So... uh... I get to be the bad guy here, then? Like, the baddest? I admit I didn't quite expect that.
I finally saw
TFA last night, and I thought it was garbage. Very well-made garbage, but garbage nonetheless.
Full disclosure: I had not been excited for the movie, hadn't been looking forward to it. I loved
SW as a kid as much as any red-blooded boy (though my primary allegiance was always to
Trek), and wanted a continuation of
RotJ as soon as I first saw it. Then, while still a boy, I discovered the Thrawn Trilogy, and it was perfect: Han and Leia got together, the New Republic survived a fiendishly clever upstart challenge from the remnants of the Empire, and Luke even got a potential romantic interest. And then came the prequels, which of course bugged the hell out of me for a thousand reasons.
Now, I know that by the time Disney acquired the franchise, it was too late to adapt the Thrawn Trilogy, not that they'd comfortably fit into 2-hour, 3-act movies anyhow. I knew the new Episodes would be their own thing... and I didn't really care about them one way or the other. How many star wars can one century of galactic history bear? At some point, all these wars stop becoming fun and start becoming depressing. (I bailed on
Smallville the series for similar reasons: by the third season, all the high school students and small-town folk becoming Kyrptonite-infected and getting hurt and dying just became
ghoulish.) How many times are we going to gaga for lightsaber twirling and quirky droids and light side/dark side soap operatics? And then I saw the movie. And, despite its lightning-fast pace (barely if at all slower than either of the nu
Treks), I was bored for long stretches.
Another Skywalker son seduced by the Dark Side? Different generation, same crap?
Another Sith lord?
Another Death Star? Another... pretty much everything in the whole movie?
revel911 said:
I feel justified having hearing JJ in that interview with Lawerence say that "to move forward, we had to start backwards." And I get that, he needed to rebuild new audiences and regain an old audience with themes we knew, to start with themes we didn't.
Well, then, surely that's the problem right there. That quote, and JJ's mindset, which is at the very core of
TFA, is pure chicken-fried bullsh*t. Like hell, Disney needed to "regain an old audience" - it's frickin'
Star Wars; all any fans asked for was a good movie for the first time since
Empire! (The Throne Room sequence of
RotJ is genuinely great, but the rest of that movie is just plain not good.)
As a friend of mine wrote on FB:
I felt gutted afterward. It was a JJ Abrams movie walking around in a Star Wars skin - the spirit of the real thing was nowhere to be seen. It had some good moments, some good new characters. But I keep coming back to the way there was no space between people, no grey area where you're not sure who you can trust. It took Han and Luke a whole film to trust each other, you never quite trust Lando, and the jury is totally out on how much good was left in Vader. That never-being-quite-sure about where people stand is crucial to the realistic depiction of a universe in which the good guys are the outgunned-but-scrappy guerillas up against a much more corporate force. But in this piece of nonsense, Bo and Finn know each other for two seconds and are immediately bosom buddies. Princess Leia is like, "Oh, you're an ex Stormtrooper, brainwashed from birth? Come on in for a hug!" What the fu**? And also, Bo treats his droid like a golden retriever - but that weird tension between a droid's artificial nature and the way our characters long to treat them as human was a prescient, meaningful part of the originals.
So now every time I watch
RotJ - which admittedly is less than often - I'll know that for our Big Three,
a whole lot of misery lies ahead. And that's
before Han gets murdered by his own son.
The hell?
...
...
For comparison, I love the MCU. I'm a bit nervous that Phase III - and by extension, the first uber-Phase of the first three Phases - looks to be heading toward a
Power Rangers-style battle over some Skittles-colored gems, but at least we're
going somewhere, and it's been a great ride so far. Heck, I'm nervous about Cap and Tony and the others having a Civil War, but I have to hand it to Marvel Studios; it's a gutsy move. But for
TFA to basically fridge the New Republic (or whatever they're calling it) and reset everything to pretty much the start of
ANH just feels horribly lazy, commercially cynical, and narratively pointless. I may still enjoy low-calorie entertainment in the form of superhero movies, but that doesn't mean I want slightly remixed versions of the same damn Skywalker saga over and over my whole damn life.
(This applies to my childhood primary love of
Trek, too, by the way - I
still have doubts that there's much left for the franchise to do after Admiral Janeway used time travel to make Voyager the Batmobile and dick-kick the Borg. Sure, we've gone back in time and along a somewhat different path since then, but the Dominion and Borg and Romulans and all that are still out there, right?
Beyond may be good and it may not be, but we're still playing around in a fundamentally known universe, yeah?)
Look, I'll happily take steaming craps on dreck like
Transformers and
GI Joe all day long, but I get no pleasure from beating up on my old childhood friend
Star Wars; I really don't. And for all those who enjoyed
TFA and can't wait for
Rogue One or the next season of
Rebels or
Episode VIII or that movie about Young Han Solo who'll grow up to be a failed father, a failed husband and whose own son will murder him... more power to ya, I guess. I'm one of those who freakin'
loved Jurassic World, so I'm not going to pretend I've evolved to some higher plane of existence or anything. I wasn't looking forward to
TFA, and not only enjoyed it far, far less than
Ant-Man, but thought it straight up sucked, and that's okay. (My mother, who I saw the movie with, was even
more revolted, and while she thought
Furious 7 was unbelievably childish when I took her to
that last year, she unequivocally said she enjoyed
that much more.) Again, while I see lots of us here have similar quibbles and annoyances with this movie, I
am a bit surprised to find myself apparently alone in the "I don't even care, can't
Star Wars and
Terminator both just
die already" camp, but, hey, that's okay too. And hell, maybe the next Episode won't be crap - at least
it's got a non-hack director. Maybe
Rogue One will be a compelling and fun story that doesn't piss all over some of my favorite childhood heroes. I'll see 'em all eventually, I'm sure, if not necessarily in theaters. May the Force be ever with us all.
But I'm glad my kid self didn't have this movie to watch right after
RotJ, is my parting thought. Because,
bleah. The big three deserved... if not happily ever after, at least something better than all
this. :-(
Grade:
C-
