Gods can’t die.
A god observes the circle of life from way up yonder. A god would be able to survive being thrown down a Death Star reactor shaft.
Emperor Palpatine has a god complex, but he’s not a god; he’s a politician. With a name like Sheev, his aliases, both Darth Sidious and Sith Lord, comes across as overcompensation.
Senator Palpatine has no friends in the legislative body that writes bills into law for the Galactic Republic; no woman either.
In Revenge Of The Sith, directed by George Lucas, Darth Sidious is too preoccupied with plotting the massacre of the galaxy’s Jedi generals with his secret clone trooper army for a personal life. You never hear anybody calling the senator out of Naboo by the name his mother gave him. Although his father, Cosigna Palpatine, a Naboo aristocrat, never appears in any of the three trilogies, he exists according to multiple fan sites.
The mother’s name may be unknown, but we have absolute confirmation that the future Darth Sidious came out of a womb.
But despite Sheev’s ability to self-generate electricity, shooting projectile lightning like a concert pianist from his fingertips – sometimes blue, sometimes white – whenever a matter vexes him, the self-appointed lord, despite all the pomp and circumstance that evil affords him, can only call himself a man at the end of a day.
Including the day Darth Vader threw him down the reactor shaft in Richard Maquand’s Return Of The Jedi.
Palpatine sure looks dead. He turns into a vapor. We saw the poof.
Ian McDiarmid, the actor who portrayed the Sith Lord, thought he was dead, too. After Episode Six wrapped up, McDiarmid asked creator George Lucas about his long-term prospects. The maestro answered: “Absolutely dead.”
To everybody’s surprise, especially Ian McDiarmid: lo and behold, Emperor Palpatine returns in J.J. Abrams’ The Rise Of Skywalker, the final installment of a trilogy that divided the warsies.
Depending on what you read, Abrams and co-writer Chris Terrio resurrected Darth Sidious of their own volition. While other people believe the plot twist was inorganic, prompted by a point of contention with how the franchise reinvented itself, radically deviating from its mythology. Allocating the foundational source of indignation expressed by generational fans, young and old alike, is just a google search away; the vitriolic detritus left behind on message boards, the aftermath of website crashes.
There were various factors as to why The Last Jedi, directed by Rian Johnson, was a hit with both, print and online critics, and yet, polarized audiences.
But in the end, it boiled down to this:
Luke Skywalker was replaced by a girl.
The force awakens:
Rey (Daisy Ridley) is a self-made Jedi.
She has no pedigree, “the mighty Skywalker blood” to fall back on.
She is the daughter of junk traders, presumed dead. Orphaned, the scavenger lives on Jakku, a desert planet, whereas Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), albeit a foundling, too, had Uncle Owen (Phil Brown) and Aunt Beru (Shelaigh Fraser) to take him in, offering the rebel dreamer three meals a day and a warm bed to sleep in.
The Force Awakens recognizes the girls who waited n the same long lines that snaked around blocks to catch the once in a lifetime phenomena that was Star Wars.
Rey is all of us. You and me.
A surrogate for any kid alive in 1977 who extended the Star Wars universe to their own.
With action figures, plastic light sabers, and ship replicas, Millennium Falcons and Tie Fighters both.
tnocs.com contributing author cappiethedog
We told our own stories. We used our imagination. In the converted cave Rey calls home, the camera pans across her mud-derived shelf, showcasing a conspicuous object that is the beating heart of the original trilogy, Episodes Four-to-Six.
Rey made her own Luke Skywalker doll, a primitive action figure, suggesting that not all females identified with Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher), but the legend himself. Rey is an extrapolated tomboy, bartering for “portions” (a self-rising puke-colored breadstuff) with scrap metal she collects from downed spacecrafts and sells to a crooked broker on the make. Rey doesn’t have a female role model.
How could she? In Star Wars: A New Hope, the Rebel Alliance was not offering jobs to women, airborne or otherwise.
