Disney Star Wars Retrospective - Episode II: Revenge of the Cinema
10,000+ words ~ 42 min read
Oh, how great it was to have been a Star Wars fan in 2015. Rebels was in full swing, with the incredible Ahsoka Tano being revealed as the operative behind the “Fulcrum” alias, and anticipation was through the roof for the upcoming release of Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens. And rightly so, as the film presented in the trailers, posters, and other marketing materials Lucasfilm produced in the run-up to the film’s December 18th release date promised to satisfy the nostalgia of old fans while still offering plenty of new characters, worlds, and stories to discover.
That said, there was still a significant amount of cautious optimism underlining the fandom during this time. The memory of the disappointment that was The Phantom Menace—and the Prequel Trilogy as a whole—loomed large in the minds of fans, leading many reluctant to buy into the hype. Nevertheless, the general atmosphere of excitement was easy to get swept up in. After all, this was a new era for the franchise. Disney, the brand’s new corporate overlord, was riding high on the success of their Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), which took the comic book characters and stories once beloved only by a niche but dedicated fandom into a mainstream powerhouse of popular culture while not alienating those original fans in the process. As such, it was not unreasonable for Star Wars fans at the time to hope that Disney’s management of the property would provide similar results.
Not only that, but a host of both returning and brand-new creative voices were involved with the project. J.J. Abrams, the man behind the successful 2009 Star Trek reboot, was hired to direct, and would write the script alongside Lawrence Kasdan, who’d worked on the screenplays for both The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983), with contributions from Michael Arndt, writer of the pitch-perfect adaptation of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013). Notably, George Lucas would not be involved beyond a brief story consulting role early in pre-production (though his ideas were eventually discarded). At the time, this was seen by many as a boon rather than a hindrance as he was often blamed for the shortcomings of the Prequel Trilogy, that nearly all of their idiosyncrasies were the result of Lucas’ weaknesses as a writer and director, and that few in the production were willing to contradict him as he was the “Great Visionary” behind the beloved Original Trilogy. The Prequels ultimately revealed that Lucas worked best when he had others around him to redirect and support his creative impulses, though many wondered if he had simply grown too far out of touch with what audiences wanted to see from the Star Wars universe. Therefore, his detachment from the Sequel Trilogy led fans to believe the new films might somehow manage to recapture the magic of the Original Trilogy after all.
For the most part, this belief was proven true, as when The Force Awakens premiered in December 2015, it debuted to rave reviews and record-setting numbers at the box office, proving the hype was more than justified. Fans and critics alike lauded the film for its exciting set pieces, incredible visual and special effects, and compelling characters introduced by the film. At the same time, many were quick to point out its aesthetic and structural similarities to previous entries in the series, particularly to Episode IV – A New Hope (1977). A brief plot synopsis illustrates this: An orphan on a desert planet discovers a dormant connection to the Force and joins an upstart Rebellion/Resistance in fighting against the tyrannical Empire/First Order, which seeks to subjugate the galaxy through the use of a planet-killing mega-weapon. Furthermore, much of the plot is driven by a secret message carried by a lost droid that has to be delivered to the good guys’ secret base before the bad guys can get ahold of it. However, the film still did enough to differentiate itself from A New Hope and not be merely a shot-for-shot remake of it by giving its characters unique motivations and personalities compared to their predecessors. While Luke Skywalker (Mark Hammil) and Rey (Daisy Ridley) both originated on desert planets, Luke was a farm boy, and Rey was an abandoned scavenger. Both yearned to escape their oppressive homes, but both found distinct reasons to stay—Luke so as to not leave his aunt and uncle to manage their farm alone, and Rey to wait for the family she was sure would return. Moreover, Rey’s fierce independence, born from a life of struggle in a hostile environment, is repeatedly affirmed throughout the film, whereas Luke often relied heavily on the help of others to get by in the wider galaxy, reflective of his relatively sheltered upbringing in the isolated Tatooine desert.
Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) most obviously parallels Han Solo (Harrison Ford) in that he’s a rogueish and charismatic pilot. But where Han was an opportunistic smuggler, more interested in the money to be earned in rescuing a princess than in the righteous cause underpinning it (until he triumphantly returns to help Luke blow up the Death Star and subsequently join the Rebellion), Poe is “the best pilot in the Resistance.” He’s a freedom fighter, devoted to the cause of preserving the Republic and destroying the First Order, a far cry from the self-interested scoundrel that Han Solo starts out as.
Kylo Ren/Ben Solo (Adam Driver) is similarly analogous to Darth Vader/Anakin Skywalker (David Prowse and James Earl Jones), a pupil of the light who was seduced by the dark side and is also related to one of our main characters. And yet, The Force Awakens shows us that his fall from grace was nothing like Vader’s before him. Though he wears a scary mask and head-to-toe black, he bears none of the disfiguring scars that marked Vader’s turn to evil, nor is he the measured-yet-strict enforcer of the pure power that Vader was. Rather, he’s more of a temperamental child, channeling his anger and insecurities through both his lightsaber and the Force, and who also happens to command an army of loyal followers as a bonus.
Finn (John Boyega) is arguably the most original character introduced in The Force Awakens. Kidnapped as a child and raised to be a First Order stormtrooper, he defects after seeing his first action and spends the rest of the film switching between trying to run away from the life he left behind and trying to keep his new friend Rey out of trouble. There truly weren’t any characters like him in the established canon of films, and his uniqueness demonstrated a clear desire by the filmmakers to develop a distinct identity for the Sequel Trilogy compared to its predecessors.
However, while the film certainly was more original than some gave it credit for, it still leaned heavily on paying homage to the most beloved aspects of the Original Trilogy, even beyond the desert-dwelling orphans and planet-killing mega-weapons. The Skywalker lightsaber is treated as an object with innate spiritual power, serving as the catalyst for Rey’s awakening in the Force, paralleling the way in which Luke’s journey with the lightsaber ignited the imaginations of Star Wars fans everywhere. Furthermore, legacy characters like Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, and Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher) are treated as legends with whom our protagonists are already well acquainted through the stories of their exploits, in much the same way fans of the franchise venerate them and the films that originated them as if they were sacred texts. The omnipresence of X-Wings and TIE Fighters is also an extension of this reflexive reverence for the Original Trilogy, as is the role of the Millenium Falcon in the film as the vessel of choice for our heroes throughout the film.
