Resignation

 

Here, he takes an almost admirable view of the situation while at the same time ignoring the obvious. Namely that the current counteroffensive by Israel has already made that new generation of Hamas. So, the genie can’t really be put back in the bottle with some good PR, or even overt acts of mercy, in the face of IDF killing 2, 5, 10 Palestinians for every one Israeli that was killed.

So why, then? Why does Israel proceed in this way? And the answer seems so painfully obvious, yet no one wants to just say it out loud…

Israel has no hope of peace.

There is no ‘long term’ victory to be had in their minds. There is no undiscovered country waiting for them in the offing. Their actions are a combination of revenge, game theory and resignation. Resignation to the fact that this is how it will always be.

Because that’s the only thing that makes sense. In the context of the occupation. In the context of “For every member of Hamas you killed, how many did you create?” Do we really think that no one in Israel burns at their country being compared to South Africa under Apartheid? That they don’t understand the bad PR of illegal settlements and the occupation? Do we really believe that they want to kill children used as shields? That they don’t bristle at having their military action against civilians drawing comparisons to Nazis?

To believe any of that is either willful ignorance or just incoherent demonization borne of pain and anger. It’s not that they don’t know or don’t care. It’s that they obviously don’t think any act of mercy or gesture to the two-state solution will make a difference. They don’t believe that an autonomous, functional Palestinian state where Hamas is the elected government would be LESS of a threat to Israel. They don’t believe Hamas can be defeated by showing mercy (few people do). There is a need to destroy an enemy — Hamas. An enemy that has SWORN to destroy them. Except the only way to eliminate the threat of Hamas would be to kill every single Palestinian man, woman and child or to drive every one of them out of Israel. Neither of these are options so it isn’t a question of whether Hamas will strike again…

It is just a question of when.

If it is a question of ‘when’, do you show conspicuous restraint now, dismantle settlements and end the occupation, and the answer to the question of ‘when’ is: 5 years? Or do you proceed from the justification provided by Hamas on Oct 7, and do enough destruction to push that out to 10 years? This is the only consideration remaining. Will it be barbaric and inhumane? Yes. Will there be human rights violations? Yes — that’s what war is. That’s what it always is — regardless of whether Hamas are ‘terrorists’ or ‘freedom fighters’. ‘Right’ rarely becomes more of important than ‘might’ once killing starts.

But this question of resignation — of this being the status quo that no one really believes can change — this is the most important part. So long as that resignation remains, Israel will show Hamas no quarter, their mercilessness will be the fertilizer that sows the soil of the Middle East, they will reap a new crop of Hamas recruits that will sprout properly in the years ahead and the whole thing will just start again. As it has so many times already.

Oppenheimer - American self-righteousness at its best

I am admittedly not fond of Christopher Nolan's aseptic, clinically-diagnosed, game-planned approach to film-making. I have a great deal of respect for people who act with method and care. I marvel at anyone with the confidence and hubris to undertake something like a theatrical motion picture and shepherd it through both writing and directing to a final creation that can be flung forth into posterity. And there is probably no easier way for a modern director to distinguish himself than by eschewing special-effect, post-production heavy filmmaking and rather, relying and elaborating upon classical technologies and methodologies of making film while consistently meeting deadlines and budgets. I'm not under the impression that I could do what Nolan has made a career of doing: creating films that defy conventions in the most mainstream way possible. He's not Hitchcock or Kubrick, but frankly no one is but also no one else is Nolan and that is an undeniable achievement. Being different in any way possible is an achievement.

Oppenheimer now I'm going to treat very harshly, if for no other reason than the collective consciousness is already lionizing this 3 hour commitment as one of the finest films of the century.

But first, let's get right to the meat of the the thing. In a movie about the most momentous, ethically fraught creation mankind has ever brought into this world - the bomb that violates those everyday laws of nature that we take for granted - that unleashed the strong nuclear force and potentiates the most heinous destruction our species has ever wrought - the bomb that was actually a concern for setting ignition to the atmosphere and killing every living thing on the planet - in a three hour movie about that undertaking and the consequence of that undertaking - how much time do you think is appropriate to devote, if not for shock value then simply for the sake of giving a thorough account - how much time in that 3 hour movie should be devoted to the families or survivors of even just one of the 70,000 victims in Hiroshima or the 40,000 victims of Nagasaki - the people most directly and undeniable and practically rather than ethically or morally or hypothetically or geopolitically or biographically affected by the work at Los Alamos? Run time of 180 minutes, what would be a prudent amount of time to show the aftermath of those bombs for the purpose of adding a simple visual context to the implied horrors of the Trinity Test?

Because if you said anything greater than a second, then Nolan somehow failed. In a movie, a visual medium, whose central subject is the moral question over these weapons and the back and forth discourse over the course that the world should take with their existence, whose main narrative weaves through how the our protagonist's wrestling with those questions shaped his life and reputation, Nolan somehow doesn't even bother to show even one victim of the bombs that troubled Oppenheimer so dearly that he sat in the Oval Office with the President of the United States and felt compelled to say that he felt blood on his hands for his work.  He feels like he has blood on his hands in a movie that really goes out of its way to not show any blood.

Clinical. Aseptic. 

Self-righteous. This is an American movie about an American and the significance of how he felt bad over something that America did. But showing what they did - taking the focus off of Americans achieving the impossible, and then doing the unimaginable, and then destroying each other in the race to lord fire over the rest of the world and then agonizing over what they did - that would take precious time off of the most important parts of the story - namely how Oppenheimer felt bad about being the spearhead of a program that he led enthusiastically right up until the moment of success and then, felt bad about it. He felt bad about it, let's make a movie. And let's not show one single image of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Let's not show one image of what a nuclear bomb does to a human body.

Because that is a little too messy for a Chris Nolan film. It's a little too risky. You might feel something.

I felt for this movie exactly what I felt in every Chris Nolan movie with the exception of "The Dark Knight" (and quite frankly, that was 85% because of Heath Ledger). Nothing. Dunkirk, Tenet, Inception. I can appreciate marvelous cinematography. I'm not numb to thrilling sound design. I can clearly see the care and work that went into every single scene in the movie.

But did I feel sorry for Robert Oppenheimer when he went to meet Truman and Truman called him a cry-baby? No I didn't. I was confused. Not by whether or not that was a matter of historical record. But by what Nolan was hoping to make me feel there. Was I supposed to feel sorry for the protagonist, that he felt bad for being part of the project? Because I didn't. It seemed remarkable to me that a person could be so casually vulnerable with the U.S. President, confiding in him like he's a long-time friend. It seemed strange to confess guilt to someone who arguably has much more blood on his hands - a person that, if he were a halfway decent person, would probably rather not reflect upon it, reflect upon the millions of lives that he played some part in destroying simply by virtue of being the person in the chair at that point in history.

If I were to feel anything in that moment other than confusion, it would be: well, you spent three years enthusiastically doing something that was apparently 'horrible' in building that bomb. If you actually feel as you say, why don't you spend 4 years doing something 'great'. Go to Japan and do missionary work. Mount your bully pulpit and tell the world of what you did and what must come next.  Offset the scale. Why am I supposed to feel something about you saying that you feel bad when the screen time spent doing the horrible thing as best as you could vs the screen time of you reflecting on it being bad has a 10 to 1 ratio?

