Star Wars, Star Trek and other Sci-Fi

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Archibald said:
Lol is that a provocative joke
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Very much no.
I grew up with the Prequels, and they defined Star Wars for me. AOTC was my first Star Wars movie, and boy was it awesome.
I am quite confident, unfortunately, that the giant pile of excrement that is the Sequel Trilogy will be beloved by many children, who will sing the praises of that... thing for decades to come.

The Prequels have far superior worldbuilding to the OT - the CGI allows for bigger and better sets, for one - and the story of the downfall of the Galactic Republic through centrifugal pressures, total war, and the massive centralization of power inherent in militarized societies is a masterpiece. Very few franchises have executed such a grand, almost historical story so well.

AOTC shows off a vast swathe of the Galaxy - from the bustle of Coruscant to idyllic Naboo to the vast industrial plants of Geonosis to the wastes of Tatooine, and the step-by-step thread-unravelling arc Obi-Wan gets storytells reasonably. The rings of Geonosis - and yes, you can get these kinds of particle densities in planetary rings - pay penance for the ludicrously unscientific asteroid fields of Hoth. The Battle of Geonosis may be a giant brawl, but the vast array of military equipment on display blew young minds.

AOTCs primary failure is a lack of Senate scenes. It takes place during a major militarized crisis with sky-high tensions, and yet fails to display a sense of crisis throughout the movie. A summit meeting - ending ignomiously in threats and shouting if need be - between Palpatine and Dooku would have been just the ticket. It's the gosh-darned Cuban Missile Crisis. Have people look scared.

ROTS nearly edges it out, but AOTC shows off more of the galaxy, while ROTS is laser-focused on the war, the Jedi, and the combatants, with the civilians in the background. The OT, taking place in the sparsely populated expanse of the Outer Rim, is too... desolate.
 
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1635yankee said:
Orionblamblam said:
Flyaway said:
And I wish for the day when people online could review shows without bringing politics into it.
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There is a simple solution to that: shows stop bringing politics into it. Specifically, *bad* politics.
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Of course, "bad" politics is any politics one disagrees with.
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Depends. As pointed out, it's also unnecessarily inserted irrelevant politics intended to annoy a large fraction of your customer base.
 
Very much no.
I grew up with the Prequels, and they defined Star Wars for me. AOTC was my first Star Wars movie, and boy was it awesome.
I am quite confident, unfortunately, that the giant pile of excrement that is the Sequel Trilogy will be beloved by many children, who will sing the praises of that... thing for decades to come.
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I see your point, and it's quite interesting. Which year are you born ? I'm from 1982.
As such, I grew up... right between the two trilogies, was 17 when Phantom menace came out.

I could spoof your message to the word, except with different trilogies, exactly this way

Don't take it as a personal attack: it just amuses me our feelings are similar, except for different trilogies). Basically your feelings about the third, present trilogy are my personal feelings about the SECOND one.

"I grew up with the FIRST trilogy, and they defined Star Wars for me. They were was my first Star Wars movies, and boy were they awesome.

I am quite confident, unfortunately, that the giant pile of excrement that is the second trilogy (from the 1990's-2000's) will be beloved by many children, who will sing the praises of that... thing for decades to come."

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Seriously, Jar-Jar Binks really sucks. And I'm not saying that as an nostalgic of the first trilogy nor a Star wars fan.
It doesn't take being a fan or a movie rat to say "Jar Jar sucks". What I intensely disliked is being considered a dumbarse, because nostalgia.

BB-8 pissed me because (just like Jar Jar back in the day) it was a pathetic atempt at masking the movies / scenario ineptitude by apealing to fan nostalgia and thus indulgence. This attitude I just can't stand it. F*ck Disney there. And f*ck 1999 George Lucas for Jar Jar.
 
GTX said:
Orionblamblam said:
it's also unnecessarily inserted irrelevant politics intended to annoy a large fraction of your customer base.
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That's just a ridiculous statement.
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Is it your contention that setting out to annoy your established fanbase is a *good* idea? If the management of the Secret Projects Forum decided that the right thing to do was add flashing lights and high volume screeching noises to the page and change the font color to red and the background color to a slightly different red, to invert all images and superimpose a watermark of the Joker on each of them, all in an effort to subvert expectations... would that be a *good* idea?

Hell, it can be argued that the NASA tech report server was mutilated back in 2012 not for any really practical purpose, but to annoy those who used it. Was that a good decision?
 
