Star Wars would be better off without the Force

Star Wars doesn't need the Force

Let me put it another way... Star Wars doesn't need the Force to hook us in, to make that universe captivating.

The Force has become a deus ex machina for a lot of the Star Wars content these days.

Hear me out...

The best Star Wars project ever made — and I mean ever — had no Jedi. No lightsabers. No Force pushes, mind tricks, or mystical prophecies. No chosen ones. No ancient Sith knowledge. No midichlorians. No glowing blue ghosts dispensing wisdom from beyond the grave.

Andor's second season hit a 97% on Rotten Tomatoes, making it the highest-rated live-action Star Wars anything — beating both its own first season and The Empire Strikes Back. It became the first TV series in history to land five consecutive episodes with IMDb scores of 9.5 or above. It won five Emmys from fourteen nominations, including Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series. Its finale topped Nielsen's streaming charts with 931 million minutes watched in a single week, beating everything else on every platform.

No Force required.

So maybe it's time to ask the question that Lucasfilm clearly doesn't want to hear: does Star Wars actually need the Force at all?

Dune Part Three: Darker, bigger, and exactly what was needed

The trailer for Dune: Part Three — the final chapter in Denis Villeneuve's trilogy — dropped yesterday.  I've been watching it over and over, trying to pick up every hint and detail buried in those two and a half minutes. If this trailer and the first two films are any indication, we're in for a hell of a ride. What an epic finale this will surely be!

Despite what some will say, I'm not usually one to go full fanboy, but I'll make an exception here. 

Villeneuve's adaptation of the Dune universe has been close to perfection — though honestly, after Arrival and Blade Runner 2049, I shouldn't be surprised. The man knows how to make magnificent cinema. But even Villeneuve would be the first to admit that none of this works without Frank Herbert's brilliance on the page. This pulls me right back to cracking open that first Dune paperback in college (what we call CÉGEP here in Québec) and realizing I'd found something different — a universe so layered with political intrigue and backstory that it felt less like science fiction and more like something that actually happened, or would in humankind's far future. 

That's a long way from the almost comical early adaptations we endured on both the big screen and television.

And now we're getting Messiah.

Learning to fly: Finding my wings in EVE Online

Just like that Tom Petty song, I've been learning to fly over the past few weeks. Not in the poetic, soul-searching kind of way — more in the 'please don't let me die on this gate' kind of way.

A few weeks back, a new acquaintance within New Eden (thanks for the intro, Rixx!) asked me to help gather a ton of stuff scattered across a few dozen systems — some in high-sec, some in low-sec. We're talking stations I’d never visited, assets worth Billions of ISKs, collecting dust like forgotten relics of a past life in space. The kind of stuff you want to move quickly while unnoticed. 

To pull this off, I needed a ship that could do three things well: carry a decent amount of cargo, move fast, and — most importantly — get out of dodge before anyone could lock me down. Not just fast. Sub-two-seconds-to-warp fast.

Enter the Sunesis.