Star Wars: The Saga Continues

[TrueMetis]

The title's aren't the problem, they're just attached to the wrong movies.

 

[Ran]

I've always just assumed that the titles were intended to hearken back to the pulp Saturday matinee adventure serials. 

[Werthead]

Yeah, they're bad titles in the sense that they pretty much just describe what happens in the movie. There isn't really much of an attempt to get any kind of metaphor going (probably the closest in that sense is The Phantom Menace) and they're just descriptive, and in some cases don't even reflect their events that well (what are the Sith getting revenge for, exactly? Haven't the Skywalkers already risen?).

I agree they're a callback to the matinee titles from the 1930s and 1940s.

[Martell Spy]

John Boyega slams Disney's handling of his Star Wars character

https://ew.com/movies/john-boyega-vs-rise-of-skywalker/

John Boyega is significantly increasing his criticism of Disney's handling of his Star Wars character.

The British actor had strong words about Finn's arc in The Rise of Skywalker during a new interview in British GQ.

Quote

 

While the franchise may have made Boyega a star, the actor has made it clear in subtle and, now, not-so-subtle ways that he felt the films treated him and his character unfairly.

“It’s so difficult to maneuver,” Boyega said while, according to the profile, "exhaling deeply." "You get yourself involved in projects and you’re not necessarily going to like everything. [But] what I would say to Disney is do not bring out a Black character, market them to be much more important in the franchise than they are and then have them pushed to the side. It’s not good. I’ll say it straight up."

The story points out Boyega wasn't just criticizing the handling of his Stormtrooper-turned-Resistance fighter hero, but also other people of color in the cast like Naomi Ackie (Jannah), Kelly Marie Tran (Rose Tico), and Oscar Isaac (Poe Dameron), who is of Guatemalan and Cuban descent. The story says "the reordered character hierarchy of 2017's The Last Jedi was particularly hard to take" in the wake of how the characters were first introduced in 2015's The Force Awakens.

 

 

[Raja]

Hard to argue with the most relevant quote from that interview - the whole interview is good tbh ( This is the original interview if people are curious, btw, EW above is just quoting from it)

Quote

“Like, you guys knew what to do with Daisy Ridley, you knew what to do with Adam Driver,” he says. “You knew what to do with these other people, but when it came to Kelly Marie Tran, when it came to John Boyega, you know fuck all. So what do you want me to say? What they want you to say is, ‘I enjoyed being a part of it. It was a great experience...’ Nah, nah, nah. I’ll take that deal when it’s a great experience. They gave all the nuance to Adam Driver, all the nuance to Daisy Ridley. Let’s be honest. Daisy knows this. Adam knows this. Everybody knows. I’m not exposing anything.”

I think he's completely on point here and I admire him being honest ( And I'm someone who liked TFA and adored TLJ)

[Nictarion]

Tbf none of the characters were handled particularly well in TRoS. 

[Rippounet]

Quote

[...] do not bring out a black character, market them to be much more important in the franchise than they are and then have them pushed to the side. It’s not good. I’ll say it straight up.

He has a point. I remember expecting Finn to play a bigger role in the trilogy. Perhaps be force sensitive, or at least learn a useful set of skills (fighting, piloting... I dunno, something... You don't have to be a jedi to be useful... ).

OTOH:

Quote

Like, you guys knew what to do with Daisy Ridley, you knew what to do with Adam Driver. [...] They gave all the nuance to Adam Driver, all the nuance to Daisy Ridley. Let’s be honest. Daisy knows this. Adam knows this. Everybody knows. I’m not exposing anything.

I really wouldn't go that far.
The writers obviously weren't sure what they wanted to do with Rey (or disagreed about what they wanted to do, which ended up being the same thing for the viewer). Kylo Ren had a decent arc, but that was part luck and part cliché (The bad guy redeeming himself in the end?   Who didn't see that coming?).
As for nuance... Well sure, Rey and Ren had inner conflicts, so the actors got to show their skill a bit more, but I dunno if "nuance" is exactly the right term here.

Honestly, I think Boyega is correct, but about Rise of Skywalker. In the two other movies, the writers at least tried to make his character relevant. It's only in RoS that his character becomes useless... Because everything is focused on Rey & Ren.
Not sure I would necessarily ascribe this to racism though... RoS was terribly written, and focusing on the two force users was probably the "easy way" for whoever wrote the thing. I might even argue that Williams as Lando got a surprisingly big part in the movie.

