Let’s Talk About Nostalgia

With the release of season two of “Stranger Things” right around the corner (October 27th), it got me thinking about nostalgia.  You know, that warm and fuzzy feeling you get while thinking about pleasant past experiences.  Those who have watched any of “Stranger Things” know that it is a show steeped in nostalgia.  It’s heavily influenced by classic ’80s movies, and takes inspiration from Spielberg, Carpenter, and the like.

You don’t even have to go past the show’s title sequence to see that ’80s influence.

This has become a common theme recently.  Many forms of media…be it books, movies, or video games…have steeped themselves in this wave of nostalgia for the 1980’s.  In fact, the game “Stories Untold” which I wrote about earlier this year has an ’80s veneer over it in the form of old text-based adventure games.  Now, I don’t hate this nostalgia…although I do feel that sometimes it becomes overbearing.  That’s something “Stranger Things” did really well with during its first season.  Despite the obvious ’80s influences, the show never went out of its way to point them out, relegating them to things like movie posters hanging on the wall in the background of a scene or taking story cues from said movies (like the van chase scene near the end of the season which is clearly inspired by “E.T.”).  The most obvious it gets is a scene where the school’s science teacher is explaining to his wife how they did some of the special effects in the movie “The Thing”.

However, there are times where I feel like the ’80s nostalgia is used like a crutch.  The book “Ready Player One” almost falls into this trap.  The premise of the story is that, in a dystopian future setting, kids like Wade Watts spend most of their time in a humongous virtual reality world.  As the book begins, we learn that the creator of this massive virtual reality passed away recently, and with his death left behind an “Easter egg” inside the game.  Whoever finds it first will inherit the creator’s massive wealth and legacy.  Because of the fact that the creator grew up in the 1980’s, this leads to a massive resurgence of ’80s pop culture as players pour over anything they can get their hands on to figure out the clues and find the Easter egg.

 

 

None of this is necessarily a bad thing.  And the book explains the origin of a lot of the ’80s references, especially the ones that are critical to the main plot.  But it teeters dangerously close to the edge of the nostalgia hole, and risks alienating younger readers who have no real connection to ’80s pop culture.  Having grown up in the ’90s, a lot of the references in the book didn’t really do it for me.  The text-adventure game “Zork” is referenced at one point, which I do have a passing familiarity with.  But most of the things I either have only a vague recollection of or I know it in passing.  Having never been steeped in that ’80s culture, part of the appeal was lost on me.

If the book wasn’t well-paced with likable characters and a fun story, the ’80s charm would have been completely wasted on me.  That being said, “Ready Player One” is definitely worth a read.  It’s a dystopian science-fiction story that manages to avoid falling into that cliché trap of lamenting the dangers of technology.

However, there is one modern instance where I really noticed the nostalgia crutch.  And that instance is…”Rogue One”.

 

Hey look, it’s Jyn Erso and Captain…umm…Captain What’s-His-Face.

 

I talked about “Rogue One” before and how I feel like the movie is a mixed bag.  The storytelling is jumbled at times.  Most of the characters aside from Jyn have very little development and aren’t memorable.  It’s part war movie, part Star Wars movie but doesn’t really nail either of those…at least until the second half of the movie.  But one thing that grated on me more than it probably should have was the fan service.  The biggest example of this was early on in the movie.  Our heroes are making their way through the holy city of Jedha when they run into those two guys from the Cantina in “A New Hope”.

You know the guys.  “I don’t like you.  My friend doesn’t like you either.”  Those guys.  They have a random ten-second cameo that adds nothing to the movie aside from making people go “hey I remember that!”

But then like twenty minutes later the entire city is destroyed by a test-firing of the Death Star’s laser.  So how did those two guys escape exactly?  Did they just happen to have a ship they flew away in just before everything was vaporized?

The movie doesn’t stop there either.  There’s a random cameo by C-3PO and R2-D2 later on.  There’s a not-so-subtle reference to Obi-Wan.  And there’s a scene with Darth Vader on Mustafar (the lava planet from “Revenge of the Sith”) that adds nothing to the plot and just regurgitates stuff we already.

And also Vader makes a pun.  So that’s cool…I guess.

My biggest gripe with all of this is that “Rogue One” was often subtitled “A Star Wars Story”, implying that the movie was meant to be standalone.  Except it isn’t, because it very clearly binds itself hand and foot to “A New Hope”.  It kind of makes sense, considering the movie is about stealing the Death Star plans, which helps the Rebel Alliance destroy it in “A New Hope”.  But at the same time, there’s so much stuff in “Rogue One” that feels like it was put there merely to appease the super fans.

