The Jedi were problematized in Scientific American the other day, so Star Wars will probably be canceled soon: “They are a religious order of intergalactic police-monks, prone to (white) saviorism and toxically masculine approaches to conflict resolution (violent duels with phallic lightsabers, gaslighting by means of “Jedi mind tricks,” etc.). The Jedi are also an exclusionary cult, membership to which is partly predicated on the possession of heightened psychic and physical abilities (or “Force-sensitivity”). Strikingly, Force-wielding talents are narratively explained in Star Wars not merely in spiritual terms but also in ableist and eugenic ones: These supernatural powers are naturalized as biological, hereditary attributes.”
Even though I disagree so much, the Star Wars posts are a "drop everything and read immediately."
I would like to stake out a place for those of us with the centrist, and I believe correct, opinion on The Last Jedi: there's nothing wrong with it conceptually, it just sucks. What it is theoretically trying to do is fine. It just happens to - with the exception of one scene - alternate between boring and cringe.
I struggled to get through it in the theater and my reaction afterwards was "holy shit that was boring, and cringe." Upon every repeated viewing I feel identically. I want to like it, but I can't. Yeah, Freddie is right about all the big things, but it's just boring. And cringe.
Freddie is, however, completely correct about TFA and I've been fighting this battle for six years and am not sure if I'll ever win. That was a "walk out of the theater thinking it was okay but with a nagging feeling" experience. Freddie is right about the problem. It makes the first six meaningless. I'm not a prequels defender, but I think Revenge of the Sith (at least the second half) is brilliant and the most emotionally draining movie in the bunch. It's just nonstop slaughter and failure and sadness. But you know that, in the end, it'll be okay. That Annakin isn't done being the good man he once was. That Obi Wan and Yoda still have a part to play. That the Emperor loses. To undo all that is unforgivable. Fuck JJ Abrams. The Force Awakens wasn't as boring as The Last Jedi but it's truly awful.
My feelings on this are fairly complicated. I did dislike at the time the retread that was TFA (I think? I watched it once when it came out streaming) but it must have done something right as I did go to watch TLJ in theatres. For me, it certainly captured the feel of Star Wars, even though the plot was fairly terrible. On the other hand, I was interested in the new characters (poor Finn...such an interesting back story, so many plot hooks and they did absolutely nothing with any of them...)
And then TLJ came. Honestly, my feelings are fairly close to those over at ACOUP (https://acoup.blog/2019/12/29/miscellanea-the-latest-jedi/). There's an interesting (arguably even important) story that's almost there. But isn't. And that's more infuriating than something that just doesn't even really try.
By the final movie, I went in with expectations super low and went out with those expectations just about met. It is a depressingly bad movie. I've seen arguments that it would have been a good trilogy all on its own, but I disagree. The obsession with world-destroying weapons reaches its zenith, the discovery of the total failure of the entire previous generation of characters, though at least the others get to die thinking they beat Palpatine...Leia...Jesus, that's a depressing end for the character.
Joins rebellion against evil empire, has world destroyed by evil empire, overthrows evil empire, rebuilds republic, republic ignores her warnings entirely, republic destroyed (via one attack on one central location, so clearly it was not a stable government and is destroyed in exactly the same fashion as her home world), chased by evil empire, discovers the emperor she thought was defeated had really been pulling the strings the whole time and dies before he's even inconvenienced...
Ultimately I'd like to see Disney stop making Star Wars movies and just focus on TV/animated stuff-The live-action Star Wars movie not being headed by Lucas feels very alien to me. I just don't think you will be able to recreate the sequels or even the prequels.
My thought on The Last Jedi after seeing it the first time, besides "well that was terrible", was that it felt like a first draft. Lots of ideas that were never properly setup, careening wildly from theme to theme, beat to beat without any consistent throughline or earned payoff. But my discipline is screenwriting so that's how I watch movies.
I don't hate Rian Johnson -- on the contrary I think he's a great filmmaker. He just wasn't given enough time to flesh out his screenplay. The two year turnaround time for the sequel trilogy films did not do them any favors. Could TLJ have worked? Sure, given a few rewrites and someone saying "hey maybe Leia floating through space isn't such a great idea."
And for the record, I thought TFA was terrible too. There's plenty of blame to go around.
TLJ is one of my favorite Star Wars films, both for the visuals and for its willingness to be subversive, even if it can't quite pay off on that subversion.
But I'm sad that Freddie didn't even discuss my most annoying failure to say anything: how are we supposed to feel about heroic sacrifice? Whasserface's Maneuver is thrilled as the ultimate sacrifice, and then Rose saves Whassisface's life because they should be life focused. So what's the answer?
