Not only is Star Wars’ time as a small, but significant, snapshot of a specific moment in time culturally long over, so is the kind of storytelling it used. Outside of the creation of Industrial Light & Magic, George Lucas’s greatest contributions have been finding ways to adapt the low-budget serials of his youth first into great, self-contained homages and then expansive franchises with highs and lows. The challenge with both the original serials and stories like Indiana Jones and Star Wars is how to arrive at a satisfying conclusion after so much build up in terms of story and character. One approach is to embrace the artifice of the form, just have a few adventures, and let the audience imagine how things can continue or end in their minds. This is basically how Indiana Jones worked, with Temple of Doom being a prequel, and each movie being a standalone story with varying levels of success. The benefit here is no one is saddled with audience expectations that “THIS IS THE LAST ONE,” each story can be told and then, when creator and audience interests move on, the story just disappears to time (does anyone know how/when Ming the Merciless was ultimately defeated?). Sort of like the old serials. The obvious alternative is to try and come up with a definitive end. The problem here is not just audience expectations, it’s that these kinds of stories are never intended to be resolved, like soap operas or Dragonball Z. The perpetual suspense of what could happen next is the whole appeal, so it’s no wonder that trying to wrap things up with a tidy bow rarely works.
With that in mind, I do think that there are some exceptions, but they come from the new land of serials, tv, and specifically kids’ tv. The first example is the Clone Wars tv show. It both embraced the anthology style of story-telling as in Indiana Jones, where we get snapshots of what happened during the war, with a loose but clear arc of how the institutions and people who led the Galactic Republic changed. In addition, by using the beginning of each episode to do a sort of newsreel “update” on what was happening each episode, it called back to the serials of the 30s and 40s without explicitly connecting each episode. This allows viewers, especially kids, to just jump in at any point in the story and become engaged. The other example are the now-beloved shows that make up the DC Animated Universe from my youth. They by and large took a similar anthology approach to their stories, with a couple of major exceptions, the most obvious being the Cadmus storyline. What worked out very well for that story was that Timm, Dini, McDuffie, and others had put in a lot of time building up the future of that world when Batman Beyond came on tv 20 (!) years ago. So, when it came time to wrap up Cadmus, they could draw on that flashforward to tie together the five series they’d worked on. (Sidenote: interesting that Rey’s searching for her place & lineage are not too dissimilar from Terry McGinnis). Also, the Cadmus story is not the final season of Justice League Unlimited, as they got renewed for one more season. That really allowed those guys to tell basically a full epilogue season that did not affect the final events that are supposed to take place decades from the present. In either case, the idea is to wrap up this particular story, and suggest that viewers use their imaginations to continue to expand the world. None of this “end of the saga/legend” business to which movies seem so wedded.
Anyway, onto the TRoS itself. I mostly thought it was fine. As someone who has basically seen all the movies and shows, I wasn’t terribly offended from the central premise of the movie. Most of the failures to me are in how things are revealed, the pacing, and whose stories are foregrounded. Just for example, the whole thing with C-3PO’s memory being wiped felt pretty inert given that his memory was wiped… at then end of episode III. Such is the life of a droid, shouts to IG-11. Instead, seeing R2 sidelined hurt me more than I thought. Also, I agree with many others that sidelining Rose Tico was weird and inconsistent with what TLJ set up. But, it seems clear that many fans, JJ Abrams chief among them, are by and large scared of introducing new ideas into this universe. This was most evident to me with choosing to make Finn in love with Rey again (who cares? Rose was right there) and with continuing to include folks from the original trilogy. I cannot say that I always wondered what Lando was up to after Endor nor when our new heroes would meet him, but Billy Dee Williams wasn’t terribly intrusive and I was glad to see him having fun.