Why did Obi-Wan come back to help even though he was in hiding from the Sith?  Because his friend Bail Organa asked him to of course!

Why did the Death Star have a super critical weakness that caused it to blow up from one proton torpedo?  Because Galen Erso purposefully designed that flaw of course!

(To be fair, I actually did enjoy the explanation of the Death Star’s weakness.  It was a nice little detail that filled a plot hole from the older Star Wars movies.)

Honestly I’m surprised there wasn’t a scene with C-3PO and R2-D2 getting on the blockade runner with Princess Leia, just to explain why they’re on the ship at the beginning of “A New Hope”.

At times the movie feels less like its own thing and more like a forced justification for everything that follows.  I could go on and on about “Rogue One”, and I would still say it’s a good movie.  It just isn’t the great movie it should have been.  It relies a bit too much on nostalgia and not enough on its own original content.  And in the end, that makes the movie feel lopsided.

Nostalgia isn’t inherently a bad thing.  It can help us cope with bad periods in our lives by remembering good times and reminding ourselves that things can and will get better.  But nostalgia can also be blinding.  It can blind us to the flaws in our past.  It’s like whenever people reminisce about the 1950’s as the “good ol’ days”, but fail to remember that they were only the “good ol’ days” if you were a straight, white, Christian male.  If you were anything else, your memories of the 1950’s were probably a bit different.

Perspective is a funny thing.  It can grow distorted, showing us things that have been exaggerated or blown out of proportion.  And sometimes it can show us things that weren’t even true.  Perspective is fickle.  And that’s why nostalgia can be dangerous.  Viewing the world through rose-colored glasses is pleasant and fun, but ignoring problems doesn’t make them go away.

If anything, it just lets them sneak up on you and cause more harm than they rightfully should.

 

Thanks for reading.  Check back next Wednesday for another post, and as always, have a wonderful week.

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2016: The Year Everybody Loved to Hate

We’re only three days into 2017 and already the narrative has been established: 2016 was an awful crap fest of a year and we’re glad it’s gone.  But was it as bad as we think?  Was there really nothing at all redeeming about the past year?

A lot of the hate surrounding 2016 seems to have a lot to do with how we ended the year on a rather sour note.  The aftermath of the election was still front and center in our minds and the death of Carrie Fisher was and still is weighing on us.  When it comes to 2016 these are the two things everyone seems to be talking about right now: the election and celebrity deaths.  Now, the election was a heated one and there were a lot of celebrities that passed away last year, but I think some good things happened too.

For starters, it was a great year for the domestic box office, making over eleven billion dollars.  That’s the first time in history.  And the year was full of noteworthy movies, the top three grossing being Finding Dory, Rogue One, and Captain America: Civil War.  Although we might as well just call it “Disney gets richer” because all three of those came out of studios owned by Disney.

But even though Disney ruled the box office it was still a great year for other movies as well.  I personally really enjoyed 10 Cloverfield Lane, the kinda-maybe sequel to the original Cloverfield back in 2008 (although you don’t have to have seen the first one to enjoy it).  It was a smartly paced horror thriller that proved that you never really can trust John Goodman.  And I mean ever.  Right when you think you’ve grown to trust him the movie throws something back at you that casts doubt on the whole situation.  It’s tense, exciting, and never really lets up.  If you’re a fan of horror or even just thrillers in general, I highly recommend it.  Even the debut trailer for the movie was great, capturing that gradual sense of unease as things grow more and more demented.

 

 

I also really enjoyed Arrival, a sci-fi film with a unique take on first contact with aliens.  I already posted a full review of it a few weeks back so I won’t go into so much detail again.  It’s a smart movie that puts the focus squarely on the impact of aliens arriving on Earth.  Their intentions unknown, the governments of the world scramble to assemble teams and figure out what the purpose of their arrival is.  It’s a high concept movie with a decidedly human core to it.

But it wasn’t all rosy in movie land.  As much as I would like to put Rogue One on my “best movies of 2016” list I simply can’t, mainly because it’s lackluster first half was only saved by such an extraordinary second half.  And then there was also Blair Witch, the 17 years later sequel to The Blair Witch Project, which failed to capitalize on any of its interesting elements and instead settled into a boring parade of pointless jump scares and shadow retelling of the events of the first movie.

It was also a great year for alternative energy or “clean energy”, if you prefer.  Solar energy is now the same price or cheaper than fossil fuels in thirty countries around the world.  Not only that, but Tesla managed to power an entire island using solar panels.  Sure the island has only 600 residents, but it’s still an amazing feat.  It shows that the future of energy may finally be arriving.  You may or may not believe in global warming, but I’m sure you can at least agree that fossil fuels will not last us forever.  Regardless of global warming, we have to secure humanity’s future by switching over to renewable energy sources.

