… is that it seems to think that nothing in the original trilogy or the prequels really matters. I’ll try to explain what I mean by that, for the issue is not, as it is sometimes presented by optimistic critics, one of a willingness “to kill fans’ darlings”. (“You have to defy wish fulfillment in order to tell a good story”, nods director Rian Johnson, apparently proudly.) That’s a red herring that needs to be utterly demolished, which I will start doing now.
Killing your Darlings
I get the point that the new movies, especially The Last Jedi, specifically thematize a generational dynamic – between the ageing and departing actors of the original trilogy, and the new heroes. I also sort of get that this might also be taken as a lens through which to see viewers’ responses to Star Wars – I grew up with the prequels and I never really got why the generation above me hated them so much. Of course part of this is, always, that people like movies for different reasons, and a new installment can’t make everyone happy.
But I think there’s something disingenuous about this defense. For one, I don’t really have darlings when it comes to Star Wars – except for the point that I will be explaining shortly, but I refuse to call that a darling. But more importantly, too much of these last two movies has been devoted precisely to reviving previous movies’ darlings: another Empire building another Death Star, led by another Darth Vader, another Emperor and another evil military leader; another almost-orphan on a desert planet (if you think Rey’s parents being ‘no one’ is a clever solution or even a deep statement about the future mattering more than the past, remember that Phantom Menace did the same without all the hype); and cameos by the Falcon, by every famous cast member of the original trilogy, and even, in this last movie, by Yoda.
This is not a movie that is making a point of moving on; rather the opposite. It is a movie, however, that is trying to erase history so that it can repeat it. It has reset the clock to the beginning of A New Hope, except that the situation is slightly more hopeless – the rebels are much fewer in number than anywhere in the OT. The only way that the movie can force itself to end on a positive note is that the ‘resistance’ still has its logo. Apparently that justifies the whole “where is Skywalker, bring me Skywalker, as long as there’s Skywalker there’s hope and we can’t have that”-thread: after all, if it hadn’t been for Luke, the Resistance would have had about 5 fewer minutes to flee the cave, and the logo couldn’t have survived.
Anyway, this resetting the clock to ‘Evil Empire’ is a deplorable choice for two very, very major reasons. One: rather than providing room for doing something new, the story is, in so many ways, just a retelling of the original trilogy from a slightly different angle – with more diversity, and with more talk of ‘oppression’ (a motif hailed as an innovation, as if we didn’t see oppression in A New Hope, or in the prequels – this nonsense is what you get if people keep refusing to watch Phantom Menace)!
Two: The resetting device is quite literally a button. Let me take a few sentences to explain how unforgivably, toe-wrenchingly beyond-annoying this is. Return of the Jedi was the finale to what turned out to be a six-movie long epic (or seven, if you count Rogue One, which you definitely should; or more, if you count the animated series, which you definitely shouldn’t) where an evil empire came to establish itself, and finally got to be decapitated as the result of a personal and metaphysical dynamic that had been there right from the beginning. I will return to this but I can’t stress enough for now the extent to which the first six movies are one large story – a fantasy story, but with a believable pace. Getting the galaxy to become evil takes time, effort and resourcefulness, and resisting the evil empire takes not only courage, but resources, diplomacy, and tact; thanks to the prequels and to Rogue One, we really get to see a failing Republic devolve into the Galactic Empire, and see some of the forces from the last days of the Republic spill over into the Rebellion – and sometimes even with a complicated relationship to the Empire, as some keep putting at least some faith in the residual republican political institutions rather than in military resistance.
Now, given how complicated all of this is, reasonably we shouldn’t expect the death of the Emperor and of Vader to solve all problems; and given what we know from the established Expanded Universe, it doesn’t. The finest proof of this is in the Heir to the Empire trilogy by Timothy Zahn: the death of the Emperor has made the establishment of a New Republic possible, but there are other powerful forces that are trying to keep the Empire alive, and they pose a real threat.
I confess that I would really have liked to see this made into a movie – but I also get that that was never going to happen. Still the context in which most post-Episode-VI-novels are set – that of a newly instated democratic republic, governing a large part of the galaxy but still very fragile – is both interesting and completely different to the context provided by Episode I-VI themselves (namely: Decadent Republic, Clone Wars, Empire), and there are many stories that could have been told within that context, with or without preserving the facts established in the novels.
But that didn’t happen. Instead, in the beginning of episode VII there is an evil empire again, and there is a Republic, which we never get to see – all we hear (read) is that it “supports the Resistance”. Then, a button is pressed – a literal fucking button – and the Republic is destroyed. Next thing we know, there is only an evil empire left.
It’s the equivalent of the US ‘supporting the Resistance’ in North Korea, then being suddenly and without any intelligence suggesting even the conceivability of this event, nuked by North Korea to the point where there is no US army at all anymore. Unbelievably, Episode VII and VIII find this whole event, which to me seems rather curious to say the least, barely worth mentioning. The big question in episode VII is whether our heroes can de-activate Death Star 3.0 before it not only annihilates the US-equivalent (this has already happened somewhere in the movie, and is just taken for granted), but also kills the-people-the-camera-happens-to-be-pointed-at. It would have been at least partially redeeming if the destruction of the republic had taken place at the end of the movie rather than at a nondescript place somewhere in the middle; if our heroes had tried to dismantle the Mega-Death-Star and failed.
