7 Reasons** Why (insert) I Like (/insert) F&F* (strike) is (/strike) Better Than Star Wars*
*the franchises - but the movies work too...
** I watched the vid where Cracked explain clickbaitiness.
[There are 7 Fast and Furious films out at the moment and 7 Star Wars films (although it looks as though Disney is going to churn out additional films at excessive speed for as long as they make money)... I haven't seen Star Wars 7 and probably won't for a while but I've heard some talk.]
1. Fast & Furious films are about a familia of characters and Star Wars turns out to be more about a family of stereotypes who barely know each other.
The Toretto familia is very much the medieval household -- a collection of blood relatives, clients, dependants, etc who're to some extent interdependent but bound more by affection, obligation, and debts of honour than pure self-interest. From the first film onwards we are given characterisation for and reasons to like even the most minor members of Dom's familia. In the second film Brian develops relationships not unlike those he's seen Dom create and in Fast 5 those friends reappear to join the familia. In Tokyo Drift Han is also shown as having created his own form of familia (the eventual timeline means this film actually happens between Furious 6 and Furious 7)
The Skywalker family is... well how do I put this... excessively dysfunctional? (Even knowing he also has a daughter Anakin/Vader doesn't appear to be fussed) You also don't get much in the way of backstory characterisation -- what do you know about Han Solo from the first movie? What do you know by the end of Jedi? He was a smuggler. He won his ship from Lando (so presumably he was doing something prior to smuggling that made enough of a stake to wager against a spaceship). And he's one of the three main characters. All I know about Luke is that he's bored with his life and wants to go and be a pilot for the Empire. And actually if you swap Empire for Rebellion that's pretty much his character arc for the first three movies -- starts place A, goes to place B because of a message, goes to place C to fight in climactic battle. In the prequel films the characterisation is also excessively limited -- to Annakin pretty much. So, along with purely plot-based and narrow characterisation the Skywalker family has very little in the way of visible long-term friends. Han Solo has two friends. The only familia the Skywalkers have are a couple of robots... who they abandon, memory-wipe, and otherwise treat really badly. These are not people who make and keep friends.
2. The Fast and Furious films have more, and more proactive, women characters.
I specified characters because the backgrounds of the F&F films are full of, often half-naked, women. Although I would point out that these don't feel like slave girls and they may be half-naked but they're there as women who've chosen what they're wearing. Even some of the half-naked ladies are allowed a few moments to demonstrate character.
Star Wars has two main women characters in six films. They're both princesses (although quite how they're titled princesses is a bit vague and hand-wavy). They both talk quite a bit, have a good grasp of girlish banter, and like their hair complicated. We get very little idea of them having family and they've both been put into politically dangerous positions at relatively young ages where other choices would seem to be limited. And until the seventh film I couldn't have said this, but the main role of both princesses is marrying a hero and having kids to be in the next set of films. I honestly can't remember either of them being particularly successful at anything else that's plot critical. The original film starts with Leia failing to get the plans of the death star to the rebels, and the prequels are fairly insistent that Anakin goes to the darkside because of his affair with Padme and the death of his mother (who you'd have thought maybe Padme could have arranged to have bought and installed in a guest room somewhere? Or would that have been really uncomfortable when her relationship with Anakin became obvious?). There are few other women in the later Star Wars universe, fewer who get even one line of dialogue, and the women are slaves, handmaids, wives, mothers, a few junior rebels, and a Mon Mothma. I've not taken a stop watch to the films (seriously I fall asleep in 2 and 3 most of the times when I try to watch them) but I suspect there's more run-time of background females that are aliens than women. Let's face it, I'm pretty sure that the meeting with Grand Moff Tarkin in the original film has more spoken lines by totally forgettable Imperial men than the entire original trilogy has dialogue by women other than Leia.
