Joshua Jones
When all is said and done, all's quiet and boring.
A waste. I see the sequels as a complete waste of my time and one movie ticket (I waited until TLJ and ROS came out on Disney +, so I was even more apathetic than Night_Eternal above!).
The strength of the original trilogy, in my mind, has always been the compelling characters. Luke, Leia, Han, Chewie, Yoda, Vader, Lando, Boba Fett... even the stupid teddy bears are iconic in their own way. The prequels swung at compelling characters and sometimes hit, sometimes missed. The sequels took the returning characters, summarily shot (or stabbed) them in cold blood, then unleashed a botched Han clone, a possibly interesting stromtrooper who absolutely nothing is done with, a trifecta of suck villains who Vader likely would have executed for sheer annoyance factor/ throwing tantrums and breaking expensive equipment. Hux feels like a chastised college student, Snoke is literally a stand in for an actual villain pretending to be Palpatine (whose cardboard stand-in place is then filled by, of course, Palpatine ex machina), and Ben is as far from menacing as I can imagine. Scratch that; he's menacing in the worst possible way, like a toddler's mind being grafted into a grown man's body and given a laser sword, only to get partially bested by a STORMTROOPER with a weapon he had barely seen before, much less used, then a rando girl from the desert.
But, I hold a special place in my heart for Rey, a Mary Sue so Mary Sue that a Mary Sue should now be called a Rey. That place, btw, is entitled "unending hatred and manifest rage". Rey is literally (and make no mistake, I mean the dictionary definition of literally) the embodiment of everything I hate about modern female SFF characters. In an attempt to make her seem "strong" they made her have no real weaknesses and no means of defeat. She can pick up a lightsaber and best a former student of Luke and current Sith with no training whatsoever, which can only mean that she is more powerful than ANY who have gone before her. Qui Gon. Obi Wan. Anakin. Luke. Palpatine. Mace Windu. Yoda. ANYONE, because they all needed training. Set aside how much this strains credulity for a moment; it makes her battles incapable of being interesting, because she can't lose. To put it another way, they tried so hard to make her the archetypal strong female action hero that they failed to make her what she needs to be most, an interesting character with real stakes.
I've already used up just about all the antipathy I can muster on the last two paragraphs, so I'll just list a partial, representative list of what else bothers me before my apathy kicks in...
"You mean, like a Death Star?"
"No, nothing like a Death Star! It's got a big ditch around it... and... climate on the outside..."
"O...K... so what does it do?"
"Destroy planets."
"Like... a Death Star?"
"No, nothing like that! This one can destroy [starts counting fingers] 5! 5 whole planets!"
"... OK... gotcha boss... what should we call it?"
"Starkiller base!"
"...because... it kills... planets... right?"
"Oh, just make up something about how a star dies every time its used or something..."
"...Right..."
The strength of the original trilogy, in my mind, has always been the compelling characters. Luke, Leia, Han, Chewie, Yoda, Vader, Lando, Boba Fett... even the stupid teddy bears are iconic in their own way. The prequels swung at compelling characters and sometimes hit, sometimes missed. The sequels took the returning characters, summarily shot (or stabbed) them in cold blood, then unleashed a botched Han clone, a possibly interesting stromtrooper who absolutely nothing is done with, a trifecta of suck villains who Vader likely would have executed for sheer annoyance factor/ throwing tantrums and breaking expensive equipment. Hux feels like a chastised college student, Snoke is literally a stand in for an actual villain pretending to be Palpatine (whose cardboard stand-in place is then filled by, of course, Palpatine ex machina), and Ben is as far from menacing as I can imagine. Scratch that; he's menacing in the worst possible way, like a toddler's mind being grafted into a grown man's body and given a laser sword, only to get partially bested by a STORMTROOPER with a weapon he had barely seen before, much less used, then a rando girl from the desert.
But, I hold a special place in my heart for Rey, a Mary Sue so Mary Sue that a Mary Sue should now be called a Rey. That place, btw, is entitled "unending hatred and manifest rage". Rey is literally (and make no mistake, I mean the dictionary definition of literally) the embodiment of everything I hate about modern female SFF characters. In an attempt to make her seem "strong" they made her have no real weaknesses and no means of defeat. She can pick up a lightsaber and best a former student of Luke and current Sith with no training whatsoever, which can only mean that she is more powerful than ANY who have gone before her. Qui Gon. Obi Wan. Anakin. Luke. Palpatine. Mace Windu. Yoda. ANYONE, because they all needed training. Set aside how much this strains credulity for a moment; it makes her battles incapable of being interesting, because she can't lose. To put it another way, they tried so hard to make her the archetypal strong female action hero that they failed to make her what she needs to be most, an interesting character with real stakes.
I've already used up just about all the antipathy I can muster on the last two paragraphs, so I'll just list a partial, representative list of what else bothers me before my apathy kicks in...
- That TFA is almost identical to A New Hope from a plot standpoint.
- That RoS was a MacGuffin quest to unlock the final boss level...
- How in heck did the First Order rise to power anyway? And where is the New Republic during the first two movies?
- The development conversation that went something like this...
"You mean, like a Death Star?"
"No, nothing like a Death Star! It's got a big ditch around it... and... climate on the outside..."
"O...K... so what does it do?"
"Destroy planets."
"Like... a Death Star?"
"No, nothing like that! This one can destroy [starts counting fingers] 5! 5 whole planets!"
"... OK... gotcha boss... what should we call it?"
"Starkiller base!"
"...because... it kills... planets... right?"
"Oh, just make up something about how a star dies every time its used or something..."
"...Right..."
- That Rey is only competing with JarJar for first place in the "Worst Star Wars Character Deathmatch" (ok, I kinda already said this, but that's how much I hate that character!).
- That any potentially interesting character they wasted entirely.
- That the directors basically sabotaged each other and failed to optimize the potential present.
- That none of the returning characters were in any way similar to their previous roles apart from maybe Chewie, and only minimal effort was shown to explain why, say, Han was now an absentee dad in a mid-life crisis.
- Leia in space. Full stop. Please.
- WHY THE CRAP WAS HAN A FORCE GHOST!!!???
- On force ghosts, if they can actually do stuff, why didn't Obi-Wan make an effort to help Luke? Or Yoda... or any of these other dead Jedi/non-Jedi... And how does whatever reason one could give her not equally apply to Rey?
- Force matter teleportation/wormholes. What started as a means for soccer mom fanservice...
- The Holdo maneuver... not so much that it happened. I can wrap my mind around the premise. What I want to know is why on earth no one thought to weaponize hyperspace drives before and slap them on missiles.
- Bombs. Ok, maybe a Star Destroyer has enough mass to have meaningful gravity to pull in the bombs. But in what universe does it make sense to fly near enough a giant spaceship to drop something on it rather than launch a barrage from afar...
- That moment when Snoke pushed Hux around on the bridge... Which looked more like slapstick than a malicious action. I would have taken the moment about as seriously if Snoke grabbed Hux's hand and started striking him about with it, asking him, "Why are you hitting yourself?" repeatedly...