fevered.earth

  • Better Thors Aren’t Possible

    Spoilers, in every sense.

    Gorr was right.

    I had something of a moment watching Thor: Love and Thunder, and it wasn’t in reaction to any of the gags or tonal shifts that have enraged other reviewers and commentators. I have no particular distaste for the screaming goats, or the musical cues, or the subplot about Natalie Portman’s character’s illness. They’re all fine, occasionally humourous elements of what is ultimately a comedy film, and if they’re let down it’s by ropey, undercooked visual effects and a crushingly conservative edit that takes away much of the time in which an audience might laugh. There was a point in the film though that brought my objection into sharp focus, and I would like to describe it to you.

    Following along with the aforementioned plot concerning Natalie Portman’s character, Jane Porter, we see Jane learn that she has a fatal prognosis and turn to the mysticism of Thor’s hammer to escape from her certain fate. This fails, however, and Porter continues to suffer after reuniting with Thor himself and coming along to face off against Christian Bale’s villain, Gorr. Portman is taken to the “New Asgard Infirmary”, the local medical unit for the relocated Asgardians of Avengers: Endgame, which we assume will be able to take a knowledgable eye to Porter’s condition. Sadly they have little insight other than to inform the audience that if Porter continues to use the hammer, she will perish. Porter bravely sacrifices herself thus in the climax, earning a place in Valhalla.

    Portman does a good job despite, well, most things.

    Hence follows a brief gag in which Thor — unfamiliar with the concept of a vending machine — steals some snacks to give Porter. The machine is located outside of Porter’s room and is a standard glass-front vending machine showing an array of items in rows and columns, with prices and a coin slot. The provenance of the machine, though obvious, is conveyed through branding on the glass: “New Asgard Infirmary”.

    This small detail displaced something inside me. The idea that the magic hospital of the gods charges you for a bag of crisps is so unfathomably depressing that it thrust me back down to earth like a reforged flying hammer. That Jane Porter, given her diagnosis of magic space hammer sickness, would nonetheless have to pay two dollars twenty five for a Diet Coke is a joke on another plane of existence to anything else in Thor: Love and Thunder.

    And that’s the moment it dawned on me: nobody in this film believes anything at all.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ct6A-Oggujc

    A scene early on in the film that has received some criticism but mostly bafflement is the one in which Valkyrie, as King of Asgard, attends the opening of a chain Thanos-themed ice cream parlour. Much has been made of the idea that the people of earth would want to joke about a traumatic event in which half the population were briefly believed dead, or whether the image of Thano’s gauntlet would have such penetration in a world in which he was a spectral villain who committed a great evil and not the motion-captured star of a major motion picture. So far as I am aware no Mayor of New York ever attended the opening of an Osama Bin Laden Pizzeria, though I may be mistaken.

    It’s not the Thanos-themed ice cream that I find most grotesque in this sequence though. More distressing is the spectacle of the King of Asgard reduced to commercial endorsements: Valkyrie was raised to the position formerly held by Odin himself at the end of Avengers: Endgame, a slovenly Thor not considering himself worthy of the role. King Valkyrie was supposed to be worthy of leading Asgard — worthiness being a major concern of Thor films until that point — and her leadership would restore Asgard to some semblance of glory in exile. In this sequel we first see her cutting the ribbon on a theme park concession.

    This is a real-life news report on the fictional ice cream shop.

    Asgard in the previous movies was a city of the gods, a heavenly utopia in which immortal beings considered the cosmos. I don’t want to suggest by any means that this should mean they can’t be mocked or made fun of, but there’s something fundamentally perverse about having them appear in this film completely subsumed into a capitalist existence. King Valkyrie has, fundamentally, failed. The film can only gloss this over because Disney films are the only media in existence which do not consider being transformed into a Disney version of your own history to be a living nightmare.

    And that’s what New Asgard is — a fixed, calcified history of itself, the Disney cruise ships lurking ominously in the background of the establishing shot. The monument to Thor’s ruined hammer an open-air Tower of London Crown Jewels exhibit. Valkyrie appears in the advert linked above prowling the streets for petty criminals, a King who has become little more than a street warden. It’s not that we should revere the provisionally imperialist, revanchist state that Odin oversaw in Thors 1 & 2, but to see not just the governance but the culture scrubbed clean like this is halting.

    The people of New Asgard have completely foreclosed not only on restoring any semblance of their own society, but on any semblance of a society better than that of Earth — of ‘Midgard’. The society in which Thor’s mother once passed away on a luxurious wooden bed surrounded by silks being waited on hand and foot can no longer even provide a complementary bag of crisps in the hospital waiting room. And they aren’t even unhappy about it — they aren’t unhappy about anything.