My contention is that no business (which really is all that a film/TV company is) sets out to deliberately annoy a large fraction of their customer base. To argue otherwise is ridiculous.
 
Archibald said:
BB-8 pissed me because (just like Jar Jar back in the day) it was a pathetic atempt at masking the movies / scenario ineptitude by apealing to fan nostalgia and thus indulgence. This attitude I just can't stand it. F*ck Disney there. And f*ck 1999 George Lucas for Jar Jar.
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Well, I must point out that it took Lucas just one movie to realize the mistake, and reduce Jar Jar to cameo roles)
 
GTX said:
My contention is that no business (which really is all that a film/TV company is) sets out to deliberately annoy a large fraction of their customer base.
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Counterpoint: Force Awakens/Last Jedi. Ghostbusters 2016. Recent Doctor Who. Many, MANY Marvel comic titles. A common theme is "that character you grew up with, loved, and saw as an inspiration? Here, we'll make him into a coward/scumbag, absent father, idiot, whatever in an effort to make new fans love the new characters we're introducing in order to replace the old ones."

The goal seems to be that by annoying the old customers, they'll attract new ones. It's a dubious approach, but it's not ridiculous to point out that it's happening.
 
That is simply your reaction. I stand by the position that no business sets out to deliberately annoy a large fraction of their customer base.
 
GTX said:
That is simply your reaction. I stand by the position that no business sets out to deliberately annoy a large fraction of their customer base.
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It was not simply *my* reaction. It was the reaction of a large fraction of the fanbases. It was the reaction *multiple* *times* as companies repeated the same process time and again. One time could be a mistake. Two times? Three? By the time someone decided to staff STD and STP with writers who didn't understand science fiction and didn't like - or even know - Star Trek, it was clear that they knew what they were doing.
 
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Arjen said:
*You* didn't like it.
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I was hardly alone.

*They* were making a buck.
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Were they? Star Wars movies collapsed in value, to the point that by the time of Solo they were *losing* money, and plans for moving forward with a vast array of other Star Wars films has been slashed to... well, little to nothing, and long delayed. Ghostbusters 2016 lost money. STD and STP are reportedly major losers. Marvel comics are now printed in *tiny* numbers compared to just a decade or two ago. Cowboy Bebop got cancelled in less than *three* *weeks.*

Clearly *somebody* was making a buck, but not the franchises as a whole.
 
GTX said:
That is simply your reaction. I stand by the position that no business sets out to deliberately annoy a large fraction of their customer base.
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While not completely, I lean more toward the Orionblamblam position. History have enormous numbers of examples, where fatal, self-harming strategy was repeated again and again, just because it was such a neat idea on paper, and proponents assured their superiors that they took all previous mistakes into account. You should make a difference between actual business and marketology; the business is about making money. The marketology is about selling strategies "how to make more money" to the business. They aren't exactly the single entity.
 
Solo is the only SW movie that didn't turn a profit.
 
GTX said:
Orionblamblam said:

Were they? Star Wars movies collapsed in value, to the point that by the time of Solo they were *losing* money,
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Go check your facts...
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Force Awakens made about $936 million domestic. Last Jedi, about $620 million domestic, Rise of Skywalker, $515 million domestic. Made more overseas, but much less of that counts as profit for the company. All of these movies turned a profit (a *good* profit by rational metrics), but the profit margin got slimmer each time. "Solo," however, made $213 million domestic, $179 million overseas, on a budget of $275 million. the general math is a movie needs to make twice the budget to turn a profit, or $550 million. By that simple metric the movie tanked, losing about $120 million.

Disney had plans for a *lot* of Star Wars movies. A Boba Fett flick, Obi Wan, a Rian Johnson trilogy, a trilogy by the showrunners of game of thrones. Disney had planned to release a "trilogy" movie every other year, with a "spinoff" movie in the intermediate years. Disney had planned on this being the state of affairs *forever.*
 
So they made a buck? That was the point. Nothing about annoying the fan base as a KPI.
 
Arjen said:
So they made a buck? That was the point. Nothing about annoying the fan base as a KPI.
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Yes, they made a buck. They made less bucks as time went on and the fanbase got increasingly annoyed. Their plan was to made half a billion a year in profit. Now they're making nothing.

