fevered.earth

Tag: Star Wars

  • 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.

  • Obi-wan (Episode 4)

    Last time, we got a little worried about Vader’s character assassination.

    Cool starfish monster hidden in the shadows as Obi-wan goes into the Inquisitor base. No idea why it’s there.

    Ah, they put in Obi-wan’s little rebreather thing! Now that’s the kind of pleasing callback I can really sink my teeth into.

    Otherwise it’s another frustrating week on the television front, with Obi-wan continuing to threaten and not deliver a really good time. Without competition, the high point here is Tala’s “you will address me as ‘Sir’” conversation when passing the security checkpoint at the Inquisitor base. The Empire is a model of technocratic bureaucracy and the weakness of such systems is deference to hierarchy and unwillingness to shake the boat. All that plus it gives us a proper insight to how Tala has maintained her cover as an Imperial Officer who can both walk the walk and talk the talk. Tala also has a good showing in her scene opposite Reva.

    StarWars.com identifies it as the “Jedi Breathing Device”. Suspect Lucas didn’t have a hand in that one.

    I could continue in this vein — I’ve got notes for the rest of the episode, things I liked and things I didn’t, little moments to love (mostly Tala) and little moments to laugh at (dead Jedi frozen in amber for), but the jig really is up at this point. Four episodes into the six episode run of Obi-wan we can say that — even assuming a two-part finale of ferocious individual success, which seems improbable — this has largely been a waste of time. Would I have been better off writing up the first season of The Mandolorian?

    Obi-wan has shown promise throughout, but ~3 hours of television with only promise to show for it is not a success. The concept was originally for an Obi-wan film in the vein of Solo, before that film underperformed and the idea of minor Star Wars films was written off. This story seems like it would have worked better as a film. Or rather, the shape of the film this story used to be is readily apparent: Leia is kidnapped, Obi-wan is enlisted to find her, he rescues her from Imperial custody and in the process comes face-to-face with his old friend, now unrecognisable. Uncertain and defeatist at first, Obi-wan cowers before Vader and his hot-headed new apprentice, but the nascent rebellion and plucky young Leia inspire him to see off a pursuing Vader in a way that appropriately tarnishes the Emperor’s lap-dog for the status quo of A New Hope. Obi-wan retreats back into the shadows, convinced that Luke and Leia can bring the Empire down when the time comes.

    Obi-wan, retreating into a shadow.

    This film would not have been groundbreaking, even in the limited sphere of Star Wars media. It is wholly made up of the kind of A->B plotting between existing states that caused Lucas to leave the first half of Revenge of the Sith on the drawing board. It’s enough to know that Obi-wan ran, bode his time, isolated, and struck when the time was right. Those events are described in the existing films and the story between them is superfluous. But it would function on a basic story level and crucially, the neat details that prove to be the enduring charm of Obi-wan would maybe tide it over to some success. A single film, received as one experience, can lean harder on the appeal of Obi-wan’s Jedi Breathing Device. It can lean harder on the surprise of young Leia. And tedious characters like the non-Reva inquisitors and also Reva the inquisitor can fade into the background easier.

    Obi-wan suffers hugely from the sensation of returning to the same limited buffet every week. The treats are always the same. References to the original series. References to the prequels. References to the TV shows. Ewan McGregor. The weaknesses fester: the aforementioned Inquisitors, the warped characterisation of Vader, the curious cheapness to what is undoubtedly a very expensive show.

    Ouch.

    Worse, some of the elements on offer go away. No more Jimmy Smits or Joel Edgerton to sweeten the deal. The limited set of episodes means that despite being a decompressed film, nothing has time to develop. The moment with Tala asserting rank stands out not only because it’s an audacious, charismatic move that hasn’t been telegraphed in advance, but because there are precious few scenes in this show where people hold a basic conversation. Last week’s episode had a similar drip-feed, with Leia asking if Obi-wan was her real father. What a concept! But alas, there is no time for such frippery when we can be staring at woodcuttings of the Rebel alliance branding set.

    Everyone’s always very busy making things move along, but the things that happen are on loop. Ambush, kidnapping, stealthy escape. The last-minute confrontation that goes unresolved. Cells of downtrodden rebels experience heartbreak. Ewan McGregor is mirrored with Vader in some odd way — he looks ridiculous coming out of that fish tank, by the way. Extending the show from a film to a series, although it probably gave us that fun sequence where Zack Braff is a weasly empire guy, ultimately turns these irritations into turn-offs.

    Just by way of example, consider the exchange of dialogue from before the final duel in Revenge of the Sith:

    Obi-wan: I have failed you, Anakin. I have failed you.

    Anakin: I should have known the Jedi were plotting to take over.

    Obi-wan: Anakin, Chancellor Palpatine is evil!

    Anakin: From my point of view, the Jedi are evil.

    Obi-wan: Then you are lost!

