#had it succeeded in that emotional core the way the trilogy did i actually think that original demographic would've enjoyed it too

[nellasbookplanet]

The more time I sink into andromeda, the more I suspect the biggest reason it ultimately failed commercially was because of the massive tonal shift I've already mentioned, and how there was probably a pretty big chunk of original trilogy players who simply no longer fit as a demographic, while the game failed to reach the people who might’ve enjoyed it.

The original trilogy, much as I love it, feels a little bit like a wishfulfillment power fantasy for a very obvious demographic. Almost all women are overtly sexy in design and the f/f relationship in the first game seems to be written along the guidelines of 'what would a straight man find hot'; you play as someone cool and confident and powerful, the most specialest human ever, and maybe you aren’t always respected but YOU and the NARRATIVE always know you're right and you get to be rude to and sometimes punch/murder people who disagree with you so it’s fine. The game then salvages all this by means of genuinely well-written characters and arcs, really cool sci-fi tech and lore, a fantastic story, and meaningful and hard-hitting choices and consequences (which also allow and often encourage you to steer away from that exact macho ideal).

Enter andromeda. Instead of being a super powerful supersoldier from the start, you're the kid of one. You barely know what you're doing. Everyone doubts you, including yourself. You don’t get the assuredness of knowing you are Right and Cool that you have as Shepard. You don’t demand that same respect. And I'm sure there are a lot of people who hated that.

[itsclydebitches]

Why do you think the show is so afraid to paint the heroes as doing bad things? With stuff like the physical and emotional abuse of Oscar in V6 and how Qrow tries to brush over Ruby's lies in V7.

Hard to say, really. For obvious not a mind reader/haven’t encountered any RT statements on the subject reasons. If I were to just theorize though I’d guess they don’t realize the heroes are doing bad things. More optimistic fans read these moments as setup for growth. The group will inevitably be called out for their theft and endangerment, they’ll inevitably realize they treated Ozpin horrifically, they’ll inevitably realize how hypocritical they’re being, etc. The problem is that so far that “inevitably” hasn’t shown up. If anything, the story keep insisting that the group is right (such as Qrow’s conversation with Ruby) rather than setting up that they think they’re right but the viewer can see how that’ll be undermined later. They’re playing it all straight: attacking Argus really was the only and best choice, Ozpin really did deserve everything they dished out, you really are different despite keeping the same secrets and telling the same lies. To me it all reads like that’s how RT truly sees their characters, as intrinsically better or, like the fandom, they just care about them so much that they can’t see when they’re screwing up. There’s no reason to paint the group as having done something wrong if you don’t think they have done anything wrong. 

If I were to expand this into our Western media landscape more broadly, I have theories about how RWBY fits into larger trends. Meaning, since the early 2000s we’ve seen a noticeably tick in dark, gritty, pessimistic storytelling. I first noticed the trend starting with The Dark Knight trilogy, later spurned on by the MCU which grew in both scope and its desire to write a “deep” and “mature” (again, darker) story as opposed to the more common ‘Good Guy superhero comes in and saves the day’ tale. We see this trend in television as well with the rise of the antihero as a loveable protagonist. Granted, this started earlier (noticeably with The Sopranos), but since roughly 2005 we’ve seen shows like Dexter, Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, Mad Men, The Office, Fleabag, The Wire, and numerous others rise to prominence in popular culture. To say nothing of the reality TV. People began calling for protagonists who weren’t classic heroes. Drug lords, murderers, sexist assholes, bad feminists, plain old shitty people. In the last decade especially we’ve seen a strong assertion that a character who is too good is automatically boring/even badly written, to the point where the grimdark trend has become so pervasive that others have pushed back with hopepunk. Not everything needs to be dystopian and not every character needs to be an asshole to tell a good story. 

Which is where RWBY comes in. Airing in 2013, it came right in the middle of when this trend started picking up real speed. Despite what others have said about RWBY being a subversion of that classic, Good vs. Evil fairy tale---There’s racism here! Bullying! One of our heroes is snobbish!---really it still started out in that same, optimistic place. RWBY might have more complicated conflicts than a Disney film, but at its core it was still a Good vs. Evil fight. Grimm are literally the embodiment of evil that we need to cut down. Ruby is literally the young girl with an innate desire to help others. There’s some deconstruction of the tropes, but the tropes were still driving the show. 

