Recently I wrote about how Marvel series interpretation varies a lot in relation to a "woke" theme issue. Marvel (and Disney) really are adding a lot of diverse characters to their movies and television shows, in some cases clearly swapping out white male characters for female / minority versions. I don't see that as a problem, but it is interesting how that shifts interpretation of whether the shows are good or not.
To some extent focus on those themes, and not story lines and character development, may really be causing a correlation, of poor story telling adjoining those diversity / inclusive-focused forms. The show I was discussing, Ms Marvel, is pretty bad, in the sense of developing core characters well and setting up motivations, oppositions, and story lines. It's really for kids, so in a sense keeping tone lighter and focusing on form could make sense, but it's still bad writing, and kids can definitely relate to good writing, in the right form. Movies like Frozen worked well for succeeding at all that.
The Obi Wan series works as a good example because, to me, it's right in between good and not especially good, and it tones down the gender / race diversity themes. The story line is interesting, just not incredibly well developed, and of course the characters are compelling, and general look and feel of the show is relatively amazing, very well done.
I get the sense that a set of popular Youtube movie "critics"--they do represent the new form of that, but it's not like Siskel and Eibert, or newspaper media versions--lean heavily to the right, politically, and mix together story and character development judgment with their own political bias. For shows like Ms Marvel and the Hawkeye series poor writing quality really does combine with adding "diversity" and gender swapping main characters, but this is something else. The Obi Wan series could be interpreted as a fantastic development of prior Star Wars themes, better than the last three movies, or on the other side as suffering from the same weaknesses. It might help to spell out what worked well and what didn't, before critiquing that left / right bias issue.
Positive show aspects:
-characters, setting, familiar theme, use of backgrounds, film quality: all of this equates to the production quality and style of the rest of the nine core movies (with two others, and lots of animation and text adjoining that). It's possible to critique the use of the same characters within the story line, as not developing them, or not being true to earlier patterns or details, which I'll take up again as a potential negative aspect.
-CGI use, sets: beyond filming in similar appearing locations (as the main movies) the production quality and set design choices, and use of visual effect input, all seemed positive to me. It's possible for critics to say that every single movie exhibits a gap in CGI use, perhaps unless a film clearly takes a next step in what can be shown, as Jurassic Park and the one Terminator movie did. In a sense saying that the CGI is bad seems to imply a reviewer is seeing something others aren't, as a better judge. To me the look of the films was fine, quite positive, including that input. They added two new set versions, Darth Vader's "castle / palace" on the volcanic planet shown in the third movie, and a new Empire base that included an underwater building setting. To me the final outcome is more about the stories and characters, but these parts were an obvious positive input.
-acting: for mostly drawing on already established characters the main points related to fleshing those out related to included character arcs (writing quality) and actor selection and portrayal. For the most part, to me, those worked well. The child actor portraying Leia was fantastic, as good as any child actor portrayal of any character I can recall, and of course Ewan McGregor is on another level, among the best of this time period. The main criticism would fall to the black female antagonist character, Reva, and the writing, how characters were used, which goes beyond what actors can do with the material.
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Negatives:
-acting, character development: was Reva's character arc that bad, or was she so badly written, or portrayed through limited acting skill? It was more that shifts in her character arc didn't make sense. I think that actor's skill level didn't match with Ewan McGregor's, that the same degree of subtlety of expression wasn't there, but it would've been harder to give life to a character with relatively poorly written motivations and personal direction. This is a weakness in the series.
Reva's arc was this (a complete spoiler for the general story line): she had been trained by the Jedi as a young child, was present for the killing of the other children in training in the movie series version events (film #3), then joined under Darth Vader to hunt Jedi, and later changed to try and extract revenge on Darth Vader, still acting on negative motivations (revenge), and then turned back to "being good" at the end. It didn't really add up.
Obi Wan's arc from not being the powerful and confident warrior he had been, after a decade in hiding, and then returning to that form, also didn't work. It was so close too; with minor revisions that sequence could have transitioned naturally. It seemed like some of that might've related to not shooting and editing the whole series as one long movie length segment, so it was harder to get the transitions like that to flow naturally.
breaking canon / inconsistency: this gets overstated by Star Wars enthusiasts. Creating lots of movies and television content is eventually going to relate to inconsistencies, but earlier focus on complete consistency tried to avoid that. To me these were trivial (eg. a "force ghost" changed capabilities, a main movie line describing prior relationship between Leia and Obi Wan didn't reflect them meeting in this series), so it works to set this aside.
improvement potential: this is where things get really hazy. What was so badly managed that it should've been different? Did they do injustice to any prior character forms, were parts so unrealistic that they "take you out of the movie," did parts of the character and story just absolutely not work?