Show don't tell. Show me the scene where, in an act of gratuitous self-flagellation, Oppenheimer spends the first hour looking at the after-action report of the blasts. He demurs at first from looking at the human carnage, instead focusing on the technical details of the blast and its effects. Then he picks up a picture. Looks at it. Puts it down. He's on the precipice now, between courage and cowardice - between convincing himself that the image is futile and that the image is the most important thing anyone will ever see. And then he picks it up. Really looks at what his bomb did to another person. His bomb. It's his bomb - regardless of what Truman says - this is what ownership looks like. Then he picks up another. The shame of looking away is too great. He forced himself forward at Los Alamos and he forces himself forward here. He forces himself to look. Then he picks up the film. Puts it on the projector.  Hits the switch.  You don't see the images on the screen. Just his expression. Just the reaction to the horrors to which his imagination didn't do justice. He did that.  He had the power to stop it.  And he didn't.  He isn't blinking now. On and on the projector goes...On and on.

Now it's real.

I couldn't possibly feel anything that Nolan might have wanted me to feel because there is not one scene like that in the film. Nolan doesn't care about feeling.  He's like the inverse George Lucas.  Lucas cares not one whit about the quality of the acting so long as the movie stimulates you.  Its almost like Nolan appreciates good acting but doesn't actually care if the movie keeps moves you at all.   

I'm honestly not sure what Nolan's aim was but Oppenheimer wasn't a sympathetic character in that moment in the Oval Office. He's not really an anything character. They say he's cocky - he doesn't really come off that way. They say he's a genius - Nolan doesn't do a very good job of showing him being the smartest person in the room and Damon's Groves' character makes a point of saying that genius is commonplace in the circles that he travels in - all the physicists at Los Alamos were geniuses. They say he's a man of integrity in a movie that has a subplot of his philandering. And then they make the point that he feels guilty when his ambition or his curiosity (who can be sure which) drove him to be the only consistent voice of the need to make this weapon first - to decide what to do with it first.

There will be people who say that this ambiguity is meant to convey the complexity of the man. And I say the ambiguity conveys the ambiguity of whatever message Nolan might have been trying to tell. Is the message that people are complex? Well, that's profound. Is he trying to say that ambition will be the death of the species? That's not clear.

Is he trying to leave you confused as to whether right and wrong even exists and that the decision to drop the bombs, like Oppenheimer himself, exists in a rapidly cycling quantum state that is neither one thing or another but rather both at the same time?

Let's be honest, that's probably what he was doing. He does, after all have a massive creative mind. He's so creative that in a movie about the birth of the Atomic Age, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were besides the point.  They missed the cut. The soap opera like intrigue of Lew Strauss being cock-blocked from the Cabinet by Jack Kennedy - that's what people want to see.

And then this obtuse drudgery of the three stories out of sequence.  Oppenheimer's reputation was left in tatters after the Gray Board hearings. His life was in ruins; his wife is furious with him for not standing up to the committee and the obvious railroading that is happening. Why won't he fight it, why won't he use his profile and platform to balance the scales? They could be destitute, they could lose their home...

But does Nolan show the aftermath of the Gray Board hearing? Does he show Oppenheimer calling the White House and being denied? Of average citizens calling him a traitor to his country, of his colleagues souring upon him? Nope. It was dramatic and traumatic and devastating and Oppenheimer was never the same again. And we see nothing to confirm that. Nothing to indicate that his life was considerably worse for his politics or his misgivings. Nothing to suggest that his life was in some degree as troublesome as the peoples whose bodies were blown apart in Japan. Is that to say that the man didn't endure hardship worthy of being put on screen? Not at all. It's that Nolan didn't show any of that. Small looks from a lawyer, a shake of the hand or nod of the head from an old colleague testifying at the hearing. And then, seemingly paying off nothing, the triumphant redemption of the Fermi medal - Einstein was right.  He was a pariah no more.  Is this what constitutes compelling drama and animus in Nolan's world? Is this what's more important than showing even a glimpse of the rubble of Nagasaki, even in those psychedelic hallucinations that Oppenheimer would have as part of the lone artistic license that Nolan employed?

I've used the word clinical. I'll move on now to the word bloodless. Let's head over to Los Alamos, the vacation resort.  Where Oppenheimer is never shown to quarrel with a colleague over what direction to take.  No, that's not right.  Teller obviously wanted to make an H-Bomb.  Teller was the lone thorn in anyone's side.  But besides that lone instance of handholding and a single scene of conflict management with the team, the movie doesn't show obvious setbacks and then the elation of overcoming them through collaboration. It doesn't show someone clearly not pulling their weight and the difficulty of carrying someone important. It doesn't show one person who feels clearly superior to the others and the difficulty that comes from one person wanting to shine. In a movie about some of the smartest people in the world, all at the same place, all at the same time, all in the same field, all presumably with competing personalities, reputations, affiliations, priorities and feelings about the work, in isolation for three years from the rest of the world, all we see is them working amicably and unremarkably, without an ounce of passion or animus for each other until, suddenly the high pressure work of creating this $2 billion thing is complete and it's time to test. It was hard work that was somehow also effortless and then it was done. It is a bloodless recounting of things that flies in the face of every experience every human everywhere has ever had working with a group of people under extraordinary circumstances but Nolan manages to make it as memorable as watching paint dry.

Then there is a meeting about how the Nazis are defeated and the threat of them getting there first is invalid. The conscientious scientists, wringing their hands over the weapon, say: let's consider stopping the work. But there is Oppenheimer, giving a 2 minute speech about how the work must continue. The protestations in the other direction have the weight of a waved white flag. The discussion can't even qualify to be termed a debate. "The Soviets." Good enough - let's keep making the weapon that has a greater than zero chance of burning the atmosphere away.

Is Nolan just hemmed in by the story that he's adapting? Or is he endeavoring to make it even more boring and lifeless than the reality because those are the limits of his imagination? I don't want to be unkind but who would believe that a group like that could work without blow-up or disagreement, without passionate discourse over a beer or philosophical confrontation, without anything substantive or remarkable at all happening for three years? And what filmmaker other than Nolan could be content showing only the collegiality, and none of the personalities or contrasting difference of opinion that add weight and colour to the camaraderie?

So we are left with a portrait of a man important and essential enough to make a movie about him.  A movie that in no way highlights what made him so special that he should lead this team and do the impossible.  A movie that leaves one thinking that anyone of the scientists at Los Alamos could have probably done the same given the resources and expertise at their disposal.  And certainly, without the political leanings that were used to broaden the group of scientists involved in the project, the same leanings that were later used to demonize him, that other person might not have finished the bomb in time to drop in on Japan.  But they almost certainly would have done so before the Soviet Union got it, so the actual aim of the project would have been similarly fulfilled.

Now let's contrast all of this with the unambiguous horror story that was HBO's Chernobyl. The casual, almost indifferent attitude to the calamity. The restraint in reaching the conclusion - in slowly revealing the extent of the coming terror. The paralyzing absurdist rage at the Soviet status quo killing people with every moment of inaction and inertia. The unvoiced implications of the accident juxtaposed with the eerie ticks of a Geiger counter.  The brief and indelible flash of melted skin and boiled flesh.  The growing friendship between the military man and the man of science.  The paranoia of being followed everywhere you go.  Everything there - every moment of a family separated by a plastic sheet, of a hole in a reactor wall, of dead birds, of ionized radiation reaching for the sky - is crafted for the obvious purpose of conveying, with images, that this is the death of the world that you are witnessing - this is as serious as life gets. This is something you, as a human, should feel viscerally.

