Disappointing that Ashoka is not good. If anything, it seems like Filoni has regressed: much of what I liked about Rebels involved the lived-in, gradual, persistent nature of dictatorship (adjusted for the medium), and much of what I liked about Mando S1 was that it could make a single chicken walker seem like a Terminator. It’s depressing that for all the attention and capital thrown at these projects there has been no sense that creative work doesn’t scale up like other projects--there’s a limit to how much good stuff any brand can present if it’s working in tight canonical bounds. But there don’t seem to be many folks at Lucasfilm with taste or respect for audiences, and few folks at Disney who understand the value of letting franchises grow rather than strip mining them.
I mean, maybe the first four were great, but I have a hard time believing it based on what I saw in this one. I think on some level that the creative catastrophe of the third sequel film created a strange compressing effect on all of what they've made since. They backed off of post-Rise of Skywalker story-telling they were planning, but also plainly didn't want to establish anything like a consistent in-house map of what happened in between ROTJ and TFA. And Disney doesn't want rough edges on anything, really, so the most interesting possibilities stay unexplored.
Disappointing that Ashoka is not good. If anything, it seems like Filoni has regressed: much of what I liked about Rebels involved the lived-in, gradual, persistent nature of dictatorship (adjusted for the medium), and much of what I liked about Mando S1 was that it could make a single chicken walker seem like a Terminator. It’s depressing that for all the attention and capital thrown at these projects there has been no sense that creative work doesn’t scale up like other projects--there’s a limit to how much good stuff any brand can present if it’s working in tight canonical bounds. But there don’t seem to be many folks at Lucasfilm with taste or respect for audiences, and few folks at Disney who understand the value of letting franchises grow rather than strip mining them.
I mean, maybe the first four were great, but I have a hard time believing it based on what I saw in this one. I think on some level that the creative catastrophe of the third sequel film created a strange compressing effect on all of what they've made since. They backed off of post-Rise of Skywalker story-telling they were planning, but also plainly didn't want to establish anything like a consistent in-house map of what happened in between ROTJ and TFA. And Disney doesn't want rough edges on anything, really, so the most interesting possibilities stay unexplored.