GeekTyrant, one of my favorite websites, reminds us that this week is the tenth anniversary of the release of the trailer for Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens. I will never forget that night. I was reloading YouTube every ten seconds, waiting for the trailer to publish. And when it finally dropped...
I guarantee you that I watched that thing at least a dozen times before going to bed. Oh sure, there had been the teaser earlier that April, but this was the full-blown serious look at what the first chapter of Star Wars's "sequel trilogy" was offering. And it was glorious! Everything about that trailer was spot-on perfect: the glimpses, the dialogue, the music... just completely epic.
Here it is if you haven't watched it in awhile (or if you've never had the pleasure of seeing it at all until now):
It had been seven years since the previous Star Wars film, Revenge of the Sith. That there could be a new movie for the saga was something many of us had given up on ever happening. And then in 2012 came the news that Episode VII was coming in three years.
That day was one of the happiest that we collectively had, in quite a long time. And that trailer for The Force Awakens reflected that. It really did herald the imminent arrival of a new Star Wars movie. Our dream was coming true. The most beloved mythology of the modern era was going to expand. It was going to keep going, on into the future. Indeed, it was going to be altogether possible that there would be no end to Star Wars, until the end of time. I couldn't help but think that I would not live to see every Star Wars movie, and there was some great comfort to draw from that. The way that grown men plant trees, in whose shades their great-grandchildren will play, though they themselves will never see it.
The trailer for The Force Awakens promised that. And more. And we could not see anything but something remarkable coming about, beyond our wildest aspirations. And that's what we got, right?
Right?
Let's get the obvious out of the way: the Star Wars sequel trilogy left a lot to be desired. It's easily the weakest of the three eras of the classic saga of the Skywalker family. For one thing it's painfully clear that there wasn't a grand design from the beginning of production. Now, there was a plan for the sequel trilogy. George Lucas had included it in the deal that he signed with Disney when he sold Lucasfilm and the related companies. But what that was, we'll probably never fully know. Kathleen Kennedy and the other Disney bigwigs abandoned Lucas's plans and instead went for something all their own. And odds are that in large part it was inferior to The Maker's design for the saga he created in the first place.
So there was no master plan, as Disney intended to execute. "But wait, Chris, did the original trilogy have such a master plan??" I'll grant you, that such a concise plot diagrammed out did not exist at the time of A New Hope's release. Lucas and Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan were writing The Empire Strikes Back by the seat of their pants. That it is arguably the greatest Star Wars movie of all time is testament to the vision that they came up with together. Their work on Episode V established the method by which all future Star Wars should be designed and carried out. That method carried over into Return of the Jedi. And when it came time years later to begin work on the prequel trilogy, Lucas already had the architecture established to go back in the saga's timeline and tell the story of young Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker. And that worked beautifully, too.
The prequel trilogy had none of that. Or if it did, it was a vague semblance of an over-arching plot. Once again the writing was by "the seat of their pants". But there was never a solid plan.
My personal biggest beef about the sequel trilogy? It's how Supreme Leader Snoke was treated. The Force Awakens portended that Snoke was going to be a major villain. The new grand adversary for the next generation of the heroes of the saga. I loved Snoke as a character. I saw the movie three times in the theater and each time I knew Snoke was about to appear, I paid especially close attention. Snoke captured my imagination. Who was he? What was he? My theory was that he was going to be revealed to be the ultimate bad guy behind everything wrong that had happened in the saga. Snoke could have been the one who created the Sith themselves, for all we knew. Snoke was an example of Chekov's rule of drama: if you see the gun mounted on the wall in act one, it must be fired in act three. And I wanted to see that gun go off.
But as The Last Jedi showed us, that was not to be. Snoke wound up a wasted character. And I absolutely hate what came of Snoke in The Rise of Skywalker. Snoke deserved better. And we could have had that, if there had been a master plan in mind that was going to be honored by the filmmakers.
Just one of the many problems that I have with the sequel era.
