Tag: Skiffy

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Brightest day, darkest night, yada yada yada….

I saw Green Lantern a while back, and I’ve been struggling since then to figure out how to write about it. I liked the movie, quite a bit. I grant some of its flaws, but for the life of me, I can’t justify the enormous piling-on of the critics who have ripped the film and given it an awful reputation. That, plus what I understand to be lackluster box office, seems to cast doubt on any hopes that Green Lantern might be the start of a franchise. Maybe DVD sales will help, but in this era of slackening DVD sales – well, I’d be surprised if the next time we see Green Lantern on the big screen will likely be a reboot that happens later rather than sooner.

Green Lantern just isn’t a bad film. It simply isn’t. Not one of its flaws is sufficient to sink it as an enjoyable experience, and I think that a lot of the harping on those flaws is downright unfair. One common complaint – too much CG! — has really become, in my view, a crutch complaint that everybody levels against everything nowadays in the movies.

But the thing is…Green Lantern is a frustrating film, because I’ve rarely seen a movie that makes so clear the ways it could have been a truly outstanding film in its genre. On the one hand, it’s a fun movie. On the other, it’s a maddening one.

I came to Green Lantern fairly virginal as far as the character goes. I knew very little about him aside from the bare bones of his origin: a hotshot pilot named Hal Jordan comes across a crashed alien spaceship, whose purple-skinned pilot hands him his green ring and the green lantern that powers the ring. In this way, Jordan becomes a Green Lantern – a member of an intergalactic police force, who uses his ring’s power to fight evil. I did read some recent comics — mostly stuff by Geoff Johns — as preparation for the movie. Some of it, I liked. Some of it (lookin’ at you, Blackest Night), I thought was just over-the-top, histrionic nonsense. But anyway….

Green Lantern casts Ryan Reynolds as Hal Jordan, and it’s a fine performance. The character isn’t really anything we haven’t seen a lot of times before; he’s the talented but uncommitted screw-up who is given power far exceeding his apparent level of maturity and who must learn to see within himself whatever the “ring” saw. Yes, that’s a tried-and-true formula, but that’s because when done well, it really works. In Green Lantern, it does work, but not as well as it should. Why?

Well, for one thing, the film keeps taking its focus off Hal Jordan for other things. There’s a lengthy intro that tells us a lot of stuff about who the Green Lanterns are and what they do and why they do it. It’s kind of interesting, but…it’s too early for it. There’s a reason why, in Star Wars, we’re more than a half hour into the movie before the words “Jedi Knight” are ever uttered. The movie has to set up its enormous cosmic threat, a beastie called Parallax. Now, I liked the way Parallax was depicted, but I kept thinking throughout the movie that we really needed a tighter focus on Hal Jordan the whole way through.

And there’s the other problem: Parallax isn’t the only villainous force in play here; there’s a whole other villain too. A scientist is somehow infected with the “Yellow” power of fear, and becomes the initial threat that Jordan must face before Parallax finally comes to call on Earth. And here is part of my general problem with superhero movies these days: they’re all origins, all the time.

I don’t mind origin stories for superheroes; in fact, we need them, so we know who they are and why they can do the things they do and why they do them in the first place. Problems arise when, in addition to a superhero’s origin story, we also have to endure a long origin story for the villain, too. That happens here. It happens in the Spiderman movies. It’s going to happen again in the new Spiderman movie, the one that’s a reboot that will apparently treat us all to seeing Peter Parker bitten by the damn spider again.

The best superhero movies I’ve seen — Superman, the Christopher Nolan Batman films, Iron Man – don’t really bother with the origins of the villains, because they don’t really need to. We can spend time delving into Superman’s origin properly because we’re not also having to learn all about how Lex Luthor became, well, Lex Luthor. Ditto The Dark Knight — we know who Batman is, and all we need know about the Joker is that he’s a lunatic. Now, the first two Spiderman movies were still well-made, but in each case, we still had to watch long origin stories for the supervillains. And in Spiderman 3, there were two of them.

I was looking forward to Green Lantern because of the hero’s space opera nature, but it turns out that Green Lantern might have really been something special if it had omitted much of the space opera and left that for the potential sequel. I did groove on all the space stuff, but I can’t help thinking that what the movie really needed to do was tighten the focus on Hal Jordan, give him more heroic things to do, and have him square off against not quite so cosmic a villain.

