Yesterday I published this article explaining my disappointment in the new Star Wars trailer. Why were people so f’n excited?I saw the trailer and saw pretty much the same shit I’ve been seeing in sci-fi movie trailers for half of my life and since I’m not seeing anything particularly new, I figured there had to be some other self gratifying reasons why people are obsessed over Star Wars.
I’ve concluded it has something to do with childhood memories in which the “event” of attending Star Wars created some pseudo love for the film despite people actually loving the surrounding events that precipitated their viewing of the movie and forgive all of the average shit that goes down in the movie.
Aside from my own investigation this wonderful article over on The Concourse sums up a lot of my reactions to the original trilogy well into puberty when I first saw the film:
https://youtu.be/en8bh60K7m8
We need to talk about this scene. This scene is an atrocity. It is as bad as nearly anything in the prequels, and—because it is part of the original trilogy, and thus can’t be ignored as easily as, say, the disastrous talk about midichlorians in The Phantom Menace—far more ruinous.
Hey, remember the Ewoks? Remember how, in Return of the Jedi, the Rebellion hadn’t assembled a squad for the absolute most crucial job that needed to be done in order to destroy the Death Star until like five minutes before their attack was about to commence, and they just threw it together on the fly right there with what amounted to a show of hands? Remember how their plan amounted to, “Walk through the woods until something happens”? Remember how this forest moon’s huge population of indigenous teddy bears caught them—and the Empire—completely by surprise? But seriously: Remember the fucking Ewoks?
With that in mind, let’s return to the scene from Return of the Jedi, in which a completely unafraid Luke Skywalker kicks skin-crawling televangelist game—I feel the conflict within you! Let go of your hate! Don’t you have somethin’ you wanna say to Jesus? Somethin’ you wanna ask Him for?—at the giant evil cyborg who chopped his hand off the last time they were in each others’ presence. Who is this soggy piece of shit wearing Darth fucking Vader’s clothes? Who is this whiny, slumping sad-sack, mewling about how he must obey his master?
This is neither the absolute cruelty nor the equally frightening true-believer zeal of the Darth Vader we knew. This is the angsty, vapid, self-pitying emo shit-for-brains we’d later come to know in the prequels—the pathetic, un-frightening goomba henchman who for all intents and purposes gets pranked into becoming a villain in the first place. This is not the bad motherfucker who gleefully slices his own kid’s extremities off and then owns him all the way to attempted suicide; whose flair for cruel showmanship led to the memorable scene of him having Han and Leia delivered to him at a dinner table. This is a defeated, excuse-making heap of garbage.
And now the prequels:
Hey, hey, remember how Darth Maul was butt? Remember how he was in The Phantom Menacefor like 12 total minutes, how he was an overcaffeinated ninja try-hard with a stupid bo-staff lightsaber and got chopped in half and tossed in the garbage by a shitty Padawan with a braided rat-tail? Remember how the scary bad guy in Attack of the Clones was an octogenarian with a lightsaber hilt that bent like an old man’s flaccid dick? Remember how he handled both Obi-Wan and Anakin at the same time?
But, hey, remember in Revenge of the Sith, when the evil Darth Sidious, the most cunning and calculating Sith Lord of all time, finally gives Order 66—the culmination of his entire subtle and slow-burning master plan for the annihilation of the Jedi Order and absolute power over the entire galaxy, the one fell stroke toward which all the events of the prequel trilogy were manipulated, the checkmate he’s been setting up literally since before Anakin Skywalker was born—and it’s “Do lasers at the Jedis when they’re not looking”? Remember how literally every Jedi in the universe except Yoda and Obi-Wan gets killed at the same time because they neither detected this plot nor were able to fight off small groups of soldiers firing exactly the kinds of beams Jedis had spend the preceding 2.8 movies deflecting like so many harmless “yo mama” jokes?
It’s a rather lengthy read but entirely entertaining. I suggest you take a look and, if you can, help me understand what the fuck is the interest? The article sums up my thoughts as such:
[The Concourse]Maybe The Force Awakens will be great! I sure as fuck hope so. J.J. Abrams is at the controls, and his crack at the Star Trek franchise yielded one terrific film followed by a frustrating misfire. If that 50-percent success rate doesn’t look all that much like a reason to feel confident, it’s a hell of a lot better than the 33-percent Star Wars is batting so far. That’s Naked Gun territory, for chrissakes.