The last time I had watched any of the sequel trilogy was probably about two years ago. I set The Rise of Skywalker playing for background noise as I worked on some writing projects one Sunday afternoon. I couldn't get through it. I got about halfway through the movie before realizing that I wasn't turning in at all even peripherally. So I stopped the movie and instead started playing the Marx Brothers's movie Duck Soup: a good comedy for stimulating the synapses. And at the time I wondered if I would ever watch any Star Wars movie again, ever. Episodes seven through nine had practically ruined something that I had carried with me since the first moment I saw an Artoo-Detoo action figure, at four years old. Star Wars seemed to be something that for all intents and purposes, was dead to me from now on.
But something funny happened recently...
It was a few weeks ago. A couple of days before my book was published. For nigh on two months I had plunged myself into preparing every facet of what it means to bring a book to the public. Everything from going over the manuscript a dozen times over, to designing the cover, to porting the book to Kindle ebook format. If I wasn't eating or sleeping or working or playing with my dog Tammy, I was focused on getting the book ready. And in the end it was finally finished, ready for the printer or download on October 1st.
I was thoroughly exhausted. My brain was drained. Mentally I was a man poured out. The book had been submitted. It was finally out of my hands. It was something that would soon be in the hands of readers and hopefully there would be many of them and more to the point, I hoped that they would find that it was a book well worth reading.
So with nothing else to occupy my time with, without really comprehending why I was doing it, I put in my Blu-ray Disc of The Force Awakens. I situated myself on the sofa, not actually braced for one thing or another. Just needing to have some distraction from my being so wiped out from the book.
And before I knew what was going on, I discovered that I was liking the movie. An awful lot. Maybe more than a person should.
Suddenly I was transported back to that night in December of 2015, when I met my lifelong best friend Chad and his wife at a cinema in Raleigh, as we watched the first showing of Episode VII. And that was a wonderful night indeed, in every way. I left that theater and hit the highway for the two-hour drive back home and my mind was on fire about the new Star Wars movie. It had been everything and more that I had expected it to be.
Lo and behold, as I watched The Force Awakens playing in my living room, those memories came rushing back. And I appreciated anew how precious those were and why they were precious and it did indeed involve that being a good Star Wars film after all.
I decided that I wanted to keep the vibe going. And so I settled in to watch the next movie: The Last Jedi.
It is perhaps the most problematic Star Wars film ever produced. Thoughts of disappointment went through my gray matter, and I braced myself for the two-plus hours to come. I wondered to myself, "Why am I doing this to myself?" But I had started this by watching The Force Awakens and I had to stay committed to the agenda. I was going to watch the entire sequel trilogy, come what may.
Well. Well indeed...
As I've said, as we all know, The Last Jedi is the most issue-ridden chapter of the entire saga. But watching it with a mind absent discrimination, with refreshened eyes... so help me I found myself enjoying The Last Jedi more than I had before.
I was greatly surprised. Genuinely shocked, even. I was able to overlook its shortcomings and instead respect its strengths. And there are many. Was Snoke mishandled? Yes, I will always believe that for the most part. But his death in The Last Jedi was certainly a shock that very few people if anyone at all saw coming.
What I especially appreciate about The Last Jedi is that perhaps more than any other episode in the saga, it delves into the workings of the Force. The scene where Luke has Rey reaching out, feeling the world around her - cold and warmth, life and death - is absolutely beautiful. Not since The Empire Strikes Back came out in 1980 had the Force been so metaphysically examined. I love that scene!
And then there is the fight between Luke and his nephew. Yes, maybe it could have ended better: with Luke living and going on to play a much bigger role in the next film. But as a duel between two Force-users, it definitely satisfies. I kept thinking while watching that scene for the first time that Luke was being awfully self-restrained. He ws fighting by not fighting. Luke was being a true Jedi master, as we had never seen him before. Actually, this was the very first time that we were seeing him as a master at all. And it did satisfy, it really did.
I finished watching The Last Jedi much more forgiving about that movie. Definitely not perfect. But it's also not the train wreck that I had first perceived it to be (and maybe had come to believe it as being simply because other people were saying how bad it is). With renewed eyes, and a refreshened mind, it was to considerable length a film worthy of Star Wars.
