Lancer Kind

No one likes to see a changing of the guard. The old guard certainly doesn’t.
Today, someone younger (she was 22) told me “I never saw Star Wars, but I’ve seen Twilight.” <insert my horrified expression here>

This travesty is becoming more common. Star Wars is over 30 years old which is twice the age of the teens and pre-teens in love with Twilight.

It’s been suggested by another member of the old guard that I perform the civic duty of booting them to the head, and when they hit the ground, I stomp on them till their brains seep out their ears. (My friend Bill is a member of the violent arm of the ‘old guard.’ So watch out for him.)

Is this fair?  Can Twilight even be considered science fiction? I wouldn’t argue that you would understand the genre if you’ve only seen Star Wars, but I’d certainly feel better about that than Twilight.  But then, I’m a member of the old guard.  Twilight is speculative fiction, not science fiction.  The same goes for Harry Potter, and we know that more of the world is familiar with Harry Potter than Star Wars (people in China bring it up all the time.)  So back to Star Wars versus Twilight.

Star Wars carries itself on imaginative eye candy and has not-well-motivated dialogue in nearly all the movies. To be great, Lucas Films needs someone who actually is a good writer work on the dialog part.

I probably would never have seen Twilight except my girlfriend wanted to watch it. I enjoyed it though I would never admit this in the presence of an ‘old guardsperson.’  The writers/author of Twilight knows how to write dialogue, but it doesn’t have any of the impact of Star Wars because any discussion of Star Wars has to be taken in context of when the original movie came out.
Star Wars was innovative to the extreme for a 1977 film. It did everything that Star Trek did 11 years before Star Wars (1966), but it took the use of special effects to a new (and expensive) level by doing it all over the place. But no 22 year-old is going to have that context without a patient discussion, which I couldn’t supply because I was in shock with what I was hearing. 🙂

Twilight is just a good movie. I’m looking forward to the sequel. It didn’t break new ground in the speculative fiction movie industry.

I’m a regular viewer of Attack of the Clones episodes on Cartoon Net (well, really digital download), and I’m enjoying that for the most part though there are moments I feel like it is insensitive to clones and glorifies war too much.

So the changing of the guard will take place whether or not the old guardsperson dressed up in spiffy white armor wants to allow it.  And let’s face it, the chicks dig Edward as much as the boys of the old guard dug Princess Leia.

Why is it that I hate myself now?

There, there Leia, Lancer didn’t really mean it.