As it stands, there’s no way of talking the movie out of this nonsense. This is not “killing your darlings” in the interest of good story-telling; it’s the opposite. It’s saying “I like Star Wars and I am nostalgic for the heroic rebels in A New Hope. I just wish I could have another one of those almighty, galaxy-wide, totalitarian oppressive evil empires to bravely rebel against, please.” And what do you know, it turns out if you make your own movies, you can build a button which serves just that purpose.
Why the Prequels Are Suddenly Looking So Good
In Episode I, II and III, we see the Empire grow out of a gigantic scheme devised by the Sith Lord Palpatine. I won’t say it’s a flawless plot, but there’s a nice combination of improvisation and purposeful planning on the part of the evil genius, and a complicated but ultimately failing response from the democratic institutions of the Republic and the aristocracy of the Jedi.
Especially, Palpatine leading both the Republic and the Confederacy, because the war is just an instrument to prepare the institutions of the republic for autocratic rule, seems to me way more interesting both as a plot device and as a social-political comment than the fashionable, cheap and uncontroversial observation in Episode VIII that Fascist Oppression Isn’t Good For Everybody (which, I suppose, is the message we are to take from the fact that the camera sometimes rests on stable boys sweeping floors).
The absolute worst part of the Prequels, except for Jar-Jar’s role in Palpatine’s Enabling Act (which we can easily ignore), is the bad execution of Anakin’s path to becoming Darth Vader. Bottom line, there’s no excuse for the jump from Anakin saving Palpatine to Anakin slaughtering the Padawans. But even so, the prequels are way more careful and successful in answering how this more-or-less-complicated monster came to be than Episode VII and VIII are in Kylo Ren’s back story.
Admitted, the scene where Luke considers killing his nephew, thereby pushing him over the edge to the Dark Side, is very good – in fact, it is one of the best plot twists in the new movies. But, overall, is the new whiny teenager better, or more interesting, than the whiny teenager of Episode II and III? I don’t think so, and I will go one further: I think that a summary of Anakin’s turning – grows up as a boy-slave whose mother radiates a belief that he’s destined for greatness; feels guilty about being able to flee this environment while not being able to save his mother from it; reasons that if his powers are worth anything, they should enable him to save the ones he loves; gets manipulated by his mentor into believing that the Dark Side can assist him into achieving this while the Light Side only wants to use him as a tool (there being more than a grain of truth in this last point); fears he is losing not only his only love in the world and her baby, but also his mentor, and, in this state, makes one quick choice from which there’s no turning back – shows that the prequels are quite good at doing even the thing they are worst at, namely character psychology. Also, the main plotlines – Jedi vs Sith, Republic vs Confederacy – are wrapped around this (admittedly clumsy) psychological battle, without getting confused with it; the prequels know how to switch between different scales, and different layers of what is, in the end, the same story.
Compared to this, Episode VII and VIII’s characters are, well, just plain flat. There is no psychology in the new trilogy (I dare you to find one character whose every motivation can’t be summarized in one short sentence), because the characters are mostly shadows of those in the Original Trilogy. At the same time, there’s no other level than the individual heroic deeds of these few heroes: in Episode VIII, both sides, apparently, have only a few spaceships in the galaxy and they are where the camera is. No matter that one side is a nearly exterminated ‘resistance’ and the other is a galaxy-wide empire. It’s an empire not because its size figures plausibly in the story in any way (its size is neither explained nor the ramifications of its size explored seriously, except that it can conjure more big guns ex machina), but because it is a handy way to give the impression of raising the stakes. Where-our-heroes-are is important, because apparently they are the last ones.
Given the amount of hate the prequels have gotten for not doing justice to the original trilogy, I think it’s fair to ask which movies take the original trilogy more seriously: the prequels, or the sequels. I also think that the answer to this question is abundantly clear, and that the prequels should look much better to everyone all of a sudden. Saying ‘no, but the point, see, is that we need to move on’ is a cop-out. No-one is saying that we can’t have BB-8 because we need R2D2. By all means, kill and forget Solo and the Skywalkers; they have done their jobs. Please, feel free to leave out R2D2 entirely if he plays no part in the movie; and I wish the movie wouldn’t have tried to squeeze one last faint smile out of us for seeing C-3PO being awkward again. Really, you can move on, it’s fine, most of us have.
But you didn’t. And now, it seems we are stuck with the worst of both worlds: with mere recycling of the Star Wars imagery, with mere repetition of the ‘evil empire vs good underdogs’ dynamic, but at the same time with a complete disregard for this one meta-rule established in Episode I-VI (and respected by Rogue One): that the previous movies happened and have consequences.
Still, of course, it’s not The Cursed Child. So that’s at least 2 out of 5 stars.