I think what I didn't like is that while it required lot of training to be Jedi in the past, Rey seemed to have miraculously acquired congenitally. Or did I not notice/heard how she got trained?
If you look at the prequels vs a new hope, the same could be said about Luke.
I think the answer there is that Luke is more force sensitive than any Jedi of the past, making his training to get to the same level minimal.
And maybe we're seeing the same thing with Rey.
Well, just for the sake of fun, I could argue that Luke only confronts one trained Jedi - his father - and that his father never wanted to kill him. Emperor Palpatine, instead, was having an easy time killing him, and was only stopped by Anakin.
The current thought is that she had training from Luke as a kid in the school they mention. But then when the school was disbanded they suppressed her memories and left her on that planet. Then when Kylo used the force on her mind, he broke loose the training.
I'm not certain we have evidence that training is necessary to use the Force, it may be mostly intended to prevent misuse.
The eight year old rugrat in the first prequel was quite remarkable without any training. We have new evil force users, despite the requisite "always being two, a master and an apprentice" both dying at Endor. Luke spent a trivial amount of time training with Yoda and Kenobi, most of which was spent convincing the farmboy that it was a simple matter of "just doing" the impossible.
As far as we know, the rigors of Jedi training in the Old Republic were intended to prevent people from misusing "what comes naturally" and falling to the dark side. That Luke, who didn't benefit from that training, had students who fell to become "Knights of Ren" reinforces that line of thinking.
If we don't know what the training is for, we can't judge if/how Rey is remarkable compared to other Force users. Regardless, given how the movie ends, it seems likely that we'll have illumination on these questions.
The big thing about Force Awakens I missed was the advances in technological film making. That was always George Lucas most important contribution to film. He always raised the bar.
Yeah, but I'm not sure they looked good at the time either. Sure, they might have been impressive for CGI, but they don't look real to me, and I don't know if people thought they looked real at the time. I think that's probably because they used so much CG they weren't able to put the required work into each environment to achieve photorealism.
The touched-up "THX Enhanced" versions of the original three movies, where they digitally removed some of the matting artifacts and such, had more convincing and better-looking SFX than the prequels, for the most part.
Movies like Jurassic Park and Independence Day that came out before the prequels (well before, in the case of JP) that used a blend of models/animatronics and CGI looked way better. The visuals in Ep. 1 were an obvious step backward the day it was released, no hindsight required.
I thought the effects looked amazing. Since the turn of the millennium we've had movies switch over almost entirely to digital effects, but pure cgi still just doesn't look really real. It's missing some ineffable emotional weight that makes its fruit not quite believable. TFA, in trying to recreate some of the look of the original films using practical effects, also had the effect of saying, look what we can do when we combine real things that are actually in front of the camera with state of the art digital effects. I don't think I've seen a big special effects movie that looked so actually real since the golden age of practical effects in the 90s – movies like Jurassic Park come to mind.
I hadn't come across the term "practical effect" before, and Wikipedia defines it as meaning no use of computer generated imagery. Jurassic Park used a lot of CGI for the dinosaurs so I'm not sure what you mean by your comment.
I get the feeling this guy takes Star Wars (and probably himself) just a little worryingly seriously.
I can't really understand what he's saying - that George Lucas is evil? That the Star Wars films are promoting Lucas' evil agenda? That no one has actually noticed any of this and that's bad?
The cynic in me wonders if perhaps David Brin has a new novel coming out soon...
Or perhaps he sees democracy as imperiled and in need of defending. In that view, efforts to undermine the public's confidence in democracy could be seen as evil.
Only if by undermining democracy you mean undermining the word itself. Teaching people that the people cannot govern themselves, that democratic institutions cannot be trusted, and that leaders are born, rather than elected, are all helpful to authoritarians and harmful to actual democracy.
He says he takes mythology very seriously. Is that really a bad thing? Star Wars is a common dream that a huge percentage of humanity shares. It's the raw material of our imagination at this point. It's as legitimate to take seriously and criticize as the myths of the gods would have been to ancient Romans.