The last Jedi
“Wisdom they held, but that library contained noting that the girl Rey doesn’t know already.”
Yoda
The Last Jedi picks up where The Force Awakens left off; the historic meeting of master and servant on a lonely island, in which a young woman reunites the old man with his most-prized possession, the light saber.
No doubt, audible gasps and cries of “Judas!” coalesced into a shared nerd-grievance from coast to coast, and across bodies of water, when Luke Skywalker tosses the kyber crystal-powdered blade over his shoulder.
Jedis don’t retire. Jedis don’t walk away from a fight.
And most importantly, nobody, especially some girl, pushes their childhood hero to the ground, holding the celebrated glowing green blade just inches from his face.
Nobody could wrap their heads around a Jedi Knight who was anything but brave. The demythologization of Luke Skywalker, portrayed by Hamill as a has-been, a secularist closed-off to The Force, was just too much for ardent fans. A Jedi Master may err, but he doesn’t walk away from an opportunity for redemption.
In A New Hope, Obi-Wan Kenobi (Alec Guinness) lost his pupil, Anakin Skywalker, the future Darth Vader, to the dark side.
And returned to Tatooine, living a hermetic life of guilt and sorrow. But he’s rejuvenated when Luke Skywalker shows up on his rocky doorstep, ready and willing, with a fire in his belly, to confront their shared foe and raze the Empire to the cosmos ground.
Luke as an old man, conversely, shows no interest in mentoring Rey – only doing so because R2D2 has a guilt-trip setting, in which the irreplaceable robot (overshadowed by BB-8, possibly, a female droid, throughout the latest trilogy), projects an archived hologram of Leia’s historical plea for Obi Wan Kenobi’s help.
But alas, Luke Skywalker doesn’t join Rey on her return trip, suggesting cowardice, and worse, indifference to the millions upon millions of innocents on vulnerable planets in thrall of Ben Solo (Adam Driver), a.k.a. Kylo Ren: his greatest mistake.
Rian Johnson, a perceived heretic, literally sets Star Wars on fire, using Yoda as his proxy, when the spectral muppet burns down the ancient Jedi temple that houses all the sacred texts to ash and cinder. Luke leaves the fate of intergalactic peace in Rey’s hands.
She returns with a porg, Chewbacca’s second mate, an animal reminiscent of an evolved guinea pig.
Warsies threw hissy fits, aghast at the disregard for tradition, asking aloud to themselves and each other, online: “She doesn’t need to read the sacred Jedi texts?”
Nobody likes a smart girl.
The rise of Skywalker
Luke loves his sister, so for three lessons, the Jedi knight-turned-ascetic curmudgeon sets aside his nihilism and gets some liturgical training in The Last Jedi. Arguably, Rey was doing fine on her own, strengthening Yoda’s argument that The Force doesn’t need interpreters in a vested capacity. Without any formal training, in The Force Awakens, Rey defeats Kylo Ren in a light saber duel against a snow-dappled backdrop at dusk. Without ceremony, Rey already was a de facto Jedi Knight.
Luke was right. His kind are the unnecessary mediators of The Force. Rey, an outsider, a girl with no rarefied bloodlines, can access the hallowed life force without a go-between because The Force isn’t exclusive to the Jedi order. She mastered this religion (as Luke describes it) back home on Jakky by herself. All she needed was faith.
This, perhaps, was the most radical shift from George Lucas’ original vision for his filmic empire.
People take Star Wars seriously.
It is, indeed, a religion. Rian Johnson’s screenplay acknowledges this converted phantasm. The Rise Of Skywalker, directed by JJ Abrams, honors those adherents who practice The Force, by unilaterally reverting their incontrovertible leader back to his leadership position.
If Rey had asked for directions to Exegol, Kylo Ren most certainly would have told her about the second pathfinder aboard his ship. The former Ben Solo benefits Rey’s healing touch after being mortally-wounded in their rematch of crossing lightsabers. He owes her, and now, they’re fighting a common enemy, Emperor Palpatine. The latest and bravest Jedi Knight rides tidal waves on a skimmer.
