Natterings From Nepantla

It's not quite up to the standard of the first Shaun the Sheep movie. But I put the first movie on my Hugo nominating ballot, so we're still talking a pretty good movie.

It seems like I'm approximately the last person to have learned that it went direct to Netflix, but if you have Netflix, and haven't seen it yet, it's a fun little feel-good movie that can take your mind off these dark times for an hour and a half. It's also chock full of TV and movie sf references, ranging in subtlety from obscure ones tucked into the corner of the frame to "how did that not result in a cease-and-desist order".

Highly recommended to all my sf fan friends.

Well, that was certainly a big chunk of commercial cinema product. Many lines were said, many things were blown up, and many stuntpeople were gainfully employed. The costume and set people are at the top of their game once again. As for the story, well.

It is highly emblematic of where this movie sits in the franchise that every time it needs to add a plot point, it hauls out another corpse.

( Mild spoilers )

When it's not doing that, it's trading hard on nostalgia for the first trilogy in many other ways. Unfortunately, much like the Ghostbusters reboot, the combined effect of every shout-out and every cameo is to remind you that the original was a lot better.

Tim Kreider has an opinion piece in the NYT looking back at the first movie and the sense of fun that made it stand out in a time of depressing movies. (Also helpfully explaining some of the subtext for those of us who were to young to catch it at the time.) (Yes, also proceeding from the assumption that sf is for children, but bear with him, he's got interesting things to say later on.) And I think he has a point there, that Lucas achieved a sense of adventure that nothing under J. J. Abrams's watch has managed to recapture.

Anyway, now I give myself permission to stop paying attention to whatever else Disney does with it. I still love the movies, and if that's not enough, just about anything anyone wanted is filled in by the radio drama of A New Hope. Fuller story, more fleshed-out characters? It's got that. A strong role for women? Leia is basically the main character. And for you sf pedants, it may still have some fantasy elements but it's the only work that's ever come up with a plausible reason for why there is sound in space.