A Hollow Beauty: The Maul– Shadow Lord Midway Check-In

Let me open this one on a positive: the way this show looks positively FUCKS.

Sitting here and pretending that any individual screenshot of Maul– Shadow Lord isn't dazzling would be a waste of all our time. I could hit pause at almost any point during any episode and behold a shot that is beautifully lit, well composed, and reflects the budget Disney typically have on offer for their shows.

Similarly, the fight scenes are incredibly choreographed. This show is truly the culmination of decades of developing a style with increasing gains in technology and investment.

But you would expect this, wouldn't you? Star Wars as a property is valued at billions of dollars. The Walt Disney corporation paid a pretty penny for the rights, and a spare-no-expense approach is the theme of their projects. Though the animated show budgets have not been publicized in the way the live action shows were, the relative jump in quality reflects a financial interest in making sure these shows look as good as possible within the constraints of this style.

So the show looking good is expected. A lot of Star Wars looks very good. The Rise of Skywalker has some genuinely gorgeous shots in spite of the movie being... like that. The show looks great. I have a few hangups about the movement and overall look of the show though. This is largely a style preference, so let it not be said that I don't respect the immense amount of skill and work on display.

I find the movement in this animation style to lack strong follow-through or weight, and it really makes it hard to appreciate the fights, the general motion of characters, and it makes the environments feel very stiff. It has an almost video game feel. Especially the fabric on characters' costumes feels jarring. It'll look loose but move like it's glued to the characters, and I wish it was a bit more tactile. Likewise, a lot of the textures lack depth or tooth to them.

This isn't to say that the show doesn't look great, but when I compare it to something like Love, Death + Robots, or Arcane, or some of the work on Star Wars: Visions, or even a lot of 2D animated series, it feels like both movement and tactile environments in Maul– Shadow Lord struggle to feel truly integrated with each other in this style. Things just don't deform, don't push, don't stretch. It softens any blow or landing or crash, even as the beautiful lighting and backgrounds and individual shots do their best to set up drama.

Like I said, this is a personal preference, but I really do feel that lack of flexibility in the character animations and in how the environment responds to them, and it leeches some of the tension of any given scene away from me.

For one great example of a little detail that I think adds so much: hair! The hair in Maul just doesn't move, and that could add so much to the characters. Let us see their hair disheveled, or flying in the wind. Let it move independently of them at times!

(Confession: I'm actually not a huge Arcane person, I watched the first season when it came out and thought the style was great but I've just never been a big League of Legends person, so I fell off the wagon. But I do think the animation is a great example of how 3D animation can feel super tactile and impactful)

I have to assume these are stylistic choices rather than a representation of the budget, because Disney has an astonishing amount of money on hand to make any show. And if they're a reflection of budget, I would have to wonder why Disney wouldn't allocate a larger budget to this show, which focuses on a beloved character in an extremely popular property.

Nevertheless, I still would like to credit the cinematography, lighting, and background work on this show immensely, as well as the fight choreography. Like I said: hit pause on almost any shot and you have a nearly perfect composition. One of the shots I really loved was of the shadows of the imperial star destroyer and all the fighters over Janix in episode 5. Great work.

But let's set aside the animation and get to the meat and potatoes of the show: the story!

Let it not be said that I did not wait to post. We're now 60% into the first season of Maul– Shadow Lord, and I have held my tongue, observed, and taken in the show as it's been released. But seeing as I think it'll be fun to return to this post after the show has reached its temporary end (of the first season), I'm getting this in NOW. For the sake of brevity I will not be summarizing the happenings of the show, but please note that this will contain spoilers for what's come out so far. Like... lots of them. In fact, this is going to be extremely spoilery. If you care about that sort of thing and haven't seen the first six episodes, look away.

This show is getting 10 25 minute episodes (well, the first episode was 31 minutes), but this includes several minutes of credits and a recap at the beginning of each episode of everything leading into the episode. In reality, each episode is a bit closer to 20 minutes in duration. Which means, in the 10 episode series run, we're getting somewhere in the range of 3-4 hours of content.

This is in line with prior animated Star Wars shows, but unlike those, which tend toward the episodic adventure with a lighter overarching plot, this show is directly and emphatically a plot driven serial. Though the show is more or less for all ages, it gears itself tonally to a more mature audience than Clone Wars or Rebels did, and I would argue the Bad Batch as well.

In fact, this show is perhaps best understood as a continuation of the Clone Wars (2008) –> Bad Batch pipeline, and relies heavily on an understanding of Maul as seen in the 2008 Clone Wars series. It is absolutely not designed to stand alone. I don't necessarily view that as an inherently detrimental to the show, I just think it's important to note that the titular character is going to be nigh upon impossible to comprehend without at least skimming the wookieepedia page for what his whole deal is.

