them to throw it all out and then selectively re-introduce the few bits that are worth saving than it would have been to drum out the bad bits one at a time.

If you enjoyed Timothy Zahn's Thrawn trillogy, I hope that you know that he recently wrote a new book called "Thrawn", and it's just as good as his older writing. I would definitely recommend it if you enjoyed Thrawn as a character.

Disney had to decanonize them to carve out room for movies that people didn't know the plot to beforehand, and to get rid of massive blunders like the Yuuzhan Vong.

but then we end up with Solo where we pretty much know the plot beforehand.

That's like saying we knew the plot of Saving Private Ryan beforehand because we knew how the battles went.

um... I'm unaware of the 4 movies about Private Ryan's adventures after WWII...

Plus the Jedi Outcast games! I have a hard time imagining a worthy successor to that in the Disney era, especially with EA having a 10-year contract on exclusive rights. I don't think they set out to make worse games on purpose, but they're definitely oriented more toward mass-market movie tie-ins with a focus on looking pretty. And I'd bet any single player story game we get will be built around a character that Disney writes into a movie, so there aren't nearly as many stories they could tell yet.

Visceral (best known for Dead Space) was working on something to come out this year, but EA canned it, shut down the studio, and merged them into EA Vancouver and EA Montreal.

Who knows if it wasn't shaping up well or if it wasn't suitably designed to stuff full of microtransactions or what. EA is supposedly still planning to adapt some parts of the concept into something else eventually, but I don't have high hopes. Maybe they'll surprise me.

This!! Kevin Anderson, Timothy Zahn... The stories were great and the fact that all the authors included and referenced each other’s events really made the universe cohesive and rich.

There was even a trilogy (!) of books already written about young Han Solo, which were equally amazing and rich..

The comics had plenty of material that breathed life in the form of details and different perspectives. Even Star Wars: Legacy, which ostensibly had the same retread of the original trilogy that the current sequel trilogy does- there is a new Empire, the Jedi are dispersed, young misfits must become heroes- redid the original plotline in a fresh and exciting way.

Leia will be wrapped up. Han in the first one, Luke in the second, so it's gotta be Leia in the third. Slowly kill the legacy so they can build the future of their own.

I wouldn't hate some sort of subversive twist, but at the same I don't think think it's necessary. To me the new trilogy has perfectly recaptured the heart and soul of star wars. I think a lot of the disappointment stems from life long fans who have expectations built up over years and years of being fans and speculating on what could be.

I haven't seen Solo yet, so I can't comment on that, but in my opinion I'd rather have one or two mediocre Star Wars movies a year than nothing at all.

I also think that people are greatly unfair when judging new entries in the franchise. It seems like if it isn't twice as good as Empire, it isn't worth anything.

'Last Jedi' was a lot of fun for me. I enjoyed it a ton. I can understand why people felt underwhelmed, but I also like that it was a typical cliff-hanger middle entry movie and can stand on its own. Maybe its just personal preference but I don't need mystery and open storylines to keep me interested. If anything, it leaves more freedom for the 3rd entry and provides plenty of jumping off points.

Overall I don't think Star Wars has a 'growing emptiness', I think fans are demanding way more than is realistic and are suffering from the hype machine/echo chamber that plagues media these days.

It would’ve been interesting to learn that Han was once a sensitive boy with a musical gift

What’s interesting is that is this the second time they have ballsed this up. Han-shot-first is a redemption arc, a man who was little better than a villain himself coming around to do the right thing when he sets aside self-interest in the end. But that was erased in rereleased editions. It seems that Han is doomed to never have any character development.

Are the movies underwhelming or was Star Wars in the past more amazing because you were younger?

For me there are two big positives to the earlier movies; the original trilogy was amazing because it was something new and it was my introduction into Star Wars.

The prequal trilogy was the movies I grew up with; less amazing than the original trilogy but what I absolutely loved about it was how it managed to give you an idea of the scale of things.

Like when in EP7 the new republic government solar system is instantly destroyed by starkiller base... who cares? Billions of people died in that moment, but none of them were introduced, the movie didnt allow us to develop a bond with them. The prequal trilogy did a better job in building a world around the main characters; they were part of something much bigger.

