Wolverhampton graffiti Jedi wisdom

Star Wars graffiti spotted in Wolverhampton. Poor old Artoo getting clamped!

Yoda's advice was very timely as we were on our way to a gig!

Star Wars Day 2020 - a long review of The Mandalorian

As it’s Star Wars Day I feel this is as good a day as any to review The Mandalorian, the newish series set in the Star Wars universe. 

THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS so I'm posting a picture of my lockdown workstation buddies to break up the text. Read on at your own risk!

Yep, they're Lego!

The Mandalorian is the flagship series on the new Disney Plus streaming service. I’m not saying it’s the only reason we bothered buying Disney Plus, but the way the service launch coincided with the lockdown combined with this series that it feels like half of the geekier end of the Internet has been raving about, made the purchase almost inevitable.

(A sidebar on Disney Plus. Is it worth the money? Kind of. Except we already own most Disney and Pixar films on other formats, along with Star Wars and the better Marvel movies. The rest of the programming isn’t hugely exciting. The Star Wars animated series Clone Wars and Rebels are probably next on my watch list. Despite them saying its all of Disney’s back catalogue there are a couple of omissions – the film ‘Song of the South’, which has a fairly relaxed attitude to slave plantations implying how life as a slave was okay really, isn’t on there. Neither is that famous nature documentary where off-scene riggers literally threw lemmings off a cliff. Maybe that’s for the best.)

Disney have been adding a new episode of The Mandalorian every Friday for the past six weeks, with two available straight away. The eight episode run is now concluded. It was ace. I have to say that right from the start. It had humour. It had believable characters. It kept me hooked week to week.

It’s not a kid’s TV series. That’s not to say it’s hugely gritty or anything. Characters aren't using the f-word and nobody’s injecting narcotics into their eyeballs. There’s no nudity, or even hints at sex. But there is violence and even blood, which you don’t get a lot of in the Star Wars universe. Bad guys die some pretty horrible deaths, including getting tipped headfirst into a smelter, although they do tend to die their horrible deaths mercifully quickly.

The series is set in the aftermath of the Empire’s collapse. There are traces all around. Some Imperial generals have set up as warlords. Some high-calibre weaponry has got into the hands of thugs and thieves. It all feels quite believable – the power vacuum when the dictatorship collapses is something we’ve seen a few times. Ordinary people are trapped by it. The new regime doesn’t really care, or have the means to sort the problem out. There are New Republic X-Wings in one episode. They turn up for their plot point and then disappear. One character is a disillusioned former Rebel Alliance soldier. Even the good guys get jaded.

We learn more about the Mandalorian Warriors. The Clone Wars cartoon series has filled in quite a bit of back story, and this series adds to it. I liked the way it was considered as a creed rather than a race, with its own lore, and honour code. Most of all the Mandalorians were recast as ambiguous, neither good, nor evil, but following their rules. “This is the way,” being their affirmation of a course of action, and signalling agreement with it. The Armourer, who is sort of the sect leader, is a combination of smith and priest, and had some real gravitas.

The lead protagonist is the Mandalorian, a bounty hunter. Other members of the bounty hunter Guild just call him "Mando". We learn a bit about his back story as the series progresses, and his real name in the last episode. But overall he manages to remain a mystery man. He is the character the story follows without the story ever really being about him. I appreciated that. Too many shows rely on character exposition rather than letting you learn about them through observation. 

The main other character is “Baby Yoda”, although that is the name ascribed to the creature by fans rather than in the show. In the script the creature is just ‘the child’ and its origins, race and purpose are a mystery to everyone, except, presumably, the Imperials who are hunting it. I knew about Baby Yoda before watching the show because, like I said, the Internet went nuts about it. I didn’t realise Baby Yoda was going to provide the main story arc of the show. I’m not complaining at all. I love a good mystery, and maybe we will learn something about Yoda along the way.

Other characters are good too. I liked Kuiil (pronounced Queel) the Ugnaught. His way of ending arguments by just saying “I have spoken” has already passed into our household vernacular. They managed to give him a backstory – enslavement by the Empire and earning his freedom – in a few short lines that made him real.

Cara Dune, the jaded former rebel soldier, was a bit less three-dimensional. There’s definitely more in her back story that could be explored, and I’d like to know more about her. IG-11, the assassin droid hunting Baby Yoda, was a character in its own right by the end of the show. I’ve noticed that Droids tend to be expendable in Star Wars spin offs now (Rogue One and Solo spring to mind). Sadly, The Mandalorian continues this theme. 