That's not in and of itself a problem, but it does point to a bigger difficulty for this show. We meet Maul at a very in-between time of his life. Seriously. After his first death-via-bisection, he comes back during the Clone Wars, only to eventually be defeated by Palpatine and lose his brother. Then we meet him again as a fallen, broken man in Rebels, obsessed with Obi-Wan Kenobi only to finally be killed by him in the end, at peace.

We're stuck in between the downfall from the Clone Wars and the end in Rebels. The ideal case for Maul in this show, then, would be to see him build up from nothing only to have a grand, colossal fall. One that lands him where we see him in Clone Wars, with his fucked up little creepo cave.

The writers of this show have a considerable challenge, then, to take this character from a massive low to another massive low, keeping it compelling, not treading on the toes of prior work, and, well, fulfilling the promise of an animated Star Wars show that is more "adult" (though we'll get to that).

This isn't to say that I don't think this can be compelling. But this is absolutely to say that this is challenging within the confines of an action/adventure story that has, all things considered, a pretty considerable amount of moving parts for being 10 episodes long in the first season.

Even more challenging, the show has to contend with telling a story that ultimately bears a striking resemblance to bits and pieces from a (pardon my french) metric fuckton of other Star Wars media. We have stories of Jedi hiding from the Empire after Order 66. We have stories about the Empire choking a planet, taking over. We have stories about the criminal underbelly of Star Wars responding to the Empire. There is a real glut of Star Wars out there, so what could Maul offer that's different? What does Maul give viewers from a story perspective that is new?

So we've arrived at the crux of the issue for Maul– Shadow Lord. The show wants to be a lot of things. It wants to do none of them.

In Roger Ebert's now-infamous review of Battlefield Earth, he claimed "The director, Roger Christian, has learned from better films that directors sometimes tilt their cameras, but he has not learned why."

Maul– Shadow Lord wishes to be a darker, more adult narrative than its animated predecessors. The plot, however, has remarkably little separating it from them. We've seen similarly grim themes explored in the Clone Wars (I would even argue that thematically the Clone Wars explores even darker areas. And though I will maybe someday explore why it struggles with some and does well with others, I want to emphasize that the point is that Maul is not a significant departure from that style of story). The show itself is rated as child appropriate, and even though there are several on-screen deaths, none are treated with any significant gravity. Being sliced in half by a lightsaber is bloodless, removed from the viewers in a layer of unreality. Though we nominally know there are crime empires Maul is subsuming, their crimes are sanded away, vaguely alluded to without any curiosity as to what they actually do.

The humor of the show is, similarly, nothing new. There is perhaps less of it than in lighter episodes of prior shows, but it still bears a striking similarity in dialogue and tone. A crime lord named "Looti Vario" who cowers before Maul and becomes his stooge spewing funny little one liners. There's a droid who has to learn the hard way (via being told his titular boots are not regulation-appropriate) that the empire is bad. There's the teenage son of our soft-boiled detective being woefully out of his depth, and sad his dad just is never home.

Perhaps there could be a departure from the norm in structure or genre, but the show does not do that. It is a largely action-driven adventure. Rather than take the trappings of a noir to give viewers a mystery story, or perhaps a horror, or even a pastiche of a noir, the story continues along the same lines as the final season of Clone Wars, or another season of the Bad Batch. There is no mystery to uncover because from the outset we know who Maul is, we know what he wants (he tells us directly), we know where he will end up, and the journey is just like the journeys we've taken before. Maul wants an apprentice, like he wanted in Rebels. Maul wants revenge like he wanted in the Clone Wars. Maul wants to rebuild his crime empire which he largely does unimpeded and we've seen in comics.

Though a character like Devon being drawn in by Maul and the dark side of the force could be interesting, I will point out that we have seen this format before. In multiple forms of media. And we've even seen it with Maul himself in Rebels. We've seen this all before, and the show, though beautiful, doesn't want to push outside of the established norm.

Imagine a world where Maul's presence was kept ambiguous. Where we followed Lawson tailing a string of murders he couldn't identify. Where Devon was hearing whispers from the dark that she thought were just her thoughts. Having a real mystery to this noir! Let it inhabit the genre whose aesthetics the show seeks to emulate. Instead, the show retreads old ground, brings back characters we've already met (hello, Marrok), re-establishes plots that exist already. Because being nominally Maul (who spends much of the show monologuing and standing dramatically until he has to look cool in a fight scene) what does this show have?

I felt similarly about the Bad Batch as I do this show– they are "Star Wars: The Clone Wars" continued. They seek to continue along those lines rather than stand on their own. There's a real fear of departure from the familiar, even from a show that signals its intent to be different. The show KNOWS that a show with real grit (because yes, of course the success of Andor was influential to the studio) garnered critical acclaim, that that show showed how Bad the Empire is and was lauded for it. But the show goes through the motions of Empire Bad without the characters themselves mattering to it. A thing happens, then another thing happens, and then another. The characters act the way that they do because without them doing that, the plot doesn't happen. We are repeatedly told why things happen because there simply isn't enough time to motivate anything of its own accord.

