A Grown-Up Watches Star Wars For the First Time, Part One – The Prequels

Posted on June 26, 2017by Guest Editorials, Interviews

obiyoda-templebodies

When was the last time you met an adult who had never watched a single Star Wars film? What if you could introduce them to the series, one film at a time, and ask them their thoughts as they went along? That’s exactly the situation I’ve found myself in, as my friend Kelsey just started watching the Star Wars films over the past few months and has become increasingly engrossed. After viewing Episodes I, II, and III, Kelsey agreed to be interviewed to satisfy my curiosity about her experience and reflections on the series so far. After all, most Star Wars fans who started with the prequels did so as children, and it’s a rare pleasure to be able to ask thoughtful questions of an adult fan with almost no prior knowledge of where the series is headed after Anakin’s fall to the dark side. Stay tuned for a follow-up interview with Kelsey in a few months after she finishes the series!

What were your favorite things about the prequels?

I really liked in Episode III all of the complications between Anakin and Padmé (I was able to get over the “weirdness factor” of their age difference!). And I saw there is something good and genuine in how they love each other, but somehow in the midst of all these good intentions, all these horrible things happened. But it wasn’t random or mysterious, it was that Anakin consistently made the wrong decisions; there was a twisting on his part. It wasn’t just a tragic love story—there’s no doubt there were some evil things that happened in Anakin that I think will set up the next couple movies. I’m intrigued about that. There was a lot of gray area: it’s not just black and white that you latch a story onto, the canvas is already gray.

I think there was also just a lot of cool worldbuilding. Especially in the middle of Episode II, I started figuring out how their society and universes generally work. In other words, I knew there was intergalactic diplomacy happening, but I didn’t understand it in [The Phantom Menace]. It wasn’t until [Attack of the Clones] that I felt I understood the universe enough that I felt if I wanted to, I could come up with another planet or species consistent with this galaxy’s rules. Plus as a biology major I enjoyed starting to see new kinds of animals in the second movie. Read More

The Han Solo Movie Doesn’t Have a Title Yet So Why Should This Article?

Posted on June 23, 2017by , , , , , and Not A Committee

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While Eleven-ThirtyEight shall forever remain gloriously free of any obligation to “report” the “news”, sometimes it’s nice to chime in on a hot topic while it’s still hot, and the big hot news this week was the departure of directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller from the still-annoyingly-untitled Han Solo standalone film. While the Disney era of Star Wars films has had no shortage of backstage drama already, Lord and Miller had been with the project for such a long time, and were so far into filming, that to lose them less than a year out from the release date seems a new threshold entirely. How does everyone feel about this? While we may not know much (indeed, may never know) about exactly what this means for the final film, does the steady stream of shenanigans make you at all wary of how Lucasfilm works with its directors on the macro level?

Jay: Overall, I don’t have an opinion on this. Or at least, my opinion is to register a non-opinion. I have a couple of reasons for this: from my overall low level of interest in the Han Solo film (like I’ve said before, it probably won’t be until I see trailers that I’ll get interested) to the fact that we really don’t know all that much about what happened other than that the directors are leaving. Everything else is speculation, or based on information we can’t corroborate.

Of course, it doesn’t look good. How can it? I don’t know how much to credit the THR or Variety “sources,” but even from LFL’s own statements, “creative differences” at this stage of the game is not great.

But. I think we have to withhold judgment about the actual decision until we see the outcome. Maybe they wanted to be bold and risky with this one, and it didn’t work out. That could be because LFL is being too risk-averse, or it could be because the film really wasn’t working out. We don’t know if the creative differences were foreseeable, a risk hedged against, or a surprise. There are really multiple ways to read it, and I don’t know that “LFL didn’t do their homework” or “Kathleen Kennedy is meddling” (these are opinions I’ve seen voiced around) are things we really have any basis to say. We may well guess at the reasons the directors are leaving (or fired, I guess — it’s probably reasonable to read “creative differences” as a euphemism for firing) but that’s all it is. Read More

On Theorizing, or Why Benicio Del Toro is Playing Ezra Bridger and I’ll Fight You Over It

Posted on June 21, 2017by Scotch Tape and Popsicle Sticks

totallyezrabridger

Last month’s The Last Jedi photo spread in Vanity Fair, among lots of other things, gave us our first look at the characters played by Laura Dern and Benicio Del Toro—something that’s especially interesting for Star Wars, where knowing that an actor is “in” a movie isn’t necessarily a guarantee that you’ll see their face. While Dern’s character was given not just a name, but a rank and affiliation—Vice Admiral Amilyn Holdo of the Resistance—Del Toro’s character is identified only as “DJ”, and if the accompanying article can be trusted (though let’s be honest, it can’t), he gets no moniker at all in the film itself.