Fast-forward three years, it’s 2016, and RWBY suddenly turns on its head. The simple setup of girls training to fight baddies is done away with. Instead they set out into the wide world where nothing is simple, let alone black and white. There was clearly some setup for this (we can see much of the foreshadowing in Volumes 1-3, to say nothing of larger decisions like Ozpin’s place in this fight), but a part of me suspects that RT, consciously or otherwise, started falling into the new trend around this time. Darker stories were gaining traction. The antihero is the new fave. People (supposedly) want more than just a good person trying to do good and eventually succeeding. So they keep pushing their characters’ situations: what if goodie-goodie Ruby stole military property? What if hot-headed Yang let loose on an ally? What if Weiss’ abuse was worse than anyone suspected? What if Blake has to stab her own abuser through the stomach? What if we made this show more like what we see people praising? Less cutesy, optimistic good girls vs. bad grimm, more gritty, complicated girls vs. really messed up baddies? 

The problem is that RT isn’t willing to go the whole way. Our heroes were never meant to be antiheroes. That innate goodness---what we started the series with---still drives them and RT keeps insisting it’s there... even as they have the characters doing things that don’t fit in with that characterization. They want Ozpin to be morally gray, but don’t have him doing enough to support that. In contrast, they want Ruby to do things less classically heroic (“How do I know what the right thing is?”) but they don’t actually want to turn her into someone who might make the wrong call and face repercussions for that. They want her and the rest of the team making the “dark” and “deep” and “complicated” decisions without the consequences of those decisions turning them into less heroic people. So they just ignore those consequences. The group gets to physically assault a guy sobbing on his knees... and be praised for that. They get to endanger a city... and be praised for that. They get to tell lies and keep secrets... and get praised for that. No matter what they do it comes back to that initial characterization of They’re The Good Guys, which in turn creates a conflict. 

So yeah. Long answer. tl;dr I suspect that RT, like much of the fandom, legitimately doesn’t get how badly they’ve had the group act, or they want that darker show but aren’t willing to commit to how that would inevitably change the characters. So they give us this frustrating setup of insisting that non-heroic actions were actually heroic all along. 

[militant-holy-knight]

Benioff and Weiss Were Always Hacks: You Only Noticed Now

Or why you should be worried for the future Star Wars movies made by them

(Disclaimer: this blogpost contains spoilers for Game of Thrones)

With only two episodes left for the series to reach it’s conclusion and the announcement for future Star Wars movies in the horizon made by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss (henceforth referred to as D&D for simplicity sake), not many fans seem to be excited about it as they should due to the creative choices taken in regards to the final season of Game of Thrones. Speaking as a GoT fan, I used to enjoy the show a lot and I believe it reached it’s peak on Season 4 and started to go went downhill on Season 5. If D&D were in charge from the beginning what happened?

D&D’s job was always to adapt the book series by George R. R. Martin, which means any merit to the show’s writing can be attributed largely to Martin while D&D were only fit for it to make it work into a tv show - which is still laudable in it’s own right because there are things in the books that still wouldn’t translate too well into the show. In any case, they did their job well from Season 1 to Season 4 which adapted the first trilogy in the series. Even though there are still five books in total released at the time, Season 5 is where they started to run out of material to adapt because some storylines didn’t find their proper conclusion and they needed to come up with their own unique deviations.

Season 5 is considered by many fans to be the low point in the series because of it’s extremely low pacing and controversial liberties taken: the biggest ones have to be the Dorne subplot because that meant axing popular book character Arianne Martell, Stannis Baratheon turning irredeemable evil and paying with his life and Sansa’s marriage to Ramsay Snow leading to her rape, which is still a very hot button among the fandom to this day (and understandably so). Season 5 did have some moments like Hardhome which showed the strength of the true villain of the series, the Night King, the leader of the White Walker invasion who brings winter with him. He is the Thanos-like menace who is teased since the very start of the show with the very first scene opening with a White Walker killing some Night Watch’s rangers and warning us about the danger he represents.