The Imperial generals are a bit cookie-cutter villains, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing – often a villain trades menace for screen time. It’s the Jaws effect – the less you see of the shark the scarier it is.

There a lot of little background details that probably need several rewatches to get. I thought it as funny seeing the Salacious Crumb creatures being sold for food in the street market. And if you ever wondered what the Cloud City refugee carrying what looked like an ice cream maker was actually carrying, then that was resolved as well. But those details are for the fans and aren’t obtrusive. 

The only thing it would be helpful to know is that the robots in a flashback scene are Super Battle Droids from the Separatist Army in the Clone Wars. But you don’t really need to know that to get what is happening, or why the titular Mandalorian became a Mandalorian Warrior. I also really liked seeing Mos Eisley again.

There wasn’t much I didn’t like about the series. One episode was a bit duff, when the Mandalorian is forced to track down a wild beast. But even that episode has a very important plot point regarding Baby Yoda. The writers have run through a number of tropes though. We’ve had the ‘village in peril needs a gunslinger’ episode, the prison break episode, the ‘blackmailed into a feat of derring do’ episode, and the ‘helping a rookie’ episode. It feels like every science fiction series has the same stock story elements for episodes.

Overall though, despite being set in a well-known and well-worn fictional universe, I felt The Mandalorian had enough new elements and introduced plenty of innovative concepts to seem like it was breaking new ground, rather than rehashing the same old thing. That contrasted a lot with Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker, which I saw around Christmas, which really didn’t offer anything new at all and felt totally bound by the conventions of Star Wars script-writing. (After The Last Jedi had controversially ripped up the blueprint for a Star Wars movie, Episode IX felt like a real let down.)

I feel The Mandalorian benefitted from not revisiting the same old scenes and from showing us something new, or showing us those things in a new way. (Mos Eisley is a big enough place to go back to.) The callbacks to the massive Star Wars back catalogue were subtle and evidence of the care shown by the creative team, but they weren’t included by people trying to show off their fanboy credentials. Blink and you’ll miss them. Those knowing nods are much more satisfying than in some of the cinematic releases, where it often feels they are trying a bit too hard.

So, overall, I really enjoyed The Mandalorian. And I’m a hard guy to please when it comes to modern Star Wars stuff. I know it’s entitlement, but I have been into Star Wars since 1983 so I have high expectations. The Mandalorian met those expectations, and I would say it’s probably worth signing up to Disney Plus even if that’s the only thing you watch on it.

Best of the Rest of Belfast part 2

After a few hours sleep (mainly because my brain decided I wanted to wake up at 6am), it was time for day 2 of my flying visit to Belfast. I was meeting up with my friends Bryan and Elaine, but first I posed for a selfie with a fish.

Technically, he's The Salmon of Knowledge, but everyone just calls him the Big Blue Fish.

Those big yellow gantry cranes in the background are part of the shipyard and are called Samson and Goliath. They are also Belfast icons.

Bryan and Elaine took me to Titanic Belfast, a museum attraction as grand on the inside as on the outside.

Outside, the outline of the Titanic and Olympic are marked out in a park area around the actual ramps the ships were launched from.

The exhibit covers everything, from the building...

... to the launch... (hey! That's my birthday!)

... to the disaster.

The tragedy is covered in a very respectful and thought-provoking way. I found it quite moving reading the stories of those who died.

The park outside is also a memorial garden. Walking the length of it makes you realise how massive these ships were.

Next to Titianic Belfast is the SS Nomadic, which was the ship used to ferry passengers to an from liners at the port of Cherbourg. It carried passengers onto the Titanic for the Atlantic crossing.

It also gives you another good view of the Titanic Belfast building.

For lunch we went to an "Honesty Cafe" called The Dock Cafe. You pay what you can, or what you feel it was worth, for your food. It had a lovely ambiance.

There's also an art installation of the Titanic done like an Airfix kit. I thought it was quite cool.

Bryan and Elaine know me well enough to take me to a shop that sells Lego. It also had a lot of large scale sculptures, including this massive one of Clone Wars era Yoda.

We then drove along the coast to Carrickfergus. This is where Elaine grew up, and centuries beforehand, it was where William of Orange landed to fight the supporters of his predecessor, King James. "King Billy" has a statue, which is apparently life-size, in which case he was quite short.

His statue is right next to Carrickfergus Castle, which is a proper battle-worn fortress.

And, the front looks like Castle Greyskull!