The new movies lack both; they don't do anything new and they don't build a world around the characters. It feels empty, and I couldn't care less for most of the cast if they make it or not.

Maybe its also the timeframe we live in; every movie needs to be full of action and movies rarely take the time to build up to something grand. I miss the much much much slower approach to movies like The Godfather had.

> It feels empty, and I couldn't care less for most of the cast if they make it or not.

Very astute. I'm someone who was in the same boat, sharing the same beliefs you hold for the OT and prequels. I haven't watched a single one of the new movies, I just don't care. The story isn't new if you (Disney) just swap some character stats (age, ethnicity, melanin levels) and just go "it's the same but everyone looks different! check out the explosions and the lightsabers! WUMMM WUMMM KRSHHH buy merchandise PEW PEW KPOW."

I know I just implied that I think it degraded because it became about the money, but at least give me good reason to spend my money. This is why I liked the old EU and side stories in general, and why game like Republic Commando and KOTOR were appealing: there were other things going on in the universe, and these things were given time to mature and breathe. There were cool things going on and I'm pretty sure I still have the Episode III capital ship/vehicle cross section book hanging around somewhere because god help me I think that the Acclamator and Venator are some cool ship designs.

I've found that this phenomenon isn't just limited to Star Wars, either.

> Are the movies underwhelming or was Star Wars in the past more amazing because you were younger?

People say this all the time, but the people who went crazy in 1977 for the original Star Wars weren't all kids. It bowled over lots of adults, too. It was a genuine pop culture phenomenon.

That Emptiness has been apparent event since the 2nd film, and is simply continued by Disney. Disney is milking a dead cow, to the delight of the Star Wars fans who have been sucked into this drivel for nearly 40 years. It's a fucking space cowboy western with Buck Rogers quality sets, acting, and direction. Beyond the metaphors lost from the original film, Star Wars has been decades of childish marketing and quality story line missed opportunity disappointments.

It's not just milking, it seems they have actual contempt for the existing fan base to the franchise and trying to dismantle the foundation piece by piece in the worst way possible while simultaneously trying to build their own thing on top.

I'm not a Star Wars fan (Episode 1 killed it for me), but watching this from the sideline has been nothing short of bizarre to me.

The existing fan base isn't the 6-10 years old toy-demanding target audience. In 15 years, those people will be spending their money trying to participate in the nostalgia being engineered today and the existing fan base will be largely irrelevant.

But then why are they making origin stories that would only interest existing fans?

So they can hook new fans with the origin stories, then sell them copies of the previous instalments without having to create anything new except a fresh box design so the collectionists amongst the older fans will buy them again too?

Contemporary nerd culture. It's all about being in on things, so you have 20 year olds that act like old fans of ST:TOS when they were -30 years old when it first aired, and was the last of the series that they ever watched (they may not have even watched it). They know everything about it, titles, air dates, actors who played bit parts and became famous later. Or people who didn't give a shit about Spiderman in the 90s who're fully read up on his wikia content now.

This leads to a faux or ironic nostalgia act by everyone involved: the "fans", the actual fans, the creators, and the media around it all.

It's making things pretty dull because this spans all ages. Older folks may have actually been fans from the start, but they still fall for teh nostalgia trip of the new media and spend money on it. And the media companies make things that are designed to appeal. To nod and wink at you for being so clever, for knowing which episode or comic issue that quote came from. For knowing that this guy was a villian in the comics, but here we'll give him to you as a bit part. Wink wink.

Star Wars sequels have been nothing more that a vehicle to market toys and other movie-related things to the next generation of children. They carefully craft each film to have at least one character that a marketing plan can be built around. It's sort of like the hook musicians try to place in their songs. That said, Disney will continue to churn these things out so long as ticket sales are high and their merchandise sells.

This has been true since the very first film. Lucas kept the merchandising rights for a very good reason.

He lucked out there. He retained merchandising because it was considered worthless. Star Wars set the pattern for this kind of film-plus-merchandising blockbuster.

