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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Disney Buying Fox! And OMG Star Wars

Just in case the Walt Disney Company didn’t own enough of our collective childhood, this week it was announced they’re moving ahead to collect a treasure trove of intellectual property and infrastructure in a buyout of a large portion of the 21st Century Fox media empire. Reportedly worth over $60 billion, the completed deal would see Fox retain their News, Business, and much of their Sports divisions, while turning everything else, from film rights to television stations like FX, over to the House of Mouse.

This would leave Disney in ownership of franchises like X-Men, the Fantastic Four and James Cameron’s Avatar, a larger stake in the streaming service Hulu, in addition to much else. The Marvel Cinematic Universe would expand notably almost overnight, and Disney would see its film and television presence grow dramatically while coopting one of its primary competitors. It would also leave the Murdoch family, who own and operate Fox, the second largest shareholders in the Walt Disney Company.

The whole thing still needs to be approved by regulators in a number of countries, but is expected to be allowed due to how the deal was structured. From Pixar to Marvel to LucasFilm and now Fox, Disney and its CEO Bob Iger, are on a bona fide roll. In an age of Netflix and Hulu, Spotify and MoviePass, traditional media companies are scrambling to adapt and consolidate. Disney is a prime example, acting more like a technology company akin to Google or Facebook while scooping up companies with valuable intellectual property. They even announced a plan to launch a streaming video service as a direct competitor to Netflix. As they well know, content is king.

Speaking of content, none is grabbing more public attention at the moment than Star Wars: The Last Jedi. With a current 93% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and pulling in an estimated $220 million over it’s opening weekend, director Rian Johnson helmed what is already becoming widely regarded as one of the best films in the franchise, and I entirely agree.

Challenging long-held tropes while honoring the best of Star Wars tradition, Johnson upends many of the expected moves for the film in favor of giving fans what may well be the most daring and forward-feeling in the canon since Empire Strikes Back. From the very start its pace is riveting and well handled. Constantly raising the stakes, giving answers many did not expect, and even eliminating characters most presumed would be present until at least the end of this new trilogy, The Last Jedi proves itself to be one of the funniest and most heartfelt films in the franchise, while carrying a weight and dark overtone worthy of the very best the saga has to offer.

From the strong performances by its lead actors to the strikingly new-yet-familiar visual treats, served one after another, this film sets itself apart as a Star Wars movie not only honoring its past, but moving boldly into its future. Disney has made it clear they wish to take the franchise in some new directions, and after the well-done yet formulaic Force Awakens, The Last Jedi is a nearly ideal follow up. Certain fans have been notably displeased by this second act of the trilogy, but this Star Wars is a new beast, rooted in its past yet not tied to the tales of the Old Republic, Empire and Skywalkers. There’s a much larger galaxy out there, waiting to be shown to us, and The Last Jedi revels in displaying just how much fun this wider world can be.

Thanks for reading! This blog works in tandem with my YouTube channel of the same name. Feel free to check it out if you enjoy my content here. Come back often for regular updates, and see you next time...

YouTube channel here.