These creative choices continue the trend established by Rebels of borrowing much of its aesthetics and iconography of the Original Trilogy. But where this was justified in Rebels by nature of its premise and place in the timeline, The Force Awakens has far fewer excuses. For starters, the Resistance and First Order don’t need to use the same fighting vehicles as the Rebellion and Empire before them. After all, more in-universe time elapsed between the events of Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens than did Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope, and yet the design of the vehicles featured across the films change far more drastically in the latter pair than in the former. While I’m sure the filmmakers can offer an in-universe explanation for this, the real truth behind it is more likely that they believed audiences wanted to see the ships they knew and loved, or that they’d be more willing to accept the newer elements if they were accompanied by things they already knew. Either way, the decision to keep the fleet vehicles of the good guys and the bad guys the same as they were in the Original Trilogy is yet more evidence that the franchise’s producers were often prioritizing fan service over original storytelling as they sought to reimagine its identity following the Disney buyout.
With all that in mind, it’s important to recognize that The Force Awakens played an important role in winning back general audiences’ interest in Star Wars after the reputational disaster that was the Prequel Trilogy. Perhaps leaning on the iconography of the Original Trilogy so heavily was exactly what the franchise needed to regain the trust of the wider public before subsequent films could push the series in new and interesting directions.
The first test of this theory would come in the form of 2016’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, the franchise’s first live-action theatrical spin-off film. It tells the story of the daring Rebels who stole the Death Star plans, which were later used to uncover and exploit its critical weakness during the events of A New Hope. Like Rebels before it, its premise and place in the timeline meant it would naturally feature the iconography of the Original Trilogy—stormtroopers, X-Wings, TIE Fighters, the Death Star, etc. And just like Rebels as well as The Force Awakens, this need not have prevented it from telling an engaging story with original compelling characters. Unfortunately, this was not the case. The main protagonists of the film, Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) and Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) have paper-thin motivations and personalities, as do much of the supporting cast around them. Audiences are frankly given little reason to grow attached to them over the course of the film, and thus can hardly be asked to care when they start getting picked off one by one during the climax of the film. Instead, it’s expected that they’ll already know why the events of this film matter from having seen A New Hope and therefore need nothing more than token appearances by the characters that film created to keep them invested, as evidenced by the cameos of Darth Vader, C-3PO, R2-D2, and uncanny CGI reanimations of Grand Moff Tarkin and young Princess Leia,
But Rogue One goes beyond the pool of easily recognizable faces listed above, pulling in some of the more obscure characters in the Star Wars canon. The most prevalent of these is Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker), a leader in the Rebel Alliance, who makes his live action debut after having been introduced in The Clone Wars and returning in Rebels. A character originating in animation jumping into live action is not without precedent in Star Wars, as Boba Fett debuted in an animated segment of the Star Wars Holiday Special before appearing in The Empire Strikes Back, and General Grievous was in Genndy Tartakovsky’s Star Was: Clone Wars animated series before showing up in Revenge of the Sith. But the projects where these characters originated were developed in tandem with their live-action debuts, whereas Saw was not. As such, his role in Rogue One can be understood in a different context, more as “fan service” than as a natural extension of an existing storyline.
That said, despite a perhaps fan-servicey motive for his appearance, Saw Gerrera’s presence is more justified than those of Cornelius Evazan and Ponda Baba.
Hang on, who? Remember in A New Hope when Luke orders a drink in the cantina and two guys start threatening him, only for Obi-wan to step in and literally disarm one of them before they can kill him? Yeah, it’s those guys. They only appear for a brief moment in Rogue One, but it’s long enough for diehard Star Wars fans to notice and recognize them. What are they doing here, you might be asking? Absolutely nothing except appearing on screen just long enough for diehard Star Wars fans to notice and recognize them. They are the ultimate example of Rogue One’s fan service and are an early example of the “Glup Shitto,” a term coined much later to refer to the phenomenon of obscure Star Wars characters reappearing in newer media for little reason other than for fans to point and say, “I know that guy!”
Now, that’s not to say that general audiences disliked Rogue One. In fact, the film was quite well-received upon its release and is still beloved by most of the fandom today. However, its critical and commercial success can ultimately be understood to be a result of this fan service and its dependence on familiar iconography rather than its originality. More people are inclined to fondly remember Darth Vader’s “hallway scene” than they are Jyn and Cassian wordlessly battling stormtroopers on Jedha.
Either way, by the time the first trailer for Episode VIII was released in early 2017, the Disney Star Wars era was still seen by most as a resounding success. With an acclaimed animated television series and two hit films under their belt, what could possibly go wrong?
I don’t think I need to explain just how vicious the response to Episode VIII was in certain sections of the internet, but I have to, as it marks the inception of a large schism within the fandom which has yet to heal.
Full disclosure before I continue: I love The Last Jedi. It is far and away my favorite Star Wars movie ever. That said, I will do my best to assess the film and the criticisms leveled against it as objectively as possible. With that out of the way, it’s time to talk about the so-called “Fandom Menace,” an informal collective of content creators who erroneously believe that Disney is “ruining Star Wars” through “forced diversity.” They are among the ideological and tactical heirs of “Gamergate,” a similar movement that proclaimed to advocate for “ethics in games journalism.” However, both have been responsible for serious harassment campaigns against the individuals they view as persona non grata in their respective “nerd” communities. Ultimately, these are reactionary movements driven largely by and for cishet white men who are resentful of the growing visibility of women, queer people, and people of color in popular culture and have resorted to extremist rhetoric and tactics in an effort to preserve the “purity” of their fandoms—this despite such people having always been part of these communities but are only now being represented in the media they enjoy. The Fandom Menace is therefore, in essence, a fascist-coded political movement centered around media consumption, in which adherents and participants wish to return to an imagined past when Star Wars was “pure” and “good” rather than “woke” and “bad.”
