Which is fitting, because too much time has passed for Lucasfilm to add to the original Star Wars trilogy.
Whether you're a fan or not, we all need to accept the fact that Luke, Han, and Leia's Star Wars does not carry the same momentum it started with 40 years ago.
Of course, every Star Wars movie makes $1 billion in the box office. So, from a production company's standards, it's still "good."
But I need to say something-- these new Star Wars movies feel like a nightmare version of the old ones.
Let me explain:
They're too dark.
A New Hope was a pulpy adventure, inspired by retro sci-fi. There were dark moments in it, but at the end of the day, you knew Han, Luke, and Leia liked each other, and would ultimately triumph together.
This sparked carried on until the end of the trilogy, despite all their obstacles, because seeing your heroes win in one movie only to be miserable next time is depressing. It's the reason The Dark Knight Rises was so sad. Audiences should be rewarded for staying invested in a saga, not punished.
The new trend for superhero sequels seems to have our beloved characters go "dark," which essentially means "miserable because they haven't done anything since the last movie." Bruce Wayne didn't do anything for 8 years since The Dark Knight, leaving no room for him to grow as a character, or for the audience to imagine any of his potential adventures.
That's not fun.
So, Disney and Lucasfilm decided to make Luke, Han, and Leia do nothing fun since Return of the Jedi. Luke ran away (which is out of character), Han and Leia got divorced (which is unnecessarily heartbreaking), while Chewie still roamed the galaxy with Han (wearing the same bandolier for 40+ years).
So nothing they did in the original movies mattered.
If the filmmakers wanted to please the audience without resorting to mindless, computer-generated, crowd pleasing moments, they would have allowed these characters to reap the rewards of their adventures from 40 years ago. They shouldn't be lonely, scrambling around the galaxy only to have gruesome deaths. The new generation of heroes should have come to them for knowledge and advice, but to send our old heroes into the fray is just a corporate excuse to give these actors some screen time to sell more tickets.
And I like all those actors. But how many times can Indiana Jones crack his whip at age 70 without having to call his chiropractor?
If you saw The Last Jedi, you most likely have one of two opinions:
A) It was great!... for what it was!
or
B) What? That wasn't Star Wars!
If your answer was A, it's because you recognize that it was, in fact, a visually beautiful movie. It had some satisfying moments, but it was very different from the Star Wars you grew up with (which should have been obvious from the repetitive, immature, out-of-character dialogue).
If your answer was B, it's because the entire vibe was off. There was a constant sense of dread, not even from the menacing characters in the film, but from the writer, who seemed to be going all in on false confidence. I don't know how to describe it except for how I did before-- a nightmare version, because everything the returning characters said and did felt wrong. Even if it was "cool."
Look, I was a fan of Rian Johnson. He masterfully directed episodes of Breaking Bad, and did a decent job with the movie Looper.
But Star Wars is special to millions of people, and I genuinely feel like he doesn't understand what they like about it.
At the end of the day, it's supposed to be FUN. Throughout the entire movie, I felt like they were all doomed, even if they survived, because the characters didn't seem to know how to enjoy life. They were just vessels to tell the mangled story of the official new Star Wars movie. And that's not right.
Having Chewie there without Han doesn't work. Luke as a lazy old man doesn't work. Leia flying through space like David Bowie in a music video doesn't work. Their best solution to this problem would have been to make the characters all hang out together, or not be there at all. Have them as legends that the new heroes briefly talk about.
By the way, WHERE'S LANDO?
The End (of this post and my lifelong interest in Star Wars)
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