Everyone’s coming in with hot takes on The Acolyte like they were Top Gunning an aircraft carrier.
Critical Drinker, Film Theory, Red Letter Media, and so on–everyone’s got an opinion about every shot. Maybe I’m a fuddy-duddy, but I’m tired of the discourse-on-discourse of it all. Any time something Star Wars comes out there’s a big kerfuffle.
From both production and audience, every tiny little thing in Star Wars is being scrutinized and analyzed and debated… EXCEPT whether it’s any good or not. It’s annoying. And it’s all just not fun anymore.
You can be diverse and still be good. Hamilton is diverse, but no one brings that up when they talk about its quality. No one cares about the races and body sizes in Bridgerton despite the fact that they are would not likely exist in the time period it’s trying to represent. Orange is the New Black, Brooklyn 99, Black Mirror. No one talks about whether these shows have the right amounts of racial diversity. They’re treating Star Wars like it’s a business, not an art. An IP machine that churns out content. They try to please everyone and end up pleasing no one.
The producers (Disney) seem more concerned about whether they’re checking boxes than creating a good story. Trying to avoid backlash from the Internet. It’s all based on identity politics. Whether the movie/show has actors with different genders, races, and sexualities, not whether the characters are any good. The fanbase doesn’t care either. They’re up in arms about some background Jedi’s birthday or whether there can be fat Jedi.
Film Theory thinks it’s because the timeline is overcomplicated. We’ve got three trilogies, which means three essential time periods. And all the stories take place before, after, and in-between them all. They think they need to be more like Marvel–new movies should be based around single characters, all culminating in an Avengers-like face-off against a Big Bad.
I don’t think that’s the answer. The complication isn’t what bothers me, it’s that no one cares about whether they’re creating good stories, audience and production alike.
Where is any of the fun? Where are the garbage monsters and Muppets? No one laughs anymore in Star Wars. In the original trilogy, there were all kinds of fun moments that emphasized the camaraderie in the team. Where are the scenes like Luke, Leia, and Han in a trash compactor with a goofy-looking monster (and C-3P0 misinterpreting their laughter as screams)? Or Yoda digging through Luke’s bag like a little goblin? Or the team happily reuniting before the attack on Death Star II? These scenes take seconds, but they have so much impact. Does anyone even laugh in episodes VII, VIII, or IX? Or Ahsoka? Or Andor? Why does it always gotta be grimdark drama?
For me, it’s not the fact that we’re arguing about lesbian space witches. It’s that there are lesbian space witches at all. It’s silly. It’s Anakin exclaiming “now this is podracing”. It’s Luke squeezing out a glass of green milk from an alien space titty. It’s Jack Black and Lizzo in The Mandalorian. It’s “NOOOOOOO!”.
What is the message you’re trying to send? Or are you trying to be “inclusive”? How do the lesbian space witches serve the story? It’s not because they don’t deserve to exist but because they aren’t fun. They’re there to create discourse. Controversy. And they aren’t Star Wars. There’s no sense of adventure to it.
It’s time to stop portraying Star Wars as pure evil vs. pure good. Stop portraying the Jedi as a wise noble council. They’re a cult. They restrict who can use the Force, who can marry, they kidnap children, shove down emotions, fight except in self-defence, own property or wealth, and server only the Jedi council and the republic. Meanwhile the Sith are like “we want everyone to wield the Force”. Stop representing the Empire AND the Republic as a government we can’t question. Stop going back to the past for stories.
No one’s judging stories based on the story anymore. It’s all about gaming the Rotten Tomatoes score. Movies with a high critic score and low audience score are “woke”, like Captain Marvel, Don’t Look Up, Ghostbusters (2016). Movies with a low critic score and high audience score are conservative, like War Room, God’s Not Dead, Transformers, DC movies. It’s no longer about whether a movie’s good or not, it’s whether “your side” is winning. It’s about the “meta” around it, whether the cast and messaging aligns with your politics. And Star Wars suffers the most when it comes to this.
