Star Wars was a good movie. Its got space lasers, space wizards, space ships, and funny googas. Over time the funny googas would have diminishing returns but… We’ll get to that.
Star Wars ended fairly satisfyingly with the good guys getting medals from the princess¹ and had two sequels, expanding it into a trilogy with the protagonist’s three father figures all turning up as ghosts at the end to nod and smile by the campfire.
For decades thats all Star Wars was, three movies².
But then in 1999, it was decided that we needed another Star War.
But here’s the thing, the result was considered by many to not be a very good movie, even though it had even more space laser, even more space wizard, even more space ship, and the purest distillation of funny googas.
It was refined Star War. Purified, distilled down to the essence.
And it sucked.
This is an essay about convincers.
You see after The Phantom Menace, The Attack of The Clones, and The Revenge of The Sith, there was another long period without a Star War³. Then Disney bought the rights and we now live in a world where there will probably never be a year without a Star War ever again. But some of them have been (and inevitably will be) kind of terrible.
I’m going to firmly take my stance in the culture war around this by saying I liked The Last Jedi more than the other two, and liked The Mandalorian more before Boba Fett and Luke Skywalker got involved.
In short I’ve started to think that the better these things are at being a Star War, the worse they are at being a compelling narrative. I think the reason for this is that the more a story is bound up inside a set of existing requirements, the less new creative ideas can be brought to the table.
Further more, I posit that magic shows have a tipping point where if they become better magic, they’re actually a worse show.
What is a Star War?
The prequels fundamentally changed what a Star War was. By taking a deep dive into historical background which had just been handwaved by the original movies. Suddenly the Jedi weren’t a tiny number of scattered space wizards, they were an official council. They had ranks and roles and temples and government contracts. A simple story of good vs evil, rebels vs empire, light vs dark⁴, is turned into a complicated construction of interplanetary trade embargos and political posturing over rumours of war based on ancient religions.
The prequels are a hard watch for a kid who enjoyed watching a sword guy fight baddies in a space station and learn magic from a cantankerous little frog dude. They even medicalised the magic by naming the implied genetic trait that allows people to sense and control what had previously been an inexplicable immeasurable supernatural… well… force.
The prequels took mystery and turned it into a stamp collection with a family tree and a bureaucratic order.
From that point on, to be a Star War required a lot more than laser swords and funny googas. Now it had to tie into the political intrigue and the ancient lore.
The very worst manifestation of this was the 9th Star War, The Rise of Skywalker. With all 3 of the the legacy characters dead, the evil government on the backfoot, the promise from The Last Jedi was that everything was now new. There was no template for what happened next…
And the very first scene explains that the Big Bad from the first 3 movies has somehow come back and has been secretly pulling the strings this whole time, and also has a bunch of big spaceships set to bring the original evil empire back⁵.
Because that’s what makes a good Star War, even if it makes a terrible movie.
What Makes Good Magic?
I’m going to pick a magic trick out of the air right now… Let’s say… The lota vase. No something more complicated, like Any Drink Called For, also known as the Magic Kettle or Inexhaustible Bottle.
For those who don’t know it, spectators name drinks usually from a menu, and you have a kettle or similar receptacle from which you can pour any drink named.
How would you improve that trick without changing the fundamental nature of it⁶?
The answer is by strengthening the conviction in the assertions made by the trick:
- The kettle is ordinary
- The kettle is empty
- The spectators are real
- The choices are free
- The drinks are genuine
Ignoring the mechanical or methodological implications of any of these things, lets think about how to strengthen the conviction. What if the kettle was examined at the end. Maybe at the start. Heck, between each pour. Why not? Let the volunteer spectators lift it and shake it to see it’s empty. Let them check the glasses too. But if there are a hundred people in the audience an you pour three drinks, how do the other 97 people know you didn’t use stooges? So why not pour more drinks? Six? Ten? Twenty? Maybe pour a drink for everyone in the audience.
It doesn’t matter how many drinks you pour if they’re all simple spirits with a mixer. You’re pouring any drink called for. Ditch the menu, ask the audience for a challenge. Do frozen margheritas, milkshakes, rootbeer, WKD IrnBru⁷, hot chocolate, a frappuchino. Let people name anything. If they promise to drink it you can pour them a glass of frogspawn or motor oil. And they have to drink it, share it even, how else will they know they’re all genuine drinks?
So there yo have it, the most amazing magic trick in the world, the satisfied audience milling around sipping at their glasses while those yet to be served queue up to closely examine an empty kettle then ask for a pint of Stella Artois before arguing with their friends about whether its the same as the Carlsberg and Budweiser they requested or everyone is just getting the same beer. As you pour the final beverage you prepare to take a bow to the hudred people who stopped caring an hour ago. No one can leave until you collect all the glasses in.
