OK, ban religion. In a hundred years the rate of war/hostility/terrorism will drop massively. Granted it would have to be a rather draconian ban to be effective…
Ok, that’s a none starter.
Race? There are differences between races. Should they be ignored or championed? Tricky one that.
But it just happened. Didn’t need press releases or force. Man meets alien and they get it on. Alien didn’t then Mary Sue Kirk and single handedly beat the crew up.
Yes Roddenberry was way ahead of his time. Different species (let alone races) living in harmony. Except those nasty brow Klingons obviously…
Just been through all the Startrek films again. Some superb writing and brilliant one liners. Went over my head as a kid. 2, 4 and 6 are exceptional and as relevant today as they were then.
The way Kirk carried on he kissed everyone.
Waved to us in Beverly Hills once, people queue hours for that at comicons!
I just want to say that I follow George Takei on twitter and he’s wonderfully bonkers.
He is excellent voicing one of the characters in the new Yakuza game.
whilst i agree with you in the main, i think thats more a comment on modern story telling than any effort to make female leads invincibly perfect.
Quite possibly but I think the two are linked in this instance. The agenda certainly didn’t help things and there wasn’t enough “talent” in the writing team to actually make it work.
Oh dear. You said *Doctor Who,*and now I have to go off on one.
Doctor Who, god bless it, has been ramming an agenda down our throats since Terry Nation dreamt up the Daleks as a warning against the proliferation of nuclear weapons. It was lecturing it’s viewers about a wide range of progressive (and some less progressive ones) issues since the sixties? Name the issue and I’ll tell you the story.
In fact, go back to the 20th century and TV and cinema was stuffed with programming pushing its agenda. Whenever anything is written by a person, their worries, beliefs, politics, views and concerns are going to come tumbling out. There has never been a time when writers wrote ‘neutral’ stories free of message. Fucks sake, virtually everything Dickens wrote was lecturing his audience on poverty and the plight of the poor.
The problem with the latest series of Doctor Who is simply that it’s very, very badly written. Jodie’s Doctor has literally no character, other than gurning and jumping about. There is no reason why you can’t have a female Doctor. The concept more than allows it. The problem is that the man entrusted to write this cut his teeth on Torchwood, a show so bad I stopped watching it despite being a massive Who nerd. So all the agendas and messages are still there like they always were, just in care of much less skilful and subtle hands.
Same with Star Wars. And Ghostbusters. And Captain Marvel. These female led shows are not shit because they are female led. They are shit because they are really badly written.
In the case of Star Wars, Disney had no clue what they wanted out the series other than the 3 billion they spent on it back, so they just veered wildly from one extreme to the other, reacting to fan demands and criticism. The Force Awakens was to safe and samey, so Rhian Johnson is given the brief of shaking it up and taking risks, only fans didn’t like it so, they went back to JJ Abrams, retconned the Last Jedi, and came up with something even worse.
With Ghostbusters, there wasn’t a script. Literally. The director’s technique relies on improv, and asking actors to construct their own material, which is extremely hard to do on a CGI heavy big budget movie with a lot riding on it. The end result is those poor women just shouting at each other in the hope that that would somehow be funny.
The temptation is to focus on the female empowerment angle, and draw the false equivalence that because those series have failed while fronted by women, then its obviously an agenda.
But in reality, you replace Doctor Who, Ghostbusters, and Star Wars female characters with men, and they are just as bad. Because it is always, always, always the writing.
Gingerism
Agree with much of what you say but i also believe there was an agenda behind the new Star Wars films lartly driven by Kathleen Kennedy. She wanted to make Rey invincible in some kind of woke statement that left the writers nowhere to go. Ryan Johnson came on to do something but he was hopeless, Kennedy didn’t like what he did and ordered more reshoots to beef up Rey further and basically fucked the whole series. After that it was a massive band aid job which again was poorly written.
But we shouldn’t lay the blame fully at Kennedy’s feet there is a Disney agenda on this. I’m reliably informed they pulled the same Mary Sue stunt with the Mulan remake.
There’s nothing wrong with female leads, superheroes etc. Just don’t make them better than everyone else before they’ve actually developed into that hero. Same stands with Male leads. The best superhero films and stories always have a broken hero that needs to face their demons.
