Welcome to another edition of ‘Miss Me with That Bullshit’, a series of opinion pieces where the topics nor the content could be to your liking.
After the interest generated by the first article in this series which featured heavily about my personal disdain for Resident Evil 4 and why that over-hyped piece of shit does not deserve a remake over something that really needs it like Resident Evil: Code Veronica and other CAPCOM franchises, I thought I would continue going down the tracks of unpopular opinions on my lovely hate-filled train and talk about something else that is dear to my heart and has been crushed by people who blindly praise something that they think is “new and different” but ultimately destroyed a beloved franchise, and that is Star Wars.
Now at the time of publishing, it is currently May 4th, 2020. The date of May 4th has become one of note as it has become the day where we take the phrase “May the Force be with you” and turn it into a nice pun of “May the 4th be with you” or “May the Fourth be with you” and everyone celebrates the long-running franchise known as Star Wars. As I am writing this, I have started my 3-day Star Wars tradition: Watching all the main series Star Wars movies in order (Not counting things like Rogue One, Solo, the Holiday Special, Ewok movies, etc) at the rate of 3 movies per day. So with this being May 4th, I begin with Episodes I, II & III; then tomorrow is the main event with IV, V & VI; and finally slugging my way through the new Disney shit of VII, VIII & IX begrudgingly.
Star Wars means a lot to many people all around the world. It’s something that is ingrained into each generation by our parents and into the next generation by us. It was a pop culture phenomenon before the phrase pop culture even existed. It predates the “normal” people vs. nerds school hall fights. It’s something that is so magical to the world that it should be celebrated with respect and given the reverence that only the top masterpieces of creation should be given… But it’s not.
Thanks to the internet and its ability to create a great divide between any fan base and the rise of “nerd culture” being accepted by people who once scorned it with the hate of 1000 suns. There is a divide between the Star Wars fandom like never seen before, and what was once a united galaxy of fans praising the whole of Star Wars, we now have a battling galaxy filled with those who either like what Disney has done to the franchise since buying it for billions back in 2012 (aka the introduction of Rey, Kylo and the complete destruction of everything that came before Episode VII: The Force Awakens) or you’re someone who is of the old guard, holding onto an outdated series of films that were nothing till Disney fixed them (aka the fans of the original trilogy, and some that like the prequel stuff too. A group called basement-dwelling neck-breads who live with their parents and are all over the age of 30).
I’m going to tell you right away, and as you might have guessed from my writing already, I am in the camp of those who prefer the original trilogy (and I don’t mind some of the prequels too). I love Episodes IV, V & VI as those were the ones I grew up knowing. I would watch them on TV and VHS back in the day, I got to see the Special Edition remasters in the cinema (My mother forced me to go after wanting me to have the same experience she had as a kid seeing the true originals in the cinema when she was a kid), I saw the prequels in the cinema and then again on DVD, and finally, I got to share the experience of watching Star Wars with my little brother in the cinema with the May 4th/5th marathons if the series to that point and later Disney trilogy (Which he didn’t like either). For me, Star Wars holds a special place in my heart because it’s a shared experience like nothing I could ever experience with my family. My mother, my little brother, and I now have a bond through our shared experiences with this series that cannot be done with anything else on the planet.
However, things have changed for me as a Star Wars fan. With the release of Episode VII: The Force Awakens, I was forced into a story that was nothing close to what I knew, yet at the same time was familiar, all the same. When we opened up with the familiar Star Wars exposition dump crawling text, I was a kid again, then once Rey popped up on screen, I knew I wasn’t going to be in for a ride like I had done so many years ago.
When Disney bought the Star Wars brand officially, people were worried about what was going to happen to the beloved brand. The worst idea was that Disney was going to find a way to place their own characters into the franchise through a blend of animation and live-action stuff (as seen in the video above). To be honest, looking back on that, I’d rather that instead of what we got. With George Lucas’ hand (somewhat thankfully) off the series, it would turn to J.J Abrams, the man who at the time revitalized the Star Trek movie series with a reboot that also paid homage and respect to the previous movies in a way that actually got old and new fans to at least agree to disagree on a majority of the issues with them. Star Wars looked to be in good hands with Abrams at the helm; however, Disney needed to make sure that they are in control. So enter Kathleen Kennedy…
For those of you who do not know the name, Kathleen Kennedy, you’ll be hearing it so much soon that you’ll be sick of hearing her name. Kennedy started out as an assistant to the great Stephen Spielberg, working on ET, Jurassic Park, and Indiana Jones movies. She was one of the hands in the creation of Amblin Entertainment, and quickly rose to become one of Hollywood’s top producers, eventually breaking away and starting her own production company with her husband… Which didn’t last long as she joined Lucasfilm as co-chair of the company not too long before the company was bought by Disney. With George Lucas stepping down from Lucasfilm as a part of the Disney deal, Kennedy became President of Lucasfilm and now has a firm seat in Disney’s war room when it comes to all things Star Wars.
