Was Star Wars Ever Truly Good?

Gungans, Ewoks, Asteroid-dwelling space worms, weak plot development, goddamn gungans, terrible dialogue, awful romantic subplots, loads of poor acting, idiotic stormtroopers, useless droids, EFFING GUNGANS; the list goes on. The long and short of it is this: even as a life-long Star Wars fan, I must admit, the saga as a whole, even the best films, have plenty of problems. Much of the franchise, including parts of the original trilogy, kind of sucks, in fact. With as much flak as The Last Jedi has been receiving, one might presume a rich, complex, masterful lore preceded it. But, that simply isn’t so.

Like most Americans, I grew up watching the original films and closed in on adulthood alongside the prequel trilogy. Like many pre-adolescent boys in 1999, watching the Phantom Menace was exhilarating for me, and I remain among a fairly small percentage of the population who hold a positive memory of my initial theatrical viewings of the prequels. They’re fun, fast-paced, action packed, and feature impressive world building paired with sublime musical scores. Not to mention, FULLY TRAINED JEDI LIGHTSABER AWESOMENESS. There’s no doubt the prequel trilogy sucks from a strict quality standpoint, but they’re so much fun to get lost in.

And that’s the point, really. The Star Wars films are overrated, not even Empire Strikes Back broke ground in storytelling or cinematography. What they are, and have always been, are supremely entertaining, summer-popcorn-blockbusters which have bled over into popular culture. Much as Shakespeare wrote for low-brow theatrical productions, while today his work is held up as exemplified mastery of flowing, heady, dramatic narrative, the original Star Wars trilogy is commonly regarded as something sacred, a holy portion of childhood not to be disturbed.

Frankly, I don’t have an inherent problem with this view. Star Wars films are among my favorite as well, and helped shaped my world as a child. Legitimate complaints against perceived flaws or creative decisions made in all of them, notably the prequels, are entirely justifiable and expected. The problem comes into play when this extends to automatically disliking new films which don’t fit into what specific fans want out of the franchise. It’s becoming incredibly common now for fans to project what they believe Star Wars should be, what they think the best version of the story is, onto the sequel trilogy and judge these new films accordingly.

Yes, Maz Kanata was shoe-horned into The Last Jedi, the Canto Bight casino sequence felt ripped out of the prequels, Snoke getting no background explanation at all left me feeling somewhat cheated, and why the hell the First Order didn’t just short-jump their Destroyers to surround and eliminate the remainder of the Resistance early on in the film is beyond me. The Last Jedi is not a perfect film, nor are any members of the Star Wars cannon. The Empire Strikes Back definitely comes the closest, but even this hallowed benchmark has plenty of campy and self-indulgent moments while leaning on hype from the original and giving a lazy cliff-hanger ending. It is not perfect story telling, and that’s okay.

The original Star Wars film was a simple, straight-forward hero’s journey tale. It was a coming-of-age, farmboy-saves-the-princess-and-slays-the-moon-sized-dragon-in-space sort of story. It was fun and well-paced, imaginative and captivating. Yet for the franchise to continue, it needs to break away from its roots as a children’s-sci-fi-fantasy and really build out the world around it. The Expanded Universe books, games and comics have been one way to enrich the franchise, but they became rather convoluted and internally inconsistent. So when Disney acquired LucasFilm, they needed to start over, to tell a cohesive tale from a unified source, and build out from there.

This is what we’re seeing now with the Sequel Trilogy and spin off anthology films. For the Star Wars franchise to survive and thrive long-term, it needs to adapt and mature. This is exactly what The Last Jedi does best: honor the past while blazing new potential for the future. Fans have had decades to imagine what the Original Trilogy heroes have done and are like all these years later, and it’s understandable many dislike the direction Disney took them, especially given their storylines in the Expanded Universe. Regardless, the backlash against the Sequel films, notably The Last Jedi, is unwarranted. Star Wars was never ours, it was never going to be decided by fan committees or a glut of individual authors. Not if it wanted to survive as more than a pleasant memory, anyway.

Disney is focused on world building, turning Star Wars into a cinematic powerhouse the likes of the MCU or the Call of Duty franchise is in gaming parlance. This isn’t going to be everyone’s style, not everyone will like this shift. Many will prefer the “good old days” which exist mostly in their heads. This is perfectly fine, yet fundamentally leaves us with two options regarding the saga. We can check out at any time, and choose to remember Star Wars for what it meant to us as children. Or we can adapt; appreciate the series for what it is: a franchise now more than forty years old, with a new generation of story-tellers crafting, for we the viewers, rich, flawed, fun summer-popcorn-blockbuster stories from a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.

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