Tommy Siegel | Bluesky
Transcript
A Helpful Guide To Star Wars vs Star Trek
Star Wars
[Image of Han Solo in Tommy’s style]
- Don’t start with the ‘first’ movie, let me tell you where to start
- Looks like ruined farm equipment in space
- In summary: the past was horrible
- JJ Abrams ruined it
Star Trek
[Image of Jean Luc Picard in Tommy’s style]
- Don’t start with the first season, let me tell you where to start
- Looks like a cruise ship in space
- In summary: the future is incredible
- JJ Abrams ruined it
I’ll die on this hill. JJ Abrams didn’t ruin Star Wars. He just didn’t do anything new with Star Wars. Rian Johnson ruined Star Wars. He was unwilling to yes-and any of the mystery boxes and plot threads Abrams set up in The Force Awakens and essentially ruined the entire trilogy by burning any plot that could have happened in the third film.
If nothing else, the complete disrespect to Finn’s implied arc was unforgivable. That boy was going to be a Jedi.
If nothing else, the complete disrespect to Finn’s implied arc was unforgivable. That boy was going to be a Jedi.
I must’ve watched all the wrong trailers because I didn’t even know Rey was going to be a character.
Based on what I saw, I thought “The Force Awakens” was going to be about a disillusioned Storm Trooper who “awakens” as the new Jedi to save the galaxy. Would have been an amazing story of redemption. Instead we got… Well… You know.
I kinda respected that they were hiding who the new Jedi was in the marketing. They kept it enough of a secret theult didn’t have many Rey toys ready to go. They did the same thing with Grogu in The Mandalorian.
I’ll criticize Disney for a lot of things, but they do actually seem to allow some of their filmmakers to make artistic decisions that have negative impacts on potential merch sales.
J. J. Abrams established that Star Wars was just a repeating formula rather than a developing story, which would be bad enough, but in order to make the formula repeat he also made it canon that everything that happened in the original trilogy was ultimately meaningless.
The Force Awakens was crap but it tended to get the benefit of the doubt because there were all these mysterious threads that might be going somewhere interesting. But the problem is, JJ Abrams had no clue about where he was going with any of it. That’s unforgivable. You need some idea of the story you want to tell. Or just hire a fucking writer ffs. Plenty of people know how to tell a story, JJ Abrams just isn’t one of them. I don’t want to let Rian Johnson off the hook but it was already on a bad trajectory before he crashed it into the ground.
He’s literally been quoted as saying he didn’t realize that the MAIN LINE STAR WARS FILM was going to be PART OF A TRILOGY.
They needed a show runner. Someone there who at least knew the gist of the whole story and had the authority to override director egos.
Neither ruined Star Wars. That honor goes to George Lucas and Episode 1.
Yes. It’s weird how much people on the Internet seem to revere the prequels. They’re terrible. Awful dialog, ridiculous plot contrivances, de-mystifying the force, turning Yoda into some kind of Tasmanian Devil, etc. etc. etc.
The sequels were just beating a dead horse.
The prequels were coarse and rough and they got everywhere :(
As individual movies, the prequels certainly had their flaws, but they left the universe in a more interesting state than it was in previously. Abrams turned Star Wars into just another soulless Hollywood sequel factory.
George made Midichlorians and turned the force into something in which you needed to be born gifted, rather than something you could aspire to.
He turned Boba Fett into just another clone and Darth Vader into an angsty teen.
He created a world where everyone forgot about the Jedi in 16 years to the point where Han thinks of it as a hokey religion when as a kid he would have seen the propaganda of the Republic’s main generals being Jedi and then them “betraying” the Republic during order 66.
The sequels might not be good, but let’s not pretend the prequels were better just because you grew up with them.
I can’t argue the quality of the prequels with indifference. I was too young when they dropped to hate them. I will say that they’re flawed and episode III is good because I watched the Clone Wars. The prequels weren’t great, but the sequels were essentially sabotaged by a proud director.