Random thoughts:

:: If the Lanterns can fly through space by themselves, why does Abin Sur have a spaceship at all?

:: Why can Parallax slap aside a dozen Lanterns in one scene, and then get taken to the mat by Hal Jordan?

:: The final fight is over too soon, anyway. Jordan should have been battered and bloody well before he got to his “In brightest day….” recitation. (Which was a great moment, by the way.)

:: I loved the fact that a little mask isn’t enough to conceal Jordan’s identity from those who know him. I also loved how he tried using the Christian Bale Batman-raspy voice.

:: Some folks have complained that Sinestro’s taking of the yellow ring, during the credits, isn’t set up in the movie. See, coming at this from a non-GL fan perspective, I thought that Sinestro’s presence in the movie did nothing but set this up. It’s the only reason he’s in the movie at all. So the film is actually giving us three origin stories!

:: I loved the look of the film. It’s not nearly as ‘green’ as the commercials and posters suggest. I also didn’t find the CGI poorly done at all. But then, these kinds of complaints seem to me to usually spring from people who have an overly strong attachment to Harryhausen stop-motion stuff.

:: Having heard the score now in context of the film…it’s still a bad film score.

So there it is. I hope there’s another movie, but I’m not optimistic. But I liked this one.

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Planets ending with ‘is’

Time to talk about some books I’ve read recently.

:: Somehow, in my life as a science fiction reader, I’d never read Dune until just a few weeks ago. Now, that’s nothing really abnormal; there are lots of SF classics I haven’t read. I haven’t read Dhalgren. I haven’t read The Book of the New Sun. I’ve read only one of Banks’s Culture novels. I still haven’t read A Canticle for Leibowitz. And I haven’t read…well, you get the idea.

Dune by Frank Herbert

So, why not Dune? I actually started it, ten or eleven years ago, but it either didn’t grab me or something else came along that I wanted to read more. I do recall that my first attempt at Dune flummoxed me a bit because I had to flip back to the book’s glossary so often that it threw me out of the book a lot. Still, I always intended to return to Dune, and I finally have.

This just in: Dune is a great book. Water, also, is wet.

Again, as before, it took me a while to get into Dune, and this time I just generally found a certain coolness to the overall emotional tone of the book. Everything felt like it was at a distance, somehow. This isn’t a criticism per se, but I found myself admiring the book more than really getting involved in it. But still – it’s a great book.

What makes the book great are a combination of factors. First, the setting, the desert planet of Arrakis. Yes, I’ve seen desert planets before, but Dune was there before all of the ones that I’ve seen, and Herbert imbues this world with an impressive sense of scale and an even more impressive sense of importance. Whenever you depict a world where conditions are about as harsh for humans as can possibly be, you need to create a reason for them to live there, and this Herbert accomplishes impressively. (The reason is, of course, the spice called “melange”, which is important because…well, that’s beyond the scope of this post.)

Even better is how Herbert is able to depict the society that lives on Arrakis, the nomadic-bedouin-like Fremen. Herbert brilliantly depicts just what the effects upon society would be on a world where water is as precious as it is on Arrakis, as people have to wear special suits that reclaim every bit of moisture their bodies excrete, and Herbert has thought things through to the point where an act that we on Earth wouldn’t even think twice about – like spitting – is deeply significant on Arrakis. Herbert’s attention to detail is superb, and he packs a lot of detail into the book.

Oh yeah, and sandworms. Sandworms are all kinds of awesome. I won’t say anything more than that.

As noted above, I wasn’t as emotionally involved in the book as I like to be, but the book’s other strengths compensated for this. Part of the problem was the glossary-flipping I had to do a lot of this time around as I did the first time; another part is Herbert’s structuring the novel by including quotes from fictional texts of his world before his chapter. This device does create some dramatic tension in one key respect – establishing that one particular character is a horrible traitor well before the treason happens – but in other ways, those text quotes were sometimes distracting.

I’m not sure if I will read Herbert’s sequels to Dune. I own them all, having picked them up at library book sales, but the general consensus out there as I’ve sussed it out seems to be that the sequels aren’t nearly as good as the first one and that they drop in quality each time out. We’ll see.