Season 6 fixed some of these problems by giving a more dynamic pacing and build it up with the Battle of the Bastards as the climatic encounter instead of something completely anti-climatic like Season 5′s finale where Stannis Baratheon’s forces were liquidated by the Boltons offscreen. But still, it was an entire season wasted to fix another one’s problems and it still had some individual problems. 

And then Season 7 came along and it all went to waste. I wouldn’t say it was as bad as Season 5 because at least shit happened and it wasn’t boring, but it was still full of groan-worthy moments like trying to force some romance between Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen which doesn’t work because they have no chemistry and they are related by blood, curing Jorah Mormont who has been infected with a dangerous disease that will turn him into a snow zombie by simply cutting out the infected area, and of course lest we forget the Wight Hunt in Episode 6 “Beyond the Wall” which broke all suspension of disbelief. Lemme sum it up for you what happens in that episode so you can get the idea and let me put up a map so you can get it from reference.

The heroes come up with the idea to capture an Wight and bring it South to convince Cersei to from a truce.

The travel by boat to the Wall from their base on Dragonstone.

After reaching the Wall, they walk into the land beyond it to find a wight.

They find one and send one of their members back to ask reinforcements having to sprint a indeterminate distance.

The team gets surrounded by the Night King’s army in a frozen lake for a indeterminate amount of time.

The allies at the Wall send a raven back to Dragonstone requesting help.

Daenerys summons her dragons to fly to the land beyond the Wall to rescue the heroes.

They are fighting to the last against the advancing horde of the Night King just before Daenerys arrives in a triumphant moment to save them.

And all of this happens like... Within a hour apparently. Several days should have taken place between this exchange but time moves at the speed of the plot, but D&D seem to be relying on emotional torque to get viewers to ignore all internal logic and be mindblown by the crowning moments of awesome. And this is the core issue with their writing.

D&D write their scenes the same way they film sex scenes apparently, hoping that the emotional moments will make the audience be carried over. Thing is... I realized this after thinking up about many moments in the past. Hardhome was one such example in Season 5 to make up for its abhorrent dullness and even Season 6 wasn’t safe from this. For example, remember how Rickon Stark died just so he could provoke Jon Snow to act irrationally and spur him into conflict? Why didn’t Rickon run in zig-zag when Ramsay began firing arrows at him? Why did he run into a straight line? Did these writers not watch Prometheus to learn their lessons from it’s mistakes? This problem was carried over in Season 8 and amplified a lot in the Long Night. Many people pointed out the several military blunders made by the protagonists when fighting against the Night King’s army.

I could talk about the moronic choice to film everything in absolute darkness and make it impossible to see shit.

I could talk about how idiotic it was to waste your cavalry against the enemy bulwark.

I could talk about how they didn’t create trenches with tar or use fire for more effective manner against the undead.

But I’d rather talk about that moment.

Arya killing the Night King.

You know at first I was okay with that because:

I wasn’t being a fan of Jon Snow in a long time.

Arya wasn’t a Mary Sue, had skills that justified her, so I could buy it better.

But the more I thought about it, more I came to the realization that it was a wrong choice all along.

Arya never had any investment in killing the Night King. She was a character defined by a list of people she wanted to kill including the Freys, Cersei, Joffrey and others.

Arya was trained as an assassin yes... But her training in Season 5 and 6 was very lackluster. She spent some time doing menial works, impersonating some people and trying to spill some poison on someone’s drink. She never learned invisibility, teleportation or any other cool shit.

And most importantly... Melisandre predicting that Arya would shut down “blue eyes” way back when they met in Season 3. If she sensed she was always destined to kill the Night King why did she ever support Stannis? Why did she even support Jon Snow? She even referred to him as the Prince that was Promised. Some fans can try to spin this as much as they want, but it breaks the plot retroactively very hard.

The actress herself didn’t think she deserved it

Of course all of these things were ignored by a large part of the fanbase, more specifically the “woke” crowd because YAS QUEEN SLAY. Little did they know that the very next episode would force them to eat a real shit sandwich when “The Last of the Starks” seemed to turn the narrative against Daenerys Targaryen by turning her into the Mad Queen, killing her handmaiden Missandei and setting up Jon to be the next King of Westeros. Not helping matters is that a series of leaks not yet confirmed as of the time of writing were released prior to the episode (but I personally feel they were legitimate due to some specific things but that is not the point) which sent many Daenerys fans into panic mode.

