Bad Signs and Bad Prequels Point to Bad Movie
Sadly, we have been down the road of Bad Star Wars movies many times. At every step of the way the sacred trust and love people have for the movies prevent you from getting any read on a movie you’ve seen 10 out of context minutes of in all sorts of commercials already. From candy to cars, Star Wars sells it all.
Star Wars Stockholm Syndrome is REAL. People sympathize with anything slapped with the Star Wars logo. The Phantom Menace was the biggest grossing of the Lucas made movies. So, in a sense theres no way to measure how good the movie is.
Critics have finally found some courage since the disaster that was The Last Jedi and the lackluster “Solo” movie that just felt like what many said it was- a wikipedia page on screen. So while Rogue 1 was an amazing view, the other three movies from the JJ Abrams crew up to now are bad or even awful.
The Curious Curse of Hiring JJ Abrams
While some people might be more forgiving, JJ Abrams will always be the guy who gave us the worst series ending of all time with LOST way back in the day. A seed was planted – JJ Abrams can only wrote beginnings. Nothing since then has disproven it.
Abrams romp through the Star Trek Universe left it so messed up things are still not really together a decade later! Chances Quentin Tarantino directs a Star Trek movie are far from high and seeming to drop weekly. The two TV shows, one bad, one yet to be seen, won’t be on regular TV but a streaming pay service from CBS. In the case of Discovery, season one wasnt good enough for TV. The other show, Picard, appears to exist outside the so called “Kelvin Tineline” people so hate, so it may be good.
The truth is JJ Abtrams is a Tropey, check off the boxes and terribly safe writer on the Star Wars movies. He’s mistake prone and creates boring enemy ships and aliens. The formula when Abrams is 100% writing and directing is schematic. Grasping at any plot device to advance from one “Star Wars Moment” to the next, wew get from point A to point B in the most predictable way possible most every time. Is it really plausible Finn and Po are close friends because for 3 minutes they attempted to escape the First Order together? No effort was made to really give them the kind of time together it takes to sell a buddy connection. So it’s hard to invest emotionally in these characters. And that BB-88 is one of the more relatable characters says something. Non verbal and usually pure slapstick. Hes a break from the lack of substance because a droiud bouncing off the walls during a space dogfight was funny and didn’t go on too long. The other characters? Maybe the fact they ARE verbal hurts? Dialogue has never been great in Star Wars but these Disney movies feature some of the blandest techno-babble ever.
Selling Out to Sell Toys
Who among us will ever forget C-3PO pointlessly mentioning his red arm, its to differentiate the Toys stream income. These movies have some of the worst toy connections ever, probably because the ships and creatures aren’t that good so they have to be pushed hard. The further they get from Lucas material the worse the movie. JJ Abrams is also a bad toy developer, which in these movies, hurts. The stuff he outright inherited from Lucas is amazing and we love stuff like Han’s blaster, Luke’s lightsaber and the sounds they made when primed, when fired and the level of damage they did to a target.
But the closer to Lucas the more Lucas must be paid. Lucas genius as a film maker pales in comparison to his abilities as a highly profitable business man. He generated a fortune for the studios and he managed to please the fans about four and half times out of 6 tries. The only thing people hated was his slow pace of development between projects. Now it looks like he understood the market and his abilities better than people ever gave him credit for.
Theres Only One George Lucas
At the end of the day the fact is George Lucas was far and away a better creative than JJ Abrams and still made a lot of money. Yes, Phantom Menace is terrible, but things improved fast despite the lack of goodwill for awhile towards the prequels. The bottom line – most of the things people hated in Phatom Menace are minimized or written away in Attack of the Clones, a movie that gets BETTER every 10 minutes.
You’ll Love it for 6 Bucks
Thats right, I said it, it will be a great view in a few months when you can watch it at home for 6 bucks. The theater is just a bad risk now. Some people I know have already seen it and one review was ‘preposterous’. So I don’t think I’m gonna end up being wrong on this
Don’t bother going to thew theater to enable a bad incarnation of a once great franchise. The movie looks derivative and bad. The lead up and trailers are bad. The promise to slow down making the movies if we just see this one is not encouraging at all and wont be kept.
So skip this movie, or, as a wise Sith once said to Luke Skywalker; “You will pay the price for your lack of vision!”
May the Force be with You as you watch the Mandalorian with a borrowed Disney code. That at least has mostly been really good.
