Control: Star Wars Quality Control Check…
I, Dalton Lewis, am shocked. I enjoyed the sequel Star Wars trilogy, but the rest of you didn’t. The 72 day total box office of Star Wars: The Force Awakens? $925,119,143. The 72 day total box office of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker? $514,574,888. Why?
The Force Awakens wasn’t very good — according to the fans. Neither was The Last Jedi. Fans hated that one. They fit the very definition of pretty good. They weren’t unforgettably good. They weren’t filled with dynamic characters and excellent plots, memorable villains. They were weak movies, and The Rise of Skywalker suffered. Star Wars stopped being an exciting release for people.
I’m sorry. I want new Star Wars movies, but you, the fan, certainly don’t. Tired of the Star Wars universe? A lot of people are. A lot of times the sequel fails when the original movie sucked. The Last Jedi sucked so the new move, The Rise of Skywalker, loses at the box office.
What happened? The new series started with The Force Awakens. It started to develop Rey and Finn and Poe. I immediately liked Rey, Finn, and Poe, and that was a problem. Rey didn’t thrill people because she was written to be pretty neat and smart and good and kind. She wasn’t unique and rebellious. She was, well, pretty good. She was pretty neat. I kind of liked her. I didn’t love her. She wasn’t complete and perfect and unique. She didn’t have enough flaws. She didn’t have enough to make me feel for her.
They spend the first half of the movie chasing around artifacts. I don’t know about you, but I want there to be human stakes instead of wanting an item. I did think that Rey and Kylo Ren had chemistry, but they billed him as the big bad until adding Palpatine at the last second. Palpatine was thought to be the big bad for all nine movies, and he showed up in a lot of them.
The defendant? JJ Abrams. JJ has made some great movies with nostalgia for eras previous to this. He has made some great sci-fi movies — like his original Star Trek reboot. That had problems relating to the character Nero really, really hating Spock. It had problems between the main characters. Kirk and Spock got into a fistfight on the Enterprise’s bridge. There was fear because people were suffering, people dying, and people reacted to the pain and anguish of the deaths. In both movies planets are destroyed, but in Star Trek they seem to notice and care. In Star Wars it is a plot point that is repeated over and over until no one cares. How many planets have they lost? It’s way too many at this moment.
When Finnegan and I started to plan out a sci-fi universe we wanted to speculate what might happen in the year 2100. We didn’t want cartoonish bad guys but instead to reflect problems in the current state of the world. Racism and elitism were real problems, so reflecting them in fiction made sense. I don’t see that in Star Wars. I don’t see the stories reflecting real life tension and problems. I see people fighting bad guys so evil they destroy planets and delight in the suffering of others. I don’t see the deeper meaning here, and I really am looking. I’m trying to defend the state of the Star Wars universe and failing.
I think that the movies are great in a terrible way and terrible in a great way. I think that the flaws of the movies reflect the way moviemaking is today: conventional stories with few risks. I think that the movie’s good spots overwhelm the negative in many ways. I think that the movie is bad and good at the same time.
Thanks, and take care, friends.