I already suggested the main antagonist role didn't really come together; there's that. In the original three movies (#4, 5, and 6) they set up Darth Vader and the Empire as this oppressive, powerful, mysterious evil background opposition, and that really worked, not developing those characters or story components so much, using background context and short exchanges to support that, more so than developing a character perspective. Then that approach wouldn't work as well in a smaller scale story designed to focus in more on limited story and character range, as this was, the form the Mandalorian series also took, largely successfully. Adding a little about Anakin's earlier perspective kind of worked, but it was a late and limited addition, and it didn't tie to what Darth Vader was going through in those sequences as well as they were trying to achieve.
The parts that over-use coincidence, or just didn't portray space battles realistically (?), didn't seem as problematic, I suppose with one exception. In one scene an escaping small ship couldn't be captured prior to time to allow plot development to occur, even though it was pursued by a much larger and heavily armed ship. Or a wounded character recovered way too fast, from one scene to the immediate next one, in time sequence. They just weren't careful enough to avoid a few obvious errors.
General assessment:
People can like or dislike whatever they watch, based on their own preconceptions and preferences. Blade Runner 2049 can be regarded as a masterpiece, a visual marvel that creates complex story lines and characters, true to prior development, and weaves together a complex story with just enough open ended aspects to keep it all interesting, and enable significant plot twists and development. Or it could seem like a horrible, uneventful, muddled slog, badly acted and written worse yet. People could love or hate this Star Wars television series, or any of the movies, or Star Wars in general.
To me this matches or exceeds level of writing quality and character development of the last six Star Wars movies. Maybe that could be seen as a problem, since the first two movies, #4 and #5, were clearly better than the rest (per my judgement, at least). With positive or negative bias going in one might love or hate this tv series.
I don't see the "woke" / left-leaning concerns as much of an issue. The main antagonist was a black female, and I think if that character had been a white male the politically conservative critics would've reviewed this series much more positively, but to me that's a case of being conditioned by bias in an unreasonable way. Maybe something like one fourth of all Americans are white males, so a majority of characters could reasonably be female or of other races, all the more reasonable when you consider that Star Wars isn't supposed to map directly to US gender and race diversity.
One criticism often levelled against series framed like this, in terms of placement in a franchise series, is that "it's a story that no one asked for." To me that's relatively meaningless too. No one asked for the Mandalorian either, which wasn't as concerned with core characters, but since the show was well written and developed this criticism was never levelled at it. The prequel movie version of Han Solo's story line wasn't as well regarded, so that came up then. When animation versions are released the opposite response seems to occur, because Star Wars enthusiasts then value creators fleshing out story lines and events that had only been developed in text forms prior, in "official canon" or other forms.
One main input seems to be that Youtube content creators draw viewers by honing in on popular opinions, so that given the culture-war context they either need to hate left-leaning content (or what can be framed as such) or support it, to draw on a related viewer base. Once a dozen (or 100) prior Youtube videos expressing a point of view draw large viewership it becomes a matter of of pursuing ad revenue, and earning a living, to keep pushing that theme, regardless of how it relates to content being critiqued. Hating Marvel and Star Wars movies and television shows pays off; passing on mixed reviews wouldn't, and acceptance probably targets a much more limited audience.
These content creators need to stick to form too; to some extent they can't love one Marvel show and hate another, even though some are much better or worse than others. They can openly accept content aspects that offset their primary opinion, but viewers are there to support one of two main takes, acceptance or criticism, which would tend to apply across all similar content. For viewers generally disliking the past six Star Wars movies (with the seventh version made, also #7 in production order, a bit more neutral) it's clear which side general viewer opinion falls on, and which stance is going to draw more views, and compensate Youtube creators better for supporting.
Reviews:
Let's consider what audience or critics thought:
Generally positive, but critic opinions can tend to differ from movie viewer takes, and seemingly can relate to a left-leaning political bias.
It's a little unusual that one third of Rotten Tomatoes viewers regarded the film negatively, and about 80% gave it a score of 7 or above in the IMDB reviews, but there could be differences in who provides feedback through different channels, or how a general positive and negative identification tends to be used.
In general the show was good. Writing about it here related to considering why it got the mixed reviews then, not showing up so much in terms of that Rotten Tomatoes score (although over one third of the audience didn't like it), but tied to online opinions. It was good but it could've been better, and it didn't seem to be accepted well because it was dealing with core characters, which some audience members weren't open to seeing portrayed in a series with some clear weaknesses.
Unfortunately probably including a black, female antagonist probably shifted about 25% of the audiences perceptions. Or maybe half, with that only accounting for a lot of the negative takes. Maybe it's that 63% liked it partly because one character was a minority female, and another a white female. Maybe the culture war is just like that now, that everything is going to be filtered through that lens first.
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