Although there was no advance merch when Star Wars came out, this quickly changed when the toy manufacturing partners realized they had a real gravy train.

> It's a fucking space cowboy western

I agree with Red Letter Media's take on this: SW is fundamentally a small universe (yes the universe IN SW is vast, but the universe OF SW is not: it's just rebels+jedis fighting stormtroopers+darth-lords. The only attempt at expanding the universe, the prequels, was a disaster). With that in mind, it's not surprising the movies are so unimaginative and Disney keep repeating themselves.

> SW is fundamentally a small universe

My favorite example from the new Solo film: Solo is told something like "find me later on Tatooine".

Imagine somebody saying "If we get out this, see me later - I'll be on earth." Or, even "I'll in New York." Does Tatooine have more than one city? More than one bar? Is there a phone directory for finding people there?

The article dances around and slightly touches this, but for me, it was always the mythos and size of the universe. The movies were never the big draw for me. The novels held the true universe.

Legends was massive. The feats within Legends were sometimes outlandish, so it makes sense that it was all scrapped. The Plagueis meme was a throwaway line in a prequal movie. Luceno wrote the novel roughly 7 years later, and it is one of my favorite SW novels to date. It perfectly encapsulates the feeling of the Rule of Two, the Sith moving in the shadows to subvert an entire collective of governments, and the true power of patience.

Current canon isn't giving the universe enough room to breathe. They want to fill in every last detail on the timeline with no room for secondary or tertiary characters to have their own plot in the background. Plagueis was Sidious' master, but Luceno did not nor needed to fill in every last detail of Sidious' apprenticeship. We get some details of a young Palpatine, but the novel doesn't crash headfirst into the Phantom Menace.

TL;DR: Star Wars shined, because it always left room for interpretation and exploration - even in fleshed out novels.

Need to drop using the term "canon", as it implies quality literature, which this drivel is not in the slightest.

>It's a fucking space cowboy western with Buck Rogers quality sets, acting, and direction.

The acting and direction I'll grant you, and yes, it's supposed to be a space cowboy western, but I don't think anyone would describe the sets or visual design of Star Wars as "Buck Rogers quality," if that's supposed to mean shoddy or inexpensive.

The one thing Star Wars gets consistently right in my opinion (even with the prequels, which I despise otherwise) is that it always looks good.

That right there is one of the major failures of the franchise: in the first film their world is filled with rusted, half operating, jury rigged everything. The Empire was the only organization with enough wealth to afford new technology, and everyone else was poverty stricken and making due. That is beautiful realism. Every single film since the first has has a "shiny chrome" world - like a fucking dumb Buck Rodgers concept.

You should really watch Clone Wars then, it's considered canon and is really good in general. If you don't want to watch all 121 of them, these are the best:

5. Carnage of Krell (Season 4)

4. Orders (Season 6)

3. ARC Troopers (Season 3)

2. The Lawless (Season 5)

1. The Wrong Jedi (Season 5)

Why? Indoctrinate myself to the drivel?

Dude, I'm saying that it's not drivel, it's good. Don't knock it before you try it.

Also, indoctrinate??? What are you on about?

Sorry. I'd had two over enthusiastic fans knocking my non-fandom the day I wrote that.

There is nothing wrong with a space cowboy western, and in fact that's one of the reason people love the original trilogy: plenty of original (for the time) action, good guys on one side and BIG BAD guys on the other, so it is easy to takes sides, add some cheap mysticism (the "force" stuff) and the redemption of the baddest of the bad guys.

Not the most original of the plots [1], but good enough and simple enough that most people can enjoy it. That's not the issue with the current state of Star Wars in my opinion. Also for most people Star Wars is the movies so the issue about what is canon and whats is not is moot [2]: for them it is canon if it appears in one of the trilogies.

I have three other different issues with the current trilogy (and in general Disney's approach to Star Wars).

