In which I bitch about Star Wars some more.

Ok, more about Star Wars, which I think is going to become a running theme on this blog.

Here's something interesting: You remember in the beginning of Revenge of the Sith, when they have to crashland the spaceship on the runway? Ok, obvious question: Corusant is a planet wide city, yeah? How many runways are there on it? How many could there be? And one big enough to land a battleship on, not your average rinkydink airport. The answer is that there have to be a shitload for them to find one with no problem. It wasn't even a question of emergency landing in some patch of ground or body of water, becuase there aren't any on Corusant, because it's a fucking planet-wide city. We saw what Corusant is like in Attack, and in the scene in Sith itself: there are skyscrapers fucking everywhere. But whoops, hey, without any steering or directing, or even the part of the ship that has the engines, they're able to bullseye a huge fucking runway. Why is there a huge fucking runway in the middle of skyscrapers?

How about this, though: have you ever seen any vehicle in Star Wars use a runway? Ever? Aren't they all vertical takeoff and landing? All of them?

Want your mind blown even more? In the Star Wars movies, how many things even have wheels? Hm? What craft uses wheels, WHEELS, the fucking most basic form of transportation and probably one of the earliest things ever invented? Can you think of anything? I can think of one or two, not counting droids, and let me tell you none of those things were even near that fucking runway.

EDIT: Because I just realized and it made me mad enough to come back and edit: even the fucking WHEELCHAIRS don't have wheels. In Attack, Owen Lar's dad is all crippled by sandpeople and he floats around in a fucking hoverchair.

So if all of your ships are VTOL and none of your craft even have wheels, why is there an enormous runway (and by extension, tens of thousands if not more for them to be able to find and hit one so easily) in the middle of your goddamn planet-wide city?

So I wrote this for a couple of reasons. First of all, the excellent webcomic Darths and Droids (www.darthsanddroids.net), which goes through the Star Wars movies as though they're an RPG adventure, have just hit that part of Sith. Also, Harry Plinkett (redlettermedia.com) is about to review Sith, and I wanted to toss this out there because if he doesn't mention it, I'll be surprised.

So yeah.

Star Wars is boring. Incredibly boring.

Hey everybody, watch this:



What part did you like best? The part with the guy that looked just like Darth Vader, or the part with the CHICK MANDALORIAN! WHAT! Or how about that sweet random shot of a R2-esque droid that had NO BUSINESS BEING ANYWHERE IN THAT FUCKING TRAILER?!?!?!?!

Or how about re-using Duel of the Fates? I'm sure John Williams appreciates the royalty check.

How crazy was that?

Isn't it great that Lucasfilm and its liscenees are mining the same handful of ideas over and over and over again? This is not new. This isn't even interesting.

You know what I liked about this? The guys using Force powers (however slightly) in the midst of combat. And the Jedi clocking the Vader-expy with the hilt of his lightsaber. And the two or three actual swordfight bits (but I'm a fan of blades like that). Seriously, what can you glean from this trailer? That Sith are fighting Jedi? Oh, so it's only like those six movies and two cartoon series they made? And every piece of expanded universe crap ever? I'm shocked, I tell you, shocked.

Okay, perhaps I'm wrong in all of this and this is a brand new look at a classic sci-fi world. But I doubt it. It's an MMO, which means it's exactly like WoW.

I've been through this before, most particularly when Warhammer Online came out. I was excited about that game, because at the core, Warhammer is about the man on the line, brandishing his halberd in the face of unspeakable horrors. But that's not how the game turned out and that's not how this game is going to turn out. There are dozens of articles already about the stupid aggravations of MMOs, so I won't go into it here, but suffice to say, if that's your bag, The Old Republic will probably offer you more of that mindless repetitive grind you crave. Enjoy it.

'Cause I won't. There's nothing new to experience in the Star Wars universe. It's all been done, and for the most part, it's all been done in A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi.

Goddammit, Stephanie Meyer, read the play. All of it, not just II:ii.

I've been bombarded with commercials for the latest film adaptation of the Twilight novels, which is pretty obvious, considering it opens at the end of the month. I know it's getting to be gauche to talk about how hard Twilight sucks, but holy Christ it's getting to the point where I want to murder myself. Oh, you like to read, do you? Anything besides R&J? Especially because R&J isn't really a romance, it's a comedy?

Twilight is another entry in a long tradition of using Romeo & Juliet as an ideal romance between two people destined for each other despite incredible hardships, family disapproval, pain, and death. But it's not. It's nothing like that. It's a comedy, all the way up to Act 3 scene 1 when Mercutio bites it. And it's a hilarious comedy.

Romeo's not a cultured lover, he's a stupid ponce who hangs out in the woods all day writing crappy poetry about a girl who won't fuck him. His dad and Benvolio don't know what to do with him because he seriously does this all the time.

Juliet's a 13 year old girl who's being wooed by a wealthy and prodigious nobleman. And by woo, I mean that Paris is bartering with her father for her (incidentally, I think Paris kind of gets the short end of the stick, because not only does he never really do anything wrong, he's gets killed while just trying to keep this crazy murderer away from the body of the guy he murdered. And on top of that they usually cut that scene for performance. Just saying). Being a 13 year old girl, she doesn't do terribly much in the play except insist that Romeo marries her before they bang, and bitch about how she should hate him for killing Tybalt, but doesn't.

They meet at a party Romeo's crashed, which he goes to to see the aforementioned girl who won't fuck him. And then he sees Juliet, and waxes lyrical about how beautiful she is. The only issue here is that it's a masquerade, so she's wearing a mask, so apparently the 13 year old has a slamming body. And then he proceeds to talk about how beautiful she is for four more acts. Seriously, that's all he freaking does when she comes up. Even in the tomb, when he's getting ready to kill himself, he takes a couple minutes to mention that even dead she's still really, really good looking.

How terribly romantic. Really, aside from the balcony gag, it's pretty much just dick jokes and swordfights until it turns into women complaining and murder-suicide.

So next time you go see Romeo & Juliet, you can duck out after 3:1. Everybody fun dies, vanishes, or stops making jokes and starts complaining. Plus they usually put an intermission right there anyway.

Oh, and Stephanie Meyer: stop writing. Seriously. You're bad at it, and you're making little girls think it's okay to be in a horribly abusive relationship as long as the boy tells you he loves you so much it hurts. They should find that out for themselves when they get to high school.