Speaking as someone who really doesn’t like Daenerys Targaryen, I can actually sympathize with them at some level because this shift appears to be very sudden specially now that the authors favored her more until this very moment. Some viewers can argue that there were always signs like her burning the Tarlys for refusing to bend the knee, which I personally took issue with before but it never really came across as the sign of an insane ruler since she offered very valid rebuttals. It all seemed like the plot was tailored to take her side no matter what and I considered Dany a Mary Sue. But just because they seem to be turning her into a villain now, it doesn’t make me hate the story any less.

Now... I spent an inordinate amount of time bitching about Game of Thrones and if you are an Star Wars fan that doesn’t know anything about it, you might be lost to anything I am writing. Well I needed to give an proper context to both GoT and SW fans since those seem to overlap now and give you a warning because Star Wars seems to be more lost now than ever. D&D were never particularly good writers, they were incoherent about continuity, care more about spectacle over substance and seem to share a thing about subverting the audience’s expectations like a certain Ruin Johnson who succeeded in completely ruining a franchise like there was no tomorrow. The key difference between D&D and Ruin is that the duo doesn’t share the same flippant attitude or picking up fights with fans on Twitter - on the contrary, D&D understand the power of fanservice even if it means daggling the metaphorical shining keys in front of the audience. 

As we come close to Game of Thrones conclusion, I have a feeling that nobody will truly come out satisfied with it should the story take the direction that we are really dreading. I’ve seen interviews about how Emilia Clarke sounds really sad and deflated, seemed like she was really disappointed with how the show ended. Whatever happens, the blame can be laid on the feet of Benioff and Weiss for their frankly baffling creative decisions. This season has been disappointing through and through with two or three episodes being needlessly long and filler to booth and to make matters worse, it was supposed to end earlier than 10 episodes. Why did they need to rush it and yet fill the series with so much dead air?

Now can you imagine a Star Wars movie made by them? With all these things I listed? The next trilogy is already dated, we don't know if it's D&D or Ruin Johnson yet. We are talking about a couple of writers that have no sense of realistic scale, continuity or logic, but rely on cheap emotional tricks to have the audience invested until they begin thinking about it. I would laugh until I was sick if this season turns everyone against those two fuckwads that Disney changes their mind about putting them in charge. If the world was a just place, this is what would happen at least.

[questions-within-questions]

My big The Last Jedi post

Spoiler free until you get to the page break 

I love the theme of this film. It’s pretty much exactly the theme from the star wars sequal trilogy I had playing in my imagination when I was a child. But it really took me in surprise with how the film executed it. It’s not as simple as “there’s a lesson the heroes are learning, meanwhile the bad guys and some idiot Jedi are standing of the way of that” 

The pacing of this film? It’s well documented that I hate the pacing of the Star Wars films. I think all of them, save for Revenge and Awakens, have terrible pacing. This film has three story-lines and is really, really long. I love long films, but even I thought “Wow I don’t expect a star wars film to feel this long” but the pacing almost makes it work because there’s a clear plot (Screw you Phantom, Clones and Empire) and a lot of the film keeps you on your toes about how it’s going to end. 

A lot of the reviews I read have complained that Finn and his story-line is the short end of the stick? I don’t understand that. I freaking love Finn and Rose’s story here. It’s not big on character arcs but it is big on character exploration, world building, and damn I love Rose? I was always eager for the plot to return to their story.

And I LOVE that world building. Thing I disliked about Awakens? No space politics; I didn’t feel like I understood how this setting worked. And, yes, I still don’t really feel like I know what the Republic even is at this point. But Finn and Rose go to a core world planet (which, we never see in the movies. Courasaunt is literally the only planet we spend any time on that isn’t a sleepy back water in the films. Naboo is the next in line and even that felt like an outsider in the republic) I freaking love seeing what that looks like. Rose says some really profound stuff about the people who live in the side of the galaxy which isn’t war torn.  I’ve seen a lot of people complaining about Luke having his character ruined. And I am so freaking happy because I hate fanon Luke. Everyone expects Luke to be a chosen one and to be a Jedi Grand Master like Yoda in the prequels and to be this super-sayan human deity. And yet Luke’s entire character arc in Return is realising that he’s better than that, beyond that. And I’m glad this film follows through with it. It’s a great performance from Mark.  Hux is, weirdly enough, the character I think who benefits the most from this film? Like, he’s not in any way different from how he was in Awakens, but the tone and plot just benefits him more. I didn’t even notice he existed after my first watch of Awakens, but in this I was always happy to see him on screen. Shippers are going to have a fucking field day.