While there was a degree of racist and misogynist backlash to The Force Awakens, with opponents railing against the film’s Black and female protagonists—Finn and Rey respectively—it failed to gain the same kind of traction that the Fandom Menace did in the wake of The Last Jedi. The reasons why it failed are multiple: first, the film’s overall quality and its reliance on familiar iconography helped fans and general audiences alike to feel warmly about it and thus not be swayed by the “anti-woke” crusade against it; second, those most vocally criticizing Rey as a “Mary Sue” and Finn as “forced diversity” were most often also proponents of Gamergate, and by late 2015 when the film released, were widely understood to be grifters with an axe to grind rather than good-faith critics; and third, this was before the 2016 election and the rise of the far-right under Donald Trump. It’s easy to forget now that he’s been out of office for some time, but his presence in national politics lent legitimacy to these cranks and weirdos that they did not have before, leading to an increase in their overall influence by the time The Last Jedi came out and helped open the Fandom Menace’s proverbial floodgates.
So, what did The Last Jedi do that enraged these chuds as much as it did? In addition to still having the same main characters as The Force Awakens, it also added Rose Tico (Kelly Marie Tran) and Vice Admiral Holdo (Laura Dern), two female characters—and one played by an Asian-American—in central roles in the story. Not only that, but it also brought the great Luke Skywalker down to the level of a lowly hermit, a far cry from the legendary hero the galaxy—and the fans—knew him as.
But that doesn’t explain why the hatred against The Last Jedi became as widespread as it did. After all, The Force Awakens committed many of these same “sins of wokeness,” and its opposition didn’t receive nearly the same level of prominence as its successor’s did. To understand why, we have to analyze the film itself to figure out what it was trying to do, why audiences might have reacted poorly to it, and how the Fandom Menace were able to capitalize on that.
The story of The Last Jedi can be divided into three separate but intertwined plotlines. The first centers around Rey and Luke on Ahch-To. We rejoin them right where we left off at the end of The Force Awakens, with Rey offering Luke his old saber, inviting him to return and fight the First Order on behalf of the Resistance. But he rejects it, callously tossing the hilt over his shoulder and refusing her pleas for help. Eventually, he agrees to teach her the ways of the Jedi…and why they need to end.
This is not the Luke Skywalker we last saw the end of Return of the Jedi, the one who declared himself to be “a Jedi, like my father before me.” Many fans felt hurt and betrayed by this, that the great Jedi they knew and loved would fall from grace was unconscionable. They wanted Luke to take back his saber and take on the whole First Order by himself. But that was not the story The Last Jedi would tell, nor should it have been. For him to have done that would have effectively sidelined our new characters and done the trilogy a disservice by retreating further into meaningless fan service. Instead, writer and director Rian Johnson (Knives Out, Looper) looked at what The Force Awakens had established and took the next logical step. Luke didn’t run away for no reason at all, and he wouldn’t be convinced to return so easily either. The motive behind his exile, the film explains, is that he inadvertently caused his nephew to turn to the Dark Side, and the shame and guilt he felt as a result of that shook his faith in the Jedi and the Force so severely that he abandoned them altogether. Therefore, when Rey bonds with Kylo Ren through the Force and believes he can be brought back to the Light, his sense that he failed to prevent his fall in the first place is too heavy for him to accept that as even a remote possibility. But she leaves anyway, and he decides to burn the island’s Jedi Temple and its sacred texts, to destroy them and the values they represent once and for all. But in this moment of weakness, his old teacher, Master Yoda, appears to him and reminds him of his responsibility in this moment. His failure at preventing Ben’s corruption and in convincing Rey of the folly of the Jedi is not a condemnation but an opportunity because, as Yoda explains: “Failure, the greatest teacher is.” He should have learned from his mistakes rather than run from them. Now, when the galaxy needs him the most, he’s nowhere to be found. But there’s still time. He can still provide the Resistance with the spark of hope it needs and inspire the next generation of heroes to fight in his absence. Which is precisely what he does when he projects himself onto Crait to, in his own words, “walk out with a laser sword and take on the whole First Order by [himself].” His actions are not only the ultimate heroic sacrifice (as the exertion is too much and he becomes one with the Force after he’s finished), but it is also the most perfectly Jedi thing he could have possibly done. He gave himself up to allow others to escape. Not only that, but he did so without harming a single person. If the Jedi lost their way when they became warriors for the Republic, then Luke’s sacrifice represents the Order’s rebirth and its embrace of the ideals of peace and justice that it once stood for. So, while I understand why some might have felt slighted by Luke’s sorry state at the start of the film, it’s disingenuous to say that he’s only that. Rather, the film puts him in such a low spot because: one, that’s how the previous film established him; and two, it services his ultimate redemption as the great hero the galaxy needed and reaffirms the need for the Jedi as guardians of the Light.
The next plotline to discuss is the one revolving around Poe’s secret plan to save the day without Vice Admiral Holdo finding out. For context, this comes after Poe is demoted when plan to destroy a Dreadnought-class First Order Star Destroyer results in him losing most of his squadron along with the Resistance’s entire bombing fleet. So when Holdo takes command after Leia’s knocked out of commission, his reputation leads her to not trust him and thus exclude him from her plan to save the fleet. But because he can’t stand to sit down and let someone else be the hero, he joins Finn and Rose in concocting a plan to break onto Snoke’s Star Destroyer and disable the system that allowed the First Order to track them through hyperspace. But the plan is doomed to fail, and it ultimately results in the Resistance’s true escape plan being discovered and the First Order continuing their pursuit to the surface of Crait, where Poe rallies a last-ditch attempt at halting the enemy’s advance. But when his team starts getting picked off one by one, he now knows to retreat before it gets out of hand, having learned his lesson from before. Then, when Luke arrives to confront the First Order, he realizes it’s a distraction and that the correct response is not to join him but to use the opportunity it creates to escape, thus completing his arc from hotshot pilot to level-headed leader, the exact thing the Resistance needs given its dire circumstances. It also goes along perfectly with the theme of learning from one’s failures established through Luke’s character arc, with Poe learning how to be a leader by reflecting on the shortcomings of his more impulsive plans and becoming more strategic as he considers new ones.