    Now, Shakespeare this is not. Lucas only cares about establishing the broad strokes of the conflict here: Anakin and Obi-wan hold two different views that are incompatible. Anakin’s being a real idiot but also Obi-wan is quick to write him off.

    Take the dialogue from before and during episode 3 of Obi-wan:

    Darth Vader: You cannot run, Obi-Wan.

    Obi-wan: What have you become?

    Darth Vader: I am what you made me.

    Darth Vader: The years have made you weak.

    Darth Vader: You should’ve killed me when you had the chance.

    Darth Vader: Now you will suffer, Obi-Wan.

    Darth Vader: Your pain has just begun.

    Again, it’s not Shakespeare — and it doesn’t have to be — but where it’s really struggling is that the two characters aren’t really talking at all. Vader is narrating the scene to the audience and Obi-wan basically isn’t saying anything at all. Why does Vader care if the years have made Obi-wan weak? Why does Vader want Obi-wan to suffer? These are not obvious conclusions to draw and the show gives no indication as to how we should interpret these statements other than as part of a generic video-game-boss villainy on Vader’s part. “From my point of view the Jedi are evil” is a famous all-time clunker. No-one is going to remember “Your pain has just begun.”

    This line was incredible though. No complaints about this one.

    I am, or was, a big fan of classic Doctor Who. The strength of that show, and the strength of cheapo British TV through the ages, is finding good actors and good scripts and that being enough. Obi-wan has the actors, and for brief moments it has the scripts. But there’s precious little time spared for the cheapest, most compelling moments.

    The rebels and their whole deal with anti-Jedi prejudice is still a terrible fit for Star Wars. It’s like watching a show centred on Constantine the Great’s anti-Praetorian-Guard prejudice. The force is meant to flow through everyone! It doesn’t manifest in an ability to make rocks float! The making rocks float is actually a very small part of it!

    I’m still hoping for a high end point for the Obi-wan series. The ultimate frustration, as I said right back at the start, is that after four out of six episodes there’s still promise.

    Ranking, best to worst:

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

  • Obi-wan (Episode 3)

    Last time, we visited the planet of the Blade Runners and saw some shit Borg.

    Ewan McGregor continues to excel.

    Given the nature of the show, being an inherently superfluous chapter inserted into what is really a closed story, it’s considerably easier to list the negatives than to be positive. The Clone Wars series slid into a gap opened up for it by Lucas trimming the first half of Episode 3 off and starting that film with the story already in motion. The space Obi-wan fills was intentionally left blank. From the off, then, there’s an air of being an off-brand refill about everything, a Seven-Per-Cent Solution for the character originated by Alec Guinness in 1979. A brand expert at Disney might be horrified by this notion, but there’s a liberating potential to the idea: What if Obi-wan hadn’t just hid, and had had to go on an adventure with tiny Leia that would bring him face-to-face with his oldest friend, without the years of reflection and confidence he faced Vader down with in that first film?

    We may have expected the climactic encounter to happen at the end of the series, rather than in the third episode. Perhaps there will yet be another encounter. As with many things in the first two episodes, the broad strokes of what’s here contain some fascinating ideas: a Vader at the height of his powers and a panicked Obi-wan lost in despair face off, not surrounded by luminous magma but in the dark and the sand, illuminated by only their lightsabers, George Luca’s mantra of expressing conflict through the motion of bars of light flipped so that the people fighting are themselves monochromatic columns on a black background. Eventually wreathed in fire, Obi-wan is saved only by chance, or perhaps the mysteries of the force.

    There’s a panache to this minimalism. Obi-wan vs Vader as star-crossed lovers, their personal dispute minute against the vast expanse.

    The details conspire to bog everything down. The grand duel in Revenge of the Sith continues for many minutes through a series of incredible set-pieces, the high drama of the confrontation expressed in magnificent landscape, the clash of swords and bursts of lava. Here, Vader and Obi-wan fight up a dusty path to a sand square. The fire that separates them both looks like you might fly past it on a thrilling rollercoaster. And crucially, while McGregor continues to portray a despairing Obi-wan with panache, Vader is malformed.

    Vader’s chest lights are not iconic.

    Is he the impassioned, erratic hothead of the prequels? Or the brooding, decisive enigma of the original trilogy — who upon meeting Obi-wan for the first time in many years announces that of the two, he is now the master? The answer is both and neither, in a way that only has the smallest glimpses of promise. Vader looks ridiculous first and foremost, his LED light show chest-plate and belt beaming off the screen in a distracting fashion. Lucas took care to keep Vader well-lit, so that his imposing black outfit could soak up the light around him. Here he skulks, melting into backgrounds and emerging from shadows, which is surprising but also makes him look small. Illuminated in flames at the episode’s climax, he looks limp and ineffectual.

    Vader has the controlled mannerisms of his original appearances but engages in arbitrary cruelty. Gone are both the leader who punishes failure in his leadership harsher than all else, and the follower so committed to his friend and chancellor that he will take orders he knows are wrong. They’re replaced with an erratic, sadistic murderer, unrecognisable as the character.