Now, considering all of Freddie's points, I'm beginning to wonder if the movie's deconstruction of itself is intentional: that it ends up being actually nihilistic in the way that it refuses to land on a meaning.
I planned to see the Marconi signal tower at Banba's Crown at Malin Head on the Inishowen Peninsula and it was also a site of the filming in the Last Jedi and now they have Star Wars tours. But once it was the highest tech place in our world.--KN4IJM (not really answering your post).
Working through Star Wars with my 5 1/2-year-old. We did the Rebels cartoon first. Which I hadn't seen and enjoyed way more than I thought I would. And then started with A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back. Now that he knows who Darth Vader is we're going to watch the Clone Wars cartoon. Kind of kid-friendly approach to Machete order. Haven't made up my mind about the prequels. I wasn't sure he was even old enough for the two movies we watched. It's been fun. Reading this is causing me to lament that they didn't get the last three films right.
Broadly agree with your take, and even discuss the fact that The Force Awakens has to destroy the past, and how that relates to its nostalgia, in my review of The Force Awakens a couple years ago.
As someone with no emotions tied to Star Wars, I thought The Last Jedi was great, specifically because it seemed most interested in breaking things.
The biggest problem is the hour or so they spend hanging around that casino planet with Benicio del Toro. Had they just dropped the secondary characters entirely or found a more effective way to tie them into the Rey/Kylo plot, it would've been much better. Also, like, at least 40 minutes shorter. Which also would have been good.
"The Disney films were fundamentally misconceived from the get go, in part due to the fan reaction to the prequels. The idea of the Star Wars series as the “Tragedy of Anakin Skywalker” is really a construction of The Return of the Jedi and the Prequels, but it works! It organically grew and was actually compelling drama, politically and psychologically. From the moment in The Force Awakens when we learn that Kylo Ren is Ben Solo, Anakin’s entire turn in Return of the Jedi is cheapened. His sacrifice for Luke, and perhaps even more so Luke’s unwillingness to meet the Emperor and Vader in violence and his action in throwing down his weapon didn’t result in the next generation learning anything!
My interpretation of the whole “Balance of the Force” concept is that Anakin finally does fulfill the prophecy, but only in Return of the Jedi when he kills the Emperor and re-embraces the Light. This is something that he can only do with his son, which also means that his bringing balance to the Force rests not on individual might, but sacrificial love. Sure, the power of all Jedi live in Rey, but she doesn’t beat the resurrected Emperor by ultimately refusing the call, but by pulling some kind of Dragon Ball Z maneuver on him. It suggests that the Light wins because it is ultimately just stronger, not because it has an inherent value."
They missed a trick by making the baddies too powerful. It should have been Galactic President Leia hunting down a handful of extremists who were trying to blow up her Peace Star. Then there could have been a sub-plot of one of the extremists trying to convert Luke to their side and the whole thing writes itself.
For my money, TLJ is the only truly good movie in the sequel trilogy and the only one that takes chances and has real character development. It works better on its own than as part of a whole, which J.J. Abrams profoundly fucked up.
TFA is summed up best by the Member Berries from South Park. And Rise of Skywalker? Fuck that movie. Just a complete cop out in every sense of the term. Not just the bringing back the Emperor, but the revelation of his connection to Rey... that right there is one of the most mind-bogglingly stupid things Star Wars has ever done.
Bonus hot take: Leia and Luke should've never been made siblings in Return of the Jedi. It was a cheap way to end the Luke/Han/Leia triangle.
I was amused by TLJ more than TFA. That didn't mean the Last Jedi was good though, as it fails both on its own terms and as a Star Wars movie.
TFA was sterile. After thirty minutes, everything about it felt like a desperate attempt to capture the story beats of the previous trilogy without really understanding how the concept of Star Wars even works. At the surface level, it had sketchy and unimaginative world building. The old characters have retrograde, offscreen development where they fall into the old patterns just because its convenient. The new characters have an arc that lasts about thirty minutes and then its not clear where they're supposed to go from there. I watched it jet lagged in a mostly empty theater in Taipei, where they don't really get Star Wars at all, but I don't think I'd react any better if I'd watched it opening night.
Much to my amusement, TLJ blew up TFA's various mystery boxes and deflates many of the points it set up. Some people though this was subversion, but to me it just felt like Rian Johnson not wanting to deal with Jar Jar Abrams BS. But while it's flippant dismissal of the TFA build up ( Luke tossing away his lightsaber in the first scene being emblematic of this) was funny enough, it was also simply boring and static. It tried to set up dilemmas that were uninteresting, like Rey's parentage and lineage. It promoted a secondary character, Poe, to leading character and then flogged him through a tedious subplot. It foolishly violated one of Lucas' principles -- don't make Jedi fly around because that looks stupid -- just to get a character moment for Leia. Some weird preachy subplot about the casino planet and arms dealers was thrown out there, apropos of nothing.