And yet, many of the film’s critics would describe this subplot as frustrating or even pointless as it all could have been easily avoided if Holdo had only told Poe what her plan was from the start. And while I can understand how it would feel this way in the moment, there are legitimate reasons why Holdo wouldn’t tell him what’s going on. Seeing as he was just recently demoted for poor judgment and insubordination, it’s reasonable for her to not believe he could be counted on to execute her orders as needed. It’s not her fault that he decided to go behind her back and develop an even riskier plan of his own. But from a story standpoint, it ultimately helped him on his journey to becoming a respected leader in his own right and thus contributes positively to the film as a whole.
Finally, we have the Finn and Rose subplot, which begins as an extension of Poe’s subplot but ultimately exists to give Finn a character arc of his own. Despite that, this section, particularly the scenes on Canto Bight, is often derided as unnecessary filler that contributes nothing to the overall story. They go there looking for the “Master Codebreaker,” only to leave with DJ (Benicio del Toro), a common thief they wound up incarcerated with. And even when they do succeed in breaking into Snoke’s Star Destroyer, their plan still fails when they’re captured and are only saved thanks to the fortunate timing of Holdo ramming the ship at lightspeed to save the escaping Resistance transports, an act which is only necessary because of DJ’s duplicity. So yes, the Resistance would have been better off if they’d never carried out this plan, but then Poe would have never learned how to be a proper leader, nor would Finn have learned what it meant to embrace a struggle instead of simply running from it. That’s what this subplot is all about.
Without going to Canto Bight with Rose, without seeing the slavery and oppression that allows for such opulence in service of the arms dealers that profit from it, he would never have been willing to sacrifice himself by flying his skimspeeder into the throat of the battering ram cannon at the end of the film. DJ is equally important to his journey as well, serving as the devil on Finn’s shoulder arguing against Rose’s angel. If Rose is trying to get him to care about more than the comfort and safety of himself and his friends, than DJ is telling him the opposite, that moral detachment from the politics and war is good, actually. Ultimately, Finn sides with Rose and becomes a true believer in the cause of the Resistance, rather than the opportunistic runaway he was throughout The Force Awakens and at the start of this film.
Now, I do need to talk about the elephant in the room. The way this subplot ends is controversial, to say the least, and while I understand why you might think Finn should have been allowed to complete his sacrifice, I believe it was the right decision to stop it. Not only would it be a disservice to the trilogy to kill off one of its main characters before the third film, but it also wouldn’t have done much to help the Resistance in the first place. The First Order would still march on and infiltrate the base, and the Resistance would not be able to hold them off for very long on their own. The best course of action then, as Poe rightly understood, was to regroup and reevaluate their position and not lose any more soldiers. That’s why Rose had to crash into him to save his life. Now, what happens next is a little trickier to parse, but I’ll try my best. I will admit, the kiss was a bit corny, especially when it’s backdropped by a massive explosion. However, I think we can unpack her line before that as I believe it speaks to what Finn’s arc is really all about.
After saving him, Rose explains that they will win not by “fighting what we hate,” but “saving what we love.” What does this mean exactly? On the surface, you could see her use of “love” as romantic in some way, an interpretation backed up by the kiss that follows. But I believe the line to be more symbolic of what Finn needed to learn in order to be an effective advocate for liberty and justice in the galaxy the Resistance sought to preserve. It wasn’t enough to be motivated by a desire to destroy your enemies; you had to have something to fight for, something you cared about, be that a group of people or an ideology of some kind. Finn’s attempted sacrifice was born more out of a desire for revenge against the people who kidnapped and enslaved him rather than a legitimate belief in the just causes of the Resistance. That’s not to say that violence in pursuit of that end is immoral, but rather that, without the proper motivation, it can result in ineffectual tactics and strategic blunders that ultimately hinder the movement overall.
All of this put together makes The Last Jedi one of the most thematically rich films in the saga, on par with some of the prequel films’ attempts at complex political themes. I use the word “attempts” here because I don’t believe the prequels do as an effective job of conveying their messages about how democratic republics can fall to tyranny in times of crisis as The Last Jedi does its themes of the righteous rebellion and personal redemption. You can certainly see the structure of these ideas throughout the prequels, but it’s so bogged down by substandard performances and unconvincing visual effects that it becomes nearly invisible. As such, I would argue that The Last Jedi succeeds where the others failed in that Rian Johnson is simply a better writer and director than George Lucas was when making the prequels. This is not say that Lucas is a bad filmmaker, only that the circumstances under which he made the Prequel Trilogy only revealed his weaknesses as an artist. The Original Trilogy and the Indiana Jones films show that he works best when he’s working with others. Rian Johnson, on the other hand, routinely writes and directs his scripts on his own, and has shown time and time again that he can be trusted to independently develop and produce films in that manner.
This is all well and good, but I do need to return to the question that started this section, and that’s this: why do people dislike The Last Jedi so much? For the average Star Wars fan, I don’t think you can attribute it to the sort of racism and sexism that unifies the Fandom Menace. Rather, I think it had more to do with just how much The Last Jedi set out to accomplish and the different ways it went about doing that. I’ve already touched on how the main plotlines may have rubbed some the wrong way, but it’s also important to note the ways in which the culture of fan theories spurned by The Force Awakens led to some of the backlash following The Last Jedi. Episode VII introduces Rey as someone yearning to be reunited with an unseen family, and when she was revealed to be incredibly gifted with the Force, many fans thought this to indicate that she was related to some powerful Force-wielder we already knew. This set off an avalanche of speculation about who her parents or grandparents really were, with Luke Skywalker, Obi-wan Kenobi, and Emperor Palpatine all being thrown around as legitimate contenders. So when The Last Jedi decides to answer this question by revealing Rey to be a nobody, her parents “filthy junk traders who sold [her] for drinking money,” it might’ve felt like a slap in the face to those fans who had spent so much of the time between the films imagining who Rey was related to.