She’s unflappable. But the fanboy outcry that followed in the wake of Luke Skywalker’s deconstruction forced J.J. Abrams’ hand.
Rian Johnson, in essence, made a Star Wars for girls.
As a result, Abrams set out to assuage the male ego. Rey can still be the hero, but the young woman must learn humility.
Outside forces took care of that. The Rise Of Skywalker weakens her otherwise steely resolve. This one-upmanship of Luke Skywalker comes to a grinding halt. Nothing about Rey’s comportment suggests that she’d run away from a final showdown with Emperor Palpatine.
But here, a transference of fatalism from Luke to Rey is performed, in which she burns Kylo Ren’s Tie Fighter and throws her light saber into the fire.
The Rise Of Skywalker reduces Rey, a warrior, to a girl. The next Jedi’s return to Temple Island stops the forward momentum of the narrative dead in its tracks, so Luke can reassert himself as the alpha male.
He gives Rey a pep talk. The Rise Of Skywalker contradicts the progressive ideas rife in Rian Johnson’s vision for the franchise. Rey not only needs a man to guide her, but also the knowledge imparted from the sacred Jedi texts, which Rey retroactively saved (arguably, a convolution) from the fire Yoda started. Rey is also Emperor Palpatine’s granddaughter.
Again, arguably, another convolution. Luke claims that Leia knew Rey was a descendant of the Sith Lord. Nobody knew: Not Luke, not Yoda, and most importantly, not Palpatine himself, who, perhaps, suddenly remembered after being volatilized into atoms. Rian Johnson captured the magic and awe of the original trilogy. He brought to Star Wars a message of plurality.
In the final sequence of The Last Jedi, a boy, with broom in hand, after just being at yelled at by his alien guardian, looks up at the right time to see the Millennium Falcon zip across the night sky.
The boy, apparently, had skipped his chores in favor of playing a self-reflexive game, a Star Wars-derived game, resistance fighters versus The First Order with his friends. He kept the ring Rose (Kelly Marie Tran) passed onto him during the course of his job as stable boy at the Canto Bight racing track.
The boy doesn’t care that Rose is a girl. But his real-life counterparts did, therefore, The Rise Of Skywalker delegitimizes Rey’s accomplishments from The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi as being solely belonging to her.
Luke Skywalker and the long line of Jedis that came before Rey gets an assist for every act of heroism she performed.
The big reveal, again, arguably, another convolution, out of the blue, just like every other plot point in The Rise Of Skywalker:
… is that she and Ben Solo are a dyad.
The paradox of Rey, as portrayed in The Rise Of Skywalker, is that she both has and does not have a place in the narrative. The former scavenger simultaneously gains and loses her identity.
Clearly, in The Last Jedi, Johnson wanted the baton to be passed from Luke to Rey. “I will not be the last Jedi,” Skywalker as hologram tells Kylo Ren on the salt flat. Mark Hamill, more than likely, was not supposed to appear in The Rise Of Skywalker.
Despite grossing $620M domestic (United States and Canada), Rian Johnson was replaced. During pre-production, not only did the patriarchy force the inorganic resurrection of Emperor Palpatine, but engineered the summoning of Luke Skywalker’s ghost, as well.
The Rise Of Skywalker made STAR WARS great again.
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I can’t comment too much on the specifics of this artistic deviation from Star Wars, as I haven’t seen any new films since The Revenge of the Sith (and it was the prequel trilogy that largely killed my appetite for more installments, though that last film had some good moments).
I tend to like when revamps add a new, challenging perspective to an established mythology. The Dark Knight is a great example of this.
Comics author Alan Moore made a name for himself by injecting a dark realism into tired old superhero stories, including Batman: The Killing Joke, which was an inspiration for Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. Moore’s The Watchmen was originally going to do the same for old DC characters, and though the names and details are changed, the theme is essentially the same: to the extent that the simplistic notion of “superhero” is at all present in the real world, it is tied tightly to fanatics and would-be tyrants.
