Lubitsch wrote:This pretty much excuses any lack of ideas and any repetitive pastiche by simply declaring that it's mythmaking.
Also backhandedly accuses
Star Wars of being unoriginal from the start.
Oddly, you took a single word I put in an aside, myth, and somehow made it the centre of my argument.
Star Wars isn't mythologizing and it's not myth. Its genre is Romance, as I said a bunch of times, and it's becoming a cycle by repeating the same events. If this bothers you, it bothers you. But it's appropriate enough for
Star Wars and worth keeping in mind so that we judge things on their own terms.
Lubitsch wrote:Yes, genre films build on well established patterns.
Perhaps it's because you haven't seen the film, but I'm talking about something far more specific than the conventions of modern genre movies. The new
Star Wars is not just repeating sci-fi conventions, it's deliberately repeating narrative beats from the other films. My post is about the latter, not the former.
Lubitsch wrote:However there's a difference between variation and simple repetition.
I didn't expect to be accused of not understanding the difference between things staying the same versus things being different. Maybe you could point out where I've done that. I think it'll be near impossible for you to do since I've tied my argument very specifically to a movie that you have not seen, but maybe you'll surprise me and point out where I've mistaken a simple repetition for a variation.
matrixschmatrix wrote:third death star was more bland redundancy than mythological cycle
Well, no shit. These movies aren't becoming myths or anything, and if they were, it sure wouldn't be because of this detail. But I didn't think this was any more redundant than anything else. I think the point was the excitement of reliving a major cultural memory, the x-wing run on the death star, in a slightly new context. That's how it worked for me--I was excited to see it all over again as shot by a different director (just like I get excited to read another version of the Perceval or Sigurd stories). And by that point, I think I would've been disappointed if they hadn't gone that far. What would be the point of so much earlier repetition of you weren't going to take it all the way and have another death star? The characters need to converge somewhere, why not there?