Were there obscene artistic license being exercised there? Yes. But, it this a piece of entertainment? Or is it a documentary? Everything meant to give a sense of the seriousness of Oppenheimer is conveyed through dialogue. Not so much as one scene of a brief, potentially disastrous accident at Los Alamos, dramatized or embellished for the simple purpose of showing the danger of enriched Uranium or Plutonium. Not so much as a near miss? A calculation done incorrectly - an outburst from Oppenheimer as to what was at stake...

Performative. Just going through the motions. Damon's Groves' character yells at a scientist that this is the most important undertaking in the history of the species. Is there anything else in this three hour movie so important or urgent that warrants yelling? A movie that ends with Oppenheimer saying to Albert Einstein that they feared that they'd destroy the world and then might have ended up accomplishing it anyways?

By now, you know the answer.

My enthusiasm for this movie, despite the crass and sensational (and cynical) declarations of the movie making community that this film was going to 'save' cinema from already failing Marvel movies was already low. Biopics are already difficult enough to make entertaining without employing creative license - what filmmaker could drain more blood from my face at the prospect of making a biopic than Chris Nolan? His clinical approach already makes his movies feel like documentaries. Now he's making a biopic, why the hell wouldn't that feel like a documentary?

Oh and he filmed it on IMAX, too? Like...?

A grown-up film for grown-ups? He's showing pointless nudity of American bodies in a movie about the people who made mutually assured destruction possible. That's okay. But showing the naked bodies of children scorched by a fireball? That's a little too grown up from a director hailed for making a war movie. Dunkirk is a movie about war, no? How can he be squeamish about that horrific honesty? How can people so easily call him an auteur while he takes no risks whatsoever?

It boggles my mind. But, to be fair, I'm not sophisticated enough to appreciate Mr. Nolan. He wrote and directed a movie about Oppenheimer and did such a good job of it, I'm not exactly sure why I should care.

Being a man

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5e6DmT2AzQc

I’m old so this is much clearer to me than it is to younger men.

There is a confusion, particularly in a society and era where everything is about appearance, about the idea of masculinity. Media sells it to us all the time but try not to blame them because they aren’t trying to warp people’s minds. They just want to put food on their table like the rest of us.

To women, they sell smallness and thinness as femininity. And to men they sell the idea of heroism.

They say that to be masculine is not just to have a Y chromosome. It is to be remarkable and visibly so. You have to be able to demonstrate power. The power to remake the world as you see fit. The power to save people: from others and from themselves — whether they want you to or not. The idea of looking good doing it. Masculinity lies simply in the expression or potential expression of power to dominate, to conquer.

That is the lie.

Quite frankly, it’s a lie so pervasive that even in works that are overtly trying to challenge the deconstruction and demonization of masculinity, like Fincher’s Fight Club for example, it isn’t enough for the Narrator/Tyler to be at peace with his own internal rebellion. It isn’t enough for him to remake himself in his preferred image. It isn’t enough for him to redefine himself on his own terms. His rebellion has to change the entire world. He has to be a man of destiny. He has to have an army who worships him.

He has to be the hero.

My counter argument to this and the one I hope any young man reading this might take a moment to think about is: don’t let the world sell you on heroism while dismissing courage. Because courage is what makes a man a man and a woman a woman. Courage is what makes a human being something better than an animal. Courage is what is at the heart of any virtue that we ascribe heroism. Heroism is often awesome to behold. Lowly courage more often than not will create an opportunity for embarrassment. Heroism is what has your jaw hanging low in the movie theater, and has you dreaming of adventure in the future. Courage can go really well, really badly and sometimes totally in-between. Heroism gets you likes and views and notoriety. Courage can be met with total indifference.

But one is essential and the other is merely the spectacle. Substance vs semblance.

Trying to be the hero of your own story or someone else’s story without the simple courage to fall on your face, dust yourself off, ignore what others are saying, protect those you love or protect those in need of protecting is futile. Trying to be the hero without mastering the art of persevering and trying even when you can’t detect even the smallest quantum of progress is just a recipe for frustration.

We think of the heroic masculine figure as this lone wolf, independent thinker, unburdened by the needs or fears of others. But the ultimate courageous figure in the world is a father: someone who sacrifices for others, protects others, provides for others, cooperates with others to create strength in numbers even though that man could take his shot at beating the whole world into submission and yelling the whole world into silence.

He could probably survive on his own. He could probably hit someone over the head and stand on top of the heap until someone bigger and meaner came and hit him over the head. But instead of a simple, brutish appeal to might, he can win the whole world over by trying to be right. By trying to be fair and by having the courage and strength to admit when he’s wrong so that he can stand on the side of justice again. The type of person practiced in being strong — so practiced in being strong that they become practiced in being courageous and taking the necessary risks that others would fail to take. The type of person that is so strong that they can afford to share their strength with others.

Someone who tries even when they are afraid, daring to be better both for themselves and for the sake of others. For a victory greater and longer lasting than standing on the top of the heap today.

At a certain point, we all might meet someone who is like this. They will do something remarkable and meaningful for us, even when we know they should have been afraid to do it. Some of these people will be our fathers or our mothers. We might call them our hero.

But long before they were a ‘hero’, it all just started from the risky, dirty, unglamourous practice of being brave when they didn’t have to be. Of thickening their skin, believing that what they were doing mattered and pushing forward to the future.

That is what it means to be a man to me. Someone strong enough that they can afford to be generous with their strength, and take risks that other people can’t for the benefit of the entire world. Every single person in the world that I have ever called a man had one thing in common: they showed up and tried to be this way more than they failed at it.

And if everyone understood masculinity that way, I honestly think the world would be a better place.

Academedia: The Rise of Skywalker, part 2 – nostalgia baiting, the hard work of character integrity, story-showing vs story-telling & the solution that causes more problems

It is an interesting question - because I can see the danger.  There is the danger that we don't open our minds up to allow the stories to dance in the wind - flutter and change.  There is the danger that we make our heroes out to be infallible, out to be unreasonably above reproach.  That we viciously try to protect their image in fear of admitting that they are as weak and terrified as the rest of us.  But there is also the danger of simply denying how good a thing is based on the childish cynicism that things that look good on the outside must obviously be too good to be true.  

That thinking is often a superficial appreciation of things and beings.  Just because something seems easy doesn't mean that it is easy.

The creative mind, charged with continuing a story that they haven't any passion for and didn't create themselves, comes to the crossroads.   There are characters that are plants - with arcs and stories still to be told.  And there are characters that are rocks - formed and mostly fashioned with only the smallest room for dramatic change.

Ben Kenobi was a rock.  Daenerys Targaryen was a plant.

Rian Johnson seems to be of the mind that 60 year old Luke Skywalker is more like 18 year old Daenerys Targaryen than like Ben Kenobi.

Is that fair?

This was the issue that I had with "The Dark Knight Rises". Ultimately it is a simple matter of opinion:  could someone who could be broken by the death of a friend become Batman in the first place?  

Or could someone live their life the way Ferris Bueler did and then reach their middle years and look back on their life with regret and dispair?

I think many people would like to think the answer is yes.  But from what I know of people who live life at these extremes on a regular basis, the answer is usually no.  I think that someone like Ferris Bueller, who is kind and charming and smart and has perspective, and sees the big picture of what matters (a person that is willing to ditch school to have fun with his friends) is someone who might get knocked on his butt, might over reach and fall short.  But a person with that outlook will never wake up one day and say "What's the point?"  They'll never say that because too many good things will always accompany the bad things.