Kylo Ren also is a character who’s arc I really, really enjoyed in this film? Which, woah that’s a surprise. I still think Rose and Finn’s storyline is more enjoyable, but Kylo’s and Rey’s is really compelling and had me surprised. Their conflict is really easy to understand and ties in really well thematically with both the film and where the franchise is right now. Kylo is probably equal only to Poe in terms of how much character development he gets, with Rey in a close third place.  SPACE BATTLES. Damn, I complained that Awakens didn’t have enough battles and this film did me a solid. Now that writers seem to have a strong hold about how battles actually work in this setting, especially in space, things are just really satisfying.  People have complained that this film is too funny? What? How is that a bad thing? Y’all just want a star wars film to make you miserable because that’s how you think you remember Empire making you feel.  Anyway time for Spoilers  ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Lot’s of spoilers now. If the prequel trilogy is about the failings of stoicism, the original trilogy is the triumph of emotion, this trilogy is setting up to be about letting things go, moving on.

Which, you know, Star Wars really badly needs to do. It’s horrifically formulaic. So having Luke Skywalker say “You don’t need Luke Skywalker”... it works for me.  I’ve been hating on the Jedi for a decade now, and Luke’s criticisms of them ring so true. The force isn’t something to be wielded. Hording the force into super soldiers isn’t what the force is here for. The force is something that is best utilised by everyone, together, rather than a lone hero. Which I think wonderfully explains why the Jedi failed and the Rebellion succeeded.  Yoda seemed to realise this, a finally reached the end point of his character arc. Forgoing his hubris and helping Luke destroy the temple. I was actually about the forgive the green bastard but then he makes this pun “There’s nothing in the library that Rey doesn’t already posses.” BITCH KNEW ABOUT THE BOOKS. But this is why I love that Luke’s last battle isn’t him using the force in an amazing display of power to destroy the first order, but rather using the force in an amazing display of power to cause a distraction so that the Resistance can live.  But how amazing is Rey and Kylo’s take on this? Two kids who spent the entirety of the previous film obsessed with the past admitting that actually, the past has been cruel to us. Kill that sentimentality. Of course the reason they differ is because Kylo is evil and thinks the end point of this is destroying the republic, resistance and the first order. Rey literally rolls her eyes at this shit. But it’s really compelling to see why these two kids would both do a 180 and turn on the legacies that previously controlled them, all be it in very different ways. Rey is just ungodly powerful, and that’s fascinating. It’s revealed that she has no lineage, she’s literally nobody special. She’s just some random kid who happens to have amazing power. (And damn she’s strong in the dark side too) which makes for a very interesting Star Wars protagonist. Because we’ve had Anakin and Luke both be chosen ones due to their conceptions. Anakin defined by the dark side and Luke by the light. It feels fresh to have Rey be the hero now. Luke literally says, “I’m going to give you three lessons. Not about how to be a jedi, no, about why the Jedi suck”. She drops out of Luke school before even taking the third lesson! She still kicks ass fighting the royal guard. It’s impressive.  