I know no one has been waiting for this review, four months late (April 5). The first time I saw this movie was opening night with Friend back in December and again with family the following weekend before Christmas. I feel weird about reviewing movies with this much emotional baggage for fans (and a little for myself) so early, because it feels rude to try to form your opinions about a movie thatwill be so inevitably watched. The purpose of reading reviews for me is to decide whether something is worthy of my attention or not, and maybe to provide a stepping off point for discussing some of the issues raised after the fact, but with movies like Avengers Endgame or Toy Story 4 or X-Men: Dark Phoenix or Star Wars: RoS (oof, there have been so many final chapters this past year), it’s never felt entirely appropriate to insert myself in that process. When I do, I try to make sure that I’m not there on a hype bandwagon. I try not to burn any idols. I try not to fixate on Snape’s murder of Dumbledore–partially that’s because I’ve never been all that interested in the relationship between source material and the final cinematic product. I appreciate when other people are able to take me through the nuances of the Spider-verse, and I know that at a certain point that passion requires the substitution nuance for novelty (as Duckworth puts it). But in the meantime, I’m a cautious observer of these showstoppers and their legacies.
First, my obligatory cred for talking about RoS, which you should feel confident in skipping, and then I’ll jump into a short review which will mostly consist of questions that I haven’t bothered to follow up on and a few recommendations for reviews by other people who have bothered to follow up. Star Wars has been a fixture of my life since I was young. It was one of the few video cassettes I remember us watching on a weekly basis when we were little–I haven’t gone back to my parents to verify, but I don’t think I realized we watched more than other families until I went to school and found out that everyone doesn’t watch A New Hope on Fridays. When we built Lego, we built the Death Star to go with our Millennium Falcon and Boba Fett’s fold-up starship thingy. We mindlessly collected Star Wars cards with no intention of ever learning how to actually play. The story I always tell about my relationship with my family and Star Wars is that my parents are and always have been very hardworking individuals, who put a lot of value in our education and so we never really took off from school, when we were sick or any of that–with one exception. Each time one of the new Star Wars prequels came out, they surprised us with a day off in order to see the movie in theaters. I associate seeing those movies with the feeling of Saturnalian nostalgia, when the normal rules of child- and adulthood were upended in celebration of a unifying event that transcended other social obligations and bonds of fealty.
I have a book in a box that I’ve carted around since I moved out of my parents house that my middle school teacher gave me to me one day–one of the Star Wars expanded universe books with Han Solo on the cover. I remember being honored and disgusted that I came off as the kind of guy who would want to read it, and then I never cracked it open, and then I’m pretty sure I just kind of was too afraid to throw it away because I thought it would be bad luck, but if Mr Gabe is out there wondering if he did right by me in 2004 when he lent me his copy of Star Wars whatever, no, no you definitely wasted your time and I often wish I had given it back to you because I’ve loaned out my fair share of books to kids before and definitely expected them to be returned.
When I was in college, I remember the day that Star Wars: Uncut released (2012) its monumentally fun take on A New Hope in 15 second clips, stitched together with the movie audio played over–and I’m sure all my roommates remember too, because I sat in our kitchen to watch the whole thing through that afternoon. (I’m none to sure about the Empire: Uncut (2014)–grad school was a hazy time–but it sparks joy that this exists.) I’m not actually that well acquainted with the myriad fan films that have been created over the years and I know that there are people who have been ride or die with that 3D animated series Attack of the Clowns for the last decade, but I just couldn’t get into any of that spin-off stuff. Maybe my favorite demonstration of love and critical engagement with the Star Wars cinematic universe (also in college) was Seth McFarlane’s treatment of the original trilogy in his Family Guy parodies: Blue Harvest, Something, Something, Something, Dark Side, and It’s a Trap!. Those films were some of my first introduction to approachable comic critique of a much beloved franchise, and they did such a good job of cleaving to the original source material that at points it’s hard for me to watch the original movies without thinking about gags from the Family Guy movies.