There are recent new religions, why do the followers believe them? Who's to say that in 200 years people can't separate myth from reality of the Star Wars universe.
Some did, but for a lot if them it was just culture and metaphor. That's why they were always remixing and rebelling the stories.
Edit: just to be clear, I'm not talking about about belief in the existence of the gods, I'm talking about the myths of the gods, which were mixed and matched and changed and definitely were not subject to any kind of orthodoxy.
Ummm, the purpose of creative people is to take the world, look at it from different angles, and share that with people. That includes looking at fiction. Brin's playful provocation might not be your taste, but he's not the one taking something too seriously...
Well, this is why I said I struggled to understand the piece. On the one hand he says "[t]he apotheosis of Darth Vader was truly disgusting", while on the other he says "Does entertainment have to have an outcome? We were doing it for fun". The two don't sit very comfortably together.
I think it's important to study the cultural impact of significant works of art and fiction, and I'm sure Star Wars counts as significant (I'm less sure if it's had much cultural impact beyond encouraging 30+ years of children to play with lightsabers). But I have no real idea whether this guy actually believes Lucas - and Yoda! - are really evil or if he's just enjoying a bit of self-aggrandising publicity.
If I wanted to understand a culture via their movies, I would not reach out exclusively for their serious dramas, historical pieces, and solemn biopics. I would certainly rope stuff like Star Wars in.
The way I see it, there was a fascinating trend in action movies throughout my life, when the hero went from plain good 100% hero (say, a late 80s hero), to a grizzled guy that's ultimately got his heart in the right place (Wolverine types, Die Hard types), to fairly despicable people that "go out like men" doing epic stuff (Walter White), to completely messed up manipulative people that are triumphant and that's it (House of Cards dude).
People find this kind of analysis very non-rigorous, but I often feel like the fact that these were successively popular with American audiences matches pretty well the changing self-image of America-the-nation. From pretense of full-righteousness to cynical "realism" and taking pride in "somebody has to do it" to "at least we're on top".
So, I think extremely deep reads of fairly shallow but resonant fiction are often very worthwhile.
edit: Of course, someone will point out that these are popular with different demographics and whatnot, that my cohort aged, etc.- I'm not going to turn this into a rigorous statistical analysis. It's just musings.
I was about to laugh at you for not realising that Netflix's House Of Cards is actually a remake of a BBC series from 1990, but on reflection that probably adds to your point.
Many British films of the 1950's and 60's (also being non-rigorous!) are morally very black and white, lots of war movies, but also things like the early James Bond films have an absolute faith that Britain was a world power, maybe alongside the US and USSR, but still important, whereas by the late 1980's that self confidence had pretty much gone and instead you get the shades of grey and cynicism of things like House Of Cards.
Of course Britain's loss of empire was much more definitive then any US decline, which is mostly a post-9/11 post-iraq war loss of confidence but there is an interesting parallel.
Most programmes are a commentary on the time they are made, not the time they are set so I agree deep reads can be very revealing.
Destruction of an entire planet is depicted as pure evil. The deaths of everyone on a Death Star is something to celebrate every time it happens. Massive clone slaughter is a demonstration of the goodness of the force because JarJar Binks steps in Poop. The Jedi aren't hauling slave owners off to jail, the only concern is obtaining a child slave with special properties to serve in their army.
It's the casual way in which these elements are bandied about as normal. Even what little nuance there was has gone down the memory hole: now Greedo draws and shoots first.
I think the worst about our media, is that most stories are based on dividing people into good and evil. This way of thinking is also very common in our society.
Why do criminals and terrorists act like they do? If you ask people they will tell you because they're evil. But actually nobody is evil, everybody wants something positive. The question is just for whom they think it will be positive and why they think it is positive to do. When you think that they're evil on the other hand you don't have to think about anything and just fight them, because good needs to fight evil.
Some people really are evil. Some psychopaths, for example, know that what they're doing is negative and do it anyway. (Many more cover it up and try to do the right thing, of course.)
But of course this doesn't apply to terrorists or most criminals. The occasional serial killer fits the bill and not much more.
