so today i watched the new star wars movie
and wtf!?
on the middle of the movie they are on a planet called JEDAAH or something like it the place is clearly an alusion to the middle west confront
it even has evil people on turbans!
what the hell??
why put something so racist on a sw movie?
You might want to refocus. Saw's partisans are more morally ambiguous compared to the Rebellion proper, but they definitely aren't more evil than the Empire. If anything it's an anti-American message, since the Empire exterminates them.
+Jedha fits the SW lore surrounding kyber crystals pretty well.
I'd also question the logic of labeling "rebels and oppressive state are fighting over a desert city and some of the rebels wear head-scarfs" as racist. Both of those things (people killing each other over their differences, people wearing sensible clothing) tend to be pretty universal.
And yeah, y'know, if you're going to bash SW movies for racism, the prequels line all the ducks up in a row for you.
I thought it was weird. I'm not opposed to the idea of SW drawing comparisons to real life events, but. If they were going to go there they shoulda, you know, gone there. The plot outline of it is fine but the execution is half baked and vague, bad news for dealing with a heavy issue. And in terms of cinematography the splinter group was definitely portrayed as evil, they had a LOT of villainy moments for secondary characters with ~10 minutes screen time. They would have been totally at home as muslim terrorists in a generic military thriller.
Remember, these guys get almost no screen time and one of them still tried to throw a grenade at a 10 year old. (yeah he probably didn't know, still counts, audience saw it. Why do you think batman never runs anyone over driving a motorcycle indoors? Cause he's a good guy)
The whole Jedha segment in general felt unearned. It has a lot of big moments:
Audibly comparing Saw to Darth Vader, his "redeeming" sacrifice, the aformentioned rebel splinter group, the reveal the main character used to be part of said group.
all kinda spoiled by the fact that it hinges on the character of a guy who
doesn't do anything ever. All he does is
take a long time making a very simple and obvious choice and then tell the heroes "yeah go whatever I don't care" after his army is already running away, the heroes have already escaped, and his fortress is crumbling. He likely couldn't have stopped them anyway. The movie plays it up as a big change of heart but basically its just very passive character continuing to be passive. When he was played up as this real dangerous badass.
I feel like that segment should have been replaced with something else or fleshed out. The characters and plot advancements introduced there could have been easily included somewhere else much quicker and the movie's main fault (I actually really like Rogue One) is that the beginning throws a bunch of planet and character names at you that all vanish 1/3rd of the way in.