Lastly, and this is just a shameless nonsequitur of a plug for Disney’s streaming service, I feel about The Mandalorian the way I do during every Star Wars movie I’ve ever watched. It held all the magic of the movies and a lot more of the humor than I was expecting. The projects they have in the pipeline are so exciting to me and I can’t wait until all my time writing reviews is gobbled up by watching two hours of Star Wars-themed television a week. So, that’s me.
When people asked me what I thought of RoS, I knew I had to have a response which was descriptive and vague, so usually I would say something like, “it was bananas” or “it was nuts”: from that rando-hand-shaped alien who’s chillin’ with the gang in that first scene on the Falcon but no one knows his name to the cool-ass lightsaber duels to the neato fake outs where you’re gripping your armrests wondering, is this the last time I’m going to see Chewbacca in one piece? It seems like RoS has given those of us who liked it a little breathing room to express our enjoyment of Rian Johnson’s iconoclastic The Last Jedi and made the Holdo maneuver, newly canonized in RoS, feel like a minor hiccup in an otherwise timely departure from the slavishly faithful sequel Force Awakens. In that sense, I think I’m generally sympathetic to the critiques I’ve encountered about a lack of communication and internal consistency across the creative teams of the trilogy. I, like a lot of people, have felt such great fascination over the interest in a fabled “J.J. cut” or the “Trevorrow cut” (ugh, thank you Honest Trailers for addressing him and his legacy by name) and how it might untangle for us so many of the mysteries of this movie, like the fact that as recently as November, the actor who plays Rose in the movie talking about how jazzed she was to have non-existent scenes with Carrie Fischer. Spectating the garbage fire of a fan response to this movie has been one of the true joys of my year, especially the unforced errors, like John Boyega melting down on Twitter after being called to task for sexualizing his non-existent relationship with Rey (apologies for the Daily Mail link) or all the articles that came out in January explaining how everybody is a clone, which led to other articles saying there were too many articles. There is so little that is pure in this world but my feelings of mirth at watching how upset others have become over this final chapter in a five-decade-long franchise is unadulterated.
Friend of mine memorably said in RoS’s defense that this movie finally found a way to make warp speed look good on camera by having the Falcon zoom through some Swiss cheese-shaped worlds in the opening shots. Honest Trailer‘s treatment suggests there was a little too much zooming and too little character development, a devil’s bargain of compromise, for instance, between the fans who wanted to see Rey earn her combat chops and those who weren’t bothered by her Mary Sue status (the first time I came across this term, I thought it was kind of a sexist pejorative, but after the least bit of research and the discovery of the term “Marty Stu,” I am really happy to be able to employ it here).
I’ve yet to receive a good answer for the purpose of the gang going to Kajimi. What is actually accomplished there? Why does Poe fear returning to that planet? When he finally gets there, he has a testy reunion with his old flame and then she immediately takes them to solve their problem and even throws in a short cut. It feels like he totally misjudges what’s in store for him there in ever-helmeted Zorii Bliss. This relationship has spawned several think pieces on the horniness of RoS, which I am delighted by.
The general premise of Rey’s entrapment by the emperor feels a little tedious to me. The scene whipsaws between enticements for Rey to kill the emperor in a weird kind of suicide by proxy type deal and then when the Rebel Alliance, their distress signal weirdly unreturned STILL, enters airspace, and only then do the rules of the universe shift so that it’s suddenly necessary and right for Rey to kill the emperor. There’s got to be a term out there for a moment when someone breaks the carefully set out rules of the universe… this happens dramatically in a Brandon Sanderson novel and it’s foreshadowed pretty well in the Matrix, but I feel like maybe it’s more clumsy in RoS.
Which brings me to maybe my favorite piece of Star Wars criticism that I’ve encountered in my time on the internet this past year: LadyKnighttheBrave has a YT channel in which she does some fabulous video essays of movies. She put together an exhaustive, detailed, thoughtful, funny essay on Rogue One “A Flawed Masterpiece,” back in November of 2019, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. Please check her out. She’s done such an excellent job with this movie and her writing is wonderful.
