Culture We Deserve What Star Wars Has Become - Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi was a bold, modern interpretation of Star Wars lore that set up new heroes with new stories

There was a moment at last week’s Star Wars Celebration 2023 in London where Dave Filoni stood with the spotlight shining behind him, arena lights dimmed to create a sliver of light, and Filoni’s instantly recognisable Stetsoned shadow looming over the arena. It was reminiscent of the Phantom Menace poster, where Darth Vader’s shadow is cast behind Anakin Skywalker. Knowing Filoni’s public persona, it may well have been a deliberate choice to play out this fantasy. But even as a coincidence, it’s a tellingly poetic reminder about Star Wars’ inability to let go of its past.

I have a curious relationship with Star Wars. I watch or play most of the stuff connected to it (or, in the common parlance, consume most of its content), but have never been in love with it. I don’t have any particular horse in the race. I don’t care that Lizzo and Jack Black are in the latest episode of The Mandalorian because I remember that the third movie ends with teddy bear puppets defeating the fascists and that the musicians are called ‘jizz wailers’. It’s always been a little silly. But it can still be silly and good. What’s more, it can be silly and good and important. But right now, it’s just a mess, and we deserve it.

Star Wars conventions have been around ever since there were Star Wars. But they used to be events for looking back, with fan-favourite clips being shown, some behind-the-scenes footage, and autographs with the stars. If there were any announcements, they would be special editions of existing things, which we did see over the weekend with discussion of the 40th anniversary cut of Return of the Jedi. We had interviews and behind-the-scenes clips too, including sequences that were storyboarded using action figures, but they were no longer the draw.

You can’t make money off the past. At least, not until you find a way to sell it into the future. Star Wars, in part thanks to the fact it’s owned by Disney, is fully in the capitalist vortex of churning out every possible spin-off it can, chasing that sweet, sweet dollar. The part of this problem not directly caused by Disney is caused by the fact Star Wars’ biggest creative leads were huge fans as kids, and are now recreating that, forever. Nothing new, just the stuff that blew their minds in the ‘80s.

The Mandalorian only exists because people thought Boba Fett’s helmet was cool. Granted, we got one great series out of it, and a few other good episodes sprinkled in, but now it’s running on fumes. It can’t just be a space western, it has to link to Luke Skywalker and Ahsoka and Boba Fett. Boba has his own spin off show too, with Ahsoka’s on the way, and now we know we’re getting a ‘MandoVerse’ movie. Why does The Mandalorian need its own universe? It’s already part of the Star Wars universe. I thought the whole point was that it was its own thing that could tell smaller stories.

This is where our own culpability comes into it. Culturally, we have shown ourselves to be good little piggies consuming content on demand. Though the superhero box office dominance is waning, we have supported the creation of spin-off after spin-off, universe after universe. About 476,923 new Star Wars projects were announced or discussed during the conference, and the vast majority were continuations, spin-offs, or old characters getting to ride again. Star Wars is failing to take advantage of the world’s potential in order to appease YouTubers with stained shirts who think it’s woke that Daisy Ridley’s abs give them complex emotions.

Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi was a bold, modern interpretation of Star Wars lore that set up new heroes with new stories and had some of the best, most layered acting the series has ever known. In the very next movie, it was all burned down so that the classic heroes could shine again. Rey went from being a nobody to being a Palpatine and then a Skywalker, only worth the viewer’s time because she has famous blood. They nepo-babied her. Now it turns out Rian Johnson’s planned trilogy is dead. Don’t worry though, Rey is getting a movie that will double down on her innate importance that only exists because of her last name.

Star Wars had a chance to be new again, to continue to blow the minds of fresh-faced fans once more. After Rogue One and The Last Jedi, it was in a place to bring in bold stories with exciting heroes. But it’s no longer interested in fresh-faced fans. It cares about middle aged dorks who remember being fresh-faced fans and now spend 20 percent of their annual earnings on Star Wars merch and desperately want their IP to remind them of the time they were fresh-faced fans. That’s who Star Wars is for now. It’s not good, but we deserve it.

https://www.thegamer.com/deserve-star-wars-celebration-mandalorian-spin-offs/

https://archive.ph/O0Jsh

 

[make_it_so]

All Disney had to do was convert those amazingly 90s Star Wars comics and novels into movies.
The entire fucking roadmap was printed out of them and they chose to make a fucking annoying Mary Sue the main character.