The first is that the current trilogy is just more of the same. The Force Awakens to me looks more like a reboot of the original movie than a sequel. The Last Jedi is a bit better but only because it looks a reboot of the whole original trilogy: I think that a better name would have been "The Empire strikes the return of the last jedi", and that would even describe the most relevant parts of the movie perfectly. In a way the prequel trilogy is better: while it is not up to par with the original trilogy, I like the contrast between a world where Jedis are available by the dozen (for example see when the jedis come to save the main characters in the arena) versus a world where there are two "bad" force users (Darth Vader and the Emperor) and two "good" force users (Luke and, for a while, Ben Kenobi).

The second issue is more general, and it is related to the fact that regardless of the quality of the content, the more movies you make about a topic or a "universe" the less value the single movie has. Even worse, after a given threshold I won't even watch any movie about the genre because I fear that if I don't see all of them I will miss something. I feel that way about the gazillion of Marvel/DC Comics movies, I feel the same about Star Trek (I only know about the original serie, but I don't have time to see _all_ the episode that I missed) and I fear one day I will feel the same about Star Wars.

[1] Also it seems Star Wars got many idea from other movies. My favorite is the one about getting inspiration for R2D2 and C3PO from the main characters of Kurosawa's "the hidden fortress", though after seeing the movies I would say the resemblance is only in "the character of the characters"

[2] I have to admit that I played to some of the games, and I think that KOTOR has a story that is much better that Star Wars original story. THAT is something I would love to see a movie about.

The irony of a New Yorker article on the blandness of an institution lacking the punch of its early life is sadly obvious to long time New Yorker readers.

When I watched the first of the new Star Wars movies, I felt pretty much the same. It was not bad as such, but it felt so derivative. More so, I felt that it was not derivative for a lack of imagination, but because the creators were playing it safe, deliberately avoiding any deviation from a proven recipe.

And given that Walt Disney now owns the franchise, I have no expectation that any future movies set in the Star Wars universe will be any different. Which is a little sad, because the Star Wars universe is such a great backdrop to tell all kinds of interesting stories.

They are segmenting the universe, which is the right thing to do. The main storyline is meant to onboard kids, and will continue to do so in the foreseeable future, so you can expect more of the same there.

Where the interesting stuff will happen is in the “underworld”/“legends” line that started with Rogue One and now continued with Solo. That’s where directors will be given enough freedom to write movies for grown-ups. Some will be good, some less so, exactly like the books and fanfiction that have been written over the years - riffing on an established universe can actually be harder than building a brand new one from scratch.

Everything is trilogies, and trilogies of trilogies. Star Wars has become Dragonlance. (I guess that’s not the worst thing to be -- I loved Dragonlance until I found better books!)

It would be cool if movies could be forked :)

Perhaps one could do for Star Wars what The Orville has done for Star Trek.

Thats essentially what the Mass Effect franchise is. Bioware got sick of being constrained by the Star Wars IP, costs, and continuity and simply created their own "Star Wars" which is actually much better than Star Wars IMO, or it used to be anyway.

Likewise, Babylon 5 was originally a Star Trek reboot. One of the writers couldn't get his idea to take hold, so he went independent.

Check out L8wrtr's Fan Edits of Episode I, II, and III.

Semi-forks.

https://ifdb.fanedit.org/sots/ https://ifdb.fanedit.org/trd/ https://ifdb.fanedit.org/dote/

A bit click baity. Solo delivered what was promised. But really, I think his big issue is really the big issue with Hollywood. But he doesn't really address that. Most new takes on regular tropes are being written for TV. Our trope vocabulary is bigger now than years ago. (Maybe seeing Upgrade on Sunday, will deliver. We'll see.) And really, we are in an era that has an embarrassment of riches. Which is probably why I've become more picky with my media intake.

I didn't hate Solo, but it's really disappointing that Disney is throwing away a whole bunch of ridiculously good IP.

One example is the Knights of the Eternal Empire trailer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkgzXpKbVGE). I want to see that story. I felt more in this 5 minute trailer than I felt all throughout The Last Jedi. That can be said for pretty much all of the trailers from The Old republic.

Completely agree. There's thousands of years of stories in the universe - why keep focusing on the same 100? Anything from the old republic or some ancient Sith history would be fresh and new (for the cinema), and very welcome. But I guess we're just fans of good storylines and not the targets of the Disney marketing machine.

