Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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I wrote last week on Revenge of the Sith, and how it benefited from the ambiguity between the "good" side and the bad. As Padme said, "[what if] the Republic has become the very evil we have been fighting to destroy?" @SubstantialFrivolity responded that, despite its flaws, Revenge of the Sith was the best of the Star Wars movies due to this complexity, and mildly criticized the original Star Wars for being a derivative "hero's journey".
Since I first watched Star Wars at age 7 (just before the abominable Special Editions came out, in its unadulterated form) it has been my favorite movie.
It is not a derivative "hero's journey". It is a distilled "hero's journey". A restless youth is trapped in a backwater. One day he seizes the opportunity to do something greater, and is suddenly thrust into confrontations of galactic import. He rescues a literal princess, with the help of a ragtag band of comrades. And while he doesn't "get the girl", that is not actually a critical component of a hero's story: rather what distinguishes the Journey is the acceptance and subsequential overcoming of an offered challenge.
A key part of a hero's journey is that the morality of the conquest is never in doubt. In Star Wars, evil is evil and good is good. From the first moment of the movie, where a gigantic, sharp, wedge shaped ship fires on a smaller, fleeing vessel; to the black, masked villain stepping into the pristine white interior; to the almost flippant destruction of an entire planet, the Evil Empire is clearly evil. The princess is being held captive, and it is a moral imperative to rescue her. The Death Star is threatening to kill all the characters we have met throughout the movie, and it is obviously a moral good to destroy it.
It is a common modern trope for a Hero to self-doubt and self-incriminate following the successful completion of the quest. (We see this writ large in our society's embarrassment over "colonialization"; which, at the time, was a manifestation of an "ascendent" society). Yet Star Wars had such clear Heroes and Villains that it carried through three sequels unexamined. It wasn't until the second movie of the sequel Trilogy that this narrative began to be subverted (and explains the audience backlash against The Last Jedi).
In short, Star Wars is pure. It is purified in its distillation of the Hero's Journey. It is pure in its depiction of Good and Evil. It is pure in its innocence. From the humble beginnings on a desert planet to the triumphant return of the motif in the Throne Room, Star Wars perfectly embodies something elemental and essential, untainted by cynicism or doubt.
I think it's funny now, how everybody (Including Red Letter Media, and myself) mocked The Phantom Menace for making the "taxation of trade routes" a major plot point, and yet, gestures around
The part George got wrong is that he clearly thought that it was going to be the Japanese.
Nitpicking, but: it wasn't a major plot point, it was a major MacGuffin. The critical thing wasn't that taxation of trade routes was in dispute, it was just that the immediate backstory had some important-but-subtle dispute that was threatening to blow up. You need "important" to make it plausible that things escalate to actual military conflict, and you need "subtle" to make it plausible (to characters who've never met Sidious) that the dispute was the result of behind-the-scenes machinations with no overt enemy or sociological force, but details of "taxes", "legal ownership of the Maltese Falcon", who cares? Trade and taxation was a great choice, because tax codes are exactly the sort of thing that makes most people's eyes glaze over but can be life-changing to the people most directly affected, but the details don't ever become important to the story.
Talking about that bit of backstory in the title crawl might have been just asking for mockery (because most of your audience is made of "most people", and the second sentence in your intro is a bad place for their eyes to glaze over), but that's bad editing, not bad plotting. There had to be some way to convey "the galaxy was so peaceful that everybody could freak out over taxes" without also accidentally implying "your fun spaceships-and-magic movie is now going to have more tax accounting!".
It's a fine nitpick. I remember reading a prequel novel ("cloak of deception" maybe?) That flushed it out way more.
I'm a phantom menace defender.
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The self-doubt in Empire Strikes Back and The Last Jedi always felt really weird to me. Like, Luke is never actually tempted by the dark side. There is nothing the dark side ever has to offer him that he wants, he never struggles with his darker tendencies. It's just people warning him "Darth Vader used to be on our side, then he turned evil, and you remind me of him". There's never actually any reason for him to turn, and never any threat that the audience could take seriously of it happening, even without plot armor. Even if he did obey the Emperor and strike down Darth Vader in anger, there's no plausible reason he would switch sides, he'd just strike down the Emperor too.
