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.”
Oh man, that article. I've done some "actually Jedi are the bad guys" sithposting in my time, but that article goes so far past what's reasonably supported and well into such self-parody that I wonder if perhaps it won't be outed as another Sokal type deal.
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.
I think writing for a massive franchise like this always comes with thousands of compromises on whatever artistic vision someone might have. I imagine he had a good working script that wrapped up under 120 minutes and focused almost exclusively on Rey and Kylo and Luke.
But I can so easily see executives demanding an action setpiece in the middle and something for the rest of the cast to do that's similar to the cloud city part of Empire Strikes Back. So we get the bizarre hour on casino planet that doesn't really fit into the rest of the movie and doesn't really add anything to the narrative, except giving those two guys some insight into the universe and themselves that could have been accomplished in, like, two minutes of dialogue.
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.
I thought the Clone Wars was going to be stupid, kiddy, nerd shit. Then I watched it. I then proceeded to assume Rebels would be stupid, kiddy, nerd shit. Then I watched it. I'm naturally biased against animation but they're both much better Star Wars than any of the new movies.
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.
I always thought you could probably say a lot about how elites/Hollywood/whatever-you-want-to-call-them see themselves by how the world was constructed in the new Star Wars: the good guys are the Rebels...but they're also in charge of the entire Galatic Republic. Why isn't Leia a senator or a Republic general? She's, what, allied to but not a part of the government? I can't help but see shades of elected government representatives tweeting #resist all over it. You don't get to pontificate about "hope" or "resistance" when you're the freaking government--you have to actually take responsibility!
Also, making the bad guys weak and elusive would've solved quite a few issues with the films.
I think this is one of the most confusing aspects of the sequel trilogy.
Does the new Republic even exist? Did the new space fascists destroy it? Are the new space fascists the dominant power in the universe? The resistance at the end of The Last Jedi seems to amount to, like, thirty people.
Like, what happened? Why does any of this matter?
Which are probably not the right questions to ask about movies made to sell toys to children, but it does make so much of the narrative feel weightless.
I've heard it told that, when Starkiller Base (🙄) destroys all those planets, that's supposed to account for all of that - yeah there was this big full-fledged Republic, but it got blown up. But this just doesn't jibe with the first half of the movie to me; the First Order (🙄) is clearly super powerful and has tons of people and ships, and more they are going wherever they please in the galaxy, blowing shit up, and everybody acts like they're the big bad. How did this happen under the watch of any remotely competent government? It makes no sense.
How did these bad guys build a fleet and planet-annihilating-weapon while the Republic was presumably trying to consolidate galactic power after the fall of the Empire?
Tempting for me to over-read liberal culture into it... seeing it as a representation of how liberals presume the right wing will always be more powerful, and that being a liberal means just a permanent state of resistance
But in reality I think it was just sloppy screenwriting and worldbuilding
I feel like this is probably all described in the various novels, comics, animes, web series, etc. that constitute the corpus of what most people younger than me consider to be "Star Wars".
The First Order bounced off to the unexplored depths of space, found enough minerals and human colonists there to forge a new war machine, and not only built a new war machine, but also leveraged it utterly obliterate the republic in like a day and a half.
So… whyna fuck didn’t the Old Republic, like, send out a few ships to start mining deep space? Turn the unknown star into new sources of revenue and what not? Since apparently a start up venture capital company of dissident fascists was able to form an East India Trading Company/Roman Empire fusion in literally like 16 years from first setting “sail” to the final victory.
I think the analogy is supposed to be with Hitler rebuilding the German war machine before WWII unimpeded by the WWI victors, but it doesn’t take more than 5 seconds to realize why that’s not a great analogy.
It's still so weird to me that a franchise so steeped in ancient myths and tragedy forgot that most epics (Beowulf, the Homeric cycle, the Aeneid) end not with getting power, but with the struggle to keep, preserve, and justify their power. You could tell a great story about rebuilding the Jedi Order with Grouchy Luke: are they all about lightsaber diplomacy and macho interventions, or turning to spiritual development and healing the torn social fabric?
I think you could maybe tell a more interesting story by Grouchy Luke refusing to train more Jedi so Leia starts training her own. You could make this either disastrous or neutral, and then have Luke react to it by becoming his own version of Vader intent on destroying the Jedi, who he believes never should have existed and definitely should not be brought back.
And, then, yeah, the test could be about the competing interests of a new (nice?) empire or senate or whatever. Since the series is so steeped in WWII history, it would have been interesting to see some of the worst assholes of the original trilogy return as respected senators or representatives of their home planets.
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.
Sketchy and unimaginative world building deserves love. Even when I was a teenager angry at how bad the (first two) prequels were, I could admit the world Lucas was creating was ambitious. The Old Republic really lives up to the idea in my 9 year old imagination. It's big and grand and decaying and has fantastic worlds. And, unfortunately, Gungans and podracing.
