The Call on the Field Stands

Look, I know I already did this like a month ago, but it turns out I'm not constitutionally capable of seeing a Star Wars movie just one time in the theater, even one that objectively sucks. Also I was half way through the month and I hadn't yet spent my state-mandated amount of my personal income on Disney services or products,* and since I couldn't sign up for Disney+ again, I dragged the one child I have left at home with me to the movie theater to watch the newest chapter... episode... thing once more.

And to be fair, I did feel a little bad about my previous review. It was a bit throaty, a bit too blood-still-pounding-in-ones-ears to be considered, well, considered critique. It was crass and erratic and ranty, a bit of an internet circa 2020 cliche of one white man's opinion on a thing that ultimately doesn't really matter; the kind of over-investment in a kind of factory-generated comestible mass culture distraction that, over a long period of time and spread over the widest of areas, could for instance inveigle otherwise reasonable people to vote incorrectly. Or in this case keep J.J. Abrams gainfully employed even though he still sucks. That part of this re-review has not changed. Well, not much.

Anyways. Ahem:

Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker

starring [bunch of fucking people, robots, at least one ghost]

directed by J.J. Abrams, fuck him.


Before you say it, yes, I did make a joke last week at my own expense suggesting that re-reviewing a movie I already reviewed would be the height of laziness and creative bankruptcy. I would like to point out unequivocally that the opinion expressed therein is still absolutely the correct opinion. And yet, somehow, here we are. Does this make me a hypocrite? you may well ask. To which I rhetorically answer: how can one be a hypocrite when the initial thought was a nihilist one in the first place?

And actually, despite the window dressing, I'm not going to re-review the film. Yes, I did actually see it again and what happened was exactly what I thought was going to happen: I was able to sit through it this time without the sting of letdown and disappointment brought on by the ways in which it betrays The Last Jedi by knocking itself in the head over and over again against a solid wall of bullshit until it can pretend it's gotten voluntary amnesia and the just does whatever kind of bonkers lunacy it wants. Seeing it the second time, I was able to view it ironically with less of a jaundiced eye toward its broader contextual flaws as it relates to the nine film cycle it's meant to to be the culmination of and more on its own merits. Such as they are. To the extent that they are.

And you know what? It was fucking fine. Not just "fine." It was very specifically fucking fine. You have to hit it with the right combination of resignation and agitation, but it's the only way to responsibly relay anything about this movie. It takes some big ass swings. Trouble is they're golf swings and up until about 2 seconds before the opening fanfare starts, we all thought we were playing baseball. I really did think I was going to be kinder here, but you know what? Fuck this movie, still. Will I watch it again? I will watch it again. Certainly. But that's only because, as I've noted, I've already paid for Disney+ and some day I will need to procrastinate from writing something very similar to this and that will be what I find.

I don't like being dissatisfied with the film, however. It lumps me in a category with loud-breathing incels and shitposting edgelords online I'm not comfortable being associated with. It's hard to tell where the lines between the genuinely passionate but entitled assholes ends and the darkly passionate misogy-racist entitled assholes begin. And usually if you have trouble finding the line, it's because it's all the way around you on the outside, in a big, fat circle indicating one (1) category. In this story, we're not making gradient distinctions between douchebags. Just know that I have a real fear that I'm one of them.

Already online you've got loud noises about the J.J. Cut of the film, a three-plus hour extravaganza of artistic and storytelling purity ruined by those bozos at the Big Studio, man. It's basically a fucking Terrence Malick film, but with more Wookiees.** This movement comes concurrently with a very full look at the rejected and abandoned Colin Trevorrow draft version of the script before he was fired that time everyone realized he was a terrible filmmaker.

Of course there's clamor and of course there's so much confidence amongst the fandom that either of these efforts would be better than the actual film that was released. That's because the details of the execution can remain theoretical while Rise of Skywalker as a film, for all its flaws, actually has the unmistakable disadvantage of actually having been created. Its half-steps and mistakes are all committed there to... well, not celluloid anymore, but, I don't know, digits(?) and projected onto screens in front of human eyeballs. Say what you want about J.J. Abrams (probably going to be along the lines of "he sucks," I get it), but at least he put the thing out there to be scrutinized. He can't ever really compete with the perfection of the supposed, the utopia of the imagined, a thing that can only be conjured, never experienced.

Like the debacle of Justice League and the bullshit insistence on the Snyder cut as a releasable thing, we're caught in a weird sinkhole that somehow has a bottom but also a giant snake lives down there who is not happy to see us.*** The fight is between The Man and fandom and their head canon. I know "head canon" sounds like the punchline to a halfway decent (at best) joke about a blowjob, but it's just never-explicitly-stated plot points and relationships that a fan would elect to believe in order to improve her or his experience, especially with a piece of media that lets them down in some way.

But the fight, like all fights initiated by common fans of things ostensibly in defense of said thing, is pointless and stupid and arrayed threateningly against itself. They've already won, that's the irony. Rise of Skywalker is the triumph of fandom, the apotheosis of head canon. It's what J.J. Abrams and Disney decided fans wanted to see instead of teasing out the complicated implications of the actual good film that preceded it in The Last Jedi. We've finally found the tipping point where the marketplace reaches back through the lens to fuck directly with the people who do all the creating. We live in a feedback society where everyone is confusing the idea that they can now be heard with the idea that they should be heard. In any way. About anything.

All the things that were railed against after Last Jedi have been "fixed" here. And the result is a cranky, slapdash, misfiring mess bereft of a unifying vision or a central story. If there's a lesson in this, it has to be: never try to please the people who like you. It's what drove George Lucas out of the business in the first place after he made the shitty prequel films and everyone shit on him for it. And there's no excuse for that, even when it's, in this case, entirely justified.

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*If you don't live in California or Florida, don't worry about it, you're probably off the hook. I'm sure it sounds weird, but you should see what they have to do to keep a park in China.

**But still probably the exact same amount of Rose Tico. Fuck you, J.J.

***You had to be there.