Or Space, Magic, Memory, and the Quest for More Money
Movies are a magic trick.
Orson Welles knew this. Even if his movies-- even if his best ones-- are imperfect, he knew that much. Cinema shares more in common with a magic trick than it does with plays or books (and maybe even TV). It's an agreed upon dream. It's a lie that you know is a lie, but you believe anyways.
In a lot of ways, nostalgia is also a brain poison. It's an idea that pits your idea of the past with reality. With the present. It tells you that the past was this special thing and that it is gone. Nostalgia is not a creative energy. It doesn't spur you on to create new things, because those new things require the destruction or the supplantation of those old things.
Naturally, this brings me to Star Wars.
The Star Wars series, especially the Sequel Trilogy is where these two tenets of art and cinema meet. The magic of buying into a fiction and the fiction that nostalgia sells you.
When The Force Awakens was announced I, like all thinking human beings, was skeptical. At that point Star Wars had been bad for longer than it had been good. The story of the prequels was the story of a man with too much time and money with nobody to tell him no. In hindsight, I think those movies were less about hubris and more about George Lucas being interested in things that no other sane human being would be into. They were bad, as well.
But then the names started coming in. The cast. The director. The producer. These were talented people and they were people who cared about the movies and they talked about it in a way that seemed to want to build on these stories, not bitch and moan about what the prequels should have been (like me and every other asshole on the internet).
And I so I waited. I did so with caution and I did so with the understanding that if it was bad, I wasn't going to get mad or sad. I was just doing to be done. I was going to like those first three movies and always hold those with affection and then just move on. Like an adult. Like a thinking human being.
That was the plan.
That John Williams score kicks in and, man, I'm there again. I believe that it works. I know it doesn't. I know that it's not true. It's an intellectual property managed by studio middle-men and wholly owned by a heartless multinational. It's there to make as much money as it can, while it can. With that, said, when the John William score kicks in, man. . .
The magic was back. The Falcon. The music. The lightsabers. All of that shit. It hit a part of my brain that told me that the magic was back. For all intents and purposes, it was back.
Richard Evans from Red Letter Media said it best when he talked about The Force Awakens, which isn't that it's bad or good to matter. All it had to be was a competent Star Wars movie to matter. That's what it was and that's all it had to be. What he didn't add was that the weight of what Star Wars means carries the product the rest of the way, because that's the magic trick.
Star Wars was good again! Just like you remembered it! And those bad Prequels, they can't hurt you any more!
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| Hey, remember this? Now imagine it's an entire movie. |
It's the double-edged sword that these movies always have to deal with-- especially with this latest batch.
People have really taken to not liking the Sequel Trilogy, which I guess is their god-given right, but Jesus is it loud out there.
"It's not my Star Wars," well, it's not anybody's Star Wars. Cynical corporate programming aside, Star Wars is an idea. It's a parlor trick. We watch a fun space movie with a great cast and an amazing score and it sticks in your brain. You saw it when you were five-- You saw it when you were the film's target audience. Now you're in your thirties and you've got back pain and your personal relationships didn't shake out the way they intended to and Star Wars is bad now for some reason! Or maybe it's good again, but it's the same exact energy at work.
They were always silly and of varying quality because they were children's films.
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| THAT'S STAR WARS BABY! |
That's the magic trick. You know you're being sold a bill of goods and you buy it anyways-- or you get mad because you expected something else-- something that it has never been. You're not being sold a movie, you're being sold a memory. A feeling of a time when everything is nice and nothing hurt. And there's a lot of money in selling that fantasy.
You can't put words to magic, because then it's no longer a magic trick.
(SIDE NOTE: If you don't want to deal with another couple-thousand words of me cranking off about the Star War, read this review from Walter Chaw. It gets to the heart of a lot of what I've been feeling and what I've been trying to say. It also takes the film(s) to task much more severely than do I. It's a really good review and, as I say later, it's stuff like this that makes me excited about movies.)
SOMETHING LIKE AN ACTUAL REVIEW--
It's fine. The Rise of Skywalker is a fun, loud, space laser-based movie that caps off a long series of loud, silly, space-laser-based movies. It's a Star Wars pictures. Unlike the best of the series, it forgoes continuity and character in favor of people running through sets real fast. And unlike the worst of the series, it isn't an eye-watering bore. In short: It's a JJ Abrams film.
(I am also self-aware enough to realize that watching Dune and Legend this year, certain parts of my brain have been liquefied. So, that probably does help the film's case.)
While there's certainly space to make the argument that I suffer from diminished expectations and from the same sort of nostalgic brain poisoning that I described above, it's still a well-crafted action-adventure films. There's a lightsaber fight. There's a John Williams score. There's space British people (as well as space racists) It's Star Wars. I'm hard-pressed to figure out what's got everybody so worked up, but then again, it's the internet. Fuck it. I got mine.
It's also one of the rare few times that I would be willing to indulge an extended cut of a film. Of all of the moves it makes and the places it goes and the things it leaves behind, it's kind of incredible that length isn't one of the sins that it commits.