Given this theme, I was extremely disappointed by the HBO adaptation of The Watchmen. Despite a fantastic first few episodes, the plot eventually culminates in uncritical hero worship, the very antithesis of what the original story was trying to do. Given that the original was critical of an older thirst for god-kings to save the day, the revamp felt like a regression to the original’s very target of criticism. That to me feels like a failure and a betrayal.
Same with HBO’s Game of Thrones, the adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. If you could take everything about fantasy stories and human politics that the books challenge and critique, the show just reverted to the simplest, dumbest, most cliched fare. The show grew increasingly incoherent as it went on, but I felt the spirit of the books were insulted from the very beginning.
Still, it’s not like I haven’t enjoyed betrayals. Paul Verhoeven’s throughly disrespectful take on Heinlein’s Starship Troopers was great! Verhoeven apparently never even read the original story, and it shows. But on its own, it’s smart and powerful satire. I certainly don’t begrudge fans of the book for being mad though!
As a Barbara Gordon fan, I’ll never fully sign on to the Killing Joke, although what Yale and Ostrander did with the creation of Oracle more than made up for that misfire. DC’s back to basics move with Babs, Hal Jordan, Barry Allen, etc., was my time to say goodbye.
Admittedly, that’s not one of my favorite stories by Moore. He had some growing to do as a writer. Even Watchmen, his first great work, feels tentative compared to some of his later works.
Yeah, Episodes 1-3 killed my enthusiasm for Star Wars. Famously, Natalie Portman is on record saying that she thought her career was over. Portman credits the late Mike Nichols for her post-Princess Amidala resume.
I’m a Star Trek guy.
You have to pick a side.
I saw The Rise of Skywalker with cousins in a theater, then I was loaned The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi on Blu Ray. I had skipped the first two films.
There’s a reason Max Von Sydow makes a cameo in The Force Awakens. Temple Island, I think, is supposed to be a stand-in for Faro. Bergman shot five-to-six films on Bergman Island. What awed me was Luke’s use of the word “religion”; The Force as a religion. That kinda sealed the deal for me. Rian Johnson is referencing Bergman, just like how Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey hilariously uses The Seventh Seal as a source. You could make a eighty-four-minute movie of just Rey and Luke. My mind was reeling. Luke Skywalker lost his religion! Winter Light, I suspect, is the influence, and a little of Hour of the Wolf.
Mark Hamill will go to his grave not knowing how great he was.
The Last Jedi is what happens when you give a filmmaker creative control. I sense one voice, rather than a committee of writers.
I am solidly Star Wars, but MrDutch is a massive Trekkie as well, so by proxy I now know of just about every variant in the Star Trek universe. And Star Trek Discovery on Paramount these days is actually a really decent show.
And Babylon 5, and Stargate, andFarscape, and every series that’s been on SyFy over the past 15 year – total catnip shows for MrDutch. Ironically the one main show on SyFy these days is mine alone – Resident Alien. As he jokingly puts it, given how much I laugh like an absolute idiot during that show, he knows it’s not for him. 😁
About Galaxy Quest, George Takei joked: “I think it’s a chillingly realistic documentary.” Throwing a little shade at William Shatner.
Leonard Nimoy liked being Spock. Alan Rickman, most likely, is sending-up Alec Guinness. Both Rickman’s character and, of course, Guinness are Shakespearean-trained actors.
I’m not the biggest fan of the series and have not seen them all (1 and 3 of the originals, the first of the ‘90s set and all three of the latest version). I guess that shows I rather liked the newest ones, which I did, but without a lot of emotional investment. I do think your analysis is on point.
Am I reading this correctly? The franchise fired a winning director and changed the story line because fanboys objected to a female lead heroine? I haven’t followed the series since Jar Jar Binks but, yeesh, fanboys are such boys.