But don't let JJ Abrhams off easy either, he's on a life long mission to cuck nerd culture.

Not just cuck it, but do so in a way that his interpretation of it (and "changes" to it) are the only ones that get licensed for merchandising - which conveniently means that all the merchandising license profits will mainly go to him and his company.

The man has a bizarre determination to live up to every single negative stereotype his tribe has.

 

[X Prime]

It's a video game, but Devil May Cry comes to mind. The second game was so bad that it is completely ignored and has characters and events that have never been referenced again. They also rebooted the series after the fourth game, and the reboot was so hated that they went back to the original continuity and made DMC 5.

This is actually dumber than it sounds.

After DMC4 came out, the guy making way too many decisions was Keiji Inafune, a character illustrator who worked on Mega Man and had risen up the ranks to holding the purse strings via seniority.

That guy had two types of issues: one, he doesn't give a shit about anything he didn't have a large hand in influencing directly. Two, at the time he kept publicly stating Japanese game dev was dying and Western dev was the future. So he kept contracting out Capcom properties to other devs he felt followed his "vision."

In the case of the DmC reboot, it was especially egregious because the team behind DMC4 wanted to continue onto 5 immediately, but Inafune cockblocked them and handed a reboot off to Ninja Theory, the British developer behind Heavenly Sword, just before he left Capcom.

So, in a way, you're right: it's similar in the fact that some random assholes who don't care about the thing they didn't make, take it and basically substitute their own shit into it.

 

[Tor Lugosi]

Years later and these retards are still spouting the 'kill the past' line as if it were the moral of the story... and not the line the villain uses to justify his actions. Which, of course, is pretty fitting for journoscum.

 

[CuzinEd]

@Disc

Jesus Christ, man, you’d think Anakin went and killed your youngling for all your spergery about this.

The prequels did not cause the sequels, or break the franchise, or anything like that. If anything, they did the opposite - they provided a ton of worldbuilding and structure from which other good series could be built upon, most notably all the clone wars stuff. Many highly-praised pieces of Star Wars build on the places and things shown by the prequels. They also, for such a controversial set of prequels, managed to not fuck up the audiences view of the OT, or even slightly taint them.

If anything, the general quality of Star Wars stuff improved in the midst and immediate wake of the prequel trilogy. Battlefront. Knights of The Old Republic. Lego Star Wars, the clone wars animated series. All released around the tail end of the prequels, all extremely fondly remembered. The worst stuff, meanwhile, like Super Bombad Racing, either gained no traction at all or was rightfully mocked and still gained no traction.

They may not be good, but they're not just bland slop that people shovel into their mouths - there's so much meme potential that people have tons of fun with them.

The perception that they could do whatever the fuck they want and make money, if it even exists (it's more likely "we here at disney specifically are 'smart' and 'insightful' enough to tell the entire world what they want is wrong"), it likely comes as much if not more from the disney god complex, mixing with the activist-that-only-supports-causes-for-themselves moral complex.

If the prequels were at fault, you’d expect things to go to shit immediately afterwards, not wait like a decade and a boss change and then go to shit.

And if the prequels were at fault, you’d expect the destruction wreaked on Star Wars to be unique to Star Wars. It is not. It is, if anything, the same destruction that Disney has done to nearly every classic franchise they own, regardless of the quality of the original works.

The prequels don’t deserve the blame for the sequels. They merely deserve playful mockery.

This faggotry here is why you will keep getting shitty Star Wars movies. The next shitty Star Wars movie or show you get thank Disc. He and all the other faggots made it possible.

I moved on a long time ago and got used to the fact that there are only 3 good Star Wars movies. That's it. Everything else is garbage. Sitting around hoping for a good Star Wars anything after those shitty prequels is a waste of time and pretty fucking gay. Star Wars is done. Just like with video games if you don't buy the garbage they want you to buy they won't make anymore. It's just how things are.

With the whole SJW cancer thing infecting all sorts of media it's not going to make it better. Especially when they are more concerned with making sure they fill in some social justice check boxes than making a good movie.

It's time to move on.

Some of the Star Wars games aren't bad. KOTOR 1 and 2 are pretty good and Fallen Order wasn't bad. Those are games though. Movies are passive entertainment and it's hard to sit there and slog through garbage. At least with a game you have the actual gameplay to get invested in.