After a very full day (and a meal overlooking Carrickfergus Harbour), I was dropped back at the airport. I'd managed to cram a huge amount into 2 days. A big thank you to Bryan and Elaine for giving me a grand day out.

Chewbacca, the overlooked hero of the Star Wars films

Cathy has complained that my review of The Last Jedi didn't mention Chewbacca once. Chewie is one of her favourite characters, and although this sounds insulting, she likes it when I remark on the comparisons between them. Like Cathy, Chewie is loyal, dependable, smart, isn't overly talkative, and is very strong.

Trading card pose!

Sadly, Chewie is also frequently overlooked. It's a famous running gag that there is no medal for the wookiee at the end of Star Wars: A New Hope. Surely with all the different edits that have happened to that poor, oft-butchered film, they could have put in a sequence where a medal is dropped round his neck and then CGI-d onto him when he says 'RRRRAAAAWWWRRRR' at the end. (Trivia quiz answer - he is the last character to speak in A New Hope.)

Then in The Force Awakens, he sees his long-time buddy / boss / best friend killed in front of him, but when the Millennium Falcon lands back at the resistance base, Princess Leia, who had hugged him earlier as if they were besties, ignores him and hugs Rey instead. Rey, who she has hardly heard anything about, much less never met. Surely, Chewie deserved the hug more. Cathy was sort of outraged about how he was snubbed here. Although I have suggested that maybe Chewie was concerned about the grievously injured Finn at the time. I'm sure once Finn was in sick bay, Chewie would have got the hug he needed, probably off-screen, because he's a proud wookiee and doesn't want people to see him grieving. (Cathy isn't buying any of my explanations, by the way.)

So, does Chewie deserve more respect from the Star Wars writers? I think so. Chronologically we first see him in Episode III, fighting to protect his home world of Kashyyyk. He is part of Yoda's honour guard, helping the old jedi survive Order 66. In A New Hope, he sets up the deal with Obi Wan to get him and Luke passage to Alderaan. In Empire, Han entrusts Leia to him. In Return of the Jedi, he wears shackles to give Leia a reason to enter Jabba the Hutt's court in a rescue attempt to spring Han.

Throughout the movies, we see him as Han's conscience. In A New Hope, Han gruffly tells Chewie that he knows what he's doing as he loads the rebel money onto the Falcon. Clearly Chewie wants them to stick around and help the attack on the Death Star. In The Force Awakens, he gives away Han's bluffing when Han is trying to lie his way out of a showdown with the gangs he has taken money from.

"I know what I'm doing!"

He's not just Han's conscience though. He is loyal to a fault. When Han starts running down a Death Star corridor after a squad of stormtroopers, he doesn't hesitate and follows them. In the Special Edition of A New Hope, Han finds Jabba and various goons at his ship (including Boba Fett on some sort of retainer), and Chewie is there and ready to back him up. Chewie is the pretend captive when Luke and Han go looking for the Princess. He follows Han out of the Falcon to look for mynocks. As I mentioned he ends up in Jabba's dungeon, where he holds onto Han like a protective mother when the two are reunited. There's no question he's going to Endor even though Han hasn't volunteered him and he's clearly annoyed that Han wanted to protect him. And so on, and so forth. No wonder he ends up hunting rathtars.

And he does have key parts to play in The Last Jedi. First he gets Luke's attention by kicking in the door of his hut. That's played for laughs in the film, but lets not overlook his commitment to supporting Rey after Han's death - even to the point of kicking in the door of the last known jedi master at the risk of seriously angering him. Then he shows off some badass piloting skills to evade the First Order TIE fighters over Crait and play as much a role in saving the last few sparks of the Resistance as Rey did. And he even managed to do that with a ship that seems to have become infested with porgs that get in the way at inconvenient moments. It's not the first time he has piloted the Falcon at key moments. He was the wookiee ex machina who saved Rey and Finn as Starkiller Base shattered around them at the end of Episode VII. (He really should have got that hug!)

I think the case is made for Chewie being the overlooked hero. Literally, on-screen in A New Hope and The Force Awakens, and generally in the trilogy. With a Han Solo spin off movie due this summer, we can only hope that Chewie gets to play a major role.

The Last Jedi - stepping out from the shadows cast by the world's biggest franchise?

This post contains MASSIVE SPOILERS for The Last Jedi. Don't read past this picture of the movie poster unless you have seen the film or don't care about spoilers.

Still here, OK, then.

