Star Worries

With the release of The Force Awakens, I've been thinking about Star Wars a lot. Because, I can. I've been riffing on some left-of-center questions about Luke, Ben, Vader and Jedi in general on social media, but I've collected my thoughts here.* These are the questions that keep me up at night and annoy my friends who wonder if I have something better to do with my free time. For the record I do, but I'd rather be doing this.



The Kenobi Conundrum

Was Ben Kenobi really Obi Wan? What if he's not? What if he was an imperfect clone of the original Jedi General? There has always been the speculation that Obi Wan was a code for a clone designation OB-1, but what if the opposite was true? If Ben's cloned memories weren't exact, it would explain a lot as to why he got many of the facts wrong about his past with Vader, Anakin, Yoda, and even Artoo. It would explain why he has to seemingly stop and think every time before he speaks, sometimes just making stuff up. Then he has to justify his inaccuracies with that 'certain point of view' nonsense later. 

An imperfect clone of Obi Wan would also explain why he seems somewhat confused about the amount of time the Jedi have been around (he says a thousand generations, and it's later established that the republic has only stood for a thousand years). And it would explain his incorrect information on the accuracy of Stormtrooper blaster fire at the Jawa massacre, as we all know they can't hit crap. Ben being a clone of Obi Wan would also explain why Vader is kind of taken aback to feel the presence of his old master again... Think about it...


Use the Force, Luke, Because I Said So

Was Luke mind controlled into becoming a Jedi? Before he sets off on his hero's journey, Ben Kenobi looks long and hard at Luke and says, "You must learn the ways of the Force, if you're to come with me to Alderaan." Watch that scene again. Was the old wizard using his Force powers on Luke to put that suggestion into his head? Kenobi knows he can't do the mission alone. His next line in that scene is that he's too old for this sort of thing. For the sake of the Rebellion, did he control Luke's mind? We've already established that Luke will cave to authority, when his aunt and uncle deny him his application to the Academy and his trip to Toshii station. Luke being under Kenobi's control might explain why Luke so quickly turned from seeing the people who raised him burned to a crisp by Stormtroopers and wanting to become a Jedi under Kenobi's guidance without so much as shedding a tear. It also might explain why he had a much stronger reaction to Kenobi's death than the death of Owen and Beru. From that moment on, Luke's driving need through the trilogy is to become a Jedi. Even at the Battle of Yavin, What if he didn't have a choice in the matter? What if Kenobi made that choice for him?



Dark Luke of the Sith

Which brings up the question, was Luke Skywalker really a Jedi? On Tatooine, he's a selfish, (sociopathic?) braggart who wanted to join the Imperial Academy, presumably to be a TIE Fighter pilot, instead of help his family farm. On Dagobah, he willfully and repeatedly ignores his master's instructions; a master with eight centuries of Jedi training experience, mind you. He gives into anger and fear on Cloud City when he confronts Vader, taking the quick and easy path. Gets mauled, maimed, and a cyborg hand, (most Sith we have seen seem to have some, if not all, of these qualities). Force chokes, threatens, and kills indiscriminately at Jabba's Palace while dressed in all black. Has zero qualms about murdering anyone who opposes him with the possible exception of his father. He taunts the Emperor, gleefully promising his death. He then gives into his hate in the presence of the Emperor, twice. 

Only in the final moments of his conflict with Vader does he really seem to understand that he's already lost the battle for his soul. In truth, he may only have one moment when he's not being truly evil, then the Emperor blasts him with wizard stuff. Afterwards, despite living in a universe with batca tanks and medical droids, just pulls the plug on his dying father. If he truly is a Jedi like his father before him, then the dark side will forever dominate his destiny.


Darth Until Death

What if at the end of Return of the Jedi, Luke didn't save Anakin, but instead Vader completed Luke's turn to the Dark Side? I've already argued that maybe Luke wasn't really a Jedi. According to Yoda, a Jedi uses his powers for knowledge and defense, never for attack. By that criteria, Luke was far from being a Jedi. And in watching the films, it seems that all Sith ascend to power by turning on their master. Betrayal is a running theme with their Order. When Vader grabbed the Emperor and threw him down the shaft, maybe his motivations weren't to save his son, but he simply saw his shot and took it. 