[Kalbear]

To be really clear - Boyega wasn't railing against TRoS, he was railing against TLJ and what they did to Finn and Rose in THAT movie. He was pretty cool with what JJ tried to salvage. 

Ultimately the obvious choice is what they did in the OT - Rey is going to have the limelight because she's got the hero's journey, but they obviously need Finn and Poe to hook up and have that be their arc, with Finn saving Poe at the beginning of TRoS. 

[Heartofice]

He has a right to feel hard done by. Finn is the most wasted character of the trilogy.

Force Awakens had a great idea of introducing a storm trooper who decided he didn’t wanna be part of it. That arc had so much potential. TLJ turned him into the  Jar Jar of the series, and after that he was barely relevant, and that is one of the most disappointing aspects.

He does also have a point that it is a wasted opportunity for a major black character. I’m sure Disney sold him the idea , a major black character in a Star Wars movie and then went back on it and screwed him over. 
 

But it’s hard to tell from the GQ interview what he actually said here and it seems to imply he said there was racial motivation for the changes to all these characters, or at least lack of attention due to race. I know the entire interview is politically charged but that is an unfortunate position to take.

I can’t think of a single character that was well served in the sequels , everyone came out of it badly. To make it about race is to put a divisive slant on it that I just think isn’t there. 
 

Though it’s hard to tell from the interview whether that’s what he actually meant or that’s the slant GQ want to put on it, possibly to sell more issues and get more clicks.

[dog-days]

I wish Filoni had been responsible for writing Finn's character. Although there were plenty of problems with his characterisation later on, I think the ball was initially dropped, and dropped hard, as early as TFA. It gave him a great introductory scene in which he was apparently shocked and saddened at the death of another stormtrooper, and then showed him do an extreme heel-face-turn that had him cackling as he gunned down his former colleagues. It was just a bit wtf? 

[Relic]

I hear what he's saying but I'm really not sure what he expected would happen. How can he read the script for the first movie and think to himself that there was a nuanced character to be found within this series? 

[Rippounet]

7 hours ago, Kalibear said:

To be really clear - Boyega wasn't railing against TRoS, he was railing against TLJ and what they did to Finn and Rose in THAT movie. He was pretty cool with what JJ tried to salvage.

Really?

That's a bit harder to swallow for me. Finn & Rose got a fair share of screen time in TLJ. Finn even gets his own personal arc in which he goes from half-coward to self-sacrificing hero.
Not that I'm a fan of the -useless- Canto Bight story, or of the Finn & Rose half-romance. And on some level I guess it did waste Finn as a character.
But to whine that the role lacked "nuance" or to link it to racism seems... petty and entitled. I mean... I get that he didn't like Finn's story in TLJ (I didn't either), but the role was never going to get much greater (or "nuanced") than that. It's StarWars we're talking about, not an indie movie.
Perhaps the jokes about his character being useless got to him (?). But I think the old proverb about not ascribing to malice what can be ascribed to incompetence holds here. These movies were poorly written and that's probably all there is to it. It's not that they didn't know what to do with a Black character (or an Asian one, or a Hispanic one), it's that they didn't know what to do beyond the Rey & Ren story ; and even that was wildly inconsistent throughout the trilogy.

IIRC the initial/alternative script for RoS would have fixed some of this, since Finn (and Poe I believe) would have gotten to lead the resistance on Coruscant, thus being far more relevant to the story as a whole.
Which, to my eyes, goes to show that the problem is -and always was- the writing.

[Relic]

1 hour ago, Rippounet said:

Which, to my eyes, goes to show that the problem is -and always was- the writing.

Totally. They managed to waste one of the most iconic white male characters of all time in Luke Skywalker, so i wouldn't chalk this one up to racism, as much as i do to piss poor writing, and a corporate mentality for generating profit over substance. 

[Rhom]

27 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

 But I think the old proverb about not ascribing to malice what can be ascribed to incompetence holds here.

This was exactly what was going through my head when I read the story.   

[mormont]

52 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

It's not that they didn't know what to do with a Black character (or an Asian one, or a Hispanic one), it's that they didn't know what to do beyond the Rey & Ren story ; and even that was wildly inconsistent throughout the trilogy.