F&F has four main women and so far only one of them -- Mia Toretto -- has produced children. All of the main women -- Mia, Letty, Elena, and Gisele -- are, or have been, involved in the heavy lifting. They all have back stories too (Mia is Dom's sister and they share backstory with Letty who was a girl next door, Elena's husband was an honest cop and when he was killed she joined the police, Gisele was military and then sold her services). Women also show up as uniformed, plain clothes, and undercover police officers in multiple countries. Also bodyguards, minor members of the familia, evil criminals, and even as a computer expert. The women involved are diverse and diverse in appearance, not simply eye-candy you can't believe capable of their roles, and unlike many major films the female characters are not continually recast with other actors, nor do they appear in one film, get bedded, and vanish without mention. Elena even returns in Furious 7... after Dom is no longer romantically involved with her.
3. Cars
Star Wars doesn't have cars and pod-racing is not car racing. No I don't like the real sport stuff I like film street races and car play/stunts. I liked driving and when I was younger and had the reflexes I would have loved to drive a fast car fast. (Also dance parties and cars)
4. Music
There's no denying that the score for Star Wars is pretty impressive and leant the original trilogy a level of serious passion that sf and fantasy films seldom aspired to. I adored and still love the original musical ending of Jedi and the fight music from Phantom too.
But F&F has theme music for various players too *aaand* some great choices of soundtrack songs. I enjoy classical music, but there's a lot to be said for music you can sing and dance along with.
5. Character diversity.
I may be overlooking someone but the cast of Star Wars was pretty white except for Darth Vader who is a white guy with a black voice-over. Then there's Lando in Empire... who betrays his old friend before handily changing sides again. He's the guy who destroys the second death star. Does he get a mention in 7? The prequels do somewhat better with a black Jedi Master but...
I'm not crazy against using aliens or robots or whatever to address issues around diversity, human rights, othering etc but Star Wars isn't using aliens to remove direct heat from an issue. Aliens are there in great diversity to sell collectible toys. When you're concentrating on that it may be easy to miss that you have hundreds of intelligent species hanging around but very little human diversity. (Or it's like The Hunger Games where you get the feeling no one noticed or questioned that the agricultural district seems to be all black people)
The first F&F film is perhaps the least diverse -- leaving aside the problem of Dom himself (and whether you consider the character or actor in judging his diversity credentials) you still have Letty and the Vietnamese racing gang led by Johnny Tran. The third film has a majority of the characters being Japanese or of Asian descent. By the time we get to 5, 6, and 7, the familia consists of four 'white' characters out of ten (Dom, Mia, Brian, and Vince) and while we lose two of the other six by the end of Furious 6 three more have been added to the main character line-up so it becomes 3/8. And yes, a chunk of the romances are interracial. Oh and the diverse characters get screen time talking to each other and building relationships between themselves without being seen only in relationships with main white characters (kind of like a Bechdel test but for diversity :P )
6. Han.
Both films have Hans in. I fell in love with both Hans.
But Stars Wars gave me a baby Harrison Ford playing a guy whose relationship is perfect for teenage girls in the last millennium (which is what and when I was). No baggage except a Wookie, and way less immature and whiny than Luke. He and Leia have one of those sniping at each other, insults = love, relationships that helpfully skirts around any awkwardness about one corner of the initial love triangle being incestuous but doesn't otherwise make that much sense to me as an adult. I can't blame Twilight etc on this but... you know I want to :P
F&F gave me Han played by Sung Kang who is as hot as (maybe hotter than) Ford and gets better dialogue. He's seen in two relationships, the first casual and the second serious. They don't snipe or undermine each other. The attraction is based on looks and mutual interests/admiration and grows through the two movies they share. The point where a small army of police officers (led by a woman) delivers a summons from Dom/Hobbs demonstrates that they literally have each others backs, and fronts, and a relationship I find way more attractive than Leia and Han's. They are totally heart-breaking.
7.Fight Scenes.