Remember he had this grand vision of ruling the galaxy as father and son, and completing Luke's training. With the Emperor distracted, Vader finally had an opportunity that was just too good to pass up, a chance to destroy his mentor and finally graduate from apprentice to master. Maybe he was just seeking to fulfill his destiny of overthrowing the Emperor and ruling with his son at his side. I mean he was beaten, but his life support was still fully functional. Perhaps, he didn't anticipate the feedback from the force lightning, and was mortally wounded. His last chance to complete Luke's turn to the Dark Side was by manipulating Luke into being an active participant in his death. By asking Luke to remove his mask, he's essentially asking Luke to kill him before his body shuts down. Knowing that this is the way of the Sith, he's essentially fast-tracking Luke to Dark Lord status. 

Maybe that's why Lucas changed Anakin's force ghost vision at the end of RotJ to the younger Anakin, because that's the last time in is life that Anakin was a servant of the light. If we take Lucas at his word that the Special Editions were the way he always envisioned them, then I can only conclude that this change was because Vader was still a Sith at the time of his death. And maybe, just maybe, so was Luke.


The Frauds Will Be With You, Always

Did most people believe the Jedi were just fakes? In all of the billions of billions of sentient beings in this galaxy far, far away, there were only four known force-trained individuals in existence at the time of A New Hope -- Kenobi, Yoda, Vader and Palpatine. The latter two hadn't even been revealed yet. That's a hell of a small percentage of people. Mace Windu states two telling things in the prequels. There are not a lot of Jedi (at least not enough to fight an army), and their powers over the force have greatly diminished. Han claims to have traveled from one end of the galaxy to the other and have never seen anything that would make him a believer in the Force, yet the fall of the Jedi and the rise of the Empire would have happened in his lifetime. Jabba is openly dismissive of Jedi powers, and he lived in a time when being a Jedi meant something. 

So, did the general populous just not believe that the Force was really a thing? Did years of Palpatine inspired propaganda turn the people against Jedi so much so that they had become just a footnote in history? Was 'may the force be with you,' just a polite thing that people said without any real spiritual weight behind it? Were the Jedi so rare as to be considered charlatans using magic tricks?

Until next time...

--

*While it's entirely possible others have reached similar conclusions about Star Wars, all of this was done from memory and not intentionally ripping anyone else off...

The Force Awakens Some Complex Reactions to Star Wars

Star Wars review, so, locking S-Foils in attack position...

I know that the bulk of these posts have been about Star Trek. Sure, I've thrown in some BvS:DoJ, and some D&D, and some photoshop fun. But I wanted to talk about the thing that everyone is talking about and that's Star Wars. Does the internet need another opinion about Star Wars? For the record, no, it does not. However, this review is not really for you. It's for me.  I'm writing this because I need to process what I saw. Because it stirred a very complex reaction in me, and I am very conflicted about it.

Star Wars is not a thing that I take lightly. Like many of my generation, it was part of my formation as a human being. The original film blew apart my limited concepts of how the world worked. At the age of five, I was not able to process a good guy dying. It messed with my myopic concept of religion, seeing a world where Christianity didn't even exist, and everybody was surprisingly okay with that.* It began my love affair with the fantastic. Parents aside, I'm trying to remember anything that I loved before Star Wars and I'm not sure that I can. I am simply not capable of being objective when it comes this subject matter.

Such is the nature of love.

The prequels just crushed me. I came to understand that not only did Lucas not really understand or respect the legacy of his own creation, but also that as a fan, I was now entirely irrelevant. The EU frustrated me. I bought terrible books, suffered through awful games, watched horrible films and television, all because it bore the brand. There are gems of course — the Thrawn Trilogy, Tartakovsky's Clone Wars, Knights of the Old Republic — but it was an abusive relationship between Star Wars and this particular fan.