But the whole disjointed effort of the three movies put together utterly fails to cohere or resonate. I've spent virtually my entire life thinking about the movies, as the original was literally the first movie I ever saw in theaters (and the novelization the first adult book I ever read). Watching the sequel trilogy, I could only see all the dangers that were narrowly avoided in the first six movies put on screen bigger and bolder than ever before. The sequel trilogy aren't about anything except making Star Wars movies made by people who didn't really understand SW (not the SW are deep movies, but they work using thematic, musical and visual resonance rather than on details).
But then again, I didn't expect things to go differently when. I just wanted to have seen all of them in theaters during their first run.
The Star Wars franchise was: a groundbreaking movie, a great movie, and then a long string of disappointments. The Phantom Menace was so obviously a disappointment, with the bad acting, Jar-Jar, the nonsensical planet core, and the overall look which seemed more advanced than events that were supposed to happen 30 years later. Freddie is right; The Force Awakens at first felt like a relief, but really it's terrible. Eventually you realize that A New Hope, The Force Awakens, and Rogue One are all the same movie. Why is it that, every time the rebels win big, they actually lose? Blow up the Death Star, then they're barely together on Hoth. Kill the Emperor and blow up the second Death Star, then this First Order arises. Destroy Starkiller base, then they're barely outrunning the First Order fleet.
It's really terrible that the phrase "Fandom Menace" has come to be associated with this group of fans, because the 2000 documentary that used that name, following a Star Wars fan club before and after the release of The Phantom Menace, is really the best exposition of the tragedy of it all.
There is a scene in that movie where Rose, after stopping Finn from sacrificing himself to stop the laser attack on the base (in a move that could have killed both of them), says to Finn that "we win by saving what we love" while the base where all their friends are literally blows up behind them.
I have to believe it's intentional trolling. The idea that someone could be that tone-deaf...
The Jedi were problematized in Scientific American the other day, so Star Wars will probably be canceled soon: “They are a religious order of intergalactic police-monks, prone to (white) saviorism and toxically masculine approaches to conflict resolution (violent duels with phallic lightsabers, gaslighting by means of “Jedi mind tricks,” etc.). The Jedi are also an exclusionary cult, membership to which is partly predicated on the possession of heightened psychic and physical abilities (or “Force-sensitivity”). Strikingly, Force-wielding talents are narratively explained in Star Wars not merely in spiritual terms but also in ableist and eugenic ones: These supernatural powers are naturalized as biological, hereditary attributes.”
Even though I disagree so much, the Star Wars posts are a "drop everything and read immediately."
I would like to stake out a place for those of us with the centrist, and I believe correct, opinion on The Last Jedi: there's nothing wrong with it conceptually, it just sucks. What it is theoretically trying to do is fine. It just happens to - with the exception of one scene - alternate between boring and cringe.
I struggled to get through it in the theater and my reaction afterwards was "holy shit that was boring, and cringe." Upon every repeated viewing I feel identically. I want to like it, but I can't. Yeah, Freddie is right about all the big things, but it's just boring. And cringe.
Freddie is, however, completely correct about TFA and I've been fighting this battle for six years and am not sure if I'll ever win. That was a "walk out of the theater thinking it was okay but with a nagging feeling" experience. Freddie is right about the problem. It makes the first six meaningless. I'm not a prequels defender, but I think Revenge of the Sith (at least the second half) is brilliant and the most emotionally draining movie in the bunch. It's just nonstop slaughter and failure and sadness. But you know that, in the end, it'll be okay. That Annakin isn't done being the good man he once was. That Obi Wan and Yoda still have a part to play. That the Emperor loses. To undo all that is unforgivable. Fuck JJ Abrams. The Force Awakens wasn't as boring as The Last Jedi but it's truly awful.
My feelings on this are fairly complicated. I did dislike at the time the retread that was TFA (I think? I watched it once when it came out streaming) but it must have done something right as I did go to watch TLJ in theatres. For me, it certainly captured the feel of Star Wars, even though the plot was fairly terrible. On the other hand, I was interested in the new characters (poor Finn...such an interesting back story, so many plot hooks and they did absolutely nothing with any of them...)
And then TLJ came. Honestly, my feelings are fairly close to those over at ACOUP (https://acoup.blog/2019/12/29/miscellanea-the-latest-jedi/). There's an interesting (arguably even important) story that's almost there. But isn't. And that's more infuriating than something that just doesn't even really try.