My revisit to the sequel trilogy was two-thirds done. And so it was that I resolved to watch The Rise of Skywalker. Would the trend continue? Might I come to have new feelings about the final film in the story of the Skywalker clan? Or would the trilogy irredeemably collapse, to be forever stricken from being considered as a worthy chapter of the Star Wars saga?
Once more, I was surprised. The Rise of Skywalker held up much better than I remembered it doing.
The ending of The Rise of Skywalker is almost what I had imagined for most of my life would be the perfect ending to the entire nine movies mythology: the Skywalker family coming back to Tatooine, accompanied by the droids, with the twin suns above the horizon. So help me that's how I dreamed of the final scene of Episode IX all my childhood and beyond. And what we see in The Rise of Skywalker is darn nearly that. My biggest complaint about it is that it doesn't have Artoo-Detoo and See-Threepio in that scene: they were the first two characters we saw in A New Hope and it would have been fitting if they were two of the last characters we saw in the final movie. But I suppose that can be let slide.
Yes, The Rise of Skywalker isn't perfect. But some things about it aren't so bad. When I think of "somehow Palpatine returned", I remember that Palpatine did return, pretty much by the same method (cloning, Dark Side magik etc.) in the Dark Empire series by Dark Horse Comics in 1992: the very first Star Wars comic of the Expanded Universe. George Lucas seriously loved the idea of bringing the Emperor back, enough so that he gave trade paperbacks of Dark Empire to all the Lucasfilm employees as Christmas presents. So that particular idea isn't very alien to Star Wars lore. Of course, Lucas was also the one who suggested killing Chewbacca in the novel Vector Prime, so there's that too, but anyway...
When Episode IX had finished playing, I found myself thinking that the sequel trilogy wasn't too awful after all. It did pretty well, all things considered. The untimely death of Carrie Fisher no doubt detrimentally impacted the story. From what I've heard, the intention was that Leia was going to figure enormously into the final film. J.J. Abrams and his team should be given some credit: they did the best that they could do with the little they were given, and it's something to be thankful for that they had all that extra footage of Fisher left over from the filming of The Force Awakens to work with. It's not a "perfect" fit. It's a bit clumsy, if we are to be honest. But that can be forgiven, under the circumstances.
And that was my day re-experiencing episodes 7, 8, and 9 of the Star Wars saga. I went to bed that night, against all sensibilities, with my love of Star Wars re-ignited. It hadn't been wasted at all. I could call myself a true fan again. The "Star Wars shrine" in my living room - that displays among other things my copy of Heir to the Empire signed by Timothy Zahn, my Yoda puppet autographed by "Weird A" Yankovic, my personal lightsaber, and my beloved Chewbacca mug that my best friend from college gave to me - is again something I can be proud of having to showcase something from my childhood that I've carried along all this time.
The Force Awakens is an amazing film. And the next two movies, if not completely up to par with Episode VII, are more than passable on their own. They are Star Wars movies, with all the lumps and warts that come with that. Even A New Hope was considered by many to be more than a little ridiculous when it premiered in 1977. It has been more than forgiven for its faults.
I do believe, absolutely, that with the passage of time episodes 7, 8, and 9 are going to be better regarded than they are today. The weakest of the trilogy is easily The Last Jedi, but the rest of it isn't too terribly bad. The kids seem to like it. Especially young girls, who found a kindred spirit in Rey, and that can't be a bad thing in any way whatsoever.
I was astounded by how much more I liked these three movies than I had before. They are not perfect, but in the end they comprise what they are: a Star Wars trilogy, lumps and all. I can accept it. Just as I can accept the quirks and weaknesses of any of the other six Star Wars movies.
Give the sequels another five or ten years. I'll bet that in time the seventh, eighth, and ninth Star Wars movies are going to be as welcome into the canon as the rest of the saga. I have tremendous confidence that is going to happen.
0 comments:
Post a Comment