Star Wars: The Book of Boba Fett (Disney+)

[Sky]

...gets a premiere date: Dec 29 2021



Edit by Trippy: add Disney+ tag

[Khaldun]

damn it's feels good to be a gangsta

[Cyrrex]

Want

[Trippy]

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOJ1cw6mohw

[rattran]

I thought it was decent. Hit some nice scenes, and look forward to the rest.

My wife thought it was great, and is gushing over it.

[Threash]

The scene where boba crawls out of the sand in front of the sarlacc pit is word for word straight from Patton Oswalds infamous Parks and Rec speech, down to the pan down from the twin suns.

[Surlyboi]

I’m pretty sure they did that on purpose too.

[Abagadro]

I mean, written by Favreau and directed by Rodriguez. I'm sure it was a deliberate nod. 

I also dug the Ray Harryhausen-esque monster.

[Khaldun]

Yeah.

I liked this a lot. My only concern so far is that for a guy who has done a lot of hard living in the company of a lot of tough guys, he seemed downright stupid in his first day as a crime lord. For one, seems pretty tough to replace Jabba with just yourself and one sidekick--I mean, if he didn't inherit some kind of organization from Bib Fortuna, he's really just a dude squatting in Jabba's old joint with a droid and a partner. When adding two Gamorrean thugs to your roster immediately doubles the size of your gang, you're maybe getting ahead of yourself by announcing you're the new crime lord. I get the "I rule from respect" and "let's show we're nice ordinary crime lord types by going for a stroll" but to get that flat-footed? I was hoping he'd have a few guys on the roof or otherwise show a bit of smarts.

Maybe he's actually kind of brain-damaged and that's going to be a subtext of the show, I dunno.

[Sir T]

The problem is that he has been held up as the ultimate Bounty hunter for decades despite not... you know... actually doing anything to justify that. Now that he has to be doing something on screen at a regular basis its going to be hard to maintain that.

Or they could pull a roundabout and say that its just some shlub in Fetts spare armour, and the real Boba Fett will turn up after this guy is revealed as a total incompetent, And shoot one person to make everyone go "Clever girl."

[Velorath]

Yeah.

he's really just a dude squatting in Jabba's old joint with a droid and a partner.

The droid is voiced by Matt Berry though so that has to count for something.

[Khaldun]

The second episode is horrifically bad.

I'm kind of surprised. It's like dinner theater Lawrence of Arabia, right down to "there's a train and I have to teach the Space Arabs how to stop it and then tell the Space Turk Drug Dealers to leave the nice natives alone and then they will adopt me into their tribe and I will show off my new robes in delight." No twists, no irony, no subversion.

Plus in the present, Boba Fett continues to want to be a crime boss with exactly three people in his gang, two of them he acquired more or less by accident, without even the slightest hint of having a plan. I would like the guy to actually be canny after his long and complicated life, but...Maybe the show means us to see him as a dumb fucking thug who keeps getting pantsed by the equivalent of a blind man flicking his rocket pack on, I dunno, but I'm not seeing the signs of that being the idea.

[HaemishM]

I liked the "Dances with Banthas" episode, but I do question why so much of both episodes has been taken up by the "how he got to meet Mando" arc and we've seen so little of Boba the crime lord.

[Khaldun]

What little we've seen makes him out to be completely fucking stupid. Which just really doesn't work unless there's a Big Sekret Plan With a Twist or something. Maybe.

But Dances With Banthas was just offensive before we get to the politics by being fucking boring. We have all seen this a billion times. Dumb natives who don't know how to fight Big Machine Technology Things need a nice stranger to show them how to Kill the White Man/Ottoman Turk/Spice-Trading Alien. It doesn't feel anything like the Tusken Raiders we've seen in Star Wars, even--I mean, either let them be cruel motherfuckers who know exactly the fuck they're doing or give them some actually alien texture and complexity. We have had zero reason up to this point to see them as oppressed indigenes who are pissed about the alien outsiders with their mysterious machines (I mean, fuck, how long have non-Tuskens been on Tatooine? We first encounter the planet in The Phantom Menace and it doesn't exactly feel like the cities and ports are brand-shiny-new intrusions). Mostly I give Star Wars credit for having these weird cosmopolitan planets where even if there are "innocent natives" the situation is slightly more messy (say, the Mandolorian episode where he more or less re-enacts The Seven Samurai only it's just him, Gina Carano and Baby Yoda.)