Thats the best version of this trick. It’s amazing. Magic scholars would write about it for decades. But would it be entertaining? Probably not. I mean it could be, but look at this classic Paul Daniels clip. This may be the closest existing performance to what I just described and it falls woefully short in terms of conviction. There’s a lot of clutter and distraction to keep it entertaining, barely any examination, pretty loose drink definitions, very few of which get confirmed as genuine for the audience at large. At one point an assistant brings two dogs on stage because why the hell not?
It was definitely entertaining in it’s time but with modern changing tastes, I think if Paul Daniels was born in 1992 and he was starting his career in the 21st century he’d probably get buzzed off Britains Got Talent in the first minute.
No one wants a better Star War.
People think they want a Star War but what they actually want is an entertaining 90 minute science fantasy action film with clearly delineated goodies and baddies⁸.
Similarly people think they want to do magic which leaves the audience utterly convinced that they saw something completely impossble, with zero doubt that it was genuine magic. Heck, the audience probably thinks that’s what they want to see. But what they actually want is to be surprised and fooled in the moment, and go away pondering how it was really done. If you ever leave an audience with 100% conviction that everything they saw was genuine, chances are they got bored during the performance, because to achieve that level of conviction they would have to examine every prop, watch you repeat the trick from multiple angles in order to test their methodological hypotheses.
But… they want to be convinced right? That’s the point of magic, that’s why they came. For that matter, people want a Star War! They paid money to watch nine of the fuckers, as well as the two prequel spinoffs and the Mandalorian Cinematic Universe on Disney plus.
It’s too early in the morning to deal with a paradox like this. There must be an answer.
Nobody cares about Glup Shitto¹⁰
The Star War is no longer a movie. It is intellectual property. That means an ever expanding library of copyrighted characters, space ship designs, bureacratic theocracies, and puppets. That’s what a Star War is now. But originally a Star War was just androids, laser swords, space battles and magic. That’s what people want in a Star War, but anyone can make a movie with robots, glowing melee weapons, spaceships fighting, and telekinesis. Only disney can make a Star War, which is why they need all this other stuff .
People will know it’s a Star War so long as it has those 4 things. The stuff in between is just making up a reason for the space wizard to fight the robot with the laser sword. Tying the rest of that motivation into the overarching plot and the events, locations, and people of all the expanded universe tie-ins for the purpose of brand cohesion is what drags a Star War down. Somehow, you see, Palpatine returned.
Similarly a magic show is when someone shows a sequence of actions, you expect one thing, but something else happens, and you don’t know why. Convincers are part of that, but they should be incidental in the motions of the efeect happening, not derailing the performance to highlight how cleanly you’re handling the cards, which have been examined and shuffled by an audience surrogate. People think that the added certainty of these moments strengthens the magic because it feeds into the brand of magicians doing the impossible. That has become part of the magic brand, which is why we are compelled to do it.
So before I go any further, let me recap everything you’ve seen in the last 4 minutes so you know just how amazing what you’re about to see is.
Just like in a Star War, the art of the thing is in giving those 4 core elements a sensible narrative and throughline. If you just make a space wizard fight against a robot with laser swords for apparently no reason, you get Revenge of the Sith, and no one wants Revenge of the Sith. The point is you can’t just have those 4 things and pad the rest out with busy work and tedious dialogue to namecheck all the extended lore. I mean you can, but you shouldn’t.
Simialrly if the stuff you put between the action and the unexpected outcome is just more description and examination of the action, the only people who will like it are other nerds who care about the minutia of Star Wars. I mean magic.
Fuck, what was I talking about again?
Chewwie gets a medal, Greedo says “Maclunkey”
In The Force awakens, Chewbacca finally gets his medal. It’s a brief scene, and oddly out of place, but it was entirely inserted because of the constand barrage of fans as far back as 1977, asking why Chewbacca didn’t get a medal of bravery along with Han and Luke at the end of the original Star Wars. From the outside looking in it’s because we all understood that Chewbacca was a sidekick, not a hero. But in the diegesis of the movie, the actions of Chewbacca are not materially different to those of Han Solo. They spend most of the movie together in the same places, they both pilot the ship, they both shoot the laser guns at the Stormtroopers. The only difference is that Han is dashing and charismatic with swagger and snappy comebacks, none of which are criteria for the medal but both of which make the difference between Harrison Ford (highest grossing actor in Hollywood in 2016, net worth of $300 million in 2023) and Peter Mayhew (net worth of $5 million when he died in 2019).