The backlash to “The Last Jedi” was insane, and shame on Lucasfilm for letting it get as bad as it did, and then making the next film a “Whoops, sorry!”, with some of the stupidest plot points and retconning do-overs I’ve ever seen. That last movie is a trash fire.
You don’t need Emperor Palpatine. Snoke was Kylo Ren’s protege. And then…you give Kylo another mentor, because The Rise of Skywalker messed up his character arc. I suspect Kylo Ren was supposed to be full-on evil. And Daisy Ridley was supposed to carry the film by herself. But they brought back not only Mark Hamill, but Harrison Ford, too. The finale should have been a light saber fight to the death between Rey and the former Ben Solo.
The IMDb killed film culture.
Oh man, the most bizarre thing to me was the backlash that Rose’s character got, in I think the first of the Rey trilogy? So bad that she got dumped to barely even a speaking role by the final film. Like, Asian girls were not supposed to exist in the Star Wars universe. What??? That whole crapstorm baffled me completely.
Not a Star Wars fan, I’ve seen the original three and Phantom Menace and decided that was enough. Seems to be the same story as with so many shows and franchises that any remake that tries to do anything different like casting a non white male in the lead incurs the wrath of a particular element of society outraged that a work of fiction about a fantasy universe doesn’t adhere to anglo saxon ideals.
Had a similar conversation about Doctor Who being a woman where the ageing white males reckoned that had a woman been cast in the role back in the 70s or 80s it would have been meaningful but now it was just pandering to wokeness and to be edgy. Having a daughter it makes me despair that there are people that see things in this way. Instead of having opportunities for all its more important to protect their male ego.
Your daughter is fortunate to have a father who sees this, and is willing to fight the good fight for her, until she is old enough to do so for herself.
Good on you and everyone who try to do right by young girls and women, every damn day.
I imagine that a lot of fanboys who rage that Peter Parker is supposed to be white would tell themselves that they’re just sticklers for staying true to the source content. But the thing is, there are plenty of adaptations that strayed far from the source content–like Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies, and Game of Thrones–where those same fanboys would regard major deviations as negligible, or even as improvements.
It’s like a secular version of “White Jesus” phenomenon. Even if most believers are well versed in the story of the Jewish preacher from ancient Palestine…many tend to picture Jesus as resembling something close to themselves. So there’s Blonde-and-Blue-Eyed Jesus, Black Jesus, Chinese Jesus. As a kid I read about Jesus envisioned by the native Motilone tribes as one of their own. If people were more self aware about this tendency as reflective of their own deep personal connection to something with their own identity, perhaps it would make more sense. But as it’s often expressed, it just seems like uncritical bigotry.
That said, corporate pandering is rampant. Not to say that it’s the big deal that the scolding fans think it is, but symbolic easy fixes over thoughtful progress will often win out when profits are paramount. Whatever the casting decisions may be, I hope they are inspired, rather than focus-grouped, PR-polished boxes to check. Sometimes it’s the former, and sometimes it’s the latter.
During The Phantom Menace, I was thinking: I’d rather be listening to my alma mater play Texas Christian in a conference tournament game. What child is going to be entertained by those speculative C-SPAN scenes?
I love this C-SPAN comparison.
There have been a lot of fan theories about Star Wars, and I have to believe some of their ideas are better than Lucas’.
Don’t get me wrong: I LOVE the Star Wars franchise, and friends and I go and see the new release every year there is one…but George isn’t known for his great dialogue. Let’s get real – the attraction of the first trilogy was the special effects, as Star Wars was one of 4 movies in my life that blew me away with its visual effects. The other 3?
*Terminator 2
*The Matrix
*Inception
But the second trilogy tells us that Anakin goes over to The Dark Side because he loves a girl. What a horrible basis for an entire universe. One fan story suggests that the rigidity of the Jedi is what should’ve been the key, and PHILOSOPHY (Stoicism vs Hedonism) the basis of these movies (sorry, I can’t find the website I read on this).