They're glasses for people who don't actually need glasses. In the 2010's glasses became "fashionable" and ALL OF THE GODDAMN FRAMES became these monstrous plastic nightmares. With fake or no lenses. Before that point nice metal frames that were subtle were the majority of frames offered at any glasses store. After? Huge chunks of garish plastic

I am 25 but I want the kind of glasses someone from the 50's or 60's would wear. People that don't need glasses that wear glasses anyway are fucking retards. They think life is like an RPG. I put on my glasses so I gained +5 to my intelligence. No, you just look like a fucking retard.

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

They're glasses for people who don't actually need glasses. In the 2010's glasses became "fashionable" and ALL OF THE GODDAMN FRAMES became these monstrous plastic nightmares. With fake or no lenses. Before that point nice metal frames that were subtle were the majority of frames offered at any glasses store. After? Huge chunks of garish plastic

I managed to get frames that weren't like that. The trick is getting half-rims. Recently had trouble getting my usual and settled on something that was close enough. Bulkier, but close enough.

This is actually dumber than it sounds.

After DMC4 came out, the guy making way too many decisions was Keiji Inafune, a character illustrator who worked on Mega Man and had risen up the ranks to holding the purse strings via seniority.

That guy had two types of issues: one, he doesn't give a shit about anything he didn't have a large hand in influencing directly. Two, at the time he kept publicly stating Japanese game dev was dying and Western dev was the future. So he kept contracting out Capcom properties to other devs he felt followed his "vision."

In the case of the DmC reboot, it was especially egregious because the team behind DMC4 wanted to continue onto 5 immediately, but Inafune cockblocked them and handed a reboot off to Ninja Theory, the British developer behind Heavenly Sword, just before he left Capcom.

So, in a way, you're right: it's similar in the fact that some random assholes who don't care about the thing they didn't make, take it and basically substitute their own shit into it.

Capcom told Ninja Theory they wanted a different Dante because it'd appeal to a younger audience. Uh, Capcom. This is an M rated series.

 

[Hijo de Dang Woodchucks!]

What do ya mean "we"? I got off the ride after Revenge of the Sith.

 

[Kulee Baba]

Why do I need every damn franchise to be 300 hours of content?

Star Wars was 2 amazing films and a third halfassed finale that was still fun. Then Lucas came back and delivered a severely mediocre trilogy albeit it had good ideas but the attempts to reassess the Prequels as some misunderstood genius is so stupid.

And then Disney bought it and has just made largely trash with its lasting contribution being South Park's memberberries becoming part of the nerd lexicon. The best thing Disney made was Mandolorian Season 1 and that's just a charming little Space Western nothing that I found so good that I'd want to watch it again.

We've got a century worth of cinema, countless masterpiece books and written compositions of music, and finally video games. The only Star Wars I look forward to is Respawn's Jedi Fallen Order sequel just because the first game was well made.

 

[pikachudidnothingwrong]

This is some cope right here.. Shitting on the originals once again.. I can't count how many times i've heard soyboy "fans" at places like reddit try to gaslight about how the old movies weren't really that good anyway, or how the series is being held back by not dumping the original 6 eras and characters completely. I can't even agree with the title ironically in this case, since disney went so hard, so early with the shitting on fans and telling them to fuck off. Many thankfully did. It's what disney deserves, not us! A dead IP that should have been a money printer. Yet at every single step of the way, they made the worst choices possible. Starting even before they bought it with the insisting that EU be erased from canon. Even after that, with a whole in-story universe to explore if they didn't want to continue GL's vision for the final part of the skywalker story, instead they try to create there own perverted take on it without ever even coming up with a plan. All the overt woke shit, politics and other bullshit is just bonus fuckery!

 

[Drain Todger]

The sequel trilogy is completely fucking mentally retarded. It introduces us to Rey, who can pilot the Millennium Falcon instantly despite only having experience on speeders, as she battles an increasingly logistically implausible First Order who are so dangerous that they have the ability to pull planet-scale superweapons and huge fleets of Star Destroyers out of their fucking asses despite being a diminished Imperial rump state with a fraction the manpower and resources they used to have, but also so harmless that they can be beaten by one woman with Down syndrome and her merry band of dingleberries.

J.J. Abrams and Rian Johnson took a franchise that was already cartoonish, stripped away any verisimilitude it may have once had, and made it into even more of a cartoon than it already was. Why would anyone complain about the current trend of nostalgia-pandering for rich boomers and pine for the sequel trilogy’s unrepentant retardation? Anything is an improvement from that, including literal diarrhea.