It’s here where things get a bit murky. From the outset, rumors started floating around the internet that Kennedy was the one who set up the Lucasfilm sale deal alongside a side deal that would see her keep her seat on the Lucasfilm board as well as get influence in Disney, leading her to be placed in full control of the Star Wars brand once George Lucas stepped aside. Some even say that it was her idea for George to sell up and retire, convincing him to sign everything over to Disney. while none of this can be confirmed as people involved in that time are not willing to speak out against Disney or Kennedy, not even Lucas. But what comes next has been confirmed by Disney and Lucasfilm insiders as well as cast members and production workers (The best source for all of this comes from the Youtube channel Clownfish TV, which got a lot of inside information sent to them during the production of the Disney trilogy). I should also mention that as a part of the Disney deal, all extended universe content (TV shows, comics, fan movies, novels, etc both official and unofficial) was deemed non-canon so Disney could continue the universe in their own way without needing to get involved in years of stories done by non-Disney personnel.
The production of The Force Awakens was originally meant to follow a partly completed script done by George Lucas which featured all the characters we had in the original trilogy, just set some years later with the idea being that their children were going to transition into the main roles as Luke, Leia, Han, etc go about their own tales including Han reuniting with his family, Luke rebuilding the Jedi Order and Leia running the galactic senate. Over the three films, things would naturally evolve over time so the shift wasn’t jarring to fans of the series. However, this wasn’t what Disney or Kennedy wanted. Disney wanted to create a whole new story series with fresh new characters that they had total control over and could market easily, leaving the older characters to appear inside stories between the main series titles. This idea worked for Kennedy, who is known to be a hardcore third-wave anti-male feminist, who used this as a chance to pitch her idea of Star Wars: A series where “The Force is Female” and she would have a female lead through the whole series who would be better than any character seen in the series before.
Enter Rey, a blank slate for Kennedy to use to push her ideals and agenda upon a new generation of Star Wars fans. Kennedy wasn’t a fan of the current “white male nerds” she saw as the main fan base of the franchise (Even though Star Wars has fans across all races, genders, etc), she wanted nothing but female fans for Star Wars, a generation of females who felt empowered and dominant in a world where men were nothing but sexist, misogynistic, and generally looked down at all things female. Kennedy wanted to see Rey plastered all over the place, a new Luke Skywalker for people like her, but better than Luke ever was. In order to make this Rey into something that would be loved by the fan base, Kennedy made sure she could do everything every Jedi ever trained years to do without thinking or needing any training.
Everyone would be in awe of Rey, praise her natural female talents and make her the new hero; but Kennedy knew that unless she catered to the easily led, the then Tumblr internet crowd, she wouldn’t capture their minds. So she created a well-muscled, emotionally unavailable, good-looking, evil but can-be-changed, easily led male character as the antagonist in this new series: Kylo Ren.
Kylo Ren is nothing but a “shipping” device, something for the new generation of female Star Wars fans to write fan-fiction about their romance and produce images of Rey and Kylo together in their forbidden romance that is easy fodder for lesser minds… And the new fans ate it up in droves. From the first time, Kylo was shown on screen, people didn’t reel in horror and boo the bad guy, instead, they swooned and instantly began writing the fiction about how Rey and Kylo are meant to be together and that they are somehow destined to do so, all with the loveable but misguided emo boy Kylo giving up his bad-boy ways to settle down with the all-powerful Rey who doesn’t need a man but wants to change Kylo into someone she can be with.
Shipping is a weird thing. Rey is meant to be this “I don’t need no man” type of modern woman, but at the same time, she pines for the bad boy in Kylo because she can change him with her love. This is a weird contradiction in character.
With the new female fan base in place, it was time to begin phase 2: Where to place blame. You see, Abrams did a good job of taking Kennedy’s demands and making a good story that pleased the older fan base with a bunch of good cameos from previous characters, a story that ties the new generation with the past, and an ending that kept people wanting to know more in future installments. But this didn’t bode well with Kennedy as her version of nothing but female leads and pushing “modern progressive ideals” into the former space western action series, creating her new vision. She wanted the past eradicated along with the “white male nerds” who were the guardians of the old films. So she jumped on board with a trend that continues to this day thanks to the media not wanting to upset this vocal idealist: Blaming everything on “white male nerds who never grew up” as fans who are destroying anything and everything progressive in pop culture. Mainstream media sites jumped on this and went with it, suddenly the older Star Wars fan base was no longer wanted nor needed, it was the new generation and their progressive feminist idealism series now.
