Postby Thad » Tue Jun 21, 2022 12:48 am
Still a couple behind but yeah episode 3's a mess, standard escape-and-then-get-captured-again time-wasting. Obi-Wan makes stupid decisions just to advance the plot ("welp, our contact isn't here, let's immediately abandon the meeting point and fuck everything up, but first a Zach Braff cameo"). And...they can't walk around the fence? If this is a Blazing Saddles reference then I love it, but that is the only possible way it makes any sense whatsoever?
The best thing I can say about the Obi-Wan/Darth Vader confrontation is that I get what they were trying to do. From the individual shots, I can tell it looked really fucking cool in the storyboard phase. And I understand the character beat they were trying to hit -- this series is all about Obi-Wan at his lowest, wracked with guilt and self-doubt, and so when he faces Darth Vader it's not just that he's looking at a ghost and being haunted by his own failure, it's also a deliberate contrast to how cool and self-assured he is when they meet in the original movie. The idea is that he's a quivering mess now, but sometime between now and Ep 4 he pulls it together and transcends his past failures. All that has real potential; there are some good ideas in there; it's just that the execution falls flat. They overdo it; Obi-Wan isn't just off-guard, he's sniveling and weak. There are definite issues with the plotting in this one, but where this scene breaks down isn't in the writing or the storyboarding, it just doesn't quite come together in the actual execution. I think it would have worked better if they'd underplayed it, if instead of running away and cowering he'd clenched his jaw and stood his ground but clearly been shaken-up and lost the fight as a result. McGregor's got the chops; he could have pulled that off. Star Wars has never been good at subtlety, it's a fucking opera and every emotion has to be oversized, and that's often to its detriment. I think this could have been a really good, intense scene if they'd trusted McGregor enough to have him go small instead of big.
I do think Vader's characterization in that scene pretty much worked out that way, but I'm not sure how much of that was deliberate and how much of it was just a result of the dual-casting. We have a Vader who sounds like James Earl Jones but acts like Hayden Christensen, for very obvious and literal reasons, but it ends up working really well on a metaphorical level, too. He wants to be the Vader of the OT, but he isn't yet; he's not as in-control as he appears, he's fucking furious. Obi-Wan survives because Vader's too emotional to just fucking kill him when he has the chance; he wants to make him suffer. I think there's something there, with Vader trying to appear calm but actually being emotional underneath it; I think if they'd had the conviction to show that same struggle with Obi-Wan, they could have really saved the entire scene.
Anyway. For all that it fell short, it had its moments. Still loving Vivien Lyra Blair as Leia. And for that matter the rest of the cast is pretty great too, Zach Braff cameo and all, even if the material's not quite there this time around.
And like I say, there were some really cool shots that I could tell looked a lot better in the storyboarding phase. And Vader's introduction was cool. The Imperial March, the breathing, the voice. Watching him get put together like fucking Voltron. And LBR, getting burned up in a volcano and then building your fucking house on it is baller as hell.
It was frustrating, but not a total loss, which is an accurate description of most of the Star Wars franchise, really.
Anyway that's episode 3. Haven't seen 4 or 5 yet but yeah for a series that's only 6 episodes long it's already hit the point where it's feeling needlessly padded. And that ain't great, but that's one more thing that's also very Star Wars.