 

[Cheeseknife]

Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi was a bold, modern interpretation of Star Wars lore that set up new heroes with new stories and had some of the best, most layered acting the series has ever known.

[citation needed]

 

[xXx: State of the Union]

I agree with the sentiment tbqh

Star Wars faggots absolutely deserve what they get since they can't help themselves from spending money on merchandise and "hate watching" shows they claim suck ass and are horrible.

 

[Vargerd]

I'm actually kind of impressed how little almost everyone cares about the new movie announcement. I know some people are doing the whole 'scream about it online' routine, but compared to the hundreds of videos about the last couple movies, it is almost dead silent by comparison. A lot of youtube channels made like 1 short video about it and just moved on because no one cares anymore. the shills will do their best to prop it up, but all the paid-for rave reviews online will not sell any tickets

 

[Akari Is My Wife]

I think it all feels like it was made by a committee where everyone's afraid of being insensitive or offensive so nobody wants to take risks.

Yeah Slave Leia was problematic, but she was also iconic and that wasn't her whole character. She used her chains to strangle that dude. She was a woman who knew her own mind, wasn't afraid to be sexy, and interacted with the other characters in a way that felt like a real person.

Versus putting teenage Mary Sues into the story, where they're not going to get laid, they're not going to face real danger... ugh.

It reminds me of how they couldn't let Faye Valentine be a femme fatale because male gaze or whatever. She literally had a gunfight with gangsters within 2 minutes of appearing in the anime, but now she's just a generic female character.

 

[From The Uncanny Valley]

It reminds me of how they couldn't let Faye Valentine be a femme fatale because male gaze or whatever. She literally had a gunfight with gangsters within 2 minutes of appearing in the anime, but now she's just a generic female character.

Nu-Bebop was so pathetic they claim it was bullied into cancellation.

 

[Long Tongue Silver]

Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi was a bold, modern interpretation of Star Wars lore that set up new heroes with new stories and had some of the best, most layered acting the series has ever known.

So this is what pure, condensed cope looks like.

 

[Pokemon Conquistador]

I'm perfectly fine with the Star Wars OT being the only thing in Star Wars canon. Which is a shame because the SW universe is a fun sandbox for writers. Well, apart from the fact that George ruined the Jedi by making them a bunch of boring bureaucrats with magic blood who serve as muscle for the blatantly corrupt ruling classes. After seeing the way they passively tolerated slavery in Phantom Menace, and the creation of an army of clone slaves in Attack of the Clones, I found it hard to reconcile my idea of them as a band of spiritually superior "Justice League" style supermonks with the reality on screen. If anyone should have had a problem with creating an army of mindless clone life that are basically just flesh droids, it should've been the Jedi. Star Wars should never have tried to be a historical epic that shows the good guys tolerating bad things for the sake of setting complexity. It should always be the kind of story where, if the good guys see someone practicing slavery, they do something about it. When you have the Outlaw of Gor outdoing your main characters on the Hero front, it's a sign that you don't know what you're doing.

I guess what I'm saying is that the Prequels lost the plot and made Star Wars go off the rails. Still, it was trying to be a good movie trilogy. If Kathleen Kennedy and Disney had been deliberately trying to destroy the SW franchise and make it a thorn in the side of its biggest fans, tell me what they would have done differently. "Nothing" is the answer I would come up with.

 

[Chuck McGill]

God I fucking hate this new gaslighting so much it's unreal. First they take something you're nostalgic for and ruin it to such an extreme degree you're forced to wonder if it's an act of intentional sabotage or blithe stupidity. Then when you don't like it, they try to accuse you of being a manchild that can't accept anything new. They build these films off the back of nostalgia, yet you're expected to judge these works as separate from that nostalgia or you're a fanboy living in the past. If you were making your own superhero movie and everybody yawned and compared it to The Avengers you might have a leg to stand on. As it stands now, you want all the buzz and attention that surrounds these nostalgic properties, but you don't want any pushback that comes with treating those beloved properties like a cheap whore.