(Seriously, folks. Sandworms.)

:: I suppose that most casual SF fans are only aware of Leigh Brackett, if at all, as the writer of the first draft of the screenplay to The Empire Strikes Back. Brackett was a prolific SF writer during the middle of the 20th century, though, and she produced a lot of fine space opera and planetary fantasy stories. In fact, Leigh Brackett is required reading for anyone interested in those strongly-related SF subgenres, and not least because she was simply a fine, fine writer.

I’ve only read a little bit of Brackett thus far, but I’ve loved everything of hers that I’ve read to date, and I can now add to that list of titles her novel The Starmen of Llyrdis.

starmen of llyrdis

A human male, Michael Trehearne, is approached by a beautiful girl who tells him that he looks like one of the Vardda, a race of humanoids who are the only beings in the galaxy who can travel between the stars. This gives them a monopoly over all interstellar trade, and most of the planet-bound species in the Galaxy hate them for it.

Trehearne is brought into the fold as a Vardda, but at the same time, he is viewed with suspicion by them, a suspicion that manifests throughout the book in betrayals and schemes and plots against him. Eventually Trehearne learns a deep secret of the Vardda: the fact that many years before, one of their scientists had figured out how it is that the Vardda can travel the stars, and how to give that ability to other species. Trehearne is now at the center of events that could change the galaxy forever.

Brackett’s writing is poetic and beautiful as she weaves a tale of adventure and galaxy-spanning mystery that even has a few action set-pieces. The story is a bit heavily skewed toward the male end of the spectrum, as might be expected of a book written in 1952, and in terms of style, there’s not a lot of humor in the book. But those are quibbles that are better taken in the context of the era in which Leigh Brackett wrote, and The Starmen of Llyrdis is a fascinating and entertaining space opera.

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Fixing the Prequels: Revenge of the Sith (part 1)

I’ve been meaning to get to this for a while, but various things have distracted me and kept it pushed down the priority list for several months. But now, it really is time to start the final edition of Fixing the Prequels, by turning to the final film in the trilogy, Revenge of the Sith.

Before I begin, it’s worth a reminder of what I’m about here. I love the Prequel Trilogy (abbreviated ‘PT’ hereafter), and have since I saw each individual film on first release. I found them all involving, exciting, and in the case of Revenge, emotionally crushing at times. I know I’m a minority in this, but I’ve never much cared about that. Even so, I must admit that as much as I love the Star Wars prequels, I don’t love them unreservedly, because they are flawed. There are things wrong with them.

That’s not an unusual opinion, but I think that my view as to the degree of that opinion is. Most folks seem to hold the flaws of the PT as fatal flaws, sinking the films to the point where the only appropriate response to them seems to be outright mockery. I don’t believe that. I think that a lot of the flaws in the films are overblown; others arise from misinterpretation or possibly a failure to understand what George Lucas was at times really getting at. And still more perceived flaws in the PT come, I think, not from a sense of genuine error on Lucas’s part but the simple fact that, by the time Lucas made these three films, tastes had changed in a lot of ways.

So when I talk about “fixing” the prequels, I’m not about wholesale rewrites and bagging on the direction of the films in all particulars. I point out flaws along the way, but my goal is also to highlight the things in these films that I find admirable, the things that keep me coming back to them frequently. My approach is to address two kinds of flaws: the ones that I think are real, genuine flaws, and the ones that I’ve heard cited as flaws from other people over the years but which I either don’t see as flaws or as fatal flaws. I’m about credit as much as criticism here, which I think is a more measured response to them than a lot of the people who deeply despise the Prequels would admit. It has long interested me that, in almost all cases of such discussion, the people who hold a negative view of something are the ones who invariably claim to be seeing the thing objectively. My response is to simply point out that having a negative opinion is not seeing something “objectively”; it’s having a negative opinion.

And now, with all that preamble behind us, let’s move on to discussing Revenge of the Sith, a fascinating film that even as I write this I’m not sure about, as to how I’d go about “fixing” it. This is mainly because I’m not entirely sure what I think is wrong with it. But as I work through the film, I expect some thoughts will crystallize. So let’s start at the beginning, which means as it always does in a Star Wars movie, a crawl:

War! The Republic is crumbling under attacks by the ruthless Sith Lord, Count Dooku. There are heroes on both sides. Evil is everywhere.