[HaemishM]

I really don't expect a show cashing in on the popularity of an almost 40+ year old popular character who never had a speaking line in his original 2 movies to do anything beyond rehash some TV/Movie tropes with some pew-pew. White savior myth aside, none of the Star Wars mythos has been consistent enough to say this version of the Tuskens is any less accurate than another. Didn't they steal Anakin's momma in Attack of the Clones? Why?

Who the fuck knows? Simple answer is "Lucas had to have something to show Anakin's journey to the Dark Side, so why not have him slaughter some Tusken kids?"

[Threash]

Rehashing old movie plots worked magnificently for the Mandalorian so I think they are just going to ride that train as far as they can.

[HaemishM]

What you did there? See it I did.

*speaking of rehashing*

[Sky]

This show is fucking great.

Sorry you got old and bitter.

[Khaldun]

Sorry I want something slightly original and less stupid.

[Rasix]

My son and I are still deciding on whether we're bored or not. 

[Draegan]

Show is not bad, but it's not great. I'm enjoying it. As boring as it is, the Tuskan stuff is kind of fun to watch still. Just feels like a time waster though.

[eldaec]

I felt that way in episode 1. But in episode 2 I kind of settled into it and decided I preferred the tuskens over current day.

They need subtitles or an excuse for being able to speak English though. I'm bored of grunting and handwaving.

[Khaldun]

I liked Boba saying "we need a protocol droid". I mean, this much I really like about the Star Wars universe: there's a lot of languages and mostly folks only speak a few at best, and some people don't speak any but their own.

[Surlyboi]

The Tuskens crafting their own gaffi sticks like jedi do their lightsabers was a solid nod though.

[Teleku]

What little we've seen makes him out to be completely fucking stupid. Which just really doesn't work unless there's a Big Sekret Plan With a Twist or something. Maybe.

But Dances With Banthas was just offensive before we get to the politics by being fucking boring. We have all seen this a billion times. Dumb natives who don't know how to fight Big Machine Technology Things need a nice stranger to show them how to Kill the White Man/Ottoman Turk/Spice-Trading Alien. It doesn't feel anything like the Tusken Raiders we've seen in Star Wars, even--I mean, either let them be cruel motherfuckers who know exactly the fuck they're doing or give them some actually alien texture and complexity. We have had zero reason up to this point to see them as oppressed indigenes who are pissed about the alien outsiders with their mysterious machines (I mean, fuck, how long have non-Tuskens been on Tatooine? We first encounter the planet in The Phantom Menace and it doesn't exactly feel like the cities and ports are brand-shiny-new intrusions). Mostly I give Star Wars credit for having these weird cosmopolitan planets where even if there are "innocent natives" the situation is slightly more messy (say, the Mandolorian episode where he more or less re-enacts The Seven Samurai only it's just him, Gina Carano and Baby Yoda.)

They fleshed out the Sand People more in season two of the Mandalorian.  They humanized them and made them more sympathetic in the episode where Mando teams up with them to kill the dragon thing.  So it seems this show is trying to just run with that/cash in on it, but doing it a lot worst.

This show is firmly 3.6 roentgen for me.  It has just enough entertainment value to keep me watching it every week, but significantly worst in every aspect of production compared to The Mandalorian.

[Khaldun]

I mean, I get it--Star Wars was built on an infrastructure of homage/ripping off. But you know, first off, the sprawling IP born from that now has some of its own world-building it can do (the krayt dragon hunt is a good example).

And 21st C. directors/writers can find some new shit to rip off. In the episode of Mandolorian where they have to get to the Imperial terminal on the giant mining transport, they're riffing off of "Sorcerer", which is a great movie. But it's just a riff--the episode has a lot of its own thing going on, and the source material is something kind of unfamiliar that deserves to be a bigger classic than it is. (It had the bad luck to come out the same summer as Star Wars...)