It’s all pretty damn dwarfed by some of the shit Luke and Snoke pull. That galaxy spanning stuff has the be the biggest displays of force power we’ve ever seen mortals do in the films. I know people are saying that Leia flying through space like an angel is bullshit powerful, but damn, if you watch Star Wars Rebels; force pulling yourself through space is just the easiest thing to do. Very pretty. Though her cloak billowing up to look like angel wings? A bit heavy handed what with Carrie’s recent passing.  Speaking of Snoke. The number one Raylo shipper? Snoke. I love his evil plan in this film. I know it rhymes a lot with the Emperor's plans, but it’s like he watched Return of the Jedi and was like “Hmmm, I could use this to my advantage” and I love that he died like a punk. I still have no idea where he came from, why he has such weirdly long legs, what his motivation is, or why he’s such a obvious retread of Palpatine, but hay it was fun watching him be an evil bastard and die so to be a stepping stone in Kylo’s story.  He also slapped Rey in the face with her own lightsaber using the force? Literally yesterday I posted to tumblr wishing this would happen. (I also theorised that Rey was her own parents so shit me did I gasp when she saw herself behind the dark side mirror) That scene in Snokes throne room is a wonderful subversion of Vader’s promise to Luke in Empire? “Together we could overthrow the emperor and rule this galaxy” this is a subversive look at, “Hay, what if Vader had actually followed through on that?”  Speaking of Raylo. Damn the ship wars are going to be intense. This film gives massive material to all of the popular ships. Huxlo and Raylo especially, without saying anything definite at all. There’s literally nothing in the text to suggest that Hux, Kylo and Rey aren’t all disgusted with each other. But damn there is fuel for those fics now.  I did a little dance every time Phasma turned up. She’s so cool. She’s somewhere between Bobba Fett and General Grievous in terms of “really cool character who does nothing and dies”  So that final scene. It’s already controversial. And I bet the editing team were anxious about leaving it in. It was probably tempting to end on our cast of heroes. But you know what? Empire did that and that ending sucked. Having a force sensitive kid telling his own stories about the Resistance as he looks up at the horizon? Thematically it’s just more satisfying.  Though this film really does try to have it’s cake and eat it too with killing the past. The Jedi temple is destroyed, but the books survive. Kylo shuns the Vader mythology, but plays the exact role that Vader did in the battle of Hoth in the final battle. Luke says we don’t need Luke Skywalker, but the final scene is a boy being inspired by his mythology.  LIST OF STUPID THINGS I LIKED Adam Driver visibly slipping on those really polished First Order floors, and the editor just keeping it in. Space nuns!?  BB-H8 turning up and the film instantly recognising that this droid is A MAJOR THREAT. They killed off Admiral Ackbar!?  Luke’s smile when he saw R2!!! Rose looking out over the casino planet. Saying all these people are happy. And not one of them cares about the war we’re dying in. Damn. I love it.

