I'll agree that Obi-Wan Kenobi doesn't add much to the Star Wars canon, but I disagree about Rogue One. The mission to steal the Death Star plans was an exciting bit of action that happened offscreen that makes for a good story in its own right.
I agree that the fact that Darth Vader and Obi-Wan can't kill each other takes away from the drama of their fight. Compare their battle on Mustafar, in which you know this will result in Anakin being defeated and becoming Darth Vader, but you don't know how it will happen. Similarly, in Rogue One, you know the mission will be a success, but the eponymous ship's crew's survival is not guaranteed.
As such, I'm in no hurry to see it, especially since I don't have a Disney+ subscription.
Out of curiosity, why do you put the first paragraph of each review in bold? I've noticed it seems to be a signature style of yours, but I'm not sure why you do it.
I do it for two reasons: first, I think it reads easier. Second, I tend to use the first paragraph to yammer on about stuff beyond the immediate scope of the thing being reviewed (the background I`m coming to the show with, my influences and biases etc), but if people don't care about that stuff, they can easily skip the bold bits and get to the meat.
Book me today! I also review weddings, funerals and bar mitzvahs.
Interesting, thanks for sharing that. I always wondered why you did that as well. As for the review I more or less agree with you on many points.
That's an interesting explanation for bolding your first paragraphs. I personally think bolding text calls more attention to it and prefer to lead with a paragraph that sums up my opinion on the work being reviewed, but to each their own.
...I mean, on the one hand, my favorite musical of all time is 1776, so I don\'t necessarily intrinsically agree that the journey can\'t be compelling if you already know the destination. Surprise is overrated, and after a few brutal years of films trying to shock and subvert audience expectations at the expense of good storytelling, I am not sympathetic to arguments to the contrary.
On the other hand, I am very sympathetic to anything that calls Rogue One out for the decent-but-overrated fluff piece that it is. (And not just because Rogue One killed a bunch of the actually good Godzilla movies I\'ll never get now.) And, well, I wasn\'t bothering to watch it, just like I didn\'t bother to watch Rise of Skywalker or whatever it\'s called for the first time in my life that a new Star Wars movie released in theaters. So... I guess overall the review was useful to me in the sense of getting me to stay on my present course?
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The Most Expensive Saturday Morning Cartoon Ever Made
I did not have high expectations for Obi Wan Kenobi. There's something just too constraining about the idea of setting a story between two movies in which none of the characters are allowed to do anything canon breaking or even particularly unexpected. That sort of story telling is the domain of fan fiction writing, not prestigious, big budget television.
Having finished the series now, I can say it is a bit better than I anticipated. A bit. It certainly still has the exact problem I just described; You go into this knowing exactly how Obi Wan, Darth Vader, Luke and Leia are going to come out of it, which somewhat undermines the tension of any scene in which anyone faces peril. And much like with Rogue One, the show feels like it only serves to fill in the gaps that existed between stories for a good reason. Nobody was desperate to know what Obi Wan was doing sitting in the desert for twenty years.
But despite those dramatic limitations and its dubious reason for existing, Kenobi has its moments. The plot itself is unimaginative, cribbing from A New Hope, but I enjoyed individual scenes, moments and characters. That includes a precocious young Leia, who bounces off the beaten down, miserable Obi Wan. My favourite scene between them also involves some fun political commentary, in the form of a jolly redneck alien with a pickup truck, complete with the Star Wars equivalent of the thin blue line bumper sticker. It's a sequence that works in humour, tension, warmth and sadness, and I wish the whole show was like that. Then there is Reva; She is a villain and the only new main character, so we actually don't know how things are going to turn out for her. This automatically makes her better than everyone else in the show. But she is also a neatly written character in her own right; an ambitious and ruthless killer with unclear motives or moral code. She ends up a more interesting dramatic foil than Vader.
Oh gosh, and Darth Vader deserves a paragraph to himself. The show really wants to give the audience these big dramatic show downs and badass moments with the guy to make him look as cool as possible. But because the show can't actually have him kill Obi Wan Kenobi, it keeps having to awkwardly contrive excuses and gaping plot holes to let him keep escaping, which ends up making Vader look like a big ole doofus. I can't say I disliked how Vader and Kenobi's arc ends up playing out in the finale, but its everything leading up to it that feels like a Saturday Morning Cartoon of Star Wars.
If all this faint praise hasn't inspired you to rush out and get a Disney+ subscription to watch it, that's fine. Almost everything about this show is uninspired. The only people who should be trying this are people who already own Disney+ and have ran out of everything else to watch.