TFA just felt like someone was filming this on a leftover Star Wars set. None of the sequels really do anything to build what should be a fascinating world. It's just "hey, I heard you like desert planets and ice planets."
Part of why Star Wars is awesome as a kid is because it clearly exists in a large world. "I served with your father in the clone wars" is a throwaway line that inspired so much imagination. Conversely, "hey guys, here's a casino planet!"
I agree. I enjoyed the world building of the prequels, in the sense that there actually was some conception of the decaying, decadent Republic that Lucas was playing around with. The podracing part was boring but at least resonated with the Ben Hur/ chariot racing biblical epics set in the Roman Empire. You could see at least there was a fun remixing of existing stuff and influences even if the realization sometimes was dull.
The sequel trilogy had world building which pretty much amounted to resetting everything so they could have an empire vs rebels dynamic, never mind how unjustified that would be. It left me feeling untethered, because the dynamics of the world simply had no connection to the sort of historical sweep that Lucas had been going after previously. This was one of a myriad of tone deaf choices made too numerous to catalogue here.
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 always liked the idea that stuff looks better in the prequels because decades of authoritarian imperial rule has wrecked everything, drained budgets, and depleted all the resources. Phantom Menace shows a civilization at its opulent peak; the original trilogy shows a frightened, frightening society scarred by years of total war and mismanagement. Of course nobody has time to wax their spaceships anymore.
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...
I think this is also why I despise TLJ a lot more than TFA.
TFA is a dumb action movie. It's not what I want, but it's acceptable at what it's trying to do, which is push nostalgia buttons and be a spectacle that wastes a few hours. TLJ is constantly pointing to ways in which it itself could be a better movie. It's frustrating. It feels like TLJ is pointing out all of its own flaws while also refusing to correct them, and so after a while it just feels insulting.
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.”
Oh man, that article. I've done some "actually Jedi are the bad guys" sithposting in my time, but that article goes so far past what's reasonably supported and well into such self-parody that I wonder if perhaps it won't be outed as another Sokal type deal.
Exactly what I was thinking, I really hope this turns out to be a hoax/parody because it definitely reads like one.
What’s up with calling a magazine Scientific *American*? I guess you like your science filtered through capitalist imperialism and white supremacy.
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.
I think writing for a massive franchise like this always comes with thousands of compromises on whatever artistic vision someone might have. I imagine he had a good working script that wrapped up under 120 minutes and focused almost exclusively on Rey and Kylo and Luke.
But I can so easily see executives demanding an action setpiece in the middle and something for the rest of the cast to do that's similar to the cloud city part of Empire Strikes Back. So we get the bizarre hour on casino planet that doesn't really fit into the rest of the movie and doesn't really add anything to the narrative, except giving those two guys some insight into the universe and themselves that could have been accomplished in, like, two minutes of dialogue.
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.
I thought the Clone Wars was going to be stupid, kiddy, nerd shit. Then I watched it. I then proceeded to assume Rebels would be stupid, kiddy, nerd shit. Then I watched it. I'm naturally biased against animation but they're both much better Star Wars than any of the new movies.
I was downplaying how much I liked Rebels because I wanted to look cool. :) I agree. And now I'm looking forward to Clone Wars that much more.
Rebels is amazing. There are several moments in it that make me cry every time.
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."
I look forward to reading your full piece. This is pretty much my main problem with the sequels trilogy.
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.
Yes that would have been a very cool inversion
I always thought you could probably say a lot about how elites/Hollywood/whatever-you-want-to-call-them see themselves by how the world was constructed in the new Star Wars: the good guys are the Rebels...but they're also in charge of the entire Galatic Republic. Why isn't Leia a senator or a Republic general? She's, what, allied to but not a part of the government? I can't help but see shades of elected government representatives tweeting #resist all over it. You don't get to pontificate about "hope" or "resistance" when you're the freaking government--you have to actually take responsibility!
Also, making the bad guys weak and elusive would've solved quite a few issues with the films.
I think this is one of the most confusing aspects of the sequel trilogy.
Does the new Republic even exist? Did the new space fascists destroy it? Are the new space fascists the dominant power in the universe? The resistance at the end of The Last Jedi seems to amount to, like, thirty people.
Like, what happened? Why does any of this matter?
Which are probably not the right questions to ask about movies made to sell toys to children, but it does make so much of the narrative feel weightless.
I've heard it told that, when Starkiller Base (🙄) destroys all those planets, that's supposed to account for all of that - yeah there was this big full-fledged Republic, but it got blown up. But this just doesn't jibe with the first half of the movie to me; the First Order (🙄) is clearly super powerful and has tons of people and ships, and more they are going wherever they please in the galaxy, blowing shit up, and everybody acts like they're the big bad. How did this happen under the watch of any remotely competent government? It makes no sense.