In a stunning move, the fiendish droid leader, General Grievous, has swept into the Republic capital and kidnapped Chancellor Palpatine, leader of the Galactic Senate.

As the Separatist Droid Army attempts to flee the besieged capital with their valuable hostage, two Jedi Knights lead a desperate mission to rescue the captive Chancellor. . . .

It sets things up nicely. I especially like that opening: “War!” This crawl is pretty blunt, with none of the “politics” stuff that many claim to have been bored by in the first two Prequels. (How they could be “bored” by a couple of lines of text is something I’ve never figured out, but no matter.) What stands out to me in this crawl, however, is that second sentence in the first paragraph: “There are heroes on both sides.” That’s an interesting line, there; it seems out of place, but I think it works in an interesting way: it calls to attention the ambiguous nature of the Clone War, the War to Preserve the Republic: we know that it’s basically a fake war, started for no other reason than to trick the Republic into destroying itself.

Revenge opens with a massive space battle, of which I’ve heard many differing opinions over the years. Detractors say that it plays like a video game on the big screen, and is impossible to follow. This has always struck me as odd, because it’s always seemed to me that George Lucas goes out of his way to make this incredibly frenetic space battle as easy to follow as possible.

After the crawl, we have our traditional pan down to a planet and a spaceship. (AOTC, remember, actually followed its crawl with a pan up.) The planet is Coruscant, and the ship is a Republic attack cruiser. The music dies away almost completely at this point; all we hear for about thirty seconds is a steady, but off-kilter (because it’s in 5-4 time), beat of drums. The camera starts to zoom in on the cruiser, when two new ships enter from behind: small fighter craft. Only two. We follow these two ships as they skim over the surface of the cruiser, out into space beyond it, and then back and dive. The camera follows over the edge of the cruiser, and there – spread out before us – is the enormous space battle.

As soon as the two Jedi starfighters come into view, the music starts in again, with the famous “Force theme”. We don’t need any dialogue or to even look into the cockpits to know that our two Jedi are flying these ships. Also, of all the ships coming and going in the skies above Coruscant, these are the only two ships of this type. This isn’t like A New Hope, when Luke Skywalker was only one of a bunch of X-wings. Even more, the Jedi starfighters are, by design, similar to what will eventually become TIE fighters, and those ships’ thrusters emit cone-shaped blasts of exhaust (presumably because the battle is taking place high in Coruscant’s atmosphere, as opposed to in the vacuum of outer space).

Another thing that interests me about this space battle is that we see almost none of it. Really. This battle clearly involves several times as many ships and combatants as the big battle at the end of Return of the Jedi (of course, a one-to-one comparison there isn’t easy because that one has a Death Star in it), but aside from lingering shots that quickly flash by, we are shown nothing of the battle itself. Nothing of the strategy, nothing of which side is winning and which is losing, nothing of tactics. All we see of this battle is what Anakin Skywalker and Obi Wan Kenobi see as they fly through it, on their way to General Grievous’s flagship. The battle is frenetic, and there is a lot happening onscreen, but it’s not at all hard to follow, so far as I can tell. The battle is entirely secondary to their main concern: getting through it alive to land on General Grievous’s ship and find the Chancellor.

So, after quite a bit of space derring-do that involves flying directly through a cloud of attacking fighters, evading missiles, and dealing with a bunch of small droids who get onto a fighter’s hull and then scuttle about taking the ship apart, our two Jedi heroes land on Grievous’s ship. I like a lot of the dialogue through here: at one point, Obi Wan notes “This is why I hate flying!”, echoing two lines from Attack of the Clones. I also like how when Obi Wan’s ship is infested by the buzz droids, Anakin’s first notion is to blast them off, which has Obi Wan screaming in protest, at which point Anakin says, “I agree. Bad idea.” So he comes up with something else.

What I also like about this whole sequence is John Williams’s music, which is full of interesting things like quotes from the “Force Theme”, sections in 5/4, and one heroic quote of the Rebel Spaceship Fanfare when R2-D2 dispatches the last buzz droid. This was a musical touch that I liked immensely.

