I hear that the best way to get trending is to talk about a movie that came out 2 years ago.
Centuries ago, the trailer for The Last Jedi came out. Like any good teaser, it encourages speculation. So much of what gets people excited about Star Wars is the speculation. Is Rey related to Luke or Obi-Wan? Will Luke turn to the Dark Side? Is Finn the only black Stormtrooper in the galaxy? Will Chewie ever get that hug?
The problem is, in order to fuel speculation like this, the audience has to be in it--more than 100% in it. And I'm not sure I'm 100% into Star Wars anymore.
The original trilogy (OT) was real to me in a way that very few follow-ups have ever been able to recapture. I was able to overlook questionable things like Ewoks because the OT was like my Bible--my belief overpowered anything that didn't make sense to me, anything that a less devoted viewer might be inclined to criticize.
And between the OT and the prequel trilogy (PT), there were the books, which became known as the Expanded Universe (EU). They would not be canon, but for a long time they would be the only Star Wars stories available. With nothing to contradict them, they were canon by default. Some of those stories were excellent. I am rather fond of the Thrawn trilogy and the Rogue Squadron series. Other books didn't meet my expectations, but that was okay. I knew that these were mere mortals writing Star Wars books, not Master Lucas himself.
And then there was the PT, and things started going wrong from there. It's an interesting phenomenon, observing someone who has loved something for so long feel so obligated to defend it from all criticism. I think many Star Wars fans felt this way after watching The Phantom Menace. From their point of view, it is not okay for there to be a bad Star Wars movie. That would be against their religion. They become apologists. They focus on the positive. Jar Jar wasn't that bad. And wasn't that lightsaber duel cool? And aren't political allegories neat?
I have been guilty of this. I loved Star Wars, and there wasn't room enough in my heart for a bad Star Wars movie. So I did what all right- or left-leaning people do when their own political candidate is a piece of shit. I made excuses. I blamed the naysayer for not having an open mind. I lied to myself.
By the time Attack of the Clones came out, I was more prepared to be a skeptic. I'd seen enough activity online to confirm that Episode I's flaws could not be ignored or explained away. And so I sat through chunks of Episode II actually wincing.
Episode III was more satisfying, but not without flaws.
What I will say about both the PT is that all of them contributed at least one thing new and substantial to the overall mythology. The PT in particular showed us Jedi culture and demystified them quite a bit. They showed us how a mighty Jedi Order could be led astray and destroyed from within. They showed us Jedi who were lost and confused--not just Anakin, but even Yoda himself, who in his wisdom failed to prevent the Sith lord from coming to pow
Movies don't have to be perfect. I've listened to enough Kevin Smith and Nerdist podcasts to appreciate just how difficult it is to make a good movie. Everything in the filmmaking process has to go perfectly, from script to completion, and the odds of this happening seem daunting. But that in itself is just another apology. Sympathy for the challenge of the process doesn't seem like a valid reason to ignore a movie's flaws. At best, you can forgive it. At worst, you can resent it.
A cartoon came out--Clone Wars. It was very good. It came quite close to making the PT better retroactively.
And then Disney bought Lucasfilm and produced The Force Awakens, the first in a new trilogy (NT).
My theory is that Hollywood tends to over-correct for past mistakes. The first Hulk movie was too cerebral, so the follow-up was full of mindless action. The Batman franchise had become a parody of itself, so Nolan's Batman Begins took itself very seriously--so seriously that every ridiculous comic book element in the film had to be rationalized, right down to the part where Alfred asks Bruce why he is compelled to dress like a bat.
Bruce says, "Bats frighten me. It's time my enemies shared my dread."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsHJpvExUEY
You know what would have been much cooler? If he had said nothing at all. Allow us to entertain the possibility that our protagonist might be insane. But no. He can't be weird or goofy, like Schumacher's Batman. He needs to be serious.
In that similar kind of way, I see The Force Awakens as Disney's attempt at a course correction for the franchise. They attempted to bring back the action, pacing, and appealing characters that made Star Wars a success. And for the most part, I think they succeeded.
What they didn't have was a good story. They had the beats of a good story, but not the meat of a good story. The story itself felt like a retread of the OT--which itself already had two Death Stars and spent two movies on a desert planet. I suppose their plan was to make us fall so utterly in love with the new characters that maybe we would overlook some glaring problems in the movie's own mythology.
Just off the top of my head: What happened to the New Republic? How could they allow yet another super weapon to be built? Were they or were they not the ones in power, thus making the First Order the underdogs in this fight? And if they were the underdogs, how did they get the resources to build a super-gigantic, even-more-deadly version of the Death Star?
The Force Awakens gave us no sense of scale and scope--something that the OT and PT never failed to provide. We knew that the Empire was obscenely large, and that the Rebel Alliance was so very small (see opening scene of A New Hope). In Episode VII, we do not know how big the Resistance is or how big the First Order is. I don't need statistics or anything--I just need to see some juxtaposition, like when the Star Destroyer pursued the tiny Corellian Corvette.
It makes me feel like J.J. Abrams himself didn't have these answers, and therefore ignored them as he made the film, deciding instead to focus on our lovable new characters. Maybe it was a sleight of hand. And maybe it would have been forgivable, if the central conflict of the movie wasn't between these two very ill-defined forces.
Or it should have been central. Maybe that's the problem right there--the conflict between the First Order and the Resistance was tangential to arcs of our adorable cast. The story emphasized the personal, and failed to balance it with larger events. I cared about Rey, Finn, and BB-8. I did not care about the First Order and the Resistance. In Episode IV, the conflict felt important. In Episode VII, it felt like an afterthought. Even Kylo Ren's story, which should be the story of leading the First Order to victory, is ultimately a personal story about the weight of legacy and the pull of family. Perhaps for him the First Order is also an afterthought.
As a result, I left the theater feeling like I'd just seen some very entertaining fan fiction. For me, the NT is not canon. It takes place in an alternate reality. Mind you, I have read some excellent, emotional fan fiction over the years, but in my mind there was always a separation between the original product and these other stories. For me, The Force Awakens will always be separate from the OT, the PT, and even the EU (the last of which Episode VII most closely resembles in my mind). Maybe if Star Wars was still my Bible, I would be looking for ways to defend or apologize for it--like all those people who insist that Rey did not, in fact, learn the ways of the Force far too quickly. (She did. Anakin was off-the-charts Force sensitive as a child, and he still had to go to school. Maybe something in Rey's backstory will clarify this, but until these questions are answered, it is a glaring omission.)
I don't want to take anything away from the devoted fans, and I'm glad they love it so much--but please allow me my opinions. If you truly love something, then you should not feel threatened by someone's conflicting opinion of it.
I fully expect I will enjoy these new installments. They will be fun popcorn flicks for me. But I am not interested in speculation. I am not interested in doing Disney's own marketing for them. And, much as I hate to admit it, I guess I don't believe in the Bible anymore.
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