I think someone who has enough ego and pain to try and single handedly take on the criminal underworld and expose themselves to those risks without any material reward, someone who literally gets beat up every night to see something through, is no longer making decisions about their life.  This is his life - his life is service to Gotham.  They are a rock.  Until Gotham is a normal city, his work isn't done.  Every new tragedy is nothing more than a log on the fire - fuel to further his obsession.

So then someone comes along and says - Boring!  I don't want to see the story of someone who makes everyone around them feel happy being happy.  I want to tell the story of how someone who wins big deals with being a loser.  I don't want to tell the story of the Batman who wins - pushes forward through anything.  I want to tell the story of the Batman that is broken - the Batman that loses.  That's how I'll be different.

But, here's the thing: loser is isn't a fact.  Loser, winner - those are mindsets.  People who lose a lot - people who are unaccustomed to good things - expect bad things and their expectation snowballs with circumstance and chance to affect their choices.  People who win a lot expect good things and expect good things to replace bad things with hard work and time.  There are very, very few losses and very, very few wins big enough that they can on their own fundamentally change the mindset of one who has lost much or one who has won much.

Or, as a Jedi master once said, "Your focus determines your reality."

Mind you, none of this is helped by the fundamental simillitude between the stories - Ben Kenobi - the old Jedi master that went into hiding and exile actually "killed" his best friend, who'd he'd spent the better part of 10 years training as a mentor before fighting side by side with him as a brother.  Yet still he had hope for the future watching over Luke - he wasn't broken, merely biding.  Luke - the old Jedi master that went into hiding and exile after making the same mistake as his father, pursuing the quick and easy path, nearly killing his nephew; Luke - who actually triumphed in reaching his father where Ben failed - gives up on everything.

So the urge to be different for the sake of being different isn't just childish and egotistical.  It is also at odds with simple, demonstrable principles of characterization.  I think it is very easy to try and be subversive and claim the mantle of "edgy/daring" by simply writing characters out of character in this way and then saying that you are deepening the character.  But without showing the specifics of that process, it would be like seeing Sansa Stark at the beginning of ASOIAF and then seeing her again sentencing Littlefinger to death and saying that it was somehow congruent.  No - for those two people to be congruent would require a massive amount of obstacles and trauma and situations that would warp and forge that person to be someone so dramatically different.  Game of Thrones did that and only by seeing the process can the product be believed.

And so the transformation of Bruce from 'I'll save Gotham by myself if need be - I'll be the bad guy if need be" to "I've lost Rachel I have nothing worth fighting for" when Rachel wasn't the thing that he wanted most in the first place and of Luke from "I have faith that there's love inside of my father who wears all black and chops people in half with his laser sword and thus there is love inside of everyone" to "I tried to kill my nephew before he turned rotten, but it was a mistake and I've lost everything so I should get out of here before I make even more of a mess" - they are so jarring that everything else that follows seems to follow off of a faulty premise. 

The wonder of seeing Luke passing through the flames to face the First Order alone - a redemption of a sort for having left the fight, a triumphant overcoming of his demons - could be beautiful.  As constructed however, in this artificial ham-fisted way, a shoehorned story of Luke’s self-betrayal, disillusionment and redemption all in the span of one movie, it becomes offensive and banal.  It’s overcrafted – it’s a moment that Rian Johnson wants you to see as beautiful.  But it could only be beautiful by ignoring that he left the fight in the first place - by ignoring everything that we know about the character before Rian Johnson got hold of him.   The person who 'stayed on target' during the trench run, seeing it through to the very end.  The person that rushed into the lion's den on Bespin to save his friends - contrary to the urgings of two Jedi Masters.  

We know what Luke’s greatest fear is.  We saw it put on screen in 1981.  His greatest fear is becoming Vader – falling to the dark side.  Taking the quick and easy path.

Johnson wants us to take him at face value that the person who had his hand cut off and chose falling to his death over falling to the Dark Side could one day raise his lightsaber to slice his nephew in half.  He wants us to believe that the person who left no one behind and went back to Tatooine - the place in the Universe he hated most - to save the man that saved his life at Yavin, could go this entire movie without a moment's reflection on the death of his friend at his student's hand.  Johnson demands we believe that Luke is who he says he is when we have so much evidence to the contrary.  And, as a result, his effort at 'redeeming' Luke can't be seen on its own merits.  It can only be regarded as a self-serving ploy by Johnson - a convoluted play for sophistication made off the heels of a baseless demand that we accept this version of the character rather than a thoughtful organic reflection on who the character actually is.

Simply put, considering Rian Johnson thinks himself a storyteller, the chasm between Luke Skywalker and 'Jake' Skywalker seems like a tall tale - perhaps even a tale worth telling.  But he doesn't actually tell that tale.  He tells us about one night that was apparently so momentous that every other moment - everything that we saw of him on screen previous to this movie - was more or less insignificant.

That's easy to believe in a simple life.  It's a much harder sell to believe that any one moment could be so momentous in a life full of momentous moments.

Maybe it is possible to make it seem as though Luke could be utterly broken and defeated.  But it would always be a tall order to make it believable that Luke, a person that grew up without a family, without parents of his own, could turn his back on his family, in a time of need, when he created the need through his own actions.

So the question is: could someone who could turn their back on Leia, and Han, and Chewie and Ben, also be the person who risked his life and his soul against the Emperor and Vader to protect them?  The person who could walk, unarmed, into the clutches of pure evil?

That's a story that I'd be interested in seeing.  But Rian Johnson isn't interested in that story.  He just wants to benefit from suggesting that it happened.

An interesting observation re: the prequels

I had an interesting thought just now watching Infinity War again.

Namely - you're sad to see your heroes vaporized.

Revolutionary, I know.  But here is the extension of that thought.

In Episode 3, when the Jedi are literally being slaughtered en masse: betrayed by their soldiers and comrades that they fought side by side with...you, as an audience, feels...

Nothing.

No animus.  No regret.  No empathy, no pity.  You feel absolutely nothing.  Shot in the back, tossed down a cliff.  You shrug.

You feel nothing for two reasons.  One, obviously, is that the average Jedi in the prequel trilogy has as much backstory as a stormtrooper.  They're nameless, faceless, personality-less.  You don't know anything about them that could possibly cause you to relate to them in any way.  They are just extras in funny robes that happen to have glow-wands in their hands.  You spent 30 years thinking that Jedi were the baddest mofos of them all, and then the Geonosis fight disabuses you of that notion and Lucas turns them into cannon fodder.  They're running into blaster fire like infantry men in WWI facing machine guns for the first time.

And two, and more startling is: George Lucas doesn't show them doing heroic things.  He doesn't seem to have any interest in driving home the point that the extermination of the Order is a bad thing.  Or at a minimum a less worse thing than the Sith takeover of the Republic that leads to an authoritarian regime that starts building planet destroying superweapons.  

Ki-Adi Mundi, Plo Koon, Shaak Ti.  Granted Star Wars has never been about large ensemble casts.  But the Jedi High Council are apparently supposed to be the wisest, most formidable people in the entire Galaxy - they ARE the Avengers.  And not only do you not see them do amazing, heroic shit, most of them get a single line in three movies.  In three movies, the Jedi Council overtly save fewer lives than Superman did in Man of Steel, a movie notorious for Superman not really giving a crap about massive losses of life.  And they are the best of the best.  So what pathos are we supposed to muster for nameless Jedi number 217 when his number comes up and the clone troopers go "Sonny Corleone on the causeway" on his non-descript ass?