Oh wow. Why couldn't we have had this instead? The emotional payload of this 5 minute trailer was greater than hours of watching gungan turds, I mean every Star Wars movie made after the '80s.

I've like all the trailers for SWTOR (and enjoyed playing the game), but trailers are different from movies, they are telling a short story without any details, which, expanded on a full-length movie, would be on the same level as the Disney movies.

See, but with Disney, at least there's an outside chance they try an Old Republic movie. So long as Lucas held the keys, nothing at all was going to be made except for cartoons mistakingly marketed at children. And books that had a limited audience.

My question to you: Have they thrown it away by making Solo? It all still exists, and they're apparently full-steam ahead making new products with that IP.

Eli Schiff wrote a good review of TLJ a while back that similarly describes the dead emptiness/meaninglessness of Star Wars nowadays:

>The sequels, and in particular, Rian Johnson's latest episode, have now fully deconstructed the Star Wars universe, and shown the characters and their motivations to be vacuous. The only character remaining who really grasped the depravity of the situation is Kylo Ren. Now that there is no hope for heroes (even the Resistance doesn't believe in those anymore—after all, heroism reinforces a hierarchy that must die), we await the climactic explosion of an end to this universe that it deserves.

>More likely though, given that we're dealing with Disney, we probably won't get anything of the sort. And for that reason I now realize why fans of all stripes didn't like The Last Jedi. What they saw in the mirror was so horrifically disfigured and alienating that it couldn't be confronted. For though history is far from over, with everyone either too smart to continue living, or too stupid to die, it may be there's no one left with the will to make history anew.

http://www.elischiff.com/blog/2017/12/27/star-wars-death-dri...

I find it weird that they only present an old person's view. I understand the demographic of the newyorker, but this review may only make sense if you saw the movies in the order they came out in. But there's a huge number of both kids and adults for whom this is their first (or close to) star wars experience. I can't unsee the previous movies to get it that way, but many people haven't seen Chewie and Han yet, they don't know about the card game, they don't know why Han shooting first is significant in any way, and who will think it's obvious why Han is bragging about the distance not speed. Let's not forget to try to understand what will they see, while we complain about some issue with prequels.

Reminding me that a cornerstone of my childhood was a series of cinematic figurine advertisements cribbed from one of Kurosawa's weaker pictures doesn't heal the wounds any faster.

...but also, "Thx 1138" is basically perfect cinema and my life was better for it. Thank you, Mr. Lucas.

For a contrarian view...

I love all of the new Star Wars movies. And most of the new books. All of the new comics. Rebels was fantastic. I will buy and consume every bit of it, and I will genuinely enjoy it.

I enjoy them too. I remember when the prequels were announced sometime around 1998 or 1999. I literally cheered on my couch. Some are better than others of course, but they are still very entertaining.

I’ve enjoyed the stand alone movies quite a bit more.

The new trilogy suffers from having so many protagonists that none of them seem worth caring about. It seems they have HBO-envy and wanted to ape the structure of a long form multi-POV serial and jam it into a 2 hour movie and it just doesn’t work.

A lot of the big franchise blockbusters these days suffer from the creative/producing team trying to fit 2 pounds of poop into a 1 pound bag.

I appreciated both Rogue 1 and Solo because they were straightforward, procedural action/adventure serials that let me feel like an 11 year old for a couple hours. They weren't trying to be high art, just well crafted.

I'd argue it's more Marvel-envy (movies, not epic TV shows), and since Disney owns both, it's more of a "hey this worked, let's try it with another franchise". I'm no expert, but I feel the Marvel universe is better at it than Star Wars.

> the Marvel universe is better at it than Star Wars

I think that's coming from an existing story structure (Comics) which work very well for multiple PoV serials and big cross-over finales. In addition to that, with the comics, there are a lot of storylines that can be used as inspiration

The best marvel movies are also fairly stand alone.

Star Wars has always been an aesthetic more than anything else

I feel the same way about the Matrix. Even the first film sacrifices a lot in order to be more cinematic.

I like both aesthetics, admittedly.