Anyway, back to the General’s ship, where Obi Wan and Anakin have just landed. There’s an interesting touch here as the two Jedi take on a typically large number of battle droids: Obi Wan leaps out of his ship and ignites his lightsaber before his ship has even slid to a stop; Anakin, however, waits until he’s stopped completely before grabbing his saber and hopping out to join the melee. I like that. It’s the kind of tiny detail that gets lost amidst a lot of the melee, the kind of blink-and-you-miss-it thing that nevertheless illustrates something about the story and our characters.

Now Obi Wan and Anakin must make their way to the observation deck where the Chancellor is being held captive. This involves more run-ins with battle droids, malfunctioning elevators, and relying on R2-D2 when R2 is dealing with his own problems. (He has to hide from a couple of battle droids when Obi Wan starts talking to him through his comm-link.) I wouldn’t change any of this material, because the banter and chemistry between Obi Wan and Anakin really works pretty well, in my opinion:

ANAKIN: I sense Count Dooku.

OBI WAN: I sense a trap.

ANAKIN: Next move?

OBI WAN: (grins) Spring the trap!

And this, the transition from the space battle to the derring-do aboard General Grievous’s ship, is a good place to stop. Next time we’ll rescue the Chancellor, land half a ship, and find out that Anakin isn’t always shooting blanks. Excelsior!

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Crap on toast.

This morning I had one of those “Ohhhh!” moments of writerly epiphany, when I realized why I’ve been finding the last three or four chapters of the Work-In-Progress something of a struggle, where the run up to that point had been really fairly easy. It’s because I screwed up and shouldn’t have written those chapters. I took the story in entirely the wrong direction, and I’ve ended up in this awful spot where nothing’s been happening; just a whole lot of exposition and introducing my main characters to new people for four chapters.

The good news about the epiphany is that I know exactly what I did wrong and where I did it. The bad news? I’ve been working on Chapter 13…and now, tonight, after I re-read the thing to refresh certain details in my head and prime the pump, I’ll be back on Chapter 9. Oh well.

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Two of Three


_DSC8763-1, originally uploaded by preloc and kanar.

Last week saw the birthdays of William Shatner (born March 22, 1931) and Leonard Nimoy (born March 26, 1931). Best to both! It’s too bad DeForest Kelley is no longer with us; way too many folks think of Star Trek‘s “Original Series” characters as Kirk and Spock instead of the real dynamic of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy. (Kelley was born January 20, by the way; if he were still around, he would be 91.)

The best recent tribute to Leonard Nimoy, of course, comes from the Christmas episode of Season Two of The Big Bang Theory. In the episode, Penny tells Sheldon that she has got him a Christmas present, which gives Sheldon pause, as he had no intention of exchanging gifts with Penny, and now he feels he must, out of social obligation. But he devises a strategy: he will buy a whole bunch of gift baskets from Bath&Body Works, and when he sees what Penny’s gift is, he will give her the basket that he judges the best match for what she has given him. Hilarity ensues.

(What does that have to do with Leonard Nimoy? Watch the clip!)

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No. Please oh please, No.

Sequels and prequels to Blade Runner. Come on. What are we gonna do now? See Deckard and Rachel on the run? Or go back in time so we can see what attack ships on fire off Orion’s shoulder look like? Now, I’ve never been as enamored of Blade Runner as many are — visually it’s a staggering achievement, but narratively I’ve always found it oddly uninvolving — but really, Hollywood, No.

I really think it’s only a matter of time before somebody actually makes Brazzaville, the first installment of the ongoing adventures of former bar owner Rick Blaine and his friend, the ethically-challenged Police Prefect Louis Renault.

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Trust your feelings!

I’ve been enjoying AICN’s “Behind the Scenes Picture of the Day” series, and for obvious reasons, I really dug this one:

I also see that the official release date for the Star Wars films on Blu-ray has been announced. I won’t be acquiring these right off the bat, unless the current DVD player at Casa Jaquandor goes belly-up between this day and that. I’m not upgrading to Blu-ray until I absolutely have to; I still don’t see any compelling need whatsoever for this new format other than Sony saying, “Holy crap, we need one last physical format to soak everybody with before everything is all-digital-download!”

And I’m amused, of course, by the huge chorus of people shouting “I’m not giving George Lucas any more of my money!”, as if he’s the one and only filmmaker releasing films successively in one format and then the next and then the next.