This is the nagging curiosity that has followed me about the prequel series.  Not that it is bogged down by trade disputes and diplomatic intrigue - Game of Thrones pulls that off.  But rather that, really, in a series defined by archetypes of good and evil, the prequels don't define anything very well.  You aren't really rooting for anything while watching the car crash that is Anakin in slow motion.

This curious bloodlessness in a story that is ostensibly about the downfall of a legend due to his hubris, his corruption by insidious forces and a forbidden love is not merely down to the absurd acting that Lucas settled on in his pictures.  It is also typified in three narrative decisions that mystify me even to this day whenever I should chance to see a couple of scenes here and there.

The first is obviously the problematic reality of Palpatine and Sidious being the same person.  It would have been so simple.  The story is about the Clone Wars.  What stretch of the imagination would it have been for Sidious to have cloned himself, used the Force to plant suggestions in the mind of his clone, and assiduously opened door after door, through manouever and assassination, until his puppet clone was the Supreme Chancellor?  Created the moral quandary of a person, more or less innocent, being used beyond their control, to do the bidding of evil?  How do the Jedi prove it?  Does the Clone find the will to resist?  What machinations lead to the discovery of the truth?  The compromise of the Supreme Chancellor, fighting for the soul not just of Anakin but also Palpatine, creates the emotional, ethical, practical and the Light vs Dark side conflict that opens the mind and frankly deepens the weight of the Jedi's actions.

What do we get instead?  Palpatine and Sidious are one in the same, and the Jedi are just fucking rubes.  Literally the most powerful Dark side user in the history of the Galaxy is sitting right next to them - and they are clueless.  Now you don't want to say that it runs contrary to the often self-contradictory canon represented by the Original Trilogy.  And with the inclusion of Midichlorians, Lucas basically reduces your strength in the Force to a number on a blood test - no doubt Palpatine had all those numbers altered.  But you have Palpatine saying that Luke is strong in the Force - something that he can evidently sense - so it gives the strong, if not unmistakable, impression that yeah, someone who is sensitive to the Force can sense when someone else is sensitive to the Force.  And yet Sidious is working side by side with the High Council - FOR YEARS - and they have nary an inkling?

What benefit could the insight provided by the Force be if someone that sinister, that evil as to be plotting mass executions of people, could go completely under the radar?  If that kind of hatred could be totally masked?

It raises the question why Sidious didn't just become a Jedi serial killer.  If they can't sense him or see him coming, what danger was there in doing some if not most of the dirty work himself?

The second dovetails into the first and at the same time is a separate entity.  So the Jedi are rubes.  They take custody of a clone army that happens to be available at the same time that galactic hostilities break out.  Yoda - least and most dumbass of them all - is incredulous when Obi-Wan calls the Battle of Geonosis a victory.  "Victory?!?" he says.  We're clearly being played.  The Clone Wars is part of that game.

Fine.  Lucas doesn't revisit this simple idea that this whole thing is fishy, an idea birthed literally on the first day of the Clone Wars, until Anakin tells Mace that the Sith Lord that they've been looking for since Naboo is Palpatine.

But Dave Filoni does.  Episode 10 of the 6th season of The Clone Wars, "The Lost One" finally pulls at the loose thread, when the Jedi reveal that Dooku was behind the creation of the Clone Army.  

So just mostly rubes.

But Filoni is hogtied.  The movies are still the movies.  Order 66 still has to happen. So what did the Jedi do when having ultimately discovered that their mortal enemy programmed and gifted them the army that they are trusting with their lives?

"If this was known," says Mace, "public confidence in the war effort, the Jedi, and the Republic would vanish.  There would be mass chaos."

"Cover up this discovery, we must," Yoda concludes.

Uhhh...what?

You have two armies.  One is working for your enemy.  The other was given to you by your enemy.  Mass chaos is already here.  I get that it's a different galaxy and it happened a long time ago and they've never heard of a Trojan Horse.  A gift given to you simply to destroy you when your guard is down.  But when Mace is saying that he senses a plot to destroy the Jedi in Revenge of the Sith - yet according to Filoni they already knew that they couldn't quite trust their own army...honestly, it just kinda hurts your head.

You've already lost.  The only question is how many people are going to die before you can get the target off your back.

It just seems like a small amount of thought would lead to the conclusion that if both of two options -  fight with the Clone Army or abandon the Clone Army - will lead to defeat, the only chance you have is to do something that your enemy wouldn't expect you to do.  But there's no discussion of this, no depiction of the Jedi thinking in strategic or unconventional terms even as they collectively get fitted for the noose.

Maybe its supposed to be some expression of the calcified nature of Jedi culture.  But through Lucas's insistance on characterizing the Jedi as borderline developmentally delayed and Filoni's engaged but irrational characterization, we again get this sense that the Jedi aren't allowed to have a brain.  Who is the council member that agrees that we should conceal the truth of the clones from the public but quietly look into dismantling their programming?  Who is the one who concludes that the future of the Jedi is at risk and the Younglings have to have a means of escape?

Who's the Jedi who insists that with an existential threat to the Order upon them, every Jedi has a right to know that they are at risk and what is at stake?

The Jedi are like a group of German Jews in 1940 who've been informed that the Holocaust is coming and are concerned about public support and appearances.  It's not a reflection of what the Order canonically stands for.  It's just poor characterization and poor writing, diametrically opposed to how real people would act in an equally precarious position.

You can feel the tension of this incredulity in the last lines of Filoni's 6th season, when Yoda admits that this war is probably already lost and that they have to play for a different, longer victory.  It's meant to foreshadow "A New Hope" that the Sith can't anticipate and the only victory that is left to them.  But again, if you know that a war is going to be lost by doing what you are doing, doesn't that suggest that you should do something, anything different rather than pinning your hopes to 'something that might happen years from now that I may have seen during a hallucination'?  Filoni is trying desperately to redeem the High Council in a canon that can't allow that to happen.  And in his effort to make the Jedi 'not-complete-idiots' in the Lucas vein, he causes them to be something even worse: incompetent and, effectively, accomplices in their own annihilation.

But these are mere quibbles, no?  How can they compare?  What are they - nothing, really - in comparison to maybe the least scrutinized, most unheralded decision that a Jedi has ever made on film?  A decision that has so much weight and magnitude, so much potential for the saga at large, that its insignificance to Lucas and to most Star Wars 'fans' speaks to a level of obliviousness that really spelled the death of the entire franchise to me. 

What plot point, line of dialogue or setpiece can speak more to the value of Star Wars as a cultural product than the momentousness, the ineptitude shown, the callous disregard for the decision by Qui-Gon to use the Force to determine Anakin's fate.

In a game of chance that was to decide the freedom of Anakin or his mother, Shmi, Qui-Gon Jinn - 'Grey' Jedi, wise master, & devotee of 'the Living Force' (whatever the fuck that means, honestly it sounds like something that a Jedi came up with while high on weed)...

a) allowed the die cast to roll and land on its own, leaving the outcome up to the uhhh...will of the Force?

b) accused Watto of using a loaded die, proved that he was cheating, and used the attempt at deception as a pretext to free both mother and child from the yoke of bondage?

c) decided that the will of the Force was not something that was determined by the conventions of the Jedi Council or the Senate and started a rebellion on Tattoine to crush Hutt rule, destroy the odious practice of slavery in the Galaxy for all times and serve as an iron clad indelible memory to the impressionable Anakin Skywalker of the Jedi's commitment to equality and justice?

or 

d) used the Force to roll the die in his favor to secure the release of the boy, not his mother, separating the child from the only family he'd ever known to much more easily satisfy his own selfish desire to train the boy as a Jedi as a vindication of his belief that the child was the Chosen One, to assuredly thumb his nose at the Council and their conventions of not teaching a child past a certain age, to definitely abandon his commitment of mentorship to his current padawan Obi-Wan Kenobi and without knowing, condemning Shmi Skywalker through his decision to her eventual, painful and untimely death on Tattoine which led to Anakin's start down the Dark path that would be the final precipitating factor in the annihilation of the Jedi order and the installation of a Sith Regime bent on everlasting rule resting upon the threat of ultimate mass destruction in the form of a planet destroying superweapon.

d) sounds bad...and is bad, and is the correct answer.

