Fire Kathleen Kennedy

This piece will talk about Star Wars and the clear differences between Star Wars from a John Favreau and Dave Filoni view and Star Wars under Kathleen Kennedy’s purview. Yes I am aware that she signs off on everything as studio head but I am referring to the Filloniverse as it is known vs everything else.

To get to the brass tax of it this article was inspired after catching up with the first few episodes of the new season of The Bad Batch and then reading an article online about the Acolyte. In both of these things two very different things are being done, on the one hand you have characters that fans have come to know over a long period of time and lots of appearance from well liked characters and on the other hand you have something very new without known characters. Now a few prefaces, I am not saying in John and Dave’s stuff there isn’t new characters there are, there are simply a lot of returning ones as well, and I am not saying outside of the John and Dave stuff there is no recurring characters in the rest of the shows there are, just these feel more forced, I am also not saying there shouldn’t be entirely original stories.

I personally think of these two approaches the one favoured by John and Dave is the right way forward as it expands Star Wars and gives us new characters but does so in a way that feels like they care about the characters they already have and care that fans like them. Whereas outside of John and Dave Kathleen and co seem to want to wipe away everything the fans care about killing off fan favourite characters and wanting to move to entirely new periods in cannon, not to tell interesting new tales but so they aren’t shackled by cannon and so they can stuff the cast with as much diversity as possible. There is a sense that John and Dave understand that Star Wars is for everyone and have strong male and female characters, look at Dinn and Bo-Katan, whereas Kathleen wants only women to watch and so pushes Rey over all the other characters in the sequel trilogy, makes Reva the main focus of the Obi-Wan show and cast the Acolyte tobasically be all women. It couldn’t be clearer to see that Kathleen and her ilk and Lucasfilm hate the male fans who make up the majority of the Star Wars fan base and most likely thinks of them as some unwashed bigots who they can try and take money from whilst calling them names. However, it is clear to see that this isn’t working. The Acolyte is already hated, Obi-Wan didn’t make the numbers in the way they wanted it to and the sequels…. Well there is a reason we haven’t had a numbered film in a goodly while.

Whereas again in the John and Dave sphere The Mandalorian has been Disney plus’s flagship show, The Bad Batch has a dedicated fan base and Ahsoka often trended on X, people want their shows whilst looking at things like the Acolyte and just seeing more of the same messaging and fan hate that ruined the sequel trilogy. Who knows maybe the Acolyte will become another Andor a breakout hit despite who is producing it but somehow I doubt it and I think it will be another round of blaming the racist fans, even though the majority aren’t, for not mindlessly consuming a bad product they didn’t ask for. It is funny how it is never that the product was bad anymore it is always oh the toxic fans.

Ultimately I think Star Wars needs to see the back of Kathleen Kennedy her politics is ruining many a good idea and I think someone who is actually a fan, I don’t believe she has ever watched any of these films of TV shows, should be in charge.

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Star Wars: The Quest To Lose Half The Audience To Get A Quarter

Written by Luke Barnes

This piece will talk about Star Wars and the continued mismanagement of the once beloved franchise. As a lot of you will know I have written a cinema issues piece before about Star Wars and Kathleen Kennedy, but here I want to talk more about the upcoming Acolyte show and how the metrics show that what certain sections of Lucasfilm are trying to do won’t work.

So before we get into it a few disclaimers, firstly I think the shows and soon to be movies under John and Dave’s watchful eye have been mostly good bar Book of Bobba Fett¸ secondly the Acolyte may well be good I could be wrong about it. With that said let’s get into it.

Men and women alike for many decades have both liked Star Wars, however, in terms of traditional gender norms it was always seen as more of a boy brand, rightly or wrongly, than a girl brand. Personally, I think people can like what they like regardless of gender, but this was how the franchise was perceived. Anyway in recent years Disney has tried to make the brand into a girl brand with the idea that the male audience would stick around and they could grow the audience even more, and maybe in a sense they could have done this. However, rather than create new stories that had male and female strong characters in it that could encourage both sides of the audience to stick around new projects like the Acolyte don’t value or want the male audience around, so only focus on creating female characters with the idea that male fans have had it too good for too long. No doubt they will cry that this isn’t for male fans or call them ists and phobes as they often do, again because Lucasfilm wants to keep the male audience around, sarcasm.