Light sabres are neat. They don't entirely make sense in a universe with blasters etc but that fight in the prequel where force fields come down and... Okay maybe it's the music that really kicks ass in that fight scene but still I loved it the first time I saw it.
I just enjoy the fight scenes in F&F more. And yes, please tell me that the physics in F&F is wrong or that these fights would cause serious injuries and possibly deaths... and then explain lightsabres
Action movies are not thrillers and none of them involve realism. SF movies are not about science and yahdahyahdah.
7a Women drive, women race, women fight, women kill, women (and other featured characters) die.
Yes I'm back on the women thing. Because while the fistfights are pretty much woman on woman the women do get to race men, and fight men when it doesn't involve fists (and while I've heard that brought up as a male gaze problem, I personally don't want to see a fight where a man goes all out on a woman -- I don't like to say never but it's more likely to misfire than work for me -- too soon)
There is nothing Star Wars has done (and I doubt does in 7) to rival Letty, Gisele, or Elena. And Mia more than gives either princess a run for her money.
I had a childhood attachment for Star Wars -- in part maybe because we didn't have videos or other home play devices -- once you'd seen it at the cinema it was a few years before it would be on tv. Eventually there was video rental and DVDs etc but I didn't watch the films over and over -- when a never ending parade of Star Wars started happening on TV in this last decade I realised I wasn't sitting down to watch. A clue might also be found in the fanfic I wrote for a competition after Empire came out -- which had non-Jedi genetically engineered force users (several female) one of which was a female protagonist who protagged... and more stuff happening :D
F&F films I can sit down and watch repeatedly and when one's on TV while I surf through it is always a temptation to keep watching.
I could pretend to hang on to a childhood attachment for Star Wars... or I can admit I'd much rather get my kicks watching fun diverse films, with human relationships that I'd want to emulate. I'm going to go with not waiting on Star Wars to stop having scenes that make me cringe -- and give my time and money to the creators who already know there are people who'll love them for Han and Gisele (and Elena and Mia and...)
I don't own any Star Wars DVDs - I have all 7 F&F films. I guess I made my choice before I knew I'd made a choice.
** I watched the vid where Cracked explain clickbaitiness.
[There are 7 Fast and Furious films out at the moment and 7 Star Wars films (although it looks as though Disney is going to churn out additional films at excessive speed for as long as they make money)... I haven't seen Star Wars 7 and probably won't for a while but I've heard some talk.]
1. Fast & Furious films are about a familia of characters and Star Wars turns out to be more about a family of stereotypes who barely know each other.
The Toretto familia is very much the medieval household -- a collection of blood relatives, clients, dependants, etc who're to some extent interdependent but bound more by affection, obligation, and debts of honour than pure self-interest. From the first film onwards we are given characterisation for and reasons to like even the most minor members of Dom's familia. In the second film Brian develops relationships not unlike those he's seen Dom create and in Fast 5 those friends reappear to join the familia. In Tokyo Drift Han is also shown as having created his own form of familia (the eventual timeline means this film actually happens between Furious 6 and Furious 7)
The Skywalker family is... well how do I put this... excessively dysfunctional? (Even knowing he also has a daughter Anakin/Vader doesn't appear to be fussed) You also don't get much in the way of backstory characterisation -- what do you know about Han Solo from the first movie? What do you know by the end of Jedi? He was a smuggler. He won his ship from Lando (so presumably he was doing something prior to smuggling that made enough of a stake to wager against a spaceship). And he's one of the three main characters. All I know about Luke is that he's bored with his life and wants to go and be a pilot for the Empire. And actually if you swap Empire for Rebellion that's pretty much his character arc for the first three movies -- starts place A, goes to place B because of a message, goes to place C to fight in climactic battle. In the prequel films the characterisation is also excessively limited -- to Annakin pretty much. So, along with purely plot-based and narrow characterisation the Skywalker family has very little in the way of visible long-term friends. Han Solo has two friends. The only familia the Skywalkers have are a couple of robots... who they abandon, memory-wipe, and otherwise treat really badly. These are not people who make and keep friends.