Did I watch the same movie as everyone else?  In what world would using the Force in such an obviously self-serving way not be a path to the Dark side?  You could say anything.  You could say that I only cheated in this hand of cards because the money that I'll make will partially go to charity.  That I only warped your mind so that I could have sex with you so that I could relieve some personal stress that I would have otherwise had to relieve by getting into a fight with someone.  You could justify anything after the fact as the lesser of some other evil.

It really isn't that hard to believe that Qui-Gon's decision, should Anakin have discovered it later on, would have, could have, should have, played a massive, believable role in his descent to evil.  Feelings of guilt that he left his mother.  Compounded by anger that his life was worth saving to the Jedi but hers apparently wasn't.  Compounded by resentment that the Jedi wouldn't let him save her himself all those years of his own training.  Compounded by fear of Padme's impending demise.  The noble Qui-Gon cheating in a game of chance that ultimately condemned his mother would be a fracture to every idea that Anakin ever had of the Jedi - they'd just be fucking hypocrites.  They didn't believe in the will of the Force; the Force was merely a tool to make their own will a reality - just like the Sith.  The only difference between them is that the Jedi tell themselves that they have good causes.  Whether Watto was himself cheating would be totally fucking irrelevant.  Anakin was led to believe that the Jedi were above that...that being a Jedi was a calling worth abandoning his mother.

You can't tell me that Sidious dropping the fact of Qui-Gon's act on Anakin wouldn't have been a plausible push.  A wedge between him and Obi-Wan who never told him, to protect the memory of his murdered master.  The shit writes itself.

But that decision, so artful, so human, so pointed (I mean, Lucas really just didn't have to put it in there) amounted to...nothing.  Not so much as a single mention of it ever again.  I just shake my head.  I thought Star Wars was supposed to be about good and evil.  How can George Lucas have no interest in whether or not that decision was right or wrong?  It's one thing to let the die fall as cast.  It's another to deny that the decision should be left up to a roll of the dice.  But to make the decision yourself?  Decide who should be free and who should remain a slave?  Decide based on which one of them is more useful to you?

I mean, I get the Jedi are dicks but...come on?!?

And so it is that, the lasting impression that modern audiences have of the Jedi Order, the bulwark against...well, fucking Death Stars, is that they were 1) kinda dicks that got what they deserved and 2) so bad that Luke Skywalker eventually warmed to the idea that they should go extinct.

A view that always made me shake my head.  Kinda like blaming the Holocaust on European Jewry.  They got outmanoevered by someone working a plan that was hundreds of years in the making.  Give Sidious some credit.

Like, okay, maybe the Jedi are dicks.  Maybe they shouldn't be fighting in wars, or condoning slavery, or accepting clone armies that appear out of nowhere or trying to be an extension of the Democratic Galactic Republic...

So by extension, it would be better if say, the Trade Federation and an endless droid army allowed part of the Republic to secede?  But um...if that massive Separtist army succeeded in seceding, who's to say that they don't take that army and just, take over the Galaxy, putting a swift end to any democratic persuasions.  Are the Jedi just supposed to sing a song and stand off to the side while that happens?  Are they not supposed to defend the status quo, if that status quo stands for some modicum of law and order and representation?

And let's say that status quo makes an uneasy alliance with the Hutts and turns a blind eye to slavery in their systems.  Are the Jedi supposed to start a war for moral reasons when the rest of the Galaxy doesn't care?

And if the Jedi are supposed to fight against the Separtists and defend the democratic status quo, are they not supposed to use a Clone Army that is waiting for their command?

And if the Jedi aren't supposed to be affiliated with the Senate and the established rule, do they fashioned themselves as outside of the rule of law?  Above it?  Are they supposed to be judge and jury, guided by the Force?

I get that they are standoffish and dicks.  But remember, Yoda is like 900 years old.  He could be the wisest person in the universe and still make the mistake of thinking he's seen it all.  Mace Windu can kill anyone in the galaxy one on one.  Why exactly should he take shit from a politician?  They can read your thoughts and your emotions.  They know when you are sleeping and they know when you are awake.  They literally have command of the forces of nature at will.

If you had those powers, you'd probably be a little bit of a dick yourself.  The real question isn't whether you'd be a dick.  The real question is whether having all that power and insight and knowledge wouldn't just cause you to see other people as so inferior that you came to the conclusion that you should be at the top of the food chain.  That it was your right to rule over all of them.

Which is exactly what the Sith think.  That the Jedi don't immediately or even eventually think and act that way makes them, frankly, fucking saints.  Actually, real saints did more questionable things with less opportunity to do them than a Jedi ever did.  That would put them a tier above saints.  

Maybe we should call that tier "laser-sword space wizard" tier.  Or, like, Jedi, or something.

Really think about it.  One - ONE - Sith Lord was able to use the Force to manueover his way to being the 'legally' elected Chancellor of the Republic.  That's what it looks like when a Force user wants to be on top and plays nice.

What could the Jedi - any Jedi or the order as a whole - do, left to their own devices, if power was their endgame?

That's the reality of the Jedi.  Superman.  Someone who has the power to rule the world spending his time saving cats from trees.  Serving as an example to others when, by all right, they should just expect everyone to bend the knee.

It would take a writer as good as George Lucas to make Luke Skywalker - a hero that defined an entire generation.  Incredibly it would also take a writer as bad as George Lucas, as derivative as JJ Abrams and as vainglorious as Rian Johnson for the entire world to be unsure whether Luke and the Order that he stands for is actually heroic.  To feel absolutely no way about a Jedi being shot in the back and shoved off a cliff.

But the mad bastard and what's left of Disney Star Wars actually pulled it off.

Last Jedi - final thoughts

 Not at all untenable.  Just not rigorous.  As a long-time EU consumer, I think I can add perspective to why the 'novel' interpretation of the Force as 'agnostic' is problematic and why TLJ is seen as a good movie but a bad SW movie by people like myself.

I got a little long winded.

TLDR: Rian Johnson's mantra of letting the past die seems like an appropriate emo-juvenile protest for Kylo Ren, wildly uncharacteristic for Luke (and a meta-tongue-in-cheek burn to old fogeys like me) but in trying to change the Star Wars paradigm and shake things up it raises the simple questions of how much actually changed and why no one in the Star Wars universe thought to shake things up that way before.

If there is a thesis to TLJ, I would think that RJ makes it pretty clear that it is to let the past die.  Luke flipping his saber over his shoulder, Kylo actually saying the words, Yoda burning down the tree.  But anyone who's read the EU knows that all sort of Jedi have tried to break out of the dichotomy of light and dark and all sorts of people have tried to make the Force to be like a dispassionate tool rather than an all-consuming devotion leading to the creation of these "religious sects" called the Jedi and the Sith.  Some call this the path of the 'Grey Jedi' (Qui-Gon Jinn being representative of this line of thinking via the 'Living Force'), but of course putting 'Jedi' in the term is somewhat self-defeating.

