BITCH YOU HAVE BEEN AWAY FOR OVER A YEAR (and have been dearly missed) David Brin has long made the point that Star Wars is about feudalism and The King wins because The King has God on his side. You can't have a multi-dimensional discussion about shades of gray when one side is The Chosen One and the other side is, well, Not Chosen. And this will probably be sacrilege to some people but I'm sorry. There are only two good Star Wars movies, and they are the first one and the second one and fuck everyone for making me call them 4 and 5. The rest of them are pretty much bullshit. JEDI: Ewoks. Whiny Kid: Jar Jar. Whiny teenager: Boba the Clone. Whiny not-quite-drinking-age dude: Backstroke of the West. Whatever-the-fuck the last one was called: Honestly? the only thing I remember was lots of Jar Jar analogues, Han Solo gets stabbed for no reason, and suddenly a wild Mark Hamill appears. Star Wars has never been more than an excuse to weld a bunch of special effects on a bunch of overwrought Campbellian archetypes and paradigms. And yeah. They've got some great design. But the series owes waaaay too much to Leni Riefenstahl and Hugo Boss. That's the thing about fashionable fascism.I really like that idea, and its one worth exploring in depth. Revolutions are not pretty things, they are bloody and violent and you tend to see lots of civilian deaths. Showing how the Rebels were brutal and sometimes maybe crossed too much of a line could really help illustrate why, say, a new version of the Empire cropped up in Force Awakens.
in keeping with your vid with the Hidden Fortress, this is a video I've posted before that goes pretty in depth into the film's movie references and almost shot-for-shot recreations that are in the original Star Wars. edit: I was combining that video with this one: the whole film "Everything is a Remix" is very interesting to me, and really informed how I look at pop culture works.
I don't wanna beat up Star Wars too much. The original film was a seismic disruption to the entire industry. It came out like 9 months after Logan's Run - you want some cognitive dissonance, watch Box and the Star Filters in the Disco Cave and then sit down to Alderan. Star Wars broke the mold, shattered the industry and remade it. And honestly, it borrowed from good sources. It's just that once Star Wars and Empire were done, nobody was ever going to tell George Lucas what to do ever again so we kind of get Ewoks all the time now.
Not reading OP just yet for fear of spoilers (sorry JTHipster), but if I remember right, The Hidden Fortress is currently on Hulu. I very much recommend it. It's not a "blow you away" kind of movie, but it strikes a good balance of both deep and accessible. Shoot. I'm gonna re watch it today. Edit: Apparently Filmstruck is now live and The Criterion Collection moved over there. I don't know how I missed that, seeing as I've been waiting for it since I first heard about it earlier this year when I gave up cable. I'll have to see if they don't have an App for Wii or Xbox yet. Edit 2: Tablet or PC only until next year. Shoot.