Then, we have to discuss Jar Jar Binks.
I’ve read (and heard Lucas say) Binks was supposed to be the *key* to Episodes 1-3, but was created/spoken horribly and rejected by Star Wars fans to such a level that plan had to be scrapped.
I would’ve preferred any other version of those episodes than 1-3, though the finale which led to the Rise of Vader was entertaining.
As for Episodes 7-9, the plot holes involving time really, REALLY bothered me. I wasn’t a fan of The Force Awakens because it felt like a victory lap, returning all the old favorites to the screen while rolling out the same exact plot. The next two were…better?
That being said:
I’ve also watched The Mandalorian, and it’s fantastic.
The Phantom Menace had the bad luck of being preceded by The Matrix. It made Star Wars look old and stale.
It’s George Lucas’ toy. He can do whatever he wants. But the guy is humorless. The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi had the same lightness as Guardians of the Galaxy, which to me, is the gold standard for a comic book movie. But hardcore fans felt that Rian Johnson didn’t take the film seriously enough. So Daisy Ridley, pretty much, has her game-face on throughout the whole ordeal. Everything that made her character so appealing in the first two films was erased.
You just shamed me. Oh, no. I started referring to Star Wars as A New Hope somewhere along the line without noticing.
One of them. One of them.
spoiler warning!
my fave is Rogue One (stop reading here if you’ve never seen it!!!)
it’s a wonderfully tight, exciting, and brave film that dares to kill everyone off at the end (a rarity in Hollywood anyway) but it’s not sad or cheap. Instead it is a display of deeply meaningful sacrifice that feels entirely natural for the characters, and a well-earned moment from a storytelling perspective. Yeah we’d love it for Jin and Cassian to go off into the sunset arm in arm, but their story was always going to end with them getting blown up by it. I haven’t seen Andor yet but I’ve heard great things from people I trust, so looking forward to a bit more fleshing out of characters who were already so well-drawn for one film.
“Andor” is, legit, one of the best seasons of a TV show – not a Star Wars TV show, any TV show – I’ve seen in a while. You’ve got to check it out. It’s got a bit of a slow start, but once it gets going? Holy cow.
Eh…I’m a casual-plus Star Wars fan. I enjoy the universe. I liked Andor…looked forward to every episode. Really enjoyed the prison sequence. But in the end it felt a little disjointed, and Andor as a character didn’t totally win me over. I’d give it a B or a B+. But I probably don’t understand important elements of the show and how they relate to the Star Wars canon continuum.
I was rooting for Brie Larson to get the lead, but Rogue One was excellent. Larson got stuck with Captain America.
Emperor Palpatine is the ultimate case and point about how nobody dies in American films.
Yes. Superhero deaths are without worry. Part of why Superman vs Batman was such a chore to watch. Nobody with a pulse actually thought Superman wouldn’t come back to life, so what was the point?
Until the actor dies (see Black Panther), the dead hero will most likely come back to life.
The OT is 2 1/2 great movies, and most of us can deal with the 1/2 that’s silly and not-so-good. They establish timeless characters and locales and create interesting journeys for them to embark on. They are loved and appreciated for good reason. They created myths that, as you noted, many people follow like a religion.
The PT is amazing world-building, paired with terrible plotting, dialogue and characterization. They border on being totally unnecessary, as most everything that happens in them is explained well enough in the OT. They are loved and hated correctly.
The ST is a frustrating mess – great characters tugged in ten different directions. Mystery boxes that go nowhere. Plots that get undone / re-written in subsequent films. Scenes of great beauty and power followed by scenes of head-scratching stupidity.
Mix in Internet culture, and you get people that hate the PT because of hurt feelings (“Not my Luke”. “Ray is a Mary-Sue”), and people struggling to have a conversation about the film’s strengths and weaknesses without getting getting attacked, or called an Incel, or something.
