The Palpatine musical cue I'm referring to is this one:
https://youtu.be/8H26Hdv3i0U?t=2m22s
...but the usage of it doesn't necessarily mean anything directly relevant to Palpatine. I just think it was previously used only for him, in ROTJ and maybe in ROTS (I want to say they played it in one of those scenes in his office on Coruscant, but I'm not sure).
When I say "dark" I mean with the tone of all the gritty warfare, suffering, dying, struggling, hopelessness, etc. Five planets got destroyed in Episode VII, presumably all inhabited; that's even worse than the destruction of Alderaan. Tonally, they also emphasized it as a horrific thing, with people looking up on the planet before it gets hit. Kylo's murder of his father is much more brutal and unexpected than Obi Wan's smiling sacrifice in episode IV, and Han probably can't finish any unfinished business he'd like as a ghost quite the way Obi Wan got to. The victories of the past have been rendered moot because the villains survived in such great number, and under unexplained new leadership as bad as the old, that they've spent decades on brutal child-army training camps and returned as an unstoppable juggernaut that deposed the legitimate government within weeks and now has them on the run with almost their entire fleet gone and little left to work with. You don't find this all to be absurdly dark? Palpatine had to spend years corrupting the republic, and even then he didn't just annihilate their fleet and their government center, he twisted that stuff into his own. Gone or not, Snoke has already done more damage than Palpatine ever hoped to, or so the movies seem to say when you look at the scope. I would've liked the reverse, a struggling first order that had no real chance of deposing the new republic, instead of having all but won by the beginning of the second film.
But yes, I like the execution of the movies and they do maintain lots of fun moments. They are very well done and I am enjoying them. Following characters like Finn and Rey and Poe, that's all great fun. I even like the characterization of Kylo Ren, even if i don't like all the implications of his story. But when I look how bad the strategic stuff is said to be, when I look how awful these people's backstories are, and how sadly our heroes from the original trilogy ended up- like a broken family, anguished old folks dying in a struggle- I find that depressing. Hope alone doesn't hold a world together, you need some actual stability and you need your past victories to count for something instead of getting wiped away.
Now to be fair, they're saying that a lot of worlds got a period of relative piece in the interrim between the trilogies (the worlds that weren't on the outer rim getting subjugated by the first order with child soldier camps, I guess??). Technology has advanced a bit (almost unheard of in Star Wars!) and somehow, the center of the New Republic (the stuff that got blown up in Episode VII) seemed so peaceful that they thought minimizing their army was reasonable. But... the events of these movies seem to suggest that was a lot of wishful thinking and folly, a relative few (if a handful of entire inhabited planets can count as 'a few') enjoying peace in an irresponsible way that couldn't last because the empire was just that huge, just that capable of rebuilding, that they apparently never really undid Palpatine's infrastructure enough to amount to much in the first place. Again I say, this undermines Return of the Jedi.
So basically I'm conflicted. I don't like what they're doing, but I love how they're doing it.
Edited by Mitsukara, 29 March 2018 - 02:06 PM.