    Gorr is visually compelling, even if there’s some suspicion that all those shadows are hiding some dubious renders.

    The children of Asgard are stolen, and Thor traces their theft to a white-cloaked man called Gorr the God-Killer. Gorr, as we see in the pre-credits sequence, is a man who has suffered a personal tragedy at the hands of his God, a stocky bearded man who would rather cavort with nymphs than rescue a man’s dying child. Gorr takes up a magical blade and kills him, beginning a crusade of assassinations against all Gods that culminates in using the children of Asgard as a lure to secure Thor’s help in using a thematically repetitive wishing device at the centre of the universe to finish the Gods off once and for all. This is the central conflict of the film, and the problem is that Gorr is unequivocally right.

    The Gods as depicted in this film are capricious, indulgent lordlings, the picture of feudal sloth. Thor visits the City of the Gods, a second Asgard, where he witnesses Zeus engage in tedious despotic displays of self-aggrandisation to a bored audience. Asking for assistance in retrieving his missing children, Zeus cruelly and selfishly dismisses Thor, who with his companions fights his way out of the council chamber (a visual callback to the Star Wars prequels, with Zeus in place of Palpatine, no less). As a parting blow to the puffed-up imbecilic overlord Zeus, Thor uses a lightning bolt to shoot him through the heart. Zeus falls, dead, from his carriage — he later appears alive again in a post-credit scene, apparently to scrub Thor’s conscience for those of us worried about his immortal soul.

    Zeus, shortly before being righteously gunned down. Mas Amedda just out of shot.

    Gorr is correct about the Gods, and Thor agrees with him. They are both at this point God-Killers, dismayed with the corruption of a treasured institution. Fundamentally they do not disagree. They could team up; unique among the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s villains, Gorr does not go out of his way to reinforce his evil credentials, beyond some half-hearted child-menacing. Surely he could be persuaded, or redeemed, or fully embraced. Could the suffering peasant take his place in the reformed city of the gods-on-earth, in New Asgard? He cannot. Gorr dies, death being the penalty for his belief. The ‘necro-sword’ that embodies the idea that a man might slay a god is — conveniently — corrosive and fatal to those that wield it. We may eschew the sword entirely: believing in an idea is corrosive and fatal in the world of Love and Thunder. All we can hope to achieve is looking cool and kicking ass and impressing our dying ex-girlfriend. Thor adopts Gorr’s daughter, granted life by Gorr’s dying wish, and teaches her the vague interventionist values he lives by — without ever changing anything.

    In the final post-credits scene, Jane Foster reaches the Halls of Valhalla, where the greatest heroes who fell in battle live on. Foster and Gorr suffer identical deaths. Foster is present, the Gorr is not. Valhalla doesn’t really believe in the cosmic resonance of individual valour — it’s just a place some people end up.

    You could continue in this vein; the people Thor assists with the help of the Guardians of the Galaxy at the start of the film see Thor destroy, through carelessness, their greatest city and holy site, but they don’t really care. They still like him. They didn’t really believe in it at all.

    What Thor chases throughout the film is meaning, but meaning is never located in actually achieving anything. Meaning is friends, family, love. Thor can tell Jane how he feels but he cannot save her. He cannot really even try.

    The political theorist Mark Fisher described his concept of ‘capitalist realism’ as “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible to even imagine a coherent alternative to it”. It is obviously too much to expect Thor: Love and Thunder to dis-spell capitalist realism for us. It is likely too much to expect for Thor: Love and Thunder to even mildly critique capitalist realism for us. But it could offer us crumbs of idealism. It could offer us a free bag of crisps. It could offer us a paradise on earth that isn’t framed by cruise ships. It does not.

    If you like my writing, please subscribe to me here on Medium or to my Letterboxd reviews or watch Sixteen attempts to talk to you about ‘Suicide Squad’, available on Youtube now. Previously I watched and wrote-up season 1 of ‘Obi-wan’, in regular order.

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  • Obi-wan (The Phantom Menace)

    Last time we tied up the Obi-wan series, pensive about the ways in which the new era differs from the old.

    Prequels are a fraught business; expectations are high and the scope for delivering surprises low. Further still, this is no regular prequel, this is The Prequel, the definite article. Star Wars: Episode 1: The Phantom Menace. It’s where we finally get to see where the Obi-wan Kenobi of A New Hope came from, with his vague anecdotes about the Clone Wars and folksy commitment to an ancient monastic order. Crucially intertwined too, the story of Lord Vader, the impassive man behind the mask — the war hero who became the Emperor’s right-hand man. Finally, the enigmatic story of Padme, mother to Luke and Leia, absent entirely from the original trilogy.