I think it's mostly just there to make it more cathartic when he does it the other way around and converts Darth Vader. But it's still weird how everyone in universe takes it so seriously.
Taking ESB alone this is a bit of an issue, though Yoda does explain it with "forever will it dominate your destiny". But ROTJ definitively answers this.
The Dark Side isn't just the target of a rival cult. It's literally space heroin, with the attendant mental and physiological changes. As with heroin, under no circumstances should you take a "sample", even for good reasons, from a weird man in a robe.
The Emperor was clearly willing and able to incapacitate Luke. If he actually had struck down Vader and resisted the Emperor, he would have woken up in a very small cell, having lost everyone he cared about and betrayed his values facing psychological torment until he broke. No amount of post-nut clarity would save him at that point.
And if he managed to kill the Emperor he would simply be the most powerful junkie.
This is perhaps the best fic detailing what would happen if Palpatine got his hands on Luke at the end of ESB and maybe my favorite series in the fandom, period (and a lot of the EU). It certainly does a better job of selling the fall than Dark Empire.
Pretty much this exact scenario plays out inThe Force Unleashed if you call on the Dark side to beat Vader.
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First there’s the Dagobah cave. It’s the payoff for a scene where Yoda explains the Dark Side: it’s the quick and easy route to power, and it’s born of haste and emotion. We immediately get a demonstration as Luke encounters a vision of Vader. He lashes out in response to fear. Since this isn’t the Jedi way, he harms only himself.
The first real temptation is Vader’s trap. Should Luke keep training or rush to the rescue? He takes the bait because he’s still not a Jedi. It’s not enough to want the right thing. You can’t be ruled by fear and anger.
Then we get the payoff. “Join me, and together we can rule the galaxy as father and son.” How’s that for a recruitment pitch? The offer of power is universal. The offer of belonging is personalized to Luke, who spent his youth dreaming of a destiny in the stars. Vader holds all the cards. We’ve seen Luke give in to his feelings before. That makes it all the sweeter when he defies Vader.
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Well, that's just because the Jedi Council knows The Truth of the Sith. (trigger warning: Yudkowsky fan fiction)
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It's not much, but he does show a lot of curiosity with Obi Wan about his father. I imagine that's the tentation, to get to know about his father. The movie doesn't do a good job of showing the internal struggle, but when he confronts Darth Vader in The Empire Strikes Back, at that point, he has lost his uncle and aunt, he has lost Obi Wan and the closest to a father figure he has left is a tiny green puppet who talks funny with the same voice actor as Miss Piggy.
I think the point is a variant of the idea of "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house". It could be taken in a philosophical sense, that if Luke strikes down Darth Vader in anger, he'll probably strike down the Emperor in anger too, and will be going down the path of normalizing striking down his enemies in anger, which will eventually lead to him becoming just as bad as Darth Vader and the Emperor. Letting the anger drive + the overwhelming power of being a trained force user = bad times for everyone. This is the what the prequels show with Anakin, the turning point that sets him down a dark path is getting revenge on sand people (who most likely had it coming, this is before primary canon had shown the sand people to be anything but murderous barbarian raiders). It also makes the "Only Siths deal in absolutes" quote stupid because Jedi deal in absolutes all the freaking time; it's their commitment to absolutist ethics that seemingly keeps them from turning into power-hungry murder machines.
Then there's the more literal sense of it, that if Luke had stricken down Darth Vader in anger, that this anger through some force bullshit would somehow literally feed the Emperor's power and Luke would then lose the ensuing battle. Maybe it'd give the Emperor a hold to Force Mind Break him or something.
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My criticism was more that the hero's journey is not an interesting story. I don't think Star Wars is more or less derivative than anything else which attempts it.
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