Go easy on me, guys... I'm just a fellow freak with too much time on his hands trying to figure it all out...
An essay...
I reckon many of us here of a certain age have similar stories to tell about how Star Wars came into our lives...
I was 5 in '77, and London was a particularly bleak place back then... My Dad actually wouldn't take me to see it because it was "PG" not "U", and I ended up lying to my best mate's parents that he said it was ok for me to go with them...
He was pretty mad at me, but then took me to see it again on re-release and it ended up having the same effect on him as well... Pure joy!!
But it was always dark... The Owen & Beru bake off... Evazan's arm on the Cantina floor... The destruction of Alderaan made so much more impactful by the scene between Tarkin and Leia on the Death Star... The death of Obi-Wan...
It felt like I was seeing something way beyond my experience at that age and it changed everything... It gave me my moral compass... A clear delineation between good and evil... From then on, my answer to any challenge was "What would Luke do? What would Han do?"...
But as Tali says, that darkness was perfectly balanced by the sheer "jubilation" of it all...
By the time ESB came round, I had a couple more years under my belt, and the blurring of that line between light and dark was a little easier to understand...
Before I even made it to the cinema in 1980, the original poster for ESB implied a darkness that I could never have expected...
Within the first 15 minutes, another lost limb (Wampa)... Lando's betrayal... Carbonite... "I am your father"... The truly brutal severing of Luke's hand...
But the context of this universe came with Dagobah and Yoda... That simple and beautiful explanation of the "Force" made perfect sense to me then and still does now...
As an atheist from a family of atheists, Yoda gave me all I needed for life... My ongoing interest in Philosophy, Astronomy, Cosmology, have all given me a "context" for our own universe and my place in it, and it all started with that little green weirdo...
Good and evil were only ever choices made within a much larger world...
In some ways, ROTJ was the icing on that cake... More boundless joy, but in hindsight, maybe the mysteries of the Force were slightly put aside in favour of a satisfying resolution between the good/evil paradigm...
The darkness and conflict were still there, and Luke's internal battle was riveting, but the Emperor was never that scary, more a caricature of the Dark side, and the Ewoks were just a little too much fun, so there was never really any doubt as to which side would win...
But in all fairness, at the end of ROTJ, Luke wasn't exactly fist-pumping their victory... He was already a pretty sombre figure as he cremated Dad and it always felt like he was still having that internal battle as the credits rolled...
If his story were to continue, the idea that that very internal struggle would eventually defeat him would surely be an opportunity not to be missed, right???
We'll get back to that later...
You still with me guys?
I was stoned through the prequels and frankly far more interested in getting laid than galaxy-hopping...
I saw TPM with a bunch of mates and we all thought we were far too cool for school and Star Wars was now strictly just for kids...
I never bothered to go and see AOTC or ROTS in the cinema, mine and my peers cynicism getting the better of us...
I never got into the wider universe either, so Star Wars for me was now really just a box of melted action figures and a broken AT-AT under my bed... But that box still travelled with me wherever I went...
My outrage at the "Special Editions" was as palpable as the rest of us, but when I finally caught up with Eps II & III, I remember being quite taken aback by the sheer visceral darkness of ROTS...
It was easier to look past the CGI, dismal dialogue, and politics and be reminded of that essential "conflict" that had been slightly diluted by the fairy-tale ending of ROTJ...
I was hooked again...
I turned 40, and after years of struggling to fit into an increasingly ugly and unfair world around me, I bought the saga box set, and the collecting began...
A lonely hobby that needed constant justification to others until I discovered this glorious forum and the wider Star Wars community that immediately felt like coming back home to a universe that made sense to me...
My therapist has a lot to say on this, but he's not a Star Wars fan, so he can go to hell!!
The anticipation for TFA left me breathless... I wept through every trailer... My delirious excitement completely crushed those instinctive doubts about JJ, Disney, and the cynicism of a wider world that saw Star Wars as irrelevant and an exclusively nerds-only waste-of-time... This movie was going to be an unexpected gift at a time when I really needed to feel that joy again...
And was it?
Of course it was... It pushed all the buttons I needed it to push... Did I fall a little bit in love with Daisy Ridley? Yes... Was I in awe of Adam Driver? Yes... Was that still Han Solo? Yes, at least as much as I needed him to be...
Did things bug me? Of course... BB8, Snoke, Poe, Maz, all left me feeling a little indifferent, but the nostalgia of seeing Han and Leia again and the depth to Rey and Kylo and even Finn more than made up for it...
