We've all got movies we hate--"A Life Less Ordinary," "Lucy," "Justice League." But I'm talking about the kind of anger that makes you stew, that invades your thoughts during peaceful moments.
The best I can come up with is "Sphere," Barry Levinson's turgid and senseless adaptation of the Michael Crichton sci-fi thriller I read and endlessly re-read as a 12-year-old. Months after eagerly seeing it in the theater, it still had me fuming.
But that's nothing compared to the rage a large number of gentlemen are still nurturing online towards "The Last Jedi," the eight official Star Wars installment which was released a full seven months ago. The frothing wrath about every related to the movie--the treatment of Luke, the female military command, the hostile takeover of the franchise by the dreaded SJWs--has become such a constant presence on every social media platform, star Kelly Marie Tran had to leave Instagram due to the vitriol.
With a few exceptions--"The Birth of a Nation," which inspired a resurgence of the KKK in the early 20th century, and "Patton," which may have inspired Richard Nixon to bomb Cambodia--the worst any movie can do to you is rob you of a few hours of life.
But movies aren't just movies anymore, they're building blocks of immersive "universes" that support obsessive lifestyles, and woe to those who disrupt them.
I have nothing of particular insight to say about the turbulent cultural forces at work here. Like many observers, the only thing I can express is bafflement.
The disconnect between the movie's overall reception--a 91% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, $1.3 billion in worldwide grosses--and the cataclysmic outrage makes it seem like people didn't just watch two different movies, but two movies produced in different galaxies.
And it's most baffling to me because the most negative emotion I can possibly dredge up regarding "The Last Jedi" is indifference.
In fact, it's the primary emotion I feel about it.
There has to be a silent majority between the film's vociferous defenders and its fire-breathing critics--those who respect director's Rian Johnson's ambition and creativity, but just find something slightly inert about it, a failure to take the inspiring concepts and turn them into truly riveting filmmaking.
And it's not just Last Jedi.
There have been four Star Wars movies released since Walt Disney Co. bought the rights from George Lucas. The most recent, "Solo," performed significantly worse than expected by Disney executives--indicating that the diminishing return on annual Star Wars movies may be coming a decade or two before they were planning.
No one could deny that these movies are entertaining. Yet none of them have convinced me that I was wrong with my pronouncement, shortly after the Disney purchase, that they would never feel right.
(I haven't seen "Solo" yet, but as I understand it would be unlikely to change my mind.)
And it's not that these movies haven't been made with skill, talent, and thoughtfulness. "Last Jedi" in particular approached the franchise in new and interesting ways, and gave its central protagonist (in my opinion) a fitting send-off.
But it still just doesn't feel right.
Even when these movies are good--really good--you can hear the groaning and wheezing of the filmmakers behind the camera. The original movies felt like they popped out of the cosmos fully formed and organic, but the new ones seem very Earth-built. Star Wars is a universe built from pure imagination--when it struggles to find a reason to exist, it's close to fatal.
Take "Last Jedi's" much-ballyhooed plot twists, seen by some as iconoclastic reworkings of the Star Wars mythos. They ought to be shocking and thought-provoking, and maybe they are. But if you take a step back, they also feel cheating.
Look at the departed Snoke, and how he evolves from what we saw in "Force Awakens." Why did he use a giant hologram to communicate with his underlings, when it turned out he was just a normal-sized man? Ego? Why did he even use a hologram at all? (In "Empire Strikes Back," the hologram made sense since the Emperor was back at the homeworld while Darth Vader was at the battle's front lines. But does the First Order even have a homeworld?)
Snoke's surprise execution sure was shocking, but it also left me feeling a bit dumb for assuming there was something more interesting about this character than just being a copy of the Emperor. Wow, you sure showed me, movie.
And the revelation that Rey's parents were nothing but "filthy junk traders" is supposed to be poignant and revealing, while also upending Star Wars' medieval reliance on royal bloodlines. But I didn't just project this mystical heritage onto Rey. "Force Awakens" spent a lot of time telling me that there was something really, really important about her background that was maybe related to Luke Skywalker.
But it turns out that was all just a trick to question the tropes of the Star Wars universe, turning this trilogy into a critique of...itself?
"Last Jedi" challenges some of the underlying assumptions of the Star Wars universe. Johnson tried to broaden and deepen concepts like the Force, the Empire, and the Rebellion, while adding some moral ambiguity--and maybe he succeeded. But I'm not sure the Star Wars universe wants to be challenged.
Other pop culture franchises thrive off of reinvention and reimaginings. Star Trek wouldn't have survived without several reboots--none more so than its best entry, "Wrath of Khan." And think of all the different directions DC Comics has taken Batman. But those properties are different--the contradictions of Batman were baked in this pulpy, Gothic, scary hero since the beginning. (It's even an element of the campy 60s show, where Bats was the straight man in an absurd act.) And Star Trek purports to be the history of the future, and with that grounding it's fun when you get to see a new angle.
Star Wars is different--it's an epic poem with a universe that just exists for the telling of it, which is why questioning or challenging that universe doesn't feel as satisfying as it might sound.