To borrow from a greentext that I can't fucking find, the idea here is to make sure no culture survives between generations, and what little culture does survive must be watered down and sanitized as possible. Much of this work happens naturally as culture inevitably evolves, but every now and again you come across something so cherished and beloved that you can't just call it racist and problematic and make it quietly go away. In instances such as this, the strategy becomes to pour as much bullshit content into the gap so the weight of the originals becomes watered down. You can show your kids the original trilogy all you want, the magic is going to be diminished when there's s a new film where Jay'quaza the chaotic neutral Jedi dual wielding lightsaber cannons fights against an army of cloned Darth Vaders. Lest you think I'm being schizo, think back to how much of the sequel trilogy is "this classic Star Wars concept but BIGGER and TOUGHER". Hell, this is why journoscum clings so The Last Jedi so hard, because it unapologetically laid out the game plan in plain English and people fucking rejected it. Cope with box office numbers all you want, nobody remembers this movie other than journos and weirdo youtube grifters, and it will only be begrudgingly inducted into the catalog of classics when the kids that saw it grow old enough to make excuses for it, much as millenials did for the prequel trilogy.

 

[Disc]

I moved on a long time ago

Clearly. That is definitely what we should interpret from your 5+ separate rants in this thread alone.

I don’t think the prequels had any sort of devil-may-care regard to their quality - they had quite a lot of effort put into them, making them cinematic spectacles of the time at the very least, and nobody wasn’t trying for the time. The issues of the prequels were because of George Luc-head-up-own-ass being put in a sole position without mediating forces.

Nor do I think disneys efforts are for the sake of pushing garbage because fans will lap it up. Because they don’t see it as garbage. And again, nothing that happened to Star Wars is unique to it. They’re doing it with everything from the MCU down to bloody Willow. And if that was the angle, wouldn’t Disney have reversed course and started upping quality when they saw that wasn't the case? If their only angle was "any shit will sell", surely the fact that star wars movies bomb in the box office these days would have made them lose that mindset?

Neither the George Lucas prequels nor the Disney stuff was made as pure shit just to be fed to gullible consumers - because neither set believed that they were shit. They thought they were great, aces, 10/10 material. You are applying the reception of the films as the base factor, and working backwards to the mindset you think someone must have had to knowingly ship them out like that. You're not realising that George Lucas' external criticism was all-but silenced by that point, he was the sole decider, and that he actually didn't know that his vision wasn't actually going to resonate with the general audience. you're not seeing that the stranglehold of self-righteous activists on Disney's movie space is preventing people from calling out the weirdo's bullshit.

Also, I feel like I need to point out the Star Wars Holiday special. You know? That infamously shit Christmas special that came out immediately after the first movie? Or what about the Ewoks movies and animated series, released after Episode 6?

I am 25 but I want the kind of glasses someone from the 50's or 60's would wear.

...Oh, of course you don't know. You're a boomer-larping zoomer. You're fondly reminiscing about the good old days when the truth is you literally didn't exist. You don't realise that the amazing stuff you see there is only stuff that stood the test of time. the flaws of the movies you grew up in the wake of are stark and clear; the flaws of the past only not forgotten because you never could have remembered them in the first place.

I'm gonna go full button-pushing mode and say there's actually a good case to be made that the quality of Star Wars actually increased in the immediate wake of the trilogies - not only did they provide a ton of worldbuilding for other artists and writers to build from, it made people actually start taking george to task and forced him to start changing his behaviour, and accept feedback. That's when shitting on George Lucas' dumbass decisions became popular. That's when people actually started caring about the quality of Star Wars.

And if you're gonna tell me I got it backwards, you have to realise that the era you're defending is the era where chewbacca's father got VR porn for christmas.

 

[Capsaicin Addict]

I mean, I suppose it is a 'bold new direction' to take a franchise widely considered to be a license to print money, and piledrive it into the ground so hard that Transformers and GI Joe fans are laughing at you.

 

[Cheeseknife]

I mean, I suppose it is a 'bold new direction' to take a franchise widely considered to be a license to print money, and piledrive it into the ground so hard that Transformers and GI Joe fans are laughing at you.

The franchise has really just become one giant reference to itself. Imagine living in China and you want to see the USA, but you end up just visiting in New York's Chinatown for a few weeks before heading home. That's exactly what the franchise is.

Disney's Star Wars is toys and media existing in a state wholly as nostalgic consumer products sans the nutritional value. It's the "Hero's Journey" repackaged dollar menu style and handed to you through a McDonald's drive thru window.

Rey's character only means anything to us because she knows who Luke and Han are and she even knows trivia about the Millennium Falcon and the Kessel Run. She is basically the embodiment of a Star Wars fan, waving around a lightsaber she got mere moments ago like she's some fan at a convention.

That's why we're supposed to be endeared to her. Not because she has any depth or development in the world she exist in, but because she symbolizes the very people watching the movies.