2. The Fast and Furious films have more, and more proactive, women characters.
I specified characters because the backgrounds of the F&F films are full of, often half-naked, women. Although I would point out that these don't feel like slave girls and they may be half-naked but they're there as women who've chosen what they're wearing. Even some of the half-naked ladies are allowed a few moments to demonstrate character.
Star Wars has two main women characters in six films. They're both princesses (although quite how they're titled princesses is a bit vague and hand-wavy). They both talk quite a bit, have a good grasp of girlish banter, and like their hair complicated. We get very little idea of them having family and they've both been put into politically dangerous positions at relatively young ages where other choices would seem to be limited. And until the seventh film I couldn't have said this, but the main role of both princesses is marrying a hero and having kids to be in the next set of films. I honestly can't remember either of them being particularly successful at anything else that's plot critical. The original film starts with Leia failing to get the plans of the death star to the rebels, and the prequels are fairly insistent that Anakin goes to the darkside because of his affair with Padme and the death of his mother (who you'd have thought maybe Padme could have arranged to have bought and installed in a guest room somewhere? Or would that have been really uncomfortable when her relationship with Anakin became obvious?). There are few other women in the later Star Wars universe, fewer who get even one line of dialogue, and the women are slaves, handmaids, wives, mothers, a few junior rebels, and a Mon Mothma. I've not taken a stop watch to the films (seriously I fall asleep in 2 and 3 most of the times when I try to watch them) but I suspect there's more run-time of background females that are aliens than women. Let's face it, I'm pretty sure that the meeting with Grand Moff Tarkin in the original film has more spoken lines by totally forgettable Imperial men than the entire original trilogy has dialogue by women other than Leia.
F&F has four main women and so far only one of them -- Mia Toretto -- has produced children. All of the main women -- Mia, Letty, Elena, and Gisele -- are, or have been, involved in the heavy lifting. They all have back stories too (Mia is Dom's sister and they share backstory with Letty who was a girl next door, Elena's husband was an honest cop and when he was killed she joined the police, Gisele was military and then sold her services). Women also show up as uniformed, plain clothes, and undercover police officers in multiple countries. Also bodyguards, minor members of the familia, evil criminals, and even as a computer expert. The women involved are diverse and diverse in appearance, not simply eye-candy you can't believe capable of their roles, and unlike many major films the female characters are not continually recast with other actors, nor do they appear in one film, get bedded, and vanish without mention. Elena even returns in Furious 7... after Dom is no longer romantically involved with her.
3. Cars
Star Wars doesn't have cars and pod-racing is not car racing. No I don't like the real sport stuff I like film street races and car play/stunts. I liked driving and when I was younger and had the reflexes I would have loved to drive a fast car fast. (Also dance parties and cars)
4. Music
There's no denying that the score for Star Wars is pretty impressive and leant the original trilogy a level of serious passion that sf and fantasy films seldom aspired to. I adored and still love the original musical ending of Jedi and the fight music from Phantom too.
But F&F has theme music for various players too *aaand* some great choices of soundtrack songs. I enjoy classical music, but there's a lot to be said for music you can sing and dance along with.
Click to view5. Character diversity.
I may be overlooking someone but the cast of Star Wars was pretty white except for Darth Vader who is a white guy with a black voice-over. Then there's Lando in Empire... who betrays his old friend before handily changing sides again. He's the guy who destroys the second death star. Does he get a mention in 7? The prequels do somewhat better with a black Jedi Master but...