    Now as well, this is where we get to see the where the title character of Disney+’s Obi-wan came from. The origin for his principled non-intervention and familiarity with child sidekicks. And the origin of the pained, murderous Vader of that series and his red hot hatred of the noble Jedi Knights. The spectral figure of Leia’s mother, described to Leia as “wise, discerning, kindhearted” which really seem to be burying the lede even for this film.

    Finally, although there isn’t the space here to really dig into it, this is the film that crafts fully half of what we consider Star Wars aesthetic, and it looks really great. So much thoughtful design by so many artists went into creating a film that looks unmistakably Star Wars while throwing out an endless succession of new designs.

    The senate chamber is a particular triumph.

    What is first and most noticeable about The Phantom Menace is that it is a story about slaves. It is bookended with snippets of high drama and action mostly taking place on Naboo, with some laser fights in space and sinister dealings in a humongous senate. The real story however sits squarely in the middle acts of the film, the tale of how young Anakin Skywalker, who will one day grow up to be Darth Vader, was once a starry-eyed slave child. The film makes no bones about this focus — encountering Anakin for the first time, Padme exclaims “you’re a slave?” and Anakin shoots back “I’m a person”.

    There is a dramatic structure entirely local to Anakin’s story. You could make three episodes of Obi-wan out of it, were you inclined:

    • Episode 1, A mysterious cloaked man comes to town and meets Anakin, a precocious young engineer who works for a grumpy alien named Watto. Caught in a sandstorm, Anakin offers the man and his friends refuge, and realises that the man is a Jedi Knight.
    • Episode 2, the mysterious stranger enlists Anakin to race a pod competitively to win the parts to repair his ship — and the price to free Anakin from Watto. Against all odds, Anakin wins.
    • Episode 3, a freed Anakin must pack his things and leave his mother, facing up to the reality that his new friend cannot or will not end slavery on Tatooine. As they finally go to leave, the Jedi is attacked by a horned demon with a red laser sword and barely escapes. Anakin looks forward to his new life as a Jedi Knight, swearing to one day return and end slavery once and for all.
    The plight of the droids, a slave class to the slave class, is ever-present, from Padme thanking R2D2 to Anakin promising to have Shmi not sell C3P0.

    Anakin talks of little else other than his desire to free the slaves, to free his mother, to free himself. He transparently believes that becoming a Jedi will grant him the power to do this, even though the Jedi Order would never allow it. From the moment he catches glimpse of Qui-gon’s laser sword it’s clear that the idea has gripped him. Conversely Qui-gon is fascinated by Anakin, and Neeson does a good, subtle job of portraying him as a man being led on by his instincts against his logical judgement. He reluctantly probes Anakin’s abilities with his mother, he double checks himself by testing Anakin’s blood. Qui-gon wants to be absolutely certain in his supposition when he goes before the council to claim that Anakin is the ‘chosen one’, a myth regarding a figure who can bring balance to the force.

    Qui-gon is positively callous in his refusal to assist — telling Anakin’s mother outright: “I didn’t come here to free slaves”. He almost sounds like he’s trying to persuade himself. The force tells him one thing and his Jedi training tells him another; Qui-gon ultimately splits the difference and frees half the slaves, frees Anakin whose route to freedom while tricky is still catered for in the Jedi ideology. Freeing Anakin’s mother would mean contending with the Jedi council’s doctrine of non-attachment and separation, so for Qui-gon it’s ultimately easier to not think about it too hard. In the end he is crucially incapable of seeing slavery as an evil in and of itself worth destroying, and in this failure he dooms the Jedi order.

    The return of Qui-Gon.

    Qui-gon is an interesting figure from the perspective of the original trilogy: a new addition to the cast, unnamed beforehand, who is formative for all three of our trilogy of protagonists. He trains Obi-wan, teaches Padme to trust the will of the force, and inspires young Anakin. Crucially, he also fails all three: he cannot free Anakin’s mother, he hurriedly concludes Obi-wan’s training to take Anakin as an apprentice, and he abandons Padme once they reach Coruscant to the manipulations of Senator Palpatine. He’s positioned as the best of the Jedi — he is, after all, the one we’re given to follow for the bulk of this film, and the council are a bunch of old fuddy-duddies who can’t see the Sith Lord right under their noses. Qui-gon is our introduction to the functioning Jedi Knight.

    Our three protagonists grouped together at the end of the film, set under the gaze of the malevolent Chancellor Palpatine.