I will admit that Genndy Tartikovsky’s Clone Wars show is perhaps the greatest piece of Star Wars media to ever exist, but as far as the movies go the prequels were overall sabotaged by an auteur’s pride and him being in a position where no one could tell him “No”.
He did write and directed it but he was still under Kathleen’s watch. She has admitted they had no overall vision for the trilogy and just winged it.
personally, I think Rise of Skywalker is the weakest of the three.
Totally Agree, I just blame The Last Jedi for that.
Edit:
aaaand. I also blame the fandom.
Rose was part of the story by the end of The Last Jedi. Whatever opinions fans had about her sudden appearance, I take personal offense that Disney caved and relegated her to the shadows for Rise of a Skywalker, replacing her with another love interest for Finn. That’s just bad story telling and kinda spineless. The character and the actor deserved better.
That added to the narrative whiplash and tone shift in the trilogy and it 100% didn’t have to be that way.
I’d agree, his first one was a adequate, but if it did more, Johnson probably would have picked up the story.
Making Finn a Jedi just because he had misgivings about being a Stormtrooper, and held a lightsaber once?
Homie, Luke was a moisture farmer who shot rats and talked to a hobo.
Because his touching the force woke him form his programing. Kylo sensed it. I didn’t say he was going to be a good Jedi. but his competency was on par with Kylo in a way that Rey’s was not. Rey was outshining both of them. Her whole deal was set to be that she had raw power but didn’t want to play either side.
There is a general rule in film making and story telling. You don’t do something without purpose. Finn holding the lightsaber was signalling, yes. It was narrative foreshadowing. checkov’s gun given weight by the promotions for the movie which had Finn holding the lightsaber. In the film, He didn’t just hold a light saber or use it quickly for some one-off maneuver. Finn wielded the lightsaber. He later stepped up to Kylo and got thrashed, giving the character a path and motivation to improve. Rey was going to have her own light saber eventually, maybe even a saber staff.
I swear people just don’t have media literacy anymore. John Boyega was very vocally pissed by the end of the trilogy. Finn spent all of IX trying to tell Rey something. It’s been mostly considered that he was trying to tell her that he was force sensitive. A fact we likely would have learned in the previous movie but we never heard at all in the trilogy. Last I heard he was only willing to come back because Dave Filoni spoke to him personally. Even after that he might be getting shafted by behind the scenes politics.
Disney is still trying to fix what Johnson did to Star Wars in cinema.
You don’t do something without purpose.
there’s one of the most analyzed moments ever, because there was no reason.
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- The very next guy to do it managed to be much worse than Abrams.
Nah. VIII had a few missteps, but it was better then the rehashed plot of the first, and far better then the mess that followed.
A few missteps is quite the understatement. I’d take boring rehash over universe-breaking any day. But it doesn’t matter in the end. It’s like comparing different flavors of shit.
“Universe breaking”, lol.
8 is the best Star Wars movie
IDK. VII was disappointing, but I hated VIII so much I still haven’t watched IX. But maybe picking a winner out of these is besides the point. Rogue One showed what a good, modern Star Wars film could look like, and in comparison with that, both VII and VIII are just terrible.
Honestly if you told me that Alex Kurtzman was a psyop by Rick Berman to make us hate him less I would have to believe it.
Force Awakens > Last Jedi > Rise of Skywalker
So it’s really a toss up. Somehow Abrahms returned and ROS hit the lowest lows in the series.
JJ abrams is responsible for what nutrek is today, all flash and no substance that KURTZMAN happily copied.
pre-disney star wars decent, but not after disney bought the franchise, and turned it intoa slop machine, and its basically just drama in space at least for the current ones.
Absolutely start with the first season of Star Trek! What the fuck kind of nonsense is that? The original series is a gods damned masterpiece! Except for I, Mudd, just skip that one, it sucks.
I think that was about TNG? People often say start when Riker gets his beard and then go back later if you like it.