There is a lot more of Rian Johnson in that movie than a lot of people-- friend or foe-- would like to admit. Abrams, by the very nature of making a follow-up to The Last Jedi is working in the shadow of somebody else's work (who was working in the shadow of somebody else's work who was working in the shadow of somebody else's work who was working in the shadow of Frank Herbert). This is exacerbated by the fact that this entire trilogy seems to be operating under a series of dictates laid out by the shareholders. It's with that in mind that I think these movies being as good as they are is amazing.
Consider how deeply bad some of these board of director driven films get pumped out into the market and at least The Rise of Skywalker is watchable. What's more is can you imagine what this film would have looked like if they let The Book of Henry guy stay on?The Rise of Skywalker does exactly what it's supposed to do and while it doesn't have the highs of The Last Jedi, nor does it take the risks, it sticks the landing. In any film that's hard to do and that's especially with an installment that concludes a story arc (Mass Effect 3 comes most readily to mind and, after reflection, so does Battlestar Galactica).
I don't know what everyone else was expecting when it came to The Rise of Skywalker. A smartass would say "I was expecting a good movie," but I think they were expecting something that it couldn't be. Due to economics, due to fan demand, due to the competence and interests of the creators, due to whatever, that movie did not get made. People want Star Wars to be something that it's not and never was-- except in their memories.
Lastly, if nothing else, I enjoyed it because I could now be done with Star Wars. That all of this sturm and drang and bitching and moaning about space wizards could finally, once and for all, conclude. I might finally be done with Star Wars and that is exhilarating.
It's a fantasy, but it's my fantasy and, right now, it's one I'm going to indulge in.
THE YELL CHAMBER: A JOURNEY THROUGH THE OPINIONSPHERE
A quick aside: The Discourse. As I alluded to earlier: I hate it.
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| This is a pretty good artist's concept of the Internet right now |
And I get it, but Christ, is it a bummer. Not because if Star Wars doesn't deserves better, but our culture deserves better.
Star Wars is nonsense, but it's the nonsense that our culture builds itself around. And not just Star Wars, but these other blockbusters. These other films. Small ones too, but especially the big ones. Hundreds of people spent thousands of hours and millions of dollars to make this. That's worth having a conversation about. It's also worth spending the time and effort to watch smaller and more meaningful movies. I like a good space laser movie, but, man, have you ever checked out a real movie? They're fucking great!
And if you don't want to deal with any of this, you can always just shut the fuck up. It's a liberating feeling not to have to have an opinion on everything. It's even more liberating not to have to force it out there so everyone knows where you stand. I'm not a "Let people enjoy things" guy-- because that's idiotic-- but it's a very human impulse to regulate how other people feel about things and if they're feeling it in the right way. But, it's a fucking space wizard movie. You're allowed to save your energy on this one.
BUT-- If we are going to keep watching these goof space-laser movies, I'm going to keep writing about them. Which brings me to another crux of my criticism: That we should engage these things with enthusiasm. We should like movies, even the bad ones. Sometimes especially the bad ones. This doesn't mean that we shouldn't ever speak ill of a movie or that we should never critically disect the good ones, but us film dorks-- the serious ones with problems, you know, jerks like me-- should be fans of movies. We should be fans of the medium itself.
Movies are amazing. That any of them exist is wonderful. I watched King of the Monsters this year and it was, on every level, a deeply unlikable movie, but I left it with a kind of spark in my hear, because this meant that I got to go watch some good movies now. I knew that disappointments like that help cast a light on the ones that are truly unique.
Movies are a common language that we all speak. Beyond Star Wars, we all have feelings on The Godfather and Westerns and Musicals and all the rest of it. Even when the movie sucks or we have disagreements, it is something that we can share. That's why it's worth having better language around them and why it's worth giving more thoughts to these things than whether it sucked or was awesome (which they sometimes do and are!).
But, the messiness is a part of the experience. That's what art is and that's where a lot of the fun is. By engaging with sterile or compromised or just plain crappy films, we learn things. We learn about ourselves, about the world around is, and about other movies. And we can do that without actually taking any real risks or suffering any real trauma, because that's art. That's what it's supposed to be (as well as by Kathleen Kennedy a new vacation house).
Or maybe this is all just me hiding my unearned love of the space laser movie behind the language of film criticism.
Who can say?
OTHER THOUGHTS GOOD, BAD, AND OTHERWISE
(And here come the SPOILERS. . .)
* I think the inclusion of the unused Leia footage is needlessly grotesque. When asked about having his appearance projected as a hologram Prince called the idea "demonic." That there's something deeply inhumane and inhuman about playing around with the dead. He says that if it was meant to be, it would have happened that way. I don't completely share Prince's point of view, but there's something deeply unsettling about having a dead woman appear on screen, especially in scenes that you know she didn't film. It's just really, deeply weird and there's nothing in this movie that seems to justify bringing back the dead (also, might be one of the reasons Rose Tico's scenes got cut out: Because Digital Carrie Fisher was creepy and looked bad. You know, supposedly.).
