Why I hope my kid won’t like The Phantom Menace…

by havoc

… because it’s a terrible movie, but I have one other reason.

We have a young child and I read parenting books. More than one talks about agency and effort. If you emphasize innate attributes rather than choices and habits, people get messed up.  They value themselves in terms of something they have no control over.

In real life, effort gets more reward than inborn attributes. (There are studies on it, aside from common sense.) Believing that what you do matters more than who you are is a freeing idea. It creates optimism that it’s worth trying and learning, rather than pessimism that you and the world are what they are.

Who knows if parents can affect how children think about these things, but one can hope.

Like a lot of nerds, I enjoy science fiction and fantasy. These books and movies tend to involve heroes, frequently young, who save the world or some such.

Consider some classics everyone knows. In The Lord of the Rings, the hero’s virtue is perseverance. The book hammers you with just how long it took to walk across Middle Earth. (A good movie version had to be 3 movies.) Frodo doesn’t have any special talents, other than finishing the journey. Even then, he fails at the end and has to be rescued by luck.

In the original Star Wars trilogy, sure the force is strong with Luke, but he has to do a bunch of training, and when he leaves Yoda without enough practice he gets his hand chopped off.

Not exactly fantasy, but take Seven Samurai. A bunch of old pros illustrating character and experience as they save a village, with one young samurai bumbling along for the ride. Some of them get killed.

Now consider some less-classics. In the Phantom Menace, an annoying kid saves the day more than once, using his inborn scientology midi-chlorians.  Even though he’s a little punk, everyone praises his midi-chlorian count. No wonder he turned out to be evil.

I recently finished and didn’t enjoy The Name of the Wind in which some kid is the best at everything without doing any work at all, and while having no character at all. (I could go on about other problems with this book, let’s just say this sort of praise seems baffling. Forgive me, I know this book has a lot of fans.)

Aside from a bad message, there’s no interesting story in these. Someone is born special and then they do special things and … whatever. Where’s the meaning? To me that isn’t a good story. Jar Jar is an extra insult – the real problem is bad story and characters.

I’m still debating how Harry Potter fits in to my argument.

My Twitter account is @havocp.
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