[Misc, TV] Not a Rebel After All?
I'm not sure how long this link will last, but here's the OFFICIAL 7-minute preview for Star Wars Rebels (Disney XD). Watch that first if you're concerned about me giving "spoilers," because this isn't some professional review. It's just a geeky gripe-fest that might only be read by one or two people. ;)
Regards the clip? Well ... I just don't like it. Drat it, I WANT to. It looks great, sounds great, definitely has anything a Star Wars fan should love. My problem is that it's also chock-full of the things that were so prominent in spin-off Star Wars material that really bugged me.
I think the first part that really bugs me is at about 3:15 in. Our Mandalorian-in-pink casually tosses a delayed explosive device (can't anybody HEAR that?) onto the bike of some Imperial cop-type, and ... pardon me, but that guy looks about as un-threatening in his reaction as you could get. His pose, as he's raising a hand as if to say, "Hey, wait!" but then lowers it as if reconsidering, and doesn't say anything -- that doesn't say to me "Evil Imperial Monster Who MUST DIE!" The whole body language says "insecure or uncertain guy who might be here even though he doesn't really want to be." Or SOMETHING. Disney animators, if you're about to show some "bad guy" being fragged, make sure I don't have any reason to feel SORRY for him.
Then, another at 5:35. It's the false white flag situation. It bugged me in Return of the Jedi when C-3PO made his bogus surrender (surprise! it's an ambush!), or when Leia gets shot in the shoulder and a Stormtrooper approaches as if to take Han and her prisoner but -- oh, just act wounded and then -- surprise! I keel you now. And now it's -- oh, I surrender! Just kidding -- die now! Nyuck-nyuck! Because nothing quite says you're a GOOD GUY like chuckling it up while you're turning your opponents into chunky giblets (technically not shown, but he just BLEW THE GUY UP) with a thermal detonator.
I remember seeing a line-up of images showing the faces of our heroes, and my thought of the expressions was, "Smirk, smirk, smirk, smirk, scowl, droid." I know I'm just repeating myself at this point, but I was afraid that it'd be another case of what I've seen in so many bad fanfics, comics, and such, when we skip the whole part of establishing just WHY we want our bad guys to have smoking holes in their chests, and go straight to "yee-haw!" with our heroes effortlessly wasting them left and right. Pardon me, but my hard-wired tendency to root for the underdog doesn't apply here when our supposed "underdogs" seem to be pretty effortlessly mincing the competition -- all the time. The first two Star Wars movies ("A New Hope" and "Empire Strikes Back") got it just about right; there was no sense that you can just take it for granted that our heroes are going to come out on top in every encounter. More recently, I've come to respect the Clone Wars cartoon because our heroes DO NOT ALWAYS WIN, and some of the episodes focusing on the clone troopers themselves (even ones we've met in previous episodes!) can be positively nail-biting, because there's no telling if they'll make it through alive or not.
That doesn't mean that I'd demand of Disney that we have a couple of good-guy characters get KILLED before I can properly sympathize with the heroes. But I've got much less of a taste for casual guerrilla violence against faceless bad guys than I did when I was, oh, 7 or so. The mindset that it's heroic to go and blow up buildings/space-stations to get your enemies, fight them while blending in with the civilian population (and then become indignant as the enemy authority throws its weight around trying to find out who's sheltering you), feign surrender and use that as a pretext for killing ... I've become a lot more jaded about that, especially when those are the sorts of methods used by, say, terrorists happily blowing up American soldiers (or New York skyscrapers). And, yes, that mindset makes me a little less golly-gee gung-ho about all the stuff we did to the British and to "British sympathizers" back in the American War for Independence. As I get older, maybe I get just a little more complicated.
Disney, making the heroes grin and joke as they kill the Stormtroopers, and making sure we can't see the FACES of the people getting killed doesn't suddenly whitewash it and make everything better and family-friendly. If anything, it's rather disturbing me.
Sure, Han Solo grinned a lot, but most of the time it felt like gallows humor and forced bravado -- like, we're really in trouble here, but I'm going to crack a joke and keep our spirits up! In this clip, I'm sorry, but pulling the "Aladdin, street rat with a heart of gold" routine doesn't work quite the same way when the palace guards are getting KILLED during our introduction. Yes, the frumpy Imperial officers are obviously jerks, but I'm given little reason to like our "heroes" much more, and from all I can tell, it's the red-shirts (white-shirts in this context?) who are getting pasted left and right so we can have our "action" fix.