By the final movie, I went in with expectations super low and went out with those expectations just about met. It is a depressingly bad movie. I've seen arguments that it would have been a good trilogy all on its own, but I disagree. The obsession with world-destroying weapons reaches its zenith, the discovery of the total failure of the entire previous generation of characters, though at least the others get to die thinking they beat Palpatine...Leia...Jesus, that's a depressing end for the character.
Joins rebellion against evil empire, has world destroyed by evil empire, overthrows evil empire, rebuilds republic, republic ignores her warnings entirely, republic destroyed (via one attack on one central location, so clearly it was not a stable government and is destroyed in exactly the same fashion as her home world), chased by evil empire, discovers the emperor she thought was defeated had really been pulling the strings the whole time and dies before he's even inconvenienced...
Ultimately I'd like to see Disney stop making Star Wars movies and just focus on TV/animated stuff-The live-action Star Wars movie not being headed by Lucas feels very alien to me. I just don't think you will be able to recreate the sequels or even the prequels.
My thought on The Last Jedi after seeing it the first time, besides "well that was terrible", was that it felt like a first draft. Lots of ideas that were never properly setup, careening wildly from theme to theme, beat to beat without any consistent throughline or earned payoff. But my discipline is screenwriting so that's how I watch movies.
I don't hate Rian Johnson -- on the contrary I think he's a great filmmaker. He just wasn't given enough time to flesh out his screenplay. The two year turnaround time for the sequel trilogy films did not do them any favors. Could TLJ have worked? Sure, given a few rewrites and someone saying "hey maybe Leia floating through space isn't such a great idea."
And for the record, I thought TFA was terrible too. There's plenty of blame to go around.
TLJ is one of my favorite Star Wars films, both for the visuals and for its willingness to be subversive, even if it can't quite pay off on that subversion.
But I'm sad that Freddie didn't even discuss my most annoying failure to say anything: how are we supposed to feel about heroic sacrifice? Whasserface's Maneuver is thrilled as the ultimate sacrifice, and then Rose saves Whassisface's life because they should be life focused. So what's the answer?
Now, considering all of Freddie's points, I'm beginning to wonder if the movie's deconstruction of itself is intentional: that it ends up being actually nihilistic in the way that it refuses to land on a meaning.
I planned to see the Marconi signal tower at Banba's Crown at Malin Head on the Inishowen Peninsula and it was also a site of the filming in the Last Jedi and now they have Star Wars tours. But once it was the highest tech place in our world.--KN4IJM (not really answering your post).
Working through Star Wars with my 5 1/2-year-old. We did the Rebels cartoon first. Which I hadn't seen and enjoyed way more than I thought I would. And then started with A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back. Now that he knows who Darth Vader is we're going to watch the Clone Wars cartoon. Kind of kid-friendly approach to Machete order. Haven't made up my mind about the prequels. I wasn't sure he was even old enough for the two movies we watched. It's been fun. Reading this is causing me to lament that they didn't get the last three films right.
Broadly agree with your take, and even discuss the fact that The Force Awakens has to destroy the past, and how that relates to its nostalgia, in my review of The Force Awakens a couple years ago.
https://3brothersfilm.com/blog/2019/12/11/star-wars-episode-vii-the-force-awakens-2015
As someone with no emotions tied to Star Wars, I thought The Last Jedi was great, specifically because it seemed most interested in breaking things.
The biggest problem is the hour or so they spend hanging around that casino planet with Benicio del Toro. Had they just dropped the secondary characters entirely or found a more effective way to tie them into the Rey/Kylo plot, it would've been much better. Also, like, at least 40 minutes shorter. Which also would have been good.
Ok, dug back into some of my writing on the Disney films and while I realize I was possibly going too easy here on both Abrams and Johnson, I stand by what I say here: https://3brothersfilm.com/blog/2019/12/31/roundtable-star-wars-the-rise-of-skywalker-2019-part-2
"The Disney films were fundamentally misconceived from the get go, in part due to the fan reaction to the prequels. The idea of the Star Wars series as the “Tragedy of Anakin Skywalker” is really a construction of The Return of the Jedi and the Prequels, but it works! It organically grew and was actually compelling drama, politically and psychologically. From the moment in The Force Awakens when we learn that Kylo Ren is Ben Solo, Anakin’s entire turn in Return of the Jedi is cheapened. His sacrifice for Luke, and perhaps even more so Luke’s unwillingness to meet the Emperor and Vader in violence and his action in throwing down his weapon didn’t result in the next generation learning anything!