The Force has had many, many interpretations but one of the core interpretations (one that I think even RJ doesn't really dismiss) is that it is like the Super Soldier Serum in Captain America.  It makes the good really good in proportion to what you do for others and it makes the bad really bad in proportion to what you do for yourself and your own satisfaction and there is a fundamental asymmetry to how you progress.  Just by its nature, gaining a "well-developed command of the Force" by using the Force in a dispassionate way is very difficult and time-consuming while gaining that same command using it in a passionate way allows you to accomplish things faster, easier, feeds into your passion and makes it easier to go to that well the next time.  It becomes an addiction and feedback loop - power as a solution that leads to power the problem leading to a need for more power.

By its nature then, or at least every major interpretation of it (including the Original Trilogy) the dark side of Force doesn't lend itself to moderation.  It isn't something that you can safely dabble in.  The spiritual offset necessary to balance yourself again after even one use of the dark side is severe.  It's like a drug that hooks you.  And so it is that while the so-called Grey Jedi could sometimes make morally ambiguous decisions, they never made outright immoral decisions because, again, using the Force is a lot easier and more seductive when it is driven by your anger, rage, selfishness, etc.

But anger, rage, selfishness ... these are things that normal people feel and act on all the time.  So if you are one of the first students of the Force, and understand this dynamic, what is the solution to the problem of normal people of varying Force-sensitivity emerging all throughout the galaxy?  Kill them the moment they are detected?  Just hope that some of them won't realize that with focus and concentration they can move things with their minds & put thoughts into other people's heads?  Hope that if they do figure that out that they never move things with their minds or put thoughts into other people's heads when angry?  That's just wishful thinking.  Left to its own accords, 99/100 people would come to believe that their Force power came from anger and rage, and pursuing that power would lead them to become ever more angry and rageful.  Now you have 99/100 crazed wizards running around.

No - after enough disasters - there would slowly and surely come a consensus that the risk of leaving these people out in the wild is too much of a danger to the communities around them.  Appeals for individual freedoms would start to wage a losing battle against the need to curtail the constant emergence of these supernatural threats.  From early on in life, these people would need training and direction and to adopt a very specific type of lifestyle, an almost paradoxical balancing act - one that was both devoted to the service of others and yet dispassionate enough to avoid the temptations of the dark side.  And in contrast to that there would rise another consensus.  An antagonistic consensus.  One that reflexively objected not just to the institutionalization of the Force but also to the implicit mission of eradicating the Dark Side in all its forms.  But the catch-22 is: anyone with considerable ability and familiarity with the Dark Side would not only see the Jedi as a threat.  

Driven continually by the need for power, their own alliances with each other would be laughably short-lived - establishing a separate paradigm where there would only dependably be two Sith Lords: one with the most knowledge and ability in using the Dark side and another highly talented disciple who craved the teachings, devoted to the teachings, but had neither the ability nor the experience to kill his master.  The Jedi would always be in a symbiotic relationship with each other and the Republic and so would always have numbers on their side and the Sith would have a parasitic relationship with every person that ever learned about the Dark Side, and hence always work via subterfuge, deceit and deception.  Throughout the galaxy there were other people that used the Force, called it other names.  But the division in how it was used was always there, because that is the nature of the Force.  That is to say, the Jedi and Sith were not formed as an opinion as to how things should be.  They are the natural consequence of how things are - and everyone that tried to deny it eventually understood the hard way why things had to be that way.

There is a logic to all of that and this is the problem with TLJ.  It confidently posits that Kylo Ren discovered that you can just shove history (like the EU) in the dustbin and start from scratch.  It confidently posits that Luke would have gone through the simple thought exercise above and come to the same conclusion.  That history just an old book full of mistakes that were made. That the past is an anchor weighing you down.    Kylo is supposedly the first person in the "10,000 generations of Jedi" to think that we can move past from the past and towards a future that has no connnection to the past.  And Luke happened to become the character that sees the past the same way.  It confidently posits that if you let the Jedi and the Sith die, and then fast forwarded 1,000 years you wouldn't just have an order of warrior-monks called the Bopy who zealously followed the North teachings of the Gift and the shadowy Diru who maniacally followed the South teachings of the Gift.

But there are only two types of people who believe that the past is full of ignoramuses, that this all could have been avoided, and that they know better.  The first are the people who have no knowledge of the past.  And the second are they people who do know the past but don't want to admit that the past has power over them - they see the past as a prison that they try to escape from.  Rian Johnson - in trying to reconceptualize the entire Star Wars paradigm - is willfully the first type of person and Kylo, as a character battling his own identity and his misgivings of the path he's chosen, is the second.  Luke is conveniently characterized as a person that has lost faith in the Jedi when he was literally the New Hope for the Galaxy and redeemed the Jedi's biggest failure.

Then Yoda appears and, in the most confusing scene in the movie, tells Luke that the past is supposed to be a teacher that you learn from and improve upon rather that a post-mortem of mistakes (a lesson that one would think Luke learned quite pointedly from the example of his own father)...before literally burning the past to the ground.   Luke who by all accounts is hoping and expecting to be the Last Jedi, is for some reason pained that the Books are being destroyed...even when the end of the Jedi is his endgame?!?

And for all Kylo's advocacy for letting the past die and killing it if need be, where do we find them at the end of the movie?  Negotiating a truce with his master...walking peaceably away?  No - he chopped him in half, just like a good Sith would.  Rey choosing to confront and kill Kylo rather than saving her friends?  No, her love for the Resistance was greater than any hate she feels towards Kylo for threatening them - like a good Jedi.  Even by the end of the movie you have to ask - what's changed other than Luke and Snoke being gone?

It's a good movie.  At times thoughtful, at times daring and in every moment extremely confident.  If you never read something about Star Wars before, it would strike you as really provocative, especially if you had misgivings of the 'crazy, laser-sword wielding, warrior-monk sect that steals children from their families'.  

But to anyone that has any history with the EU and the work that had gone before to flesh out the Force, it's a textbook case of someone coming late to the party and suggesting that they know better.  That we can get to space in a hot air balloon.  Kepler and Newton and all those who created math for orbital mechanics didn't do so because they hadn't thought of hot air balloons.  They did all that because they knew hot air balloons wouldn't get it done.  Orbital mechanics might be hard to understand but if you want to go to space, the hardest work or all - creating the math in the first place - has already been done for you.  Unfortunately Disney threw out all that work and is offering hot air balloon rides to space but plenty of us know that hot air balloons don't make any sense in this context.  It's not so much gatekeeping as it is...well, this new thing that RJ made isn't as thoughtful as what has already been done.

Probably a moot point now though, as Star Wars appears to exists only to sell merchandise.

#snydercut: #marvel's vindication

1) Is this 4 hour movie supposed to convince us that the DCEU wasn't rushed? That it wasn't a crass and cynical attempt to cash in on the ancillary market benefits of the superhero genre as patiently crafted and honed through the unlikely and immensely risky efforts of Marvel Studios and their cache of B-C tier superheroes, made mainstream through a ten year dedication to the creation of some really well produced motion pictures?  Are we supposed to pat HBO Max or Warner or Zack Snyder on the back now?   If you need a 4 hour movie to make it all come together then maybe what you actually needed was at least two more 2 hour movies before your narrative could properly make a Justice League movie.  Just saying...