I'm not a fan of splitting hairs about motivation when the effects of an action was clearly to perpetuate systemic racism.

The fact is, the characters of colour could have been developed and given a central role but instead were shoved to the side. This was not inevitable. Different choices could have been made. The defence largely seems to consist of a lack of imagination, looking at the story that was told and assuming it was the only story that could have been told. But that's Boyega's exact point: it was a choice. The creators could absolutely have made Finn, or Rose, or anyone else more central to the story, by choosing to tell a different story. One where, for example, Finn proves critical to Rey's final victory, or where Rey dies in a shock twist and Finn avenges her, or where Finn and Kylo Ren interact at all after the first movie.

[Vaughn]

I don't get the tie between Rose and Finn in terms of the character development. She was created and introduced in tLJ and completely sidelined in tRoS - that's on JJ/Terrio. Boyega's right to be disappointed with how his character development went over the second and third movies but don't blame Johnson for what happened to Rose or to Tran in real life (which sucked).

[Heartofice]

17 minutes ago, mormont said:

I'm not a fan of splitting hairs about motivation when the effects of an action was clearly to perpetuate systemic racism.

 

17 minutes ago, mormont said:

The fact is, the characters of colour could have been developed and given a central role but instead were shoved to the side. This was not inevitable. Different choices could have been made. The defence largely seems to consist of a lack of imagination, looking at the story that was told and assuming it was the only story that could have been told. But that's Boyega's exact point: it was a choice. The creators could absolutely have made Finn, or Rose, or anyone else more central to the story, by choosing to tell a different story. One where, for example, Finn proves critical to Rey's final victory, or where Rey dies in a shock twist and Finn avenges her, or where Finn and Kylo Ren interact at all after the first movie.

I could go through the entire trilogy and list out potential different choices the writers could have made that would have been better than the ones they chose, it would take a very long time! 
Honestly I don't think it is important whether Finn as a character has more relevance to the resolution of the plot or not, what was more important was that his character had some level of resolution to his own arc. The whole ex-stormtrooper thing was mostly dropped about 10 minutes after he escaped and was barely mentioned again and it was never seen as a key piece of his characters DNA. That for me is why he was so wasted, the writers simply didn't know what to do with him or how he would fit into the myriad of other ideas they had for the story. Like pretty much every character outside of Rey and Kylo he served no purpose but to be set dressing and plot enablers. 

* Though I am assuming here you are not suggesting his character should be given a more central role to the plot based purely on the basis of the actors skin colour. 

[Jace, Extat]

15 minutes ago, mormont said:

I'm not a fan of splitting hairs about motivation when the effects of an action was clearly to perpetuate systemic racism.

The fact is, the characters of colour could have been developed and given a central role but instead were shoved to the side. This was not inevitable. Different choices could have been made. The defence largely seems to consist of a lack of imagination, looking at the story that was told and assuming it was the only story that could have been told. But that's Boyega's exact point: it was a choice. The creators could absolutely have made Finn, or Rose, or anyone else more central to the story, by choosing to tell a different story. One where, for example, Finn proves critical to Rey's final victory, or where Rey dies in a shock twist and Finn avenges her, or where Finn and Kylo Ren interact at all after the first movie.

Well said. Boyega could well have been edited out of The Last Jedi entirely and the film would not be appreciably changed. He's right to be upset about that, even though in hindsight it's the only one of the three worth watching.

[Relic]

1 hour ago, mormont said:

I'm not a fan of splitting hairs about motivation when the effects of an action was clearly to perpetuate systemic racism.

Agree with this as well. 

[Rippounet]

22 minutes ago, mormont said:

I'm not a fan of splitting hairs about motivation when the effects of an action was clearly to perpetuate systemic racism.

And I'm not a fan of twisting words to call everyone and everything a racist, but here we are.

Bitching about a secondary role lacking "nuance" or being useless to the plot is just a very bad way of beating around the bush. What Boyega is really trying to say is that he felt humiliated and demeaned when he realized he was the token black guy in StarWars.
If you want to criticize the systemic racism here, it was obviously in the casting, since the two leading roles were played by white actors. But to attack the writing for not fixing the casting is rather ridiculous.