I feel like it was a cheesy space opera, until it tried to pivot to the Marvel style action comedy dressed up as hero epic.
Cheesy, theatrical one-liners (“You failed, Your Highness. I am a Jedi, like my father before me.”) are replaced by quips that try to be humorous (“Every word of what you just said was wrong”) instead. The textbook dramatic arc of conflict, catastrophe and resolution is replaced by a comicbook escalation of ever greater threats. The final conflict of Ep VI was spiritual in nature, where Ep IX saw the Evil Wizard Reborn reach into his magic hat and pull out a fleet so massive that the only way to destroy it is a supercharged reprise of “dying lightning blast”.
Whether they’re good isn’t relevant here. Both are cliché executions of their respective genres, but cliché doesn’t have to be bad, nor does it strictly need to be good to be entertaining. My point is that they’re different genres to begin with, and it’s that genre shift that prompts fans of one genre to find the things they dislike about the other.
I think I could have enjoyed the Sequels as an “entertaining enough in the theatre” series, if they weren’t such a jarring departure from the setting and associated expectations they were tacked onto.
I feel like it was a cheesy space opera, until it tried to pivot to the Marvel style action comedy dressed up as hero epic.
Cheesy, theatrical one-liners (“You failed, Your Highness. I am a Jedi, like my father before me.”) are replaced by quips that try to be humorous (“Every word of what you just said was wrong”) instead. The textbook dramatic arc of conflict, catastrophe and resolution is replaced by a comicbook escalation of ever greater threats. The final conflict of Ep VI was spiritual in nature, where Ep IX saw the Evil Wizard Reborn reach into his magic hat and pull out a fleet so massive that the only way to destroy it is a supercharged reprise of “dying lightning blast”.
Whether they’re good isn’t relevant here. Both are cliché executions of their respective genres, but cliché doesn’t have to be bad, nor does it strictly need to be good to be entertaining. My point is that they’re different genres to begin with, and it’s that genre shift that prompts fans of one genre to find the things they dislike about the other.
I think I could have enjoyed the Sequels as an “entertaining enough in the theatre” series, if they weren’t such a jarring departure from the setting and associated expectations they were tacked onto.