Palpatine is a trickier one, for me. On the one hand, I was mildly disappointed to find that Rey was not, as Adam Serwer predicted, a Vader clone (which seemed to be teased a few times throughout these movies). On the other hand, her being related to him is still consistent with the central idea of Adam’s theory that Palpatine wanted insurance for the future and Rey’s choices are still ultimately her own, in keeping with some of the ideas of TLJ. I do not think Palpatine needed to be alive for her to learn her heritage, though. I suspect that this has more to do with Abrams wanting to play with the same toys as George Lucas while the people who captured his imagination as a child. The other issue is that many fans have sworn off the prequels and Lucas failed to see that the more compelling protagonist of that trilogy was Palpatine (an idea the Clone Wars tv show understood quite a bit better). By only getting glimpses of Palpatine’s rise to power, we are kind of robbed of the emotional potential of Rey’s story. But then, that would turn these movies into something other than the “Skywalker Saga.”
That said, there are a couple of ideas that, when viewed in the bigger picture, make this entry pretty interesting to me. The first is that by Rey once and for all (?) ending the Sith, it reinforces the idea that the Jedi were wrong about the prophecy of the “chosen one.” Once again, Anakin failed to bring balance to the force. Instead, the offspring of the Jedi’s most effective enemy eliminates their threat. One unintended consequence of expanding on the original trilogy is the extent to which it forces the audience to consider the full lives of the heroes and the ways in which they profoundly failed. That was the whole point of the prequels, and this final entry to this aspect of the SW universe is no different by pointing out just how wrong Qui-Gon Jinn was in his original assessment of Anakin. I also appreciated that the mind-merge stayed and that more of its potential was realized, especially the fight in Ren’s quarters. It lacked the eerie quiet and intimacy of their interactions of the previous movie, but I can easily handwave that away as their powers/connection growing. I would also say that I liked expanding the worlds that are visited, and strongly suggesting that Finn is coming into his own Force sensitivity. That gets back to my idea about ending this story segment while suggesting that even more can be imagined. I generally feel that not every minor storyline needs finality, with one major exception.
I would not call what I am about to say a criticism, but there is one idea from the totality of the Star Wars movies that I think needed to be addressed more fully, and that is the inequality across the galaxy. The prequels lay this out a bit, but especially in the Phantom Menace, we learn that the Republic isn’t really doing its job to ensure that citizens are treated fairly across systems. Corruption is rampant, slavery is ongoing, while folks in Coruscant are living it up. This idea does not really get any further treatment until TLJ, and that movie’s engagement with the full film series is I guess one of the reasons some people hated it. I truly never understood. Anyway, getting a glimpse into Canto Bight, child labor, and the cycle of war profiteering at the highest levels of society had me excited for a final installment that would resolve what, to me, was a central tension in this fictional universe. Sadly, it was not to be, and I suspect a lot of my fellow fans probably prefer not to think about the logistics of rebuilding a society after decades of war. But who knows, maybe Disney+ is working on a Star Wars/Deadwood mashup created by the guys who did Justified or something.
Stray thoughts:
- Whereas George Lucas figured out a way to transform disregarded genre serials into big movie making, JJ Abrams is pretty good at recreating the surface feeling of of his influences. Given that before Star Wars, he would hop around resurrecting franchises like Mission: Impossible and Star Trek, combining his mystery box hook with the ability to recapture the original feel of those movies proved pretty successful. But, once he goes returns to a world, that formula runs old, like the second Star Trek. Honestly, given the reception that movie got, I was surprised he would try his luck again by helming a second and “THE LAST” Star Wars. I guess pride goes before the fall.
- Something I’ve been turning over in my head, but don’t know where to put it: outside of eps IV, V, and VIII, the Phantom Menace is the next most interesting Star Wars movie. I am absolutely willing to argue about this.
- This is not a big return to blogging; I have plenty on my plate now. I just had these thoughts in my head and needed a space to put them. That being said, as things come to me about just about anything, I’ll put them here for the sake of just being able to keep track of my thoughts. It will help keep me sane as it will force me to think about something other than all science, all the time.
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