The thing with that is that Rey being a nobody makes perfect sense both narratively and thematically. If Rey were a Skywalker or a Palpatine or a Kenobi, what would that mean to her? Nothing. She doesn’t know these people. Perhaps if she were related to Luke then she may feel some degree of resentment towards him for abandoning her, but then wouldn’t Kylo Ren have told her that anyway to get her to join him? Except he didn’t. Instead, he told the truth because it was the very last thing Rey wanted to hear. Early on, Rey tells Luke that she wants “someone to show me my place in all of this.” So if she’d found out that she was part of some legendary family of Force users, then it would be just the thing she wanted. But it wasn’t what she needed. What she needed was the truth, that she came from nowhere but still had this great power inside her, because that would inform her journey going forward. It gave her the freedom to choose what side she takes, who and what she fights for, unburdened by ideas of legacy or lineage, which in turn makes her the perfect foil to Kylo Ren, the heir to the Skywalker name and all the baggage that comes with it. So while it may have angered fans initially to hear that their theories were bullshit, it’s actually the only answer that makes sense given the story being told.
The other main mystery implicitly established by The Force Awakens which The Last Jedi sought to answer was the importance of Supreme Leader Snoke. It was understandable for fans coming out of Episode VII to wonder who this guy was, where he came from and what he wanted. Given that it was a sequel in a long running film series, it’s reasonable to assume that he might have been a secret pupil of Palpatine’s or some independent agent of darkness, operating in the shadows while the Empire crumbled. As such, fans spent a considerable amount of time speculating on Snoke’s background as they waited for Episodes VIII and IX to confirm their theories. So when Kylo Ren betrays Snoke by slicing him in half with the Skywalker saber, it read as yet another case of The Last Jedi mocking these fans for daring to theorize on the mysteries established by The Force Awakens. Only this is yet another example of the film recognizing what direction the story should go and doing that, rather than simply giving the fans what they want.
When developing the story of The Last Jedi, Rian Johnson rightly recognized that the more interesting conflict in the trilogy was the one between Rey and Kylo Ren and the things they represented. Rey the Nobody and Kylo Ren the Nepo Baby, both equally powerful in the Force but pulled in opposite directions by their respective backgrounds. The Light and the Dark, pushing and pulling on one another in an eternal struggle for balance. How did Snoke fit into all of this? Han Solo was right when he told Ben that “Snoke is using you for your power. When he gets what he wants he’ll crush you.” Snoke only ever wanted Ben for his mighty Skywalker blood and saw his connection to Darth Vader as a way of twisting and manipulating him towards the Dark Side. Kylo Ren eventually realizes this, and that’s why he kills him. As he explains himself, “Let the past die. Kill it if you have to. That’s the only way to become what you were meant to be.” He says this to Rey, but in truth, he’s talking about himself. His entire life has been defined by the legacy of his ancestors, the good and the bad. All he wants is to be free of that, to be allowed to decide for himself what course his life will take. And since Snoke stands in the way of that, he must be eliminated. That’s also why he kills his father, the war hero, and why he wants to kill Luke Skywalker, Jedi Master. They all represent the shadow of the legacy he’s trying to run away from. Snoke ultimately didn’t matter to the story of the Sequel Trilogy, and the film therefore had no reason to explain who he was before he became the Supreme Leader. That’s what spin-offs are for.
Regardless of the narrative justifications for these decisions, they nevertheless left a sour taste in the mouths of many fans as they left the theater after watching the film, a feeling the Fandom Menace was all too eager to exploit in pursuit of their ant-Disney, “anti-woke” agenda. What made their attacks against the film so persuasive this time around was that they weren’t just complaining about the presence of women and minorities but about details of the plot itself. So while the Fandom Menace had gone into the film knowing they’d hate it for ideological reasons, it became easy to point to these aspects of the film as “legitimate criticisms” instead of their usual thinly-veiled hate-filled tirades. Those fans who then went online to see what others had to say about the film were immediately inundated with scores of videos, tweets, and reddit threads from the Fandom Menace and their followers ravaging it for “ruining Luke Skywalker,” killing Snoke without explaining his backstory, and pointing out the supposed “plot holes” in the mutiny/Canto Bight subplot, all of which helped to sway public opinion against The Last Jedi. This is not to say there weren’t others online at the time singing the film’s praises—established film critics are mostly unanimous in celebrating it—but the opposition all but dominated the discourse from the very beginning. Not only that, but the tenor of the conversation was so hostile that many fans were persuaded into believing that the film was beyond redemption, that you shouldn’t even bother rewatching it because it’s just that bad. I sincerely believe that if more people revisited the film with an open mind, they might find their opinion of it changed or at least softened.
But in early 2018, the effects were obvious. The Fandom Menace’s anti-Disney Star Wars agenda had gone mainstream within the fandom. Not only that, but some of its worst actions had resulted in wider media coverage, like when a racist and sexist hate mob of Fandom Menace acolytes bullied Kelly Marie Tran off the internet for the crime of portraying a character in a Star Wars movie they didn’t like. Again, I’m not saying that everyone who dislikes the movie is racist and/or sexist, but it’s undeniable that an inordinate amount of the criticism levied against the film was propagated by a concerted movement bent on poisoning the discourse with bad-faith attacks on the film and the people who made it, one that cloaked its bigotry through less objectionable rhetoric that still emboldened those who shared their beliefs to act on it.
This was the general atmosphere when the next film in the Disney era came into. Solo: A Star Wars Story, released in May 2018, was the second spin-off film released since the Lucasfilm buyout and was also its weakest both critically and commercially. Initial reviews were mixed, mostly praising the cast’s performances but criticizing its inconsistent tone, which was almost certainly the result of its troubled production. Even before the film was released, the headlines about it weren’t great. Midway through shooting, the original directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (The Lego Movie, 21 Jump Street) were let go due to “creative differences” with the studio and replaced with Ron Howard (Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind), who would be responsible for finishing the film and also reshooting much of Lord and Miller’s material as well. This alone contributed to the film’s problems from a storytelling standpoint, but it also lent credence to the narrative being spun by the Fandom Menace that Disney and Lucasfilm were micromanaging the Star Wars brand into the ground. Furthermore, rumors that the film’s producers had brought in an acting coach for Alden Ehrenreich, the actor cast in the role of young Han Solo, only helped to sour fans and audiences against the film before it could even hit theaters.
