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| Is the rest of the franchise going to be like this? by Sfia 01/10/2018, 9:52pm PST | ||||
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| It remains to be seen what the point of the new Star Wars movies is, other than to keep the merchandise moving. Why are we supposed to care about Rey, Finn, or Poe? Or Kylo? What insight do we get into the setting of the films? At least the prequel trilogy told a story, clumsily, but a story that made some kind of sense: manipulation of galactic politics that set up the destruction of the Republic, and the impotence of its guardians to stop it. It would have been even better if it had been competently written, acted, and directed.
With the new movies, we get big budget fan fiction. What is common to all fanfic is that it venerates the characters and backdrop to the point of masturbation. This has to do with the way fans react to the material--for them it is essentially a fetish experience. Thus we get a rebooted Empire, lightsabers, a grumpy Jedi master, X-Wings, bigger Death Star, and money shots of the Millennium Falcon, because that is all anyone at Disney can relate to Star Wars as: a toybox of recognizable merchandise. None of it moves forward dramatically, which would involve someone doing something new that changes expectations. A few critics are trying to defend The Last Jedi on the grounds that it is doing something new, but all I saw was fanfiction and callbacks. A real problem is that Lucas envisioned Star Wars as the Skywalker saga, and it has run out of Skywalkers. That was, at least on paper, a potent arc: father turns evil and son redeems him. But it leaves you with nothing to explore afterward. Son's nephew turns bad and son goes into self-pitying exile doesn't cut it. It's a pale imitation of the original. It does make you appreciate the prequels more, at least until it you watch them again. It showed a very different setting, peaceful yet slowly becoming corrupt, a child created by the Force itself, hints of Sith lore that made them seem more interesting than just standard issue bad guys, a universe of different factions that felt bigger and more complicated -- despite the obligatory and needless return to Tatooine. The Disney sequels, by contrast, make its universe feel smaller, with fewer moving parts, and less room to do anything different. |
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