What really gets me is that if you start taking about terrorists like this, saying you should understand what makes them tick, that they think they're doing the right thing, etc., people freak out. I just think we should understand them better so we know how to stop them, but any attempt at understanding is taken as justification for what they do.
Look at what happened in the UK with the IRA - for years we had the approach of refusing to talk to them. Eventually we did, found that they had some legitimate complaints and when those were addressed we eventually got an end to the Troubles.
Now we have people like Martin McGuinness, a former IRA leader, as active politicians in Northern Ireland.
I don't know why you would think that killing innocent people isn't evil.
If you delibrately disturb harmony, or deny someone their rights, or take away something by force that isn't yours, you need to be stopped. Because one thing would lead to another and life as everyone knows it would become a living hell.
Step back and look at oppressive regimes over the course of history. They all have traces of evil in them. It's that simple. I admit that good for one might be evil for another, but there's a basic set of things, I guess, the majority can agree on about what's good and what's not.
Are you familiar with the Trolley Problem? [0] It's a simple thought experiment, which is intended to make you re-think whether murder is always an evil act.
Suppose a trolley is barelling down a track towards five tied-down people. If it continues, it'll kill them. But, you have access to a lever which would send the trolley down a side-track instead. But the side-track also has one person tied to it. By pulling the lever, you are effectively murdering that helpless, innocent person -- but you would save the other five. If you don't touch the lever, then you are just an innocent bystander who happened to see a quintuple homicide.
In this case, if you insist that murder is evil, and you refuse to be evil, then you have no choice but to let the five people die. But if you allow that murder is sometimes okay -- which is a utilitarian perspective, in the sense that you care more about the ends than the means -- then it becomes much fuzzier whether murder is inherently evil. Indeed, as soon as you give an explicit definition for evil, it becomes very difficult to defend it. The fact of the matter is, the good/evil dichotomy is false and artificial.
Philosophizing abstractly about edge cases is fun but it doesn't really offer anything useful for day-to-day basic living. It's pretty clear that to a vanishingly small gap, murder is 100% evil.
It's true that it doesn't affect our day-to-day life. But I think it is important in the context of being an informed citizen (and, more fundamentally, an ethical person) to have an understanding of different moral systems and the philosophy of ethics. I recognize that this is a personal opinion though, so I won't try to force it on you.
I'd agree that there is objective morality, so people can be wrong about their own goodness or evilness. OP was saying that people are not intentionally evil, but they are often confused about what values are good. Islamic terrorists value Islamic dominion over everybody and fighting those who oppose this system can then be described as good. This is in contrast to Kylo Ren and the villains of saturday morning cartoons that we grew up with.
Yes people can absolutely disagree about what is good and what is innocent. For instance - are American tax payers innocent? Some people see them as empowering the world's largest imperial death/chaos/war machine.
The problem with the concept of evil is that it is an explanation mechanism. Sure, innocent people getting killed is something really terrible, but it's not happening because terrorists are evil. It's happening because they think they're fighting for something good. For them probably we are the evil ones and need to be fought because we're not following god's laws.
Even with your reasoning you could come to the conclusion that the west is evil, as lots of innocent people were killed in the Iraq war.
I agree with you that it's more nuanced than the binary thinking often advocated. But I also think that "evil" exists in the world: ISIS is evil, the Nazis where evil, serial killers are evil, and so on. I think the question of "do they think they are doing good or bad" is an interesting question as well.
There's also, like you say, people who do things we perceive as "bad", but it often comes down to misunderstandings of motives, imbalances of power and so on. If somebody steals bread to eat, it's not a good thing, but I can't condemn the act either. As somebody who likes to think they're a force for good, I should probably see what I can do to improve their situation so they don't have to steal in the future.
People like and want heroes and kings. It's not supposed to, but I think the role of US president often satisfies the role of king (much more so than prime ministers of other democracies).
Some radio hosts promote this: I remember in the last election some host (I don't remember which one) was very clearly promoting Mitt Romney as the new king. (Not to say that this is shared by all of the right-wing, it certainly is not- the right-wing would say that the left-wing doesn't want kings, but dictators).