Moreover, look at something like Madame Web that thought it could take its male audience for granted and went full force into the idea of tokenistic cynical female empowerment and then got closer to having women being fifty percent of the audience but at the same time lost a massive chunk of their male audience and bombed. If I ran Star Wars that would bother me, and I would know as the research suggests that most of my audience was male so I would question will this show work for them.

I am not saying that men can’t relate to female characters of course they can look at the popularity of Buffy but when you create a show that seems to be from the off, with how the creatives have spoken about it, being fairly antagonistic to a large part of your viewing audience, you can’t really be surprised when this does flop or underperform or just doesn’t get picked up for a second season.

What I want is for common sense to return, for the pendulum to swing back to the middle. You can make a show that is for everyone, that doesn’t have creatives that hate their audience and tells them this show isn’t for them, you can have a show that appeals to men and women, you don’t need to prioritise the female audience over the male audience you can do both. Why does it have to be one way or the other at the moment. You know why something like Dune did really well because it appealed to men and women, the director didn’t do an Instagram post in a car looking like he hasn’t shaved in a few too many years and tell fans that the film isn’t for them it is just for a small section of vocal activists on X who probably don’t even care about the IP.

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Ahsoka: Season Overview

Written by Luke Barnes

Summary

Rebels gets a meaningful wrap up.

Whilst Kathleen Kennedy lives out her days proving South Park right and thinks that forcing another chapter in the much hated sequel trilogy is the right way to go with a director who wants to make a large part of the audience ‘uncomfortable’, Dave Filoni proves that he is the one sane voice left in Star Wars.

I will admit this isn’t a perfect series, the pacing is really all over the place and it takes far too long to get good but once it does it really does. I think it is nice to see the Rebels family back together again and I think seeing Ezra, Eman Esfandi, is still carrying on with the force in his self-imposed exile is a nice parallel to Luke, Mark Hamill, who wanted the Jedi to die.

I think that Rosario Dawson did an okay job as Ahsoka, I am still not sold, but her scenes with Anakin, played by Hayden Christensen, where interesting and compelling especially if you have watched a lot of the previous animated material. However, I thought the best characters here by a country mile are Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Hera and Natasha Liu Bordizzo as Sabine. Winstead plays Hera with the right amounts of maternal feeling but also military prowess that both aspects of the character are realised well, I think the scene in the finale where she gets to meet Ezra again is particularly touching. Bordizzo’s Sabine on the other hand really is the anchor of the series, I think she is a great audience surrogate character and you really buy her quest to save Ezra, I also thought that turning her into a Mandalorian jedi, padawan for now, was a nice touch. I would be interested to see if the show keeps Sabine and Ezra as just friends, I have a feeling there may be another force baby on the way in the coming seasons.

The villains are strong, Thrawn, Lars Mikkelsen, is probably the least strong of the bunch maybe it was just because I didn’t get to see much of him but I thought that he just didn’t have the same menace he did in the shows. Elsbeth, Diana Lee Inosanto, was cool it is night to see more from the Nightsisters hopefully we get to see more of them in the next season. Baylan, played by Rey Stevenson, and Shin, played by Ivanna Sakhno, were both very interesting, I found Baylan’s quest to be very interesting and it is a shame we didn’t get a more definitive answer as to what he was looking for in the final episode. I would like to see flashbacks to his time in the order in the next season, they could do that to get around the tragic real world passing of Stevenson. Shin has a lot of potential to rise to be a Sith Lord in the post original trilogy pre sequel trilogy era, though I think they will have her turn to the light instead.

The plot is mainly just a quest to find Ezra and then to find Thrawn which really isn’t very much, hence the need to pad it out, but I think the season ends off on an interesting note.

Overall, there is still some hope left out there in the Star Wars universe

4/5

Pros.

Hera, Sabine

Seeing the characters reunited

Where the season ends off

More Nightsisters

Cons.

Pacing
Bad costumes/effects at times

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Star Wars Is Dead

Written by Luke Barnes

This piece will talk about Star Wars and the recent controversy around the comments made by the director of the next cinematic release.

Now for those of you who have followed me for a while you will know where I am going with this, why alienate your audience. Kathleen Kennedy seems to think that the force is female but if you actually want to be profitable, and be able to make streaming services that aren’t haemorrhaging viewers season by season it might be time to admit that the force is genderless and stop telling the male audience to take a long walk off a short pier.