Once all was said and done, the result was clear. The film, with a massive budget of at least $275 million—largely due to its production woes—returned only $393.2 million at the global box office. On paper this seems like it turned a profit, but blockbusters of this scale often spend around double their stated budget on marketing, meaning it would have had to make somewhere in the ballpark of $500 million on the low end to even break even.
Its failure to receive the support of general audiences is the result of several factors. First is the aforementioned toxic discourse surrounding the franchise following The Last Jedi. If audiences went to see Rogue One because they’d enjoyed The Force Awakens, then it’s reasonable to assume that the general antipathy towards The Last Jedi would have the opposite effect on its follow-up. Second, you can also point to the shorter period between the releases of these films as part of the problem. An entire year passed between The Force Awakens and Rogue One, giving audiences a chance to miss the franchise and get excited for the next installment. Meanwhile, Solo came out only five months after The Last Jedi, in time for the summer blockbuster season, yes, but perhaps too soon to have general audiences eager to check out the next Star Wars thing.
You can also see Solo’s failure to generate much buzz in the box office as the result of a general disinterest in Star Wars spin-offs. For the average consumer prior to 2015, Star Wars was a series of six films telling the story of Anakin Skywalker’s rise, fall, and ultimate redemption. While they might be vaguely aware of stories within the Star Wars universe outside of that, they were not necessarily the big-screen blockbuster events that the main saga had been. Probably the most well-known of its spin-offs was The Clone Wars series on Cartoon Network, but even that, along with the EU/Legends canon of novels and comics, were largely seen as the domain of Star Wars nerds and children, things the average moviegoer didn’t need to worry about. As such, a spin-off film, even one focusing on a familiar character from the Original Trilogy, would not be as easy a sell as an all-new entry to the Skywalker saga.
This then raises the question: if spin-off Star Wars films would not appeal to general audiences, then how did Rogue One succeed? I can point to three things to help explain that. First is the residual hype from The Force Awakens carrying enough momentum for general audiences to be interested in it. Second is that the considerable amount of Original Trilogy imagery peppered throughout the marketing for the film likely created a sense of familiarity with the story being told; even if there were new characters and planets involved, audiences would still feel warmth at seeing Darth Vader, the Death Star, and the like again. And third is that the events of the film tied directly into the saga, specifically A New Hope, as it effectively told a more detailed version of the film’s opening crawl.
Solo, however, while also set in the period between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope, did not feature nearly the same degree of familiar iconography as Rogue One had, apart from the titular character and the Millenium Falcon. Nor could they market it as a necessary piece of Star Wars lore in the same way that Rogue One was. What did it matter how Han Solo won the Millenium Falcon and became the smuggler we knew and loved? You don’t need to know all that to still get excited when he helps Luke rescue the Princess and save the day. From its premise alone, Solo had a much harder time selling itself to general audiences compared to Rogue One. It also didn’t help that it just wasn’t of a high enough quality for word of mouth to generate interest either.
Even for the general audiences who did turn out to see it but hadn’t been following the franchise outside of the main saga, a moment at the film’s conclusion likely left them scratching their heads in confusion. That is, when Qi’ra (Emilia Clarke), having taken over Dryden Vos’ (Paul Bettanny) division of the Crimson Dawn crime syndicate, contacts Darth Maul, the organization’s leader, to pledge her loyalty to him. For viewers who were unaware of Maul’s return in The Clone Wars and Rebels this moment must have struck them as an out-of-left-field reveal that a character they last saw falling down a reactor shaft in two pieces was not only alive but also running one of the most powerful organized crime rackets in the galaxy. His presence here is entirely as fan service to those fans who were up-to-date on The Clone Wars and Rebels and is utterly lost on anyone didn’t.
Comparing his appearance to Saw Gerrera’s in Rogue One can help us understand why one works and the other doesn’t. When Saw shows up in Rogue One, you don’t necessarily need to know that we first met him leading an insurgent campaign against the Separatists during The Clone Wars to understand his place in this story as a Rebel leader and mentor to Jyn Erso, as those are clearly established by the film itself. But with Maul, his return and journey to becoming a crime lord was only ever shown in the animated spin-off shows which, while popular among Star Wars fans, were largely ignored by the general movie-going public who might have been interested in Solo otherwise. So while you might see Maul’s inclusion as a positive in that it might inspire some of those ignorant viewers to give The Clone Wars and Rebels a shot, it has an equal if not greater chance of having the opposite effect of turning them away from the film all together. No one wants to do “homework” before watching a Star Wars movie.
Well, I guess I have to talk about The Rise of Skywalker now. Where do I even begin? Episode IX, the grand finale of both the Sequel Trilogy and the Skywalker Saga, could not have been more of a complete and utter disappointment. There’s a lot to unpack here, so I’ll start by going over the film’s production and how that led to the finished product being what it was. Which is bad. Really, really bad.
In August 2015, Lucasfilm announced that Colin Trevorrow would direct the then-untitled Episode IX, writing the script with his longtime writing partner Derek Connolly. At the time, they seemed like an excellent choice considering they were hot off the heels of their wildly successful Jurassic World, a reboot of the Kathleen Kennedy-produced Jurassic Park franchise. Surely, they could be trusted to create the epic conclusion to one of the most beloved franchises in cinema history.
Then, in 2017, after over a year of preproduction, Trevorrow and Connolly left the project, again citing “creative differences” with the top brass at Lucasfilm. Rumors abounded that Kathleen Kennedy had soured on the duo after they’d failed to turn in a satisfactory screenplay, despite several revisions. But since the film was slated for a May 24, 2019, release date, they’d have to put together a new creative team fast if they wanted to avoid any serious delays. A few names were tossed around, including Episode VIII director Rian Johnson and David Fincher (Fight Club, Gone Girl), but ultimately, J.J. Abrams was brought back to finish what he’d started, with Chris Terrio, the writer of such hit films as Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice and Justice League coming in to help write the script.