Also, I think this explains a lot of populist animosity towards Obama: How can our king not be one of us?
Anyway Star Wars (and many other fantasy) is all about this kind of mythology.
from charles manson to josef mengele, from the killing fields of the khmer rouge to the zetas in mexico - if you have no problem, no qualms, when you're taking an unarmed human being, shoving them in a barrel then lighting them on fire - you should qualify as evil.
some people cause harm for fun. they enjoy it, take pleasure from it. if you don't label them as evil, then you belittle all the people that put themselves in harms way to help others.
Effective leadership is difficult. It's relatively easier to whip people into an us v. them frenzy to get a group on your side. Good v. evil is the most basic way to delineate the groups, although there are others.
The two hallmarks of modern blockbusters, the sanitized but intense violence and the simplistic morality, are actually joined at the hip. On the one hand, if your idea of a rollicking good climax is lots of people being killed, you need to make sure that those people are working in the service of some evil power so great and immovable that it can't be dealt with in any other way. On the other hand, if the world is divided between uncompromised good and uncompromised evil, it is actually okay for the good guys to resort to violence.
" I’ve issued a challenge for anyone out there to come show us even one scene in the latest flick that was not an homage to earlier Star Wars episodes. "
I hate it when people give these pseudo-challenges. There were quite a few, and I fear I run the risk of some easily mocked nerd rage if I attempt to list them.
When Kylo killed Han, how was that an homage to any earlier scene in a SW movie? No character in any Star Wars move had ever killed their parent-Anakin's mom was killed by the Sand People, and Vader/Anakin succumbed to injuries sustained by Palpatine's force lightning, that shorted out his circuitry.
I think it's a perfect parallel of the scene when Vader kills Obi-Wan: Evil Jedi-turned-bad kills an important figure of his past, while the untrained future Jedi can't do anything but watch how a father-like figure and source of inspiration dies.
The fact that it happens while sabotaging the new new Death Star and it involves the new Vader drive the point even more.
Yes, but it's still an obvious homage. Father/son meet on narrow path over giant pit, father begs son to join him, son summons the strength to do what his mentors taught, etc. Sure the light / dark sides are swapped but it's very much not subtle.
Given the fact, that they basically took "New Hope" script and did the remake, with just some minor details changed, then I can bet that Ep. VIII will be the remake of "Empire Strikes Back", in which we will see a heartbreaking scene where Kylo Ren fights Rey and speaks "I am your brother" :)
CHALLENGE: when The Force Awakens gets it's DVD release I challenge you to watch it simultaneously (e.g. in two-monitor setup) with New Hope. I am under impression that some plot parallels can be timed to 20-30 seconds accuracy.
He obviously has the right to his own opinion, but it would help if he actually gave the impression of watching the films thoroughly.
To quote:
"The force was only a little bit about talent and more about training: Obi-Wan offers to teach it to Han"
This simply does not happen anywhere, neither in the films nor in the now de-cannoned EU.
He also gets the plotlines of Ep. II and III quite mixed up in a few paragraphs about Yoda, and fails to realise that the Republic is hardly modelled on a modern-day parliamentary democracy but rather the fatally flawed Weimar Republic.
While this doesn't necessarily invalidate his trains of thought, it certainly makes their basis scientifically dishonest.
Some commenters disputed the Han statement, and some others flew to his defense. His own defense of that statement was rather uncharitable to the objectors and he coyly avoided pointing out where exactly it occurred.
I myself reviewed the script several times, and I couldn't find it anywhere. The only time the topic came up with Han and Ben was while Luke was training with the helmet and droid, and Ben definitely does not offer to train him. So I'm confused where he seems to think this occurred.
A bit off topic, but was anyone else disappointed that a sanatation trooper was able to have a decent light saber fight with a Jedi!!?? Unless Finn has special Jedi powers that we don't know about yet. That would be like my Luddite artist friend taking an hour of code and beating out Linus in a hackathon.
72 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 143 ms ] threadThe eight year old rugrat in the first prequel was quite remarkable without any training. We have new evil force users, despite the requisite "always being two, a master and an apprentice" both dying at Endor. Luke spent a trivial amount of time training with Yoda and Kenobi, most of which was spent convincing the farmboy that it was a simple matter of "just doing" the impossible.