[casualarsonist]

Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi review

*SPOILERS*, but who cares at this point?

I’ve placed a lot of expectation on myself for this review. It’s been through three incarnations already, and I still can’t get it right. It’s muddled, it says too little about too many things, it’s all over the place emotionally, and it needs a good edit. 

...Hey then, I suppose in that case it’s perfect, because it’s exactly like Star Wars: The Last Jedi *badoom tish*.

For those that don’t know, I’m a massive Star Wars fan with all the usual caveats applying - not the prequels, not the garbage games, not the Christmas Special. And yet The ‘Last Jedi’ was the first Star Wars film ever released that I straight-up refused to watch. It started with me simply failing to care, and then it became an antagonistic joke to some people who asked me to review it, until finally it turned into a matter of earnest protest - I was not going to pay to see this film, because that way Disney wins. It was only after I realised it was released on a streaming service that my girlfriend had a subscription for that I decided to bite the bullet. I’ve asked myself many times before and since how the hell things could possibly have gotten to this point - to the point that I, the second biggest fan I know, for whom the series was and is a deep and integral part of my life, would simply stop giving a shit?

In the case of The Last Jedi, it began with the mundanity of Disney’s output. Who would have guessed that, after all the prophecies of hope and dread following the corporation’s acquisition of the Star Wars licence, the actual end-result would be that they would simply bore us to death with aggressively average releases? That fact, coupled with the unfathomable laziness of The Force Awakens’ rehashing of A New Hope’s story, and the cavalcade of negative press, reviews, and anecdotes I read and heard in the wake of The Last Jedi’s release hammered the last nail in the coffin with such force, it might as well have been fired directly from the Death Star. For what it’s worth now, it’s immediately clear that even though the prequel trilogy are, by most metrics, terrible films, at least they still very much fit into the Star Wars universe. There’s something about George Lucas’ touch, something that I can’t explain, in that while it stands for nothing in terms of guaranteeing quality, it can at least be counted on to sprinkle originality and imagination over an otherwise well-worn, classic story. George Lucas’ Episode VII sure as hell wouldn’t have been a blatant reboot of A New Hope. And whatever your thoughts on the man, the fact is that without him, we’re stuck in a real worst-case scenario: a bunch of isolated  ‘enthusiasts’ writing disconnected fan-fiction screenplays for the corporate zombies on Disney’s board to mutilate in accordance with their latest focus-group data. Mediocre scripts rendered ever-more tedious by a studio intent on watering down anything and everything that might turn someone away, and in doing so, they end up turning away everyone that was looking for something new. For the series that I so adore, this is a fate worse than death. So it is that we end up with Rian Johnson’s crack at the franchise, and so it is that I found myself completely and utterly ambivalent. 

I wish I had enough passion in me to savage this film - to create a real spectacle piece, a cathartic script to read for anyone else feeling angry and disappointed. I wish that, after all the waiting and the bemused anticipation, The Last Jedi had made me mad enough to rip it to pieces...but, honestly, I don’t know if it did. I think the overwhelming sensation that filled me when it was all said and done was that it met my expectations exactly. And don’t get me wrong - by most metrics, The Last Jedi is an utter clusterfuck. By most metrics, it’s a terrible Star Wars film. But it’s not like Johnson scorched the earth of the franchise - Disney had more to do with that than he. Johnson’s script simply built itself a weird, amateurish hovel atop a pre-existing ruin. And while I’m not saying that no-one could ever possibly release a good Star Wars film again (even though I don’t think they will), for me - and judging by the extremely lackluster numbers of ‘Solo’, a great deal of others - Disney simply cannot recapture the strange, flawed, wizard-magic of George Lucas and Lucasfilm, and I don’t know if I’m ever going to care about another Star Wars film again. 

Yes, it’s that famous nerd-fan hyperbole at play here - I won’t deny that I care more than I should - but I want to reiterate that I’m not so much in histrionics over this particular instalment, but about what the film and its collective flaws represent. The feeling George Lucas got during the test screening of The Phantom Menace - that dreadful understanding that your multi-million-dollar creation is a dog’s breakfast - is a feeling that should have echoed throughout the entirety of Disney HQ when The Last Jedi was first screened. Disney’s fractured, unfocused, haphazard production process is directly mirrored in The Last Jedi’s fractured, unfocused, haphazard final product. Its plot is a mess and filled with holes and unfinished ideas. It’s tone-deaf. Every single attempt at humour is groan-inducing. It’s so fixated on concluding the stories of old, core characters, and yet unceremoniously shovels beloved side-characters into a mass grave; and every single time it tries to introduce someone or something new, they either don’t fit properly into the universe, or the film drops it like a pot of Kevin Malone’s chili into the middle of a confusing series of events, glossing over character’s histories to such an extent that it’s impossible to care about them. Admiral Ackbar is in this film, apparently. I didn’t know that until one of the characters mentions that he’d been killed. Maybe I wasn’t paying enough attention, or maybe they said his name while I was yelling at the TV in incredulous rage, but one of the most revered characters in the series is eliminated with such little fanfare, I didn’t even know he was onscreen when it happened. He’s then supplanted by a commander that was apparently trained by Leia, but has never been mentioned in 40 years of canon. She’s killed an hour later. That’s cool. That was a good decision.  