“Rogue One” / Andor / “The Clone Wars” / “Rebels” / most of “The Mandalorian” works because they were made by competent adults who can actually write coherent plots and character arcs.
“Obi-Wan” / “Book Of Boba Fett” / “Solo” are either unnecessary or so beholden to “fan service” that they forgot basic elements like coherent plots and character arcs.
I could probably write 20 books about how I feel about “Star Wars” – this is all I have the emotional energy for right now.
Great article, even if I respectfully and deeply disagree with the last line.
This might blow your mind.
Elizabeth Hand, who writes Star Wars tie-in books, made the NYT Notable Books list with a genre novel called Hokuloa Road.
Thank you, everybody, for commenting.
Thank you, mt58.
Back at you, cappie. We all appreciate your impassioned work when you write for us. Well done!
I have been never been sucked into the Star Wars universe (or, that matter, The Star Trek universe). I’ve been there since both came upon the screen
and I don’t really comprehend the vitriol heaped upon whatever the seguels have been.
George made a big mistake by working backwards with the new prologues instead of continuing forward ( I give big props to “Rogue” for giving us what led to a “New Hope”) but you should never retrace your steps but move on the narration.
I may be getting this wrong, but the Bibilical quote, ” When I was a child, I played as a child but when I became and adult, I put my child toys away”.
Grow up Star Wars and Star Trek fans and move on with your lives
I know what you mean! And yet I’m a fan. I think for me I worry less about what happens to characters I love, and instead get bothered by bad storytelling. And for as great as Star Wars is, there was definitely some storytelling elements that were amateurish.
For me the Star Wars universe was one of those things like finding out Santa isn’t real or realizing that the USA isn’t a perfect country that you thought it was as a kid. I was 7 when Star Wars came out, so to me 4-5-6 were the untouchable gold standard for perfect movies and storytelling. And yet, when later movies came out it was wild to realize that the Star Wars universe wasn’t perfect. Remember George Lucas’ re-mixed original trilogy that came out before episodes 1-2-3? Remember at the end of Return of the Jedi when fireworks go off over the NYC skyline? Hello?-long, long ago were the first words of the first released movie of Star Wars! That was the first crack in the perfection for me.
I wasn’t nearly as offended by the other movies as a lot of people were. I just can’t get THAT excited by it all. But the storyline I was least satisfied with was young Anakin.
First of all, elementary school aged Anakin was way, way too smart/advanced. There are precociously intelligent kids, but I lose patience with movies that make little kids/teens out to be not just geniuses, but experts in trades that would require decades to master. (Rey’s character almost made me feel the same way, but she wasn’t quite as extreme).
And THEN older Anakin was just confined by terrible writing/dialogue. He was so unlikeable as a young Jedi. There was less than zero chemistry between he and Amidala. Which then made his descent to the dark side less believable. It was all very clumsy and unconvincing. It was actually more offensive than Jar Jar Binks to me. Episodes 1-3 are very dry and clumsy, but I still think they’re worth watching if you like the Star Wars universe.
My English teacher at community college worked on a film called Baraka. The post-production was done at Skywalker Sound. Since his trade was script doctor, George Lucas hired him in the very early stages of pre-production. He and Lawrence Kasdan looked at a lot of audition tapes for Anakin as child. Both men agreed that Haley Joel Osment was the best candidate. Baraka was an outlier. Art films was not his forte, but nevertheless, Lucas derailed my teacher’s momentum. The sequel to Baraka, Samsara, was put on hold because the filmmaker got hired for Revenge of the Sith.
I’m older now. I feel bad for Jake Lloyd, now. It must’ve been so brutal for that kid to read all the bad critical notices he received. And he got nominated for a Razzie. It’s not really his fault, though. It’s the dialogue.
I never blamed Jake. He was a cute enough kid. It’s sad how much he was badgered over the years. Indeed the writing/dialogue is more to blame.