A lot of older fans, including myself, stood firm in their opinions of The Force Awakens as both a good call back to the previous series, doing it justice; but also noticed that the new characters and the way they acted and were shown were not organic, out of place, and something right out of Tumblr fan-fiction that if left unchecked could see the end of Star Wars as a viable franchise in both marketing and enjoy-ability. Then we got the news that would confirm the worst, but no one would believe us thanks to the combined might of Kennedy, Disney, and the media.
J.J. Abrams was no longer going to work on Episode VIII…
Due to a deal with Paramount Pictures and Netflix, Abrams had to bow out of directing Episode VIII in order to produce Star Trek Beyond and The Cloverfield Paradox respectively. This left Kennedy open to choosing someone new to write and direct Episode VIII in a way that suited her whims properly. Kennedy brought in Rian Johnson, a then-unknown producer/director whose biggest work to date was the film Looper. Johnson was someone who loved to do movies that didn’t follow established ideas and wanted to make things that were truly unique. Kennedy saw Johnson as someone whom she could easily control and create her version of Star Wars properly; so she gave Johnson only one-directional path: Burn it all down. Kennedy wanted to see Star Wars burn, and she had someone who would do it without question, easily manipulated by the idea that if The Last Jedi was successful, then Johnson would not only get to do Episode IX but also a brand new Star Wars trilogy to make in the future.
So we got The Last Jedi, a movie that did exactly what Kennedy wanted: Burnt the whole saga to that point, including The Force Awakens, to the ground. We got brand new characters in the likes of Rose Tico, a mechanic who would become the new Han Solo in Kennedy’s eyes because she was female and Asian (ticking those diversity boxes), and also becoming an inter-racial couple with the already established Finn. Vice Admiral Amilyn Holdo, a female Admiral because all military roles except for front-line infantry are meant to be for female leaders, (let the men do the dying) and a replacement for Leia; who was almost killed off in the film if it wasn’t for some Disney mandate of one old character death per film. The death was Luke, who wasn’t even Luke by that point. And the death of the mysterious Master Snoke, who was created by Abrams to keep Kylo as an almost anti-hero bad guy in the trilogy.
To say that The Last Jedi is a failure is a bit of a misconception. According to the media and new generation fans, The Last Jedi was a masterpiece of reinvention for Star Wars and a great point to bring the film series into the modern era of political correctness and progressive thinking and casting, a blueprint of how a film series can be taken over and remodeled into the modern ways of thinking. However, a lot of long-term fans saw The Last Jedi as nothing more than confirmation of the end of Star Wars in general. By this point, all established characters were either dead or going to be killed off, and all the new characters were just invincible and full of dues-ex Machina bullshit, with no real character progression or even challenges to overcome. This is where a lot of the battles between old and new fans come into play, spurred on by mainstream media saying that if you didn’t like The Last Jedi, you were holding the franchise back and were no longer true fans.
But things were in the works to make some changes for the final installment of the Star Wars series, now titled “The Skywalker Saga”. In between the main installments of the series, we got what were meant to be stand-alone stories about the events pre-Episode I or other areas in the timeline. The first of which was Rogue One, the story about a pilot who got the first Death Star plans for the rebellion, leading into the events of Episode IV: A New Hope. Rogue One was also a Kennedy production, made with a strong female lead as its center.
But unlike The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, the writing with Rogue One wasn’t an all-powerful fan-fiction character who did everything without a problem, it was a well-written story with characters who were interesting, unique, and flawed; making a good side story to the overall series. Rogue One was praised as being different while being familiar, a great addition to the series as seen by both sides of the divide.
However, the second one wasn’t all that great of a story. What was meant to be the origin of one of the best characters in the Star Wars franchise, Han Solo turned out to be a terrible movie. Taking almost everything we knew about Han Solo and throwing it into the trash for a more modern take on the character, taking him from a handsome charismatic rogue into a sexist, trouble-making, egotistical playboy. From the moment this whole thing went into production there were issues. The script, or at least parts of it, got leaked onto the internet (something that would cause trouble again later for the Star Wars series), causing people to find out some of the bad parts of the movie before it hit the screen. But unlike later where things got changed, Disney continued on with Solo and put the movie out there, with the media calling it “A throwback to the dated Star Wars of old” and instantly blaming the same people who didn’t like The Last Jedi for the failure of Solo before it even hit cinemas; furthering the divide between fans.