I'm not crazy against using aliens or robots or whatever to address issues around diversity, human rights, othering etc but Star Wars isn't using aliens to remove direct heat from an issue. Aliens are there in great diversity to sell collectible toys. When you're concentrating on that it may be easy to miss that you have hundreds of intelligent species hanging around but very little human diversity. (Or it's like The Hunger Games where you get the feeling no one noticed or questioned that the agricultural district seems to be all black people)
The first F&F film is perhaps the least diverse -- leaving aside the problem of Dom himself (and whether you consider the character or actor in judging his diversity credentials) you still have Letty and the Vietnamese racing gang led by Johnny Tran. The third film has a majority of the characters being Japanese or of Asian descent. By the time we get to 5, 6, and 7, the familia consists of four 'white' characters out of ten (Dom, Mia, Brian, and Vince) and while we lose two of the other six by the end of Furious 6 three more have been added to the main character line-up so it becomes 3/8. And yes, a chunk of the romances are interracial. Oh and the diverse characters get screen time talking to each other and building relationships between themselves without being seen only in relationships with main white characters (kind of like a Bechdel test but for diversity :P )
6. Han.
Both films have Hans in. I fell in love with both Hans.
But Stars Wars gave me a baby Harrison Ford playing a guy whose relationship is perfect for teenage girls in the last millennium (which is what and when I was). No baggage except a Wookie, and way less immature and whiny than Luke. He and Leia have one of those sniping at each other, insults = love, relationships that helpfully skirts around any awkwardness about one corner of the initial love triangle being incestuous but doesn't otherwise make that much sense to me as an adult. I can't blame Twilight etc on this but... you know I want to :P
F&F gave me Han played by Sung Kang who is as hot as (maybe hotter than) Ford and gets better dialogue. He's seen in two relationships, the first casual and the second serious. They don't snipe or undermine each other. The attraction is based on looks and mutual interests/admiration and grows through the two movies they share. The point where a small army of police officers (led by a woman) delivers a summons from Dom/Hobbs demonstrates that they literally have each others backs, and fronts, and a relationship I find way more attractive than Leia and Han's. They are totally heart-breaking.
7.Fight Scenes.
Light sabres are neat. They don't entirely make sense in a universe with blasters etc but that fight in the prequel where force fields come down and... Okay maybe it's the music that really kicks ass in that fight scene but still I loved it the first time I saw it.
I just enjoy the fight scenes in F&F more. And yes, please tell me that the physics in F&F is wrong or that these fights would cause serious injuries and possibly deaths... and then explain lightsabres
Action movies are not thrillers and none of them involve realism. SF movies are not about science and yahdahyahdah.
7a Women drive, women race, women fight, women kill, women (and other featured characters) die.
Yes I'm back on the women thing. Because while the fistfights are pretty much woman on woman the women do get to race men, and fight men when it doesn't involve fists (and while I've heard that brought up as a male gaze problem, I personally don't want to see a fight where a man goes all out on a woman -- I don't like to say never but it's more likely to misfire than work for me -- too soon)
There is nothing Star Wars has done (and I doubt does in 7) to rival Letty, Gisele, or Elena. And Mia more than gives either princess a run for her money.
I had a childhood attachment for Star Wars -- in part maybe because we didn't have videos or other home play devices -- once you'd seen it at the cinema it was a few years before it would be on tv. Eventually there was video rental and DVDs etc but I didn't watch the films over and over -- when a never ending parade of Star Wars started happening on TV in this last decade I realised I wasn't sitting down to watch. A clue might also be found in the fanfic I wrote for a competition after Empire came out -- which had non-Jedi genetically engineered force users (several female) one of which was a female protagonist who protagged... and more stuff happening :D
F&F films I can sit down and watch repeatedly and when one's on TV while I surf through it is always a temptation to keep watching.
I could pretend to hang on to a childhood attachment for Star Wars... or I can admit I'd much rather get my kicks watching fun diverse films, with human relationships that I'd want to emulate. I'm going to go with not waiting on Star Wars to stop having scenes that make me cringe -- and give my time and money to the creators who already know there are people who'll love them for Han and Gisele (and Elena and Mia and...)
I don't own any Star Wars DVDs - I have all 7 F&F films. I guess I made my choice before I knew I'd made a choice.