2) To all the people saying that #snydercut is some kind of vindication of the integrity of the artistic process (sidebar: HA HA HA HA HA HA HA), I guess i have two simple questions.  The first - if Zack Snyder was forced to take the 7 hours of film he had and make a 2 hour movie, would that movie be significantly better than the Joss-tice League?  And the second, if Joss Whedon had the freedom to take those same 7 hours and make a 4 hour movie, would that movie be significantly worse than Zack Snyder's Justice League?  I don't think anyone in the world can convince me that the answer to either of those questions isn't no.

3) Why are people fighting over Zack Snyder's artistic vision when DC/Warner are going to drop it at the very first opportunity to reboot it all and make the money all over again?  It's not like the Snyderverse was in the running to still be chugging along 10 years from now like the MCU.  He made a Justice League movie before Flash and Cyborg (to say nothing of Lantern or Martian Manhunter or Hawkgirl) were even committed to film.  It was always going to be, at most, something to squeeze dry.  It was going to run its course, make some money, and then Warner would try something new and different...the way they have with literally everything else.  Christopher Nolan made perhaps the greatest film with any of these characters, The Dark Knight.  Did Warner use that artistic and commercial success and spin-off a universe of characters from that world?  Did they slowly and methodically do the work of taking Nolan's grounded, hyperrealistic vision and weave increasingly fantastical elements until they had something that was both gritty and bombastic?  Did they interweave the fate of Gotham with some international intrigue that led Bruce to Lex Luthor in Metropolis bringing him into an uneasy alliance with the Man of Steel?  No, they dropped it and everything in it, every character, every story beat, every detail.  Cleared the slate to fill the board with something...better?  Comparing the MCU to the DCEU is literally the same as comparing the Disney animation library with...everyone else.  Disney has been doing it non-stop since 1937.  Everyone else is just a tourist visiting a place that Disney lives.  

The MCU builds on concrete; the DCEU builds on sand.  

4) How can people wonder why the MCU has so much good will?  Quick: Over-under on how many actors will play Superman on screen again before I die?  Over-under on how many actors besides Robert Downey Jr will play Tony Stark on screen before I die?  Can you imagine Marvel rebooting Iron Man?  Captain America?  The idea is ludicrous.  Marvel has put in the work and has the faith that they can make an Ant-Man movie sell tickets.  But Warner doesn't believe that they can make a Captain Atom movie that will sell.  To quote Thanos, the Warner/DC executives see the world as it is instead of what it could be.  And because they don't have that faith, they don't put in the work and because they don't put in the work, their faith will never be rewarded. So get ready to see Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman rebooted for the Nth time before you'll ever see a Black Canary movie, which incidently in a perfect world, would be a million times more bankable of an idea than a Black Widow movie.  But Disney is going to make money off of Black Widow that Warner will never make off of Black Canary because 1) they got a great actress in Scarlett Johansson to play the part and 2) they were ballsy enough to put the character in like 6 movies more than Black Canary will probably ever be in.

The MCU is an avalanche gaining momentum downhill.  The DCEU is a snowball melting in the sun.

5)  The first appointment TV series of my life was Batman The Animated Series.  The second was X-Men The Animated Series.  If you missed a new episode, you basically didn't exist in school until you saw it.  You were on the outside while everyone else was talking about it.  

DC has the braintrust to do what Marvel did.  But somewhere there is a disconnect between the creative side, the adaptation side and the bottom line people.  Marvel has put together a bunch of visionary directors; DC settles for one visionary director and chooses, of all people, Zack Snyder.  And that's not to say that Zack Snyder isn't one of a kind.  He is.  But what is the movie that someone would point to to say that Zack Snyder should be personally responsible for 7 hours of filmaking in the DCEU alone?  What has Zack Snyder done to earn a 4 hour movie?  I wouldn't personally sit for 4 hours through a Spielberg movie.  Maybe Hitchcock, maybe Kubrick...But Zack Snyder?

Between CA: Winter Soldier, CA: Civil War and the momentous task of ending the 10 year MCU run to this point, the Russo brothers had obviously earned as much runtime as they needed to make the final Avengers movie.  And they wisely broke their narrative into two parts.  Infinity War and Endgame could have been one 5 hour movie.  But, umm, they have some sense in their heads???  They had every excuse to make Endgame some uber-long epic a la the Return of the King extended cut.  Their movie was exactly ONE HOUR shorter than Zack Snyder's 'masterpiece'.  So one film maker makes a good Superman film, and a mess of a crossover film and gets 4 hours for his next film.  The others make two absolutely kick-ass movies and then decide to break up their swan-song into two parts and they barely crack the 3 hour mark.  How does any of this add up?

Too unjustified, too unearned.  Too convoluted, too audacious for too little setup.  Imagine putting a vision of the future and a time travelling visitor from the future in the same scene.  Zack Snyder actually put his Knightmare foreshadowing right next to the Flashpoint omen in a movie introducing Ben Affleck as Batman.  But was there a Flash movie at that point in the narrative for any of that to make any semblance of sense?  No - they just expected you to stick around for there to be some eventual payoff.  Was that a safe assumption?  Was that a reasonable assumption?  Or, was the movie with the Knightmare scene as a plot element actually being made at the same time as BVS so that you could at least say - "well the movie where this happens is going to be released one way or another"?  Since the odds are pretty much against that Knightmare storyline ever coming to pass, the answer is a resounding no.  So it wasn't a safe or reasonable assumption that there would be a payoff to that scene AND putting that scene in the movie materially decreased the chances that the movie it was in would be good enough to make that storyline a reality.   If, for whatever reason, people are watching BVS 50 years from now, they'll just be like, 'why is this in the movie?"

Contrast this with Nick Fury's appearance at the end of Iron Man.  In an after-credits scene.  If Avengers happens, great.  If it doesn't and the entire MCU falls apart, it was in an after-credits scene.  The movie it was in is affected in no way whatsoever.  

6) There has to be standards.  These things aren't all created equally.  100 years from now, when people have 10 decades worth of more stuff to watch, people will still be watching Batman the Animated Series.   Will they still be watching The Batman with Robert Pattinson when there will almost definitely be 10-15 other motion picture reboots of Batman between now and then to choose from?  The movie hasn't even been released yet but I'm pretty sure the answer is no.  It will be like one of the 40 or so Zorro movies that have been made - none of them saying anything all that different, so if you were going to sit down and watch any of them, you'd likely only look at the highest rated one and the most recent one.  All the others are just cannon fodder: soulless cash grabs to exploit a property license for the sole purpose of lining a studio's pocketbooks.

We fanboys get wrapped up in Marvel vs DC and all the rest of the nonsense.  But we need to take a step back and look at these properties from a more broad lens.  Someone wrote the story of Hercules and you have to bet that someone wrote the story of someone just like Hercules.  Why do we know Hercules but not that other guy?  It is because for something to last it has to meet certain expectations.  And we who love these stories and characters have to expect and demand enduring iterations of these characters, that speak to comic books lovers but also have a place in the overall storytelling heritage of this species.  Stories that build on each other.  Films with certain timeless qualities with some dimension compelling enough to be captivating to someone seeing it at age 5 or age 50.   And a pretty easy way to tell is: will people 100 years from now still watch this?  If the answer is no, we shouldn't be fighting over it, defending it or trying to save it.  We should just be demanding for something that people will be bothering to watch a century from now.

I'm pretty sure people will be watching the MCU a century from now the same way we still watch Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs 83 years later.  But if someone thinks people will be watching the Snyder Cut a hundred years from now and can say that with a straight face, I'd love to have whatever that person is smoking.