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RE: The Last Jedi and the Dark Side of the Fandom
It's a good point bringing up the MCU, considering that both the MCU and the SWU are both under the Disney umbrella so both are going to be nudged into a "house style". Also, I think Forbes did an article about how Ep 9's issue won't be screeching fanboys, but competition. Star Wars usually didn't have to worry about sharing opening weekend with any other AAA blockbusters, but that's changed in recent years. All you have to do is look at what's opening in December 2019 to see what it'll be up against.
Solo was... a heist movie that just happened to be in the SWU, and I think it worked because it's a flavor of Marvel's "common movie genre, only with superheroes! :D" house style.
Yeah. My hope is that Star Wars can move on in a direction that learns from its mistakes, which are thinking that it has things it really doesn't have like it used to (for instance, they were able to have some of the Original Trilogy characters return, but not really enough to carry the plot forward).
If you had told me ten years ago that Star Wars was going to have to seriously compete, I wouldn't have believed you. Solo really showed us that it will have to, and people argue that that's because it was a side-plot, but I think it's really because Disney isn't approaching it with enough concern for the finished product.
Solo was amazing. It might be one of my top movies of 2018 (I would even say it's almost as good as Infinity Wars, which I thought dragged out a little much).
I think they could learn from Luke Cage and create a Star Wars that's got a little bit deeper villains. The First Order just isn't as compelling, and Kylo Ren manages to be aggressively shallow between moments of looking like he's developing.
The thing that surprised me in Luke Cage is that Shades, who I really wanted to go off and die during Season 1, actually wound up becoming one of my favorite villains, with actual moral conflict and development. The new Star Wars villains lack the mystique of the old ones, because they draw too much upon their past (ironic, given Kylo Ren's catchphrase from the most recent movie), and they aren't really shown to have a good reason why they fight.
We can buy the existence of an evil Empire, but the people who follow it need a reason to exist. If you had simply said "Oh wait, we didn't really finish them off!" that would make sense. However, nobody really seems to like the First Order in-universe. It's not successful enough for people to stick with it because of the potential benefits (I mean, at least from my observation: we've seen them lose a superweapon, barely hunt down a massively outgunned rebel fleet at the cost of their main flagship and their leader), and I just can't understand the organization's purpose.
I think they just need more talent involved. It feels like they're going for the opposite approach to Blade Runner. Instead of lingering and giving us time to fall asleep, they over-stimulate everyone and fail to deliver substance.
Shades really is an excellent character, especially in the new season, and Bushmaster... I agree with the AV Club that he commands the camera with every scene he's in, but they needed to figure out how much exposition he really needed. As always, the weak link in Luke Cage is, well, Luke Cage. Mike Colter is a fantastic Luke Cage, but there are so many scenes of "Luke's closing himself off again". I mean, if you can point out the likely emotional arc of the season in the first 90 seconds of the opener, and the protagonist doesn't figure it out until the penultimate episode... It's like how the DCTVU are working on moving off from that tired trope of "the hero's keeping secrets because he doesn't want anyone to get hurt", but they still stumble. Is it required that EVERY hero has to have that moment of hand-wringing?
Yeah, all of the Marvel Netflix stuff tends to feel like people miss the obvious solutions.
It's like whoever ordered the series said "And the incredibly obvious solution of the protagonist getting over X needs to wait until the end of the season."