So, when Disney announced Abrams was announced, I was skeptical. I find him an uneven filmmaker. I dropped Lost after the first season. Alias and Fringe were hit or miss for me, though I preferred the latter. I thought Mission Impossible 3 was interesting, Super-8 was a colossal mess. I'm sure I'll get into this in another post down the line, but I have an absolute love-hate with his Trek films. But could he do it? Maybe. One consistent thread about his work is that his films look fantastic, and the action sequences are well done. He at least had a big-budget science fiction franchise reboot in his filmography.

I tried to avoid as much of the media surrounding the film as I could. I never watched the trailers beyond the first teaser.  Han and Chewie hit me like a ton of bricks, and the shadow of the Phantom Menace loomed over the franchise. And through social media, a few crumbs leaked in. Starkiller base. Fan theories of Luke Skywalker being the man behind the mask. Han professing that things were true, all of it. I went into The Force Awakens with the intent of having as pure of a moviegoing experience as possible. The truth is, I went into The Force Awakens with my arms crossed and daring JJ Abrams to make me love Star Wars again.

Snape kills Dumbledore #starwarsspoilers

The film is fun, but far from perfect. It's gorgeous, but leans too heavily on the imagery of the past. It is a fantastic mix-tape of just the good parts of Star Wars, but isn't really anything new. Kylo Ren is far more interesting and complex than any Star Wars villain we have yet to see. The cross arcs of Ren and Rey embracing their destiny is great thing to behold. Fin and Poe are fantastic. The search for Skywalker is a wonderful macguffin.

Much like his Star Trek films, Abrams is far more interested in painting with broad strokes than getting into the minutia of the mythology. This is where my if-only-they-had-done-blank fanboy nerdism gets in the way of me being able to let go of the past and embrace the film wholly. Fin should have gotten slaughtered in his lightsaber duel with Kylo Ren. It undercut him as both a villain and the importance of the Force and its wielders in the universe. Rey discovered her powers far too easily. And the parallels between the Artoo's stolen data tapes and BB-8's map to the first Jedi Temple, and the Death Star and Starkiller Base were too much. The last one was my biggest disappointment. It felt both calculated and lazy. It hammered the nail in the coffin of this as a remake of A New Hope. There are many, many other parallels, too many to go into here. Are these just fanboy nits or fundamental flaws in the film? Well, to be honest, they're both, which is why I'm having such a hard time reconciling my feelings about the movie.

The Force Awakens cannot be judged on its own merits. Because if taken on its own merits, it's a fun, if derivative, action movie. However, movies, particularly this one, do not exist in a vacuum. This is not just a sequel in a decades-spanning, multi-gazillion-dollar franchise, but a both a celebration of and an apology for its predecessors. Did I recognize that the Tie fighter chase of the Millennium Falcon was a blatant ripoff of the asteroid chase in Empire? Of course I did. Did I love it anyway? Of course I did. Did I recognize that blowing up Coruscant and other unnamed planets was a metaphorical eradication of prequels? Of course I did.

This isn't a black and white situation. I should be raging against it. I should be fawning over it. It's lazy and terrible, and glorious and wonderful. I should look it as an action-space-fantasy, yet it has a connection to the core of who I am that I cannot just dismiss it as the big-budget, mega-studio blockbuster popcorn fun it is. I wish it were that simple. It's not.

To say that The Force Awakens is a soft-reboot of the franchise, or a remake of A New Hope, dismisses what it has accomplished for me. This film is the emotional equivalent of a grand romantic gesture. And while some have cynically seen this as the calculated ploy it is, it has simply given me hope that I can love Star Wars again.

Star Wars began as a love letter to the cheesy sci-fi serial films of Lucas' youth. And what the Force Awakens is Abrams' love letter to the films of his youth, which happens to be Star Wars. The circle is now complete. The learner has become the master.

--

*As a five-year-old, I was not well versed in comparative theology.