Picking through the scraps of information doled out in advance of a new film and trying to decide what’s important is one of the most fun things about this new era for me—who is Bobbajo? What’s a “Guavian Enforcer”? And who is this intriguing Constable Zuvio?? For us to know about them months beforehand, these must be crucial parts of the story, right?

Well, nope. Not remotely. The truth of Star Wars is that everything is a “big deal” in the sense that it’s new and fantastical and captures people’s attention—but actually playing a major role in the story is another thing entirely. This is reinforced by the fact that many well-known, respected actors will gladly sign on for what amounts to a cameo role, or even a completely anonymous one, just for the thrill of being in Star Wars. Knowing that Benicio Del Toro is in The Last Jedi, in other words, is a very, very different thing from knowing that his character matters. The fact that he allegedly doesn’t even have a full name supports this—“DJ” could be to TLJ what “Bobbajo” was to The Force Awakens: a glorified walk-on role.

Having said all that, though? I decided pretty quickly that he’s playing a grown-up Ezra Bridger. Read More

The Scale of a Sequel – What The Last Jedi Can Learn from The Empire Strikes Back

Posted on June 19, 2017by Guest Editorials

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There is a conversation that has existed since the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens regarding the narrative direction of The Last Jedi and the possibility of it paralleling certain story elements of The Empire Strikes Back. The Force Awakens was a wonderful successor to the original trilogy – it captured the saga’s serialized thrill and introduced us to new characters who were so well developed that they were adopted immediately and are praised among fans (with the exception of a few vocal minorities). However, one of its biggest criticisms, and one I hold myself, is its narrative parallels with A New Hope.

I love The Force Awakens as a whole and this subject has been talked about endlessly. Suffice it to say that, with characters as good as Rey, Poe, Finn, and Kylo Ren, I would have liked to see them take more chances with the story; although I understand the apprehension involved that drove them to play it about as safe as safe can be. My hope is that The Last Jedi sets itself apart from its original trilogy counterpart by having a different overall direction and narrative beat. However, there are plenty of elements from Empire that The Last Jedi should strive to emulate and they have nothing to do with the plot of the film, but rather how the film itself is told.

Empire is unlike many sequels. It doesn’t seek to top A New Hope in terms of effects or spectacle. It never feels like the unnecessary continuation of a story; or a reactionary effort greenlit in the wake of monetary success. There’s no greater threat to top the Death Star, no McGuffin, no prolonged action sequences that try to distract the audience from a lack of story. Empire is a much smaller film than A New Hope and that may be its greatest asset. It recognizes that the best sequels don’t artificially increase their scale in lieu of story, but expand upon the characterization and emotional scope of their predecessors. It understands that great sequels allow their characters to change. Irrevocably. Read More

Let’s Game Like It’s 1999 — Running a Prequel to Your RPG Campaign

Posted on June 14, 2017by Six on the Wild Die
It's time for the people back there to take over!
It’s time for the people back there to take over!

Welcome again to The Force Does Not Throw Dice, our section about the wonderful world of running tabletop roleplaying games set in the Galaxy Far Far Away. No, this piece is not about gaming in what is known as “the prequel trilogy era”. What we are going to be talking about is how to set up a prequel campaign to your existing campaign. So dust off your Jar Jar sipping cup, find your old Y2K survival kit, play your least-hated Limp Bizkit CD… and let’s game like it’s 1999!

First of all: I’m perfectly aware that, out of the many words that are likely to elicit strong reactions from the fans, the two most powerful ones are probably “canon” and “prequels”, but this article is not going to get into whether the idea of Star Wars prequels was pure genius or a regrettable mistake. I have my own personal thoughts on the matter, of course, but it’s completely undeniable that the existence of prequels has become one of the most important or at least one of the most popular facets of Star Wars storytelling. So, if one of our objectives as GMs is presenting a faithful “Star Wars experience” in our RPG, why not bringing this to the table? So let’s work together and see how we can make our own prequel game.

Before taking a look at how to run a prequel, I’m going to make a few assumptions here. First of all, I’m assuming that you’ve had a “source campaign” running for a while and that you’ve created enough lore and characters to draw from: to be able to create a prequel, you need some kind of original work first! Second, I’m also assuming that we are talking about a “prequel” purely in the manner of the Star Wars prequel trilogy: we are not talking about a series focused on the childhood of the current characters or about a distant prequel set in the Old Republic or even before that, but a prequel set one or two generations before the current series. Third: in an effort to make this article as useful as possible, I’m assuming that the prequel campaign is going to be either a one-shot game or a short campaign, but there’s nothing stopping it from turning into a long campaign or even completely supplanting your original game: it happened to me, and it actually was the best Star Wars campaign I’ve ever directed. But I’m being realistic: it’s hard enough to get a campaign running, so I’m assuming you will be more likely to run a one-shot between adventures. Most experienced GMs are not really going to need any of this advice, but I still hope that they will find a few useful ideas in here! Read More