Star Wars: Do We Even have Expectations Anymore?
Directed by: JJ Abrams
The Star Wars films have been declining in value since The Last Jedi, and the events of The Last Jedi itself had people confused about where the story was gonna go from here. Unsurprisingly, The Rise of Skywalker is thus an overstuffed, confusing mess that still manages to fit in a lot of the stuff that attracts you to Star Wars; energy, excitement, space fights, lightsaber fights, and some spiritual lore. It's not perfect by any means; but after Jedi and then Solo's lukewarm reception, did we really expect it to work perfectly? It's basically all right, and that's about as good as we can expect at this point.
It's two hours and twenty two minutes; fast-paced, bright, exciting, energetic, and basically comprehensible to anyone who watches it. If you have any kids, they probably like it. If you're looking for a lesson, talk about good vs evil and what the film says about it; does it come from what your ancestors are, or from what you choose to be? They should have it together.
This film really teaches us that franchise-building the way Marvel's been doing is actually pretty hard; each entry in the franchise has to be a million different marketable things, and a single failure to stick to formula can have reverberations for the franchise as a whole. Not to hammer the point, but The Last Jedi deviated from formula in terms of franchise themes, tones, plot, and perhaps most importantly, pacing, and that created a lot of untracked road that Skywalker had to make up for. As for Skywalker's other big flaw - bringing back Emperor Palpatine as the baddie - well, that was in ALL the marketing leading up to release, so even if we were disappointed, we had six months to get over it. Once again, I don't know what people were expecting after the expected ultimate villain got rendered useless in Last Jedi; Kylo Ren wasn't gonna be the villain because he's the Severus Snape character - he's interesting because he's NOT the main villain. Their hands were pretty tied here.
Star Wars is semi-immortal; it seems to be transitioning to TV right now with The Mandalorian and the upcoming Kenobi series. But in ten years, they'll probably try to make another trilogy, and as much tumult as it's creating now, I'll bet that in ten years nostalgia will have set in and we'll be dying to get some more of it. And that'll be good. People want Star Wars 'cause it speaks to certain feelings, and if there's still gonna be moments of demand for it, trying again isn't the WORST thing.
3.5 out of 5. Higher if you didn't mind all the weirdness; less if you did.
No comments:
Post a Comment