In the early days of the pandemic, when we were locked away from everyone, I took LSD for the first time in 20 years.
Having survived The Holy Mountain in one piece, I was watching Samsara, quite enthralled. But at some point my wife was trying to get romantic….right when this scene came on:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MLIcnua1is
Had to shut it off to retain my sanity and capacity for romance, but it’s still burned into my brain.
Hawt!!
I was told by my teacher that Peter Gabriel was originally slated to score Baraka.
I’ve seen Santa Sangre. I actually don’t know what’s stopping me from seeing El Topo and The Holy Mountain. From what I’ve read, Santa Sangre is Jodorowsky’s “commercial” film, by comparison.
Alejandro Jodorowsky is alive.
I hope he has one more film in him.
Santa Sangre is great, and actually pretty much a coherent film. I guess that makes it more commercial? The Holy Mountain is the least like a normal film, with the most intense imagery. I definitely recommend watching that and El Topo. Now, his first film, Fando and Lis? It has its moments, but I can take it or leave it. It’s no Eraserhead.
I definitely feel as though the original trilogy were ‘mine’. They defined my childhood. A lot like the music of my childhood was ‘mine’ in a way in the 80s – carefree youth allows you to soak up entertainment like that much more readily. The Phantom Menace came out while I was in college, and it was a Big Deal of course, but the level of excitement for me was like a tenth of what I had felt as a younger Dutch.
By the time Rey’s trilogy came along, MrDutch and I treated them as sorta kinda big deal, but with even diminished enthusiasm from the Anakin trilogy. And he’s just as much of a Star Wars nerd as I am. I’ll still watch them usually when I come across them on TV, but I have to admit I thought Rouge One was the best of the most recent movies. I think it’s just an impossible task to stay within the Solo/Skywalker/Vader mythology after all these years and try to stay within the set parameters, knowing how every last detail will be pulled apart and scrutinized by fanboys and girls.
Honestly, The Mandalorian, Boba Fett, and Obi-Wan series have been rather refreshing, as they’re more outer fringes in looping back in with the mythology while remaining just recognizable enough that yes, this is the Star Wars universe, but these plotlines are totally plausible and believeable as opposed to Rey’s Trilogy that seemed too forced.
Andor, on the other hand, just couldn’t hold my attention and I gave up watching around episode 4.
Return of The Jedi was my favorite as a kid (c’mon, those Ewoks were awesome when I was 10!!!!), but I have to say my favorite now is Empire Strikes Back. It’s the only one that plays out like a seriously legit movie with a lot of heart and humor, rather than a bombastic popcorn flick, IMO.
Excellent write-up, cappie!
I’ll concede that I don’t understand when Rey found time to train as a pilot. (You’re right, LinkCrawford.)
I guess it’s The Force guiding her.
I’ve seen many films in which people seemed to completely miss the humor, or subtle joke. (Nobody laughs at Wes Anderson films where I live.) I wish I saw The Last Jedi with an audience. I want to know if people laughed when Rey tells Luke Skywalker: “I’ve seen your daily routine. You’re not busy.” Rian Johnson, and Abrams in The Force Awakens, allows her to act like a “girl”. The female lead is usually asked to be masculine or gender neutral in action films. Like in The Force Awakens, she rebuffs Finn’s help repeatedly when they’re escaping. “Stop holding my hand!” But on the Millennium Falcon, when faced with one of those killer octopuses, she shows off a girly side, widening her eyes and covering her mouth in horror. In this instance, Finn is the one who’s unafraid. Balance is restored. I don’t think it was the filmmaker’s intention to start a battle of the sexes. They just wanted a strong female lead.
If you look at the first shot in The Force Awakens, you’ll see Kylo Ren’s ship moving vertically and diagonally across a planet. There is an appendage sticking out in front of the ship. I think that’s Rian Johnson giving the fanboys who disparaged the casting of Daisy Ridley the finger.
Thank you, dutchg8r.