* I love that Kijimi was droid-accessible. It was a town of staircase and, yet, it had a bunch of ramps for our sweet, sweet rolly boys. Even when in a despotic, space-facist past, city centers are handicapped accessible.
* Now that we are through this long, national nightmare, we can all acknowledge that Rogue One was not only the best of the new movie, but is just about the best Star Wars movie ever made. Also, I wrote a bunch about it's themes and design not once, but twice.
* Everything around Kylo Ren/Ben Solo's face turn was well done. Not just for the movie, but any movie. Adam Driver is a hell of an actor and so is Daisy Ridley. They're good together and they're good when they're alone. It's the one part of the movie that I doesn't need a qualification.
* The movie needed more Rose Tico. The current fan theories/glib jokes are that she got cut out because Reddit wouldn't shut it's mouth. I'm skeptical that a multi-billion dollar monopoly like Disney would be influenced by a tightly-knit pact of mega-virgins, but who knows? Disney likes money and it's entirely possible that was the route they saw to making more of it. But, still: The best new character of the second movie was given short shrift. She was a great character that humanized the conflict and connected it to the ground level. What is more is they should have given her more to do just to piss off the internet crowd. Apparently there are scenes that were shot, but Lord knows if we'll ever see them, even as a DVD extra. It is Disney, after all. Hiding shit in vaults is their number one, main thing.
* I like the inclusion of the Emperor. I like it a lot! People complain that it comes out of nowhere, but that's always kind of been the tenor of Star Wars storytelling. These things can pop up out of nowhere. Especially this motherfucker. It gives the final film the weight of a true villain-- something that the last two movies didn't have. The Emperor is gross and evil and seems to have been refugeed from a failed live-action production of a Warhammer 40,000 movie. It's rad. And Ian McDermond is having the time of his fucking life. ALSO: I dig that they answer "Who was Snoke?" by saying "Oh, him? We have a tube for that. Don't worry about it."* There also should have been more porgs. Which brings me back to Rose Tico and Kelly Marie Tran. My theory about all of this isn't that Abrams (or Disney) gave a shit about the Internet's tantrums about The Last Jedi, I just don't think he was interested in characters that he didn't have a hand in (which might explain why Rian Johnson dropped the Knights of Ren outright). It doesn't get him off the hook for dropping certain plot lines, but it does soften the movie somewhat. But, yeah, give me more porgs. Tell me that Chewie has a crate for the little guy he kept. Give me some connection to that movie. Anything.
* The Final Order is a better name than the First Order, a group of villains that everyone would rather associate with the follow-up to Joy Division. I mean, Jesus, what a terrible name for the bad guys. Just some first-draft-ass names landing inside of a two-hundred million dollar movie.
* Mark Kermode quoted somebody, saying that The Rise of Skywalker felt like the third part of a story without a second part. That's a little unfair, but beyond more of Rose, little touches here and there, The Last Jedi only appears as an echo, an unfinished rhyme. It's a real shame-- and not just because certain actors got the shaft.
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| Just look at him! So cool! |
* She should have had that lightsaber in the beginning of the movie. Again: This would be a callback to Return of the Jedi when Luke appears with his green lightsaber (which was in this movie, I think?). And it would have moved her forward as a character.
* Also, why do the Sequels only have blue and red lightsabers? I mean, I know the reason why: They're the iconic colors of A New Hope and they don't want your mind wandering to the Prequels, because that might cause Unregulated Emotions and Disney can't have that (more on that in a moment). . .
* I like how Oscar Isaac has clearly had movie military training, where as John Boyega has not. Dude can handle a blaster well, what can I say?
* I like how this is an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink type of movie and it actually works. King of the Monsters tried to do this and didn't succeed (at least for me). Then again, I also don't think that Mass Effect 3 was as bad as people said it was. I'm of the opinion that if you're going to fuck up one of these movies, fuck it up by overdoing it. It seems that Abrams subscribes to the same theory.
* Poe and Finn are not gay. They are bi. To say otherwise is erasure.
* Last, but not least: Rey being a Palpatine is stupid. I mean, it's great, because it's an incredibly ham-handed device to wedge more operative bullshit into an already overloaded filmic cavity, but, in terms of actual plot and story, it's dumb as all hell. It doesn't add anything to her arc-- she's already conflicted and she already has a preternatural sensitivity to the Force. And on the downside, it undercuts the point of The Last Jedi (and Abrams' own The Force Awakens) which was that a "nobody" could be a hero. It doesn't make her choice to turn away from the Dark Side any more significant. All it does is give her Hero's Journey brand recognition. At best it confuses the plot and at worst it undercuts the idea that this film exists in a series.
James Kislingbury is a writer, podcaster, and will probably still pay to see another one of these fucking movies. You can listen to him here and here. You can shovel piles of lucre at him here and here.