    Obi-wan’s dubious training is heavily hinted at in the final scenes of the movie, trapped as a forced observer behind a series of red force fields as he watches the sinister Darth Maul slay his tutor. Obi-wan’s rage on the death of Qui-gon is non-too-subtly coded as a reaction of the dark side, the red glow over his face making him a mirror of Maul. His stance behind the force field, tense and anxious, recalls Maul more than it does the quiet meditation of Qui-gon. Somewhat interestingly, Obi-wan’s defeat of Maul is echoed in the final conflict of the Obi-wan series, as Kenobi is thrown by his opponent into a pit, which he is able to channel his intense emotions into vaulting out of.

    To some frustration, Qui-gon’s return in Obi-wan amounted to a cameo of a few incoherent sentences. It really would be fascinating to hear his ghostly perspective on how subsequent events to his death played out. The show was unwilling to provide them. Apparently he appears in the Lucas-governed animated series which I haven’t seen.

    Love that goofy puppet-mouth though, a good choice for a villain who is literally a puppet.

    Phantom Menace is not without flaws; it’s hard to begrudge someone finding the use of accents for the Trade Federationists distasteful. By all accounts Lucas was attempting to address the issue head-on by some dubious means during the design of the characters but the consensus since is definitely that polishing specific cultural indicators off your Fu Manchu villains does not liberate them from being Fu Manchu villains. I found it easier to digest Watto, the slaver who seems to barely live better than his slaves. Watto always struck me as more of a hard-nosed New York guy stereotype than anything else, like Bob Hoskins playing Super Mario — but then I am hardly an appropriate judge to deliver this verdict.

    The “I’ve been wondering, what are midichlorians?” conversation is a notable clunker, dialogue-wise. It has the feeling of a late addition, interjected to explicitly explain to audiences that the Jedi can measure the mechanical aspects of using the force via science. This is one of the most interesting and disruptive elements that the prequels wrote in over the top of the original films, making a mockery of Yoda’s airy pronunciation that we are all luminous beings, that the Jedi are a religion of universal spirituality— the Jedi Knights were cracking out the calipers when things got really serious.

    The elements of The Phantom Menace that have been much derided in years since the release of the film did not hugely bother me — Jake Lloyd is perfectly competent as child Anakin, certainly by reference to child Leia and child Luke from the Obi-wan series. He’s endearing and filled with childish glee. The ‘yippee’s are a bit much but hardly a cardinal sin. Jar-Jar similarly is a coherent component of the film as the cartoon rabbit who steps in the animal dung. No complaints.

    Surprised they never went back and re-rendered Jar-Jar with some more modern materials. He mostly looks acceptable with some occasional dips into ‘unconvincing’ but he’d be a good candidate for a special edition.

    The most notable reflection for Obi-wan in The Phantom Menace is the metamorphosis from a story concerned about general evils to a story concerned about a specific evil. Palpatine announces to Padme that “the Republic is not what it once was,” that the system that governed the galaxy has lost its power and its way, setting the stage for his ascension to the Supreme Chancellorship, and thereafter the Empire: The Empire is an answer for this chaos we see, manufactured though some of it is. Palpatine has manoeuvred the Trade Federation, to be sure, but the Senate’s inability to decisively resolve the conflict is authentic. Their inability to tackle slavery on Naboo is authentic. It is a failing government, and the Jedi are papering the cracks for it, pressed into the nakedly corrupt position of being sent out as the Supreme Chancellor’s enforcers at the start of the film.

    Obi-wan’s focus on the Empire as a state oppressing the Jedi is completely alien to this film. It is unthinkable. An untrained Jedi child is no more threat to the Empire than is Sebulba — Anakin’s force sensitivity could easily be left to rot on the vine to no large calamity, and the possibility of doing so is seriously considered by all involved. Being ‘force-sensitive’ is treated with all the awe of being found to be ‘maths-sensitive’, an advantage in many fields but really only an indicator of potential. The decision whether or not to train him is what will make the difference. This butts uncomfortably against Obi-wan’s ingrained notion of the Jedi identity, rescuing Jedi children, the rebellion helping prevent the Empire from rooting out unknowing Jedi. That story simply is not this story.

    The Empire, lurking.

    Furthermore The Empire itself, even here, is the Republic’s dirty secret. Qui-gon, Kenobi and Maul push from the picturesque halls of the Naboo palace into the back rooms and find the Empire waiting there for them, gleaming floors and bannister-free walkways aplenty. There is continuity between the gilding of the dying Republic and its Jedi enforcers and the Empire — and this first prequel is unconditional about this. When Anakin, defeated, tells Obi-wan that he is not responsible for creating Vader, Obi-wan has created the entire Empire, insofar as every Jedi created the entire Empire. To ‘rebel’ against it from this position is incoherent: the Rebellion should scorn all Jedis.

    Anakin ends the film in the traditional garb of the learner Jedi.

