Comment by hobofan
8 hours ago
The Viet Cong parallels in the original Star Wars about as much "winking at the camera" as current Star Wars is to current politics.
8 hours ago
The Viet Cong parallels in the original Star Wars about as much "winking at the camera" as current Star Wars is to current politics.
What Viet Cong parallels? Whatever you mean, it can’t have been very visible to the audience, since clear Viet Cong sympathies would not have gone over well (at least not universally) in 1977-1983.
This 3 minute clip of a conversation between George Lucas and James Cameron might help.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=fv9Jq_mCJEo
“Not available in your country.”
But what George Lucas claims to have thought (now many years later), is essentially irrelevant. What matters is how audiences interpret the movies when watching them, both at the time and now. If, as I strongly suspect, essentially nobody saw clear Viet Cong sympathies in the original trilogy, then the modern Star Wars differs significantly.
And this is my point. The politics of the original trilogy was cookie-cutter, incidental, and unimportant, whereas much of the modern Star Wars has political creeds, obvious symbolism and grandstanding all over the place, front and center. You may (or may not) agree with the politics of the new Star Wars, but you can’t deny that they are different.
1 reply →