And hey, remember Pokemon GO?  It was that mobile game that actually got people to go outside and walk around.  How amazing is that?  A video game actually made people go enjoy the outdoors.  Never mind the media, who apparently tried their best to sour the achievement by reporting all the accidents that occurred with people playing the game (although at least one such report of a highway accident involving the game was false).  The hype around Pokemon GO has certainly died down at this point, but there’s no denying the impact it had on popular culture.

See here’s the thing with 2016: I think most of the bad stuff that happened was at least slightly blown out of proportion by either the news or social media.  There were certainly a lot of high-note celebrity deaths last year, but as Cracked points out pretty much every year is the worst year in celebrity deaths.  And something I didn’t mention before, but in the aftermath of that Dallas shooting in July where five police officers were killed we had this narrative in our heads that the United States had become such a battleground for our forces in blue that they were afraid to even step out the door because they might not come back home.  Never mind the fact that the number of police officers being killed has been, on average, declining for the past few decades.  It just shows you how our perception can be shaped so easily by exaggeration.

 

Source: BBC.

 

And when it comes to the election, yes there was a lot of vitriol flowing around, but we have to remember that this has been the culmination of the public frustration that’s been brewing for quite some time.  Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders wouldn’t have gotten nearly the amount of attention they did if they had run even just a decade ago (Trump did actually try running for the Reform Party back in 2000, but withdrew before the voting began).  And while Trump’s win greatly upset a lot of people, I don’t think it makes 2016 a terrible year.  If anything, I think it makes 2017 an uncertain year because now he’ll actually be able to start doing things when he takes office on January 20th.  Before, all he could really do was talk (or tweet).  It leaves us with an uncertain future on progressive policies and environmental issues.  I mean, Trump is the guy who once said that wind turbines are killing all the eagles.  No joke.

But despite all my defenses of 2016, I still don’t think it was a great year.  Hell, I’m not even sure if I would necessarily call it a “good” year, just an average one.  But it certainly wasn’t the doomsday terrible good-for-nothing year that many of us seem to have in our minds.  If anything, instead of focusing on the bad parts of 2016, we should be focusing on fighting to make sure 2017 is a good year and goes where we want it to.  The past can inform us, but it can also bind us and steer us away from the things that matter.

 

Well that’s all I have for this week.  But before I go, I do want to say one thing.  I made a resolution during New Year’s that I haven’t shared with anyone else yet, so this is the first time I’m speaking of it period (aren’t you lucky).  My resolution is that I will write a short story each month this year, so twelve in total.  And on the final Wednesday of each month, instead of a normal blog post I will be posting the story for that month for you all to read.  It’s another way to help me keep writing (I have been working on a full-length book, but working on that all the time really takes its toll after a while so I’ve wanted new projects for a while).  Please, do leave feedback on the stories and tell me what you think.

Check back next Wednesday for another post, and as always, have a wonderful week.

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Elsewhere in the Galaxy Far Far Away: Rogue One Review

Warning: there will be spoilers for Rogue One below.  Read at your own risk.

As the first true standalone movie in the Star Wars franchise, Rogue One has a lot to live up to.  It has to stand on its own two feet with its own self-contained story but also tie itself in to the greater story of Star Wars as a whole.  There is a lot to be excited for in this movie, but there is also cause for concern.  So, is Rogue One worthy of the Star Wars name?  Did it succeed in crafting its own memorable story?

Well…yes and no.  The answer is a bit complicated with this one.

Rogue One is in some ways a prequel to A New Hope, the first Star Wars movie ever made.  It tells the story of a group of ragtag soldiers who steal the plans for the Death Star (which, if you remember, was what Darth Vader is looking for at the beginning of A New Hope).  On its face, this seems like the perfect setup for a Star Wars story.  It fills in a gap that hasn’t really been explored (at least in the movies) and tells a story fans have been wanting to see.  Unfortunately, as I’ll get into in a little bit, the movie seems to cater to the fans a little too much, leaving more casual viewers in the dust.

The crux of the thing is that Rogue One feels like a battle between its two halves.  The second half of the movie is great and has an amazing climactic battle, but the whole thing is weighed down by a jumbled and sloppy first half.  When the movie begins, we see Jyn Erso (the movie’s protagonist) as a child.  We are clued in to her father’s ties to the empire, and without spoiling too much, Jyn is forced to go on the run.  But then the movie jumps ahead to Jyn as an adult, and we see that she’s in an Imperial prison.