My interpretation of the whole “Balance of the Force” concept is that Anakin finally does fulfill the prophecy, but only in Return of the Jedi when he kills the Emperor and re-embraces the Light. This is something that he can only do with his son, which also means that his bringing balance to the Force rests not on individual might, but sacrificial love. Sure, the power of all Jedi live in Rey, but she doesn’t beat the resurrected Emperor by ultimately refusing the call, but by pulling some kind of Dragon Ball Z maneuver on him. It suggests that the Light wins because it is ultimately just stronger, not because it has an inherent value."
They missed a trick by making the baddies too powerful. It should have been Galactic President Leia hunting down a handful of extremists who were trying to blow up her Peace Star. Then there could have been a sub-plot of one of the extremists trying to convert Luke to their side and the whole thing writes itself.
For my money, TLJ is the only truly good movie in the sequel trilogy and the only one that takes chances and has real character development. It works better on its own than as part of a whole, which J.J. Abrams profoundly fucked up.
TFA is summed up best by the Member Berries from South Park. And Rise of Skywalker? Fuck that movie. Just a complete cop out in every sense of the term. Not just the bringing back the Emperor, but the revelation of his connection to Rey... that right there is one of the most mind-bogglingly stupid things Star Wars has ever done.
Bonus hot take: Leia and Luke should've never been made siblings in Return of the Jedi. It was a cheap way to end the Luke/Han/Leia triangle.
I was amused by TLJ more than TFA. That didn't mean the Last Jedi was good though, as it fails both on its own terms and as a Star Wars movie.
TFA was sterile. After thirty minutes, everything about it felt like a desperate attempt to capture the story beats of the previous trilogy without really understanding how the concept of Star Wars even works. At the surface level, it had sketchy and unimaginative world building. The old characters have retrograde, offscreen development where they fall into the old patterns just because its convenient. The new characters have an arc that lasts about thirty minutes and then its not clear where they're supposed to go from there. I watched it jet lagged in a mostly empty theater in Taipei, where they don't really get Star Wars at all, but I don't think I'd react any better if I'd watched it opening night.
Much to my amusement, TLJ blew up TFA's various mystery boxes and deflates many of the points it set up. Some people though this was subversion, but to me it just felt like Rian Johnson not wanting to deal with Jar Jar Abrams BS. But while it's flippant dismissal of the TFA build up ( Luke tossing away his lightsaber in the first scene being emblematic of this) was funny enough, it was also simply boring and static. It tried to set up dilemmas that were uninteresting, like Rey's parentage and lineage. It promoted a secondary character, Poe, to leading character and then flogged him through a tedious subplot. It foolishly violated one of Lucas' principles -- don't make Jedi fly around because that looks stupid -- just to get a character moment for Leia. Some weird preachy subplot about the casino planet and arms dealers was thrown out there, apropos of nothing.
But the whole disjointed effort of the three movies put together utterly fails to cohere or resonate. I've spent virtually my entire life thinking about the movies, as the original was literally the first movie I ever saw in theaters (and the novelization the first adult book I ever read). Watching the sequel trilogy, I could only see all the dangers that were narrowly avoided in the first six movies put on screen bigger and bolder than ever before. The sequel trilogy aren't about anything except making Star Wars movies made by people who didn't really understand SW (not the SW are deep movies, but they work using thematic, musical and visual resonance rather than on details).
But then again, I didn't expect things to go differently when. I just wanted to have seen all of them in theaters during their first run.
The Star Wars franchise was: a groundbreaking movie, a great movie, and then a long string of disappointments. The Phantom Menace was so obviously a disappointment, with the bad acting, Jar-Jar, the nonsensical planet core, and the overall look which seemed more advanced than events that were supposed to happen 30 years later. Freddie is right; The Force Awakens at first felt like a relief, but really it's terrible. Eventually you realize that A New Hope, The Force Awakens, and Rogue One are all the same movie. Why is it that, every time the rebels win big, they actually lose? Blow up the Death Star, then they're barely together on Hoth. Kill the Emperor and blow up the second Death Star, then this First Order arises. Destroy Starkiller base, then they're barely outrunning the First Order fleet.
It's really terrible that the phrase "Fandom Menace" has come to be associated with this group of fans, because the 2000 documentary that used that name, following a Star Wars fan club before and after the release of The Phantom Menace, is really the best exposition of the tragedy of it all.
I still half-believe TLJ is a massive troll.
There is a scene in that movie where Rose, after stopping Finn from sacrificing himself to stop the laser attack on the base (in a move that could have killed both of them), says to Finn that "we win by saving what we love" while the base where all their friends are literally blows up behind them.
I have to believe it's intentional trolling. The idea that someone could be that tone-deaf...