Sacrifices what- the parallel computation reason for the Matrix in favor for the simple "humans as batteries" explanation to simplify it to audiences?

I never had a huge problem with that, but that's the one complaint I see thrown around a lot with the first movie.

That is a complaint I have with the first movie, but my main beefs are with movies 2 and 3 making almost no sense whilst having bigger and more expensive set pieces. The first movie's main crime is that it promised so much but never really explored any of the themes, characters or locations that they established.

I only saw star wars as an adult and even the original ones seemed overhyped and unimpressive. Bad acting, bad storyline. It's a "meh" series. I haven't even bothered to see the new Disney ones.

I agree.

My guess is that for its time the special effects were cool so people ignored the bad acting (especially) and the universe just built so much hype that it just became an institution few people dare to criticize openly. Also, popular with children + nostalgia :)

Credit where it's due - for its time the special effects in the original series were groundbreaking and revolutionized the industry. The original trilogy pioneered many techniques for practical effects, bluescreen, modelwork and cinematography which would become standard in action movies for years to come, and the prequels arguably did the same with the scale with which they integrated CGI and motion capture with live action.

I don't know what makes the storyline "bad", necessarily, but I really don't understand the acting charge, especially against the original 1977 release.

Alec Guinness, James Earl Jones, Peter Cushing, Harrison Ford--none of these are slackers. Anthony Daniels might not have much range, but he fit perfectly in the scope required of him. Mark Hamill was convincing as Luke.

The only weak link to me, bless her soul, might have been Carrie Fisher. And maybe a few bit-players. But the bulk of the show was carried by capable, if not excellent, actors.

This is just my opinion. All of those actors are great! They were just not very good in star wars

SW always felt empty to me. Where star trek always dealt with deep philosophical questions of humanism, consciousness, sentience, and took scientific plausibility seriously SW dealt with very shallow concepts and eschewed scientific realism in favor of hyper space or whatever. Just not nearly as interesting.

> took scientific plausibility seriously

Didn't Star Trek essentially pioneer the concept of technobabble?

> eschewed scientific realism in favor of hyper space or whatever

Warp travel? Subspace? Q? Accelerated human evolution into lizard people?

> Warp travel? Subspace? Q? Accelerated human evolution into lizard people?

There's a lot of bad Trek out there. But also a lot of good Trek. The best of it is like a slice of speculative fiction - like a mini District 9, Interstellar, Her, or Arrival. The worst of it is pure melodrama with technobabble layered on top.

I think what the parent is getting at is that Star Wars never, ever goes the speculative fiction route. It's all "character drama in space".

Fair to say that Star Wars is more psychological than philosophical?

To me, it's more political than mechanical.

Star Wars has more political and interpersonal conflicts lead to shifts of power. Palpatine gained control of the Galactic Senate through political maneuvering - letting the Trade Federation apply political pressure through shipping fees, and then manipulating weak-minded senators while their stronger-minded companions are fleeing the Trade Federation. Rarely are technical details relevant to the plot - starship fuel or reactor operation details are vague at best, an executive summary. They don't goto Watto for engine parts, but a whole new engine, and Jedi aren't trained on starship repairs as they have astromech droids.

Star Trek has more situations where mechanical failure or damage leads to interpersonal conflicts and shifts of power. During the Klingon Civil War, you get a pretty good idea of how Geordi keeps the Romulans away. Ship fuel was a main plotline through the entire Voyager series. Everyone on every Starfleet ship has taken a college class on how the warp core reactor works, and they flaunt that knowledge regularly.

> To me, it's more political than mechanical.

That's mostly the 1-3 trilogy. The original trilogy is mostly fantasy in space/space opera

> Didn't Star Trek essentially pioneer the concept of technobabble?

Hell, no. Technobabble has been a staple of science fiction all the way back to its origins.

OK, perhaps "popularize" or "serve as a very prominent example" might've been a better choice of words.

The point remains: Star Trek's science is frequently either nonsensical or laughably bad. Hard sci-fi it's not.

Star Wars has always been more fantasy than science fiction. What did you expect?

