Star Wars: The Book of Fett

[legios]

Dec 18, 2023 14:29:18 GMT The Doctor said:

I felt that watching a third of the show was enough to make a judgement.

-Ralph

I think that is fair - If you've given a show four hours and it hasn't grabbed you then it's likely that it isn't going to. Like my colleague who was asking me if they should stick with The Expanse - I said that if they had got as far as CQB and it wasn't working for them then it probably never would. Similar applies with Andor I think - it isn't going to be your thing after five episodes if it wasn't after four.

I loved it, but I'd say that it is something that is so tonally different from anything else in the SW universe that I can see why it isn't to a lot of folks taste. At heart it is a drama about tyranny and resistance wearing a Star Wars jumper. It is about as far from the Fantasy space adventure serial that defines SW as one can really get. On its own terms I loved it, but bar the trappings it isn't really related to Star Wars in any thematic or tonal way.

Karl

[Philip Ayres]

Dec 18, 2023 17:15:03 GMT Shockprowl said:

Ahhhh, right, I see. Funny Disney don't produce their own.

If hey don't produce the DVDs you're more likely to sign up to the service to watch it as it's the only legal way

[legios]

Yeah, the intent is to have exclusive content - if you want to consume Disney media product you must pay a subscription fee to Disney. There is a strong desire with entertainment companies to move away from selling people product, to renting it - hence the move towards not providing physical releases of series, and everyone and their clone-siblings jumping on the Live Service bandwagon on the videogame front. Why should they sell you something that you only pay for once and can then keep using, when they can rent you something that you have to continue to pay them regularly to keep using. Or so the logic goes.

Karl

[Jim]

Dec 18, 2023 17:44:03 GMT legios said:

I loved it, but I'd say that it is something that is so tonally different from anything else in the SW universe that I can see why it isn't to a lot of folks taste. At heart it is a drama about tyranny and resistance wearing a Star Wars jumper. It is about as far from the Fantasy space adventure serial that defines SW as one can really get. On its own terms I loved it, but bar the trappings it isn't really related to Star Wars in any thematic or tonal way.

I find that interesting - to me, it's works very well tonally and thematically with the original Star Wars film, though you have to set aside pretty much everything else that came after. I find Star Wars still had some of that bleak 70s edge to it that was lost with Empire onwards. Rogue One brought some of it back, and Andor brought it in spades.

If I could keep only three pieces of Star Wars media it would be Andor, Rogue One, and Star Wars. I think they'd make a really satisfying watch (depending on what happens with S2 I guess).

[legios]

Food for thought that. I don't tend to get any sense of bleakness from Star Wars I must admit. I tend to see in it that kinetic movie-serial bounce from peril to peril, with last minute escapes by skill or good fortune leading to the next deadly situation. Less bleak, more pulp high adventure. But some of that may be the different angles we happen to be viewing it from. Both could well be true. It is certainly fodder for me to go back and look at Star Wars through a new lens, and I always appreciate good a reason to re-appraise a piece of media.

Karl

[Stomski]

Bleakness is lack of hope, so is fully appropriate for Star Wars during the time of the Empire, being Andor and Rogue One. Solo's best bits were when they it played on that bleakness given that it failed as the Western it wanted to be.

[Jim]

I think the bleaker, or at least more down-trodden 70s-movie-style, aspects of SW are largely in the first half of the film, though it's fairly bloodthirsty in the climactic battle compared to a lot of later movies. Certainly some people see it as literally the turning point of cinema of the era, and there's quite a bit about it at the end of the Easy Riders, Raging Bulls book. The destruction of the Death Star as the herald of the 80s era of blockbuster action cinema.