Category: Opinion

The Perfect Space Battle: What Scarif and Exegol Learned, or Didn’t, From the Battle of Endor

Posted on April 17, 2020by The Armchair Admiral

I don’t use the word perfect a lot, but I do for the space battle over Endor in Return of the Jedi. That film, released 37 years ago (nearly one month after the birth of a future online admiral with a penchant for fish people), undoubtedly laid out the structure for how good space battles are designed, shot, and utilized narratively. It is the fleet battle against which all fleet battles in sci-fi are measured against. Our gold standard.

Before I dive in, I’d be remiss if I didn’t give a quick shout out to the brilliant minds at Industrial Light & Magic, both past and present. Those wizards created fantastic physical and digital models for these space battles and the techniques to film or compose a shot. Regardless of these battles’ narrative elements, ILM’s work is perfect and without peer.

This article will focus primarily on the narrative structure of a good space battle and how, when used properly, they can be an integral and memorable part of a film. To do so, I will first showcase the decisions and story beats that comprise the space battle over Endor. Second, I will compare these traits to what we see in the two major fleet battles of the modern Star Wars era, the Battle of Scarif in Rogue One and the Battle of Exegol in The Rise of Skywalker. Along the way, we’ll see what works, what doesn’t, and what are the elements of the “secret sauce” that makes a damned good space battle!

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What Have We Learned? – How Time Has Changed The Clone Wars

Posted on April 13, 2020by Sidelong Glance

I was cautiously excited when it was announced that The Clone Wars would make its triumphant return to the screen by airing three previously-unfinished arcs on Disney+. I’ve been hot and cold on the series in general, because while it does do a great deal to expand and deepen the era between Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, the actual show itself has a very distinct tone and style that often rubs me the wrong way. It is a show unafraid to bring up big concepts and ideas, ones challenging to the era and the franchise as a whole, but often tosses them aside or bypasses them in favor of more sharply-animated action setpieces or references to other parts of the franchise.

The biggest issue that this raises is with the characters. Giving characters depth or exploring their motivations has simply never been TCW’s strong suit. Arcs like Ahsoka’s trial fall flat for me because the central character — other than Ahsoka — is the true culprit, Barriss Offee, who we hadn’t seen since the second season at that point and had apparently undergone a lot of change and turmoil in that time, all of it offscreen. While I wasn’t personally offended because I wasn’t invested in Barriss as a character, that in itself is damning; this character I didn’t care about because we’d seen so little of her was such a major part of the arc that my absence of feeling toward her motivations and fate felt like a hole in the story.

In the time between the show being cancelled from its original airing on Cartoon Network, the debut of its sixth season on Netflix, and now the seventh and final season on Disney+, the show’s crew has gotten up to plenty of other things. Dave Filoni and his team of animators moved to Star Wars Rebels, and then the animators worked on Star Wars Resistance while Filoni himself assisted with the production and direction of The Mandalorian. Filoni has said that all three of these shows were tremendous learning experiences that he and his team were able to bring back to TCW to make its final three arcs better. I assumed that he meant mainly in terms of direction and animation; I didn’t expect him to have taken some lessons from either of those shows in terms of how to write compelling character moments. And my expectation was borne out in the first four episodes of this new season, known as the Bad Batch arc.

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Trilogy of Trilogies: Does the Skywalker Saga Tell a Cohesive Story?

Posted on April 6, 2020by Guest Editorials

With the release of The Rise of Skywalker, the Skywalker saga is (ostensibly) complete. But with nine movies arranged into three trilogies, do each of the three trilogies tell a cohesive story? And do the three trilogies tell a cohesive narrative as a whole? 

The answer to both questions is affirmative: each of the three trilogies tells its own cohesive story, and all three trilogies together do indeed form a single cohesive narrative. Get your clichés about “rhyming” out now, because an in-depth analysis of the structure of all three movies is imminent.

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The Continuity Trap: Could The High Republic Signal a Creative Rebirth for Star Wars?

Posted on March 30, 2020by Six on the Wild Die

We all love lore. I think we can safely say that, right? No matter what angle of Star Wars tickles our fancies, be it the arrangement of the fleets of the Confederacy of Independent Systems or the hobbies and personalities of Padmé’s handmaidens, we all like uncovering new and unexpected details about the universe. But adding new lore—new continuity—to a shared universe like Star Wars is not a simple task. A well-intentioned author who loves Star Wars lore as much as we do can write what he thinks will be a fun detail: that all Mandalorian generals don green pauldrons in honor of the first mythosaur hunt, for example. Then a couple of years later, a Mandalorian general will appear in a movie or TV show, and the lead designer will have to give them red pauldrons to avoid interfering with the green screen. Was the author wrong in setting that detail in stone? Should the director have respected that choice even if it meant altering the shot?

There’s no easy answer here. The line to walk is tenuous and sometimes blurry. It’s common sense that the creators behind Star Wars should always aim to keep a certain level of consistency and plausibility. At the same time, it’s a bad idea to tie the hands of future authors just because of a self-indulgent need to classify and taxonomize every single item in the universe. Star Wars has walked this edge since its very beginning. It even rebooted a few years ago, partly because of how deep its lore has become. But how have things changed since the reboot? Have things become more accessible? Does accessibility also make things blander? And could a publishing program like the recently-announced The High Republic be the way to both have the cake and eat it?

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I Swear It’s Good Now: Why You Should Return to Battlefront II

Posted on March 27, 2020by Guest Editorials

Is it possible to overhaul a video game so radically that it becomes almost an entirely new, better product? I think so, and I think Battlefront II proves it. After well over two years in release, Battlefront II has been revitalized with new game modes, playable characters, and skins. The wealth of new content is a shot in the arm that’s resulted in a completely changed game. 

I don’t really play a lot of online shooters. I’ve dabbled in Battlefield and Call of Duty as much as any other gamer, but I’ve never really been able to get into them. Getting good at these games requires a lot of effort and playtime. So, it was to my great relief that I discovered the new modes in Battlefront II don’t require that.

The most striking new addition is a Co-Op mode. Allowing four players to team up against waves of AI troopers, Co-Op was what attracted me to buy the game. Each Co-Op mission contains a little mini narrative, where you and your friends fight to complete a series of objectives. 

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