I can agree on that.
TOS is what got me watching almost all of Star Trek in the last 3 years. It was the damn star trek memes on lemmy (when there used to be a lot less content) that made me check it out, and I got hooked. I love me some sci-fi, what can I say
i started with TNG, i assume most of us did, but i dont watch the older ones except some of the important clips.
The worst episode of TOS is the one with the planet of children where Kirk puts the rizz on a little tweenage girl. I think it’s called Miri. Skip that one.
Oh yeah, I completely blocked that one out. That one is disgusting, definitely a skip.
tng first season was awkward, trying to find its legs.
It was also mostly made up of leftover stories that didn’t make it into the original series.
I can hear it now…
HarCOURT!
I guess I’m in the minority of, nine times out of ten, I’m just stoked there’s new material in my favorite franchises.
I don’t mind JJ Abram’s Star Treks. The man himself is deplorable but his movies are fun enough to watch. And I’ll always be grateful because those movies turned him into a Trekkie!
I also nostalgically love the Star Wars Prequels. It’s become a comfort show for my husband and I to laugh at and enjoy together.
Unless it’s a clear AI Slop cash grab, and seems like the creators intent was to create an at least half decent show, then I’ll give it a watch.
Maybe I’m just an idiot who’s easy to please.
[EDITED - Forgot to proofread. Added comma, and cleared up my language]
he only made the movies, but Kurtzman is the one who showrunned the rest of nutrek, or people took orders from him. i think hes from transformer series, he clearly stated he never watched trek before even showrunning it, thats where the problem lies.
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JJ Abrams is a talentless hack that couldn’t direct water out of a boot if the script was on the heel.
He’s great technically, but his problem is he has nothing to say–he’s not an artist.
And that’s exactly why studio execs love him so much.
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The only good Star Wars that has dropped recently has been Zero Company.
And before that, “Andor”.
Hot take: I loved the JJ Abrams Star Treks
Pretty much my only real exposure to Star Trek prior to the movies was watching Voyager episodes at night not in order.
I really enjoyed the Abrams movies as a neutral fan. To me they were just actions movies in space around an IP I wasn’t invested in.
You could do a lot worse for a movie night. I liked the first one well enough
Into Darkness had a chance to do something fun and different with Khan. It choose to play ‘member berries’ when it didn’t really make sense. If it was a ‘what-if’ universe I would have enjoyed a Khan-Kirk team up but they chose to make him so one-dimensional.
but I did like the 1st one and the 3rd one.
Ohh, this comment section is gonna be good. 🍿
Aren’t you going to argue firefly is better than then both?
I tried watching a bit of that, but I didn’t really like it. (This screenname predates that show.)
What is “the past” in Star Wars?
Edit: I came to the right place.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away
All of it
Start with the first season.
Yeah but is that first season of TOS, or just skip to first season of TNG
I mean TNG, which establishes the modern lore. Ive actually never watched all of TOS.
This is on a very thin line between a meme and a comic…
Tommy has made a number of “guide” comics like this. There’s a previous one on beards here somewhere. But yeah, it is pretty minimal.
Fair enough. Although it is also a meme template
I guess I’m one of the relative few that really enjoyed the new ST universe movies. They’re fun, well cast action films. Are they true to “morality tale” Trek? No. And I’m kinda tired of every director/writer trying to make Spock a chick magnet that can barely control himself.
As far as SW goes, there are very few good movies. The OG ANH and ESB, but RotJ is meh. 1-3 suck, world class actors and wooden AF, bad story writng even if it does flesh out the pre OG3 universe in movie-land. Same for the new Skywalker series. However, Andor and Rogue One are amazing, and I’ve enjoyed a bit of the hit-or-miss Mandalorian series.
Not hating on Abrams, but he’s like hiring Harrison Ford or Chalamet for a part. You’re getting the actor, not the character, Abrams is gonna do what he does.
No.
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