There's too little runtime in this season for this much to happen and not feel like a checklist of events and character beats. It leans so heavily into tropes because there's too much they want to happen without actually taking their time to motivate it (Dad, you work too much) (I got sent to prison for stealing a loaf of bread some fruit) (The empire is bad, my wife works for them and we're on the rocks) (She would make an excellent apprentice).

It's a rush job. It's puzzle pieces from other stories that worked there because they worked there forced together in an extremely short timeframe. It doesn't fill out the aesthetics of the show because they're not trying to make a noir, they're not trying to make make a darker animated show, they're not trying to make a crime show, they're not trying to make a character study of Maul, the titular character. They're making a show that looks like all of those. The core of the show is essentially derivative.

The show brings back a character who got brought back to life (at the behest of George Lucas) at least in part because he was so beloved and liked by fans. But over the years since his initial revival, we've seen him die, come back, die again, come back, and can fill in so much of his life. This character, once praised for his stoic nature and the impact of his design, and how sparingly he was used as a secondary antagonist, now needs to be filled out in depth.

The character gets his own show about his crime empire, but the show does not take an interest in exploring the crimes, in having real violence and crime and evils. The show displays a remarkable lack of curiosity in the internal motivations of its titular character, even though he will repeatedly tell them to the camera, and has a hard time marrying the show's own family-friendly aims with the amorality of its character. It carries itself on a look and aesthetic that fans have come to associate with another beloved property, but demonstrates no ability to expand beyond the look. There is no exploration of the character in depth, nor is there an ability to depart, tonally or thematically, from the previous works

This post is also about the Book of Boba Fett.

The Postmaultem Addendum

Well. I don't know what I expected. I wanted to take a second here and just discuss the final episodes of the first season, because I have a non-negligible amount of thoughts on the topic. So. Let's do it. Here's your blanket spoiler warning if you haven't finished the show. I will be spoiling things. Avert your eyes. Starting... NOW

Welcome to the spoiler zone. Now that we're here, happy Revenge of the Fifth. I was busy yesterday (doing Star Wars things) (GUYS THE FIRST STAR WARS TABLETOP GAME IS SO FUN ACTUALLY).

I guess we were supposed to feel shocked by all the deaths (possibly temporary for Lawson) in this finale. Which. Ok, man. I mentioned earlier that the show really struggles to impart a sense of camaraderie or characterization, in part because of how quickly it goes through the motions of plot. I also mentioned that a lot of the fighting lacks stakes and violence because of the animation style. These things combine to make a finale that really lacks gravitas.

In the four episodes since we last spoke, a lot of people have died. I say this with a very disinterested tone because we barely knew most of them. Maul's cronies mostly only get named in subtitles, and most of them have no characterization beyond a vaguely scornful or tough exterior persona. We get a vague sense of internal tensions in Maul's camp, but ultimately it doesn't culminate in anything significant. Sure we nominally see them betray Maul, but does it sting? They just immediately die anyway. Does any death in this show feel important when these are characters we just don't know?

The only death that has some sort of significance would be Daki's death, but even that one feels lacking in execution. I obviously understand wanting Maul to Force push him at Vader from the perspective of generating tension between Maul and Devon moving forward, but the execution of his execution (ha) felt sloppy.

The show simply tries to do too much at once. To the point of nothing mattering.

And a final note about the animation: the limitations of this style become glaringly apparent when the show steps out of its usual dramatic lighting and into a more flat, sterile setting for the finale. The lighting in previous fights was pretty good, but the battle against Vader looks surprisingly mediocre. Both the way the scene is edited (it lacks follow through in a lot of the hits) and the overall aesthetic just look worse than the rest of the show in a way that baffles me.

This show ultimately feels like its resources were mismanaged. Why wouldn't you allocate a little extra money for the finale? Did it cost the same but end up looking worse due to the stylistic departure? Why wasn't there a more in-depth session with writers about how to make things flow more naturally. The editing of the show both in terms of storyline and dialogue and writing but also in the cuts and shots used to convey everything is really messy. This feels rushed.

I see a lot of skill on display in this show. Genuinely. Some of the vocal performances are quite good. There are obviously incredibly talented artists working on the backdrops and textures and animation. Hell, the writing has some cool ideas (I do really love the idea of a crime drama and a noir in Star Wars). But the show deeply lacks focus. It lacks stakes. It feels underbaked.

And I think it's a real shame for such a huge property with resources that most artists could only dream of to put out a product that doesn't make the most of those resources. You can't overpromise and underdeliver forever and KEEP those resources. The Star Wars money-printing machine is not a perpetual motion machine. And I fear a show like this doesn't build something that can be enjoyed for very long before the veneer flakes off and exposes a foundation full of cracks.