There's a few nice original touches in this episode--the hallucinogenic lizard, sort of crafting the gaffi sticks, etc. But if you haven't seen "Lawrence of Arabia" and "Dances With Wolves", maybe you wouldn't be aware of just how closely it follows the moves in those films, and in the case of Lawrence, right down to specific scenes, tropes, etc. I'm looking at people in the subreddits where they're talking about the episode and I'm thinking, "These are all people under 30 who've never seen either of those films". And the problem here is that those films are templates spread across our entire culture, very much unlike "Sorcerer"--they're cliches and kind of icky ones to boot.

There's no reason why they couldn't have made an episode explaining:

a) That the Tuskens have a reason for being stubborn and camping where the train can shoot at them--maybe it's a migration route for something they hunt, maybe it's the best sand-gourd area on the whole planet, whatever, something that makes them other than stupid natives who just fatalistically accept getting shot by drug lords when all they need to do is move 300 yards further away from the train route otherwise
b) That they know perfectly well how to ride speeder bikes and so on and they just plain refuse because it makes them dependent on the people who make them
c) That they make the plan and ask Boba to help because they know he's a bad-ass. (It would help if he then was in fact a bad-ass, which so far he's not doing that well.)

Now it is also just possible that Boba's whole confidence in asserting his control of Mos Espa is based on a convergence between the Tuskens in the past and the present--e.g., that he's going to pull a Paul Atreides and use desert power and he's just waiting for the Tusken penny to drop. If not, the stuff in the present-day frame isn't so much derivative as kind of dumb.

[Sir T]

I really don't expect a show cashing in on the popularity of an almost 40+ year old popular character who never had a speaking line in his original 2 movies...

Incorrect. In ESB he said "As you wish," and "He's worth a lot to me." He says nothing in ROTJ.

He had a lot more lines in the animated bit in the Star Wars Holiday Special, which was his introduction. But he didn't do anything then bar try and trick the Rebels and run away after shooting once. The only reason people think he is a bad ass is that Vader says something like "Thats why they call you the best bounty hunter in the Galaxy." And no-one ever thinks Vader could be lying to flatter someone.

There really is nothing in the canonical films which could not have him just be an arrogant idiot who tells everyone how great he is.

[Cyrrex]

Well, the whole setup of Boba in AotC is that he is Jango's selected progeny and has been directly trained by Jango as a Mandalorian, making him far superior to regular clones.  I think it is fair to say he was a badass.

I realize your point is about the original trilogy, but canon is canon.

[Velorath]

So directly trained by a dude that got his head chopped off when Boba was still a kid...

[Khaldun]

Look, Jango did a pretty good job getting him to brush his teeth and eat his vegetables--a bounty hunter's got to start somewhere.

[LanTheWarder]

This show is fucking great.

Sorry you got old and bitter.

I mean we can all see they are going to mirror the dune plot right?

I'm still enjoying the hell out of it though.

[HaemishM]

I expect it to be less Dune and more old style Westerns or The Last Samurai or Lawrence of Arabia.

[LanTheWarder]

Interesting I'm thinking the sand people are going to be the reason he is able to hold/keep his throne.

[HaemishM]

Yes, that's about the most obvious bit of foreshadowing on the show.

Or when he comes back to Tatooine after his adventures with Mando, he discovers that the entire Tusken tribe was wiped out by the crime lords on Tatooine, thus his hard on for taking them on.

[eldaec]

There's no reason why they couldn't have made an episode explaining:

a) That the Tuskens have a reason for being stubborn and camping where the train can shoot at them--maybe it's a migration route for something they hunt, maybe it's the best sand-gourd area on the whole planet, whatever, something that makes them other than stupid natives who just fatalistically accept getting shot by drug lords when all they need to do is move 300 yards further away from the train route otherwise
b) That they know perfectly well how to ride speeder bikes and so on and they just plain refuse because it makes them dependent on the people who make them
c) That they make the plan and ask Boba to help because they know he's a bad-ass. (It would help if he then was in fact a bad-ass, which so far he's not doing that well.)

I *really* don't need them adding tiresome exposition for things like a & b. Sometimes Mando and this have too little dialog to such an extent that it prevents you connecting with characters. But I really don't want this kind of 'characters say things they each already know' bullshit.

c I just don't care either way.