    Ranking, best to worst:

    1. The Phantom Menace
    2. Flashback recap of the prequel trilogy
    3. Obi-wan: Episode 5
    4. Obi-wan: Episode 3
    5. Obi-wan: Episode 1
    6. Obi-wan: Episode 6
    7. Obi-wan: Episode 4
    8. Obi-wan: Episode 2

    If you like my writing, please subscribe to my Letterboxd reviews or watch Sixteen attempts to talk to you about ‘Suicide Squad’, available on Youtube now. Previously I watched and wrote-up season 1 of ‘Invincible’, in reverse order.

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  • Obi-wan (Episode 6)

    Last time was unexpectedly pretty good.

    It’s a little murky but if you squint you might be able to make out the shape of a man whom wars are currently making great.

    Part 1: An episode

    Obi-wan S01E06 was a typical 50 minutes for the series — I cannot lie, I breathed a sigh of relief on seeing that the final episode was a mere 50 minutes and not the rumoured ‘feature-length 1h:30’. Some scattered highs, considerable lows, a show still struggling to make an impression now that it’s gone. Ewan McGregor gets little serious work here, and Hayden Christensen also is poorly served — sandwiched as well between more of the recurring phenomenon of “Video Game Boss Vader”. Incapable of talking in complete statements to his old friend and master, looming over a Sarlaac pit death screen, Vader announces that “You could never have defeated me”. Reload, Obi-wan!

    I don’t know why Watto is giving the tips. What does Watto know about laser sword combat.

    In this show Obi-wan and Vader have fought twice, in a flat quarry and in a rocky quarry, and while the thrill of the fact of it was enough to carry the scene the first time around, it’s just not enough to do so again.

    Everything is just so very careless. Having spent the entire season hiding his identity and location, Kenobi spends this epilogue flitting between planets in his incongruously large escape pod, stopping off for a chit-chat session with Leia and Jimmy Smits. Look, I know this is petty, but Jimmy Smits announces to the audience that “Dark times are ahead. The Empire grows ever bolder.” Now, excuse me fellow. Excuse me Jimmy. You’re an Imperial Senator at the Imperial Senate. You can be as rebellion-sympathetic as you like, but you’re still part of the Empire. Your struggle is a power struggle within the Empire that is ultimately resolved by the Emperor dissolving the body you work for — which he can do because it’s part of the empire he leads. It’s just the general weakness of the script that’s been evident the whole series long, but it’s particularly painful here in the denouement. Vader asks pointedly “Have you come here to destroy me, Obi-wan?” when he himself just landed in his ship.

    Reva’s plot wraps up here, a little pat in the resolution and not nearly enough made of the parallels to Vader she has following her injury in the previous episode. Give her an oxygen mask, General Grievous’s cough, anything. Reva’s story peaked last episode and this entire sequence, passable though it is, could have been replaced with a scene in which she stares long and hard at the hologram message she uncovered in the sand last time, then closes her eyes and puts it away. At least there’s no cheap death for the character who may as well have been the avatar of this show — full of promise and talent but more often than not reduced to saying “Hope you like pain!” to a child.

    Moses Ingram brought a modicum of intensity even to scenes that were completely ridiculous but in the end, I did not like pain.

    Bizarre that Owen has an about-face on letting Obi-wan interact with Luke, given everything. Owen and Beru doing their western homestead defence bit was pleasingly rough-and-ready though — taking a big metal pole to a lightsaber fight was neat. Again it would have been nice for Reva to be more of a mess here, to make their surviving the defence slightly more plausible.

    And, well, that’s a wrap on Obi-wan season 1. I’m happy with my assessment at Episode 4 that the series would not meet expectations, the very essence of ‘about to get good’ for almost the entirely of the six-episode run. Episode 5 was the obvious highlight for me, with seemingly the entire character arcs for both Vader and Reva packed in there and every other major sequence in the show a pale reflection of those ones. Would I recommend watching it? Only to the most committed Star Wars appreciator, but then those people will likely watch it anyway. It’s nice to see all the classic prequel actors back on screen, especially as they’re all very talented. But is that enough? Perhaps someone will edit a tight 1h:30 tele-movie out of Obi-wan that will trim the fat and shave the rough edges. Perhaps not though.

    Part 2: A prequel to A New Hope

    We could have had two victories by now, Obi-wan, if you could finish a job.

    The psychosexual desire to replace the prequels has long been noted by commentators. The fundamental thesis is that, corrupted by computers or sycophants or pure money, Lucas accidentally slipped on his ass and put out three entire films wrongly. And so when Lucas sold his golden child to Disney for uncountable megabucks, the idea started to be whispered in all the secret nooks and crannies where people discuss Star Wars in terrifying depth: What if they fix it?