Again Kennedy in her wisdom, and likely some kind of voodoo hold over Bob Iger, has hired a documentary filmmaker for the director of the next film. Now I have no issue with the director’s work on Ms Marvel she did make the best episodes, however, I think that you need professionals not activists. I have often said studios should have it in their contracts that anyone working on any of their projects cannot make divisive political statements whilst they are under contract it just makes sense. Anyway, the new director in an interview said that she likes her film’s to make men uncomfortable, again this is not the kind of attitude you want from a director of a blockbuster.

I won’t even engage with this from a culture war outlook, but rather from a business one the Star Wars brand is on life support and the last thing you want to be doing is saying something like this that will fracture and divide your fanbase even further and create bad PR for the film before it has even come out. Yes, there are people who would hate this anyway as it carries on the sequel trilogy, but why go out of your way to make it worse.

Again Kathleen Kennedy needs to realise that her rather glaring political positions are getting in the way of her making a good film, if you say the force is female and tell the male audience to take a hike, and take it further by making a film that is seemingly now designed to make them uncomfortable then it won’t do well at the box office and will bomb because lets face facts women aren’t turning out for Star Wars, any analytics you want to look at will still tell you men are the main audience.

If I was Bob Iger right now I would be livid, I would remove Kennedy as she cannot be trusted anymore, I don’t know how after the last Indiana Jones film that killed that franchise and the Sequel trilogy she is still in a job but hey. If nothing else if for some reason they can’t get rid of her I would veto her directing choice take the bad PR and then bring in a Brice Dallas Howard someone who knows the brand well the fans like and is still female so they can still tick that progressive box.

Lets face it folks Rey, a hated character, led Star Wars film that carries on the bad blood of the sequels and is directed by someone who wants to make the majority of the audience uncomfortable is destined to bomb as it has no fan excitement, it has no hype and it will go the way of Aquaman II after the whole Amber Heard thing.

Widely this is a step to kill Star Wars as Kennedy knows her days are numbered in the top job.

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Star Wars Visions: The Bandits Of Golak

Written by Luke Barnes

Summary

A brother and sister duo try to escape Imperials and Inquisitors whilst fleeing the Galactic Civil War.

There isn’t a whole lot wrong with this episode, it has some okay action and at times knows how to use its tension, but I think that is just it, this is an episode of half measures it is fine but doesn’t push for more than that.

I think the major issue with this episode is that the plot idea has been done before and done better, not the exact same plot but the idea of force sensitives having to run away from the Empire whilst being hunted down and having to make sacrifices to go into hiding. I feel like I have seen the episode so many times before in different areas of Star Wars media and for me that is a problem.

I also think that it is time to stop having all these survivors of Order 66 as it totally ruins the moment within the lore. Order 66 was impactful as it killed off most of the Jedis, it was a big deal, to have more and more of them surviving just takes away from it. Before you say it I know this show isn’t cannon, but I just wanted to say as it plays a role in the narrative of the episode that it is a plot crutch I am not enjoying from current year Star Wars. If they want to have more Jedi they could establish that there was a temple of some kind in the Outer Rim or beyond that was a splinter group from the main order and which didn’t get involved in the Galactic Civil War for whatever reason. That way you can have more new Jedi’s pop up without the question being where were they in the original trilogy.

Overall, a fine episode if one that felt very, very familiar.

2/5

Pros.

The action was okay

It was watchable

Cons.

The lazy plot crutch of another surviving Jedi

I feel like I have seen it before

The emotions weren’t developed enough to be impactful

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Star Wars Visions: The Spy Dancer

Written by Luke Barnes

Summary

A dancer bides her time to strike back against the Empire.

Despite my claims in the last Star Wars Visions review this episode is in fact the best of the season so far. This is for two central reasons.

Firstly the story of the lead and the horrors she has faced really puts a human, or in this case alien, face to the rebellion and makes it feel even more important and impactful. I think the episode perfectly captures this idea of rebelling and pain in the most beautiful way, and that the final hint towards resolution was surprisingly effecting.

Secondly, the animation is the best here is has been all season with Cartoon Saloon being the only ones thus far to pose a challenge to Studio La Cachette’s excellent form. This really comes through during the dancing scenes with the incredibly intricate dance wherein the lead’s outfit and the fabric itself seem to come to life.

I think both of these reasons raise the bar from what has already come out this season and lays down a gauntlet for the final few episodes to match or exceed.

Overall, I think this is a powerful episode that is well crafted and is guaranteed to make you shed a tear.

4/5

Pros.

The emotions

The animation

The characters

The feeling of rebellion and pain

Cons.