This never came up with Jar Jar Binks (Ahmed Best, net worth $2 million in 2024, contemplated suicide in the early 2000s because of how reviled his character was), because fans didn’t want him to get a medal, they wanted him to die and never ever come back.
This is a sort of continuation of the continual release of remasters and special editions of the first 3 Star War movies. This began with the improvement of special effects like CSO masking and the fact that Jabba the Hut, famously a giant wealthy slug monster, was just some fat guy in the first movie. The replacement of Man Jabba with Slug Jabba cracked a seal in George Lucas’ head, and suddely the floodgates were opened to add more spaceships, more robots, more googas and a fix for a plotpoint which never made sense; not Chewwie’s missing medal but why Han shot Greedo without warning.
In the first film there’s a scene where Han Solo shoots Greedo, a little green guy, apparently unprovoked. It’s sort of implied that he was about to shoot Han so it was kinda self defence but it’s not very cleanly telegraphed, so in one of many remasters they recut the scene so Greedo gets a shot off first, and it’s clearly self defence when Han shoots back. Except… well now Han is only alive because Greedo missed. He isn’t a badass he’s just lucky. Over time this got redone over and over, with Han shooting first, then Greedo shooting first, then both shooting almost simultaneously but Han dodges, then both shooting even closer to simultaneosuly, then finally both shooting similtaneously but Greedo says a single word first. That word?
Maclunkey.
Or, according to wikipedia, “ma klounkee”, which is Huttese for “This’ll be the end of you”
This tweaking and correcting is a closer analogy to the magician’s need for extra convincers. There’s a classic piece of advice for magicians which is to hang around in the public toilets after a show to secretly listen to the audience talking about the show¹¹. When you do this you hear things like “Was the box really empty at the start?” or “I bet she secretly peeked at that bit of paper somehow when I wrote it down.” or “Magnets, right? Or a like black string hanging from the ceiling.”
Even if these people are wrong, this kind of feedback compels a magician to prove in their next performance that there were in fact no magnets, no threads, the paper never came close, and the box is definitely definitely empty. But this feedback is never ending and the show can only be so long. If you performed with any kind of competence, 90% of what people guess you did doesn’t even match up to what they saw, but they can’t remember every minute element of the trick an hour later. This might even be an advantage because it means if they see the show again, with this assumed method in their head, they will see that it cant be done that way and have their mind blown all over again.
Eventually you just have to let go, accept that people will always assume there’s some kind of method and will always guess at one.
Just make a good movie and say “I don’t care if people think Chewbacca deserves a medal. He’s sci-fi Tonto and the show is about The Lone Ranger.”
¹ but not Chewbacca, because he’s a sidekick, not a hero. This would be corrected in the later movies but… We’ll get to that.
² For the purposes of this essay I will be ignoring TV spin-offs such as Droids, Ewoks, and The Star Wars Holiday Special, for the same reason that scholars of Shakespeare don’t talk about Ten Things I Hate About You or Get Over It.
³ Yes I am going to be using the phrase Star War for the rest of this article.
⁴ this is a very problematic framing, associating dark with evil. I’ve heard people talk about the racial implications of this and I have to admit its a compelling argument. Unfortunately it is very culturally ingrained as a metaphor, and will probably take many years to unpack, along with the cultural will to do so.
⁵ Yes, this plot point was later recycled by the Ahsoka series, right down to the McGuffin being a map to the bad guy’s hiding place, and both the goodies and the baddies getting there simultaneously and fighting it out at the other end.
⁶ Yes I can hear everyone yelling “think a drink” at their screens. That’s a different thing, because you’re adding mindreading, a totally different effect mixed in.
⁷ Made in Scotland from girders and liver disease. The fact that I not only know this exists but also that it comes in 75cl bottles is testement to my horrifcally misspent youth.
⁸ Okay so I know there are a few instances of a character changing sides, turning evil or heroic as a final twist to the story, but the good and evil sides are clearly enough delineated that everyone is at any given time, one or the other. At no point does anyone turn around and say “Hey maybe the Jedi and the Sith are bad. Force sensitivity gives you unchecked privilege and an unearned position in a clear galactic hierarchy. The galaxy still has slavery and human trafficking and neither the Jedi or the Empire have done fuck all about it. Maybe this star war is just a distraction to keep everyone occupied while the rich oppress the working class.”⁹
⁹ Okay, in fairness Rose does essentially say this in The Last Jedi. That’s why it’s the best one, and probably also why people who wanted to watch a Star War didn’t like it.
¹⁰ Glup Shitto is the most important and deepest character in the Star Wars lore. Educate yourself.
¹¹ lets face it, there are way better reasons to hang around in public toilets, many of which are rather attractive to some magicians, but they have to later explain what they were doing there to less open minded interrogators.