Name: Chris Mack

Internet/Writing Alias: Invid Fan

Skills: writing, various genres. Have actually completed novels. Also, baking bagels.

Looking For: artists for various projects, be it book covers or even story illustrations/adaptations. Prefer writing my own stuff, but willing to helping with yours.

Contact Info: invidfan@gmail

They are just black wires...

It is a question of what genre the film is claiming to be. We react to "real" events differently than we do fiction. The same shot of people jumping from a skyscraper will have a different feel and effect if it is in a 9/11 documentary as opposed to a new Transformers movie.

His blog is about current wars. Fun... is not what he's dealing with.

Oh, agreed. However, it wouldn't take much for someone to spin it as "You know, if all these Americans who were bombing us just left, the Russians would be able to send food in" It's all PR, and they just hated Russians more than they hated the English and Americans once the shooting stopped.

As for what the bad guy for the next few movies could be, how about the obvious? The Jedi. Luke (and Staci) have trained a few Jedi, who then trained more over the last 30 years. However, partly because it was felt they really needed to increase numbers quickly, these new Jedi have not had that much training in how to resist the Dark Side. The training was also done with adolescents instead of youngsters, who can't see why they should serve this new Republic instead of controlling it. After all, didn't the Jedi of old rule, to the benefit of all? It could be a slow build, not erupting into Jedi War until the third movie giving you two films of mostly non-Jedi story.

Ideally, critics should be focusing on what, if anything, the movie is saying, and how well it's saying it. Whether you agree with the point or not should come into the process very late, if at all. It does, though, too often devolve into just using the movie as an excuse to give their point of view. I remember a "wonderful" review of the Next Generation pilot, "Encounter at Farpoint", in the free Communist newspaper left in the University of Buffalo Commons. Their opinion was that it was great when Q was going on about how humans had fucked up and nuked the planet, but did not go NEARLY far enough in that direction. Very amusing.

You also have to consider it as a male reaction to Private Benjamin, and know the state of the US army about that time. As for the third act, it is almost as if they realized the basic training movie they wanted to make was only going to fill fifty minutes, and quickly flailed around for something else for them to do.