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The Lucas Itch

I love me some John Scalzi, but that creates problems for me because as much as I loves me some John Scalzi, I loves me some George Lucas way more. And John Scalzi most certainly does not love him some George Lucas much at all. Today Scalzi responds to someone who is responding to a four-year-old post of his, which leads me to look at that four-year old post itself. And now I really wish I hadn’t. Because…well…it’s crap. Crap of the “My opinion of [Item X] is fact” crap. And I think, largely, that Scalzi wrote the original post because he thought of a new way to speak negatively about Star Wars, which is a pastime he rarely fails to engage in when the opportunity presents itself.

How else to take this statement:

Star Wars is not entertainment. Star Wars is George Lucas masturbating to a picture of Joseph Campbell and conning billions of people into watching the money shot.

He goes on to describe the entirety of Lucas’s output in Star Wars in lots of negative ways, including maintaining his “masturbation” imagery by use of the adjective “Onanistic”. OK then.

Here’s the thing, though — Scalzi seems to make some odd assumptions regarding the concept of “entertainment”. Take this, for example:

There is nothing in the least bit “popular” about the Star Wars films. This is true of all of them, but especially of Episodes I, II and III: They are the selfish, ungenerous, onanistic output of a man who has no desire to include others in the internal grammar of his fictional world. They are the ultimate in auteur theory, but this creator has contempt for the people who view his work — or if not contempt, at the very least a near-austistic lack of concern as to whether anyone else “gets” his vision. The word “entertainer” has as an assumption that the creator/actor is reaching out to his or audience to engage them. George Lucas doesn’t bother with this. He won’t keep you out of his universe; he just doesn’t care that you’re in it. To call the Star Wars films “entertainment” is to fundamentally misapprehend the meaning of the world.

There are an awful lot of assertions here, with no evidence or citations to back them up. No working definition, for example, of what we’re even talking about with respect to “entertainment” is forthcoming. But on what possible basis can George Lucas be said to not be “reaching out to his audience to engage them”? You can argue all you want that he’s not successful in his efforts, but that’s not remotely the same thing as saying he doesn’t try at all.

Or take that word “popular”, in Scalzi’s first sentence above. Again, no definition is given, so I have no idea what Lucas could have included in a Star Wars film that would satisfy Scalzi’s desires here, but…well, as far as I can see, this is still false. Sure, Jar Jar Binks was a deeply unpopular character, but is that because Lucas openly decided to include something unpopular, or was he trying to include something that he hoped would be popular? Given that the “goofy sidekick” has been a standard element in storytelling since, well, forever, I think the latter is more likely. Ditto in Attack of the Clones, when Lucas tried to include another trope that has been deeply popular throughout the years, the youthful romance. Again, you can argue that Lucas failed — but failure is not synonymous with not making the attempt in the first place. (Again, I’m assuming Scalzi’s meaning here, because he doesn’t clarify matters at all.)

Then there is this:

What’s interesting about mythology is that it’s the residue of a teleological system that’s dead; it’s what you get after everyone who believed in something has croaked and nothing is left but stories. Building a mythology is necrophilic storytelling; one that implicitly kills off an entire culture and plays with its corpse (or corpus, as the case may be). It’s one better than being a God, really. Gods have to deal with the universes they create; mythmakers merely have to say what happened. When Lucas started Star Wars with the words “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…” he was implicitly serving notice to the audience that they weren’t participants, they were at best witnesses to events that had already happened, through participants who were long dead.

I’m sorry, but this is deeply, deeply silly. It just is.

Storytelling is, by its very nature, not participatory. At all. I have never, not once, been a “participant” in any movie I’ve ever seen. I wasn’t a “participant” when I saw Casablanca. I wasn’t a “participant” when I saw Titanic. I wasn’t a “participant” when I saw The Lord of the Rings. I wasn’t a “participant” when I saw 3:10 to Yuma. I wasn’t a “participant” when I saw…you get the idea. And this isn’t just true of movies: how would I “participate” when reading The Pit and the Pendulum? How would I “participate” in Rendezvous with Rama? How would I “participate” in The Once and Future King? or Maus? or Pride and Prejudice? or Old Man’s War? Was I supposed to think of myself as a “participant” in any of these?