A review in one sentence: Well, that repeatedly went in a different direction than I expected.

Here are six things that struck me about the film.

1) Rey is a nobody, and wow, was that dark!
After The Force Awakens, there were lots of discussions about Rey's provenance. Was she related to the Skywalkers? How would she link in with the rest of the known universe? That tends to be the (much mocked) trope in Star Wars films.

But, no, she is a nobody from nowhere. And how bleak is this - her alcoholic parents sold her for drinking money to the junk dealer Unku Plutt. It's interesting that in The Force Awakens, Finn talks about being taken as a child and indoctrinated into the First Order as a child soldier. My mum commented on that at this time. But this is as bad a situation in terms of mistreating children.

Abandonment and child slavery? The Galaxy Far Far Away (GFFA) is a messed up place. But, equally, this is refreshingly different for a Star Wars character.

2) They killed off the 'big bad' in the second act
I don't really care about Supreme Leader Snoke. I thought he was annoying and a ridiculous baddie, really. Like so many evil characters he seemed to prefer to send his minions to do his bidding for him rather than sort things out himself. So I wasn't too upset when he got sliced and diced by Kylo Ren.

I was surprised though, that it happened when it did. Normally it's the sort of thing saved for a third act showdown, but no, Snoke just got offed and then afterwards we had an epic fight scene, with Rey and Ren fighting back to back against Snoke's elite guards.

3) War profiteering is the real evil in the galaxy
Whoah, Star Wars just got relevant. I really wasn't expecting this theme to ever come up. Star Wars has always been about light versus dark, good versus evil, heroes and villains. But first with Rogue One, and now with this film, the GFFA is starting to become more nuanced. There are grey areas.

The scene in Canto Bight is quite stunning in its own way. Finn sees the glitz and is mesmerised by it. Rose sees through the glitz to the brutality that shapes the entertainment for the wealthy gamblers. Fascism always creates an elite and it is easy to be bedazzled by it. In the first Star Wars film, it was a grubby smuggler's township that was a hive of scum and villainy. In the Last Jedi, the scum have floated to the top by making money off the suffering of others. That's an astonishing message condemning the military industrial complex for a mainstream film to be putting out there.

4) The scoundrel stays a scoundrel 
Star Wars has always been about redemptive arcs. Han Solo in A New Hope, Lando in Empire Strikes Back, and, of course, Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi. Arguably the prequels lacked this redemptive theme, which is one reason why they fail to connect emotionally. In The Force Awakens, we see Finn going through his own redemption as he turns his back on the First Order, and that's perhaps one of the reasons it felt like the films were back on track in Episode VII.

So when Finn and Rose meet a thief and hacker in a prison cell, and promise him paid work, we all know how this will turn out. The criminal will have a change of heart and join the rebellion because it's the right thing to do.

Except he doesn't. There is no redemptive story arc for him. He sells out Finn and Rose, and the fleeing remnant of the Resistance to save his own skin. He kind of apologises for it, but doesn't seem very sincere. He doesn't fly back in to save the day like Han Solo. He takes the money and he walks away.

5) The hotshot pilot is a bit of a dick
Poe is a poor leader. He is willing to sacrifice the lives of people around him to achieve an aim. He is reprimanded and demoted by Leia. He doesn't trust the decisions of the leadership and tries to take over the ship instead, trusting in his own gut instincts to fight, rather than to protect the people he should be trying to protect. He inadvertently alerts the code slicer that Finn and Rose have recruited to Admiral Holdo's plan, which gives the slicer a bargaining chip to use when captured. When he cuts a deal the First Order destroy at least 12 unarmed transport ships full of Resistance crew and soldiers as they flee towards Crait. (And, yes, I counted them as they got blown up.) All those people died because of him.

The message here if that it's not enough to be heroic. People die as a result.

Luke Skywalker, of course, was a hotshot pilot. Jumping into a vacant X-Wing seat he totalled the Death Star. In this film, he is also shown to be a failure as a leader. His hubris in establishing a new Jedi Temple facilitated Ben Solo's growth as a Force user, and then his panic at Ben's seduction by the dark side cemented Ben's transformation into Kylo Ren. One of the most interesting parallels in this film is between Poe and Luke - both are legendary heroes, but prideful. Both are hotshot pilots and they end up getting the people around them killed.

6) A background person becomes more than background
Rose isn't anyone special. A tech working "behind pipes all day". She doesn't get whisked into top-ranking briefing rooms or given super top secret missions. She is stunned to be talking to a real life Resistance hero when she first meets Finn.