    In positives, the episode opens with a reworking of Vader’s birth scene by way of Robocop (2014), all limbs and body horror. It wouldn’t fit in Episode 3 but it works here. The Mustafar temple set we briefly see is very cool, although somewhat bafflingly Vader attempts to march forcefully away from the only chair in the room. Zach Braff’s Empire-supporting alien gopher is fun, although surely Obi-wan didn’t need to redress his robes quite that often. A petty complaint for sure, but one I kept thinking.

    The writing is again a weak point, with the seams between a number of drafts readily on show, between Obi-wan shooting some Stormtroopers to be captured at gunpoint seconds later by others, Indira Varma’s fun proto-rebel making the reprehensible choice to abandon a child in an underground tunnel to go speculatively rescue a middle-aged man, and Vader being eluded by a short jog and then six feet of flames.

    The concept is outstanding but the execution here just misses the mark.

    The specious references to how the Empire is hunting down “anyone force-sensitive” could be a catastrophic misreading of the much-maligned midichlorians or they could be a reaction again it. The result in either case is a mis-step: where the Empire was previously such an indomitable power that they could sweep the Jedi order aside with the stroke of a space-pen, now the Imperial officers are reduced to mucking about in the sand to sift out any lost protagonists they might have mislaid. The Jedi become X-Men, oppressed as well as eradicated. The emphasis in the episode on the Imperial and Rebel insignias has an uncomfortable marketing-lead smell about it.

    I was quite surprised to discover that Obi-wan is only six episodes long; a longer series might be more easily forgiven a pair of episodes like the first two, meandering and a little unfocused but warming up the characters and setting. This third episode does not have those flaws, however disappointing I found it. We now know what the show is about: a reimagining and re-contextualising of the climactic sword-fights of Episodes 3 & 4, a new take where instead of refusing the fight he won twenty years ago, Obi-wan is committing himself to the fate he knows is coming. Where the show is faltering, aside from the painfully unpolished script, is failing to match the visuals and locations to this lofty goal.

    Yeah, they’re still in it.

    Ranking, best to worst:

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

  • Obi-wan (Episode 2)

    Last time, I got culture shock at a montage of prequel scenes as we rejoin the story of Obi-wan Kenobi.

    Loved this guy, who’s just a raptor with a gun.

    A theory starts to suggest itself, fairly or unfairly. At the beginning of A New Hope, Vader’s position within the Empire seems diminished compared to what we might have expected from his vaunted position at the Emperor’s side during the final fall of the republic. Previously I might have considered this to be a reflection of Vader’s loss of physical capability following him becoming char-grilled on Mustafar. In this new story, informed by the first two episodes of Obi-wan, I’m starting to wonder if he’s brought low by the lingering embarrassment for everyone involved with the Inquisitors.

    The episode starts out all well and good, with Obi-wan tracking the kidnappers from the previous episode down to the Blade Runner planet, which naturally gets introduced with another one of those interminable market square scenes where an oddly low number of people mill about for whatever reason around some stalls in the middle of the night. The unrefined writing from the previous episode hasn’t gone away, with a charming young waif turning directly to the camera and saying “I am representation of the ill future plausible for our kidnapped child protagonist”.

    It’s slightly weird that Obi-wan does his Deckard-hunt through the future slums to find Leia, who he’s there to save, given that Deckard is hunting to kill.

    Ewan McGregor is the pure quality component of all this, his Obi-wan voice not diminished in the slightest by the years, along with a brief uneven character role for Kumail Nanjiani of ‘Kingo’ fame. In hopefully not a sign of things to come, his contribution to the episode is trimmed down to exactly three moments, one where we find he’s a villain with a heart of gold, one where he considers being just a villain, and one where he still has the heart of gold. It’s so terse that we don’t even see him reconsider, he just walks out of one frame holding a gun and enters the next scene a reformed man.

    But those Inquisitors! The episode’s shabby treatment of them is typified by the extended, somewhat dull rooftop shootout where Obi-wan remains pinned down with Leia in peril as we see intercut shots of the third sister, played by Moses Ingram, bouncing along like Ezio Auditore on her way to cut down the trapped Jedi. Except the scene ends and Obi-wan walks off with Leia, then we cut back to her and she’s still jumping about. She was no-where near! All this builds up to the grand finale where she murders her commander in a dispute over who gets to claim credit for capturing Obi-wan, a feat neither of them have yet managed. There’s a fourth one this episode who looks like a shit Borg.

    They look slightly less outlandish here than they did in the previous episode, but they’re still walking in formation.

    All of which is just to say that as a villain faction, not much effort is being put into making them a threat. Perhaps the rest of them are going to melt away and Ingram’s Third Sister will become the sole antagonist, hopefully in a better fitting costume.

    The rest of the episode reaches the ‘fine’ mark once more. Getting to see Obi-wan go places and do things is still a grand novelty, for now.

    Ranking, best to worst:

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