Imagine if, rather than antagonizing the fanbase, they had made *good* Star Wars movies. Disney would be *rolling* in annual Star Wars cash infusions. The popularity of "Mandalorian" shows that there is still a whole lot of interest in *good* Star Wars. Disney of course has several other Star Wars TV series in works, including Boba Fett and Obi Wan, carry-overs from their failed Movie efforts. They had *more* TV series in works; there was considerable interest in "Rangers of the New Republic," but that got cancelled. The cancellation of *that* seems to have been another attempt to annoy a large fraction of the fanbase, those who were fond of Gina Corano and/or her character, since there was no logical reason for Disney firing her.
 
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The bottom line: billions and billions in merchandise.
 
Ralph McQuarrie with his own take on Christmas...
 

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Arjen said:
The bottom line: billions and billions in merchandise.
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In the *past.* Remember just before "Force Awakens" came out, and Disney released all the spiffy new Star Wars merchandice on one day (called "Force Friday")? I visited the local WalMart that day. It was a madhouse akin to the old Cabbage Patch days. By the time "Rise of Skywalker" came out, though, they didn't bother to anywhere near the same degree, because nobody was buying that stuff. There are a bajillion videos on YouTube showing mountains of unsold Rose Tico figures from "Last Jedi." When Force Awakens and Rogue One came out, the licensees cranked out a bunch of toy spaceships. Some were released for Last Jedi; none for Rise of Skywalker.Star Wars without toy spaceships? It's like taking crazypills.

In the last year or so, Baby Yoda and The Mandalorian helped turn things around a bit for Star Wars, but those sales are still nothing like the glory days of when the fandom gave a crap about new movies... of which there are none.
 
Rhinocrates said:
my commentary on where this thread has gone.
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Ah. You're appreciating that the thread is providing useful information and context that could be used by any producers of science fiction movies or TV series to improve their product and help avoid the pitfalls that have damaged IPs like Star Trek and Star Wars.
 
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Orionblamblam said:
Rhinocrates said:
my commentary on where this thread has gone.
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Ah. You're appreciating that the thread is providing useful information and context that could be used by any producers of science fiction movies or TV series to improve their product and help avoid the pitfalls that have damaged IPs like Star Trek and Star Wars.
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But it is also true that opposing points have been made, counterpoints too, and we are back at the start again.
 
A winter, but not Christmas themed cover by Frank Kelly Freas.

And a 1999 review of the story which contains one line well worth reading since it explains just what has gone wrong of late.

...the basic premise of The City Machine could be the stuff of which melodrama is made, Trimble is a good enough author to avoid the most obvious of pitfalls by structuring and executing his tale as strict escapist action-adventure, rather than as self-important message-mongering.
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https://sff180.com/reviews/t/trimble/city_machine.html
 

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Graham1973 said:
A winter, but not Christmas themed cover by Frank Kelly Freas.

And a 1999 review of the story which contains one line well worth reading since it explains just what has gone wrong of late.

...the basic premise of The City Machine could be the stuff of which melodrama is made, Trimble is a good enough author to avoid the most obvious of pitfalls by structuring and executing his tale as strict escapist action-adventure, rather than as self-important message-mongering.
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https://sff180.com/reviews/t/trimble/city_machine.html
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Even if one doesn't get bothered by particular political messaging, this review of Discovery nails its failings for me:

www.avclub.com

Star Trek: Discovery heads into the void and finds cause for alarm

A dangerous nullity, an unneeded confession, and an A.I. with heart make for an awkward episode
www.avclub.com www.avclub.com

To wit:

for a show that’s so relentlessly fixated on foregrounding the internal lives of its ensemble, it’s weird that no one on Discovery besides Saru seems to have matured past mid-adolescence... one of my routine complaints is the ship’s complete lack of an on-duty counselor; here, though, we get nothing but counseling, and yet it seems to do little more than regurgitate the same problems week after week...

a diverse cast flies through time and space just to find slightly different ways to talk about themselves...

It’s healthy and good to treat the feelings of others and yourself with respect, but has no one in the future ever heard of “a time and place for everything?” Some basic professionalism in the face of planet-destroying catastrophes, that’s all I’m asking for...

Part of the reason that “giant eye” visual is so cool is that it managed to instill something that nearly four years of the show has only occasionally stumbled upon: a legitimate sense of awe. But the awe is fleeting, especially when it comes with the knowledge that regardless of whatever else we learn about the DMA this season, the solution is inevitably going to have something to do with “love.”

It's the last that sums it up for me. There is the possibility, indeed the dramatic obligation to produce awe, but it's buried under trivialisation, anthropomorphism, navel-gazing, and saccharine affirmations.
 
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