The ending is a bit too opened ended for my liking I would have liked a more definitive ending

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Star Wars Visions: Journey To The Dark Head

Written by Luke Barnes

Summary

A monk and a Jedi must work together in order to turn the tide against the Sith.

Finally midway through the season this show remembers what it is. This was the first episode of the season that actually felt like Star Wars and would be what I would expect from this show.

That is not to say it was perfect as it was a little formulaic at times and felt very much like something we have all seen before, but there were still more good elements than bad which made this the best episode so far this season in my opinion, but that is also a pretty low bar.

I enjoyed seeing the Sith Lord being fully evil and destroying the Jedi temple in the flashback as I feel like within Star Wars more broadly we are often told about the evil things these Sith Lords have done rather than being shown it. By showing it here it allows for an added layer of dramatic weight which enables the novice Jedi’s backstory and later character journey to feel more believable and weighty.

Overall, a lot further down the right track.

3/5

Pros.

It feels like Star Wars

Showing the Sith at their most powerful

The premise is interesting and mostly delivers

Cons.

The monk characters feels very one note

At times this episode bordered on the overly familiar

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Star Wars Visions: I Am Your Mother

Written by Luke Barnes

Summary

A young pilot is embarrassed of her mum and so doesn’t informer her about the family race.

This is a very sad review for me, I am a big fan of Aardman Animation for the most part and when I heard they were doing their own Star Wars short I was very excited, but this is the review I am writing.

Many aspects of this short just didn’t work. The characters are paper thin and cannot have a believable emotional journey in the amount of time they are on screen for. The story is generic and revolves around a child being embarrassed by their parent, which we have all seen before. Even the humour and tone feels a little too goofy to fit the pretty sober tone of the rest of the animated offerings within this second season.

I suppose that brings things to the crux of the problem, much like with the last episode this just doesn’t feel like Star Wars, yes there are fighter pilots, but more broadly there is a lack of connectivity that makes this episode feel like it could just be taking place in any old science fiction universe.

Overall, I am all for doing something different with Star Wars but there is a point when it just doesn’t feel like Star Wars anymore.

1.5/5

Pros.

A little bit of Aardman charm manages to get through

It is short

Cons.

The tone doesn’t work

It doesn’t feel like Star Wars

The story feels generic and played out

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Star Wars Visions: In The Stars

Written by Luke Barnes

Summary

Two sisters attempt to restore water to their devastated world

Much like episode 2 I found this episode to be depressing, and I know Star Wars can be depressing and can do it well look at Andor, however, even within the confines of that show there is an underlying hopefulness as the Rebellion is beginning to from, here things start out incredibly bleak and don’t get better until the end of the episode.

I thought the characters were fine, I didn’t really warm to either sister, and thought that their arc of one being naïve and plucky and the other guarded and jaded had been done better in the past. I understand where the episode wanted their arcs to go and it roughly got there but I think more work was needed to do it well.

I am finding with this second season of Visions that pacing is really becoming an issue either the idea isn’t developed enough and needs more time to tell its story or the idea is too long and needs to be better cut down. The whole season thus far could do with some better editing.

Overall, fairly boring and generic.

2/5

Pros.

A solid premise

Seeing the wide reaches of the Empire

Cons.

It is underdeveloped and the character arcs needed more time

The sister’s don’t stand out as characters and feel too familiar in terms of personality

It feels depressing and not fun to watch

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Star Wars Visions: Screecher’s Reach

Written by Luke Barnes

Summary

A group of children straight from the workhouse explore a cave system and come across an old Sith who has gone mad and is thought of by the locals as a ghost, little do the children know they have stumbled into a much darker game.

This episode was certainly not what I was bargaining for, in many senses this episode was deeply unsettling outright creepy. Normally I wouldn’t have an issue with this but in the context of the show and what Star Wars is this came across as being far too different.

Now the whole point of this show is to try and play around with Star Wars and do new things, however, I think it is a balancing act between doing something new that still feels like the brand at the same time. This I would argue crossed that line and no longer felt like Star Wars

The Sith Mother, who is the real villain behind the whole episode was a very intriguing figure that I have not been able to stop thinking about since watching this, there was just something so off-kilter and incredibly sinister about her that makes her interesting. I hope the wider Star Wars lore comes back to her at some point.

Overall, depressing and unsettling not really what I want out of a Star Wars show.

1.5/5

Pros.

The Sith Mother was interesting

It has great animation

Cons.

It is bleak

It doesn’t feel like Star Wars

It is unsettling

The narrative needed greater explanation

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