As far as we know, the rigors of Jedi training in the Old Republic were intended to prevent people from misusing "what comes naturally" and falling to the dark side. That Luke, who didn't benefit from that training, had students who fell to become "Knights of Ren" reinforces that line of thinking.
If we don't know what the training is for, we can't judge if/how Rey is remarkable compared to other Force users. Regardless, given how the movie ends, it seems likely that we'll have illumination on these questions.
Wait, I must be thinking of a different film, nevermind.
Movies like Jurassic Park and Independence Day that came out before the prequels (well before, in the case of JP) that used a blend of models/animatronics and CGI looked way better. The visuals in Ep. 1 were an obvious step backward the day it was released, no hindsight required.
Edit: the internet says 4 minutes
I can't really understand what he's saying - that George Lucas is evil? That the Star Wars films are promoting Lucas' evil agenda? That no one has actually noticed any of this and that's bad?
The cynic in me wonders if perhaps David Brin has a new novel coming out soon...
I was thinking the same thing, but he restores some perspective when he says,
"Does entertainment have to have an outcome? We were doing it for fun."
But it also seems that, for Brin, Democracy is an unassailable good, and pointing out its shortcomings might be a little bit evil.
No, it isn't. Ancient Romans actually believed that stuff.
Edit: just to be clear, I'm not talking about about belief in the existence of the gods, I'm talking about the myths of the gods, which were mixed and matched and changed and definitely were not subject to any kind of orthodoxy.
I think a little fun and rumination over Star Wars is not too worrying, compared to that.
I think it's important to study the cultural impact of significant works of art and fiction, and I'm sure Star Wars counts as significant (I'm less sure if it's had much cultural impact beyond encouraging 30+ years of children to play with lightsabers). But I have no real idea whether this guy actually believes Lucas - and Yoda! - are really evil or if he's just enjoying a bit of self-aggrandising publicity.
The way I see it, there was a fascinating trend in action movies throughout my life, when the hero went from plain good 100% hero (say, a late 80s hero), to a grizzled guy that's ultimately got his heart in the right place (Wolverine types, Die Hard types), to fairly despicable people that "go out like men" doing epic stuff (Walter White), to completely messed up manipulative people that are triumphant and that's it (House of Cards dude).
People find this kind of analysis very non-rigorous, but I often feel like the fact that these were successively popular with American audiences matches pretty well the changing self-image of America-the-nation. From pretense of full-righteousness to cynical "realism" and taking pride in "somebody has to do it" to "at least we're on top".
So, I think extremely deep reads of fairly shallow but resonant fiction are often very worthwhile.
edit: Of course, someone will point out that these are popular with different demographics and whatnot, that my cohort aged, etc.- I'm not going to turn this into a rigorous statistical analysis. It's just musings.
Many British films of the 1950's and 60's (also being non-rigorous!) are morally very black and white, lots of war movies, but also things like the early James Bond films have an absolute faith that Britain was a world power, maybe alongside the US and USSR, but still important, whereas by the late 1980's that self confidence had pretty much gone and instead you get the shades of grey and cynicism of things like House Of Cards.
Of course Britain's loss of empire was much more definitive then any US decline, which is mostly a post-9/11 post-iraq war loss of confidence but there is an interesting parallel.
Most programmes are a commentary on the time they are made, not the time they are set so I agree deep reads can be very revealing.
It's the casual way in which these elements are bandied about as normal. Even what little nuance there was has gone down the memory hole: now Greedo draws and shoots first.
Why do criminals and terrorists act like they do? If you ask people they will tell you because they're evil. But actually nobody is evil, everybody wants something positive. The question is just for whom they think it will be positive and why they think it is positive to do. When you think that they're evil on the other hand you don't have to think about anything and just fight them, because good needs to fight evil.
But of course this doesn't apply to terrorists or most criminals. The occasional serial killer fits the bill and not much more.