As a fan of both franchises, I totally agree with your take on Star Trek. But Star Wars isn't meant to be enjoyed the same way. The issue is that "science fiction" is such a broad genre, and it unfortunately encompasses both Star Trek and Star Wars. Star Wars is more fantasy than Star Trek. Star Wars does deal with some deep (but different) issues. How ought the powerful wield their power? What is justice? Jedi v. Sith is essentially a philosophical debate on the origins of power and justice. Those philosophies are reified by the characters. Look at Luke's behavior in Return of the Jedi -- he defeats his father (definitely drawing on "dark side" powers), but triumphantly throws down his weapon. There was no way he could have defeated the emperor using conventional force. But, somehow, that does not diminish the power of Luke, because his actions still directly caused the downfall of the emperor.

So Star Wars does have a kind of philosophical elegance, but it has to be appreciated from a different mindset than Star Trek.

You are not wrong. But when I first watched the original Star Wars movies, I was a kid and had lower standards. When I watch these movies today, it is less about the movies themselves, but about revisiting those pleasant childhood memories.

The newer movies do not have those memories attached, so I am more critical. It's the same with Indiana Jones - the fourth movie was not really bad, but without the warm glow of childhood memories it does not have that same magic.

Battlestar Galactica worked out very well, but that was mostly because they turned the original show completely inside out and turned it into something that could stand on its own.

Someone from Conan has a nice monologue arguing for star wars: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmRouEds_2A

The thing is, if you're looking for action, adventure, melodrama set against the backdrop of of a richly imagined universe, Star Wars delivers. It's triple A, top rate.

Whereas if you're looking for philosophical questions of humanism, sentience, and scientific plausibility: then what the heck are you doing watching Star Trek? It's watered down tripe. Go to the library, you turkey.

They're just not the same genre, despite superficial similarities. Star Trek is (often) sci-fi, Star Wars is more like space fantasy. You could pretty much take all the characters and plot from Star Wars and move it to a Lord of the Ring-like heroic fantasy setting and 99% would still work with only minor tweaking. It's all character driven drama. Even the "a long time ago in a galaxy far away" is telling, Lucas didn't try to predict the future of humankind, he's telling an old story that doesn't really concern us. Like Tolkien and Middle Earth.

Being born in the mid 80's I think I think I "missed" Star Wars, by the time I watched the original trilogy in the mid 90's it was still enjoyable but already dated and when the prequels released I was old enough to see the many obvious flaws of the movies through the thick CGI layers. I expect younger generations might have a different relation towards the Star Wars "brand", having it fed to them almost non-stop since birth.

I never thought of it on my own, but someone pointed out that "a long time ago" is simply saying the story is being told about our distant future from a perspective even further in the future. There's no reason why the POV of the narrator should be present day.

I'm sorry, no. I'm a fan of both, and I've seen every Star Trek series and film, and almost everything Star Wars, but Star Trek was never philosophically deep nor did it often take scientific plausibility seriously.

The scripts for TNG often simply said "tech" when "technology" was supposed to "happen" because the production crew didn't care about the spec-fic element as anything more than a means to drive melodrama[0] which couldn't offend sponsors or the morals of American viewers. There's a good reason the term "technobabble" originated with Star Trek, and why, despite the Federation's implied diversity and progressivism, there has only ever been one openly gay character depicted in its history. Star Trek is about as deep as a saucer of milk.

The Force and hyperspace are no less plausible than a warp drive running on dilithium crystals and subspace (arguably more, since there are actually mathematical models for hyperspace, but what even is subspace?) Both franchises have alien races and cultures which consist of a few generic traits, and Klingon bat'leths make about as much sense as lightsabers, which is to say, little beyond their relative cool factors. The only difference between the two franchises that Star Trek has somehow gained pretentions of being something more highbrow than it ever really was.

[0]https://whatever.scalzi.com/2009/10/13/teching-the-tech/

I recall David Brin having an interesting take on it. I think its this article which is mangled its current form on my browser: https://www.salon.com/1999/06/15/brin_main/

What I took away from that and always echoes in these arguments is how Star Wars lionizes and celebrates the superhuman whereas Star Trek (especially TOS) almost pities them.

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