To my knowledge, there’s only one form of storytelling right now in which you can participate, and that is the video game. (Which is why I think that games are a pretty exciting development in artistic terms.) Yes, there are arts and entertainments in which you can participate. You can act in a play, for instance. Sing in a choir. But there is nothing about The Bourne Identity that is more “participatory” than any Star Wars movie. The notion makes zero sense.

And besides, the disdain Scalzi is showing here for the “Once upon a time” storytelling trope here is pretty troubling. Was Walt Disney not an entertainer, then? How many of his movies start off with “Once upon a time” and follow Campbellian storytelling tropes that have been around for thousands of years? For many years, Westerns were one of the most popular film genres. And yet, every single Western ever made, by definition, was about characters long dead doing events that were over years and years before. So, come to that, is every historically-set movie ever made.

And besides that, why can’t there be multiple reasons to do something? Can’t George Lucas want to spin a story from mythological cloth and entertain at the same time? I’d bet that if you were to ask George Lucas if he wanted to entertain with his Star Wars movies, he’d likely consider it silly that anyone ever assumed otherwise. I’ve read the interviews and heard the commentaries, and I’ve heard nothing that rules out the notion that Lucas wanted to make films that would entertain people. But Scalzi’s entire argument assumes that the films do not entertain. Or, in other words: Scalzi’s entire argument assumes Scalzi’s own opinion of the films as fact.

Unfair? I don’t think so. There’s this:

Now, hold on, you say: If the Star Wars films aren’t meant to be entertainment, how come so many people were entertained? It’s a fair question; after all, there’s not a single film in the series that made less than $200 million at the box office (and those are in 1980 dollars). I’m happy to allow it’s entirely possible to be entertained by Episodes IV, V and VI, due to their novelty and the intervention of hired guns who aimed for entertainment even as Lucas was on his holy quest for mythology. Even then, however, Return of the Jedi was pushing it. I defy you to find any person who was genuinely entertained by Episodes I, II and III. Episode I in particular is an airless, joyless slog; in the theater you could actually hear people’s expectations deflate — a whooshing groan — the moment Jar-Jar showed up. After the first weekend of Episode I, people went to the prequel trilogy films for the same reason so many people go to church on Sunday: It’s habit, they know when to stand and when to sit, and they want to see how the preacher will screw up the sermon this week. You know what I felt when Episode III was done? Relief. I was done with the Star Wars films. I was free. I’m not the only one.

That line there — “I defy you to find anyone entertained by the Prequels” — now reminds me that I have read this post before, and responded to it. But I must have skimmed it before, because so much of this is silly, condescending, or both. Now I know that Scalzi’s not suggesting that all churchgoers go to church out of just “habit”, but I wonder what percentage of churchgoers he thinks do. Still, the whole exercise reeks of some kind of desperate reaching: “Since I’ve already established that Star Wars isn’t entertainment, I must come up with some other reason why people keep seeing the damn things. And that means that I must argue that millions of people are doing something for some other reason completely.”

That last bit — “I was so relieved after the last one came out! I was free!” — is just stupid. Scalzi could have been “free” of Star Wars any time he wanted to be. I decided that I was “free” of The Matrix after the first one; I never bothered watching the next two. I’ve stopped watching many a teevee series after I decided that I didn’t like it anymore. Good example: ER. I loved that show for years, but then it lost me, so I stopped watching it. It went on another five seasons after that. Did I feel “free” when ER finally went off the air, five years after it stopped entertaining me? No. Because I had, you know, stopped paying attention. The notion that people were going to Star Wars movie after Star Wars movie out of some robotic notion that they had to is just nonsensical.

But I’ve heard arguments like that before. Another good example is Titanic, a movie that has suffered as vicious a backlash since it was beloved in its initial release as I’ve ever seen. Now it’s not uncommon to hear people say that the movie wasn’t popular because lots of people liked it; no, it’s because of armies of thirteen-year-old girls who went to the movie over and over again to drool over Leonardo DiCaprio.

Maybe I’m being unfair to Scalzi, either by misreading or misrepresenting. But I don’t think so. His whole argument hinges on assumptions as to George Lucas’s intentions and a definition of “entertainment” that I don’t find well-taken. Ultimately it boils down to saying “Star Wars isn’t entertainment because I didn’t find it entertaining.”

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