That's what I mean!
How did these bad guys build a fleet and planet-annihilating-weapon while the Republic was presumably trying to consolidate galactic power after the fall of the Empire?
Tempting for me to over-read liberal culture into it... seeing it as a representation of how liberals presume the right wing will always be more powerful, and that being a liberal means just a permanent state of resistance
But in reality I think it was just sloppy screenwriting and worldbuilding
Yeah, and devotion to the originals. Also, maybe absolute fear of treading in the political waters the prequels steeped themselves in.
I can imagine Disney executives being terrified of seeing space senators in space congress giving speeches about space democracy.
I feel like this is probably all described in the various novels, comics, animes, web series, etc. that constitute the corpus of what most people younger than me consider to be "Star Wars".
The First Order bounced off to the unexplored depths of space, found enough minerals and human colonists there to forge a new war machine, and not only built a new war machine, but also leveraged it utterly obliterate the republic in like a day and a half.
So… whyna fuck didn’t the Old Republic, like, send out a few ships to start mining deep space? Turn the unknown star into new sources of revenue and what not? Since apparently a start up venture capital company of dissident fascists was able to form an East India Trading Company/Roman Empire fusion in literally like 16 years from first setting “sail” to the final victory.
I think the analogy is supposed to be with Hitler rebuilding the German war machine before WWII unimpeded by the WWI victors, but it doesn’t take more than 5 seconds to realize why that’s not a great analogy.
It's still so weird to me that a franchise so steeped in ancient myths and tragedy forgot that most epics (Beowulf, the Homeric cycle, the Aeneid) end not with getting power, but with the struggle to keep, preserve, and justify their power. You could tell a great story about rebuilding the Jedi Order with Grouchy Luke: are they all about lightsaber diplomacy and macho interventions, or turning to spiritual development and healing the torn social fabric?
I think you could maybe tell a more interesting story by Grouchy Luke refusing to train more Jedi so Leia starts training her own. You could make this either disastrous or neutral, and then have Luke react to it by becoming his own version of Vader intent on destroying the Jedi, who he believes never should have existed and definitely should not be brought back.
And, then, yeah, the test could be about the competing interests of a new (nice?) empire or senate or whatever. Since the series is so steeped in WWII history, it would have been interesting to see some of the worst assholes of the original trilogy return as respected senators or representatives of their home planets.
That's a good idea. Kylo could still be there, and be almost the same character! Probably wouldn't have been that hard to write.
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.
Sketchy and unimaginative world building deserves love. Even when I was a teenager angry at how bad the (first two) prequels were, I could admit the world Lucas was creating was ambitious. The Old Republic really lives up to the idea in my 9 year old imagination. It's big and grand and decaying and has fantastic worlds. And, unfortunately, Gungans and podracing.
TFA just felt like someone was filming this on a leftover Star Wars set. None of the sequels really do anything to build what should be a fascinating world. It's just "hey, I heard you like desert planets and ice planets."
Part of why Star Wars is awesome as a kid is because it clearly exists in a large world. "I served with your father in the clone wars" is a throwaway line that inspired so much imagination. Conversely, "hey guys, here's a casino planet!"
I agree. I enjoyed the world building of the prequels, in the sense that there actually was some conception of the decaying, decadent Republic that Lucas was playing around with. The podracing part was boring but at least resonated with the Ben Hur/ chariot racing biblical epics set in the Roman Empire. You could see at least there was a fun remixing of existing stuff and influences even if the realization sometimes was dull.
The sequel trilogy had world building which pretty much amounted to resetting everything so they could have an empire vs rebels dynamic, never mind how unjustified that would be. It left me feeling untethered, because the dynamics of the world simply had no connection to the sort of historical sweep that Lucas had been going after previously. This was one of a myriad of tone deaf choices made too numerous to catalogue here.
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 always liked the idea that stuff looks better in the prequels because decades of authoritarian imperial rule has wrecked everything, drained budgets, and depleted all the resources. Phantom Menace shows a civilization at its opulent peak; the original trilogy shows a frightened, frightening society scarred by years of total war and mismanagement. Of course nobody has time to wax their spaceships anymore.
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...
I think this is also why I despise TLJ a lot more than TFA.
TFA is a dumb action movie. It's not what I want, but it's acceptable at what it's trying to do, which is push nostalgia buttons and be a spectacle that wastes a few hours. TLJ is constantly pointing to ways in which it itself could be a better movie. It's frustrating. It feels like TLJ is pointing out all of its own flaws while also refusing to correct them, and so after a while it just feels insulting.
I've seen Ryan Johnson's Criterion Collection interviews and he does seem like enough of a dingus to be that tone deaf.