What really gets me is that if you start taking about terrorists like this, saying you should understand what makes them tick, that they think they're doing the right thing, etc., people freak out. I just think we should understand them better so we know how to stop them, but any attempt at understanding is taken as justification for what they do.
Now we have people like Martin McGuinness, a former IRA leader, as active politicians in Northern Ireland.
If you delibrately disturb harmony, or deny someone their rights, or take away something by force that isn't yours, you need to be stopped. Because one thing would lead to another and life as everyone knows it would become a living hell.
Step back and look at oppressive regimes over the course of history. They all have traces of evil in them. It's that simple. I admit that good for one might be evil for another, but there's a basic set of things, I guess, the majority can agree on about what's good and what's not.
Is that evil? Or is that justified?
Suppose a trolley is barelling down a track towards five tied-down people. If it continues, it'll kill them. But, you have access to a lever which would send the trolley down a side-track instead. But the side-track also has one person tied to it. By pulling the lever, you are effectively murdering that helpless, innocent person -- but you would save the other five. If you don't touch the lever, then you are just an innocent bystander who happened to see a quintuple homicide.
In this case, if you insist that murder is evil, and you refuse to be evil, then you have no choice but to let the five people die. But if you allow that murder is sometimes okay -- which is a utilitarian perspective, in the sense that you care more about the ends than the means -- then it becomes much fuzzier whether murder is inherently evil. Indeed, as soon as you give an explicit definition for evil, it becomes very difficult to defend it. The fact of the matter is, the good/evil dichotomy is false and artificial.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem
Especially if those concepts are touted as being all-encompassing, holding without exception or being superior to other concepts.
There's also, like you say, people who do things we perceive as "bad", but it often comes down to misunderstandings of motives, imbalances of power and so on. If somebody steals bread to eat, it's not a good thing, but I can't condemn the act either. As somebody who likes to think they're a force for good, I should probably see what I can do to improve their situation so they don't have to steal in the future.
Some radio hosts promote this: I remember in the last election some host (I don't remember which one) was very clearly promoting Mitt Romney as the new king. (Not to say that this is shared by all of the right-wing, it certainly is not- the right-wing would say that the left-wing doesn't want kings, but dictators).
Also, I think this explains a lot of populist animosity towards Obama: How can our king not be one of us?
Anyway Star Wars (and many other fantasy) is all about this kind of mythology.
you don't think anyone is evil?
from charles manson to josef mengele, from the killing fields of the khmer rouge to the zetas in mexico - if you have no problem, no qualms, when you're taking an unarmed human being, shoving them in a barrel then lighting them on fire - you should qualify as evil.
some people cause harm for fun. they enjoy it, take pleasure from it. if you don't label them as evil, then you belittle all the people that put themselves in harms way to help others.
You can't characterize all human motivations along this line of rationale. Psychopathy is real. Even recent history is littered with sadistic madmen.
I think it's a perfect parallel of the scene when Vader kills Obi-Wan: Evil Jedi-turned-bad kills an important figure of his past, while the untrained future Jedi can't do anything but watch how a father-like figure and source of inspiration dies.
The fact that it happens while sabotaging the new new Death Star and it involves the new Vader drive the point even more.
CHALLENGE: when The Force Awakens gets it's DVD release I challenge you to watch it simultaneously (e.g. in two-monitor setup) with New Hope. I am under impression that some plot parallels can be timed to 20-30 seconds accuracy.
To quote:
"The force was only a little bit about talent and more about training: Obi-Wan offers to teach it to Han"
This simply does not happen anywhere, neither in the films nor in the now de-cannoned EU.
He also gets the plotlines of Ep. II and III quite mixed up in a few paragraphs about Yoda, and fails to realise that the Republic is hardly modelled on a modern-day parliamentary democracy but rather the fatally flawed Weimar Republic.
While this doesn't necessarily invalidate his trains of thought, it certainly makes their basis scientifically dishonest.
I myself reviewed the script several times, and I couldn't find it anywhere. The only time the topic came up with Han and Ben was while Luke was training with the helmet and droid, and Ben definitely does not offer to train him. So I'm confused where he seems to think this occurred.
(Still the movie was very special).