Was the conflict still there? Yes... Was it dark enough? Ultimately, yes... Han's death was a necessary sacrifice, for him as well as us, the distress was quickly dispelled by the sight of a fierce looking Luke on a cliff... Glorious!!
And so many questions unanswered... Not in 35 years has a 2-year wait seemed so unbearably long...
Wait... Only 1 year until Rogue One? Ok... It seems like just a filler, so I won't get too excited...
But the idea that these guys are going to keep giving me what I want every year from now on can only be welcomed...
And it delivered... My lack of investment in the characters, especially posh-brit Jyn (although Cassian and Krennic made up for her inadequacy), was more than repaid by the Battle of Scarif, the greatest space battle in the history of it all, and the final, desperately intense sight of rebel troopers stumbling to get the plans off the ship while a Vader, so terrifying, redeemed any doubt about how dark the dark side can get...
Whatever anyone says, it was a fan-film made by a fan for fans... Any criticism of it being too dark and gritty seems so odd to me considering I could barely hear the end credit score over the cheering in the cinema...
Pure joy... Again...
But what about the "Force"?
If that benevolent and benign canvas on which this whole mythology is painted is now just reduced to midichlorians, parlour tricks and a quasi-religious "May the Force be with You", does my philosophy for life this past 40 years and my understanding of what holds the universe together now become irrelevant?
Is the Force now a cruel "God", not the actual fabric of space and time, the dark matter I believed it to be?
And is the idea of "balance" alluded to before, now just a metaphor for heaven and hell?
Up until last Christmas last year, I thought I had a pretty good idea what the Force meant to me personally...
It has helped me to make sense of my world and I don't remember giving anyone permission to mess with that...
Now, it seems I'm being forced (no pun intended) out of that comfort zone and challenged to re-evaluate the "faith" I once had...
Some might say that is a good thing, but our galaxy has now become a much scarier place, and I look out of my window every day and see a world never more in need of some sense of harmony...
Is it just the past that has been forgotten, "kill it if you have to", or is it the Force itself that has been killed in the process?
There's some irony that the controversy surrounding "The Last Jedi" seems to be directly as a result of the amazingly bold choice to raise these questions that are at the very core of this mythology...
What is the Force? What is the "balance" in the Force"? Are our heroes really heroes? Where do we put our "faith" now?
That a film-maker should be given the freedom to explore those questions within this almost sacred mythology is incredible, and all kudos to him for making those choices, but was it a genuine intention to bring the story back to it's core philosophy, or in a world drowning in conflicted values, simply a choice to make the franchise more current and mirror the mess of our own galaxy?
I would like to believe in Rian Johnson's sincerity of intent, but it's the delivery of his vision, the failures in story-telling and almost brutal lack of respect for what has meant so much to so many for so long, that has made it so hard for me to embrace this film as I would love to be able to... It's hard to shake the feeling that it's some kind of revenge against everyone that ever bullied him at school!!
In a larger context, it's a brilliant premise, a brilliant evolution of the story, but a far from brilliant film, and fundamentally lacking the joy that balanced the darkness of it's predecessors, leaving it ultimately somehow sterile of any real feeling or romance at all...
Cheap comedy and the unbearably nauseating children on Canto Bight seem to have been the only token efforts to keep the film "fun" amidst a sea of relentless hopelessness, and the genuinely compelling relationship between Rey and Kylo initially promised something exciting and hopeful, but then left Kylo looking petulant and diminished and Rey somehow saint-like and bland... And the choice to place Luke in self-imposed exile did make sense in the larger context given his already apparent inner struggle in ROTJ, but was it really necessary to humiliate him in the process?
The tear-jerking moments between Luke/R2 and Luke/Leia which had me genuinely sobbing, but still felt completely out of place in a movie that is about as bleak as it gets, and with the death of Luke, Han and inevitably Leia, and the relevance of the Force itself being called into question by Yoda himself, what do we have left to believe in?
The arguments around political agendas, gender-issues, etc, all have some merit, but are of little interest to me in the context of what Star Wars means to me personally and I've found it equally confusing and upsetting...
I feel something has been taken away from me, almost as if my identity has been subverted against my will, and I want it back...
But hopefully it won't be too long to wait...
There's no doubt that VIII sets up IX for what could be a massively satisfying and rewarding resolution to all those questions about the true nature of the Force, and I do trust JJ to recognize how important it is to heal the division this chapter has created and bring back that sense of hope and joy that started it all way back in '77... And maybe I'll get my faith back as well...
Until then, I'm going to go and play with my dolls...
.)