This was bad enough already, as a film of this scale changing its writers and director so late in the game rarely results in a quality product, as evidenced by Solo. But as if to add insult to injury, they were also tasked with working around Carrie Fisher’s untimely passing in December 2016. Fortunately for The Last Jedi, all of her footage had been shot. But since Leia had survived to the end of the film, it was expected that she would return in its sequel. This created a problem for Abrams and Terrio where they had to go back through the archive footage and deleted scenes from Episodes VII and VIII that featured her to try and retrofit them into the story they needed to tell. Additionally, they would have to be strategic in how they filmed her character during principal photography, using body doubles and head-replacement CGI to bring her character to life without simply recasting her or killing her off entirely.
That alone would have likely resulted in a certain degree of awkwardness in the final film, but it doesn’t explain why everything else about it is the way it is, nor does the fact that they fired their writers and director midway through pre-production. But what can explain this is who they brought in to replace them and their what their strengths and weaknesses as storytellers are, and why they might have made some of the creative decisions that they did.
J.J. Abrams is a notorious crowd pleaser, and his films have often been criticized for being derivative as much as they’ve been praised for their merits as works of art. The Force Awakens and his two Star Trek films are obvious examples, but even Super 8, the only original feature in his filmography, is clearly heavily inspired by Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extraterrestrial and other “kids on bikes” movies that were popular in the 80s. As such, some—myself included—felt a certain degree of pessimism when we heard he was coming back to finish the trilogy. Especially after the intense backlash The Last Jedi received across the board, it was easy to imagine Abrams might backtrack or at least quietly ignore some of the creative decisions made by The Last Jedi in an effort to appease the aggrieved fanbase.
That’s at least why I believe he and Terrio decided to revive Palpatine, make Rey related to him, and sideline Rose entirely, among other things. I’ve already talked at length about how important it was for the story that Rey be related to no one important, so it should be obvious why I fundamentally disagree with the decision to retcon that and make her a Palpatine. Not only does it complicate the truth of the matter—it’s explained that her parents still sold her, that money did change hands (it was to protect her!)—but it also betrays a lack of trust in the audience to be able to accept that the story is going in a direction they didn’t expect. It’s been so long that it’s easy to forget that the reveal in The Empire Strikes Back that Darth Vader was Luke’s father was initially met with confusion and even anger by fans at the time. Then imagine if Return of the Jedi came out and said, “Actually, no. We lied. Oops.” It would have cheapened that moment and the trilogy as a whole. Instead, it stuck to its guns and developed an interesting story out of it, with Luke now being motivated by a love for his father and the belief that he could still be saved, rather than merely wanting to destroy him because he’s evil.
But because the fans refused to accept one of The Last Jedi’s most controversial and brilliant decisions, they had to undo it and write in their own explanation instead. Now, this may have been the answer Abrams intended when he made The Force Awakens, but by the time he came back to Episode IX, The Last Jedi was well under way and Rian Johnson had written his own conclusion to that particular mystery. It would have been better for the film and the trilogy if they had simply let it be and worked through its implications rather than discard it altogether and come up with something else instead. You can even still bring Palpatine back, but that doesn’t mean Rey—or anyone for that matter—has to be related to him. Even then, I still think The Rise of Skywalker would’ve been better off if Palpatine had been left to rot in the ruins of the second Death Star.
Was Palpatine’s return part of Abrams’ initial plan for the trilogy? Maybe. But if it was, either he didn’t tell Rian Johnson that or, if he did, Johnson decided the story needed to head in a different direction and ignored it. Either way, bringing back Palpatine in the way that they did is too great a status quo change to happen off screen. At least when Maul shows up in Solo, you can point to The Clone Wars and Rebels as proof that this didn’t actually come out of nowhere. But for The Rise of Skywalker, it did, and it therefore becomes the movie’s responsibility to explain how he survived and why, ultimately distracting from the story being told of Rey, Finn, and Poe leading their scrappy rebellion against the overwhelming might of the First Order. Now everything must be about Palpatine and his master plan that I guess he’s been working on for decades but that we’re only learning about now in the eleventh hour. At the same time, it still wants us to treat us to those fun adventures with our heroes we came to love from the previous two films—and those are some of its best parts—but all this results in is an unfocused mess that tries to cram far too much into its two-hour, twenty-two-minute runtime.
Even with all of this being the case, there is absolutely no excuse for Rose being written the way she was other than pure cowardice. Her character was nowhere near as bad or annoying as the bigoted hate mobs on the internet wanted you to think she was, but because the discourse had become so polluted by their vitriol, Abrams and Terrio evidently felt the need to reduce her character to a glorified extra in order to appease the anti-The Last Jedi bandwagon. What makes this all the more offensive is that, early in the film, there’s a scene where Finn, Poe, and Chewbacca are on a mission to retrieve an encoded message from a spy in the First Order (which turns out to be confirmation that Palpatine has returned). They’re soon set upon by TIE Fighters, and Poe’s daring maneuvers put immense stress on the hyperdrive as they make their escape. You easily could have had Rose be part of the crew here as the Falcon’s overworked mechanic struggling to keep the ship in working order, seeing as she introduced herself as “working behind pipes all day,” but no. Instead, it’s this hideous giant slug-thing named Klaud in her place. I mean what can he even do?! He’s a fucking slug! He doesn’t even have arms! Rose could have and should have been the mechanic, and she should’ve had a little porg friend that sits on her shoulder and fetches her tools and stuff.
That’s also something wrong with The Rise of Skywalker: where are all the porgs? They’re clearly shown in The Last Jedi to have started nesting inside the Falcon. Shouldn’t there still be at least a few of them hanging around there? Maybe they’ve even begun to spread at the new Resistance base. That they’re almost entirely absent from the film, only appearing briefly when Rey returns to Ahch-To during her second act slump, further demonstrates the filmmakers’ desire to wipe away anything viewers might associate with The Last Jedi.
All of this comes together to make a film that is so bloated with unnecessary plot points that it ends up devaluing the stories that came before it. Because the film became so invested in not only bringing back Palpatine, but also making him the film’s main villain and Rey’s grandfather, it makes it difficult to go back to The Force Awakens and especially The Last Jedi and see them as anything more than meandering setup for the derivative fluff we ended up getting from the trilogy’s conclusion.