    Obi-wan is now the third Disney-developed prequel to Star Wars, and it is safe to say that none of the three efforts (Rogue One and Solo: A Star Wars Story being the other two) have gone well or gone to plan. All three of these creations have been heavily edited late in the process, reformatted or had key figures drift in and out. But nonetheless, we now have three Disney prequels, which fill in the story that happened before the opening scenes of 1979’s A New Hope. We know what Han Solo was up too. We know what happened with the Death Star plans. And now we have seen the last time Obi-wan and Vader met… and it was to bicker in a rocky quarry and will-they-won’t-they over who gets to die. Whatever you think about his storytelling prowess, George Lucas had these characters clashing swords together over a lava-fall. In a grotesque metaphor for the events of the preceding film, their duel causes them to bump into a large button labelled “destroy society” that starts the process of plunging everything around them into fiery lava while they fight, oblivious.

    There is an obvious thematic content here to Anakin crawling his way out of the dirt with his mechanical hand. Vaders gets to return the favour in Obi-wan, burying Kenobi under a mountain of dirt. Kenobi bursts his way out in an explosion of love.

    In many ways the concerns of A New Hope are the concerns of Obi-wan. The venerable old master who gives up his life to save the nascent rebels would be recognisable to a viewer of the earlier film, given that Obi-wan tries to do little else here. Leia’s impassive reaction to his death less so. It’s easy to see the connection between Obi-wan learning here to put his faith in decent people across the galaxy and the potential of his young wards, and the character’s actions in A New Hope. It’s perhaps harder to understand Obi-wan’s statements, his commitment to spirituality, and his unceasingly misleading approach to Luke. Obi-wan isn’t spiritual here — he communes with the spirit of his dead master, but it’s almost slapstick, and perfunctory. The spirit of the ages is a force phone call.

    Obi-wan learns the power of love here, but he doesn’t understand the power of love in A New Hope or the subsequent two films. His position there is that of the master who is stuck in his ways, who does not believe in universal salvation, who Luke ultimately surpasses. So a viewer only having seen the original trilogy would be very confused, because the power of love can’t help you beat Vader in a duel because beating Vader in a duel isn’t the way to beat Vader. The show understood this as recently as episode 5, but fails it in the final clash. And on a fundamental level, as the great backstory to the two masters clashing for the last time, this is just… dull.

    This was a neat visual, but it’s extremely similar to what I noted as a neat visual in Episode 3. Were there always two duels in the script, one wonders?

    As a prequel to A New Hope, the best thing you can say about Obi-wan is that it casts into sharp relief the necessity of the Star Wars prequels as a project, to avoid this wishy-washy nonsense where the Jedis are an oppressed people and the Empire consists of all the bad people and the Rebellion all the good people. Trade disputes and all that might be boring but they anchor the story in a material reality rather than vague sentiment and gesture, and Obi-wan can only offer the latter: Young Leia in a tiny Leia outfit, cute as a button, ready to grow up into the character we know and love. Young Luke in a tiny Luke output, cute as a button, ready to grow up into the character we know and love. Obi-wan, inspired to great power by his hope for the next generation of heroes, unrecognisable to us.

    Part 3: A sequel to Revenge of the Sith

    Did this series have heroes on both sides? Was Reva heroic?

    Halfway through episode 6, Obi-wan has a vision in which he hears a montage of Anakin lines and Vader lines, a fascinating little vignette — not least because even the most poignant selection of Anakin lines can’t disguise the bratty nature of his character, which is quite funny. It’s a marker though of the surfacing of the prequels into the Obi-wan series, which are ostensibly committed to the new-old aesthetic of Rogue One and Solo, a glossier overpaint of the aesthetic of the original three films.

    McGregor’s Obi-wan though is an invention of the prequels —only one ‘Hello there’ is a meme, after all — as is Christensen’s Vader. And so what we perhaps get is a ‘new New Hope’, a sequel that picks up where Revenge of the Sith left off: Kenobi in hiding, Vader ascendent, children split up and hidden. And those are the concerns of Obi-wan, Reva even falling neatly into the prequel series mandate of a single new Sith villain to encounter and contend with on each outing.

    So what would someone get if they watched a prequel quadrilogy that climaxed with Obi-wan? The impression, perhaps, that Vader and Kenobi are trapped in a stalemate, doomed to meet and fight inconclusively time and again, unable to kill each other due to their deep abiding connection. “You were my brother, Anakin!” Obi-wan yelled at his burning friend, and that brother here too casts his sibling into a fire, but cannot bring himself to kill. The Vader of A New Hope, who strikes his old master down without pause, would seem strange and alien.

