Salon Arts and Entertainment: What's wrong (and right) with "The Phantom Menace"
David Brin on What's Wrong with the Star Wars Saga
There are some severe holes in the Star Wars Saga that go beyond the mere quibbling about what James Kirk's initials are...
Anakin Skywalker is "too old," at 6, to be trained as a Jedi. But apparently his son Luke is a "quick fixer-upper" at twentysomething...
Unstoppable robot enemy!!! Why doesn't someone pull the central switch? (Um, central switch?)
"Gee whillikers, R2, the folks out there sure are in a pickle. What's that, girl? Solve the whole plot by diving my tiny ship into the center of a big bad-ass one, and set off a chain reaction to blow it up from the inside while we run away real fast? What an idea! Gee, I'll bet THAT'S never been done before!"
"We, the Jedi Council, won't train young Skywalker because he might turn dangerous."
Instead, they waffle between leaving his training to a novice Jedi Knight, or throw him into the street, free for someone evil to train to be truly dangerous.
Once the queen gets back home to her purse, wouldn't it make sense for her to get her Galactic Express card out and buy Anakin's mother out of slavery? Or perhaps they really don't care that she's a slave...
Darth Vader grew up on Tatooine, and yet has forgotten about this, and R2-D2, and the robot C3PO that he himself built as a child.
Apparently the Republic has no police forces, no journalists, no dampening mechanisms of any sort.
In our world, the United Nations may be regarded as pretty lame, but when push comes to shove, they eventually did get troops deployed in East Timor and Bosnia.
David Brin: "Star Wars" despots vs. "Star Trek" populists
Just what bill of goods are we being sold, between the frames?
Elites have an inherent right to arbitrary rule; common citizens needn't be consulted. They may only choose which elite to follow.
"Good" elites should act on their subjective whims, without evidence, argument or accountability.
Any amount of sin can be forgiven if you are important enough.
True leaders are born. It's genetic. The right to rule is inherited.
Justified human emotions can turn a good person evil.
The killer thesis is thus: The "redemption" of Darth Vader is akin to letting Adoph Hitler off the hook. At best, Darth Vader has gone along with murdering billions of people, whilst repeatedly letting his children escape, allowing them to defeat the emperor that he could not.
I can go along with that; the "new series" of Star Wars movies look like they're likely to be real stinkers, from the perspective of the quality of the stories that they are trying to tell.
There are good arguments that, in the Star Wars saga, the Republic and later the Rebellion are the BAD guys, and that the Empire is actually the good guys.
This is particularly clear in [Attack of the Clones]; Dooku has promised his confederates smaller government, unlimited free trade, and an "absolute commitment to capitalism."
What happens? The Republic eagerly grabs the Clone Army to quash this separatist movement.
Obiwan Kenobi encounters Count Dooku, who tries to explain that the Republic is doing some bad stuff. The immediate assumption is that Dooku's motives are "evil," and the Republic goes to war with the barest expression of democratic process.
A more rational look at things indicates that the would-be separatists have ample cause to want to leave the Republic. It is manifestly clear that the Republic is badly messed up.
It can't keep its members from committing genocide on one another, as on Naboo.
It can't deal coherently with would-be separatists.
The Jedi Masters that are in charge of "defense" are very clearly spectacularly incompetent. They gleefully jump into obvious traps.
The "prequels" are putting a whole new slant on the Original Three films. They are demonstrating that the "grand old republic" was rather more like a set of squabbling Somalian warlords. The royalist-wannabees of the the Rebel Alliance are pretty much just terrorists, fighting against an Empire that is increasingly likely to have been an improvement on a brutal Republic that few would have wanted to live in.
Chefelf.com - The Nitpicker's Guide to The Star Wars Holiday Special
This is perhaps the most ghastly bit of television that I ever have seen, a tale of how Chewbacca tried to get back to his family for the special Wookie celebration of "Life Day." Watching the life of the family shows why Chewie would rather risk death in near-hopeless fights against the Imperials than spend time with these people. It also featured Bea Arthur doing a song and dance number. Enough said?
It's not "so bad it's hilarious;" it is fairly much a train wreck of lameness all the way through.
This essay points out some really serious flaws in the Star Trek "saga." I hadn't really realized it before they pointed it out, but the notion that the Federation is relatively egalitarian and that the makers of Star Trek (as TV) are proposing a fair and good society is really seriously flawed.
For instance, between The Old Series and The Next Generation, the Klingons transformed from "Cold War adversaries," sometimes unscrupulous (though actually not moreso than the Federation, as both sides are quite prepared to behave badly), but essentially not that different, into, effectively, "Space Vikings", restricted by their very genetic heritage, to rape, loot, and pillage.
Similarly, between the first meeting of the Ferengi early in TNG and the later regular presentation of them in DS-9, they transformed from a potentially dangerous enemy into a lampooning of the greediest possible ways of regarding mercantilism and capitalism, where economic principle becomes a pretty bad religion. Roddenberry was pretty anti-religious, and much as when Richard Dawkins tries to write about what he imagines a religion might be structured, all you get at the end is a lampooning that looks as stupid as they consider religion to be...
There's also bone-headed engineering, where, after seeing a "Jeffreys Tube" once, in TOS, evidently all maintenance requires going through such bottlenecks. In TOS, this is silly; there are numerous occasions there where Mr Spock opens panels to get at equipment, and it's laid out to be convenient!