That’s not to mention how The Rise of Skywalker treated—or rather, mistreated—Finn’s character. It’s once again an example of a missed opportunity on the part of the filmmakers. I’m not talking about his Force-sensitivity—I like that—or the lack of a payoff for his attempted confession to Rey—more a case of bad editing than anything else. No, I’m talking about Finn not leading a stormtrooper uprising during the climax of the film. His arc in The Last Jedi set him up perfectly for that; not only was he a stormtrooper who saw the evils of the First Order and decided to leave, but now he was ideologically committed to fighting against it. What better way to finish his journey than have him inspire a legion of his former comrades to take up arms against their oppressors? But no, we have to have him taking down Star Destroyers equipped with mini-Death Star cannons instead.
Even Poe wasn’t spared from a degree of character regression in this one. The Last Jedi clearly set him up to be the new leader of the Resistance, taking over from Leia so she can finish training Rey to become a Jedi. But for the most part, he still comes across as the same hothead he was when we first met him. Perhaps that’s Abrams only being able to envision him as he was in The Force Awakens when he was still in charge of the character, but it also speaks to the broader trend of the film either undoing or outright ignoring the character beats of its predecessor, even if unintentionally.
There are, of course, flaws outside of these more existential issues with the film’s storytelling. The breakneck pacing in the opening act, for starters; Ben’s half-baked redemption arc and the irritating MacGuffin dagger also come to mind. But these are problems that, despite sometimes stemming from the decision to bring back Palpatine, were not inevitable, and rather speak to the weaknesses of the filmmakers. A better storyteller might have avoided making these mistakes, though it’s difficult to say for certain. It certainly didn’t help that they were working under an abbreviated pre-production timeline, giving them fewer opportunities to workshop and revise the story before they had to shoot it. But that was a problem Disney and Lucasfilm could have easily avoided if they had kept the traditional release of a Star Wars trilogy intact.
That, I believe, is the fundamental flaw of the Sequel Trilogy, one that informs many of the problems that arose throughout its production, and that came to a disastrous head with The Rise of Skywalker. See, the films in the Original and Prequel Trilogies all released three years apart from one another—1977, 1980, and 1983 for the former; 1999, 2002, and 2005 for the latter. This gave the production ample time to write, record, and edit the film before putting it out to the public. But with the Sequel Trilogy, it was decided early on that they would shorten the time between its installments to only two years, with additional spin-off films releasing between them. Perhaps they felt audiences wouldn’t be willing to wait three years for the next chapter in the saga, that their attention spans had become so much worse since Revenge of the Sith that it was no longer possible for them to remember what happened in the last part before watching the next. Whether or not that’s true, this truncated release schedule made the productions inflexible to the sorts of challenges and delays The Rise of Skywalker ended up facing. Having Episode VIII release in 2018 and followed by Episode IX in 2021 would have given Lucasfilm not only more time to polish out some of the kinks in the former but also ensured that the latter would also have had enough time to buff out its story to make it out on time, even after changing its director and writers. Of course, hindsight indicates that the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic would have ultimately interfered with this schedule more than any mid-production change in creative direction could, but that couldn’t possibly have been known in 2013 when the studio was laying out their plans for the upcoming trilogy.
So then why did they greenlight five different productions in five years? This is the one aspect that the Fandom Menace is sort of correct on. Disney, despite all the goodwill they’ve earned over the years as the industry leader in family-friendly consumer entertainment, are a business at the end of the day. And if they feel it’ll maximize their shareholder value if there’s an endless stream of Star Wars movies coming out one year after the other, then so be it. And if anyone could do it and have it be successful, it would be them. After all, they were the ones putting out two to three different MCU movies every year, each seemingly more successful than the last. Couldn’t that model work for Star Wars as well?
From the very beginning of the Disney era, you can see how the franchise’s new corporate overlords wanted to model its future after the MCU as a monolith of popular culture which will grow in perpetuity and dominate all forms of media. The two-year turnaround between saga films is certainly proof of that, but so is the introduction of spin-off films that fill out the lore and character backstories between the big event films. Rogue One and Solo are to the Sequel Trilogy what Ant-Man and Captain America: The Winter Soldier are to the Avengers movies. Only Star Wars didn’t benefit from this model in the same way the MCU did. Let me explain why.
The basis for the MCU was comic book superheroes, a medium and genre built around serial releases of individual, character-centric storylines that occasionally tie into larger crossover events. Adapting this formula to film, while risky, certainly paid off for Disney and Marvel, and led many other studios to try building their own “cinematic universes” in its wake. The most prominent of these was Warner Bros.’ now-defunct DC Extended Universe franchise, which began with Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel in 2013. The reasons why that experiment failed are myriad but mostly have to do with Snyder’s habits as a filmmaker being incompatible with what’s necessary to sustain such a massive undertaking, both critically and commercially, in addition to other issues outside of that (the sudden death of Snyder’s daughter, general studio meddling, and David Ayer’s Suicide Squad to name a few).
But while DC and Warner Bros. could have made the “cinematic universe” model work for them (and still can if James Gunn can successfully right the ship over there), I’m not sure Star Wars is the right fit for that kind of experiment. As I’ve stated, Star Wars, in popular consciousness, was mostly the main saga of six—now nine—films. There were always spin-off novels, comics, and TV series for the hardcore fans to follow, but to the general public, a new Star Wars movie was always a massive event, something that only happened every once in a while, and was to be appreciated whenever it did. This scarcity was one of the intangible aspects of the franchise that made it so valuable to Disney and why they wanted to buy it. But by basing their plans for the franchise off the comic book-inspired cinematic universe model they’d pioneered, they inadvertently devalued what it meant to be a new Star Wars movie, leading fans and general audiences alike to not be nearly as excited or interested in whatever new projects are revealed or released, thus resulting in diminishing returns on their investment.
We’ll eventually look at how this trend continued to develop as Star Wars moved away from theaters and onto Disney+, what impact the streaming ecosystem has had on the franchise, and how fans have responded to it. But first, we have to take a bit of a detour. A walk in the park(s), if you will, to discuss Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge and the franchise’s increased presence in Disney theme parks since the buyout.
stormborns
2087
germansingergirl
vaporwave
turnnoffyourmind
janainaart
