Star Wars
I've been thinking too much about Star Wars lately.
I reread the J.W. Rinzler trilogy of 'Making Of' books. I think they're fantastic, as someone who used to inhale as much special features DVD content as I could get while that kind of thing was still being produced. They are coffee table-sized books with a small set type, and are exhaustive accounts of the creative, legal, and financial journey those movies took to be completed.
I finally watched Battle of Algiers, a phenomenal movie. There are moments you forget it is all a staged film and does not use newsreel footage. It made me think about Andor, which the creators have said was a direct inspiration. I think the flute melody of Algiers is one of the most haunting pieces of music ever composed. The movie is very clear about the methods that both sides are using to achieve their goals, and none of them are heroic. An individual act is heroic, like saving someone from a burning building. I don't know if it's possible to achieve freedom from oppression by performing only heroic acts. Star Wars certainly thinks so, Andor does not. Though you don't see the heroes of Andor firebombing cafés either.
Recently, on the same day, I had two conversations with different groups of people about the Expanded Universe novels. I've read a handful of these and liked basically none of them. Even the agreed-upon best like Heir to the Empire fall extremely flat for me. I dislike them even at the level of the prose itself, and I don't mind a pulpy science fiction novel. In these conversations I compared them to the Warhammer 40k novels, of which I have only read two but they exceeded my expectations. 40k does not have a root depiction like a film or book with a large influence on the rest, and Games Workshop had a loose idea of canon over the years, I'm told. I realized that what I want from a Star Wars book is only what a book could provide. The films are films, they communicate their ideas in a certain way. Reading a book that describes how things look in a film is deeply unsatisfying. I've yet to read a Star Wars book that feels like it's communicating how only a book can.
The complimentary media that is "Star Wars" to me is games. I had the now funny misfortune of seeing Knights of the Old Republic for the first time at a LAN lounge, played it for twenty minutes before reading more words than I had that day, and shutting it off. The systemization of games lends itself well to what Star Wars became. I just finished playing Zero Company, and it's extremely good. Tactics games, especially big budget tactics games, are hard to make, but this one is very smartly assembled. It takes place in probably my least favorite time period of the canon yet the story held my interest throughout. I'll certainly play it again.