“My friend told me I HAD to read this, that this was the good Star Wars shit to read right now.
I’m like 99% sure that I don’t give a shit about Star Wars anymore. Before reading this I was at like 97%, but I think I’m up to 99. Because it’s not bad. There’s nothing wrong with it. It features characters I enjoy watching. I just don’t care.
Okay, it does do one thing I hate. I have really come to loathe that when things are remade/rebooted/relaunched/rewhatever-ed, one of the roads they go down is to look at what’s come before and say, “Gee, what was left mysterious by previous incarnations of this franchise?”
In this one, it’s “Why do bad guys have red lightsabers?” And we get an explanation.
In other stuff, it’s other stuff.
“Where did the Ghostbusters logo come from?”
“What if we got explicit about Bones getting his nickname?”
“How come everyone in town forgot about Beast’s castle?”
“Just how did the Fantastic Four get that name anyway?”
“Couldn’t we add some sort of arbitrary structure to explain why Bodhi wants to surf that wave?”
I don’t really give a shit. The older movies, they tell us enough. I don’t need to know that Bodhi and his crew are completing some kind of 8-point test of enlightenment or some shit (Yeah, that happens in the remake! Has a remake ever displayed LESS understanding for what makes the original fun?) I don’t need a technical reason that Darth Vader’s lightsaber is red. Because it looks awesome?
And wasn’t Darth Vader more interesting when he was just this weird, fucked-up evil guy in that pod thing, before we knew every step of the journey?
Wondering at what happened to make this dude like this was WAY more interesting than knowing. That, I think, is the problem with all the remake stuff. Bad remakes ferret out small, unresolved details, and they hand us the answers, removing anything interesting from the margins of a story.
What I like about remakes is when they do something new and different. When they tell their own stories. When they use an existing property as a launchpad, they blast off, and they don’t look back. What I dislike is when we get too many pointless details. It’s like listening to your parents tell a story, and they go back and forth over which street they were on when they got a phone call, and that really doesn’t matter because the story is about the content of the phone call. “