Star Wars and the MCU

I hadn’t seen a single Star Wars film until the start of this year. Not one.

I’ve now seen a Star Wars film at the movies. And I’m going to list some spoilers for it too, so… be warned.

Why?

Back in the day we never used to watch films at the movies. So rare, in fact, was the experience that I can remember seven films between 5 and 18.

1. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (great montage, if you’ve seen it, you know the one I mean)
2. The Avengers (as part of a school fundraiser: single best time I’ve had watching a movie at the cinema)
3. The A-Team (likewise)
4. Home on the Range
5. Meet the Robinsons
6. Madagascar
7. Avatar (the blue people one)

There were definitely a few more (Chicken Little, maybe?) and 4–6 were all (as I remember) courtesy of my much older half-sister (iirc we watched Madagascar with her and she’d got us some gift tickets too.

But that’s not many. It’s certainly nothing like this year where I’ve seen five. The three MCU films, Star Wars and, today, Jumanji.

I still think going to the cinema is a far inferior experience. You can’t really talk… you certainly can’t pause and the volume is often way too loud, or the flashes of light far too bright (since everyone and their dog wants Rembrandt to be their cinematographer… why? even End of Watch ended up doing this). It is, in other words, the worst way of watching a film.

But if you want to see something soon, it’s the way to go. And even though films are stupidly expensive, we can afford to watch them more than we used to.

And that’s basically why I watched Star Wars the other day. I wanted to know what happened and I didn’t want to read the Wikipedia page.

We might compare, for a minute, You, Mr Robot, Barry and Game of Thrones. These television series all share one thing in common… I watched a bunch of episodes and gave them up as a bad job. Barry’s not as absurd as it should be. Mr Robot… actually, I cared enough to read the Wiki summaries and I think the answer here is it’s made by people with their heads up their arse because they’ve got an interesting story. You… too weird, it’s not “fun” to watch and I didn’t get the feeling it knew how bad its villain & main character is. Game of Thrones is just bad… boring story and pretentious style (but, to be fair, I’ve heard the first series was actually good and unlike these other examples I didn’t watch from the start, but GOT spoilers were everywhere in 2016–17 so I know the story well).

If I kept watching the Star Wars films but gave those up, does that mean Star Wars is better than them? More my thing than them?

No.

Firstly, I’m not a big fan of space. It’s not particularly interesting and when it is, it’s mostly because it’s fantasy set in space… e.g. Saga… or time travel in disguise (Doctor Who, Insterstellar), which is the One True SciFi (don’t deny it, you know you’re lying to yourself).

Secondly, Mr Robot and Barry are way more the sort of thing I like. I mean, hell, my problem with Barry is that it’s not Barry enough to work.

The reason I kept going with the Star Wars films is probably because while each “episode” is long, the story as a whole is short. And, watching in chronological order, the story is pretty good.

People like to talk about retcons and plot holes in Star Wars but, honestly, they’re not noticeable. It’s not like the MCU which doesn’t have many, but the ones it does have give one whiplash.

And this is probably why the MCU is able to churn out lots of films, why Rogue One did well and Solo (even though it is the best Star Wars film) did not. When it comes down to it… Star Wars is an actual saga and it was telling a proper arc. It is, in other words, Harry Potter, the Devimon/Crests/Myotismon/Dark Masters arcs of Digimon Adventure, Digimon Tamers (as a whole… watch the dub… easily one of the top 10 TV shows of all time, just needed a better budget) or Avatar (not the dumb blue people, the real Avatar). The exception to this rule (and the most MCU-ish one overall) is Solo… which isn’t really part of the saga. And, lo, it didn’t do very well.

Look, the Rise of Skywalker isn’t a perfect film but it doesn’t rely on a series of contrived events and nonsensical events like Infinity War and Endgame do. The questions that you can raise about it have actual answers. Over on r/marvelstudios people will tell you Doctor Strange was trying to murder Tony Stark. And they’re right! It’s the best possible explanation for what happens in Infinity War and Endgame. Literally nothing else makes sense and the reason for that is that it describes what the writers and directors were looking to do with the film.

This character actually describes the later Phase Three films of the MCU very well. The film-makers have been told that their films need to involve X, Y and Z events. That’s fine. The problem is that f(X) = A in some films whereas in other films f(X) = B. That’s not fine. And, as we saw, we also know f(Y) = C => g(K) = Z, even though Y => g(K) =/= Z. It’s mental.

Disney under Star Wars doesn’t have this problem. Why? Because of its scatter-brained, arse-backwards approach to making films. The Force Awakens makes a series of offers to The Last Jedi, which immediately turned pretty much all of them down. The Last Jedi didn’t really set much up moving forwards except (a) Reylo and (b) Zuko’s, er, Kylo Ren/Ben Solo’s redemption. Both of these things went on to happen, but almost everything else was stripped out. The Rebels/Resistance seem well established, Finn/Rose is ditched, Hux is sidelined/killed, Rose is sidelined/ignored… and, well, I guess responsible Poe reflected the lesson he learnt in TLJ. The result is a sequence of films where you can go, “Wait, how?” and get an answer. It might not be a good answer, but it’s not “Doctor Strange murdered Tony Stark”.

That’s… a disturbing willingness to have no idea what your story is going to do. It’s little wonder Star Wars just ended up ripping off Avatar: The Last Airbender pretty much wholesale, actually. And, I guess, in some ways they also riffed from the (unfairly) maligned Legend of Korra Book 2 (whose plot, but not ideas, were copied more directly by Korra Book 4, incidentally… but no-one wants to acknowledge this). Why is it little wonder? It’s an accessible narrative, popular among the old “younger” fans who probably attacked TLJ the most and, of course, the Avatar and the Jedi have parallels.

So… which way is better? Sagas or Cinematic Universes?

Honestly, the MCU’s is proving quite unsatisfactory… and it’s been getting worse (in this sense, the films themselves are mostly funnier, more entertaining and embrace the source material more even as the story has declined in quality). I don’t think that’s a consequence of the cinematic universe per se but rather the way they’ve been doing things. The comics work because they play with the world. As Patrick H. Willems once pointed out (it might be this video) the only films the MCU’s done that actually work this way are Ragnarok and Black Panther. As long as the MCU keeps trying to use contrived plot “ladders” disguised under charismatic villain lines and clever quips, the story will fail to deliver. So, is Star Wars better? Probably not, no.

Something the MCU’s got on Star Wars is that it does maintain cohesion without seeming too generic. Which is weird… Star Wars is a supposedly original series and the MCU an adaptation, but Civil War seems a less conventional story anyway. Ragnarok and Black Panther have pretty much the same plot, but they don’t feel like something else as much as Disney’s trilogy feels like Avatar or the prequels “hero becomes bad” (which has echoes of Greek tragedy to it) or the original trilogy “the chosen one” (Luke’s kind of the reverse Mordred, living in a world where Merlin and Arthur are evil).

It’s the need to tie the object to a subject that did the MCU in. When it was just Infinity Stones, it was better in terms of the story. At least, until it became always the Infinity Stones. If there is another subject, here’s hoping they’re played out for real as a saga… four movies at least (but,perhaps in the Palpatine fashion… not starting off as a villain in the open… or the Anakin fashion, corrupted over time).

But maybe I’m just spouting textual hot air. After all, would I watch more Star Wars films? Not at the movies. Will I be watching Black Widow? You betcha.