Wait…what?  How did this happen?  It’s hard not to feel like something was missing in between.

Unfortunately, that seems to be the case for much of Rogue One‘s first half.  We’re spirited away to a handful of different planets at light speed with very little detail provided on any of what occurs.  It actually took me some time to get my bearings after the opening sequence was over, and that’s not a very good sign.

The rapid fire pacing continues as we see Jyn being taken to an Imperial labor camp.  It seems like this would be a good time to show off the movie’s grittier side and show what life is like under Imperial rule right?  Well too bad, because this sequence lasts all of thirty seconds before Jyn is rescued by the Rebels.  Even once she’s brought to the Rebel base we don’t get much in the way of exposition on her criminal background.  We just get a list of the crimes she’s committed.  It still doesn’t tell us what exactly she did that got her thrown into prison.  And her muddled backstory continues to confuse throughout the first act.  At one part there’s a dream sequence of Jyn living with an Imperial family or something, and it’s not properly explained at all aside from one or two lines of dialogue later on.  It’s all a mess that could have been handled so much better.

Ironically, despite Jyn’s backstory problems, she’s actually the most developed character in the movie.  Despite the large amount of characters in the movie, all of their character traits are handled in broad strokes.  There’s the nervous Imperial pilot who defected from the Empire, the handsome and charismatic leader, the hardened fighter who wields a fully automatic laser rifle, the mystical force-attuned samurai guy, and so on.  Even Saw Gerrera, a character who is hyped up quite a bit during the first act, barely has any impact on the movie as a whole.

Honestly the only true standout character aside from Jyn is K-2SO, a reprogrammed Imperial robot who, as another character puts it, “says anything that comes into his circuits”.  He’s a dry, sarcastic character who serves as the comic relief in the movie.  And it works.  Early on in the movie there’s a scene where he nonchalantly tosses a grenade behind him to blow up a few Stormtroopers before he quips “yeah, I should’ve stayed on the ship”.

It’s not just the character exposition that’s handled poorly either.  Throughout the movie, there are these little references and nods that have nothing to do with anything besides being a nod to the fans.  And not just the regular fans either, but the super fans.  The ones who digest everything Star Wars they can get their hands on.  There’s a lot of details and information dropped in the first half of the movie (particularly when they get to Jedda) that doesn’t have any significance to the casual viewer.  They do that kind of stuff in superhero movies as well, add little easter eggs that will slip past normal views but will leave the super fans saying “oh yeah that’s obviously a reference to issue number 523″ and so on.  It always struck me as heavy-handed because for a casual view, those moments are jarring and interrupt the flow of the movie.  I mean sure, Star Wars is so big that it probably doesn’t make much of a difference, but it still mucks up the pacing.

Even Darth Vader’s presence in this movie seems to serve no purpose other than fan service (although he does have one really cool scene near the end of the movie).  The first scene we see him in takes place in some random castle thing on the planet Mustafar (the lava planet from Episode III where Anakin and Obi-Wan have their duel), and it serves basically no purpose.  There’s no new information given to the audience.  It just gives us what we already know.  It seems to exist solely to appeal to the fans by showing off more of Darth Vader (and his voice is pretty bad sounding…85-year-old James Earl Jones does not sound nearly as intimidating as he once did).  The scene could have been cut from the movie and would have had barely any impact on it.

Despite all of these misgivings about the first half of the movie, the second half more than makes up for it.  It has a razor-sharp focus on its action, we get payoff for Jyn’s personal story, and it culminates in a prolonged, epic battle that features action on the ground and in space.  It’s an epic moment for the movie that is expertly handled.  There’s honestly not a whole lot to say about the second half except that it recognizes that action is what it does best.  It’s just a shame that the first half of the movie wasn’t as magnificently crafted as the second half is, otherwise I would be inclined to put it way higher on the list of Star Wars movies.

Overall, I would say that Rogue One is good.  The first half is a bit of a dud and drags the movie down, but the second half excels with its focus on action.  The movie certainly has a lot of grit and grime to it, although I found it a little strange that for being labeled as a darker movie, it’s not until near the end that it truly embraces its darker side (pun not intended).  It’s certainly an inconsistent movie, but still worth seeing.

Let me put it this way: if you’re looking for a movie to watch this holiday season, you could do a lot worse than Rogue One.

 

Thanks for reading!  Check back next Wednesday for another post and as always, have a wonderful week.

I was saddened to hear that Carrie Fisher (who played Princess Leia in the original trilogy as well as The Force Awakens) died yesterday.  She was a truly inspirational person and honestly nothing I say can do her justice.  Today the world mourns one of its heroes.

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