The trouble of Solo, along with a rising voice of fans who have become displeased with Star Wars as a whole caused some changes to come from Disney, completely bypassing Kathleen Kennedy when needed. Disney canceled all Star Wars side story movies, including Boba Fett, and replaced Rian Johnson with a returning J.J. Abrams to save the final installment of the main series. A lot of these decisions came into play because Solo tanked so hard at the box office that the film barely made its budget back, and also that Disney was about to open its newest attraction at Disney theme parks: Galaxy’s Edge; an area inside Disney parks that was themed after the Disney movie series and side stories that Disney had sunk big money into. Another thing that showed Disney that a redirection of the Star Wars franchise was needed was the sudden and very vocal outcry and stories coming out of people involved in The Last Jedi and Solo; with none other louder and more heard than Luke Skywalker himself, Mark Hamill.
Hamill began tweeting not too long after his reintroduction into the Disney trilogy at the end of The Force Awakens with a bit of happiness, glad to be back in the series that shot him into fame over 40 years ago. However, things changed once The Last Jedi happened. Hamill started posting tweets about being upset and disheartened by not only the direction of his own character but the franchise as a whole. Hamill often complained about his role in the Disney trilogy being one so distant from his time with Lucas that he wasn’t playing Luke Skywalker at all, but John Skywalker, who looked like Luke but didn’t act anything like him. Hamill often would mention it was like no one involved in this Disney trilogy had even seen the previous films, let alone take notes to make the characters even act close to what they would if Lucas continued the series. Hamill openly started voicing his issues with things in media interviews both online and through traditional means, and Disney noticed. When one of the franchise’s top stars starts complaining openly against your vision (or, in this case, Kathleen Kennedy’s vision), then you’re going to make changes.
But Disney had one last kick to the franchise’s nuts to deliver. The Rise of Skywalker instantly hit with the force of a 1990s Mike Tyson punch to the collective gut of fans. After burning everything possible to the ground with The Last Jedi, Abrams was left to not only correct the issues raised and created by that film, but also find some way to bring everything to a conclusion that would satisfy all fans of the series, a task that was impossible to do, but Abrams tried his best. Yet there was one last dragon to slay: Kathleen Kennedy.
Kennedy tried very hard to keep all the inclusions she and Johnson had made in The Last Jedi, wanting to keep Rose Tico as a main character, the Admiral as the head of the rebellion, and ignore Leia completely (though Fisher’s death would change things slightly) and just have Rey be no one of note, yet at the same time be the new chosen one; completing her idea of “The Force is Female: Forever”. Abrams did keep some of these things but also leaned back on what people enjoyed about The Force Awakens, being that it had something new, a bit of mystery, and a lot of nostalgia. The Rise of Skywalker ended up being a huge mash-up of everything past and present but with a story that didn’t make sense and an ending that no one liked at all.
Going into The Rise of Skywalker I already knew what was going on. Reddit had someone who not only leaked the production script of the movie but also found out what was changed from re-shoots that happened because of the leak. I tried my best to stay away from spoilers as I wanted to know if my own predictions of The Rise of Skywalker would be true, but only 2 days out from seeing it I read what was going to happen and I was mostly right, but what I didn’t see was the return of Emperor Palpatine, the replacement for the now death thanks to Johnson and Kennedy Master Snoke. Kylo got his redemption, only to die in Rey’s arms. Rey finds out who she really is, but hates who it was so much that she chooses to take the name Skywalker for no logical reason. Leaving the cinema with this knowledge and a grouping of about 20 people in a 150-seat cinema on opening day, I knew then that Star Wars as I knew it was dead.
With the viewing of The Rise of Skywalker bringing Star Wars to an end, I now don’t have that special feeling about the series that I once had. Thanks to a bunch of political corporate bullshit from the likes of Kathleen Kennedy, Rian Johnson, and a blind Disney board, that connection of happy times I had with Star Wars had ended. I still get a smile on my face when I think back to the times of watching the first six movies with my little brother in the cinema, hearing my Mom talk about her experiences back in the day still happens; but when I go to even touch the Star Wars movies I have on the shelf: Either the old VHS versions, the DVDs, or the Blurays; I can’t help but cringe as the main memory to come back are of the Disney trilogy and how much that has caused the divide in the fan-base that once never existed. Luckily there may be hope with the non-movie projects like Clone Wars, Rebels, and The Mandalorian actually being good in production and free of the bullshit that now stains the movies forever.
