On Reboots
There has been a lot of talk about, and lot of, “rebooting” classic science fiction and fantasy features in the past few years. From the brilliant (for the first 55% at least) Battlestar Galactica, to the competent new Star Trek, to the abysmal Knight Rider that NBC tried to shove down viewer’s throats earlier this year. That’s the spirit in which I received this recent post about rebooting Star Wars, a few weeks ago.
I’m mostly favorable to the idea of reboots, I realize that it is a fad, and that pretty soon only the successful ones will stick around, and no new ones will be forth coming, but I think there are some very good reasons to rewrite some of Star War’s basic rules that the article didn’t go into.
- Star Wars was made before The Matrix: Like it or not, like the sequels or not, The Matrix changed everything about action movies, and afterwards the idea of spiritual warriors using nothing but swords and not moving like Neo, Trinity and Morpheus is laughable. Sadly, this is something that the prequels never picked up on. I’m not saying make a new Star Wars have effects just like The Matrix, but when Keanu Reeves makes you look like a sissy…well.
- The Dark Side/Light Side of the Force thing needs a bunch more nuance, or at least the official, spelled out reasoning that force wielders use to explain it.
- Give the Galaxy an actual “New Hope:” The longer you watch Star Wars and the more and more of the extended universe you get involved with you start to see that there have been no significant technological advances in the galaxy for thousands upon thousands of years. The whole time Jedi and Sith are constantly warring, and innocents are always dieing. There’s no real or apparent chance for peace, living in that world must be grueling and dismal. Something I’ve always wondered about this, is that nobody else seems to blame The Force itself, and they ought to. In fact, if I lived in that world, I would strap on a Ysalamir and hunt down as many Jedi and Sith both as I could. In fact, I’ve often wondered how tough a jedi or sith would be without their super powers, yeah they would have their swords, but would they really be able to use them all that well.
- Some of the technology is still really advanced and some of it was out of date in the ’90s. Every time I look at a computer in Star Wars I sort of giggle
- Make the violence more gory. I don’t mean this because I think fans of the should indulge their blood lust, but because there should be less confusion about what our Jedi heroes are doing when they cut down an enemy army. It would add some of that light side/dark side nuance I mentioned earlier. Also, it would cut back on much of the fun everybody seems to have when they are running around shooting people. How does Han Solo not have terrible nightmares and PTSD (PTSD is something only hinted at in Knights of the Old Republic 2, I think this is a sad state of affairs especially as our country fights two wars right now, neither of them pretty), for example? It would also add a strong anti-war vibe to the franchise.
- And finally, a new Star Wars could have dialogue that doesn’t suck.