    “Only a master of evil, Darth!”

    The problem with having Obi-wan repeatedly disavow Vader’s humanity in this way is that it comes across like he doesn’t actually believe it. The Obi-wan of A New Hope arrogantly disavows his former pupil, and Luke later calls him out on it and his gives his infamously weak justification. That Obi-wan truly believes Vader to be inhuman because it allows him to cover his own failings — the Jedi weren’t corrupt or venal, and Obi-wan wasn’t too busy adventuring to see what was happening before his very eyes. It was Vader! He was inherently corrupt and he must be killed. It’s a self-serving myth. Kenobi here, staring tearfully at the ruin of his former friend, cannot possibly believe this.

    This isn’t necessarily a complaint — it’s the nature of making a project like this that has a satisfactory self-contained narrative within a larger existing one that it’s going to give closure to the characters that they didn’t previously have, and that’s why we’re considering it in this way. But it’s a departure for the character of Obi-wan. Kenobi here, in a third series of Obi-wan that takes the place of Return of the Jedi, would be the one still insisting that Anakin is in there somewhere. He would be the one Vader intervenes to save from the Emperor. In this series, they truly are brothers.

    Another prominent takeaway would be Vader’s Empire-building, pardoning the pun. Anakin in Obi-wan following Revenge is an Anakin who still seethes with the injustice of not being permitted a seat on the Jedi council, and he has constructed his own council with his own masters — and his own intrigues. From his Mustafar base he consolidates power against a skeptical Emperor. It is impossible to imagine him being dressed down by Grand Moff Tarkin — the Vader who has suppressed all emotion in his trauma is replaced by a hothead, firebrand Vader prone to irrational violence. Or to put it simpler, Vader here is a Kylo Ren figure.

    Vader has his own ivory tower on his own Coruscant.

    Perhaps most cynically of all, I think a viewer of this fictional quadrilogy would see no end in sight. What are tiny Luke and tiny Leia, embroiled in adventure and plots amongst the stars from an early age, but photocopies of tiny Anakin and the mistakes in his care? Luke’s down-to-earth folksy wisdom in the original films guides him through the nonsensical Jedi creed to find his own values, his lack of experience in this world a boon rather than a drag. Who is he if he’s been fighting Imperial agents from an early age? Who is Leia? Who is Obi-wan if he never went into hiding, his adventures butting up right against a growing Luke? These are ultimately the concerns of the sequel trilogy, concerns about children making our own mistakes again. The New Hope was that Luke, separated from the Jedi and the Republic and all the failure, would be able to do something new. This Luke has lived his whole life running from the Empire, and will do so until he dies.

    Sorry kid, this just ain’t your story.

    And so

    That was Obi-wan. I’m just going to come out and say it, I don’t like they way they light the sword fights in this. It’s too much glow from the lightsabers. The effect is tacky and it looks so distracting for the user that it’s hard to imagine it being practical. My major problem was with the way they lit the sword fights, it was too much, I never got on with it. George Lucas was very subtle with the lightsaber glow! These things are like torches. Please Disney, fix this for me. Release a special edition of the Obi-wan series that fixes this for me.

    Look at this! It’s a laser light show, not a great duel of the masters! Please Disney, Lucasfilm, ILM, anyone?!

    Thank you for reading.

    I have ranked the episodes but in the end I’d say the quality of the series was pretty consistent, with some variance in how much each episode felt like it was mostly filler.

    Ranking, best to worst:

    1. Flashback recap of the prequel trilogy
    2. Obi-wan: Episode 5
    3. Obi-wan: Episode 3
    4. Obi-wan: Episode 1
    5. Obi-wan: Episode 6
    6. Obi-wan: Episode 4
    7. Obi-wan: Episode 2

    If you like my writing, please subscribe to my Letterboxd reviews or watch Sixteen attempts to talk to you about ‘Suicide Squad’, available on Youtube now. Previously I watched and wrote-up season 1 of ‘Invincible’, in reverse order.

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  • Obi-wan (Episode 5)

    Last time, I talked a lot about how it wasn’t going to matter how good this episode is.

    Enjoyed the Vader-imagery in this opening sequence, even if the blocking on those Stormtroopers was frankly embarrassing.

    Heaven help us, there were at least twenty of minutes of gripping television in this. Beyond promising and into interesting — even if some of the most exhilarating moments in this and the last episode owe a little debt to the action sequences in the video game Jedi: Fallen Order. When Obi-wan announced that he wanted to talk to Reva, I felt sure that he’d read my post about Episode 4.