It’s going to be really hard to detail all the missteps in The Last Jedi’s lumbering progression towards its underwhelming end, but I’ll try to relate some of the most impactful. Through an absurd web of barely-connected story threads, we follow Luke Skywalker as he drinks raw milk from an alien’s tit. We see General Hux turned into some slapstick comedy ragdoll existing only to scream incomprehensibly and be dragged around the set by the dark jedi. We see Luke toss his old lightsaber away as if the last time he had it, it didn’t disappear down a bottomless pit. We’re still not given an explanation as to where and how it was found, and we probably never will. We see every side character from the previous film either written-out or killed. We see Leia somehow master the Force to overcome certain death, and it’s never explained how. We see an X-Wing ‘drift’ in the vacuum of space. We see Captain Phasma return as if she’s some kind of nemesis to Finn, only to have her ass kicked by the ex-stormtrooper grunt in a 30-second fight before falling to her presumed death. Leia chastises Poe for being reckless, then immediately sanctions his recklessness. Finn decides that the only way to stop a First Order weapon is to fly into it and kill himself. This does not happen, and there are no consequences. Yoda’s force ghost somehow burns down the site of old Jedi texts, and then the texts turn up unscathed in a throwaway shot later on. A joke prop from A New Hope is given a role of sentimental importance, even though most people won’t even know it ever existed, and won’t therefore have any emotional connection with it - I didn’t, and I’ve watched the film about 30 times. And perhaps most importantly, we see the ‘Resistance’ on the run from an evil entity that somehow crawled out of the ashes of a decimated Empire with enough manpower and capital to finance and build a weapon the size of a literal planet, lost that planet along with all the men and materiel remaining on it, and STILL remains far more powerful than the fighting force and governing power that defeated its every incarnation throughout history. Apparently, eradicating the Empire’s dictatorial command structure and freeing the most influential planets in the galaxy does absolutely nothing to weaken it, and yet the entirety of the armed forces of the new Galactic Republic exists aboard a dozen underpowered ships. 

Nothing makes sense. Nothing is sacred. The weakness of J.J. Abrams conceit for Episode VII is revealed here as Johnson intentionally erases every mystery he established and tosses away all the minor characters that glimmered with the faint hope of being something more interesting this time around. He’s stated in interviews that he was trying to ‘subvert audience expectations’, and if your expectation was that the second film in the trilogy would build on the first, he certainly succeeded in that goal. But what story is The Last Jedi trying to tell? Like The Force Awakens, it’s so trapped by the prestige of its past and the burden of creating a future that, in accordance with Disney, must please every single human being alive, that it achieves nothing. When Mark Hamill tells you to your face that he completely disagrees with every single decision you’ve made about a character he’s known and lived for forty years, your decisions probably need a rethink. But Johnson didn’t rethink his decisions, and Mark Hamill is such a boss that he gave it his all regardless. No, The Last Jedi doesn’t scorch the earth. It simply salts the already desolate landscape so that nothing more may grow again, at least from this story-cycle.

So with all this frustration, you might assume that I despised the film...but I didn’t. It has the worst script of any Star Wars film, no doubt - worse in its inept storytelling and its awful, atonal jokes than almost anything Lucas ever wrote – and yet I'd still watch it again sooner than Episode 2. I’d watch it sooner than The Force Awakens. It's stupid, and overlong, and a directionless, muddled mess, but it still has some good moments. I liked seeing Luke, despite the potential of his character being wasted. I liked the idea of a union between Kylo and Rey, even if that too was squandered. I still like Kylo Ren, even if that’s not a popular opinion. As much as Admiral Holdo's character was ineptly shoehorned into the plot, I liked her final scene. Leia carries herself with strength and dignity, and actually gives orders and counsel, as she should. These moments are a drop in a bucket when it comes to tallying the bad vs the good, but they're there, and they’re okay. 

But this film cannot be fixed. Rian Johnson has said that J.J. Abrams shared no long-term plans for the trilogy. No shit. For every three films planned, George Lucas had a three-film arc; that’s what tied together even the worst of the Lucasfilm releases. Disney has no such plan. They’re trying to cobble together a trilogy of films without retaining any creative staff, and giving the new people they bring in through a revolving door free-reign to do whatever they want right up until it clashes with the company’s monetisation plan. There’s no consistency. There’s no permanence. There’s no balance or flow between instalments because there’s no unified oversight, and the end result is that every incoming writer has to spend a large portion of their time guessing the answers to questions that the previous writer posed. And Rian Johnson, for his part, has no idea what he’s doing or where he’s going. His contribution to the Star Wars legacy is to undo everything Abrams left for him, retroactively destroying any worth The Force Awakens might have had, and establish nothing for himself. Every film in this new cycle has been a patchwork mess led by an ever-changing roster of freelance writers and directors looking for a million-dollar paycheck. It’s an utter disaster, and Disney can call it ‘canon’ all it likes, but this is not a real Star Wars film. 

3/10