Let's Stop Encouraging This

Rating: 2/10 (19 December 2017)

Terrible as Star Wars, ok as a movie. But as Star Wars... devastating. Don't get me wrong, if you're a millenial, someone that watched Star Wars movies the way you watch most other movies, someone who came late to it or didn't like the originals, then you might like this one. But if you have anything invested in Star Wars historically then you'll come away with a big hand print on your face from being slapped by Disney.
It wasn't all bad - there were a number of scenes that were very nicely done. The scene with the ramming of the enemy fleet was awesome. Cinematography was really nice, the sets were well done, etc. I thought the Rey/Kylo arc was fascinating, but they took all the possibilities there and dropped the ball, as they did with most of it.
First they took Luke Skywalker, the most powerful Jedi the galaxy has ever known, and turned him into a grumpy old man on a mountain. And not only a grumpy old Jedi on a mountain - there's a strong tradition of Jedi that withdraw in order to dedicate themselves to the Force - no, he spends the time cut off from the force and crying in his soup. And the story prior to that is pathetic. "He starts a school. Bad guy corrupts his school. School destroyed. Go hide. Make a very realistic vision of himself. Die." It was bad enough that they made Han a pathetic scoundrel and loser after a Trilogy of character development and improvement, but this was terrible. It's a slap in the face to decades of Skywalker character development in cinema, comics, and books, and a slap in the face to fans that have been with it from the beginning.
Having been handed a crap sandwich though, Hamill took the role and ran with it. I thought he did an excellent job at it for sure. I'm a little disappointed in him as a fan himself that he went along with it. But I guess you have to toe the contractual line to get paid. Very sad, though.
Then they took what was supposedly one of the most mysterious and dangerous baddies the galaxy had ever seen and just killed him off with no explanation. Mysterious Snoke! Terrible Snoke! Master of the dark side Snoke! Meh, just chop him in half. Having said that, Kylo's method of killing him was very clever. Kudos for that part of the scene.
And the mystery of Rey is... that there is no mystery? Her parentage isn't a larger story arc? Like Snoke, let's just build that up via one director and screenwriting team, and then let's have another come across who have a different idea and kill off all the ideas from the first one. Meh, just kill that idea off.
The training of Rey consisted of a couple of lessons on Luke's grumpy mountain? Man, Yoda and all those other guys must have been sooo wrong about how to teach Jedi after all those centuries. Apparently you just fall into it and it takes over. No need to practice or study. Just "Hey, there it is! Now I'm super powerful!". Light, dark, you're in between, visit the dark side cave and it's fine, something something force. No development, no nothing.
It took a hastily introduced character (Rose), attached her to Finn (who they still haven't figured out what to do with) and tried to create a relationship based on nothing. Not even close to believable. As a matter of fact, pretty much all of the new characters are totally flat and unrelatable.
C3PO gets maybe 20 seconds of screentime and half of that is telling him to shut up. R2D2 gets about the same. Chewbacca gets one scene with a Porg and a scene eating by the fire. Admiral Ackbar gets a minute of screentime and then gets unceremoniously jettisoned into space. BB8 gets a couple of really cool scenes, though, so that was a plus!
Do I need to talk about Leia force-flying in space? Do I really? Just go see Guardians of the Galaxy. It's a more well rounded and thought out film.
What was the point of Canto Bight? Were we trying to insert politics here? Social commentary?
And speaking of social commentary, we got that in spades. What did we learn from this little episode kids? We learned that the men (Han, Luke, Poe, Finn, Admiral Ackbar) can't get it right. We learned that only by listening to the female leads, and this was all female leads, is there any hope. The only men we see with any sort of power or influence, aside from Poe who is put in his place immediately, are incompetent. Did you notice that team darkside is headed by men? Men who appear comedic and incompetent? Did you see any gals on the bridge with them? No? And that's why they fail, young Jedi. Because they have wedding tackle. Because of toxic masculinity. Females lead team lightside and that's really why they win. Very politically correct.
Don't get me wrong - I love Rey. I love Leia. In a couple of movies after I see Rose actually develop her character I might even like her. But it's unbalanced and obviously pandering.
Phasma is the exception here in that she's female, but that was the crappiest character ever created anyway so I have a hard time feeling bad about the ending to that one.
And let's talk about the rebellion in general. This is another slap in the face to Star Wars story, but this time right in Leia's face. Was she able to accomplish nothing? The rebellion is now just a few transports full of main characters and a couple of extras? And they were defeated by the not funny but comedic team of Hux and Kylo? The rest of the universe doesn't give a crap about them and refuses to help when they ask for it?
In very obvious dialog, Kylo tells Rey that she has no place in the story and that she's a nobody. I think the idea was again to "free" the series from the Skywalkers. But nobody that's ever really been a Star Wars fan has thought that. The world of the Jedi and Sith has always been huge and wondrous. The Skywalkers had a big place in it at a certain time, but the universe itself was humongous. They didn't free anybody. They jettisoned what made it Star Wars.
Now they say that this is all "freeing" the Star Wars universe from the baggage of the past, and making it new and relevant, but that's a bunch of horse crap. Whenever you cast aside the roots of a story like Star Wars you throw away what makes it Star Wars. Now it's a space adventure. You're free of Luke, the Skywalker clan, the Jedi, the Sith, and all of that. Now you have what seems like a smaller universe and story that ends up being somewhat hazy and nebulous. The kid at the end with the broom I suppose we're supposed to think is a sign that now anybody and everybody can be a Jedi. It's free wheeling and fancy free I guess. But that was always the case. It was never just Skywalkers. And ity was never even all Jedi or all Sith. Had they not jettisoned all the books and lore they would know that. By originally declaring it all non-canon they made the universe smaller. And by "cutting themselves free" of the older movies they made it smaller still.
If you wanted to do a hand-off to a new generation, and even change a lot about the way things work, then you could do that with some decent storytelling. But this was just a travesty. It's sole purpose seems to be to get rid of anything prior and dump it. Destroy it all and star over with a clean slate telling what Disney wants to tell. This wasn't a hand-off, it was a corporate slaughter. It was the moneymakers at Disney taking something that should have been great and tearing it apart to give themselves more room to make some more cash.
And that's where we're left. A smaller universe without the millenia of story and history that made the Star Wars universe so huge and mysterious. Now that all of that baggage is gone we can do it right. Hand it over to the next generation. Yay.
But hey, Disney can pump out movie after movie for the next decade and do whatever they want with it. And that's what it's all about.
The only way to stop is to not buy it. And mark my words, this sort of subpar crap will keep coming now that Disney owns most beloved movie characters. Just don't buy it.