(This is also why discussions of whether the Empire is actually good are so pointless. The Empire's evil is one of many postulates that's necessary for this universe to exist--if you don't buy it, watch something else.)
But despite all this, I come not to bury Last Jedi. In fact, I'd argue it's probably the best of the new crop of Star Wars movies. (Unlike it's detractors and Mark Hamill himself, I loved everything about Luke Skywalker's transformation into a wizened, cynical sage.)
But it all exists on a more intellectual level than a Star Wars movie should.
"The Force Awakens" may actually be a more swashbuckling good time as a movie, despite its considerable flaws. Those include weak characterization--Rey as a protagonist too flawless and heroic to be very interesting, Finn acting like a normal protagonist instead of the reformed killing machine he's supposed to be. And J.J. Abrams' reluctance to veer from the well-worn franchise formulas is at this point a well-known issue.
"Rogue One" is admirably made--that's how you could describe all of these movies, actually--but feels a little too cold and solemn for Star Wars.
And the preoccupation with filling in backstories to the established canon seems like a subpar direction for the franchise--what do I really need to know about Han Solo, but that he's a quick-thinking pirate? Or that the Death Star plans were stolen by spies? (By the way, I still can't stand the idea that the Death Star's design flaws were intentionally built in by a saboteur, and weren't due to the Empire's arrogance.)
And Lord Almighty, why do we need a Boba Fett film?
But now more than ever, I'm convinced the fatal flaw in these films is the decision to stick so close to the originals' plotlines and aesthetics.
It's not just that it's disappointing and frustrating to learn that the triumph in "Return of the Jedi" was only a fleeting moment, that the sides went back to fighting almost immediately--although that's certainly true.
And it's not just that the movies actively resist any attempt to understand how the young second Republic fell apart and the dark forces rose again so quickly, as if it were unimportant to the conflict--although that's certainly true too.
It's also not just that it's hard to believe the First Order is a powerful, all-encompassing menace when it seemed to have been willed into the plot instantaneously by the screenwriters--although that's certainly true as well.
It's that there's something a little ridiculous about watching 21st-century technical wizards flawlessly and reverently reconstruct the clunky sci-fi look of the late 1970s, as if it were some ancient ceremony.
I think that's underlying a lot of the plot complaints out there about "Last Jedi." Can you really destroy a fleet by ramming a frigate into a Star Destroyer at light speed? Do all these ships really run on "fuel?"
It's just hard to forget that the filmmakers are playing with someone else's toys.
Say what you will about the prequels, it was a bold choice by George Lucas to create a new, different world connected to the Star Wars timeline, rather than to try to extend the old. It would have been a bold choice by Disney too, that might have given the filmmakers more room to let the franchise breathe and inject their own life into it.
Maybe it would have been too bold.
I'll admit may be holding Star Wars to too high a standard. But unlike many of its critics, I'm not comparing it to a better imaginary version in my head. I'm convinced my complaints are correct, but I'm not convinced addressing them would have created better movies without their own flaws--let alone one which could navigate the impossible fan expectations.
What I'm more convinced of than ever is that this franchise doesn't have many more places to go. I know I'm on shaky ground here, given the beloved Star Wars library of TV shows, books, comics, and other derivative works. Star Wars pretty much invented the concept of an extended universe. (Unread by me--and I disagree that one needs a PhD in the secondary work to truly understand or appreciate Star Wars.) Many of those works are, I'm sure, incredible. But they occupy a different space of the imagination than the movies--the central text, the epic poem itself.
To paraphrase myself from six years ago, it's hard to reinvent something that's about reinvention. It's hard to be a copy of a copy and feel fresh. New Star Wars movies may have been doomed to fail, as inevitable as they may have been.
"Universes" took Hollywood by storm six years ago. Perhaps not coincidentally, the same year Disney paid $4 billion-plus for the Star Wars intellectual property, its Avengers franchise skyrocketed, proving that moviegoers would flock to a network of movies featuring interconnected plots and characters.
But the history, since then, has been mixed. The Marvel Universe seems to be unstoppable. Warner Brothers and DC Comics has had less luck with the concept. The Godzilla and King Kong universe has consisted, so far, of a movie about Godzilla and an unconnected movie about King Kong. And the ludicrous Universal "Monsters" franchise has featured two aborted kick-off movies and is, God willing, defunct.
Studios have discovered that what Kevin Feige at Marvel made look so easy--maintaining a consistent tone and gradually building interest from invested fans--can be mind-meltingly difficult. Regular producer-mandated reshoots and managing backlashes from over-stimulated fanbases has become a constant headache for the suits of Los Angeles.
Yet the economics of the movie business--especially amid the revolution in online streaming options in the Golden Age of TV--demand it.
Star Wars, a universe of pure urgency, popped from the head of George Lucas 40 years ago and changed movie-making overnight. Today, it's been resurrected as the most valuable property in entertainment, and is struggling to figure out a reason to exist.
What a metaphor for Hollywood.
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