    The triumph of the episode is the twin duels, Anakin versus Obi-wan and Vader versus Reva (ah, I see what they did there). In the first, the young padawan apparently overwhelms the master training him, but even a disarmed Obi-wan is skilful enough to beat Anakin. The lesson, not to become complacent and dependent on raw power, is lost on Anakin. Perhaps taking his master’s instruction that “this weapon is your life” too literally, he considers the disarmed Obi-wan to be a defeated Obi-wan, paralleling their eventual final showdown in A New Hope.

    The opulence of the prequel Republic is represented well enough, even if we could do with a referee-droid or some such filling up the backgrounds.

    This is a mildly fascinating and indeed uncovered thread of the two characters’ relationship, left implicit in the gaps between the three prequels: how Anakin was trained, and what lessons he took from that training. Cut through the episode, the duel recalls most if not all of the grandiosity of the Jedi regime in the prequels, the distractingly shiny floor and the vague feeling of emptiness to the set minor distractions from the two characters going at it in an ivory tower overlooking the government planet. The marble floors recur in the temple massacre flashback, Anakin’s practiced duelling put to work.

    And the mirror image of the Obi-wan/Anakin fight is the Vader/Reva fight. Vader starts with no weapon and ostensibly no power, disarms Reva, rearms Reva, and murders Reva. It’s a tour-de-force and considerably more effective than Vader’s lurch into slasher villain in the third episode. All Vader has is power. All Vader needs is power. What he took away from the duel with Obi-wan was that he needed to continue to have overwhelming force even when disarmed. Nothing can get in the way of using power to make the world function in an ordered and fair manner. The Inquisitors, in all their backstabbing glory, are ultimately insignificant compared to the power of the force. This is the first episode of Obi-wan that has felt like it understands Vader as a character at all.

    It struggles to carry in a still image but there was a real weight behind Vader in this sequence.

    Reva also gets a better showing here than she has done, even if her motivations continue to be contradictory and vague once we know her backstory. “You have no idea what I’ve done alone” is finally a banger of a threat from a character who has spoken little else, as is her sudden decision to use her lightsaber to do anything at all useful.

    There is a fly in the ointment here, which is that the dramatic tension in all this is tied, in the fashion of a lead balloon, to the series’ overarching indulgence into the massacre at the template and Anakin killing the younglings. This is an indigestible foodstuff. It can’t be made threatening, it can’t be made dramatic. The purpose it serves is to say conclusively that Anakin has lost it in a fashion that has no end, no comeback from. It would have been better to patch it and say that all the younglings in fact became grody Inquisitor types, or else avoid it entirely, rather than this dithering on it as something Anakin might get some ‘just deserts’ for; the point is that there is no amount of just desert that can make it okay.

    The most obvious gap in the episode is the poorly exposited sequence in which Reva possibly implicitly deliberately lets Obi-wan go, where he effectively walks out of one frame in chains and appears in the next a free man who’s about to board a secret second ship. The second ship subplot could be better refined than it is — perhaps more plausible for Vader to be at the wrong pad entirely rather than be caught off guard by a ship that from his perspective he can probably see, but that’s nit-picking. It makes a loose thematic sense though: Vader’s raw power means he can miss a second ship, or not care that his new grand inquisitor is an assassin, because he’s a dark wizard who you cannot kill.

    This was almost a callback to Empire Strikes Back Vader catching a laser blast with his hand.

    Spare a thought for poor Tala, who goes out with a bang as the series’ best individual contribution to the Wookiepedia character list, even if she’s lumped here with more oppression of Jedi-types waffle. Why would an ex-Imperial Officer, even one turned pseudo-Nazi hunter, count the number of Imperial Officers killed? You have to believe in the possibility of redemption for Imperial Officers, you were one.

    The Grand Inquisitor is back, and in his time off he’s practised making an arch, cod-intellectual speech that doesn’t suck. Good for him.

    So where does that leave us with Obi-wan? As I said last episode, a barnstormer of a finale will not be enough to redeem the series, and this is only just about half of one. If anything, the dense collection of actually interesting scenes in this episode continues to point in favour of this being a better movie than it is TV series. Still, it is pleasant to have got to the end of an episode not just tolerant, but eager to see more. We will see what next week brings.

    Tatooine is so blue at this time of year.

    Ranking, best to worst:

    1. Flashback recap of the prequel trilogy
    2. Obi-wan: Episode 5
    3. Obi-wan: Episode 3
    4. Obi-wan: Episode 1
    5. Obi-wan: Episode 4
    6. Obi-wan: Episode 2

    If you like my writing, please subscribe to my Letterboxd reviews or watch Sixteen attempts to talk to you about ‘Suicide Squad’, available on Youtube now. Previously I watched and wrote-up season 1 of ‘Invincible’, in reverse order.

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