Agreed, they failed because the scripts were crap, not because they had female leads (tips hat to Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor). The reason they were shit is because they were so busy destroying the men, they forgot to actually write a script.
I’m not sure about the ‘destroying the men’ thing. I didn’t notice any men being destroyed in the making of Star Wars or Doctor Who. That might just be male insecurity talking.
So Luke’s character wasn’t utterly destroyed? Did you watch the film? Picard? Mandalorian has pulled Starwars back from the mad wokeness but it has a long way to go. All we want is good stories without the agenda.
As for Kathleen Kennedy, as we know, the force is female.
Finn too, became more and more useless and comical as the films progressed.
leia also became a Jedi overnight through some convenient training from Luke in the back story. Apparently she could get blown up, survive the cold of space and doesn’t need to breathe.
I didn’t like the creative decisions around Luke, but I really didn’t see it as being a feminist thing. It was, in my opinion, the wrong decision to pick up his story as a broken man living in isolation, but I never saw this as an evil man hating agenda.
Rey didn’t have a character arc. She started ace, got more ace and never failed or overcame a challenge. That’s obviously a problem. But again, I see that as being a marketing problem (as in, let’s make this character amazing so we can sell toys) rather than anything sinister. Fin had a similar, if less publicised problem, in that he is supposedly not a very good stormtrooper, but is suddenly a dead shot ice cold warrior when the plot needs him to be. Comedy relief when the plot needs that. It’s just all over the shop, rather than woke.
And if you never want to see any drama that pushes an agenda, you’ll be waiting a long time indeed. All writing is essentially a regurgitation of the writers beliefs, worries and personal politics. George Lucas very much included. The battle of Endor is basically the Vietnam war, after all.
It’s all about the skill of the writer to craft those stories so that whatever the author is saying is not delivered in a clumsy, ham-fisted way.
I only watched two episodes of Picard and gave up because it was just fucking boring. But if you like the Next Generation, maybe you should watch a few episodes again, because it is some of the most preachy, agenda driven, PC writing you’ll ever see. Virtually every episode is a set piece framed around an ethical dilemma, which the crew must navigate and emerge from as better, wiser people, as must the audience. Possibly the difference is that it was just much better written than today’s twaddle (although to be honest, I was never much of a fan).
I think what’s actually going on is that we are currently going through something like to a third wave of feminism, and kick back around under-representation in general, but this is it’s happening at a time when the film and TV studios have sidelined author-led process in favour of writing by committee and focus groups. So they are trying to be more representative, which is ultimately a good thing but making an absolute fucking mess of it, because they are trying to craft these stories by marketing. Honestly, there are lots really shit male led films out there. But when a film is shit and female led, it has to be woke as well. Can’t it just be shit?
The Mandalorian is the best Star Wars for years. It’s really great. I’m not far in, but I’m really enjoying it. However, I note that in the episodes I’ve seen, Mando has ended up in a stalemate now with three separate women, who have proved his equal physically and intellectually. So what’s the difference? The difference is John Favreau knows what he is doing, and has more or less been given control. As I said before, give good writers the space to be good writers and you’ll get good stories, and they’ll probably be progressive and have a message in them too. Try to write by marketing and committee and it will be shit.
One of my favourite, if not my favourite, Star Wars’ films is Rogue One and that’s got a female lead.
But if Luke had done that nobody would have had a problem with it.
And aren’t you being a bit guilty of a double standard here?
What does Luke’s training consist of? He does a bit of blindfolded lightsabering on the Millenium Falcon on the way to Alderran in Star Wars, spends maybe a couple of days on Dagobah with Yoda doing swampy back flips, gets his arse kicked by Vader, goes back to Dagobah, where he is told by Yoda he doesn’t need any more training, and that’s it. The next thing is he does is go and have a rematch with Vader which he wins.
Luke’s training is far more overnight that Leia’s. In the sequels its suggested that Leia spent far more time training than Luke ever did. Why does Luke short cutting his way to Jedi Master status get ignored. But Leia and Rey are Mary Sues? Especially when we are explicitly shown that Leia spent many years training as a Jedi.
The problem with Rey was that there was no challenge to her. There is no failure for her to bounce back from, and no character flaw to overcome. That’s why Luke has the more satisfying story - the write understood the components of the heroes journey, whereas the writers of the sequels didn’t.