S.E. Barcus

Star Wars Is Dead To Me

By S.E. Barcus

(*SPOILERS!*  Not that you should care — if reading this makes you skip the movie, so much the better.)

“The new Star Wars isn’t just a re-boot this time!”

— Oh yeah?  Luke was exactly like Yoda on Dagobah. He disses Rey at first, then agrees to train her. And Rey leaves, to save someone, before she is ready. And falls into a trap. And Yoda’s ghost appears to Luke, to chill him out, like Obi-wan did with Yoda.  ALL re-do.

— Kylo Ren wants to rule the galaxy with Rey, “like father and son” (or husband and wife?). Rey feels something good in Kylo and tries to turn him, but he’s just a dog, and brings her to his master.  But then during the fight between Rey and the Emperor, Kylo comes around, and saves her, by killing the Emperor.

— The Porgs?  They are both the new Ewoks AND Jar Jar, cuddly AND annoying.

— Crait’s salt planet purposefully looks like Hoth — and the giant armored door, like the Rebel’s Hoth door.  To set up a visual-exact-replica of Empire’s AT-AT battle. (And to give Gareth Edwards a cameo….)

—The shitty George Lucasy dialogue with forced-exposition and platitudes feels like the original trilogy’s writing – as if this was the first ever screenplay written by some NYU undergrad.  Characters like Poe have several whole, complete, un-natural sentences that they scream in the midst of a heated battle, when they should be concentrating on their fighting, in order to tell everyone – mainly the audience – the importance of how high the stakes are raised with this particular battle, or that this is our last chance to drop these particular bombs in that battle, and so on.  Painfully bad.  (When Rose tells Finn we are “not fighting what we hate; (but) saving what we love”, I outwardly groaned.)

— Kylo kills the younglings. … The younglings!!

— All of the above assumes Rey and Kylo are not going to actually end up being revealed as twins. (The big surprising line in the next movie? “No Rey — I — am your brother!”)

— Finn fell to his death — but didn’t!  There was luckily some elevator that saves him out of nowhere.  (There were multitudes of deus ex machinas in this movie; again, a sign of poor writing.)  But then Captain Phasma falls the same way, and DOES die.  So badass “Chromedome” dies an undignified pointless death … just like Boba Fett.

— Oh — Luke and Kylo have a big end-of-the-movie light saber duel, where Kylo might as well have said, “when I left you, I was but the learner.  Now — I — am the master.”

“Oh, but come on, there’s so much that’s NEW!”

— Ok, ok. That light saber duel does end differently — it ends with Luke ripping off the whole Yoda disappearing act?!  What the hell?!  (Don’t ever feel “balance” and “peace” and “oneness” in this universe — cuz when you get to Nirvana, your suffering doesn’t just go away — YOU go away.)  First Han, now Luke.  The only person to leave these reboots with their life is Carrie Fisher’s Leia.  What a pickle.  Two bad options.  They’ll now have to kill off Leia for practical reasons in some dumb car crash or landspeeder crash or some other dumb shit between the films, with a cheap melodramatic Vader-esque funeral pyre to start the next movie.  Or Carrie Fisher is coming back CGI to tell Rey she’s her daughter or some crap, which will be unconscionable.  They could have solved this problem.  Carrie Fisher died a full year ago.  Now they’re boxed in.  Ugh.

— Yes, there’s Luke chugging the blue milk from the tit of a walrus-cow.  Enjoy.  That’s new.  (Or is it?  Isn’t Luke’s milk on Tatooine blue?)

— General Ackbar dies a new, undignified and pointless death.  With no melodramatic fanfare or anything.  He’s just a Zoidberg in the background running back and forth comically across a blown up bridge.  The end.

— Leia turns into Superman or Star Lord.  That was a new thing. … Cheesy, but new.

— Wait – about a quarter of the movie is new!  And it — the whole casino world, Canto Bright – also gives Finn a storyline!  But think about it. It goes NOWEHERE.  It is LITERALLY pointless.  It adds nothing to the overall plot of this movie whatsoever.  Was the whole thing a false lead?  Was it all to set up del Toro as the new Brad-Pitt-Tom-Waits-looking mercenary, the new Han or Jaba?  Was it to force in an Asian character, so that the Benetton-millennials’ P.C. Star Wars can be complete?  (Hey – I’m all about increased diversity in casting and roles, and like that they have a main Asian character – but, alas, my cynicism overtakes me.  Everything this franchise does now smells of, “how do we increase the marketability and profit of the franchise??”)  So … tell me, what was the POINT of this whole sub-plot?!?!  Nothing.  A few cuts to Finn and Rose mopping a floor for 30 minutes of film would have moved the plot forward literally just as much.  You would’ve asked, “what did Finn do again? … Oh yeah … he … mopped the floor or something.”  Oh — and if I have to “get” the point by seeing the next movie…?  That would be like Disney giving me the finger, then telling me, “hey, if you want to know why I gave you that finger, you’ll have to come back tomorrow and give me more money.”

Bottom line:
The new Start Wars, “The Last Jedi”, was really such a shitty mish mash of all the old tropes. The fact that this major of a movie — with all of the incredible writers available in Hollywood, including the writers of this film — couldn’t get a decent script together SMELLS like studio heads forcing in marketing crap.  It’s like they threw $200 million dollars into a big bag and are dragging it around the world, and people are running over to it to throw money at it.  Then they’ll come home, add up their billions, and do it to us all over again.

It’s like the SNL franchise, trying so hard to not offend anyone, and so dumbed down to some USA-Today-4^th-grader pop cultural reading level so as to get to a bigger audience, that it is now cornered in to no-risk, uninteresting story solutions.  Thank goodness Alex Garland’s new movie Annihilation comes out soon (speaking of a good ex machina), which will hopefully remove the bitterness from this science fiction backwash.

Ugh. I’m so done with this shit.

…

Oh.  WAIT!  Ok.  There was ONE really cool thing in the new Star Wars.  The lightspeed kamikaze scene of Laura Dern was super cool — … because it used the silent-space-sound-effect style of the Battlestar GALACTICA TV SERIES!  AAAGGHHHHH!!!!

Copyright December 2017