I think this is probably the first time a committed member of the movement actually steps out of the shadows into the role of hero. If you look at almost every other rebel character, they start out as established leaders (Leia, Poe), or start their story outside the Rebellion but become heroes through great feats of daring do (Luke, Han, Lando, Finn, Rey). Rose is unique - not new to the Rebellion; not a noteworthy person.

Of course, the film still just trashes numerous Resistance troops, from the crews of the doomed bomber squadron at the start of the film, through to the trenches full of troopers outside the mine in Crait. The resistance is whittled down to just a dozen or so survivors huddled in the Millennium Falcon, their only serviceable ship. The death toll in this film is massive.

To sum up
In conclusion, then is seems the directorial team took to heart Kylo Ren's advice to Rey: "Let go of the past. Destroy it if you have to. So you can become the person you were meant to be." They certainly trashed the past. The Jedi failed. Luke Skywalker went from being a legendary hero to a devastated hermit, haunted by what he had unleashed in Kylo Ren, and cut off from the Force. The script literally left you thinking that everything about the Jedi had been left to burn.

The film has garnered some praise and some hate. My feeling is that the directors made a lot of brave choices to take the film in several different directions, upsetting several established tropes from the series so far. It is incredibly hard to imagine a Star Wars film that is revolutionary. Rogue One tried but to me, was a huge disappointment in that regard.

And just to round this post off, here is my round up of random opinions. Feel free to disagree.

Best character: I do still really like Rey.

Best hairstyle: Vice-Admiral Holdo, by several parsecs.

Most annoying character: I'll give this to Poe. He's a tool for most of the film.

Most under-used character: Captain Phasma. Although, yet again, the pre-release merchandise led us to believe some new characters would play more of a role than they ended up doing. The First Order black rolly ball droid had about 30 seconds of screen time, and yet is a pop vinyl figure. (It's no Morroff or Pau from Rogue One, though.)

Funniest bit: Probably Poe winding up General Hux right at the start. Although Rey 'reaching out' to feel the force in Luke's first lesson was very funny too.

Best line: Finn's "Rebel scum!" response to Captain Phasma. Finn also had a great line when the TIE Fighters all peeled off to chase the Falcon: "Oh, yeah, they hate that ship!"

Most jarring line: "Page-turners, they were not." It was very funny but the phrase 'page-turners' didn't seem very Star Wars-y. (But then they were actually books, which is interesting given the idea that people in the Star Wars universe are functionally illiterate.)

Most quotable bit of Star Wars wisdom: Rose, saying "We don't win by fighting what we hate. We win by saving what we love."

Biggest surprise: Ghost Yoda turning up.

Daftest bit: Leia force-guiding herself through the vacuum of space.

Biggest disappointment: They killed off Admiral Ackbar! I was genuinely gutted by this. He was one of my favourite characters as a kid, and probably my favourite of the original Star Wars figures that I had. And he dies ignominiously along with the entire bridge crew, which is pretty much an off-screen death.

Weirdest plot turn: Pretty much everything with the casino at Canto Bight, including the escape on the racing animals.

Thing I'm most relieved to report: The porgs were stupid, but bearable in small doses. And they were in very small doses.


Some more Star Wars posts:
How Rogue One almost killed off my love of Star Wars
What I liked about The Force Awakens
What Return of the Jedi means to me

My iconic desktop heroes

Yoda and Bumblebee team up to ward off evil on my computer speaker.



Now that would be a crossover film worth watching.

The other true religion*

*it's a paradoxical statement, but then I am disturbingly post-modern

A few years ago I was told to look after a work placement girl from Canada, who's dad worked for a fundamentalist Christian organisation. I was showing off how wise I was and quoted Jedi Master Yoda, "you know, from Star Wars..." "Star Wars?" she asked incredulously. "Yeah," I said. "It is the other true religion."

On Wednesday I'm going to be doing a talk on the spirituality of Star Wars. I don't want to give too much away ahead of the evening, but in terms of understanding concepts of God in a technological age, the cultural impact of the Star Wars films in my generation can't be underestimated. The conflict between materialism and spirituality predates post-Modernism as a popular movement, and certainly at the dying end of the Modern era, the films explore a definite yearning for something more than the world we can see.

So far I've got 12 clips ready from the original trilogy to illustrate my points with regards to conceiving and perceiving God; the duality of matter and force; and the mastery of evil within and the possibility of redemption.

Oh, yeah, it's going to be good.